Catholics to Pray (Again) for Jews to be...Enlightened

[halplm]

But if I were to take the position that Jnyusa is suggesting, that historical persecution of Christians is part of our culture, and should rightly shape our "world view," then why don't we discuss the attempts by Jews to exterminate Christianity before it even got started?

hal, it was the Romans who tried to stamp out incipient Christianity, not the Jews. The first Christians were Jews, remember?

If it were only the Romans, you would be correct... but you've completely ignored my point.

[Jnyusa]

hal, if there were people on this board whose known ancestors had actively tried to exterminate Christians, I would hope that they would be willing to listen to Christians talk about that and how it influences their world view.

Roman slaughter of early Christians was so exhaustive that they had to build a special arena with underground culverts to carry the blood away. As far as I know, Christianity as a whole bears no lingering resentment against Italians, but if they did I would hope that no one here would tell them summarily to "get over it."

How long will it be before we get over it? That's a fatuous question, isn't it, when some of the events we're talking about happened to the immediate families of people on this board?

Are you seriously suggesting that because it is no longer relevant to talk about Alexander's persecution of the Magi of Partia we should stop talking about the Holocaust too?

yov, I am really sorry that you found my summary of your position so insulting. I really did not intend it to be insulting, and I'm sort of flummoxed that this is your reaction. As I said, my impression is that you have always felt blase about homophobia and have felt comfortable feeling that way ... if that makes sense. You're certainly entitled to feel as you do. I just don't think it's arrogant to feel otherwise, as you seemed to be implying; nor do I feel, as I said, that all reactions to 'the other' are equivalent in their moral justification or their consequences.

[anthriel]

ps - Anthy should never delete her posts
(just sayin')

I've done that several times today. I seem to have fits of erasaholism, occasionally.


I erased it because I didn't want to open a big ol' can of worms. I just wanted yov to know that I think I might be one of the ones who always saw what he meant.

[Teremia]

yov, what I gathered from reading your posts over the years (:) kinda cool we can say things like that, no?) was that you yourself having been raised within a world in which homosexuality has no good place and is considered a sin (but a world inhabited by people you love deeply and who love you deeply) --

-- but then finding yourself to be gay, and still a good person

-- have the experience of inhabiting two incompatible worlds at once. Why wouldn't you still understand and love family members who love you but still believe that homosexuality is a sin? But of course you also understand how profoundly little "choice" you have had in your orientation, and see that you are no more or less a sinner than you were before you acknowledged you were gay. So love and honesty require you also to see the world very differently from your family members, whom you love nonetheless.

And being able to understand what it feels like to believe homosexuality is a sin, you extend that compassion to other people who aren't in your family.

This is how I've understood your situation.

The danger (the self-hatred some have alluded to) would be in letting the world-in-which-homosexuality-is-a-sin overwhelm the world-in-which-you-know-you're-a-good-guy, but I don't see you doing that.

[anthriel]

See? There's really no need for me to write things, erase them, and then rewrite edited versions. I could just wait for Teremia to come along, and write it out so well.

[yovargas]

Thanks you two I'd comment but I didn't intend to make this thread about me. I hope I didn't kill the thread...

[Jnyusa]

The other thing going on here has to do with the Messianic beliefs that Hasidic orthodox do still adhere to. The Messiah is supposed to come from the House of David, so they put some effort into maintaining their family trees and trying to keep their bloodlines pure, in case the Messiah should want to be born of their family. This does not preclude converts as such - one of the ancestors of David was a convert - but they want to make sure any convert is really their convert ... really Jewish by their rules.

Again, I say- umm...

Glowy, don't know if you're still reading here, but your head-scratching over this one gave me a weak stomach regarding what I had said, and I've been trying off and on since then to either find comfirmation of what I thought I had read before, or find disconfirmation of it. It really had been 25 years since I had read about Hasidic families trees, and looked at the pictures, and I might well have imagined this to be characteristic of a much broader population than I thought it was. Problem was, I couldn't figure out at first what keywords to search under .... but then - aha! - descent from King David is apparently a research venture all it own!

Some of these links below I'm giving just for the fun of reading them ... it really is amazing how the accounts from various sources had to be cobbled together because of the diaspora ... and then entire families were killed, you know, so there are big gaps in both the lineages and the documentation. But ... I'm hoping you'll enjoy reading some of these as much as I did.

