“A trenchant theme in the Bible,… the ways in which bad things happen to good people… Most striking in the Book of Ruth is that Naomi does regard God as the source of her troubles…” … “God” is not “all good” in indigenous Jewish tradition.
First of all, Jews don’t have a “Bible”, that is a Christian word. Secondly, though suffering for Jews is attributed in Torah to crimes (“sins”) committed by Jews, even TaNaKh attributes evil to the work of “God” – consider Saul’s hatefully violent affliction by “God”, consider Job’s suffering inflicted upon him by “God”. Ruth is not the only place in our Judean-orignating Chumash that places both good and evil into the lap of “God”. Why is this? Anyone?
“A trenchant theme in the Bible, and perhaps in all religious traditions, addresses the ways in which bad things happen to good people, offering possible explanations, questions of fairness, and deep matters of worldview. A strong thread in the Bible blames hardship on sins, variously defined.
Most striking in the Book of Ruth is that Naomi does regard God as the source of her troubles—indeed the deity controls all that happens—but she does not blame herself or Ruth. And just as the inscrutable God causes or allows her to suffer, the same deity reverses her fortunes for the good.” – post by Professor Susan Niditch
Read more, her article on TABS, please!
https://www.facebook.com/100064790466425/posts/645279254308418/?mibextid=Nif5oz
————-
“A round of applauses!!! Fernão de Oliveira argued that wars must be waged according to the principles of just war, and that any enslavement of peoples acquired by unjust wars must be stopped. These issues are discussed in the first five chapters of A Arte da Guerra do Mar (1536). De Oliveira confronts Portugal’s wars at sea and those of some African states. He points out that African monarchs wage unjust wars with other African kingdoms to acquire slaves to sell to the Europeans, or by stealing fellow Africans for the slave trade. Even though slave markets existed among Africans before the introduction of the Portuguese, he accuses the latter of stimulating the request for slaves and thereby expanding the slave trade across the Atlantic.” – Rabbi Yehonatan Elazar-DeMota
“I know this is a uncomfortable but factual subject in the African American Community because many feel this is a distraction from the European Domination of the Atlantic Slave Trade of Africans.” – AG
But, Jews are not Europeans, but an Indigenous Levantine minority group in Arab-European Colonial diasporas. We *need* to be heard!
————-
This is literally everyday for us – if we show our faces to the greater public around us, if we dare to actually comment online… “And, folks, privileged implicit racism has spoken on this Jewish web page. For antisemitism to end, we just must label every antisemitic comment, so that non-racists don’t become indoctrinated racists. For example, here:
“Dude, you know NOTHING about antisemitism if you think that my disrespect of your attitude and arrogance in your supposed knowledge makes me a antisemitic. I have dealt with many antisemitics online who desire destruction and death for Israel and the Jewish people.” … Notice, here, that this was said by a European Christian social supremacist to a Jew in this world. (There are 2.4 billion Christians who feel the privileged need to speak for the 15.2 million Jewish people in this world – a kind of help we are always ambivalent about!)
Let’s translate this above quote to another minority group: “Dude (“black” man), you know NOTHING about racism if you think that my disrespect of your attitude and arrogance in your supposed knowledge makes me a racist. I have dealt with many racists online who desire destruction and death for black people.” A privileged “white” Christian man saying this. If we Jews don’t call out the implicit racist antisemitism, then we will never be free from antisemitism! ”
Bye, Arab-European antisemites! We Jews have heard all the victim blaming and labeling epithets before. This does not change our lived reality as Jews who are indigenous to Judea-Samaria, the greater Levant, and Southwest Asia. We do not argue nor discuss with those who seek to racistly label us. Now if you ask an honest question of inquiry from the start, you would surely get a response that is true to Jews and Judaism. But, this isn’t what most of you non-Jews speaking for Jews are interested in, right? You know it all, already, you “woke”! So, harass the Jews, why don’t you?! … Yawn, we see you, Arab-European Colonizers, and we *will* survive you.
Note, this antisemitic attack was a response to my making a comment on theTorah dot com FB page.
————-
0 Comments