#Rabbi Jill Jacobs

[vyorei]

Calling for a ceasefire would really put a dent in the whole Terror thing

[apenitentialprayer]

are there any Jews who view Jesus in a positive way (aside from like messianic Jews who, as far I’ve understood, are considered evangelical Christians by all other Jews)

Okay, ah, to answer this question simply: to my knowledge, as far as Jewish communities who (1) self-identify as Jewish, (2) consider themselves practicing Judaism, and (3) deny that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah go, none of them have an "official" stance on Jesus. Jesus may be a false Messiah, but this is only a "doctrine" in Judaism the same way that the fact that Vissarion of Siberia is a false Parousia of Jesus is a "doctrine" in Christianity — which is to say, not so much an actually asserted belief, but a natural corollary to more deeply held beliefs.

That being said, individual Jewish people have held a variety of beliefs about Jesus of Nazareth. Some of them are, well, quite negative. For example, one Hasidic story tells of how the Baal Shem Tov saw Jesus and Sabbatai Zvi (both false Messiahs) stuck in the same level of Hell together; the infamous Toledot Yeshu, a parody gospel, certainly does not paint Jesus or His Mother in a particularly good light; Maimonides doesn't even use the usual "may his name be blotted out" as he would when talking about an enemy of Israel, but instead uses "may his bones be ground to dust" after citing Jesus by name.

There are relatively sympathetic views among those whose views are negative too, for the record; for example, there's a story of a Rabbi, Yehoshua ben Prachya, who was said to have been incredibly cruel to a student, and by the time he chose to relent that student had already gone off to form his own idolatrous sect. Struck by the consequences of his harshness, he would go on to emphasize the importance of kindness and giving people the benefit of the doubt. Though the timeline doesn't match up (Yehoshua lived two hundred years before Him), some commentators identified this student as Yeshu the Nazarene.

But, let's actually answer your question. You will find a spectrum of relatively positive views. Bob Dylan technically falls outside the parameters I listed above because he does seem to believe Jesus is the Messiah, but I'll use him as the extreme example, because he continued to be active in his Orthodox Jewish community after his conversion. You also have Leonard Cohen, whose Jewishness was very important to him, who could at least understand the importance of the mystical connection to Jesus that Christians claimed as their own — "the figure of Jesus, nailed to a human predicament, summoning the heart to comprehend its own suffering."

You have some scholars, like Amy-Jill Levine; in the work she did in The Misunderstood Jew, The Historical Jesus in Context, and The Jewish Annotated New Testament, she tries to emphasize the idea that the Person of Jesus is something that can bring Christians and Jews into closer ecumenical dialogue; that if Christians could get more comfortable with the Jewish context of Jesus, and if the Jewish community could see the New Testament as a corpus of texts that isn't non-Jewish, but rather a particular type of first century Jewish, then there could be ground for both groups to better understand each other.

During the early modern period, there were attempts by some Jewish thinkers to reclaim Jesus. Rabbi Jacob Emden argued that Jesus never meant to abolish the Law, and that He has actually "done a double kindness in the world" by increasing veneration of the Torah and bringing light to the Gentiles, if only the Gentiles could learn how to properly interpret their own Scriptures (talk about flipping the script!). Moses Mendelssohn also claimed that Jesus never meant to abrogate the Law, and suggested that Jesus and the early Christian community could be models that modern 19th century Jews living among oppressive Prussian authorities could emulate.

The above paragraph was about Jewish individuals who tried to distance Jesus from traditional Christian understandings of Him. So I'm going to end, I think, with Rabbi Jacob Neusner, who engaged the Gospel on its own terms. In 1993, he published A Rabbi Talks with Jesus. In this book, Rabbi Neusner imagines himself as a first century Jewish man and tries to earnestly listen to and consider the words of Jesus as depicted in the Gospel of Matthew. This work places the words of Jesus in conversation with the Rabbinic tradition, and ultimately ends with Neusner being unconvinced and unable to follow Jesus as His disciple. Pope Benedict lauded this work as an authentic exercise in interreligious dialogue, and cites it frequently in his own Jesus of Nazareth.

