This passage was posted a year ago at HorsesAss. The result was the usual … white liberals blaming Jews for the bible.
Liberal Scientist is a Dirty Fucking Socialist Hippie spews:
Is there a clearer moral indictment to be made dismissing the use of a 2000+ year old text as a rulebook for a modern, moral society?
Here it is…’god’ delivering an inerrant, dispassionate guideline for the acquisition and keeping of fellow humans (’god’s’ children, anyone?) as chattel. The Bible served as a prime justification by our own deeply immoral slavery institution, that was defended by ostentatious Christians with these very verses.
Time to evolve.
So, it is our fault, the Jews fault, that your religion took OUR Torah and misused it?
The Torah is about 3 millennia old. It records an amazingly modern code we have followed for at least 2500 years (when the code was first written). The code was built by a people threatened by enslavement by their more powerful neighbors. For whites to to force Jews to justify Christian slavery as God’s word is bizarre.
Within our own world, the laws of Leviticus have been leavened by centuries of interpretation and a kind of revelation Christians have never understood. The same Torah has always been interpreted as requiring that REALITY … science and the real world … be considered as revelation. Since at least the time of the return from Babylon, 2500 years ago, scribes, and rabbis, have had the job of interpreting the Torah in the light of oral traditions, common sense, and science.
Even in the time of Leviticus, “slavery” was more like corporate employment at Walmart than like slavery in Mr. Jefferson’s cotton fields. Slavery was not hereditary. Slaves had to be released after certain times and there were rules about how slaves could be used.
The same Leviticus you demean would have served you white folks well. While Christian zealots were burning each others’ churches in the name of heresy, forcing pagans to accept the ravings of the Book of Revelations, and turning dark folks into chattel, Jews lived under the rule of OUR law. Jews who had slaves were following white law, that is the Roman and later Christian laws based on Christian fundamentalism.
While Rome adopted enforced acceptance of the Christian Credo, Jewish scholars authored the Talmud with its Midrash and Gomorrah (commentaries). Jews maintained our right to follow our own laws. After the Romans the Muslims also imposed the rule of truth for their holy book the Quran. Both white Europeans and light brownish Arabs enslaved black and brown folk while murdering others in the crusades. In the midst if these historic horrors, a Jewish scholar … Maimonides. .. advised the great Kurdish Muslim leader, Saladin on how to humanely govern while fighting the white barbarians. Paramount among Maimonides teachings is that each human must arrive at religious truth by efforts to understand both the written word and scientific reality. Under the brownish Saladin Jews had religious freedom they did not have under the white rulers of Christendom. For what it is worth, Maimonides’ skin likely looked like Saladin’s.
Maimonides, a thousand years ago, taught that science trumps Torah. His contemporary, Judah Halevi, laid this out in a great thesis, the Khazari, that precedes Voltaire and Jefferson by seven centuries. A Jew of the Enlightenment, Spinoza, is still at the cutting edge of any effort to create a rational replacement for a moral system based on dogmatic interpretation of the bible.
For white folks (i.e. those of you whose ancestors come from Christendom) to understand Jewish morality, perhaps you should read the Haggadah … not the bible. The Haggadah is the Jewish text used to celebrate freedom from slavery. It celebrates not only Jewish freedom, but the central principle of freedom for all men and women. The Haggadah was written about 170 AD (in the years since your God) as the starting point. Rabbi Yehudah bar Elai, and other rabbis who stayed in our homeland even after the atrocities of the Roman wars wrote the Haggadah to state the importance of freedom for all people. Like Dr. King, Nelson Mandela, and the Mahatma. these brave men had the courage to stand up to white (in this case Roman) violence by practicing their beliefs under the shield of non-violence.
My message to non Jews who call themselves liberals? Next April, attend a Passover Seder.