i'm not calling *you* a heretic. i am simply outlining how a belief that jesus was the jewish messiah is a heretical belief for a *jew*.
b'shalom
bananabrain
Hi Banana. Hope all is cool with you.
I agree with you that aggressive or deceptive drives for conversion are not acceptable, and just downright nasty. On the other hand, as you might expect, I have reservations about the violence of your rhetoric. I think Bandit was right in calling you on the heresy issue, not from the point of view of whether you’re right or wrong based on some dictionary definition of the word, but because the idea of heresy itself is a genie – as Christians know only too well – better left in the bottle. There’s also the irony that the idea of heresy is really a fellow traveller to the tendency toward absolutism, and it’s absolutist ideas driving these kinds of conversion campaigns that create the problem in the first place. The result: war.
But this thread has also veered into the most radioactive territory imaginable: the holocaust and the survival of the Jewish people. It’s hardly possible even to evoke the word without an accompanying desire to weep. Even after Cambodia, East Timor, Rwanda, and many others, it remains the paradigm of premeditated evil. In that sense, it belongs to the history of everyone.
In a more restricted sense, of course, it more properly belongs to the historical consciousness of a given people, and there are severe limits to what an outsider can advise as proper responses to that history. It may even take a fool.
Enter the fool. The natural response of any victim is to arm himself in the interest of self-defence, and to the end that he will escape being a victim again. In the real world, this is inevitable, unavoidable, understandable & needs no apology. But there is the wider perspective – the perspective that you perhaps refer to when you talk about sacred history and Divine Will – on how all these things will reach ultimate resolution.
One dominant opinion is that there will be a Judgement Day (or some version of that idea) where the sheep & goats will all be sorted out and perfect justice delivered. I can’t share that opinion, or at least I can’t see justice in any ordinary sense of the word being done to adequately punish the criminals and compensate the victims, especially in the kinds of atrocities that have been mentioned. I think that if there were some ultimate justice, it would have to be justice in some quite other sense.
My opinion is rather more Buddhist in flavour, but with roots as well in Judeo-Christian tradition. It’s really a commonplace: that the only adequate response to past crimes in the end won’t be to answer violence with more violence or threats of violence but to undercut the conditions that produce violence in the first place, at the root. I take the “turning the other cheek” saying of Jesus in this more radical sense. It’s not about “let’s just be nice” – although usually that’s not a bad thing! It’s much more subversive than that. There’s nothing more deflating than to have someone not answer your abuse with abuse of his own. But this is well rooted in the Jewish tradition even before Jesus. Isn’t there a saying to the effect, Returning good for evil is like heaping hot coals on the head of your enemy?
Of course, we’ve been told innumerable times to apparently only modest effect that violence leads to violence. And, in the short term, we sometimes can’t avoid employing violence against violence. But on the ultimate level, which is where I assume a religious forum should be pitched, we know that violence can’t stop violence – like the tar baby, the more we struggle against it the more it bogs us down.
So as to present cases, I’m a fool but not quite foolish enough to offer opinions or critiques regarding current political realities for the Jewish people; I’m only saying that the long term survival of Jews and other minorities will depend more on the work of sincere practitioners like yourself, who are trying to reach across sectarian lines, than the presence or absence of certain military equipment and guys with guns. I believe the less violence you employ or condone – rhetorical or otherwise – the greater will be your contribution to your people.
“Turning the other cheek” to me is just a metaphor for the practice of outsmarting violence and the will to power that leads to violence. And for that we need the full engagement of our intelligence, because the will to power at the root of violence is a wily devil. And I think to outsmart that devil we have to admit to the existence of the power impulse itself, and in ourselves, and take notice every time we fall into its coils. We have to be able continually to pose the question:
Can we renounce the power that leads to and feeds violence? Can we transform this power? Can we at least put power into suspension? Can you? Can I? Can we renounce power?
