“Because Jewishness encompasses ethnic as well as religious components, the term “Jewish atheism” does not necessarily imply any kind of contradiction.”
IMO it’s clear that they are making the same distinction I made in the other thread, i.e. that Jewish atheists may be “Jewish” in the ethnic and/or cultural sense, but not in the religious sense. Whether their actions may lead other people into thinking they are Jewish in the religious sense does not seem very important to me.
I’m an agnostic, and essentially an atheist when it comes to the Christian (or Jewish) god. But I enjoy Christian holidays, and I like to listen to classical requiems and masses. When I go to a church for a wedding or funeral, I sing (badly) along with the hymns, I bow my head and keep silent during prayers, and I go through the required aerobics if it’s a Catholic ceremony requiring a lot of kneeling (but of course I respectfully decline communion if it’s that kind of service). I imagine that a stranger at the ceremony would assume I’m a Christian because of my actions, but I would not for a second consider myself Christian, let alone Catholic, simply because I choose not to act boorishly in a church, or enjoy holidays with friends and family, or listen to Mozart or Bach.
You are welcome to consider yourself whatever you want, but I think you are misleading people when you state or imply that belief in God is not a crucial aspect of the Jewish religion.
You are commanded in Deut 6 to love God with all your heart and soul and strength. IMO anybody who says he can do that without belief is just playing word games whose rules, and sense, escape me.
Rambam did not give us 613 mitzvot; the Torah did.
You’re talking about the 13 articles of faith - and that, too, is up for debate.
You’re also commanded to honor your father and mother. It is a matter of action.
Anyone who follows Judaism to his or her will and does not believe in God is not dishonoring anyone as long as they do it sincerely. To follow God blindly is not following God at all.
That is not a close parallel. Honoring someone, i.e. treating them with all due respect and courtesy, is indeed a matter of action. Loving with all your heart and soul, especially when the object is not tangible, is almost entirely mental, and makes no sense without belief in its existence.
In the other thread, you said I made no sense when I talked about a hypothetical Jewish state (and to make it explicit, I meant a different one from the existing Israel, alright?) I think it makes no sense to talk about “sincerely” going through the motions of a faith without believing in it.
How do you show your love for God? By following mitzvot. It essentially becomes the same thing.
You make no sense because there already is a Jewish state. A two-state solution still includes non-Jews in Israel and nowhere does it advocate for the bucking of secular law!
Huh? If God talked to me every day of my life, there’d be no blind about it.
I’m not sure I understand your point here. As I understand things, he compiled the list of 613 Mitzvot based on his study of the Torah. Am I incorrect?
What exactly is the debate? According to every source I could find, Mitzvah number 1 is to “know there is a G-d.” How is this debatable?
I think this is a problem that Christians (and post-Christians) have. Christianity lays great stress on faith, and Protestant Christianity in particular tends to understand faith in terms of belief. For somebody whose normative example of religion is Christianity, it is easy to assume that all religions are matters mainly of belief. Even atheists fall into this trap. (In fact, new atheists like Dawkins have a distinctly Protestant concept of what it is to be religious.)
Judaism is not so much about what you believe as about how you live. Sure, it may be easier to commit to a careful observance of the Law if that commitment is underpinned by certain beliefs, but that is not of the essence. You could have other reasons for thinking that keeping the Law is important and worthwhile.
It comes down to this; a righteous Jew, an observant Jew, is one who observes the Law.
That might be how you show it to other people. But you are lucky if it’s never occurred to you that you can do nice things for people, including everything they ask you to do, while not liking them, let alone loving them.
I guess I wasn’t aware that all the details had been ironed out. I thought there were different proposals from different factions. And my question was very clearly hypothetical.
If you hear a voice in your head telling you to murder your children, how do you know it’s God? I think the stats will back me up on this: most times, it isn’t.
…you were speaking of the 13 Principles of Faith, right?
To say that it is Rule No. 1 means there is a two, a three, a four hundred, and a six hundred and thirteen, thereby giving weight to some more than others.
Rambam is/was not the end all be all and his 13 principles didn’t gain widespread acceptance until long after his death.
The first mitzvah given is* to be fruitful and multiply.*
I get that you can be a good person without believing in God. What I’m not seeing is how you can say you are following all of the commands, when some of them make no sense without belief. How can you love God with all your heart and soul if you don’t even believe in him?
The things you do to love God are the mitzvot. Judaism is not by faith alone. If such were the case, we’d be Christians or some such business. Judaism says that only action expresses faith, and the sages said (paraphrasing), something like:
How do you cleave to God? Visit the sick, clothe the naked, comfort the mourning (because this is what HaShem did for man to show love).
