Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Israel as Idolatry

Blind loyalty to Israel is the primary form of idolatry today in the
Jewish world.
Go into any synagogue in the US or Israel and you can tell people that
you don’t believe in God, don’t observe the commands of Torah, don’t
observe the Sabbath, or even that you plan to be eating a pig sandwich
on Yom Kippur and the majority of people will shrug their shoulders,
and welcome you in. But dare to say that you think that Israel is
violating human rights or, worse, that it really is just a political
entity like all other political entities and does not have any
particular claim on your loyalties, and you will be treated as though
you had just spoken the greatest of Jewish heresies.
And that is what it means to be the god of a particular people — when
critiquing it is seen as the one belief that you cannot critique
without being dismissed as hurtful, evil or perverse. When Aaron
facilitated the creation of the Golden Calf, he proclaimed “These are
your Gods, O Israel.” Today, in word and deed, most of the synagogues
in the world proclaim “The state of Israel is the ultimate holy God, O
Israel.” Israel is the new idolatry.
It’s not hard to see how this happened. Jews used to believe in YHVH,
the God who is the Force of Healing and Transformation, the God who
proclaimed that “I shall be whom I shall be,” in other words, the
force in the universe that makes people the transformation from “that
which is” to “that which can and should be.” The central lesson of our
exodus from Egypt, proclaimed in our Torah, was that the world is not
fixed, that every system or oppression can be overcome, that justice
and kindness can prevail against what appears to be overwhelming force
and violence. The task of the Jewish people was to incorporate this
understanding into our society and to share this message with the rest
of the world: that everything can be transformed toward the good.
The task of the Jew was to love our neighbors and love “the other,”
“the stranger,” and to care for the powerless, the widow, the orphan.
Remember, our Torah kept repeating, “You were ‘the Other’ in the land
of Egypt.”
It was a tough message to live by, and the Prophets over and over
again promised the Jewish people that we would be thrown out of our
land of Israel if we failed to do so. And yet over and over again, we
Jews chosen to live by the logic of political and economic realism,
ignoring the sacred charge of Torah, and de facto abandoning God for
the allures of wealth and power. And the exiles from our land followed
just as the prophets had warned.
For most of our history, Jews were torn between loyalty to the vision
of a God who commanded us to live and spread the message that the
world could be based on peace, justice, generosity, caring for others,
stewardship of the environment, and loving-kindness both towards our
own and towards the stranger (”the Other”) and the “common sense”
idolatrous message of the larger world: that money and power reign and
that it is foolish to be idealistic and self-destructive to pursue
justice.
That idolatrous message overwhelmed Jewish sensibilities after the
Holocaust. But that misunderstands the claim of the Jewish tradition.
It does not claim that evil will never triumph — only that if we build
a world based on love, generosity, kindness, etc. that we can
eventually defeat the forces of evil. The Jewish people could not, of
course, by ourselves, build such a world, and we are certainly not to
blame for the failure of all the nations of the world after the First
World War to try to rebuild Germany in a caring rather than the
exploitive way that the Allies actually imposed, conditions that
caused the reaction that were a precondition for the rise of Nazism.
The Jewish people can only help promote a different kind of world, and
cannot be held responsible if few respond to that call.
But we can be held responsible if we give up on our historic task,
allow the Nazis the ultimate victory of redefining Jewish life so that
it accepts the notion that only “power over” rather than “cooperation
with and generosity toward others” can provide safety and security for
us or anyone else.
Who can blame the Jews who lost faith in our own values after such a
devastating manifestation of evil?
And yet, the direction of relying on power, momentarily quite sensible
in the face of the Nazis, has in the long run undermined Judaism. The
loving message that God had urged Jews to bring to the world was
replaced with a new kind of militarist pragmatism. Israel,
particularly after its 1967 military victory that gave it control over
Gaza and the West Bank, became the central object of worship.
Eventually, this new religion of “being realistic” pervaded the
consciousness of Jews in both the neo-con and the liberal worlds, and
the old message of a God that could transform the world if we lived in
accord with that God’s outrageous teaching to “love the Other” and to
pursue peace and justice was dismissed as “utopian” and, imagine the
shame, “idealistic.”
No wonder then that the even-handed UN report that condemned both
Israeli human rights violations and Palestinian shelling of Israeli
cities during the 2008-2009 Gaza war was dismissed as biased or even
anti-Semitic, though it had been written by a pro-Zionist Jewish
jurist named Goldstone. You cannot criticize this idolatrous god
called the State of Israel and live without harrassment in much of the
contemporary Jewish religious world. While growing numbers of American
Jews have supported Tikkun, Peace Now, Rabbis for Human Rights, and
now J Street — voices that have emphasized that it is in Israel’s best
survival interests to change its policies toward Palestinians, and we
at Tikkun have also pointed out that the demand for knee-jerk loyalty
to Israel actually is one of the major reasons why many Jews born
after the creation of Israel have become alienated from Judaism and
caused a decline in Jewish continuity — only a very few prophetic
voices have dared question whether the attachment to the political
entity that is the State of Israel is an appropriate element in Jewish
religion, at least until that State begins to reflect the highest
values of the Jewish people and its rich and compassionate religious
tradition.
Yet, it is never too late to return to the Jewish God of justice,
peace, love, and compassion. That’s what the current Days of
Repentance are meant to make possible. It’s still possible that this
Yom Kippur (Monday, Sept 28th) Jews in synagogues around the world
will once again return to their true God, and start treating Israel as
it deserves to be treated — a normal political entity that houses many
of our brothers and sisters, a state that deserves Jewish appreciation
for all it has done to take in millions of Jewish refuges, but that is
as flawed and deserving of criticism as every other political entity
on the planet and is neither “sacred” nor in any way are religious
Jews obligated to give it political support. That truth, already
recognized by a growing number of secular Jews in America, must be
publicly affirmed in the synagogues of America this Yom Kippur if our
atonement is to be meaningful. One place to start would be to
unequivocally affirm that Palestinians and Muslims are equally
precious to God as Jews, equally created in God’s image, and equally
deserving of sharing of the promise to Abraham’s descendents to
inherit the land of Israel.
http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2009/09/21/israel-as-idolatry/

 .
http://www.tikkun.org
yawn. Un amico che e' stato da quelle parti mi racconta che, pure
contando le donne (come e' giusto)  e i non ebrei presenti (uhmm..)
non riescono nemmeno a fare minyan.

 yawn. Un amico che e' stato da quelle parti
quali? San Francisco? E chi sarebbe così pirla a San Francisco da
perdere tempo ad andare in sinagoga? Giusto in Israele, la Chelm del
21 secolo possono farlo...:D
e ora un po' di sano pregiudizio antireform:
"    We were married by a Reform rabbi in Long Island. A very Reform
rabbi. A Nazi."
"    At an Orthodox wedding, the bride's mother is pregnant. At a
Conservative wedding, the bride is pregnant. At a Reform wedding, the
rabbi is pregnant. At a Reconstructionist wedding, the rabbi and her
wife are both pregnant."
An Orthodox, a Conservative, and a Reform rabbi are each asked whether
one is supposed to say a brokhe (blessing) over a lobster. The
Orthodox rabbi doesn't know what a "lobster" is. The Conservative
rabbi doesn't know what to say. The Reform rabbi says, "What's a
brokhe?"

 quali? 
Fatti da solo queste cazzo di ricerchine.
-- 
Tb (bieco illuminista)