"Too bad that kind of faith won’t save you. I’ll pray for you.

And it doesn’t matter what people claim. The question is what is true. It’s a crying shame that coherent argument and commitment to truth-seeking have been eroded. If we can’t even start with basic truths and work our way up-down-back-forward, the whole discussion is POINTLESS!"

Above is a Christian weblog response to another commenter:

"When I was in Desert Storm, I took the time to make a pilgrimage to the Wailing Wall. I prayed to God there, and confessed how much mankind has shaken my faith. “If you are truly my Father, and I your son, then I know that if I honestly do the best I can, you will be proud of me”.

Such is my own faith."

———

It’s a shame that Christianity has this precedent that unless you "accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Saviour before you die" you will spend eternity in some Greek Hades.

It’s a shame because it’s a lie.

How can I merely ignore John 8:24, "I said therefore unto you, that ye shall die in your sins: for if ye believe not that I am he, ye shall die in your sins." and other such verses that appear on the surface to relegate all unbelievers to a permanent state of death?  The answer is, I’m not.  However, you must take all verses into account of context and timing.

Ezekiel 20:48, "And all flesh shall see that I, YHWH, have kindled it: it shall not be quenched."

Matthew 24:30, "And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory."

There are many righteous individuals who do not see, neither with their heart nor their eyes.  This seeing will only come with a physical revelation such as that of "Doubting Thomas."

John 20:29, "Y’shua saith unto him, Toma, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: [more] blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed."

Y’shua is using a rabbinical comparison in these two verses called Kal v’khomer.  This means light and heavy and is used to argue that if this light thing is important then how much more important is this heavier thing.

Excpert from an article in Tikkun Magazine written by  Aaron J. Tapper, the Founder and Co-Executive Director of Abraham’s Vision:

A Prayer for “Righteous Gentiles”

Though Purim is unabashedly a celebration of Jewish triumph, Passover presents itself as a more nuanced holiday. Even many non-Jews are aware of the custom during the Seder of spilling wine out of our cups during the recitation of the Ten Plagues, symbolizing our communal discomfort with celebrating the suffering and deaths of the Egyptians, an idea echoed in various midrashim.

Realizing the contradiction in calling for God’s wrath to be waged upon non-Jews immediately before making a prayer for universal peace, some rabbis have offered the following prayer as an alternative or accompaniment to Shfokh Chamatkha:   

Pour out Your love upon the nations who have known You and upon the regions where they call upon Your name, due to the loving-kindness that they have enacted upon Jacob’s descendants and for defending Your nation Israel from those who would devour them. May they live to see the sukkah [of peace spread] over your chosen ones and to participate in the happiness of your nations.

Until three years ago, I chose to recite this passage at my family’s Seder, after my father said Shfokh Chamatkha. I was comforted that I was performing a custom I believed was more than 500 years old, said to have been established around the same time as Shfokh Chamatkha. Thinking of the Talmud, I also felt that in reciting both texts alongside one another my family was being more accurately reflective of our pluralistic, multi-opinioned tradition.

But eventually I became dissatisfied with this second tradition as well. I was asking God to bless those people who were already, in common vernacular, “good to the Jews.” I realized that this prayer was limited in scope, focusing on a single group of non-Jews who—at least in my mind—already seem to be on God’s path. Though this prayer did not call for violence, it continued the pattern of dividing the world into Jew and non-Jew, those who help Jews and those who hurt Jews, creating an “othering” that has generated much violence. Soon thereafter I learned that this second tradition was probably created around 1963, as the Halachic authority, Rabbi David Golinkin, contends in the Spring 2003 edition of Conservative Judaism.

Understanding Forgiveness

In the Summer of 2003 I had the opportunity to spend one month in Freetown, Sierra Leone, volunteering as a research intern with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). As many people know, prior to the ceasefire of 2002, a bloody and ruthless civil war raged in Sierra Leone for more than ten years. One of the many forms of violence perpetrated during this time was the chopping off of an “enemy’s” hands.

