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7/11/2025, 11:54:04 PM
>>40703691
>>40703714
>who were facing persecution for bringing monotheism to the world
But this frames my question perfectly: Did the Jewish people bring monotheism to the world, or did God bring monotheism to the world? Is God an idea that the Jewish people discovered, or is God an actual being who exerted agency through some of these people? I think the thrust of the Torah is of the latter sort; with God having agency through the People, and with the people themselves being a fallible, passive instrument at best, whose virtues were reliant upon their submission to God, rather than on their intrinsic ethnic peculiarity.
I don't think that Jews were being singled out for their ethnicity so much as for behaving differently, resulant from their religious proximity to God, and subsequent resistance to idols and reductive/deranged, merely earthly powers and laws.
Do you see how there's a difference, here?
I don't think God chose Abraham to be the main vessel for his covenant because of his ethnicity, but because he was himself a preeminently humble and faithful man.
I think the sense that the idea that ethnicity, in an immutable sense, is what makes the Jewish Nation special is problematic, and not necessarily found in the TaNaKh. Of course, I as a potential convert might have this sense, but I also think this is true of the TaNaKh and perhaps more easy to see from the outside, whereas the importance of Ethnicity may plausibly have developed within the Jewish Diaspora as a result of myriad efforts to force assimilation, in the sense of abandnonment of the Law, rather than in the sense of merging with foreign genes.
Do you see what I mean? Wouldn't that tend more toward materialsitic racism and nationalism, than toward spiritual piety, high-mindedness, and virtue, which I think of as the true purpose of Judaism?
>>40703714
>who were facing persecution for bringing monotheism to the world
But this frames my question perfectly: Did the Jewish people bring monotheism to the world, or did God bring monotheism to the world? Is God an idea that the Jewish people discovered, or is God an actual being who exerted agency through some of these people? I think the thrust of the Torah is of the latter sort; with God having agency through the People, and with the people themselves being a fallible, passive instrument at best, whose virtues were reliant upon their submission to God, rather than on their intrinsic ethnic peculiarity.
I don't think that Jews were being singled out for their ethnicity so much as for behaving differently, resulant from their religious proximity to God, and subsequent resistance to idols and reductive/deranged, merely earthly powers and laws.
Do you see how there's a difference, here?
I don't think God chose Abraham to be the main vessel for his covenant because of his ethnicity, but because he was himself a preeminently humble and faithful man.
I think the sense that the idea that ethnicity, in an immutable sense, is what makes the Jewish Nation special is problematic, and not necessarily found in the TaNaKh. Of course, I as a potential convert might have this sense, but I also think this is true of the TaNaKh and perhaps more easy to see from the outside, whereas the importance of Ethnicity may plausibly have developed within the Jewish Diaspora as a result of myriad efforts to force assimilation, in the sense of abandnonment of the Law, rather than in the sense of merging with foreign genes.
Do you see what I mean? Wouldn't that tend more toward materialsitic racism and nationalism, than toward spiritual piety, high-mindedness, and virtue, which I think of as the true purpose of Judaism?
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