Lethargic Man (anag.)

Here's something I've been wondering about for going on for twenty years, but had (some) new insights into in the last year or two, as I shall explain. Orthodox Judaism of today portrays itself as being how Judaism has been practised for millennia (until the rise of the Reform in the early nineteenth century), but is that really the case? ( Read more... )

Sometimes I look at Judaism and think the fundamentalists took over the religion. This is not, however, I think a recent phenomenon. Looking at the literature in the Dead Sea Scrolls, it seems to be the case that the fundamentalists had taken over there too (for at least the Qumran sect). And even in the time after the return from the Babylonian exile, we see Nehemiah imposing much stricter standards on the returnees than they had themselves been adhering to.

Of course, there was a group of people who did take over Judaism almost two thousand years ago: the rabbis, whose movement represented the continuation of Pharisaism. ( Read more... )

Last Shovuos the topic came up in conversation with Rabbi Reuven Firestone of the kingdom of Ḥimyar in present-day Yemen, which was Jewish (or at least its royal family and much of its population) in the final century or two of its existence before its destruction in the sixth century. Why were there so many Jews there? Reuven told me that after the Mishna was written, it—meaning rabbinical Judaism in general—was generally accepted in the Land of Israel, but not in Babylonia. The rabbis sent emissaries to Babylonia to convert the Jews there to accepting the Talmud; thus the people the Talmud portrays as "ignoramuses" were actually not non-practising Jews but those practising a different stream of Judaism.

As the Babylonian community gradually became increasingly hostile to non-rabbinical Judaism, it is thought, so Reuven said, that Ḥimyar became a refuge for those who would not accept the authority of the Talmud. With the destruction of the kingdom however, the last bastion of pre-rabbinical Judaism came to an end.

( Read more... )

So what are we left with, when we manage to avoid looking at Jewish history through rabbinically-tinted glasses? Sometimes I think Judaism as we have it came "off the derech" centuries ago. But the corollary of Judaism having come off the derech is that there is a derech. The question is only one of how to find it, when the Torah doesn't give clear instructions on how to obey it.

( Read more... )

I only recently discovered the remark of an early advocate for reforming Jewish law (his name was Jesus of Nazareth, you may have heard of him) that the Sabbath was made for people and not the other way around". I think there's a lot to be said for this. But the solution is not to simply junk three thousand years of tradition and just go with what you like (or not if you're not a Reform Jew at least, which I'm not). The solution is to pore through the evidence and try and find what Shabbos observance (or kashrus, or whatever) looked like before the fundamentalists got ahold of the religion, or to put it another way: what the essence of these practices is.

But that's not really possible because the earlier (i.e. Biblical) writers took knowledge of this all for granted, and evidence from the Second Temple period either suffers from a taboo on writing down oral law, or is sectarian (i.e. divergent from the path that led to modern Judaism. So what, then, am I to do?

The answer is of course keep grappling with the issue. After all, "wrestles with God" is what the name of my people, Israel, means.

( Snippety-snip (sorry, couldn't resist it) )