Having trouble reading this e-mail? |
||||||
|
||||||
What's the Jewish People's Secret?
According to best estimates, the United States of America now has more than 300 million people. Only about 1.34% of them are Jewish. The Jews' numbers have dwindled considerably over the last few generations, in absolute as well as relative terms. The figure was up at almost 3% in 1960. Despite these low numbers, Jewish people make up 50% of what one Harvard study (quoted in Rainbow Covenant) called America's top 200 intellectuals, about 40% of her Nobel Prize-winners in science and economics, 40% of the partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington, and almost 60% of the directors, writers and producers of two or more primetime television series (like CSI, Law and Order, and The Simpsons, for instance). Jews are news, thanks to their Torah. Consider the "atonement phone" that Stephen Colbert kept on his desk between Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur this year. Colbert has a funny show on cable tv's Comedy Central where he plays a pompous news commentator. The ten days immediately before the Day of Atonement are a propitious time for people to make special efforts to reconcile themselves with God and man. Colbert, a gentile, used it to encourage his Jewish friends to call him on the phone to beg him for forgiveness on the air. How is it that this "peculiar people," as the Bible calls the Jews, this "fewest of all peoples," has such fantastically outsized influence? What's their secret? Nothing that is so plainly set out in the world's most popular book, the Bible, can really be called secret. You could say that Israel's secret, which is, of course, God and Torah, is hidden in plain sight. In the Bible, after entreating Israel yet again to cleave to the Lord (HaShem) their God, to carefully keep the Torah in all respects, Moses elaborates: for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the gentile nations, that shall hear all thse statutes and say, "Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. For what nation is there so great, that has God so close to them, as the Lord our God is in all things that we call upon Him for? And what nation is there so great, that has statutes and judgments as righteous as all this Torah? (Deuteronomy 4:1-8) ___________________
Commandments, Statutes, Circumcision"Statutes" in Torah are Commandments whose reasons for being aren't completely clear to us. We don't know exactly why God commands the people of Israel not to eat pork, for instance. We don't know exactly why He wants Israel to eat matzah on Pesach/Passover. On the other hand, the reasoning behind His laws, such as the Noahide laws, is fairly plain. The Noahide laws against murder and stealing all make perfect sense to us, for instance. Similarly, everyone should know better than to eat flesh which has been torn from a warm blooded living animal. As for the Noahide laws against sexual immorality - against acts like adultery, incest, bestiality, or male homosexual practices - the Torah itself tells us why they're forbidden. In fact, the Torah provides a value: such acts are all abominable; they are perverse, they are abominations. (Leviticus 18) In other words, the Noahide laws all make sense to us, or at least they should. So do the Torah's many "judgments," the prophecies and all the obviously wise laws of gentleness and justice. But it's different with the Torah's statutes. Nothing about them is obvious. Nevertheless, the Torah promises, the time will come when the nations of the world come to appreciate the goodness even of the statutes. And, in fact, something very like that just happened recently. Scientific studies produced a major policy change in Africa last month. Ever since the time of Abraham, the performance of male circumcision - the cutting of the foreskin of the male reproductive organ - has been denounced as a kind of grotesque "male genital mutilation." You can Google those words on the Internet if you want to see people still at it. Their term for it is MGM. How they hate it! A cruel, degraded, superstitious Jewish practice, they call it. Now science shows that circumcision drastically reduces the chances of a man receiving or transmitting venereal diseases - HIV in particular, the virus that causes AIDS. To the great discomfiture of the anti-circumcision crusaders - the "male genital mutilation" MGM crusaders - women all across Africa are telling their husbands and boyfriends to get circumcised. And clinics all across the continent, which used to refuse to do them, are earnestly performing the procedure on men who have been lining up to get it. That's the way it is with all the Torah's statutes. People will attack them with everything they've got; enemies, often in the name of "higher ideals," may - and often do, in Israel's long history - try to remove them completely from the world. It doesn't matter. Sooner or later, the righteousness in all of them comes out.
