Judaism Is Not Xtianity - Blog Posts

“Jewish law knows no incurable sin.”

— Moshe Glickson (via yidquotes)

“In Jewish thought, a sin is not an offense against God, an act of disobedience. A sin is a missed opportunity to act humanly. The verb to sin in Hebrew is also used in the sense of ‘missing the target.’ When God created us free to choose between good and bad, He also gave us the capacity to know when we had chosen wrongly”

— Harold Kushner, To Life!: A Celebration of Jewish Being and Thinking (via huzzahitsthedoctor)

In the Mishnah, Rabbi Yosi makes the radical statement: “androgynos bria bifnei atzma hu / the androgynos he is a created being of her own.” This Hebrew phrase blends male and female pronouns to poetically express the complexity of the androgynos’ identity. The term bri’a b’ifnei atzmah is a classical Jewish legal term for exceptionality. This term is an acknowledgement that not all of creation can be understood within binary categories. It recognizes the possibility that uniqueness can burst through the walls that demarcate our society. The Hebrew word bria (created being) explicitly refers to divine formation; hence this term also reminds us that all bodies are created in the image of God. People can’t always be easily defined; they can only be seen and respected, and their lives made holy. This Jewish approach allows for genders beyond male and female. It opens up space in society for every body. And it protects those who live in the places in between.

Rabbi Elliot Rose Kukla and Reuben Zellman

“Again the Jew has the right to say to the Christian, you have no right to laugh over the absurdities and ghost stories of the Talmud and its expounders of the past, when you believe in a personal Satan who tempted and tried the Son of God, absurdity can hardly go beyond this; when you believe the ghost stories and exorcisms of the New Testament, which are certainly glaring enough to defy reason and override all intelligence. The greatest miracles of the Talmud are mere child’s play in comparison to the immaculate conception, the resurrection of the crucified one from death and his post-mortem feats on earth, in Hades and then in Heaven.”

— Rabbi Isaac M Wise (via yidquotes)

Traditionally religious people often claim that the Torah requires them to exclude, exile, or condemn transgender people, but the Torah never commands or encourages that kind of behavior. None of the Torah's laws requires the Israelite community to treat people whose appearance or  behavior doesn't fit binary norms as defiled or defiling.

— Joy Ladin, “The Soul of the Stranger: Reading G-d and Torah from a Transgender Perspective”  

Something I think a lot of xians don’t get is that while Judaism and Tanakh are absolutely essential to xianity and it making any kind of sense, Judaism in no way needs anything xianity has to offer, nor is modern rabbinic Judaism dependent on the existence of xianity. We exist entirely outside of and independent of xianity and Judaism (both as it was before the fall of the Second Temple as well as modern rabbinic Judaism) would have continued just fine without xianity. If xianity somehow disappears from the earth entirely, Judaism will still be here and will still make sense. 

On the other hand, if Judaism and all of its texts were to disappear, xianity is no longer intelligible. And that is what I mean when I say that xianity is parasitic on Judaism. This is not a mutual or symbiotic relationship, no matter how hard xians seem to want to think it is.