"Really SJ? I thought you professed to be a secular (rational) jew. Please help me understand.
I have never claimed to be a secular Jew.
Despite the efforts of Christians to paint us as a religion, we are not now and never have been a religion.
For the last 3500 years we have been a people .. like the Chinese, the Hindus, or the French.
We are an ancient people, perhaps the oldest of all the world's peoples that have a continuity of culture and tradition.
Part of our tradition is a religion, Judaism. That is as old as we are, and has evolved as much as we ourselves have evolved. The traces of our origins in the Torah are nothing less than a magical viewing glass into the origins of our people and our belie.
In the 3000 or so years since the Torah was written, a lot has happened and we have had many wonderful teachers. Some of these are recorded as the prophets of our scriptures. Later we had teachers like Hillel, the great Pharisee whose teachings seem ti be the basis for the good parts of the words attributed to Jesus.
Since Hillel, we have had Akiba, Maimonides, Halevy, Abravanel, Spinoza, Marx, Ricardo, Weizman, Gompers, Einstein, Rabin, ... and many more whose ideas stem from the root of the ancient Torah.
If you do not mind Jewish pride, I see part of our history as being one of the great roots from which the tree of knowledge has grown.
Oh yeh, and the prophet David Goldstein of HA, is one of the fruits on that tree. Eat him!
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