Dear Rabbis of the Western diasporas, despite your successfully colonized statements of, “If you want to claim that Israel has an indisputable right to the land and does not need to make peace with the Palestinians, the Torah can support that too”: With or without the Torah, the Jewish people have an indisputable right to the land, full stop! The “Palestinians” are not the Indigenous People of our land, but Arab colonizers – of whom most arrived during the British Mandate period to deny the Jewish fight for Independence and self-sovereignty upon our ancestral land.
To this day, the “Palestinian” Arab occupation of the “West Bank” and Gaza portions of our 1948 successfully decolonized land serves fully to achieve this purpose – an end to Indigenous Israeli sovereignty upon the land of Israel. It is a colonized statement *always* to equate an Indigenous minority with the historic Colonial Arab-European majority that wants sovereign possession of our land, by any means achievable! Learn more here, please…. http://aniyostsef.com/takemeon/a-colonizer-is-a-colonizer-regardless-of-ancestry/
Dear Rabbis of the Western diasporas, despite your insistence upon phrases such as, that “God is often depicted” and that “God is akin to” and “we need to think of God as”: To which “God” are you referring to when you say these things? For there are many “God”s according to humankind, and not all “God”s are the same – despite the Western modern false equivalency apologetics that tries to render them so. This is not the way to peace and ending of the first Colonial racism of antisemitism, for only *historical honesty* is this path!
The Christian god is *not* the Jewish deity, and never was – according to the very Church Father founders of this northern Aegean-created Christian religion. Names for “God” really do matter, folks! The word “God” is not a proper name, but a generic descriptor in reference to a deity. The Maimonides version of universal “God” is not known at all to the Torah, nor those who wrote and preserved the Torah.
The purpose of Torah is *not* to turn the world into monotheists, but to remind an Indigenous Judean people of the land of Israel *who and what we are* as the Indigenous People of this land. This is why the Torah speaks only in our Canaanite Hebrew language. To erase the voice of Torah with universalism thoughts and expressions is to separate Jewish identity from our land’s worldview source (a form of slow Colonial assimilation of our people)!
Dear Rabbis of the Western diasporas, despite what you so often say to everyone: The Torah has never outright prohibited homosexuality, it was Rabbis of the Greco-Roman era that created this legal *interpretation*. I know it is uncomfortable to challenge two thousand years of precedence laid out by Judaism. But, we only learn by doing so.
If it really is, as tradition has put it, that “lying of woman” is the intended meaning of Vayikra 18.22 & 20.13, then why not just clearly say so – such as שכב עם אשה , “lay-down with woman,” or שכבת אשה, “lying-of woman,” for example. Why use a noun, instead, that can only be understood as “lying of” in the context of a euphemism – of all places, within a Torah law? Why further pluralize this noun, making it enigmatic, with a euphemistic meaning of “lyings of woman”?
Isn’t it more likely that the shakhav-based plural noun, משכבי, used in this pasuk (repeated twice, once with punishment) is meant to be understood as the noun that it simply is? Like how this noun is understood in Bereishit 49.4, so here in Vayikra – a “bed-for-two,” a “marriage/conjugal bed”? In context of this Torah law pasuk, male no will lie (tishkav) “bed of wife” (mishkvei ishah)…?
It seems to me that this pasuk is alluding to a man who is married having sex with a male, whether married or not – whether “active or passive,” as the Talmudic rabbis put it. And only assumes a euphemistic meaning through the interpretation of later rabbis influenced by the occupying Greek culture.
Your thoughts, please, Rabbis/Professors? I believe this subject deserves more critical scholarly study, than it has so far received to date. It’s been twenty years since the words of a Rabbi and mentor – “התורה לא משתעלת!” – triggered my awareness of this pasuk, and whether it is accurately being translated by modern Judaism. I am hoping that theTorah, especially, will explore it.
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