Your post is a cool example of a key difference between Judaism and Christianity - you’re doing it exactly right! You’re inadvertently practicing the way Jewish scholars interact with the material.
Flesh your analysis out a little more by exploring the implications of your analysis on the rest of the chapter, and you are halfway to writing your own Midrash 
Or maybe if people didn’t waste their time arguing the minute details of ridiculous mythical stories, but instead focused on what was happening in the real world today there may be a real solution to real problems
Who the fuck cares who killed who in a book?
Yes, purim. When we read the book of Esther. And after Esther and Mordecai gain the favor of the king of Persia, he gives the Israelites permission to kill all of Haman’s clan. They kill 500 of Haman’s relatives the first day, and another 300 the second day, and impale Haman’s ten sons on stakes, because Haman plotted to destroy the Israelites.
It’s the “genocide at the end of the book”. (Chapter 9 of the book of Esther, for anyone not familiar with the story.)
And yes, Haman, who plotted to kill the Jews is identified by modern Jews as an Amalekite because he tried to destroy the Jews. And so, every year, we celebrate that we weren’t destroyed, and also, just incidentally, we celebrate the murder of all of Haman’s relatives.
And that’s why i don’t usually celebrate Purim. Because i find that little genocide disturbing.
Yeah, I’ve always had problems with that myself. I get that it’s very easy to blur the boundary between “celebrating that our enemies didn’t succeed in destroying us” and “celebrating that we destroyed our enemies”, and the Book of Esther is a product of its historical time and circumstances. But it still feels weird to be cheering about all that one-sided slaughter, even if it’s committed by people who narrowly escaped being slaughtered themselves.
(And let’s not even get into the issue of the whole train of events kicking off because the king wanted Queen Vashti to come out and be ogled by all the dudes at his banquet, and she wouldn’t do it, so he went trawling for beautiful young virgins to restock his harem, one of whom was Esther. Not to mention the bunches of non-Jewish people at the end of the book converting to Judaism because they were afraid of the Jews, and so on. Of course you can’t judge historical texts by modern standards, but let’s just say there’s a whole lot about that story that doesn’t stand up very well to being recited verbatim as part of a modern celebration.)
This guy writing last March says it better than I could, about both historical and modern contexts.
I had about a decade from age 15 to 25 that I stopped attending synagogue. My family isn’t religious but we engaged as a matter of cultural preservation/continuation. When I started going to my campus Chabad (for the same reason), I remember being struck specifically by how jarring the story of Purim is when you’re not conditioned to cheering and jeering at the annihilation of Haman and his tribe. Count me as another Jew who’s uncomfortable, if not with the story (which as Kimtsu said is a product of its historical time), then at least with the lack of nuance in the way it was discussed at my service.
I do sometimes make hamantoschen, though. Cookies are nice, even if the story is jarring.
I’m seriously asking:
When you say that, is it true for all Judaism, or is what you’re saying only applicable to the more modern/reform aspects? (Apologies, I don’t know all the appropriate terms)
Because I get the sense that there’s no small number of ultra-conservative/Haredi/Whatever the right name is who just might interpret it exactly as written. But if that’s not right I’m open to that.
I reiterate, I don’t know if working out the “correct” interpretation of such stories, or whether they exist at all, matters. If some psycho reads them and then hits the West Bank like a U.S. school shooter, the odds are he would have done, or been told to do, precisely the same thing had he read the Financial Times that morning instead.
I do not like organized religion, but there is no point in a political context to go looking for flaws in Judaism, Islam, Buddhism themselves. If someone is weaponizing religion as one of the tools to stir up their particular collection of psychos, Nazis, and hoi polloi, then we can blame them (as well as the people who listen to them; there is no excuse).
The links I posted earlier were from Chabad, which is a Haredi movement.
Judaism doesn’t map 1:1 with Christianity. More intense Jews aren’t more literal because almost all types of Judaism, no matter how strict, look at both the Written Torah and the Oral Torah as key aspects of God’s message.
