Believe in one God? or the same God?

After I finished reading JCM chapter 6, “Monotheism in Islam,” I came up with one serious question.

Do Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe in the same God?

When President Bush was asked by the same question 3 years ago, President Bush replied, “I believe we worship the same God.”
Scripturally, the Quran is known to insist that its God is the same as the God of Judaism and Christianity; Chronologically, Jews, Christians, and Muslims all recognize Abraham as the first generation.

If President Bush is right, then, why do the Moon God of Mecca, known as Allah, the God of Israel, known as YHWH, and the Christian God, known as God the Father, seem so different from one anther (honestly, I do not see the difference between YHWH and the God the Father. However, the Moon God of Mecca seems so separated from the other two)?

Why do we believe in different doctrines and practices if Allah, YHWH, and God the Father (Jehovah) are the same Supreme Being? Why do we use different scriptures? Why are those different scriptures (the Torah, Qu’ran, and the New Testament) written in different styles if they have been come from the same God?

Why are they so different while believing in the same God?

Shakin' the Reformation: Music in Judaism

Growing up, I remember going to synagogue with my family and hearing the thunderous and beautiful tones of the organ. I was surprised to read today that music was initially regarded as –halakhically, wrong to play on the Sabbath day. “Restraint from music making on the Sabbath was part of the Sabbath avodah” (JCM, 229) I was relieved when I read that to members of the reformed movement, this particular law was not seen as a sanctification of the Sabbath, but rather a deprivation of human enjoyment. The sounds of the organ always struck deep into my soul, allowing me to connect with my religion at a young age. Although now I do not consider myself a deeply religious person, I consider myself quite connected with a higher power. I am glad that the reformers of the 19^th century (I believe) decided not to compromise on this matter. What would temple be without song, dance, and chanting? For me, it wouldn’t be the same. Without these integral parts of the social, and communal dimensions of religion, Judaism would be missing something. I know I can always connect to people of any congregation through the commonly shared Jewish songs and daces. Perhaps it was the reverberations of the organ, which drove me to devote my scholastic career to the study of religion.

Like Bread on the Seder Plate

I just wanted to post this picture to go along with my comment to Sophie's post. If you're interested in Jewish feminism, this is a good book to read.

Shouldnt Grandma get to study the torah too?

In the last week as we read about the roles of women in both the bible and jewish culture I found it slightly disturbing that there is such a disparity between men and women when it comes to learning about torah. Stereotypes of judaism are always about the role of the jewish mother. She nags you, feeds you too much, never likes your boyfriend (unless he is from a good jewish family), uses the mothers guilt, is nosey. These are all stereotypes of jewish mothers that I have heard, however the role of the mother in the family life of jews seems to be very important if there are so many stereotypes about them. I have found that generally something does not get a stereotype if it does not make a lasting impression, well it seems to me that women of the jewish faith have left an impression

I was stunned during the scene in the film that we watched when all the women were praying at the wall in Jerusalem and men were protesting them and yelling for them to leave. I would think that these men would want the women that they value so much to be able to have the same experience as they do with the torah. It seems as if it is a selfish thing one is doing to deny women the right to study the torah, did these men ever think that they may have been getting the analysis wrong all these years? And that a woman may shine some new light on the study? Rejecting women and separating them during certain services and studies only perpetuates old world sexism and male hierarchy. I mean if a man loves his bubbie so much wouldn't he want her to be able to connect with the torah as he has?

A Woman's Religion

Is it possible that women have escaped mention in the Torah because they could have had a religion seperate from the men? I wonder if women did, in the time the Bible was written, have a religion of oral traditions passed down from mother to daughter that remained apart from the God of fathers and men. Usually in the Bible, as God is listing his references, he calls himself the God of Jacob or Isaac or Abraham and every once in a while will mention a matriarch like Rebecca. I wonder if this is at possible because the god we now know as God, YHWH, was perhaps a god of men. At a time when women's work and men's work was very seperate, it seems that it could be possible that there could have been seperate gods for the very different functions needed by each gender. Maybe women worshipped a goddess of fertility, pregnancy, childbirth or menstruation. I would also assume that men were more likely to write down their myths because they were the ones with access to an education, while I would assume practically all women were illiterate.

I know that it is true that the Judaism were understand as eventually written down as the Torah evolved slowly from a polytheistic religion indigenous to the area surrounding Isreal. I just wonder if perhaps this polytheism or at least the worship of a female deity could have lasted longer among female populations since their work was so often seperate from men's.

