Judaism discovered


The Divine Inspiration of



Yüklə 1,67 Mb.
səhifə12/66
tarix22.07.2018
ölçüsü1,67 Mb.
#57648
1   ...   8   9   10   11   12   13   14   15   ...   66

The Divine Inspiration of Chazal (the Talmudic and Kabbalistic "sages of blessed memory")

  • The Racial and Spiritual Superiority of the Judaic male as personified by the rabbi (gaon; godol; posek ha-dor)

    The Study of the Bible only through the Intervention of the Rabbinic
    Glosses


    All who deny the preceding are subject to penalties ranging from censure to death, depending on the position of dominance and power which the rabbis occupy in a given time and place. For example, to believe and teach in the various Talmud schools of Orthodox Judaism known as the yeshiva and the kollel that the graves of gentiles are capable of defiling a person, is a vile thought-crime heresy in the view of the belt din (rabbinic court).


    162



    Gentiles

    The graves of Gentiles do not defile under the law of "tent" .



    Only a grave containing the remains of a human being can defile a living person. The graves of animals do not defile. The graves of gentiles do not defile, and for the same reason.

    Declamations of soothing gibberish in front of the gentile public to the effect that gentiles are indeed human is a great mitzvah in Judaism, since it serves the god of Judaism, the Father of Lies. Judaism has decoy statements transcribed within its sacred texts intended principally for gentile consumption. These are cryptically indicated by oral cues conveyed in the belt midrash ("house of learning") and by means of the rabbis' complex internal excursus. Though they appear to an outsider to be authoritative, these decoy texts are not intended to have force of law in Judaism.

    Until this insight is grasped, every scholar who attempts an objective evaluation of Judaism will become lost in the rabbis' nonpareil system of textually cloaked, arcane misdirection. Though much is made of knowledge of languages such as Mishnaic Hebrew and Aramaic in mastering Judaism, and all Christian scholars should certainly learn Old Testament Hebrew so as to better know their Israelite faith and heritage, there is actually an even more important linguistic skill necessary to deconstructing the religion of Judaism — mastery of the language of those in the know.

    129 In some cases these decoys are aimed at baalei teshuva (those Judaics who are newly returned to Judaism); certain Judaics under the age of forty (ve-gam besulos), and other special cases among Judaics themselves. Self-deception as a human need is recognized in Judaism as inescapable and inevitable, and deception is sown throughout its belief-system. Deceiving God and one's self is Judaism's distinctive characteristic. Western civilization's ideal of the pursuit of truth for its own sake is not considered valid in Judaism. This can be seen at work in the halachic principle of "mutav sheyihiyu shogegin ve'al yehiyu meizidin," expressed as follows: "It is better that they transgress out of ignorance rather than willfully." This is supported by the statement in the Gemara: "It is preferable to allow a person to remain uninformed and to sustain his status of an unintentional transgressor, than to transform that person into an intentional transgressor by informing him" (BT Shabbat 148b, Beitzah 30a). "Just as it is a mitzvah to say something that will be heard, so it is a mitzvah not to say something that will not be adhered to" (BT Yebamot 65b).


    163



    The Tarnish on Hillel's Golden Rule

    Hillel, the "merciful" Pharisee was a "quiet, peace-loving man, accommodating himself to circumstances and times, and being determined only upon fostering the Law and bringing man nearer to his God and to his neighbor." Shammai the "severe," on the other hand, was stern and unbending. To Shammai it seemed impossible to be sufficiently stringent in religious prohibitions. The disciples of Hillel, "evinced in all their public dealings the peacefulness, gentleness, and conciliatory spirit which had distinguished their great master; and by the same characteristic qualities they were guided during the political storms which convulsed their country. The Shammaites, on the contrary, were intensely patriotic, and would not bow to foreign rule. Bet Shammai and Bet Hillel continued their disputes— probably interrupted during the war times—after the destruction of the Temple, or until after the reorganization of the Sanhedrin under the presidency of Gamaliel II. (80 C.E.)."

