Who is Sin an offense against?

[Sabour]

Almost all the sins that there were sacrifices for were unintentional sins.

Just to give a secular example.

If your break light is out and you don't realize it. You broke the law even though it was unintentional.

What about a real example of how an unintentional action becomes a sin?

 

[Penumbra]

In judaism you use the method given by G-D. You can't improve on perfection.

The Torah does say homosexual behavior is an abomination. That doesn't change no matter how "stylish" it may now be.

Also, the criteria for the death penality was so strict that it was virtually impossible to carry out.

Below is a little about it.

The Death Penalty in Jewish Tradition - My Jewish Learning

So just to clarify then, for any given topic, regardless of the evidence or reasoning to the contrary if such should exist, you would support the Torah as perfect over that, correct?

Or no?

 

[Call_of_the_Wild]

Sin is an offense against God. God is the standard. God is the objective standard for what is morally right or morally acceptable. So when you sin, you are going against that standard, you are going against the standard of God, so you are sinning against God.

Just like when we say "stealing is against the law "...we mean "stealing is against the standard of not taking things that don't belong to you".

The same way with God..it is against the objective standard of the Almighty, heavenly, Father from above

 

[McBell]

In your opinion, is sin an offense against god? An offense against your fellow humans? Both an offense against god and an offense against your fellow humans? Or something else altogether?

Why? What's your reasoning?

"Sin" is nothing more than going against the will/wants/desires of your chosen deity.

 

[CMike]

:Originally Posted by CMike
In judaism you use the method given by G-D. You can't improve on perfection.

The Torah does say homosexual behavior is an abomination. That doesn't change no matter how "stylish" it may now be.

Also, the criteria for the death penality was so strict that it was virtually impossible to carry out.

Below is a little about it.

The Death Penalty in Jewish Tradition - My Jewish Learning

So just to clarify then, for any given topic, regardless of the evidence or reasoning to the contrary if such should exist, you would support the Torah as perfect over that, correct?

Or no?

Sorry I'm not dealing with hypotheticals.

 

[Levite]

It depends on what we're talking about.

The Torah sets out how we, as Jews, should live our lives, and it is all encompassing; it tells us how to eat, how to conduct business, how to treat our fellow man, and how to worship God. Our term for sin means "to miss the mark", and is generally understood to indicate that we have failed to live up to our end of the deal.

In that sense, everything we do contrary to Torah is an "offense" against God, and we remedy it by correcting the situation or the behavior and living in a manner that doesn't repeat it. If what we have done (or failed to do) involves another person, such as theft or assault, then it is also against a person, and we must make amends for what we have done to the person we wronged as well as "squaring up" with God.

^^ This. :yes:

In our tradition, we differentiate between "sins between a person and God" and "sins between a person and their fellow." Whatever the commandment that one has transgressed, whether something "between a person and God" or "between a person and their fellow," it is in a sense going against God.

But the difference is that we may presume that God will always forgive sincere repentance, and therefore all we must do after having committed a "sin between a person a God" is to acknowledge and regret it, commit ourselves to trying not to repeat it, confess to God, and participate in Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). But if we commit a "sin between a person and their fellow," we must also apologize to the one(s) we have wronged, make whatever amends possible, and accept any consequences of our actions, in addition to the same acts of penance we might do for the other sort of sin.

And, as noted above, we have a very innovative and flexible system of law born out of the confluence of Written Torah and Oral Torah, which gives us wide lattitude to determine how best we shall follow the commandments, and under what circumstances they shall have been deemed abrogated or violated; and those determinations can sometimes be altered due to changing circumstances, provided there is good reason and the alteration is done within the parameters of rabbinic authority.

 

[CMike]

Actually we don't have have wide lattitude how to follow jewish law.

Jewish law is very specific.

 

[Levite]

Actually we don't have have wide lattitude how to follow jewish law.

Jewish law is very specific.

OK, for those of us who have not decided to ignore what we find (in)convenient in our legal traditions and history, we have wide lattitude.

For those of us who have decided that Judaism is only what certain rabbis of the past two hundred years or so say it has always been, there is no wide lattitude, everything is quite specific.

 

[ZooGirl02]

Some sin is only a sin against God while some sin is a sin against humanity. Sometimes sins can be both sins against God and humanity in my opinion.

 

[John Martin]

In your opinion, is sin an offense against god? An offense against your fellow humans? Both an offense against god and an offense against your fellow humans? Or something else altogether?

Why? What's your reasoning?

Sin is not an offense against God or against neighbour. Sin is an offense against oneself. Sin is acting against own own human dignity. When we act against our human dignity, it manifests as offense against God and against our neighbour.

 

[YmirGF]

In your opinion, is sin an offense against god? An offense against your fellow humans? Both an offense against god and an offense against your fellow humans? Or something else altogether?

Why? What's your reasoning?

I don't subscribe to the concept of sin but to my thinking "sin" is an offense made by people against other people's sensibilities. Sin is one of those ideas that is really just value judgment tarted up in religious clothing to validate their beliefs of moral superiority over others.

 

[psylient]

there is no such thing as sin as an offence against humanity or god. no one does that but there is surely an act which is the outcome of ones ignorance. We are not sinful, we have many mistakes but it was due our ignorance , once we realizes this we stops doing further mistakes.

 

[Glaurung]

In your opinion, is sin an offense against god? An offense against your fellow humans? Both an offense against god and an offense against your fellow humans? Or something else altogether?

