Essay on Judaism

[salinea]

There's a gorgeous post :Whose story are they by nextian, about being Jewish and listening to Christian readings of our holy books. (I would also add, listening to Atheist from a Christian background read to our holy books, although the writer doesn't, because that's one of the thing that often makes me flinch when I read discussions on religion and atheism).

It was the second time I'd read a naked Bible, a text without extensive annotation and commentary, without doing straight-up line searches online. It looked rude, or like I was missing half the story. I'm Reform, and I don't believe that the Talmud came down to us from sacred inspiration (Rebecca was three years old? Please, even the Talmudic scholars disagreed on that one), but -- without years of argument and debate surrounding every line, how were you supposed to work past your first assumption about the text? How were you supposed to understand what it meant to your fathers, to those of your mothers who snuck looks at the stories, to Maimonides in Al-Andalus and to Akiva who didn't think much of Jesus when he met him and to the thousands of years of commentators thinking under the yoke of the Christian world?

How was I supposed to sit in class and listen to people say, Maybe we're just not supposed to understand the contradictions in the text?

Or to the new grad student teacher, a Jew himself, telling me, We try to read the text in isolation here?

What does that even mean?

Comments

[peadarog.livejournal.com]

Nice. The intersection of religion and culture is always, always fascinating. Thanks for the link.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

sometimes I think "religion" as a category just doesn't work much. It serves to group a bunch of social phenomenons and philosophical ideas, and randomly excludes other quite arbitrarily and allow some people to think they're entitled to know when, well, they don't.

I love the concept of intertextuality, in religions in general and in judaism in particular :)