Posted on 11/25/2007 7:22:05 PM PST by goldstategop
A few weeks ago I attended the annual dinner of the National Bible Association, which admirably seeks to promote the reading of the Bible across the United States. I was seated at a table with other Orthodox rabbis, one of whom had kindly invited me. Things did not go smoothly.
One of the honorees was a Jewish-born Christian chaplain from the armed forces who spoke of his conversion away from Judaism and how he had chosen Jesus as his personal Messiah.
Fair enough. People are free to believe what they want and, sadly, there are Jews who, sometimes out of ignorance of their own faith, find their spiritual home in Christianity.
But what bothered me more was how one Christian clergyman after another got up and spoke of their admiration for "the Old Testament." It had a bad ring to it. "New" connotes vibrant, alive and fresh. "Old" brings to mind stodgy, musty and out-of-date.
I am a rabbi who enjoys an extremely warm relationship with the Christian community and has the highest admiration for my Christian brothers and sisters. And I had, of course, heard and read the phrase "Old Testament" on countless occasions. But that night something about the phrase grated.
To be sure, Christians have used the expression for millennia to portray the Jews, in whose stubbornness Jesus was rejected, as God's old, forsaken people; while Christians, who embrace the savior, are the "new" Israel. But this organization's mandate was to promote a love for the Bible and instill within the American breast an appreciation of its wisdom and values. Would they be successful if they referred to 70 percent of it as something turgid and dreary?
WERE THE speakers who lauded the wondrous values contained in the "Old Testament" not aware of how they contradicted themselves by referring to the Hebrew Bible as obsolete? The time has come for our Christian brothers and sisters to finally retire the "Old Testament" pejorative and begin referring to Jewish scripture as "the Hebrew Bible," in contradistinction to the "The Christian Bible," which is what the New Testament is.
We live in an age when we have begun cleaning up the language of so many past slights. We no longer call twentysomething women "girls" or "gals." We no longer insultingly refer to Native Americans as Redskins, or to African-Americans as Negroes. Why, then, would our Christian brothers and sisters unnecessarily refer to our Bible as "Old?"
Can we really be successful in promoting biblical values in America, most of which are based on Hebrew Scripture (as opposed to the New Testament), when we look at those scriptures as having been rejected because of their irrelevance? You can't have it both ways; insisting, on the one hand, that America is based on the principles of the "Old Testament," which suggests an eternal relevance, while describing those same scriptures as archaic and prehistoric.
This follows a much broader need for Christian reexamination. Christianity is one of the world's greatest religions, and it has brought the knowledge of God and the Bible to more people than any other. But it has always suffered from a critical flaw, namely, its claim to a copyright on all spiritual truth.
NO DOCTRINE has done more harm to Christianity that its insistence on the uselessness of other religions. And this doctrine of exclusivity lies in stark contrast to the incredible humanity one otherwise finds among believing Christians.
In New York City on December 8, our Jewish Values Network will host a high-powered discussion featuring leaders in politics, media and the arts debating whether religion is a blessing or a curse to America. Truth be told, it is both.
On the one hand, religion is the source of America's most cherished values, none more so than religion's emphasis on the infinite value of human life. The Bible is what inspired a faith-based army to fight on behalf of a severely mentally-handicapped woman named Terry Schaivo.
The elders of Sparta would carefully inspect newborn infants and, if they were judged to be weakly, would cast them into a chiasm off Mount Taygetos. The Romans behaved similarly with adults of significant mental disability, throwing them from the Tarpeian Rock.
By contrast, a Godly America declared on its most famous monument, the Statue of Liberty, that it embraced the "poor, your huddled masses... the wretched refuse of your teeming shore."
But somehow, in a rejection of biblical values, Terry Schaivo's life did not even rise to the level of "wretched refuse," and she was condemned to the monstrosity of death by starvation in the richest country on earth. Such are the consequences of rejecting religion and its value-system.
ON THE other hand, religion has become the single most divisive issue in our country, inspiring a culture war of Right and Left. This was never necessary. People can disagree on abortion and gay rights without assassinating each other's character.
Religion can use the power of rational argument and win over its critics, but not when it insists on wholly irrational and immoral doctrines, such as the conviction that whoever lacks belief is going straight to hell. That our evangelical brothers and sisters continue to insist that irrespective of a non-Christian's righteous actions he or she is going to burn forever because of a wrong belief seems utterly incompatible with the lofty ideal of Christian love.