[thoughtlessarse]

As a rabbi, I’ve devoted my life to tending to the well-being of the American Jewish community. That community is now collapsing in on itself in a moment of true rupture—and that, I believe, is not only necessary but a blessing. Usually, Jewish homes are full of extended family at this time of year. It’s the season of the High Holy Days, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and for Jews of all backgrounds this means getting together and, often, going to synagogue. On these holidays, many Jews who otherwise forgo religious services break out the prayer shawl they wore at their b’nai mitzvahs and pray. They fast. They atone. But many people won’t be attending services at their family’s synagogue this year because it has a large “We Stand With Israel” poster out front or an Israeli flag on the podium next to the rabbi. They won’t be intoning a prayer for Israel—with no mention of Palestinians—alongside the rest of the congregation. Instead, these Jews, many of them young, will be turning to alternative services that are explicitly non-Zionist or creating their own ways to observe the High Holidays. What is typically a time of unity in Jewish communities will this year be a time of separation. For many in the establishment Jewish community, this is a source of deep anxiety. In May, as a human-made famine was taking hold in Gaza, and as students were protesting across US campuses, Rabbi Jill Jacobs wrote in The Forward: “A panic has developed within much of the Jewish community as more and more Jews—mostly, but not entirely young people—have declared themselves to be anti-Zionists or non-Zionists.” I share Rabbi Jacobs’s sentiment that there is indeed a moral crisis at the heart of mainstream Jewish life. (I also appreciate that she argues against formally excommunicating non- and anti-Zionist Jews, even as we have long been unwelcome in supposedly progressive spaces.) However, I believe our panic should not be over the waning support for Zionism among Jewish young people. Instead, the crisis is that the Jewish state that was founded in the shadow of the Holocaust has been found guilty of its own plausible genocide. Our Jewish community should break apart when so many of our leaders and institutions go along with or even champion Israel as it maims, tortures, starves, and kills Palestinians, including tens of thousands of children.

continue reading

[apatosaurus]

Rabbi Jill Jacobs from T’ruah is one of the voices I have come to trust this year. Read the article all the way through.

[nijjhar]