    Judaism in projecting its public image, projects the face of Hillel the merciful, though he was by no means as kind, just, sweet, compassionate, decent and virtuous as the legends portray him. In its actual practice and beliefs, Judaism combines characteristics of both Hillel and Shammai who form one of the exegetical early zugot or "pairs," and as a pair they reflect a central unity on those key dogmas which will brook no dissent. Here is an instructive indication of the rabbinic mentality as symbolized by the figure of Hillel: "Hillel is described as a man of great humility who in his pursuit of peace was even prepared to depart from the truth (Bezah 20a)." 130

    Hillel is a symbol of the deceit which Judaism regards as necessary to advancing its power: for the sake of an ulterior motive the preeminent Pharisee departs from the truth. With this in mind, how should we regard the statement that Hillel reduced the entire Oral Law to the clean and simple crystalline lines of one, zen-like requirement? "To a heathen who came to him to be converted on condition that he teach him the entire Torah 'while standing on one foot,' Hillel replied, 'What is hateful to you, do not unto your neighbor, this is the entire Torah, all the rest is commentary." 131



    130

    .


    164

    But this is a Big Lie. Judaism's thousands of laws and rules binding on Judaics are not "commentary," they are halacha and the failure to keep them can result in calamities ranging from birth defects and death in childbirth, to the delaying of the coming of the Moshiach (Messiah) and the imposition of the "iron fist of gentile oppression."

    If the golden rule, as embodied by Hillel was the chief law of Judaism from which all other rabbinic laws flowed, and all the rest of Judaism's positive and negative laws "constituted mere commentary," the min and the apikorsim would not be beaten and killed, and their books would not be banned, hanged and burned. Since "our neighbor" does not want these things done unto him, if this were Judaism's rule of law, the rabbis would not visit these things upon doubters and dissidents. The tale of Hillel's "wise and benevolent" distillation of the essence of Judaism is tailor-made to appeal to western ideals and is often retailed to the goyim as part of Judaism's introductory mythology. Hillel serves his purpose within the rabbinic semiotic by acting as poster boy for the Kabbalistic pillar of chesed. But the rule of Shammai, the pillar of gevurah, also forms a significant part of the reality of Orthodox Judaism, even though Hillel is put forth as the more prominent (and dominant) of the two. In truth, they are complimentary, as the mystical Kabbalah compliments the bureaucratic Talmud, thesis/ antithesis — "pairs" produce the synthesis that is Judaism in all of its indissolubly connected, subterranean minutiae.

    165



    Why did the Chofetz Chaim & R'Chaim Ozer Grodzinsky start Ezras Torah?








    to save TALMIDEI CHOCHOMIM from

    THE PAIN AND SHAME OF POVERTY.

    In an ideal world, those who devote their lives to Torah would be recognized as the spiritual heroes that they are. Support Ezras Torah's Zedakah Programs and make that ideal a reality.

    In Eretz Yisroel today, Ezras Torah provides Housing, Emergency Medical funds, Wedding Assistance, Yom Tbv Stipends, Simcbas and Spatial Need's Grants and Loans.

    Make a life of Torah devotion and commitment an everlasting edifice that will bring us the Rabbonim, Dayonim and leaders of tomorrow!

    STAND UP FOR TORAH!

    Help Ezras Torah's committed scholars and families stand strong!




    Many adult Talmud scholars ("Talmidei chochomim") often do not engage in gainful employment, spending many days loitering in a kollel while their wives are employed, and money is sometimes scarce. Various rabbinic charities such as Ezras Torah act as welfare agencies for these indigent, perpetual Talmud students. In the United States these adult Talmud students also receive social services.

    Neither Ezras Torah or the American welfare system actually do away with indigence. They are palliatives. "Pain and shame" are terminal conditions in Orthodox Judaism.

    Furthermore, the reference to "Torah" in the above advertisement is not to the Bible but to the Torah SheBeal Peh, the oral traditions of men centered on the Mishnah and Gemara. Consequently, the "Torah" referred to is actually the Talmud.

    The legal codifier Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan (1838-1933) was known as the "Chofetz Chaim" (also spelled "Chafetz"). Rabbi Chaim Ozer G rod/en sky (1863-1939) was a legal codifier and one of the founders of Agudath Israel.




    166



    We are cognizant of the Israeli debate concerning Hasidic indolence in which the Shulchan Aruch was mustered to defend loitering in a kollel, while the kibbutzniks mustered the Mishneh Torah to argue that performing some work is indeed seemly. Maimonides was also on the conservative side of the issue on the wilder forms of Kabbalistic superstition, though he tacitly approved the belief in reincarnation as can be seen from subsequent rabbinic interpretation of his sly commentary on Onan's Kabbalistic obligation in Genesis 38 (according to the Kabbalah, Onan's secret duty was to continue his brother's seed so that his dead brother could reincarnate in the body of the child produced by the proposed union between Onan and Tamar).132

    Halachic rulings have been reached in both cases, by rabbinic consensus and precedent, as expressed in praxis. This is the key exegetical principle which rabbinic apologists have omitted or suppressed. The Shulchan Aruch has prevailed. Israeli Talmidim do not have to work, and the ultra-Orthodox penchant for magic amulets in service of Shas' party candidates as dispensed by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and many others, is not a red line in Orthodox Judaism, however much it may be regarded as crass or vulgar. There is Sephardic Kabbalah and there is the David Mamet version. Differences in this realm are matters of style and not substance.