The way that I have come to interpret it is that you commit 'sin' when you fail to live up to the moral standard becoming of being endowed with moral reason. Sin can be anything from a minor failure in conduct, to serious assaults against other human beings. We don't hurt God with our sins but we are nonetheless held accountable for them.

 

[chinu]

In the first place Sin is an offense against Own-Soul and in the second place Sin is an offence against All-Souls, or whole humanity.

 

[CMike]

OK, for those of us who have not decided to ignore what we find inconvenient in our legal traditions and history, we have wide lattitude.

For those of us who have decided that Judaism is only what certain rabbis of the past two hundred years or so say it has always been, there is no wide lattitude, everything is quite specific.

There are two types of jews regarding Torah.

1) G-D in the Torah tells them what to do. That is very specific.

2) Those jews who tell G-D what the commandments should be, rather than the other way around. At that point jewish law really doesn't matter anyway to them.

 

[CMike]

What about a real example of how an unintentional action becomes a sin?

Here is an analysis about it.

The Jewish Press » » Making Sense Of The Sin Offering


Making Sense Of The Sin Offering


By: Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks


Parshat Vayikra, which deals with a variety of sacrifices, devotes an extended section to the chatat, the sin offering, as brought by different individuals: first the high priest (Leviticus 4:3-12), then the community as a whole (4:13-21), then a leader (4:22-26), and finally an ordinary individual (4:27-35).


The whole passage sounds strange to modern ears, not only because sacrifices have not been offered for almost two millennia since the destruction of the Second Temple, but also because it is hard for us to understand the very concepts of sin and atonement as they are dealt with in the Torah.

The puzzle is that the sins for which an offering had to be brought were those committed inadvertently, be’shogeg. Either the sinner had forgotten the law, or some relevant fact. Here’s a contemporary example: suppose the phone rings on Shabbat and you answer it. You would only be liable for a sin offering if either you forgot the law that you may not answer a phone on Shabbat, or you forgot the fact that the day was Shabbat. For a moment you thought it was Friday or Sunday.
It’s just this kind of act that we don’t see as a sin at all. It was a mistake. You forgot. You did not mean to do anything wrong. And when you realize that inadvertently you have broken Shabbat, you are more likely to feel regret than remorse. You feel sorry but not guilty.

We think of a sin as something we did intentionally, yielding to temptation perhaps, or in a moment of rebellion. That is what Jewish law calls b’zadon in biblical Hebrew or b’mezid in rabbinic Hebrew. That is the kind of act we would have thought calls for a sin offering. But actually such an act cannot be atoned for by an offering at all. So how do we make sense of the sin offering?

The answer is that there are three dimensions of wrongdoing between us and God. The first is guilt and shame. When we sin deliberately and intentionally, we know inwardly that we have done wrong. Our conscience – the voice of God within the human heart – tells us that we have done wrong.

That is what happened to Adam and Eve in the Garden after they had sinned. They felt shame. They tried to hide. For that kind of deliberate, conscious, intentional sin, the only adequate moral response is teshuvah, repentance. This involves (a) remorse, charatah, (b) confession, vidui, and (c) kabbalat he’atid, a resolution never to commit the sin again. The result is selichah u’mechilah – leading, hopefully for God’s forgiveness. A mere sacrifice is not enough.

However, there is a second dimension. Regardless of guilt and responsibility, if we commit a sin we have objectively transgressed a boundary. The word chet means to miss the mark, to stray, to deviate from the proper path. We have committed an act that somehow disturbs the moral balance of the world.

To take a secular example, imagine that your car has a faulty speedometer. You are caught driving at 50 miles per hour in a 30-mile-an-hour zone. You tell the policeman who stops you that you didn’t know. Your speedometer was only showing 30 miles per hour. He may sympathize, but you have still broken the law, transgressed the limit, and you will still have to pay the penalty.

That is what a sin offering is. According to Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch it is a penalty for carelessness. According to the Sefer HaChinuch it is an educational and preventive measure. Deeds, in Judaism, are the way we train the mind. The fact that you have had to pay the price by bringing a sacrifice will make you take greater care in the future.

Rabbi Isaac Arama (Spain, 15th century) says that the difference between an intentional and an unintentional sin is that in the former case, both the body and the soul were at fault. In the case of an unintentional sin only the body was at fault, not the soul. Therefore a physical sacrifice helps, since it was only the physical act of the body that was in the wrong. A physical sacrifice cannot atone for a deliberate sin, because it cannot rectify a wrong in the soul.

What the sacrifice achieves is kapparah, not forgiveness as such but a covering over, or obliteration, of the sin. Noah was told to “cover” (vechapharta) the surface of the ark with pitch (Genesis 6:14).

The cover of the ark in the Tabernacle was called kaporet (Exodus 25:17). Once a sin has been symbolically covered over, it is forgiven, but as the Malbim points out, in such cases the verb for forgiveness – s-l-ch – is always in the passive (venislach: Leviticus 4:20, 26, 31). The forgiveness is not direct, as it is in the case of repentance, but indirect, a consequence of the sacrifice.

 

[LuisDantas]

To the extent that I can make sense of the concept of Sin, it seems to me that it would be not so much an offense as a lack of wisdom or of morality.

But it really is best to avoid the concept entirely and focus on constructive concepts and approaches.