How did sacked Husbandmen of the Winepress establish themselves in the C... How did the sacked Husbandmen of the Winepress establish themselves in the Churches and jilled people? https://youtu.be/fZPNZNOSxZI Hi Brother, In Jesus, we are the twice-born Royal Priests capable of Preaching the Gospel from the core of our hearts through logical reasoning that Brews “Logo” and Logo is His Word = God Himself. The Royal Priests are Roving Preachers of spirituality received directly from our Father Free and Freely we give seminars. So, anyone who takes money, he cannot love God and without God, they ply the dead letters for fleecing the people called turning stones into Bread and Butter. Such Dog-Collared hireling Priests would drive in luxurious cars and live in houses provided by their stone-headed devotees. In fact, they are stealing money from the Church purse as Judas Iscariot was doing and Jesus threw him out into the Darkness. Ananias and Sapphira blasphemers against the Holy Spirit were not allowed into the Church of God, One Mammon-Free Fold headed by our Bridegroom Christ Jesus. Jesus took the 11 into the Wedding Chamber where He washed their feet the arrogant Simon and the Pharisees didn’t but Mary Magdalene did. And through “Eucharist”, He married the Virgin Solitary Brides to remain solitary making others solitary and capable of entering into the Royal Kingdom of God where the True Vine the bridegroom Christ Jesus is Planted by our Supernatural Father Elohim, Allah, Parbrahm, etc. Thus, these Churches that employ Dog-Collared licenced Priest bound in the letters of the law themselves cannot set others Free in the Holy Spirit but bind them worse than the Rabbis from the Yoke of which He had set us FREE. This is how Matt 12v43-45 is fulfilled and the Anti-Christ Synagogues of Satan killed those who wanted to express themselves. The sacked Husbandmen of the old Winepress, the Temple, were good for no other job than that of a Priest. After the deaths of the Apostles, they stormed the Church of God headed by Christ Jesus and set up a similar system as was in the Temple calling the Chief Priest a Bishop and Pope and they killed those who disobeyed them making the situation worse than before the arrival of the Light Christ Jesus. Much more in my other videos. I am from the Punjab where the second coming of Jesus in the name of Satguru = Christ Nanak took place in 1469 among the Kings and Emperors of Darkness the people of the Khatri tribe who didn’t hide their tribal identity under the spiritual self-Hindu as the Chosen people had done under the spiritual self-Jew. By doing so, the Chosen Elite people became the sons of the most powerful Satan Al-Djmar Al-Aksa, the religious fanatics that wanted to kill Saint Paul for exposing their hypocrisies or a set of blasphemies. Angel Stephen in his long speech to the Synhedrion emphasised that Abraham was a Nobel Man brought from the Iraq area to settle in the Middle East as Adam, Sarah as Eve and he gave them the Promised Land as the Garden of Eden. But out of the 12 sons of Jacob, only Joseph was truthful Salt of Abraham whilst the rest of the eleven were telling lies and they were murderers –John 8v44. As soon as the eleven crook brethren sold Joseph as a slave to the Egyptian, there was none remained who was faithful to Abraham and Yahweh, the Lord of Nature at large. Now, Abraham is the father of the faithful and not the unfaithful super bastard fanatic devils – John 8v44. Yahweh protects and feed you so far you are faithful to your tribal father as the Egyptians were and not the super bastard unfaithful and Saltless people to Abraham and Yahweh. Joseph became prosperous under the protection and wisdom of Yahweh, the Lord of the Nature whilst the crook liars and murderers were dying of hunger. They had to leave the Promised Land that belonged to Abraham and take shelter in Egypt where their brother Joseph got them the best land to settle. But as the Pharaohs changed and became cruel, then Prophet Moses appeared among them and He brought them back to the lush green Promised Land as the faithful sons of Abraham and no more rift among the brethren under “Eros” or the snake was lifted up in the Wilderness where they ate Manna as compared with the most delicious food Jesus offered to them in the desert urging them to join hands with him by eating the flesh of Jesus or what came out of the mouth of Jesus, digest that over your heart with the Teeth of logical reasoning to ....... POST “VIRAL”. MUSSALLMAN = GURMUKH SIKH. https://youtu.be/7VmQG3ew19E MATT. 13V24-30:- ATOMIC WAR EXPECTED ON 14/11/2023 Punjabi - Ch. Saddam Hussein Khokhar Jatt https://youtu.be/XAb1fhT3Mqk Much more on my website:- http://www.gnosticgospel.co.uk/UnitedJatts.htm WHY TEN LIGHTS? www.gnosticgospel.co.uk/tenlight.htm Any helper to finish my Books:- ONE GOD ONE FAITH:- www.gnosticgospel.co.uk/bookfin.pdf and in Punjabi KAKHH OHLAE LAKHH:-  www.gnosticgospel.co.uk/pdbook.pdf John's baptism:- www.gnosticgospel.co.uk/johnsig.pdf Trinity:- www.gnosticgospel.co.uk/trinity.pdf

[discworldwitches]

i flipped through it. he particularly blames the renewal movement (dang we didn’t even come up w the idea of ethical monotheism) and has deep ire for rabbis art green, arthur waskow, zalman shachter-shalomi (z”l), abraham joshua heschel, and jill jacobs. though he calls rabbi jill a rabbi, he refers to reb zal & heschel as “theologians” which, while not technically wrong, feels intentional. he rly hates tru’ah which is like one of the more liberal orgs lmao.

this is insane…

[eretzyisrael]

Source

[amandapanduh]

Quote from: "The incomplete education of American Jews" on Vox

Quote from: “The incomplete education of American Jews” on Vox

There’s a lot of scorn for liberal Zionism out there, and there’s a sense that you have to choose between being an anti-Zionist or a Zionist and that being a Zionist has to mean that you 100 percent agree with Israeli government policy. First, that’s just not true, that you have to pick one or the other. But second, I actually am on the side of saying that we should not be talking about Zionism…

[mental-mona]

Excerpt:

Let’s talk about the special itself. It’s very wide-ranging. What are you hoping people will take away from it?

