reluctance to murder is not a weakness

nonbinaryjudean:

faggotry-enjoyer:

silly-jewish-vents:

diamondsandphoenixfire:

jewishgay4il:

anon i assure you orthodoxy did not exist 200 years ago the way you think it did lmao

Per the Talmud, conversion necessitates only:

• mikveh,
• brit milah as applicable,
• a sacrifice while the Temple stands (not currently) and
• learning / motivation / beit din (bundling these because the beit din judges learning and motivation so they’re kind of inextricable).

Therefore, halachically, converts who undergo these steps are fully Jewish.

Non-Orthodox converts do this.

They are fully, halachically Jewish.

End of.

Per Halacha at least.

Orthodoxy has added its own reinterpretations. And I’m not opposed to new interpretation in general, I believe that each generation adds to our knowledge, we learn more and improve, etc etc, but to pretend that Orthodoxy is More Authentic or somehow Unchanged is asinine.

Examples:

• the Talmud specifically accepts conversion for the purposes of marriage (Yevamot 24b:6), whereas Orthodox Jewish groups today do not
• the Talmud does not say you have to send your children to Jewish as opposed to public schools in order to be a valid convert but Orthodox Jewish groups today do
• Charedi clothes are not ancient Israelite clothes. They were not wearing fur hats and black coats in ancient Judea.
• the Talmud also indicates that many people had pretty limited Jewish knowledge immediately post conversion, indicating that the Orthodox practice of only converting people once they are up to community standards is novel

And again, I don’t think it’s wrong that Orthodoxy has its own interpretations of Halacha, just as Reform and Conservative do. We are one people but we are not automatons who always think and feel and need the same things. Someone needed to figure out how to navigate electricity, airplanes, IVF, chemotherapy, and other things that did not exist in Talmudic times.

Just generally, I think that every person on earth would benefit from sitting awhile with the concept of “with very few exceptions, everyone always thinks they’re right.” That’s just being a person. Most people don’t wake up in the morning and go “you know what? I’m going to be a bad person.” Or “I’m going to do Judaism wrong.” Definitely people do that. But we all think we’re right. We’re all only human.

Anyway, Nonnie, if YOU want to cut YOURSELF off from us, I can’t stop you but… We all think we’re right. You’re not special for that. 

I’m just a lil shocked. Where the hell is this hate of reform and conservative Judaism coming from. Have you (anon) even done any research into their thought process because the more I learn the more I admire. Besides its not like the first time there were schisms in Jewish thought and Practice.

Hillel and Shammai are like a literal blatant example of this.

Take a deep breath in and out. Reform and Conservative Judaism are just as legit as Orthodoxy and there are some shit that sections of Orthodoxy does that I can promise you was not actually done 200 years ago (because it started out as a response to the Holocaust or like the rise of electricity).

Also like just because someone is Conservative or reform doesn’t mean they don’t keep Halacha at all. Plenty are more religious than some Orthodox Jews that I know.

If you wanna cut yourself off from other Jews I can’t stop you. But I refuse to condone denying reform and conservative jews as part of my family.

the framework in which Jewish law eternally binding and unchanging…aka Judaism.

Jewish law has never been unchanging. Even going back to pre-rabbinic Judaism, we can see changes in the law within the Torah. For example:

Exodus 21

2 If you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall work for six years, and in the seventh he shall go free, without payment. 3 If he came by himself, he shall go out by himself; if he had a wife, his wife shall go with him. 4 If his master gave him a wife, and she bore him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall belong to her master [i.e., the slave-owner], and he [the slave] shall go by himself. 5 And if the slave sincerely says, “I love my master and my wife and my children; I don’t wish to go free,” 6 then his master shall bring him before God [i.e., a temple; or perhaps, “before judges”–i.e., to a court of law], and he will bring him to the door or the doorpost. His master shall then pierce his ear with an awl; and he [the slave] will work for him [the master] forever. 7 If a man sells his daughter to be a slave, she shall not go free as a male slave goes free. [There follows a separate set of laws, according to which a female slave may not request freedom, but may be set free if her master dislikes her; she may not be sold to an outsider.]

Deuteronomy 15

12 If your brother, a Hebrew, is sold to you, whether a male or a female, he will work for you for six years. In the seventh year, you shall set him free. 13 And when you set him free, you shall not send him away empty-handed. 14 Be sure to apportion to him some of what comes from your flock and your threshing floor and your wine-vat. You shall give to him that with which God had blessed you. 15 You should remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and God rescued you. Therefore I command you this thing today. 16 But if he says to you, “I do not wish to go away from you,” because he loves you and your house and enjoys being with you, 17 then you shall take the awl and put it through his ear into the door; and he will be your slave forever. You shall also do this for your female slave. 18 Do not let yourself feel severe when you set him free: for six years he worked for you twice as hard as a hired man would have. HaShem your God will bless you in all you do.