Jews can be guilty of the same sin. We sometimes hear religious Jews speak of "goyim," a word that, while meaning "nation," has also assumed a pejorative connotation and should therefore likewise be retired.
We even sometimes hear religious Jews speak of the superiority of the Jewish to the non-Jewish soul, in direct contradiction to the biblical declaration that all humans are created equally in the image of God.
Chosenness has never meant that Jews are better than any other people. Precisely the opposite is true: The Jews are chosen to bring the light of God to all nations as a permanent reminder that God loves and values all his human children, and wishes for them all to share in the bounty and glory of His light.
That is the cornerstone of all religious belief. It comes from the Hebrew Bible, and there is nothing old about it.
Bump for later read.
The Hebrew scriptures are there not so much to tell us what happened as to tell us what happens.
Nice PARTIAL recitation of history: after the court gave Terri’s adulterous husband rights to decide her treatment, the Florida legislature passed a law forbidding the kind of cruel starvation that Terri ended up enduring. And then the activist Florida Supreme Court narrowly—and quite wrongly—tossed the law out. Only then did it go to the Fed’s (courts and Congress), the part that is more famous in the history books.
People should not be starved!
Enlighten me: on what grounds did the Florida Supreme Court strike down the new law and did that court set new or existing legal precedent when it made its ruling? And, let’s suppose that you believe that Terri would have wanted to end her life given her condition, which is probably not the kind of thing that you would like to suppose but I want you to in order to answer the next question. How should Terri’s wishes have been carried out if not by withholding of food/water?
Sorry, no time to research it! But you can post more here if you’d like.
Peace!
How? Easily, as once the decision to end the patient’s life is made, the question that then arises is “kill by what means?”.
Dehydration produces headaches of severe and lasting duration, along with a long list of other unpleasant effects.
“How? - you asked. Ask any vet.
Ask any physician.
Both have used well known drugs to end suffering.
For those with no knowledge of medicine, consider that an overdose of morphine results in a death vastly preferable to the prolonged agonies of dehydration.
Perhaps we are unwilling to accept that once a “kill the patient” decision has been made, to quibble over the passive withholding of water and food as compared to the active injection of a lethal drug is to attempt to avoid the inescapable responsibility assumed by making the “kill the patient” decision.
Just a remark to this particular sentiment.
"Americans", so-called "native" or any others, get the name from an obscure Italian illustrator and perhaps pornographer named Amerigo Vespucci, whose actual exploration exploits may fall short of the legends told about him. Is it proper to call a Apache a descendant of a risque Italian ne'er-do-well? I think not!
Better to call an Indian by the name of the Tribe he belongs to (excepting Ward Churchill, who we can safely call "slime").
And those so-called natives, themselves, are only recently arrived. Most tribes as we European-arrivals found them, only arrived in the settlements we know somewhere in the recent 500 to 2,000 years. We are all "out of Africa" or someplace, it seems -- Eden or Africa.
So the real insult is to call somebody something they are most definitely not, and even that which is slanderous, e.g. "Native American". It is a joke, untruths and even insulting.
The same thing goes with "African-American". What the heck does that mean? Whereas "negro" is no more or less than calling somebody white, light-skinned, pale-skinned, etc. It means only black, or dark.
And it is one thing to call an Indian a Native-American, at least you recognize by that that he is a member of some real genuine organized tribe. He is still an individual, but also a member of a tribe. Not so with "African-American" -- by using that term you steal a man's individuality and place him in some box of prejudice and bias -- locking him to a dark back-wards continent full of strive and hazard to our day.
I think is strange that the writer equates the word 'old' as stodgy, musty, out-of-date. Perhaps the good rabbi also believes that folks over 65 as stodgy, musty and out-of-date too. He sounds like he's got a serious case of ageism.
Actually, I think what is sticking in his craw (a favorite expression of my Grampa Gene) is that non-Jewish people have absconded with Hebrew Scripture, tacked on more text, then had the audacity to claim that it is the completion of Holy Scripture.
The reason Christians did/do that is that is what Jesus claimed for Himself, the New Covenant in His blood.
However, I can certainly understand why the rabbi is cranky about it, as the Jews were indeed, before they failed to recognize Jesus, meant to be God’s people and a light to the Gentiles.
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