I’m hoping that people take away a couple of things. Number one is that it’s so easy, especially in the world in which we live, to have a point of view and be dug in and not listen to somebody else. 

Let’s just take antisemitism that is growing on the progressive political left. What I learned in doing this, which was probably the most fraught, complicated part of this hour, is that people are just talking past each other. Rabbi Danny Zemel, he’s a proud progressive and he’s my rabbi [at Temple Micah in Washington, D.C.]. I called him, and I said, “You have to help me here, because I have to get this right.” And I talked it through with him. He completely understood, because not everybody who’s on the progressive left, who stands up and says they’re an anti-Zionist, really means that they’re anti-Jewish, that they’re antisemitic. He suggested I talk to Rabbi Jill Jacobs, who runs [the rabbinic human rights group] T’ruah, and I interviewed her, and she’s the one who explained and described that to me.

What she does with her friends in the secular progressive world [is] to try to stop their rhetoric and their approach from devolving into antisemitism. When she hears them say, “Well, I’m anti-Zionist,” she says, “What do you mean by that? Explain what you mean by that.” If they say, “Well, I don’t like the policies of the Israeli government,” well, that’s not antisemitism. Lipstadt says that if you want to hear the biggest criticism of the Israeli government, go sit in a cafe in Jerusalem and listen to the Jews. 

What is antisemitism is criticizing the Israeli government with tropes, like, “The Jews run the world, the Jews are power-hungry or money-hungry.” And then it gets into much more of a slippery slope, which is what happened to this young woman who I profiled who goes to SUNY New Paltz, where she said she is a proud Zionist in an Instagram post and she got kicked out of a group to help victims of sexual assault, that she founded. Because they didn’t even want to hear what she meant by that. [The student, Cassandra Blotner, is one of two who recently filed a civil rights complaint against SUNY New Paltz with the Department of Education.]

Really what I want to get across is that it’s an age-old conspiracy theory. We’re now, unfortunately, much more familiar with conspiracy theories. A disease pops up, it’s the Jews. A thunderstorm pops up, it’s the Jews, the economy goes down, it’s the Jews. And it is corrosive when it comes to society. 

Education is really the number-one thing that I learned that we have to be aggressive and zealous about. Because that’s the way to combat antisemitism, is to educate. There are people who just have hate in their heart, period, and they don’t want to hear it. But for the most part, people get caught up in using tropes or using language that is inherently antisemitic and they don’t realize it until it’s pointed out, which is education. 

The other thing that I learned is how pervasive this is online. And it’s not just in the deep dark web. It’s on social media. It’s in online gaming that our young kids are using, and that we think is a safe space. And that’s something that we have to be incredibly aware of.

You’re describing such a central part of the debates within the Jewish community about how to talk about antisemitism, how to frame it, especially when it comes to the left versus the right, and the question of whether they’re equivalent.

And I just want to say, they’re not equivalent. I did not talk to one person who said that they’re equivalent. The extremism and antisemitism on the far right has devolved into real violence, people with semi-automatic weapons going into synagogues and shooting down Jews for no reason other than they were Jews. 

On the left, it’s more discourse. Jonathan Greenblatt at the ADL said to me, “On the right, it’s like a category-five hurricane or tornado and they just come in and that just tears everything apart. On the far left, it’s more like climate change. It’s slow moving, it’s growing. Some people deny it exists, but it does exist, and if you ignore it, it’s going to envelop you.” And I thought that was a really good analogy.

[wi11owbird]

Another relevant article https://medium.com/@truahrabbis/criticism-of-israel-and-antisemitism-how-to-tell-where-one-ends-and-the-other-begins-8035798f5b7c

Of course you can criticize Israel without being antisemitic. It's just that none of you are fucking doing it!

[a-queer-seminarian]

What is infectiously appealing about Jesus is that he likes to celebrate. He is consistently meeting people not at the altar but at table, whether as host, guest, or the body and blood to be consumed (as in John 6 and the synoptic Last Supper accounts).

He is indiscriminate in his dining companions, who include Pharisees, tax collectors, sinners, and even an upscale family consisting of two sisters and a formerly dead brother. ...To be in his presence is not only to be challenged and comforted; it is to celebrate at table. ...