    Talmudic indeterminacy, or the "Uncertainty Principle," which teaches that "there are no definitive answers possible" appears in a statement by Dr. K. Kohler: "...on these laws (Talmudic), no decisive authority being attached to one opinion any more than to the other." If this were true, how then could any Orthodox Judaic practice arise and maintain its hold over the population of adherents for 1600 years? If there are no "definitive answers" then what have the rabbis been doing all these centuries?133

    Much of the debate between Judaism and Christianity turns on which exegetical procedure will be followed: the inclusion of supplementary addenda (Talmud) into the canon of sacred texts and extrapolations made thereof, or teaching and interpretation of Scripture that proceeds in the spirit of the original texts on the basis of man-subordinate-to-God, and God's Word accessible to all people of good will. As part of Orthodox Judaism's sacred narrative, God's word is viewed as having an external or exoteric meaning

    .


    167



    and beneath that surface appearance, a much more profound and instructive esoteric meaning capable of being plumbed only by the Judaic male in his rabbinic propria persona. The irreconcilable division between Judaism and Christianity that vitiates all claims of an ecumenical common ground is centered in the Pharisaic claim that their particular exegesis was, synonymous with the written Torah, secretly bequeathed to Moses on Sinai, and maintained down through the centuries through an unbroken chain of oral transference. These claims put God's stamp of approval on two contradictory revelations: the Torah of the Old Testament {Torah SheBichtav) on one hand, and the Talmud/Kabbalah (Torah SheBeal Peh) on the other, which Judaism erroneously groups collectively as "Torah" under one heading, without distinction). The contradiction between the two is only denied in public for the benefit of the goyim. In rabbinic texts it is admitted, as per the statement of Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah: "When God spoke 'all these words' at Sinai, he spoke the exoteric Torah and the various—even contradictory—words of human exegesis" (BT Hag 3a-b). The contradictions are sustained and upheld in Judaism by its claim that there are two sources of God's law: the Bible and the rabbis: "The Holy One, Blessed be He, speaks Torah out of the mouths of all rabbis" (BT Hag 15b).

    Judaism's commitment to the Torah SheBeal Peh as the guarantor of authentic understanding of the Torah SheBichtav was institutionalized, contemporary with the repudiation and crucifixion of the Messiah of Israel, by Hillel,134 our much touted, supposed liberal-humanist "wise man for all ages" (often compared favorably with Jesus by ecumenicists). In this Tannaitic period that led to the writing of the Mishnah (first two centuries A.D.), the earliest halachic midrashim (legal exegesis) were formed on the basis of a solution Hillel devised to a problem in the cognitive psychology of Judaism: how to persuade a Judaic audience of the correctness of one's Scriptural interpretation. Hillel was unable to convince his fellow Judaics on the basis of the Scriptures alone. Prefacing one's remarks, as Jesus did, with "It is written" was insufficient for the followers of the religion of the Pharisees. In the fateful step of institutionalizing the heretofore oral tradition by writing it down as the proto-Mishnah, Hillel established his credentials and established his school of interpretation by invoking the oral

    ."


    168



    tradition which he had received from his Pharisaic mentors — Shemayah and Avtalyon — from which formed Judaism's early labyrinthine hermeneutical system of methodology (which would grow ever longer and more complex over time), the middot of sevenfold classification, based on ultra-meticulous syntactical and phraseological lawyer's minutiae.135 These seven rules soon morphed into thirteen (as devised by Rabbi Ishmael) and then thirty-two (as devised by Rabbi Eliezer ben Jose ha-Galili, a disciple of Rabbi Akiba) and like a cancer, have never ceased exploding in number and complexity since then.