Gifts of the MuslimsTime Magazine recently ran a cover story about the Pope and Islam. It invited a well-regarded Muslim scholar, Tariq Ramadan, to respond to the Pope's gentle criticism of Islam. Ramadan accused the Pope of ignoring "the critical role that Muslims played in the development of Western thought." He listed the following names, and nothing else, as proof of Islam's many contributions, these being "rationalist Muslim thinkers like al-Farabi (10th century), Avicenna (11th century), Averroes (12th century), al-Ghazali (12th century), Ash-Shatibi (13th century), and Ibn Khaldun (14th century). [Time Magazine, November 27, 2006, p. 49]. With this list, Tariq Ramadan has suggested a nice little thought experiment. Imagine if we did what Ramadan has done with Muslims and tried it with another group. Ramadan's list filled up less than half a paragraph. Suppose we tried to list the contributions to civilization of the Jewish people? (One item for that list: all the thinkers that Ramadan mentioned lived in a culture relatively hospitable to Jews, where Jewish people made up a good part of the intelligentsia.) _________________
Clustered ConferencesThis has been a season filled with interesting conferences. People who deny God in the name of science staged one which denounced belief in God. Holocaust-deniers held a conference in Teheran, hosted by the president of Iran. And the American Jewish Conservative Movement had a conference in New York City, which has opened the way to homosexual "commitment ceremonies" and the hiring of actively homosexual men and women as Conservative Movement rabbis. One of the more ironic things at the scientists' conference, which included several Nobel Prize-winners: an inordinate number of the people who organized and attended it were Jewish. That is, in a group of mostly fairly prominent scientists, Jews didn't make up 1.34% but more like 40 to 60% of the group. But that fact, which actual truth-seekers would recognize as being strongly supportive, at least, of God's reality, probably never even reached the stage of being seriously considered. The God Who brought all those Jews there never really had a chance. What about the Bible? If you had asked the people at that conference about it, you would have found that they didn't know much about it, and that they considered the Torah at its core, the Five Books of Moses, to be a fake. _________________
Nullifying the Bible That's the holding of the Documentary Hypothesis, the currently prevailing dogma in the world's universities. It holds that the Torah, perhaps the world's most carefully written text, was written over many centuries by many different people, and then fairly casually slapped together by later editors, or redactors. The chief "proof" of this is that the Torah uses different names for God in different places.
Future generations will find it hard to believe that anything as fantastically stupid as this could have convinced otherwise intelligent people to dismiss the Bible as they have. ________________
The Few, the Weird, the HairyThe Holocaust deniers' conference probably had the fewest Jews. Not that the people of Israel were completely absent. Four rabbis with black hats, long coats, sidecurls and beards made an appearance. They wanted to show, even though they recognize that the Holocaust deniers are - basically - crazy, that they support eliminating the State of Israel.
__________________
New KnicknackWe mentioned in an earlier newsletter that the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, recently re-gilded, had become the universal symbol of Arab and Muslim grievance. Now, not only are pictures of it everywhere, people are giving each other little gilt replicas of the Dome of the Rock as knicknacks, and collecting them by the dozen. Most of them, naturally, are made in China.
Just Solutions
|
We call on God for help. As the prayer that Israel says every morning just before reciting the Hebrew statement of faith known as the shema asks (please understand that this is much richer in Hebrew than in English): Our Father, the merciful Father, Who acts mercifully, have mercy on us, instill in our hearts to understand and elucidate, to listen, learn, teach, safeguard, perform and fulfill all the words of Your Torah's teachings with love. Enlighten our eyes in Your Torah, attach our hearts to Your commandments, and unify our hearts to love and fear Your Name. Amen Questions? Comments? We want to hear from you: info @ 1stcovenant. com Visit our website: we're constantly adding new content: Multimedia If you liked Rainbow Covenant: Torah and the Seven Universal Laws
|
Please feel free to copy and reprint Covenant Connection or any part of it, but please include this sentence with the copyright information: The First Covenant Foundation is a U.S. IRS 501(C)(3) non-profit |