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by D.M. Murdock
Freethought Examiner
July 25, 2009
from
Examiner Website
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D.M. Murdock, also known
as Acharya S, is an independent scholar of comparative
religion and mythology from a "freethinking"
perspective.
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She is the author of
The Christ Conspiracy,
Suns of God, Who was Jesus? and Christ in Egypt. Her
work was featured in the movie Zeitgeist and Bill
Maher�s Religulous.
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Her main website is
TruthBeKnown.com |
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The recent arrest and indictment of
several - 19 according to one source - members of Orthodox Jewish
communities in New York and New Jersey on racketeering,
money-laundering and organ-smuggling charges reminds us that this is
not the first time Orthodox Jews have allegedly engaged in financial
and other crimes.
In 2007, the Grand Rabbi of the Spinka sect of Orthodox Judaism,
also located in New York, was indicted on tax fraud and money
laundering, along with "several other defendants and five Spinka
charities," according to the Los Angeles Times.
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In March 2009, one of the
co-conspirators in that case, Rabbi Moshe Zigelman, was
sentenced to 24 months in prison for these crimes.
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Unfortunately, the list goes on, with
rampant sexual abuse charges as well within these tight-knit
communities.
Ultra-Orthodox
Jews in New York
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The resentment within the Orthodox
Jewish community itself concerning such activities is clear from the
resultant commentary by one of their own in an "Open
Letter to the Money-Grubbing Jews" by Ben Sales,
published in the National Jewish Student Magazine:
"Because you make me look bad, me
and everyone else who wears a kippah, a long skirt and long
sleeves, a black hat, a t-shirt with Hebrew writing on it, a
necklace with a silver chai.
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Every kid who goes to Jewish school
and Jewish camp, every college student who attends Hillel, every
Zionist and post-Zionist, Conservative, Orthodox, Reconstructionist, Reform, Sephardi, Ashkenazi, Hasidic, secular
must now bear the brunt of those who read of your exploits and
think: there�s another Shylock, another Madoff, another Jew for
whom the bottom line is more important than his own community."
Sales adds,
"This concept, as I would think you
know, is called a chillul hashem, a desecration of God�s
name."
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The "Good Book?"
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This seemingly pervasive problem of
"desecrating God's name" may lie not necessarily in the apparent
corruptibility of so many individual rabbis and other members of the
Orthodox Jewish community but within the very scriptures themselves
that create such religions, sects and cults.
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In this regard, it is clear from
biblical traditions and dictates that "chosen people" are to be
rewarded by God for their piety by being given the booty of "the
nations," i.e., non-Jewish lands.
A Scroll of the
Torah/Pentateuch
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Consider the following scriptures from
the Old Testament part of the Bible, called in Judaism the "Tanakh"
- which,
as in Christianity, is considered by Orthodox Jews to be "God's
Word":
"For you are a people holy to the
Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you to be a
people for his own possession, out of all the peoples that are
on the face of the earth."
(Deuteronomy 7:6)
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"When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms
of peace to it. And if its answer to you is peace and it opens
to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced
labor for you and shall serve you.
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But if it makes no peace with you,
but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when
the Lord your
God gives it into your hand you shall put all its
males to the sword, but the women and the little ones, the
cattle, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you
shall take as booty for yourselves; and you shall enjoy the
spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you.
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Thus you shall do to all the cities
which are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations
here. But in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God
gives you for an inheritance, you shall save nothing that
breathes..."
(Deuteronomy 20:10-16)
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"He [the Jew] should not press his fellow [Jew] for payment
...the foreigner [Gentile] you may press for payment."
(Deuteronomy 15: 2-3)
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"You must not make your brother pay interest, interest on money,
interest on food, interest on anything on which one may claim
interest. You may make a foreigner [Gentile] pay interest but
your brother [fellow Jew] you must not make pay interest."
(Deuteronomy 23: 19-20)
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"Foreigners (Gentiles) shall rebuild your walls, and their kings
shall minister to you ...Your gates shall be open continuously;
day and night they shall not be shut; that men may bring to you
the wealth of the nations, with their kings led in procession.
For the nation or kingdom that will not not serve you; shall
perish; those nations shall be utterly laid waste...."
(Isaiah 60:10-12)
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"You shall suck the milk of nations, you shall suck the breast
of kings; and you shall know that I, the Lord, am your Savior
and your Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob."
(Isaiah 60:16)
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"And strangers [Gentiles] shall stand and feed your flocks,
strangers shall be your plowmen and vinedressers; but you shall
be called the priests of the Lord, men shall speak of you as the
ministers of our God; you shall eat the wealth of the nations,
and in their riches you shall glory."
(Isaiah 61:5-6)
Lest we underestimate the scope and
influence of such Jewish writings within their own community, let us
consider the experience by a dear friend of mine, now deceased, who
was born and raised within the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in
New York.
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Her father was a rabbi who had survived
Auschwitz.
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Yet, she - a very lovely, intelligent, kind and generous
individual - felt the need to escape from the oppression of her
community, which made her shave her head, marry a man she did not
love and suffer assorted other indignities and deprivations,
including being barred from studying the Jewish text called the
Talmud because she was a female.
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My friend was very aware of this
exclusion because she knew how important that book was to her
community, as she used to hide behind the door listening to her
father teach it to the younger men.
Babylonian Talmud
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The
Talmud - which is not "Holy Writ" in
itself but which frequently cites the Tanakh/Old Testament - is one of
the most important texts within Orthodox Judaism.
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Not only did this
exhaustive legal text take centuries to compile but it is pored over
endlessly by Orthodox Jewish rabbis. Along with the Tanakh, the
Talmud is repeatedly consulted for the very minutest details of
orthodox Jewish life.
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As Jewish apologist Herman Wouk says in
This is My God (181):
"The Talmud is not only an
encyclopedia of law but a work of folk art, a hymn to the Lord
rising out of many generations of men who spent their lives in
the quest for him. This quest for God, the confident search for
the holy in every busy detail of life, is its grand single
theme. The Talmud recaptures a long golden age of intelligence
and insight, and it is to this day the circulating heart's blood
of the Jewish religion.
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Whatever laws, customs, or
ceremonies we observe - whether we are orthodox, Conservative,
Reform, or merely spasmodic sentimentalists - we follow the
Talmud. It is our common law."
Following are
some quotes from the Soncino edition of the Talmud:
"...R. Hanina also said: He who
smites an Israelite on the jaw, is as though he had thus
assaulted the Divine Presence; for it is written, one who
smiteth man [i.e. an Israelite] attacketh the Holy One."
(Sanhedrin 58b)
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"It was taught: R. Judah used to say, A man is bound to say the
following three blessings daily:
"[Blessed art thou...] who hast
not made me a heathen, [non-Jew]"
".... who hast not made me a woman";
and
"... who hast not made me a brutish
man."...
(Menachoth 43b-44a)
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"And he who desires that none of his vows made during the year
shall be valid, let him stand at the beginning of the year and
declare, �Every vow which I may make in the future shall be
null.' [HIS VOWS ARE THEN INVALID,] PROVIDING THAT HE REMEMBERS
THIS AT THE TIME OF THE VOW."
(Nedarim 23b)
These are but a few of the passages in
the Talmud that reflect an "anti-goyim" or accountability-shirking
attitude.
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Indeed, within both the Talmud and
Tanakh appears a disturbing amount of material that foments
xenophobia - the "stranger-fear" so evident from the clannishness of
these communities - and apparently fosters corruption in the form of
"sucking the milk" and "eating the wealth of the nations."
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This attitude can also be found in
various quotes from Jewish leaders over the centuries, revealing
that this mentality definitely does exist.
The question is why? Is it all blamable as a reaction to
perceived "anti-Semitism?" Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
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Certainly, the Old Testament record of Israelites rampaging through
the "Holy Land" and slaughtering non-Jews to steal their booty and
virgin girls occurred long before "anti-Semitism" was ever
conceived.
If people are programmed from birth with these various "religious"
texts - some of which are said to be the very "Word of God"
- is it any
wonder they will behave in this manner? Defenders of such writings
claim that these prejudicial parts are "taken out of context" and
constitute only a small portion of the massive texts.
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Regarding this "out of context" quote
mining, Wouk (181) also states:
"In a word, one can say almost
anything about this tape recording of the talk of wise men
through seven centuries, and then find a passage to support it.
The enemies of Judaism in all ages have snipped out the
harshest, strangest patches they could find, run them together,
and offered the result to the world as the true face of the
Jews' mystery book.
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The same technique could make a preposterous
dummy of the New Testament or of the Old, of the works of Plato,
Shakespeare, or Dickens, or the utterances of our American
presidents."
These contentions are somewhat true, in
that some of the passages used by Talmud-bashers are certainly taken
out of context and paraphrased poorly, and that there is much more
to the Talmud.
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But in light of the "holier-than-thou"
attitude frequently developed by the most pious, can we really just
ignore the effects that these "relatively few" bigoted writings have
upon the human mind, particularly when searching for a source for
the corruption of so many leaders of the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish
community and when factoring in the numerous scriptures from the Old
Testament/Tanakh cited above that clearly dictate megalomania and
hegemony?
Instead of conditioning children with anachronistic, ethnocentric
and prejudicial "scriptures" from ancient times, let us portray and
recreate humanity in a more evolved manner.
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The solution is not to pit culture
against culture, with shrill cries using "hate speech," but to
provide less hate speech in the first place in our "holy texts,"
which need either to be rewritten or to be scrapped entirely
in
favor of more enlightened creations.
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