elimgarakofficial:

tikkunolamorgtfo:

kyidyl:

vermiciousyid:

tikkunolamorgtfo:

They always—ALWAYS—look at things with a Christian lens, even when they are supposedly forsaking Christianity. 

That’s part of why they feel a need to enlighten others: they need to win converts to their beliefs. Like Christians.

But…what deities don’t require belief? And if you didn’t believe in your religion’s god, why would you participate in that religion? Idk I’m confused by this.

JUDAISM. 

There are literally atheist rabbis. There are literally two branches of Judaism that are actually centred around the idea that deistic belief is unimportant to being Jewish. 

That’s what this whole post is about it. You “don’t get it” because you’re approaching the concept of what religion is from an entirely different viewpoint than how Jewish people approach Judaism. 

It’s like, say you have an object weighs twelve pounds. But then an astronaut tells you, “Oh, we’re going to bring this to the moon and it’s only going to weigh two pounds.” And you’re like “Um, excuse me? The object is twelve pounds. I’ve lived on earth my whole life, and I know how much this weighs, and it’s twelve pounds. You can’t just change the weight of an object, that’s not how mass works.” EXCEPT! If you bring something from earth to the moon, the yeah, that’s exactly how mass works! Because gravity on the moon is totally different than it is on earth, and things on the moon are 1/6 of their weight on earth. It’s a totally different framework! 

So like…right now, if Judaism is gravity on the moon, you’re approaching it like it’s gravity on earth. That’s why you’re confused. Your framework is totally wrong.

hi! my rabbi doesn’t believe in souls or a personal g-d! he still sings the service in hebrew like he was trained when he was a chabadnik and learning to be a hazzan. 

it’s bigger than just belief in g-d. it’s not just about g-d. it’s also about the people yisrael and our relationship to the rest of the world and our history, culture and traditions. you don’t need g-d to find it all meaningful. 

and anyway, the hebrew word for “belief” doesn’t mean “belief”, it means “trust”. it denotes a whole different kind of relationship with g-d.

and there are some rabbis that argue that all jews don’t believe in the kind of g-d that westerners think of as a g-d, because our conception of HaShem is like … miles and miles away from the christian beard-and-masochist-and-ghost in the sky. 

here’s a really good overview of that notion

like. what jews believe in and why is not, in fact, something a christian or a christian-encultured person can grasp right off the bat without adapting to a totally different mindset towards g-d, religion and tradition.

i’ve heard it said that judaism is not about orthodoxy, but orthopraxy. you can honestly believe a great deal of disparate things (the only non-negotiable ones are what is laid out in the shema: HaShem is our g-d, HaShem is One—that is, in my view, one of the only things you have to accept: HaShem is our g-d and the second part is open to a great deal of interpretation—and the other thing i think most jews would agree we more or less believe without any caveats is that yeshua nazarene was not our anointed king, not our messiah (please stop shoving him down our throats, thnx) and for the majority of judaism’s existence, that wasn’t even a fucking concern, thanks christianity).

judaism is concerned with the here and now and with doing rather than believing. this is why there’s actually like, a notion of secular jews, who don’t by and large do what practising jews do, but are still jewish bc jewishness is, among other things, a culture and an ethnicity (though you don’t have to be ethnically jewish to be a jew—i’m like 1/8 at the most, if we’re talking descent). 

but yeah.

it’s … different. this is why the concept of “judeo-christian” is bunk. we have about as much in common with christianity as an etrog has with a plank of wood.