OT -- Re: random cover of a range

[Joel C. Salomon]

I’m going to combine a bunch of responses into one here.

Don wrote:
> You seem to be assuming that modern Judaism is identical to
> first-century Judaism. It clearly isn't. In particular, (1) the
> destruction of the temple required significant "breaking of backward
> compatibility" (not to anywhere near the same extent as Christianity, of
> course), and (2) Orthodox Judaism recognizes the Talmud, which was
> written down later than the New Testament.

Not sure what you mean by “breaking of backward compatibility”. As
regards (2), the Talmud is based on discussions and decisions made and
taken from the second century BCE to the fifth or sixth CE; much is due,
for example, to Hillel the Elder (c.110BCE–10CE).

<snip>
> Actually it'd be pretty interesting to model it in code <g>. The Tanakh
> (Old Testament) involves a number of virtual functions and a lot of
> code. Christianity and modern Judaism inherit all of the code from it,
> Islam only inherits the interfaces.

Except for things like:

sacrifice(Animal a) {

	version(Christianity) {
		pragma(message("deprecated; see Jesus")); return;
	}
	version(Modern Judaism) {
		// not currently implemented; maintaining stub function
		pray(Shacharis);
		return;
	}
	…
}


Christopher Wright wrote:
> Divergence of belief in the historical content of the text, yes. (I
> know that Christianity has some divergence on whether the text is
> completely and literally accurate in all aspects. I don't know whether
> there are any young-earth creationists among non-Christian Jews, or
> anything like that.)

Among the Orthodox, views range from Young-Earth Creationism to taking
the Creation Story as purely metaphor; the most authoritative position
is from the Talmud: “Whoever regards four things would better not have
been born: the things above, the things below, the things that were
before, and the things that shall be.” To continue the code metaphor,
Genesis has the comment:
	/* You are not expected to understand this. */
(as do things like Ezekiel 1 &c.)

> However, there are a lot of commandments given down regarding what is
> clean and unclean, and how to distinguish, and treatment for being
> unclean in various ways. That is universally ignored. Doctors do
> better at healing people than priests who follow the Torah exactly. In
> case of an infestation of mold in your house, you are going to call
> someone who specializes in that issue, and they're not going to follow
> the Torah, even if they are the strictest of orthodox Jews.

For the most part, the rules of “clean” and “unclean” are bound up in
Temple service and are therefore on hiatus. They are still studied,
though, and are still active to some extent.


Denis Koroskin wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:28:33 +0300, Christopher Wright
>> I don't know many ultra-Orthodox Jews; do any of you know a Jew who
>> would go to his priest regarding a rash before he would go to a
>> doctor?
>
> I've heard many Jews refuse to do the blood transfusion even if it
> costs them their life.

I think you’re confusing Jews with Christian Scientists. I can’t think
of any medical procedure an Orthodox Jew would not have done in life- or
health-threatening situations. As for blood transfusions specifically,
local organizations in the Orthodox community run blood drives regularly.

—Joel Salomon