There are definitely Jews who are even crazier than Haradi Jews - like the Jews who hate Israel because they think a true Jewish state (they mean “kingdom”) can only happen when the Messiah comes back and the temple is rebuilt, and therefore anything else that looks like a Jewish state is an evil facsimile. Or the very extremist Jewish people who don’t like Israel because the Jewish identity now has something to focus on and build around other than strict religion, which they view as a bad thing. But both of these groups get there through varying interpretation of the Oral Torah, not by being more literal.
And of course, there are Karaites, who believe only in the written Torah. They are the Biblical literalists you are probably thinking of. They are also so far removed from all incarnations of mainstream Judaism (Rabbinic Judaism) and such a tiny minority (like 50,000 worldwide) that I wasn’t really taking them into account.
I want to second this. They exist, and they are totally irrelevant to almost all discussions, certainly to discussions of modern Israeli politics. They are considered heretics by mainstream Judaism, because the oral law is canonical to mainstream Judaism (from ultra Orthodox to Reform). And there aren’t very many of them.
IMHO if any religious group (big, small, whatever) is relevant to modern politics then there is already a big problem. In that case it might matter, or seem to matter, what the local Supreme Cult Leader’s view on genocide is. Corrupt politicians are enough of a problem in and of themselves.
Okay, but how do you avoid it? Outlaw like minded people from voting as a bloc?
Best guess is sometime between a couple months ago and mid-July, if you want to stick to the official (and very strict) definition of famine. But it’s inconceivable to me that you would use the lack of data from Gaza as evidence to argue that people aren’t starving there.
The US-based famine early warning system network (Fews Net) said it was “possible, if not likely” that famine began in northern Gaza in April. Two UN organisations said more than 1 million people were “expected to face death and starvation” by mid-July.
War complicates the collection of data that would confirm famine has taken hold. But focusing only on whether Gaza had passed the moment when extreme hunger tips into an official declaration of famine risked obscuring the extremely high toll that food shortages had taken on Palestinians already, both organisations said.
“Regardless of whether or not the famine (IPC phase 5) thresholds have been definitively reached or exceeded, people are dying of hunger-related causes across Gaza,” the Fews Net report found. “Acute malnutrition among children is extremely high and this will result in irreversible physiological impacts."
I’ve been meaning to get around to finding an exact timeline but in yemen with a military that was unabashedly trying to starve out civillians in enemy areas it took a long time for the famine to develop. And it’s not like literally everyone died after being under siege for years.
Yeah, if your definition of famine is “everyone there died of hunger due to absence of food”, there are probably very few historical circumstances that would qualify.
Timeline-wise, here is the most recent IPC Acute Food Insecurity Projection Update for Yemen (Oct '23-Feb '24) that I can find, linking to a whole list of previous projections for earlier periods. And here’s the IPC projection for March-July in Gaza.
Right now, I’m all; “Fuck the Israeli government”. And needed to express it.
They’re seemingly psychotic and dragging us down with them. I’m pretty sure most people are with me on the government’s cruelty. Yeah, but the college protestors are, no doubt, Pro Hamas, (unless we need them to fight in a war sparked by this bullshit).
If I’m overlooking anything, tell me. I really had to express my disgust.
Certainly not all, but quite a few, Israelis are all “Fuck the Israeli government”, too, at least for their own reasons.
Yes. Some of those people I think just don’t want things to escalate, but I’m sure there are many that see this as unjust.
Anyway, now that we have definitive proof that Hamas have been using refugee camps as bases of operation, I’ll be expecting full retractions and apologies from those who claimed there were never any legitimate targets there and Israel was deliberately attacking civilians in order to genocide them.
…from the article:
The video from last night are some of the worst that I’ve seen. Children with their brains coming out of their heads.
Every time Smapti demands an apology, its immediately after they’ve shared evidence of an atrocity. Wants to come and gloat over the bodies of brown children. This is what he is defending. Because he doesn’t think Palestinians are human.
I’m pleased that the hostages are safe. How the rescues were conducted though, especially with evidence coming out that it included a disguised aid truck and potentially US involvement on the ground, is yet more evidence of breaches of the Geneva Conventions and International Humanitarian law.