    A Gigantic Heap of Self-perpetuating Legal and Textual Arcana What we are observing is a cataclysmic shift away from the Bible as sole or even ultimate authority, toward the authority of the Mishnah. Whereas previously this had been something that haunted and tempted carnal Israel even as it kept the Old Testament as its benchmark, a permanent shift occurs with the full emergence of the authority of the rabbinic Mishnah in the Amoraic age of Judaism (200-500 A.D.), in which man's word (the Mishnah), supplants God's Word (the Tanakh, i.e. Old Testament), as the guiding inspiration of the rabbis, leading to the composition of the "sacred" books of the Gemara which, together with the Mishnah comprise the Talmud. After the "sages" of the Amora'im era completed the Talmud (with some added tinkering in the sixth century), the first institutions of Talmudic learning, the great rabbinic academies, arose in the latter half of the sixth century, initiating the period of the Gaonim. In this Gaonic age, the Talmudic palimpsest became ever more darkened with a multipicity of emendations and additions to the rabbinic procedures for interpretation, methodology, exegesis, and taxonomy: the Seder Tannaim YAmoraim of Rabbis Nachshon Gaon and Zemach ben Paltoi Gaon, the Kelalei Ha-Talmud of Rabbi Saadi Gaon. Proceeding onward into the Rishonim era of the eleventh though the sixteenth centuries, we encounter the Mebo ha-Talmud of Rabbi Samuel Ibn Nagrela,136 the Sepher ha-Maphteach of Rabbi Nisim ben Jacob, the Sepher Kerithoth of Rabbi Samson of Chinin, the Halichot Olam of Rabbi Joshua ben Halevi (translated into Latin and circulated in Holland in 1634 by Constantin

    .


    169

    L'Empereur); the Darkhei ha-Gemara of Rabbi Isaac Kamponton. The modern period witnessed ever more treatises on Talmudic hermeneutics, methodology and the principles of the Oral Law such as the Kelalei ha-Gemara of the preeminent halachic authority Joseph Karo; the Sheyare Keneseth ha-Gedolah and the Shelah II (co-written with Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz), of Rabbi Hayim Benvenisti, the Yavin Shemuah, the Halichot Eli and the Gufe Halachoth of Rabbi Solomon Nisim Algazi. Though the bibliography of works establishing rules for Talmudic exegesis are nearly inexhaustible, we will mention the Yad Malachi of Rabbi Malachi Cohen, a detailed eighteenth century compendium of every technical rule of the Talmud. These often encyclopedic volumes of claustrophobic, self-referential systemization of the works of their own imaginations, led to the dominance of pilpulistic puerilities and gloomy, impenetrable hiddushim for its own sake. Maximus in minimis. How well and truly did Jesus Christ speak concerning the mentality of these religious leaders in Matthew 23:4, "For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders..."

    Beyond even the aspect of making religion into a grievous burden, these commentaries upon commentaries and rulings on rule books that rule on still other texts, codes, methodologies and hermeneutics, is the creation, expansion and promulgation of the gigantic heap of self-perpetuating legal and textual arcana through the concepts of 1. the "gezarah shava" and 2. the "hedge around the law." Both of these weave nets of obscurity and falsehood around the Scriptures.

    Falsifying Scripture with Gezara Shava

    1. In Judaism, a guiding principle overseeing a considerable amount of the fraud and falsification entailed by the rabbinic nullification of God's Word, is the concept of gezara shava: "Talmudic hermeneutics, which includes both legal (halacha) and literary (aggadah) interpretive traditions ... involves myriad interpretational moves, including the seven interpretive rules of Hillel and the thirty-two interpretive rules of Reb Eliezer...An important first principle of Talmudic reading is that...in the Biblical text...(e) very apparent redundancy hides a hidden meaning....Using the nonredundancy principle, readers re-interpret the parallel construction that is typical of Biblical style — two sentences with parallel and equivalent syntax and meaning — as nonequivalent; they then use the gendered grammar of Hebrew (i.e., all nouns are either masculine or feminine) to

    170



    derive a hidden meaning. A second interpretive strategy is to assume that similar wording in different contexts bear a relationship, a strategy called gezara shava that was invented by Hillel and popularized by the medieval scholar Rashi.. .For example, in the excerpt from Midrash Rabbah on Genesis...the recurrence of the word 'beginning' in two widely separated contexts, Genesis and Proverbs, suggests an underlying connection..." 137

    Gezarah shava is an exegetical method for construing a definite textual passage with reference to an indefinite one. "The following rule of interpretation, which is quoted in 'Broom's Legal Maxims,' p. 586, comes still nearer to the character of Talmudic Gezera Shava: 'Where an act of Parliament has received a judicial construction putting a certain meaning on its words, and the Legislature in a subsequent act in pari materia uses the same words, there is a presumption that the Legislature used those words intending to express the meaning which it knew had been put upon the words before, and unless there is something to rebut that presumption the act should be so construed, even if the words were such that they might originally have been construed otherwise."

