Redeeming the Akedah.

[John D. Brey]

I found it interesting you say "depends".....

When a few posts prior you said ...

..."And the elderly can rely on them too if my blabbering about devekut causes them to lose their bladder"....

That would help to be wearing depends (noun), under those circumstances.

You never cease to intrigue me John. Did you know John is alternative for Jack, ...Jack is alternative for Jacob...

Jacob got in a fight with God and won, earning him the name Israel, which means "contender with God". God said "you have fought with God and won".

And when God asked Jacob to let go of him, Jacob said "No, I will not, not until you (give a certain reward".

So, Jacob, realizing it was God incarnate all night long he was wrestling with, essentially said "my will comes first, your will comes second. I will not let go until you give me what I demand ".

I believe he was showing God the same disrespect that God shows to his people, and people in general. He also stole the greatest blessing in scripture, by loyalty to a woman (above God) and I think the Divine feminine helped Jacob win that fight.

Pray about it.

I like it!

I would merely add that in my own understanding of things, ha adam was originally divinely created femininity, but for the fact that since there was no fleshly male (phallic-flesh) yet, that divine femininity was the sole manifestation of invisible masculinity, i.e., the true androgyny, which should be a "gynandros," since the feminine manifestation is the first, and at that point the only, visualization of what is otherwise invisible, i.e., masculinity.

In this sense, the divine-feminine deity you claim helped Jacob win that fight is actually the true androgynous (or gynandros) God, the masculine God hidden in the "manifestation" of the feminine God: the Shekinah. The allegedly masculine god Jacob defeats is the same faux-masculinity (phallic-masculinity) the first human had placed on his formerly feminine body (in Genesis 2:21) so that he now becomes an image of that god, faux, phallic, flesh, through which he impregnates Eve to conceive Cain (and then the rest of us, save one) by means of the flesh created in the image of a serpentine God whose arse Jacob kicked.

It is a well known fact that in almost every culture the serpent represents some sort of phallic symbol. To a large degree then, the serpent represents sexual temptation. Our sages teach us that the main temptation the serpent used to lure Eve was that of sex.​

​

Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, Tzitzith: A Thread of Light.​

John

 

[GoodAttention]

The problem with there being "good" relative concepts versus "bad" ones, is that without an absolute determination of "good" versus "bad," even the determination of "good" versus "bad" is merely arbitrary, i.e., relative to one's frame of reference or relative values.

Good or bad is merely arbitrary, therefore the basis of whether a concept is accepted or denied should be...?

In the Judaeo/Christian concept of the evolution of revelation, there are no doubt wide detours from what would be the absolute determinate of truth and reality. We're flawed creatures such that we advance only through difficult persistence. Nevertheless, the Judaeo/Christian "faith" in the absolute keeps mankind on a step-by-step, year-by-year, pursuit of truth, fact, and reality (in opposition to the enemy of falsehood), in a slowly but surely evolution of the knowledge that will eventually, but surely, bring mankind to a place where he'll finally undo the second law of thermodynamics that represents "bad" since it's the power of death and decay.

The evolution of any knowledge need not be a dripfed system, where the energies of curiosity and discovery are held back the expectations of eventuallity and exhausting consensus. Questions that remain unanswered after thousands of years speaks of spiritual laziness or contentment, neither of which help evolution or reaching absolute determination.

Case in point, it's not a fantasy to believe that with the supercomputers and AI we have today (which came about through the evolution of knowledge), we will soon be able to locate and exterminate the genes that lead to aging therein returning mankind to the time when living organisms were immortal (they didn't senescence and die).

Case in point that we can barely walk and yet we want to dream of flying!

If this speaks of an evolution from full atheism, to the idea of a non-theistic god or god-principle, then I would see that as a positive leap ---guided by the theistic absolute ----toward the inevitable truth about the theistic absolute; the theistic absolute could be thought of as something like a magnet drawing in every thought subject to the power of absolute truth (2 Cor. 10:5), rather than labored down with decay and half-truths.

One's ego could then only exist between the lines of ignoring the existence of ego in others, and holding the consideration of an absolute ego as unnecessary. This would be a challenge to any theistic absolute to call out to.

This would be part of the truth of atheism that I mentioned. But for me, the key is the word "being." There isn't a necessary "being" in the general sense of the word. And that's where atheism is founded in truth. But there is a necessary concept, Logos, or absolute principle, without which, we wouldn't be able to argue such things since everything would be tentative, relative, arbitrary.

I raise you Trinity and proclaim the Quadrinity. In simplest terms it would be the Unknowable God, without ego, essence, or empathy, it cannot be worshipped, deified, or venerated. There are no paths of action, devotion, or knowledge towards it, so it can only be acknowledged and respected as the theistic absolute and transcedental signifier.

 

[John D. Brey]

I raise you Trinity and proclaim the Quadrinity. In simplest terms it would be the Unknowable God, without ego, essence, or empathy, it cannot be worshipped, deified, or venerated. There are no paths of action, devotion, or knowledge towards it, so it can only be acknowledged and respected as the theistic absolute and transcedental signifier.

This is the truth of atheism I admire and think needs to be incorporated to some extent into theism proper.