It’s very clear that the passage from Deuteronomy is referencing the older law from Exodus: both passages concern treatment of a fellow Hebrew slave, and both are centered on the core idea of working for six years and freedom on the seventh, with the option to forego that freedom if desired. Perhaps most crucially, both contain the ritual of piercing the ear with an awl at the doorpost in the case that a slave wishes to remain. That’s very specific; it certainly didn’t evolve independently twice within Israelite culture. The Deuteronomic author was almost certainly reading a copy of the law from Exodus; at the very least, they were familiar with the ideas it contained.

And they make changes to it. The law now applies to both men and women. One can no longer release a slave directly into poverty, you have to free them with the materials to restart their life. It is no longer stated that a freed slave must leave his wife and children behind if he married during enslavement, and the fact that women must also be freed allows room for the implication that the whole family should be allowed to go together. Deuteronomy introduced the idea that there can only be one temple in one set location, so Exodus’s assumption that one could easily get to a temple no longer holds. The ritual of piercing the ear with an awl is thus adapted to take place at the doorpost of one’s own home, where being “before God” can now be represented through the mezuzah.

Besides the concrete changes in law, there’s also a dramatic shift in perspective and tone. The Exodus law clearly favors the slaveowner. In the very first sentence, the slaveowner is the subject, who is buying the slave. The law is built in such a way as to increase the odds that a slave will “want” to stay. By being freed with nothing and returning to his farm after 6 whole years away, he will need to immediately take on debt to get the seed and possibly equipment to start farming again–and of course, debt is probably what brought him into slavery in the first place, so there’s a very real risk that he’ll stay in that cycle and end up enslaved again anyway. All after being separated from his family! By contrast, Deuteronomy favors the slave. In the first sentence, the slave is the subject, and he is referred to as your brother, forcing the reader to foreground his experience as important. By being freed with the materials to restart his life, and likely having his family with him, he is much less likely to choose to stay as the “less bad” option. It’s much more humane.

But the Deuteronomic author faces a challenge: everyone is already following the Exodus law, and if slaveowners are acting in their own economic self-interest, they’ll probably prefer the old version. So Deuteronomy attempts to persuade, not merely state the law. The author repeats that the law now also applies to women, placing emphasis and ensuring that the earlier “male or female” cannot be written off as a scribal error. They reassure the slaveowner that they still benefited from slavery, and that God will bless them for following this version of the law. They refer to the slave as “your brother” and invoke the Israelite’s founding myth of having been enslaved in Egypt, providing reasoning for the change.

And this kind of thing has shown up again and again in Jewish law for millennia. The Mishnah is unusual in the way it only states the law–and it’s not long until the Gemara steps in to add that reasoning. When you read a teshuvah, it doesn’t just contain the ruling the rabbis settled on. It includes their reasoning and cites the precedents they’re drawing on.

The details of what changed in the laws of slavery between Exodus and Deuteronomy aren’t the important part here. Honestly, I probably got a little carried away elaborating on that. The important part is that Jewish law has always been open to change and reinterpretation, even going back as far as when parts of the Torah were still being written. Moving forward in time a bit, the entire premise of Rabbinic Judaism is “how do we adapt our laws to fit our current situation?” The first “current situation” that needed adapting to was, of course, no longer having a temple. But that was far from the last. Today’s rabbis adapting halakhah to things like electricity and the internet and modern medicine are engaging in the same process as the earliest rabbis adapting halakhah to the destruction of the temple and living in exile. Today’s rabbis asserting egalitarianism, asserting that women can read from the Torah and lead services and become rabbis, are engaging in the same process as the author of Deuteronomy amending the laws in Exodus to free a female slave as well as a male one.

i’m sorry if this is kinda a rambly mess i don’t have energy to write this perfectly but a couple more points i feel are necessary to make:

• these different movements of judaism are very relatively new (as others have pointed out) but so is judaism being categorized as “just religion”. a lot of the reason why it’s like this is because jews who were assimilated into christian societies (especially modern western countries) were kinda forced to “remodel” judaism to be more similar/acceptable to christianity.
• this is also connected to the fact these different streams were almost entirely an ashkenazi thing (saying this as an ashkenazi jew). this does not take into account so many jewish diaspora experiences.
• this logic also relegates jewishness to only the religious aspects of it which is something a lot of antisemites do to erase our history (our ethnic identity, racial discrimination towards us).
• this is more of my personal experience but i think it should be noted: a lot of jews do not live in an area with enough jews for there to be a real division between movements or what have you. i’m from the bible belt southeastern usa. the city i grew up in has a reform synagogue and a conservative synagogue that also does orthodox services. both were part of the same community. this is exactly the same situation where i live now and in the city where i was born.
• basically this bs disregards SO MANY jewish communities, is very ashkenazi-centric, and displays a lot of ignorance towards jews who don’t get much of a choice in their specific movement bc their communities are so small
• anon is annoying as fuck. do you really think antisemites care whether a jew is orthodox or reform or secular or a convert