The passage which you mentioned - Devarim 6 - is about the commandment to carry on Judaism. This means the law and custom of Jews.
Most of those Jews turn and follow another stream. Or are just rejected entirely.
Ask Baruch Spinoza.
I’ve mentioned this before: to some of us, “HaShem” is an idea - kind of like democracy, love, patience, or other such judgeable but not quite solid things.
I think it is more of where the importance is placed. Yes, it is a commandment, a mitzvah, to “know that God exists” as it is to know that God is One and to love God. “Not to make a loan to an Israelite on interest” is also one. So is “To keep the Canaanite slave forever”, and “Not to cross-breed cattle of different species” and … you get the point. You can be a Jew and not follow all the Mitzvot, obviously some are not even possible to do.
Of the Mitzvot there are a handful that have to do with belief and hundreds that have to do with behaviors, with actions to perform and to not perform.
Of modern Jews a minority are Orthodox. Many others are still religious and something other than Orthodox. You can be a Reform or a Reconstructionist Jew and still be religious. Of those religious Jews who are not Orthodox most do not feel that completing as many of the Mitzvot as possible is as important - some they decide are and some not. To many modern non-Orthodox religious Jews the important lessons are not checking off the Mitzvot, but the guidelines on ethical behaviors and on working towards perfecting the world. But both Orthodox and other Jews, both religious and secular Jews, would agree that Judaism is much much more concerned with how we behave here and now than with statements of faith or with what happens after we die. To all groups a Jew who behaves in a manner that they feel is consistent with being a good Jew will be accepted as a good Jew, whether they actively profess belief or not. Jews being excommunicated for heresy is notable for the rarity of its occurrence (Spinoza and maybe a few others?).
As for blind faith, most notable the Jewish take on the stories of Torah is on how these characters, our spiritual ancestors, argued with God. “Israel” means one who wrestles with God. And sometimes they won the arguments.
It is, I understand, very different than a Christian perspective. Not being Christian I cannot know if this is an accurate take, but I have often thought of it like this:
In Christianity you know God and are thereby guided, perhaps, to do the right things; in Judaism you do the right things, and thereby, perhaps, come to know God.
I’m no longer a Christian, but I was raised as one, and IMO you are correct that their take is very different. In Christianity, belief is by far the most important thing. Theoretically, if Hitler had sincerely repented of his actions and accepted Jesus as his savior ten seconds before he died, he would be in heaven right now. And we don’t know that he didn’t.
On the other hand, although there are exceptions, including some recent and highly publicized rethinking by the Catholic Church, for most of the last 2000 years and for most denominations, actions without belief are not enough. Even if you devoted your entire life to helping others tirelessly, if you were given the chance to accept Jesus and did not take it, you are doomed to hell.
One of the many reasons I’m no longer a Christian.
I don’t think so, no. I’m not Jewish but, SFAIK, Jews do not observe the Law as a means of coming to know God. Observing the Law may help to have this outcome, but it’s not the point of it. Assuming that the ultimate purpose of acting in a particular way is to arrive at a particular knowledge or belief is, again, the “everyone is a Protestant” fallacy. From the Jewish perspective, observing the Law is inherently good; it’s how God intends Jews to live.
And this isn’t an attitude completely foreign to Christianity. There’s a well-known passage in Mt 25 in which Jesus describes the “Son of Man” coming in glory and dividing the nations into the righteous, who are to join him in the kingdom, and the unrighteous, for whom a less attractive is planned. The righteous are identified because “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you made me welcome”, etc, etc, and when they say, basically, “Lord, we’ve never seen you before” the reply is that “in so far as you did this to one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me”.
In short, the righteous are those who do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. They don’t have to know God, or to know of God; simply by loving their fellow-men they are loving God. This may be a Christian teaching, but its straight out of Judaism.
Of course, Christianity does stress faith as well, and the precise relationship between faith and works has been a matter of considerable theological dispute within Christianity. But that’s a problem for Christians, not for Jews. As far as Jews are concerned, there are particular mitzvot which are undoubtedly easier to observe if you believe in God, but they are relatively few. And it doesn’t follow that even they are impossible to observe without a belief in God. If living as God calls you to live is the highest form of loving God, then it is possible to discern how you are called to live without identifying God as the author of that calling, and to love God by living in accordance with that discernment.
On the contrary. I think you confuse us with your Christianity. In case you forgot, the schism between Jews and Nazarenes was the Christian belief that the Mosaic law (including kosher!) no longer applied.
Since we’re working our way through Devarim atm and have gone over these ideas/passages recently, this stuff is fairly fresh in my head. I wish I had my notebook in the house but I’m too lazy to trek to the car to get it…but here’s what I was referencing earlier.