Such images are not arbitrary. One dominant Jewish view of the olam ha-ba, the “world to come,” was of a banquet, a great feast at which one “reclined at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (see Matt. 8.11). In his dining, Jesus is providing a foretaste of that messianic age. These images add depth to the parable of the Leaven in particular and to the various stories about banquets.

Jesus’s parables, with their frequent theme of celebration and their warnings to those who fail to share this joy, unsettle, and at the same time the more we chew on them, the greater the smile that will cross our lips, the more food for thought we have, and the more we want to taste.

- Jewish Scholar Amy Jill Levine in Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (2014)

[yidquotes]

Per the Talmud:

“The Sages taught: The people of Sodom became haughty due only to the excessive goodness that the Holy Blessed One bestowed upon them…

They said: Since we [have] a land from which bread comes and has the dust of gold, why do we need travelers, as they come only to take away our property? Come, let us cause the proper treatment of travelers to be forgotten from our land…”

The rabbis go on to describe the people of Sodom as engaged in wanton cruelty toward foreigners, including torture and the punishment of anyone who offers humanitarian relief. (Sanhedrin 109a)

Our country has become Sodom—a place that refuses to see asylum seekers and immigrants as human beings, and that engages in random cruelty that serves no humanitarian or economic purpose.

Rabbi Jill Jacobs

[jewish-privilege]

Pete Buttigieg has a word he likes to use to describe Vice President Mike Pence: “Pharisee.” Jewish scholars would like him to stop doing that.

Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, running a dark horse campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, has advanced the idea of liberal candidates using religious language to talk about their values.

The flip side of that, Buttigieg says, is that Republican leaders don’t practice the religious values they preach. He takes particular aim at Pence, who often speaks of his own conservative Christian values while serving under President Donald Trump. Buttigieg has criticized Trump for paying off an adult film actress with whom he allegedly had an affair.

Buttigieg believes that reeks of hypocrisy, so he uses an age-old Christian metaphor for hypocrites: the Pharisees.

“There’s an awful lot about Pharisees in there,” Buttigieg told The Washington Post this week, referring to the New Testament while discussing Pence. “And when you see someone, especially somebody who has such a dogmatic take on faith that they bring it into public life, being willing to attach themselves to this administration for the purposes of gaining power, it is alarmingly resonant with some New Testament themes, and not in a good way.”

The Pharisees were one of several Jewish sects during the first century, the time of Jesus. They also include the rabbis of the Talmud and the creators of Rabbinic Judaism, the ideological ancestor of mainstream Jewish practice today.

But in Christian discourse, the Pharisees have taken on the role of “hypocrites, fools and a brood of vipers, full of extortion, greed, and iniquity,” wrote Amy-Jill Levine, a professor at the Vanderbilt University Divinity School, in an article in Sojourners magazine. That’s because the New Testament Gospels say Pharisee leaders criticized Jesus, and then lambaste them for hypocrisy.

“The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat,” reads Matthew, chapter 23.

”So you must be careful to do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach.”

Buttigieg repeated that idea in an appearance last month on ABC’s “The View,” again right after talking about Pence. “The Bible is full of — it talks about this,” he said. “It talks about hypocrites. It talks about Pharisees.”

...Although almost no Jews describe themselves as Pharisees today, the word is still anti-Semitic because it refers to Jews, said Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, an author who has criticized Buttigieg in the past for using the term. She compared it to a kid on a playground using the word “gay” as an insult. Even though the kid may not be referring to sexual orientation, Ruttenberg said, using the word in a negative light still perpetuates homophobia.

“When you use that as an insult, you’re saying that Jews are bad,” she said. “It perpetrates anti-Semitism: Jew as bad guy, as Christ killer, is one of the ways people have justified murder and pogroms and the Inquisition and the Holocaust for centuries.”

Over the past two millennia, people have also described the Pharisees as money and power hungry, said Sara Ronis, an assistant professor of theology at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio. Those traits were appended to the Pharisees over time, she said, in part because they are common anti-Semitic tropes.