On one of my last days at the TRC, I spoke with a Sierra Leonean who had lost his left hand in one such attack. Hesitantly questioning him as to what he would do if he encountered the man who had viciously chopped his hand off, I asked him about forgiveness. In one of the more profound moments of my life I listened to the beautiful way that this individual had decided to treat his so-called enemy.

“I would embrace him,” he said. “I would hug him and tell him that I forgive him. I know that he didn’t chop off my hand because he hated me. He didn’t even know me. He chopped off my hand in a crazed state of fear and madness.”

Is it possible for my Jewish community to deal with perceived enemies in this same way? Or should we pray for their demise or even their deaths? What about those who don’t actually commit a crime? Should they be punished for intentions of thought? Purim’s Haman, as the megillah informs us, didn’t kill anyone. Using terms from the United States criminal justice system, Haman only “conspired” to kill others. And according to the text his sons didn’t even do that. As for the more than 75,000 others who were killed by the Jewish community that day, the text implies that some of these non-Jews were killed in self-defense and some were murdered in pre-emptive attacks.

But Jewish texts offer an abundance of voices in favor of reconciliation. According to one text, the esteemed Talmudic figure Beruriah finds her husband, Rabbi Meir, praying for God to destroy some men. Shocked at her husband’s behavior Beruriah sharply admonishes her husband, asking him to explain how he could make such a prayer. Rabbi Meir explains that on his way home he was robbed by two thieves and his prayer was asking God to “justly” punish these sinners. Citing her own interpretation of a verse from the Book of Psalms, Beruriah tells Rabbi Meir that rather than asking God to destroy the men—to destroy the sinners—he should instead pray for God to destroy their sins.

In looking at the advocacy of nonviolence in the Jewish tradition, one is not hard-pressed to find that Beruriah was following an age-old Jewish tradition that confronts a Jew’s urge to commit revenge, focusing instead on the biblical commandments to bear no grudge and to forgive others. Being created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, commands us to take our lives—and the lives of all others—extremely seriously. Indeed, as a famous Mishnah teaches us, the loss of a single life is equivalent to the death of the entirety of humanity. The Jerusalem Talmud teaches us that it does not matter if the individual is a Jew or a non-Jew. Both are holy in the eyes of God.

This theology of nonviolence and communal forgiveness has been developed by contemporary rabbis Everett Gendler and Jeremy Milgrom, among others. It is a theology we can apply to reconciling with children of WWII-era Germans who must live with the actions of their parents and grandparents. It is a theology we can apply to the situation in the Middle East, where only by engaging in compassionate forgiveness will we be able to achieve an endurable peace.

Jacques Derrida, a Jew from Algiers who knew much about both war and genocide, wrote that there is an element of giving within the concept of forgiveness, a giving of a piece of oneself to another in response to an unforgivable act. But, he continues, the process must be performed despite this paradox. Reconciliation is the path towards healing, the way towards peace, whether in Sierra Leone, South Africa, or Israel and Palestine. We, as a Jewish community, must attempt to reconcile with our perceived enemies, for both the safety and sustenance of the Jewish community as well as the future stability of our global world.

A New Prayer

Using Beruriah’s wisdom and other Jewish texts and customs as a backdrop, I recently composed the following prayer, to be said during the Pesach Seder, either in place of or alongside Shfokh Chamatkha:

Pour out Your love upon the commmunities who do not know You—both Jews and non-Jews—and the regions where they call upon Your name in vain, for we all need help from you to see the hate inside of us. Transform our evil thoughts so that we can use our power to make the world whole and to perfect its brokenness. May we live to see the sukkah of peace and to participate in the happiness of all of Your nations. Give all of us Your support, so that we can achieve a state of internal peace and a peace within the human collective, in Your name if not in ours, in our name if not in Yours. You who brings peace to Your world brings peace to us and to the people Israel and to all humankind, and we say Amen.

———–

Would you Christians sentence him to Hell, too?

Psalm 94:1, "O YHWH, El of vengeance, thou El of vengeance, shine forth!"

John 9:41, "Y’shua said unto them, If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth"