yisunsinfangirl:

lj-writes:

yinx1:

lj-writes:

yinx1:

Also the difference comes in to place with the Bible as well. Jewish ppl tend to follow the god of the Old Testament, all powerful, all knowing, vengeful, jealous, and law abiding. Many of the rules Jewish people ahere to come from the Old Testament, observing the Sabbath, not eating of unclean things like pork. God was something to be feared and have limited to no access to. They also follow the Torah.

Whereas Christians tend to weigh heavily on the New Testament. Christians believe in Jesus, and once he died for our sins the veil from the Old Testament ripped in two clearing the way of god and mankind to become one hence the Holy Spirit. God in you. Though most Christians believe in Jesus and what he did and talked about his two rules, many like to dip into the Old Testament to pick up rules that no longer apply because of what Jesus did. Christians use these rules to okay racism, control over women, slavery, kill homosexuality, killing people who aren’t Christians etc. Christians come from the word Christ as in Jesus Christ.

But a few Christians called Red Letter Christians (which I am) only adhered to Jesus spoken word via the red lettering in the New Testament of the Bible. Jesus gave only two rules 1. Love thy neighbor as thyself. 2. Believe in Him. Never during his time on earth did Jesus condemn homosexuality, control over women, slavery, killing because a person isn’t like you, nor racism.

Is that concept of Judaism something told to you by someone who is Jewish? Because Jewish people I know seem to believe god is a punk-ass bitch and they need to fistfight him, more or less. Jewish people have literally put him on trial multiple times, so mainstream modern Judaism seems very different from the characterization of following an all-powerful, jealous and law-abiding god. And for that matter, most Jewish people’s relationship to the commandments doesn’t bear much resemblance to the legalistic adherence to archaic rules that many Christians characterize them as, aided by the Christian Bible itself.

I had a few Jewish friends growing up. They were from a stricter denomination, Orthodox Judaism to be precise. Your friends sound like Reconstructive Judaism. Orthodox don’t believe Christ was the son of god and that he was just a Prophet.

There are different sects of Judaism: Orthodox (adhere to the Bible/Torah strictly, obey the Sabbath and have a gazzion rules to follow), Conservative (adhere to both the Torah but also *live in the real world* like won’t eat pork but work on the Sabbath), and Reconstructive (which as you described your friends are, they believe in Jesus as God’s son, and condemn God’s teachings of the old rules)

Orthodox Jewish people make up just 10% of Jewish people in the U.S., so they are hardly representative (link). That number is 31% in Israel, adding up adherents of Haredi Judaism and religious Zionism, but they are still outnumbered by the 67% of Jewish Israelis who are non-religious and atheist (link). What we would call Orthodoxy does seem to outnumber Reform (3.9%) and Conservative (3.2%) Judaism among religious Jewish Israelis, however. Jewish people have expressed frustration at the idea that Orthodoxy is more “real” or representative Judaism than other denominations (link). The largest Jewish denomination in the U.S. is Reform (which I think my friends are, if memory serves) followed by Conservative, though these terms are not universal across communities. Reconstructionism as far as I can tell does not teach that Jesus is the son of God, in fact according to my research “classic” Reconstructionists reject traditional theism altogether. While Reconstructionism is theologically diverse, I can’t find a mention of any strain of Reconstructionism believing in Jesus that way.

@yinx1 What you are writing here is a severe misinterpretation of Judaism, and Orthodox Judaism in particular. For reference, I am a practicing Orthodox Jewish woman.

Re the original question, in Judaism there is less of a focus about who G-d is and more of a focus on what G-d does. So when Jewish people talk about G-d, it is as the one who created the world, and delivered the Jewish people from Egypt and gave the Torah. Most Orthodox Jews assume G-d is all-powerful and all-knowing, but don’t really focus on that, since it’s less important.

lj-writes:

I am so not qualified to talk about the Jewish concept of g-d or even whether there’s just one concept of it, so if anyone Jewish wants to talk about it feel free. I can talk briefly about the Christian God, but keep in mind I used to belong to a fairly conservative Protestant sect heavily influenced by U.S. Evangelical Christianity so this likely doesn’t represent all Christians. I mean my old sect, the Korean Presbyterian Church, recently declared Catholicism a heresy I can’t with these fuckers 😂

Much antisemitism below

So in the version of Christianity I’m familiar with God is a unity and Trinity at the same time, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. He is heavily gendered, translated with exclusively masculine titles such as King. Not so much gendered pronouns though, since Korean doesn’t truck much with them. Jesus, the Holy Son, is considered to be the Messiah and the fulfillment of prophecies by the Jewish prophets and holy books. (I’m still embarrassed about ever believing this, ouch.) Jesus is considered human and divine at the same time, a concept so tricky–much like all this Trinity stuff–that historically they literally had to kill people who didn’t believe it.

The Virgin Mary is NOT a part of the divine and we were taught nothing about there being anything feminine in God. It’s a big beef my particular sect, and probably many Protestant sects, have with Catholicism that Catholics over-exalt Mary. Some even accuse Catholics of worshipping her as a goddess, which I have seen no evidence of but may not be that far from the history of Mary taking over local goddesses as Christianity spread. But at least we let her have sex after she had Jesus, I think most Protestants believe she had Jesus’s brothers and sisters the good old-fashioned way with Joseph. Evidently Catholics believe she and Joseph never had sex and the siblings of Jesus mentioned in the Bible were cousins or step-siblings, something that had me completely agog when I first heard it.

God as I was taught is all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing, a trilemma I struggled with until I couldn’t keep up my faith anymore. I’ve since come to think God could be at best two out of three, but from talking to Jewish friends they hardly grant one out of three which is, like, a pretty harsh grade to give the creator of the entire universe lmao. I’ve also been taught Scripture is flawless and perfect and to be read literally, so the pronouncements of God are not to be questioned ever. Like, not the genocides, not the slavery, not anything.

Re God’s shady past, it was a pretty common line in my church that the God of the New Testament was a kinder and gentler one than the God of the Old Testament, and that Jewish people worshipped the, I guess, cruel and barbaric pre-makeover god who ordered slaughters and kept His people to an unbearably harsh set of laws while our God was kindly and full of love (but still homophobic as hell because the Old Testament suddenly becomes super important then and only then). The event that perpetuated this huge character growth in God was evidently the coming of Jesus/a.k.a. Messiah, because now our sins were all forgiven as long as we accepted Jesus as our lord and savior so we didn’t need animal sacrifices or all those technical laws anymore. Yeah, again, I’m embarrassed I ever believed any of this.

So those are the headcanons of God from my old corner of the Bible fandom. It’s far from universal but fairly widespread, and I believe very damaging between its cultural appropriation, antisemitism, and regressive attitudes toward women and queer people.

Jewish ppl tend to follow the god of the Old Testament, all powerful, all knowing, vengeful, jealous, and law abiding. Many of the rules Jewish people ahere to come from the Old Testament, observing the Sabbath, not eating of unclean things like pork. God was something to be feared and have limited to no access to. They also follow the Torah. 

This is a mixture on inaccuracies and nonsense. A fundamental belief in Judaism is that G-d created humans in order to have a relationship with them, and that G-d is aware people make mistakes, and is forgiving, provided that the person does repentance for their actions. 

(as an example from Ezekiel: “

Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord GOD; and not rather that he should return from his ways, and live?

“ or Isaiah: “

Let the wicked forsake his way, and the man of iniquity his thoughts; and let him return unto the LORD, and He will have compassion upon him, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon

“)

Now you can probably say, well what about the times in the Tanakh (what some call the Old Testament) where G-d seemed to act in cruel ways? There are two points that should be made clear regarding that. Firstly, that Jews (not only Orthodox Jews) do not consider the written Tanakh to be the entire Torah, and learn it alongside the Oral Torah – the Talmud, midrash etc. So, for example, when the Torah talks about punishing a person an eye for an eye, the Jewish position has always been that the phrase is talking about monetary compensation. Jews do not read the Torah just literally. The second point is, yes, there are cases where we ask, while we learn, why did G-d do this or that. That’s one of the reasons why Jewish people argue.

An example that I think will illustrate the point I’m trying to make is the destruction of Sodom. Why did G-d destroy Sodom and Gomorrah? (No, it wasn’t homosexuality). The text simply says that there was ‘a great cry’ and that their sins were ‘grievous’. Then G-d tells Abraham what he is about to do. That, in essence, is an invitation for Abraham to challenge G-d, which Abraham does. He tells G-d, to his face, “

shall not the Judge of all the earth do justly?

“ and tells G-d that he can’t destroy a place even if most of the people there are acting wickedly, if there are a few righteous ones as well. G-d agrees with Abraham.

So what was the sin of Sodom? Here the midrash says that the people there hated any visitors or immigrants, who they perceived as coming to steal their wealth, and would torture any visitors or immigrants in horrific ways. In the text itself we see the people of Sodom threatening to gang rape the angels. (Again, the issue here isn’t homosexuality, it’s gang rape)

to sum it up, to say that in Judaism G-d is “

something to be feared and have limited to no access to

“ is erroneous, to put it mildly. Like I wrote above, G-d created humans in order to have a relationship with them. (This is not exclusive to Jewish people.)