Does the New Testament Criticize Judaism from Within or from Without?

Historians of ancient Christianity have long debated the meaning of New Testament passages that appear to criticize Judaism. For many scholars, these passages represent a sort of family squabble in which followers of one Jewish sect are attacking another. Charles David Isbell disagrees:

The . . . writers of the [the books of Mark, Matthew, and Luke] were not part of either mainstream Judaism or any identifiable Jewish sub-group of the era. The . . . points being made [in these books] fit a Roman or Hellenistic context far too often to sustain the idea that we are reading nothing more than the saga of some Jews involved in a petty dispute. In addition, the [later] Church Fathers, who were certainly not Jewish, had no difficulty in using the New Testament to denigrate Judaism in a most derogatory fashion. This they could do without the necessity of rephrasing as Gentiles what they read in a Jewish New Testament. All they needed to do was to take seriously the New Testament on its own terms as they read and understood it. As it stood, it fit well with . . . decidedly non-Jewish world views and cultures.

Read more at Bible and Interpretation

More about: ancient Judaism, Christianity, Hellenism, History & Ideas, Jewish-Christian relations, New Testament

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society