whose stories are they?

[nextian]

This is a personal essay I have been trying to write for a very, very long time. It isn't sparked by one thing in particular, but it comes in response to, and accord with, things I've read by chopchica and miriam_heddy and roga and dafnap and abyssinia4077 and xiphias and kita0610 and ... yeah

Comments

[nepheliad]

I want to thank you for this post again - I am going to thank you for it again and again, whenever I link someone to it to say "This is what I think when you say that," because you say it all better than I do.

I wish I could have known your rabbi; that is a concept that never came by me before. My religious school was largely a bad experience that had nothing to do with the religion and everything to do with my fellow students, and that was half the reason I never got my Bat Mitzvah. That and questioning whether or not I deserved it, because my mother is a convert whose conversion was complete three days after my birth (despite having received a mikvah and Simchat Bat of my own) - now she and I still want to do it together, someday, now that we are both Too Old in the eyes of the common public.

(Then again, what do they know?)

I still don't have words beyond the words I tried to give you before - that this is a little piece of perfection, a little bit like reading my mind, and thank you. ♥

And the next time Beth says "Old

[nextian]

Uncoincidentally, that rabbi is the reason our Sunday school is so fantastic, because if nothing else he understands how important it is to really teach the kids. He's just a remarkable man and I hope you can meet him one day, and the other rabbis who kept me Jewish even though I'm a big atheist, and who suckered me into this persistent desire to be the world's only totally unbelieving unreligious rabbi.

I also, as I've said before, think you deserve an anshei mitzvah more than almost anyone I know. ♥

God, thank you, Rue. It means a lot to me that you know what I'm talking about. This comment doesn't sound selfish in the slightest.

[nepheliad]

I love being Jewish because I can say "I don't believe in God but I believe in my culture and my people" and my culture and people don't ... y'know, kick me out of the club. I think you'd be an awesome rabbi.

(And then when California fixes its mixup from November, you can perform our godless lesbian Jewish wedding.)

[museclio]

Hi, you don't know me, and I know this is on an incredibly old post - was reading through some other links. But there are other atheistic rabbits out there. Two whole movements of them even, and my mom is one of them. Looks for either the Congress of Secular Jewish Organizations or the Society for Humanistic Judaism.

[pushingmetaphor]

I said this before but it bears repeating: I am glad to have read this. Also, NORTON READER.

[nextian]

Thank you for reading it, for serious. ♥

oh god my first thought was EMPEROR NORTON WHAR??

[pushingmetaphor]

Baby, you know I am always up for your serious think-y thoughts.

IT IS ALSO EMPEROR NORTON APPROVED, OKAY!!!!

[newredshoes]

Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you.

I remember the first time I was told that the Old Testament God was angry and vengeful, and that the New Testament God was gentle and forgiving, and obviously superior. I can't begin to say how angry that made me, and I was just a kid and she was the grown-up next-door neighbor, so I couldn't talk back. No. We are more. We are so much, and so few people want to hear about it. It doesn't count the same way. But I'm glad I read this, and that you wrote it. I will always be happy to see you write more.

[nepheliad]

I remember the first time I was told that the Old Testament God was angry and vengeful, and that the New Testament God was gentle and forgiving, and obviously superior.

Holy what I do not know what to say to that except hello, sudden blinding rage!

[newredshoes]

Oh, yeah, you never heard that? Yeah, welcome to my childhood. I used to get invited to vacation bible school over the summer because "it was just something fun to do" and there was nothing religious about it. My friend never understood why I kept refusing.

[nepheliad]

I was lucky in where I lived, I think, in that alternating between the Harlem and Yorkville sections of Manhattan most of the people I associated with until I was about ten were Jewish, and after that it was a fairly even mix. So people knew not to say stuff like that, though the converse is I, uh. Didn't think Christians were real until I was five. I thought my mother made them up. :| My parents like to remind me of this.

[deutscheami]

I'm not sure which Christian schools of thought you've had the most interaction with, but the... Christian tradition, call it, that I come from teaches that we can only understand the New Testament through the context given by the Old Testament-- there's not a hard, impermeable divide between the two, but a connection that's alive and symbiotic and full of grace through Jesus-- who came to fulfill the Law (=Old Testament) and not to abolish it*.