If this is true, I wonder how impossible it would be to add some of these traditions back into Judaism...in the time of early Christianity, all those who did attempt to add the feminine priniciple back into the idea of a divine failed...

Jewish Women and Judaism

I always think of my tradition (Southern Sudanese) as a discriminatory tradition because women are prevented to do certain things (because they are not basically as smart as men). Even though I watched the first movie wandering why there were no Jewish women studying the Torah, I did not expect that Jewish women would almost not be allowed to study the laws that played the important roles in the history of their tradition. But today in class I wandered more by seeing women in one of the great tradition (Judaism) challenging the way they were not encouraged to learning the Torah.

It was a fascinating movie because the women tried hard to find their common ground between religious and historical tradition. I thought the women played an important role not only by praying at the Holly Wall in Jerusalem (to show the men they are part of this tradition), but also addressing the issues of their religious civil rights, and the struggle for self-definition in a man dominant tradition and religion. I do not know why Judaism does not allow women to study and learn the Torah, Is it because God created man and woman differently or was this created by men who wrote or interpreted the Torah? Did God prohibit Jewish women from studying the Torah, or did this develop over the years of Jewish traditional change?

Who's wrong in the eyes of God?

I believe that both Jewish men and women have the same relationships to the Torah in a way that they perceive the Torah as the bridge which connects the Jew and God. It is undeniable fact that the Torah has been the core of Judaism; the individual’s attempt to develop and deepen his or her personal relationship with God through studying of Torah, explains why the importance of Torah study has been stressing out among the different Jewish communities around the world.

After watching the video “The Torah and the Scholar Today,” I could completely understand the significant meaning(s) of Torah study within the Jewish society. Through watching the video, I learned that the importance of Torah study comes not only from one’s sincere desire to appreciate (or to learn more about) YHWH, but also from one’s duty, as a Jew, to preserve a special relationship that the one true God of Israel had made with the Jewish people in the ancient past. Therefore, it was not so hard to understand Jewish women’s desperation to study (or even to read) Torah while watching the video, “Half the Kingdom.”

However, while watching several women’s “unbreakable will” against their own ethical traditions, I thought of a small possibility that some of the women could have used the notion of Torah study as a weapon to fulfil one's own desire (to build a strong relationship with God or to justify gender equality to the Jewish men) whether their society or ethical traditions approve it or not.

I strongly believe that those women have every right to claim their rights and duties to worship and learn about God who loves and treats them equally as He does to men; I believe that no man has a right to stop anyone from performing religious acts. However, when I was watching the part where Jewish men were yelling at or disapproving women’s reading the Torah (or performing religious practice) in public, I wondered how God would respond to their behaviors.

Would God say that those men had a right to disapprove women’s mere desire to worship Him in public? Or, would God say that those women had a right to disorganize the society and disobey their husbands in order to worship Him in public?

I do not know what God truly wants His people to do. However, I am sure God would not want His beloved people to either discriminate one another due to gender difference or violate one’s traditional role to fulfill one’s own desire.

The Ten Commandments and Laws

After reading the ten commandments and the other laws that are given in the torah, to me it is much like a reading a handbook for a lifestyle than anything else. Many of the laws are about creating a "meal" so to speak so that it is holy in the eyes of God, as well as rules about governing ones self with others. These laws seem like guidelines as to how to be holy in the eyes of God and make ones self like him (which in the end is the ultimate goal I guess). However, the thing about these laws is that they can be very hard to follow at times. I mean when you are growing up its hard to not want to disrespect your parents (its a natural tendency I think for most), it also seems like the laws are challenges for the israelites to see if they can really live up to the image of God. The laws may seem simple but when you look closely at ones day to day life, I think that it would be really hard to constantly follow the ten commandments!

The Torah and Jewish Women and Men

If Scripture is a “relational concept” and the Torah and Talmud are Jewish scriptures, do Jewish men and women have the same relationship to the Torah?