John

 

[John D. Brey]

Case in point that we can barely walk and yet we want to dream of flying!

I doubt that I'm merely dreaming that I sit before a magnificent, amazing, calculating (MAC) machine linking me to instantaneous knowledge of anything I might dream to know, and simultaneously linking me with thousands of interlocutors from around the globe. My fingers are joyfully, in jouissance, masterly baiting plastic keys to cross reference (so to say) every verse in the Bible, Talmud (and sagely commentary galore), at the speed of light through light-emitting-diodes feeding my starving eyes what they're longing to see: things formerly hidden from Judaism and the Holy See but not me.



John

 

[GoodAttention]

I doubt that I'm merely dreaming that I sit before a magnificent, amazing, calculating (MAC) machine linking me to instantaneous knowledge of anything I might dream to know, and simultaneously linking me with thousands of interlocutors from around the globe. My fingers are joyfully, in jouissance, masterly bating plastic keys to cross reference (so to say) every verse in the Bible, Talmud (and sagely commentary galore), at the speed of light through light-emitting-diodes feeding my starving eyes what they're longing to see: things formerly hidden from Judaism and the Holy See but not me.



John

So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, “We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.”

 

[dybmh]

You know, we could consider Rabbi Hirsch and Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz's claim that the Jew is reborn from his physical birth

Except they don't actually say that. That's an English translation which you are cherry picking.

 

[John D. Brey]

Except they don't actually say that. That's an English translation which you are cherry picking.

Communication, particularly through the written word, is both a science and an art form. As many experts on literary theory point out, once a statement has left the mouth or the pen of the author, it no longer belongs to him exclusively since no one can engage his statement without interpreting it within the context they already possess. The reader or hearer takes possession of the words and digests them as best they can within their own context not the context of the author. They don't possess the context of the author. So they can never really know exactly what he meant.

All translation requires interpretation. So the English version of what Rabbi Hirsch says has already undergone one iteration of interpretation. Nevertheless, even read in his original German a reader must interpret what he wrote using a knowledge of Hebrew idioms as they come through in Hirsch's German. The greater the context of the reader of Rabbi Hirsch, the better the likelihood they will at least present him within some modicum of similarity to what he's expressing.

No one knows precisely, exactly, what Hirsch or any other writer, say yours truly, is saying in their own context. We can only present them within our own context, which is a process you refer to as "cherry picking."




John

 

[John D. Brey]

You know, we could consider Rabbi Hirsch and Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz's claim that the Jew is reborn from his physical birth, i.e., that he is [clearing throat] "born-again," and that this being born-again means he's conceived the second time without semen (so both men say)

Except they don't actually say that. That's an English translation which you are cherry picking.

Here's an English translation of Rabbi Hirsch made by Daniel Haberman which millions of Jews have read since it's the translation given in a popular rendition of The Hirsch Chumash.

מילה is not a completion of, or supplement to, physical birth, but the beginning of a higher "octave." It marks the second, higher "birthday,". . . Physical birth belongs to the night . . . but מילה, birth as a Jew, belongs to the daytime. . . Therefore, the physical birth of the child is completed on the seventh day. The eighth day, the octave of birth, as it were, repeats the day of [physical] birth, but as a day of higher, spiritual birth for his Jewish mission and his Jewish destiny.​

A non-Jew, or someone unfamiliar with the Talmud, and Jewish thought in general, might not interpret the statement "Physical birth belongs to the night . . . but מילה, birth as a Jew, belongs to the daytime," with the vigor any Talmud-reading Jew might interpret the statement, since in the Talmud, phallic-sex belongs exclusively to the night (Talmudic Jews are prohibited from having sex in the day), while it's prohibited to perform circumcision מילה at night.

Voila! Rabbi Hirsch is saying (unless Daniel Haberman is screwing with us), that the "physical birth" of the child belongs to phallic-sex, at night, whereas "birth as a Jew" belongs to the daytime, when circumcision occurs, such that unless Daniel Haberman is just bollixing up the German all to hell, Rabbi Hirsch seems to be saying, point blank, that a for a Jew to fulfill his mission as a Jew he must be born twice (you know, "born-again"); once through a conception based on phallic-sex, at night, and a second time, a rebirth as it were, i.e., being "born-again," which, the being born-again, occurs eight days after the first birth, which is to say on the day he's circumcised.

Now, add to the simple logic above that Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz (the Shelah HaKaddosh), claims, pretty blatantly, at least in the English translation of Shney Luchot Habrit, that Isaac is born-again, and that his rebirth is without semen (as was the case in Jesus' virgin birth), and it starts to look like Professor Arthur Green isn't just whistling Dixie, or peeing into the wind, when he claims certain aspects of the Christian message appear to have been so appealing to thoughtful Jewish men that they attempted to, what was the term you used, cherry pick the Christian message in order to present certain aspects of it in a Jewish context.

Fwiw, I'm not worried about the tit for tat between Jewish and Christian expositors. I want to know what's hidden from both of them (and thus us) because of their fear of the Other; a fear that often exhibits as spiritual xenophobia or religious racism related to both classes of theists believing they and they alone are the chosen ones.




John