One of my favorite readings from Sunday services says in part that "We believe the Word of God is alive and moving, speaking and acting" and I love how that resonates with your rabbi's image of the Torah as a beating heart.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this either, so I'm going to link to a song that I love and use that as an attempt at a graceful conclusion, which this decidedly is not: Sarah Masen- Psalm 139

*Matthew 5: 17-19 "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and

[nextian]

Between you and slacktivist, I have near-constant proof that there's a great deal of love and wonder and respect in the Christian tradition tied to the same things we believe in ours, and I don't want to discredit or devalue any of it -- cf Lowery above.

I have enormous respect for serious Christian religious scholarship and it's informed my whole life since I started reading it with C. S. Lewis right through Augustine and Family Man. Which is why I can't tell you what tradition teaches that we are imperfect and unfinished -- any tradition that pays attention to its own text would know that, as you say, it's right there in Matthew.* Nevertheless, as newredshoes says before, it's a truism in this culture that the Old Testament is vengeful and the New is loving, or that, you know, Genesis is so weird and Deuteronomy so boring. Or all those lines about "well these are rules for some weird desert people." All of which I've even said in my lifetime. But, you know, we are a weird desert people, and we can totally hear you saying that

[deutscheami]

I am going to do a TERRIBLE job trying to explain this, so bear with me as I do some shadow-punching, Bible in hand

[deutscheami]

Christ doesn't make the law obsolete, he's fulfilled it ("For Christ has already accomplished the purpose for which the law was given. As a result, all who believe in him are made right with God" [Romans 10:4]) and made it new-- Hebrews 8:13 cross-references in my Bible to 2 Corinthians 5:17-- "This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!"--through the grace granted through the acceptance of his sacrifice on my behalf. But outside of that grace-- and back to Romans-- "...in fact, it was the law that showed me my sin... at one time I lived without understanding the law. But when I learned the command not to covet, for instance, the power of sin came to life, and I died. So I discovered that the law's commands, which were supposed to bring life, brought spiritual death instead. Sin took advantage of those commands and deceived me; it used the commands to kill me. But still the law itself is holy, and its commands are holy and right and good. ...so we can see

[rimestock]

Actually nevermind! I haven't figured out how to say what I want to say, yet, and I ... also don't want to get into arguments with my father about godless lesbian Jewish weddings.

At some point I think you'd actually like talking to him, because he ... is interested in so much more than mere Christianity, written by C S Lewis or otherwise - he is definitely the smartest person I know, the most well-educated when it comes to religion and how Christianity builds off Judaism and needs its roots, it isn't isolated. How even the New Testament, so well-beloved by Christians who are blind to what came before, doesn't make sense if you take it out of context, if you don't pay attention to the fact that the first three books were written with very different target audiences, and that is why they say different things -

I am going to stop talking because I can be surprisingly passionate about this and it's all from a historical perspective and I know that I don't know jack shit, so really I'm going to shut up and be thought an idiot instead

[nextian]

If you do make up your mind, I'd be proud and honored if you showed it to him, as long as you explain that I do love a lot of Christian scholarship and religious tradition. I also don't mind if you link it anywhere.

If your father understands those things, he's a very good pastor. I wish he were more typical.

[rimestock]

If you want a sampling of what my father does or does not understand, I would recommend looking at his website, which has occasional flaws in terms of the construction of a website but at the same time is also ... it impresses me, again and again, and makes me proud, because he is incredibly well-articulated and capable of saying, even when not speaking aloud, even when his audience is separated by paper or digitalization and time, saying things that make me understand stuff about the Presbyterian faith that I didn't, before.

The bit about the Q&A Index refers to the Q&A column he wrote for a long time for Presbyterians Today, and is also worth reading if you have the time at some point. (I even got Rue to read it! He compared the Holy Spirit to paramedics!)

I'm going to go back to trying to sleep now; I will probably share this post with him at some point that is not immediately-before-bed.