Hello my dear fellow classmates,
oh how wonderful it is to blog again!
i have truly missed this. So as everyone probably noticed, since my presence lights up the room, i have been MIA in class lately and it has been gloomy and sad. Therefore, i have decided to blog about the torah as a whole as an introduction to this semester since we are learning the first sefer rather than just talking about what we have learned so far. As we know, we can interpret the Torah in many different ways and we can learn so much for it; it serves as our moral code among many other things. Over the past few decades, different kinds of people broke off from the "original" Judaism due to the fact that they interpreted the Torah differently. For example, the Karaites decided to take everything that was said in the Torah literally. They broke off from Judaism because they interpreted the Torah differently. Over the years, new groups have developed such as the Reform or Conservative Jews who view the Torah differently and what we consider wrong nad not strict enough. This caused me to wonder whether that is right or wrong. Is it unnecessary to create different groups and perhaps cause a strain between Jews simply because they interpret things differently than we do and perhaps disagree with the way we do it. Should we just accept everyone and all be one no matter how they interpret the values and ideas presented in our Torah. Should we be a society in which we all have different opinions and do things differently and simply accept that. Maybe we will even discuss our differences and come to common grounds and understand one another. Or do you think that that is simply impossible since we cannot all possibly get along if we all have different viewpoints and will just cause us to fight all the time and not be one.
I agree with what you said. We shouldn't be judgmental or anything about other groups, and we should all get along and everything.
ReplyDeleteThis might be a bit unrelated to your post, but as I read it this thought came up and so I hope it actually is connected with your post.
So you talked about the Karaites and how they broke off, and then the Conservatives and Reformed. I feel that sometimes people doubt the Torah or find it hard to follow and because we are people, we want to change it.
"This law is outdated! We need to change it- the rest of the world isn't like this anymore." I feel like that is not a good way to approach the Torah. We need to restrict ourselves. We can't just make up and change the rules just because we do not like them- but I'm not saying that this is what the people did! Just sometimes that's an excuse for saying things.
In my post I mentioned that we sometimes think about the Torah in the ways we did when we were young, and that can be bad. Maybe if we were taught not just the Torah, but all of the specifics of how we can prove 100% that a man did not just write the Torah, we wouldn't not follow all of the laws exactly.
But as you said, we should all understand how the other groups come to feel the way that we do...
A good book to read is Beyond a Reasonable Doubt by Shmuel Waldman. He spends the first 3 or 4 chapters talking about how we can prove the truth of Torah and G-d..