Ronis added that many modern depictions of Pharisees show them in striped shawls — what many Jews would recognize as the tallit, or Jewish prayer shawl.

“So many textbooks trace Rabbinic Judaism to the Pharisees,” she said. “Using that language as a negative slur today, when I think so many people have this stereotype … the associations people have unconsciously between that and Jews certainly doesn’t help with modern stereotypes around Jews and money and control and secret power.”

Chris Meagher, Buttigieg’s national press secretary, said in a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that “Pharisee” is a common expression for hypocritical leaders.

“The Mayor expressed his concern about the hypocrisy on the part of evangelical leaders,” Meagher said in the statement. “He invoked this Biblical reference, since it is commonly used to show skepticism of hypocritical establishment leaders. That was the way he intended it.”

...“I do think there are the stirrings out there in our count right now of a religious left that understands that living your faith might also have to do with paying more attention to those most in need and not celebrating those who already have the most wealth and the most power,” he said on “The View.”

That’s similar to what a lot of liberal rabbis have been saying for a while. A range of major Jewish organizations tend to take liberal positions on domestic issues, and the Reform movement, American Judaism’s largest denomination, is vocally left wing on a broad spectrum of issues.

Orthodox groups have tended more to the right, and earlier this year two major Orthodox groups spoke out against a New York law that liberalized abortion policy. But the major American Jewish denominations have found consensus on some issues, like Donald Trump’s 2017 travel ban, which all opposed, and last year’s family separation policy.

...Rabbi Jill Jacobs, the executive director of T’ruah, a liberal rabbinic human rights group with 2,000 member rabbis, said Buttigieg need only look to the Jewish community for an example of a religious left.

“There’s no need to bring back the religious left because the religious left is out there and it’s strong,” she said. “It’s crucial that those of us who are doing their human rights work out of a religious place are speaking about it in religious terms."

-----

It doesn’t matter how he intended it. When Jews are telling you the history of that word and how it’s been weaponized to rationalize antisemitism, you should listen. You should listen to Jews when we tell you what the effect is. And anyway, how difficult can it possibly be to just listen and stop using the word once its antisemitic reality is explained to say “I hear you, I didn’t know, I’ll respect you.” Apparently, it’s too difficult for Mayor Pete.

[thatsillyfucknvegan]

BY RABBI JILL JACOBS

Beginning with the first chapters of the Torah , Judaism establishes a fundamental connection between human beings and animals. Animals, created on the fifth day of the biblical story of creation, can be understood as prototypes of the first human beings–Adam and Eve, created on the sixth day. One of Adam’s first responsibilities as a human being is to name the animals. As evidenced by the episode in which a serpent tempts Eve to eat a forbidden fruit, humans and animals originally speak one another’s language (Genesis 1-3).

The story of Noah’s ark represents a turning point in the relationship between human beings and animals. Furious about human misbehavior, God decides to destroy the world by flood, saving only the righteous Noah and his family and enough animals to sustain all of the species. When the waters recede, God gives Noah seven laws–now known as the Noahide laws–aimed at establishing a just society.

Perhaps as a concession to the violent tendencies that God now recognizes within human nature, God here permits humans to eat animals. At the same time, God protects animals against unduly cruel slaughter by banning the practice of cutting a limb off a living animal (Genesis 9:3-4). This balance between simultaneously permitting the use of animals for human need and prohibiting unnecessary cruelty to animals becomes the overarching principle of later Jewish law regarding the treatment of animals.

Within the Talmud, this prohibition against unnecessary cruelty acquires a name–tzaar baalei hayim: the suffering of animals.

Kashrut and Animal Suffering read more...

[anyroads]

Rabbi Jill Jacobs wrote some thoughts re: Saturday’s Women’s March and I felt compelled to share: 

[the-greenrose]

Out of the twisted and evil hearts of bestial men [has] come new courage and new hopes.”

From a sermon delivered by Rabbi Jacob Rothschild of the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation on May 9, 1958 in Atlanta, when Neo-Nazis had bombed the synagogue into smithereens. The synagogue served the Blacks of Atlanta. Jill Lepore of the New Yorker makes a historical connection between 1958 and 2018.