    The preceding passage from British law, while saturated with lawyers' jargon, and Talmudic in that sense, does not exceed the bounds of rationality and therefore is not wholly Talmudic in character. The Talmudic Gezera Shava "consists in this, that the argument from a parity of expressions is also admitted in cases where two laws or passages, compared with each other, have nothing in common except a single, often very insignificant word which has not the last bearing on the conclusion to be drawn therefrom" (Moses Mielziner). Prof. Mielziner explains this away by claiming it is only an infrequently used "peculiar" "and "exorbitant" application of the principle and that the sense in which the British lawyers and law-makers use it, is closer to how the rabbis do as well. This is a lie. The majority of the time the rabbis apply Gezera Shava in the peculiar and exorbitant sense. The more restricted and rigorous British legal usage, though deplorable for its Talmudic-like exacerbation of the procedural thicket common to modern western legislatures and courts, is not fully comparable to the rabbinic understanding and implementation of the Gezera Shava principle of the comparison of the

    .


    171



    meaning of words. As Mielziner himself admits, the "exorbitant" application of Gezarah Shava in the sense of comparing words and passages that have almost nothing in common, was used by revered rabbinic "sages" of the Amoraic period, in "an attempt to find Scriptural support for an opinion expressed by one of the authorities in the Mishna." He further notes: "A very extensive use of this kind of Gezera Shava was made especially in the Aggadah (the homiletic explanation of moral and historical passages of Biblical texts), where it was not restricted by any rule. There it gave rise to many of those most fanciful interpretations and legendary narratives quoted in the Midrash and Talmud" (emphasis supplied).

    For the rabbinic mind the path to authentic understanding of the Bible leads inextricably through contrived fantasies, like the associations between the appearance of the word "beginning" in the books of Genesis and Proverbs. One might just as well say that because the word "the" occurs in a passage in Genesis and Proverbs, we can draw meaningful parallels between both of them on the basis of that "congruity." The reader may here be wondering if rabbinic cognition is really that profoundly idiotic. We answer without hesitation, yes, it is. We have often wondered what psychedelic substance the rabbis were smoking when they distilled some of the more appalling of their hare-brained hermeneutical schemes.

    The rabbinic lesson which the case at hand imparts is that, according to the principle of Gezera shava, the student of the Bible can only truly determine what the Bible is saying through a process of drawing analogies between two disparate Scripture verses based on "verbal congruities" supposedly appearing in both of them. This is the sort of venerated sophistry which leads many gentiles to conclude that the rabbis possess profound mystical insights into the truth of the Scriptures.

    Another example: one of the Babylonian Amora'im, Rabbi Ashi, asserts that he can enlarge on the laws of corporal punishment and courts as outlined in Mishna Sanhedrin 1:1 by comparing the relationship between the word "guilty" as it occurs in the law on corporal punishment (Deut. 25:2) with the word "guilty" as it is used in the law on capital punishment (Numbers 35:31). Another example, even more preposterous: at BT Kiddushin 2a there ' is an analysis of Mishna Kiddushin 1:1 which decrees the law in which marriage is contracted with money, and the bride would appear to have been purchased by the groom or his family. The rabbis, scrambling for a Biblical




    172



    pretext to justify this man-made enactment from the Mishnah, came up with this howler: "The Tanakh (Old Testament), in speaking of a marriage, uses the expression, 'if a man take a wife' (Deut. 22:13). But 'to take' also means 'to acquire' property, and is used elsewhere in connection with money given in consideration of the acquisition of property (Gen. 23:13); hence, a wife is also acquired by money."

    Why all of these far-fetched contrivances, attempting to give the appearance of scholarship and mastery of Scripture? Because the rabbis are desperate. As they themselves admit, it is only by these exegetical flights of fancy that their Talmudic traditions can be made to be seen to have a Biblical warrant: "Do not look slightingly upon arguments from the analogy of Gezerah Shava, since very important injunctions of the traditional law can derive their Scriptural authority in no other way than by means of this analogy." 138



    Yüklə 1,67 Mb.

    Dostları ilə paylaş:
  • 1   ...   8   9   10   11   12   13   14   15   ...   66




    Verilənlər bazası müəlliflik hüququ ilə müdafiə olunur ©www.genderi.org 2024
    rəhbərliyinə müraciət

        Ana səhifə