You have the right to Aliyah, but that doesn't mean you're going to get it lmao, I dare you to go to fucking Israel and see if a rabbi would approve your Aliyah, I'll pay for a one-way flight.
I have a better chance of getting in because I am not Messianic. I don't believe "J-sus is G-d" kind of a stuff and I don't believe in proselytizing. They will look at your overall character when assessing your Aliyah application.
Although some Messianic people have been allowed in, although some had to go through court battles.
I'm related to a Jewish family and married a Jewish woman, all you do is LARP as one.
No Orthodox Sanhedrin or Rabbi would marry a Jew to a Buddhist. So in order to have married her you would have had to be married by a Reform Rabbi.
Just as the Orthodox would not accept your marriage, you try to scrutinize others. Pitiful.
@TamarYaelBatYah Melinda! I read the entire thread. Where do I start in responding? I'll try not to be repetitive and raise only those matters that I recall have slipped through the cracks. I will try and confine each post to one salient matter.
You repeatedly and without elaboration respond to posts with accusations of "patriarchy" or "misogyny" and appear to believe that Torah is a proto-feminist text. There is an entire branch of feminist study known as
Jewish Feminism, which is concerned with--amongst other things--applying 2nd and 3rd Wave feminist theory to Jewish Scripture. I am referring to
bona fide Jewish female academics like Tali Artman Partock (
https://www.divinity.cam.ac.uk/directory/dr-tali-artman-partock), Lynn Davidman (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Davidman), Judith Plaskow (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Plaskow) and Cynthia Ozick (
https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/ozick-cynthia who is more of an essayist in this field).
All Jewish feminist scholars agree that Torah is patriarchal, androcentric and sexist. I have not encountered otherwise. They disagree only on such matters as the nature and extent of this sexual bias.
In your post
https://kiwifarms.net/threads/melinda-leigh-scott-marshall-castersen.32118/page-540#post-7310615 you make the claim that Deuteronomy 25:13-16 is a statement of gender equality. No Jewish feminist has ever made this claim. They haven't done so because the two verses are literally concerned with honesty in weights and measures. It is a denouncement of keeping and using false weights to cheat customers. This prohibition is repeated in Amos 8:5, Miccah 6:11, Leviticus 19:35, Hosiah 12:8 Proverbs 11:1.
View attachment 1671546
More broadly, no respected interpreter of Torah at any point in time has understood Deuteronomy 25:13-16 to have anything other than a plain literal meaning.
If you insist that the above portion has a figurative meaning it is incumbent on you to explain the figurative language. What type of rhetorical device are you claiming the above consists of? Synecdoche? Metonymy? Metaphor? Simile? Something else? The concept of
equality is absent from Deuteronomy 25:13-16, so how could it be about
gender equality? There are no linguistic elements related to equality that are able to serve a figurative purpose. There is no legitimate rhetorical device that completely changes the meaning of a text. There is also no exegetical principle that supports such a thing either.
Deuteronomy 25:13-16 is
literally about using honest and true weights and measures in commerce and trade. In ancient Israel dishonest merchants would employ two sets of stones that are used to balance one side of the scale: one true, the other underweight. The underweight set was presumably used selectively when the merchant believed the customer wouldn't notice or perhaps they weren't an Israelite. So when the customer would ask for 1 (heavy) mina of grain (which is approximately 1kg) the unscrupulous merchant would reach into his bag of untrue weight stones and cheat the customer by giving him/her less than a mina of grain for the price of 1 mina. This must have been a big problem because the commandment is repeated multiple times (as I have noted above).
In case you are thinking these Jewish women aren't truly feminist and have "internalised misogyny" let me give you the case of Judith Plaskow. Plaskow has an
a priori commitment to liberal feminism. She doesn't judge feminism through Torah but judges Torah through feminism. In her essay "Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective" she writes, "The feminist relation to Torah thus begins in suspicion, critique, and the refusal to assign revelatory status to the establishment and reinforcement of patriarchy." To paraphrase Plaskow, she is arguing that Torah as it is cannot be a product of divine revelation because it is patriarchal, androcentric and sexist and Yahweh just wouldn't be like that. That is the substance of her position.
Another more minor point is your use of the phrase "gender equality". The concept of
gender (as opposed to
sex) is a 20th-century invention. John Money (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Money) took the term from linguistics and applied it in sexology in 1955. He did this because he believed that sex and gender can diverge and as such a new category was required. It is anachronistic to introduce the notion of gender when talking about ancient peoples. The Israelites would have understood only sex.
Well, top of the morning to ya!
Three of these female scholars you cited were born before 1950. They are my grandmother's generation, a different kind of feminist. Dr. Tali Artman Partock looks to be about a decade or two older than me, she's another kind of feminist too. I'm the next generation of women pushing the envelope, so to speak. You could call me the "fourth wave".