Here's a short, readable essay that presents the main argument, the one I found most frequently referred to - descent through Rashi.

http://www.jewishgen.org/Rabbinic/journal/descent.htm

The project of the Eshet Chauil Foundation is to help all Jews (not just Hasidim) determine whether they are of Davidic descent

http://www.davidicdynasty.org/

Here are two forums where the Chabadniks are chatting about the claim of Rabbi Schneerson and the Charedim are disputing it!

http://www.chabadtalk.com/forum/showthread.php3?t=7030

http://failedmessiah.typepad.com/failed ... king_.html

Chaim Freedman on the scholarship behind the claim of Davidic descent (I don't know who Chaim Freedman is, so you'll have to evaluate this for yourself)

http://chfreedman.blogspot.com/2007/06/ ... -king.html

And then two families whose personal research is posted and really made my eyes pop. The first, the Loeb family, traced themselves all the way back to Judah, son of Jacob the Patriarch! And the second has in their possession a document that is absolutely beautiful - forgetting for the moment any question of accuracy, wouldn't you love to have something like this as an heirloom, dated ~1840?

http://www.loebtree.com/kings.html

http://jackwhite.net/berdugo/eternal_house_of_david.htm

There are literally hundreds of thousands of sites devoted to this ... I posted the ones with the the most concise explanation ... or the spiciest discussion! Quite a few also address identical claims by the Christian monarchic families of Europe. What I googled to find it finally was "Descent King David." (I had started out looking under 'geneology' references, and found about a half million places you can go to find out if you have the Cohen gene.)

The connection to conversation law and the Law of Return is not directly stated anywhere that I could find, but it is strongly implied in many of the sites concerning the halacha of conversion, and I have connected these issues together in my own mind for sure.

I was not aware that not all members of the Hasidic community accept one another's conversions, and apparently there is a project going on right now to make the laws of conversion uniform among all the orthodox. (That was my experience, by the way, that not all the orthodox had the same approach, not by a long shot, but that is more to be expected if we are looking at the whole Union. It was surprising for me that even within the Hasidic community there is not agreement.)

Here's a short article about the unification project:

http://www.jewishpress.com/displayConte ... h%20Family

I felt that the last sentence in this article, bolded by them for emphasis, was pretty representative of the discussion about conversion law that I've read previously:

"Obviously, nothing less than the integrity of the Jewish bloodline is involved. And the Eternal Jewish Family is poised to bring order and reliability to a situation that has long been marked by abuse, chaos and drift. "

But they are not so concerned with the ger hatzadic as with the adopted child who might be of Jewish descent, because then there are other halachic concerns - pidyon haben and the status of mamzerim, etc. These have nothing directly to do with messianic bloodlines, of course, though I guess in the case of mamzerim they might. Though, as one rabbi pointed out, it took a miracle to make David a King from all those illicit acts that preceded him, and we have to expect a miracle in the making of the moshiach!

If you dig through this stuff a bit you'll find some beautiful medieval illuminations - a favorite browse of mine. Enjoy!

[Kushana]

The prayer calls for God to enlighten the hearts of Jews “so that they may acknowledge Jesus Christ, the savior of all men.”

This is never a polite way to treat one's mother.

-Kushana

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Kushuna!

Nice to see you here.

[TheEllipticalDisillusion]

I love this pope. He says all sorts of garbage no one should pay heed to. If tomorrow the pope declared atheists do not deserve the glories of heaven, I would have a hard time being offended. I can't possibly worry about the good or bad of a place that I don't think exists.

Is this pope offensive? Yes. Would we all (not catholics maybe) be happier if we ignored him? Yes. Like a screaming child, tie him up and drown him in a pool. It makes all the noise go away.

ETA: I'd like to add that I did not realize how long this thread has gone because I don't always pay attention. I shall try to read through some of it.

[MithLuin]

Generally, I do not deal with screaming children by drowning them. Just sayin'.

And without reopening the content of this thread too much, Catholics do believe that Jews have a path of salvation handed down to them by Moses. We happen to think our own is cooler, of course, but that doesn't invalidate theirs. I am not even suggesting that Jewish people are all that hung up on their eternal salvation, but if that is the question you were asking....that's the answer.

[solicitr]

To reiterate a point from Back When, just for those who haven't read this whole thread:

The Tridentine Good Friday liturgy is almost never, ever used; and the revised prayer is actually something of an improvement on the 1579 text, although obviously still not as sensitive as one could wish.

99-point-something percent of all Catholic masses worldwide follow the Novus Ordo of 1970, which contains no such text.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Is this pope offensive? Yes. Would we all (not catholics maybe) be happier if we ignored him? Yes. Like a screaming child, tie him up and drown him in a pool. It makes all the noise go away.

I missed this comment when it was first posted. Please restrain from even tongue-in-cheek suggestions of violence against anyone.

[Kushana]

I always enjoy the company of friends.

-Kushana

[TheEllipticalDisillusion]

By my avatar I sometimes can't help but be tongue-in-cheek about children.

But, c'est la vie.