Judaism does not really have the transactional approach to religion that Christianity seems to have. You’re not supposed to do the right thing because you’re going to get something in return - you’re supposed to do it because it’s the right thing to do (although what the “right thing” actually is can be open to debate).
Of course, God is justice, by definition, so things should work out in the end, eventually, somehow…
I agree. In my experience, Jews tend not to dwell on such things. It seems to me, that when hearing about a previously unknown Jewish practice, a Jew will generally not respond with questions about the punishment for ignoring that practice, rather, a Jew will tend to ask about the origins and meanings of that practice.
However, in my particular case, I reached a point in my teenage years when I debated with myself about what direction I wanted my life to take. For example, my parents kept a kosher home, but we ate non-kosher at restaurants; we ate non-kosher at restaurants, but only the rest of the year and not on Passover. These halfway measures were unacceptable to me, and I tried to figure out a basis for turning my life in one direction or another. And it seemed to me that trying harder to follow Judaism was a relatively easy solution, especially when compared to the possible rewards. (And much later, I learned how similar that was to Pascal’s Wager.)
That’s generally true of modern Judaism, but much of the Torah is very explicitly transactional; “You do the sacrifices right, you get rain; screw up, you get Babylonians”.
Of course they can. Millions have.
Who is saying they can’t? Jews? Why in the world would anyone who renounced (or abandoned or converted from or stopped observing or…) care or listen?
The preview on Goodreads only has a single page. Should I be checking somewhere else on the site?
Scroll down.
Oh, wait, I think you have to have a Gmail account to see more than that. 
Of course, anyone can say whatever they want. A Jew can go through the motions and announce to the world that they are renouncing Judaism and/or accepting another religion. But from the perspective of Jewish law, the statement has no effect, and the person remains a Jew from the perspective of Jewish law.
There are many people who would not care, and even many who would celebrate such a decision. But there would also be many Jews who would consider this person to still be part of the family. A sinner, yes, but still part of the family.
I misread this at first thinking you were referring to a “fence around a synagogue”. I.e., an eruv. It’s a … ploy to allow people to carry out more activities on the Sabbath that one normally couldn’t do since you are in the “walled in” area. And the wall is just a wire.
This, compared with the expansion of the dairy/meat thing contrast nicely in expanding vs. weakening of rules by one group. (I know people who kept meat and dairy in separate refrigerators and used different colored dishes for meals of one type or the other.)
But anyway. I’ve been reading quite a few scholarly books on related topics lately plus there’s some well done YouTube channels on such matters.
The key thing is that Jewish beliefs on the OP’s topic changed over time based on outside influences. The Babylon experience, contact with Greeks, competing with Christianity etc.
Early on there was no concept of a separate soul vs. body. When the body died, that was it. (With a couple notable exceptions of people being taken up to … wherever.)
As mentioned, there are a ton of examples of evil people being punished in the OT. Either individually or collectively. But that was within people’s lifetimes.
A large part of the “long term view” was oriented towards survival of the family/tribe/nation. You acted properly so that these would continue to survive. If you did really bad stuff, these could be punished, even extinguished.
In the first century BCE, presumably due to interactions with the Greeks, other views started to be debated. In particular resurrection (which might also be termed “reincarnation” by some in modern terms.) So that was a hot topic when Jesus came along. Hence some followers suggesting that he was the resurrection of John the Baptist (which creates time line issues from our point of view).
By the time the Talmud came along, actual afterlife topics came into play. E.g., if a woman is married, her husband dies and she remarries and both die, who is she married to in the afterlife?
You cannot live a good life and believe this.
To take an extreme example, why wouldn’t you give the same credence to a Christian calling that same non-Jew a Christ-killer because they are always going to be Jewish?
Yes, that’s certainly a crucial point to understand; Jewish beliefs and attitudes on this point have evolved over time, and there are really no fundamental doctrines at all that are consistently expressed through all of Jewish history. You want to believe there is no afterlife, we’ve got a textual cite for that. You want angels and harps, we can do that, too.