Just as it is said that Judith Plaskow was "the
first Jewish feminist", there is a
first along the lines many places. At one point Plaskow was the only one saying what she said. They another came. And another. And another. This is the way academic scholarship evolves. Jane says AB. Jill says ABC. Then 60 years later Joann comes along and says, no, its ACD.
As a matter of practice in Academia, being the
first one to challenge scholarly consensus does not invalidate a scholar. It gets other scholars thinking. Glad to see you thinking.
And while I am glad to see that you are aware of Jewish Feminists and that you recognize them, you've left out Tal Ilan, author of "Women in Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls" (2010) who recognized the gender equality aspects of that Jewish sect. This writing is available here:
This writing is particularly important because it demonstrates the
gender equality principle that that Jewish sect held. Ilan demonstrates this through an analysis of why Leviticus 18
omits a passage about Uncle's marrying their nieces. It says in Lev. 18 that nephews cannot marry their Aunts but oddly enough it is
not directly written in that passage that Uncle's cannot marry their nieces. The Qumran/DSS community however, reasoned that because
gender equality was written into The Torah, the same applied to Uncles and nieces. How did they reach that conclusion? A quote from Tal Ilan's writing:
"Here CD states that, 'while it is true that this prohibition is absent from the list of incestuous relationships recorded in Leviticus 18
the mirror opposite, marriage to an aunt, is', and ‘
The rule of incest is written for males but refers equally to women’ (CD 5:9-11)
*CD is "The Damascus Document"
So here we have a Jewish feminist writing about gender equality principles in The Torah recognized by a Jewish sect.
Now I turn to your statements about dual meanings of verses in The Torah.
In The Torah, there are often double meanings to passages. This is widely accepted by all sects of Judaism. Even Christians actually. For example, it is commonly known that the phrase "you shall not muzzle and ox while treading the grain"
literally means that you should allow an ox to chew the cud/don't put a muzzle on it. It
also has a
spiritual meaning. That you should not hold back the food/wages of a clan leader/the Ox of the family.
Even the Orthodox Rabbis recognize this dual meaning of phrases with things like the word "nakedness". In Genesis it says "and they were naked and unashamed". Orthodox Rabbis have long interpreted the word "naked" to mean your inner spirit, the seat of one's heart and thoughts. If you aren't aware of that, here is a link for a sample:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3266667?seq=1
Here is also the Reform Jew take on it, which shows that "nakedness" has a dual meaning:
https://reformjudaism.org/learning/torah-study/torah-commentary/nakedness-and-vulnerability
You seem to be aware of this dual meaning of things somewhat but then you back track when it comes to Deut. 25:13-16.
First, I think it's important to show some of the Hebrew that is written into Deuteronomy 25. When you go to the Hebrew, you can see the spiritual meaning of this verse better:
“You are not to have in your pack two sets of weights, one heavy, the other light. You are not to have in your house two sets of measures, one big, the other small. You are to have a correct[שׁלמה] and fair[וצדק] weight[אבן], and you are to have a correct[שׁלמה] and fair[וצדק] measure[לך איפה], so that you will prolong your days in the land
Adonai your Elohim is giving you. For all who do such things, all who deal dishonestly, are destestable to
Adonai your Elohim."
So these two words here, שׁלמה and צדק are from the roots of words meaning "Shalom" and "Righteousness" (Tzedakah). Keep that in mind as we proceed here. Also, the word for weight is H68 אבן and for measure there is H374: אֵיפָה.
The word אבן has figurative meanings in Isa. 8:14, Ezek. 11:19, Ezek. 36:26, to name just a few
Here are some verses that show that the word "measure" in Hebrew has a figurative meaning. Micah 6:10 is a weaker proof but any doubt that is left is settled by Zec. 5:10.
"Are there yet the
treasures of wickedness in the house of The Wicked, and the
scant[רזון] measure [H374: אֵיפָה.] that is
abominable?" (Micah 6:10).
"Then the angel speaking with me went forward and said to me, “Now raise your eyes, and see what this thing is, passing by.” I asked,
“What is it?” He said, “This is the eifah-measure passing by.” Then he added, “
This is their eye in all the land.” Next I saw a lead disc lifted up to reveal
a woman sitting in the eifah. He said,
“This is Evil.” He threw her down into the
eifah and pressed the lead weight over its opening. I raised my eyes and saw two women coming with the wind in their wings; for they had wings like those of a stork. They lifted the
eifah up between the earth and the sky. I asked the angel speaking with me, “Where are they taking the
eifah?” He answered me, “To build it a shrine in the land of Shin‘ar. When it’s ready, [the
eifah] will be set down there on its base.”" (Zec. 5:10)
More importantly, are the words of my Rabbi. This is what he taught, likening a "measure" to someone's behavior (using "measure" in figurative language):
"For the way you judge others is how you will be judged — the
measure with which you
measure out will be used to
measure to you" (Matthew 7:2)
"Measure" and "weight" have figurative meanings in Hebrew too.