After watching the video The Torah and the Scholar today, it’s hard not to wonder whether Jewish women have any relationship with the Torah at all. In the video we saw only males engaged with one another studying Torah (even when Rabbi Steinsaltz was teaching a class to non-religious Jews), and women only as brides, or praying and celebrating separately from the men. At the Wailing Wall, the men and women were separated by a barrier, the mehitzah (though in an older photo, men and women were praying together at the wall with no barrier). On the other hand, Rabbi Steinsaltz commented that his wife would like doing his type of work much more than he does. Didn’t you wonder why Mrs. Steinsaltz didn’t do his work -promoting and teaching the study of Talmud? And in the next movie we see, Half the Kingdom, we’ll observe Jewish women intentionally breaking down the barriers that have kept them from studying Torah and worshipping like Jewish men. It’s possible that the picture we get of Jewish women’s relationships to the Torah is skewed by the cultural and ideological biases of the filmmakers. Inspired by a romanticized ideal of male Torah learning, it probably didn’t even occur to the director of the Talmud and The Scholar to film women studying with women or at the women’s yeshivot that Vanessa Ochs describes in Words on Fire, or women engaged in Torah in other venues or in other ways. Aren’t making challah, cooking kosher meals, or teaching children Bible stories and domestic traditions other ways of relating to Torah? Is indeed study the only or most appropriate way for Jews to relate to their scriptures? That seems to be the ideological bias underlying the focus on Jewish women’s Torah study in Half the Kingdom. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m inclined to agree. But didn’t we all sort of gasp as the yeshivah boys who knew more about the Talmud than current movies and pop music, or the rabbi who studied Talmud maybe 12+ hours a day? Isn’t such devotion to Torah study, whether by men or women, a little out of touch with reality?!

What I’d like you to think about and reflect upon this week is
1) Do Jewish women and men indeed have the same or different relationships to the Torah (based on what you see in the videos and in the readings)?
2) What historical and cultural factors do you see that make Jewish men and Jewish women hold up Torah study as the ideal relationship of Jews to the Torah (as opposed to other ways of relating to the Torah, or of not really relating to it all)?

In other words. why Torah study, and why men and/or women stressing the importance of Torah study now (in 20th-21st century America, Israel, Russia)?

The Ten Commandment Lessons

The lessons God gave the Israelites after the Ten Commandments changed their lives. I am not sure, but were the Ten Commandments given to make the Israelites’ lives hard or to warm them of dangers and to show them the safe ways to go in? God also made it difficult for the Israelites to live new life. In (Deuteronomy 6 verses 6-9), I think God forced the Israelite parents and adults to must talk with the children about God’s laws. The Israelites must write words on doorposts and on gates. If the children did break the laws, who would God punish, the children, the parents, or even all the Israelites? The chaotic narrative of the transmission of the Ten Commandments is complicated. Who actually heard and saw God? Why would God want to speak to Moses, but intended the Israelites to hear the words of laws? Basically all of this seemed ambiguous in the reading.

Torah as Law

Here are some ideas and questions to think about if you respond to the reading by Edward Greenstein on Biblical law in Back to the Sources.

He says,

The Laws of the Torah are one of its means of teaching; they are the specific behaviors by which God inculcates his ways -- what we call values -- in his human creatures. If we are to understand these values we must read the laws, in a sense, as a sort of body language that outwardly symbolizes something of a much deeper significance.(p.84)

It is significant that the Hebrew word "Torah" literally means "teaching," though it seems to be used in the book of Leviticus to refer to a law or set of ritual practices, i.e., "this is the torah of the whole burnt offering...," "This is the torah of beast and fowl..." I have also discussed this peculiar use of "torah" in Leviticus here. What values do the Torah's dietary laws, the laws regarding the treatment of slaves and servants, or the laws of taking a pledge from a borrower (which Greenstein discusses) symbolize?

What exactly is the connection between these laws and the stories of the Creation, the Exodus from Egypt, or other important stories from the Biblical history of the Israelites? Do the laws of purity around the sanctuary have any connection to these stories?

Moral Questions

I want to hear people's opinion on Holtz's claim that "Biblical narrative rarely moralizes. It explores moral questions, to be sure, but it is in the wit and nuance of the specific moment that one is to find the narrative's intelligence most concentrated" (63). What does this mean for modern followers of the Bible. Can we take away "morals" from the Bible? I just think this is so interesting because people usually look to the Bible for these values, and justify lifestyles based on these so-called morals.

Does Jewish Scripture have a distinctive style?

Does the Hebrew Bible have a distinctive narrative style that makes it different from ordinary books? In Back to the Sources, Joel Rosenberg seems to suggest it does. What are some examples, and how do they make reading the Bible different from reading ordinary stories?