#these same people are like “jews are a diaspora people so thats why we learn yiddish'

[hindahoney]

Has anyone else noticed the weird appropriation of Yiddish for specifically anti-zionist spaces? It makes me deeply uncomfortable.

[ill-be-istj-if-no-one-else-is]

Okay this is not mbti related but you are an intelligent person so I wanted to ask you whether its really not possible to know everything about a religion?? It was actually my plan to learn everything about four of the five main religions christianity, islam, judaism, hinduism and buddhism (i decided to not study the 5th main religion, hinduism, because i read somewhere that you cannot convert into hinduism, you have to be born as a hindu) and then decide whether i follow one of them or...

....or dont follow any of them and become an atheist or something. its important for me to somehow have something that explains the meaning of life and everything. but i really want to be sure that im believing in the right thing, thats why i wanted to know everything about each religion im considering to convert into. but thats actually not doable? 

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Hi anon,

No it is not. To illustrate this: I am Jewish both ethnically and religiously; I attended a Jewish day school from ages 5-14 (I’m in the U.S., so this corresponded from K-8) and enrichment programs in high school geared towards Jewish high school students in secondary school. I have been the lay leader of an independent Jewish congregation. I would not under any circumstances say I knew everything about Judaism. If I asked any rabbi I’ve known whether they knew everything about Judaism they would probably not laugh in my face but only because they’ve generally been respectful people.

We are talking about a religion with a history of 4,000 years and with much of that in diaspora, including isolated sects all over the world. Jews who migrated to the Iberian peninsula and North Africa (Sephardim) have different traditions (within the same larger tradition) than Jews who migrated to more northern and eastern parts of Europe (Ashkenazim) and both differ from Jews who remained in the middle east (Mizrahim) or some of those more isolated areas (eg: the Bene Israel from Ethiopia, Kaifeng Jews in China). There are two entirely different sub-branches of Judaism depending on whether you only follow the laws as written in the Torah (5 books of Moses), which is called Karaite Judaism, or Judaism as most people think of it and which I practice, Rabbinic Judaism, where the vast oral tradition (eventually written down) is also taken into consideration. Please do note that both the oral tradition and the commentary from writing down the oral tradition were both recorded and are both taken into consideration in rabbinic laws, and that new rulings are being made in the modern day depending on sect (eg: reform, reconstructionist, conservative, orthodox) and the changing times; within my lifetime there have been many changes within certain sects of Judaism regarding their positions on LGBT issues, for example.

I can’t speak with nearly as much knowledge about other religions, but I can say that there is similarly a lot of disagreement and multiple sects (I mean, Christianity encompasses everything from Catholicism to Unitarianism which have fundamentally opposing ideas of the trinity vs. a single deity). Seminaries exist. The mere act of learning a whole lot about a single religion is widely considered a several-year endeavor.

I also can’t speak for all religious beliefs, but at least from the perspective in which I was raised the point of religion isn’t to get answers or find the meaning of life. Nor is the idea that one religion is “correct” even true in most non-extremist interpretations of religion. Judaism has the Noahide laws, is compatible to an extent with outright agnosticism due to its status as an ethnoreligion, and no real interest in proselytizing; I believe Islam mentions within the Quran a respect for other “people of the book” (ie, the Abrahamic religions of Judaism and Christianity); most mainline protestants and liberal Catholics tend to leave people to do their own thing. There’s a reason the phrase “the lord works in mysterious ways” is a common phrase. It’s like you’re asking for the answer to philosophy - there wasn’t even a single question, let alone a definitive answer.

So to put this somewhere between bluntly and gently, this question sounds like it’s coming from someone with very little experience with religion at all and some fundamental misunderstandings, which is why I said you sound either very young or very sheltered or both. With that being said, I suspect what you actually want to start is a fairly basic overview of these religions (which I think would be good if only to help you better get a handle on the concept of religion and the vast diversity within it), and you could start on that pretty easily, through reaching out to local houses of worship or taking a world religions course. You may end up finding that one of those religions holds meaning for you, or you may find that you’re interested in religion intellectually but not in practice, or something else entirely, but it is not a finite piece of knowledge to which you can come to the end.