If there is anything almost all Jews would probably agree on about the afterlife, it’s that we’ll all find out soon enough and there’s no use wasting time speculating on the details before then.
Well, that would depend on how much they plan on interacting with religious Jews in the future, wouldn’t it? At the extreme, if they’re in some ultra-Orthodox community, openly renouncing Judaism is going to lead to them being shunned by literally everyone they have ever known.
Outside of the Orthodox world, converting to some other religion might be strongly frowned upon (much more so than just becoming secular would be), but the criticism would be much more likely to be framed as appeals to ethnic loyalty than to religious law. Obviously nobody actually expects that a person who wants to leave Judaism is going to be deterred by the fact that Jewish law forbids them from doing so.
I seem to recall you getting worked up about this in other threads, not sure why. It has essentially zero impact on anyone who doesn’t care about the opinion of religious zealots.
And it’s not a uniquely Jewish thing; the Catholics don’t have an opt-out clause either (though in their case baptism, rather than birth, is when you get locked in), and I’m pretty sure the Muslims don’t. Actually, I’m not sure that any religion DOES provide an explicit procedure for getting out with no hard feelings.
And I do think that attitude, the really not giving two shits about it while here and now takes up so much energy, is a bit … alien … to many Christian mindsets.
Oh the High Holy Days make a to do about how our various sins may have us written for a bad fate in the year to come and what we can do to potentially avert a severe decree before the book is sealed on Yom Kippur … and that is a wee bit transactional … but even that is a transaction for within our lives.
And there are some afterlife concepts in there somewhere mixed in with a bunch of stuff that we almost all ignore, include many more religiously observant.
The emphasis though is that you should do what is right because it is right and there no reward required or promised. (With some defining what is right by the official mitzvot and others by ethical interpretations and many points of mix and match.)
What I’m hearing is that you’re saying that my personal beliefs can be blown off because they’re not the beliefs of an official religion.
That beautifully encapsulates the divide between believers and non-believers.
Claiming that some religious doctrine is incompatible with “living a good life” is…let’s just say probably not appropriate for this forum.
The difference is that calling someone a Christ-killer is very often a prelude to physical assault, often enough that it could reasonably be considered a threat. A Jew who is trying to engage you in a discussion of religious law might be annoying, bigoted and offensive, but he is almost certainly not going to suddenly start throwing punches, and he is not going to gather his buddies to come burn down your house.
Not at all. I find it a bit silly that you’re so hung up on this particular point, but your beliefs are certainly just as valid as those of any “official” religion. Personally, I would never dream of trying to tell someone who says they’re not Jewish that they actually are.
I said it was an extreme example, chosen because it was so extreme. It was meant to emphasize that there are only two choices. Either all religious pronouncements about some other non-members’ beliefs are acceptable or they all are not. No one gets to insist that their own religion’s beliefs are acceptable but those of others are not, no matter how benign or malignant they are. The particular religion does not matter. From the outside all religious beliefs about non-members are potentially dangerous, as history has proven uncounted times.
So what is your remedy? How exactly should a Jew who expresses his belief in Jewish law be punished?
I’m honestly not sure what you are trying to say here.
There exists a concept of “agreeing to disagree”. Suppose a person was born Jewish, and then renounces it, and now considers himself non-Jewish. And then someone else points out that from the perspective of Jewish law, that person really is still Jewish.
It seems to me that this is still a mutually respectable situation, provided that each side is clearly “from this perspective” or “from that perspective”. Those words might be explicit or implicit, and I can easily see how tempers can flare if someone gives the appearance of saying that “I am right and you are wrong”, but I hope that’s not the case in this forum.
But your example totally failed, because you compared a situation in which there is a immediate threat of physical violence to a situation in which there is not. Presumably everyone here agrees that violence is never an acceptable response to religious differences, so I’m not sure what you thought that added to the discussion.
If a Christian who I knew meant me no harm wanted to discuss the laws of matrilineal descent, and had a different opinion than I did, why would I care? People get to believe different things.
Who said something about physical violence??? I missed that!
I hope it wasn’t me!!!