jewish-demi-dragoneyes:

shoutingjar:

asearchforg-d:

erini-v:

so i might be stepping out of line making this post but i feel it needs to be made so yolo i guess.

i know a lot of millenials have a sort of knee-jerk negative reaction towards abrahamic religions (really mostly christianity and judaism) and i understand. really, i get it. my dad is a pastor, and he used his religon to abuse, demean, and control me at every opportunity. he regularly tells my sisters that he’s “so sad im going to hell” and other sundry passive aggressive nonsense, so trust me i get it. i understand how a certain religion can be triggering to someone.

but there is a very important point here, and i really hope you understand this.

you cannot let it make you prejudiced, and, let me be clear here, im talking specifically about antisemitism.

i know exactly whats going on in your head, because for a long time it was what was going on in my head. you hear the word “judaism” and you have flashbacks to sunday school and the old testament and all the times you sat in a church and felt personally attacked, and you associate that with judaism and jewish people because most of the things that upset you were in the old testament. 

you can have your triggers, but you can’t let those triggers become an excuse to further marginalize a minority thats already attacked from literally every position of power there is. every major religion has leaders who are antisemitic, every country has a history of marginalizing jewish people, every person on the planet grows up in an inherently antisemitic world and has to unlearn that sort of toxic mindset.

and maybe this post should have been made by a jewish person, or somebody with more education on the subject than me but i think its really important that people don’t let their personal experiences with organized religion turn them into the kind of prejudiced person that hurt them in the first place. 

as a romni i have a shared tragedy with jewish people, so i feel like it was easier for me to step back and be like “woah, your thought process here is super toxic and you need to stop” but i feel like a lot of white christian-raised people don’t really have that touchstone and need somebody to be like “wake up, what you are doing is wrong”

I can remove this if you want but I feel a strong need to reblog

as a jew, i’m gonna add to this.

first of all. we don’t have a lot of allies speaking for us genuinely, instead of because of some sort of twisted “jesus was jewish” or “i can secretly defend my faith or politics using jews as pawns” so when y’all do it means a lot. we don’t see it much, so don’t feel bad for making this post.

second of all, the part that you didn’t know, through no real fault of your own, is that the version you learn in sunday school or from non-jewish sources? that isn’t even remotely how jews understand that source.

jews have a totally different relationship with our holy text than christians do. every jewish person is expected to know the “old testament” cover to cover then to freely access and participate in millennia of commentary and debate on it. the core book of jewish law is just a book of debates and discussions, many of which don’t even come with firm answers. and whenever it’s printed, it’s printed with centuries worth of commentary in the margins.

if you have and issue with or felt personally attacked by any part of the “old testament” i can guarantee that there are pages and pages of jewish commentary about that from the point of view you were looking for and several dozen you haven’t even considered. jews have never stopped questioning and arguing about this thing.

so when non-jews make the assumption that our religion is some sort of backwards or primitive thing based on a text they don’t care for, they are doing jews a double disservice.

i guarantee you some 1st century BCE judaen made the point that not eating shrimp because a book says to is kinda silly far more eloquently than you did, pal. heck. there’s a rabbi in the talmud who just straight up becomes a heretic.

judaism has been around and has been evolving as a culture and a religion longer than christianity has existed. it’s one of the oldest living traditions on the planet and its still growing and evolving.

Another very important point to make is that the Jewish Tanakh (Torah, Prophets, and Writings) is an original document written in ancient Hebrew and Aramaic. Christian bibles are translations of this and often the translations were manipulated to match the teachings of the Church (this is why there are so many different versions of the Christian Bible). The text we are reading as Jews is not the same text you are reading. There is no guarantee that anything you read in your Christian “Old Testament” is in the Tanakh or has been translated the way Judaism translates it.

Making assumptions about Judaism based on the Christian New Testament is thus false for 2 reasons: First, because you aren’t reading the same text and second, because Jews have thousands of years of rabbinic commentary on our text that changes how we interpret it and that is missing completely from Christianity as a whole.