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Tuesday, June 24, 2014

The Purpose of Religions: How It Affects Us Today in Israel

Nadene Goldfoot                    
                                                                                            

                Haj Amin Husseini, Arab leader,  flew to Germany to talk with Hitler about Jews

"When Husseini eventually met with Hitler and Ribbentrop in 1941, he assured Hitler that 'The Arabs were Germany's natural friends because they had the same enemies... namely the English, the Jews, and the Communists'." 

Hammurabi came along  with a code of laws.  It was a well-preserved Babylonian law code of ancient Mesopotamia, dating back to about 1772 BCE. It is one of the oldest deciphered writings of significant length in the world. The sixth Babylonian king, Hammurabi, enacted the code, and partial copies exist on a human-sized stone stele and various clay tablets. The Code consists of 282 laws, with scaled punishments, adjusting "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth as graded depending on social status, of slave versus free man.   Moses came along much later (1391 BCE-1271 BCE). He had a set of laws that were similar but improved upon, and his came from G-d.  That carries much more weight than from a king of some country.  We don't know Hammurabi's story, though.  Was he given the laws through such a means as G-d?  Did he just think them all up?  We'll never know.    

The Jews waited for 2,000 years to have their country back again.  They went through 2,000 years of anti-Semitism against them for religious reasons. Why did they need a country?  Because they couldn't practice their religion.  They were hounded and killed for ages because they were Jews.  In modern society they were slaughtered in a recent Holocaust.  They couldn't work in certain places because they were Jews.  They were the first picked on as the cause of everyone's problems; the scapegoat of the world.  They were people without a country, a people of an ancient religion.  They were being treated horribly.  That's not how they wanted their children to grow up and learn to emulate.

 The idea was that originally Jesus had come to teach the people in Judah a way of living.  He spoke without a script and didn't give papers to people to read.  He had been educated in Judaism.  He gave his opinions such as I am in this article.    For Jews   he was simply teaching Judaism in a new and modern way, bringing a form of Judaism to the masses.  Jews  had been following Judaism since Moses taught them the way to live since 1311 BCE.  That Moses lived from 1391 BCE and died at age 120 in 1271 BCE meant that Judaism hadn't been noticeably upgraded for 1,200 years when Jesus came along.  Then Jesus was one of the many thousands of Jews hung on crosses by the Romans in their taking of the country.  He had become a threat to the Romans, a possible king.

 Jews were accused of killing Jesus, however, and his followers said he was the son of G-d.    Jews had killed their god. Judaism teaches me that we are all children of G-d.  How someone can kill a god is beyond me, but that has been the accusation, and it has stuck to this day.  According to his story as told much later by the Gospel writers, was that he seemed to know what was going to happen.   The new religious group attacked Judaism.   This put Jews on the side of outcasts; they lost their country in 70 CE and they killed Jesus, so his followers said. They suffered from the Crusades and from the Spanish Inquisition, the hundreds of years that Catholicism attacked them and forced them to flee from country to country.

The Jews remained believers in one and only one G-d, a god that was unseen.  The rest of the world that the Jews found themselves in became Christians, followers of Jesus.  Instead of the new religion  concentrating on what Jesus had taught, such as how to treat each other -as you would be treated (the Golden Rule) , it became a contest between 2 religions, like a soccer game.  Christianity  had to put down Judaism in order to come out on top. Whatever people remembered of Jesus' teachings was forgotten when it came to the treatment of Jesus' people, the Jews.

And so we find that finally after 2,000 years of patiently waiting for the right moment, the moment came with WWI and Judah had been part of the Ottoman Empire for 400 years.  Arabs made the mistake of siding with the Germans who lost that war.  The land was put in the hands of England, who held the mandate for a period of 25 years.  It was decided to give back to the Jews their Jewish Homeland.  This was in the form of a letter, the Balfour Declaration.  Finally the allied countries had felt some guilt about how Jews had been treated.

  1. The Balfour Declaration (dated 2 November 1917) was a letter from the United Kingdom's Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Baron Rothschild (Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild), a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland.
His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.  Later in 1922, the League of Nations voted for a Jewish Homeland by accepting the Balfour Declaration.  By 1939, at the start of WWII, England issued the White Paper stopping Jews from entering Palestine to escape Hitler's death sentences.  
                                                                          
                                   Chaim Weizmann and Emir Feisal

25 years of planning and waiting was interrupted by WWII where again the Arabs backed Germany.  Whereas Emir Feisal backed the Jewish return, thinking it would help improve his own uneducated masses, his competitors were against the idea.  When Jews tried to enter Palestine while Hitler was trying to kill all Jews, England stopped them  from  entering.  At the same time they aided and abetted Arabs in coming into land meant to become the Jewish Homeland.  

On May 14, 1948 Israel was declared a state and 5 minutes later they were attacked by all the neighboring Arab countries.  Now why couldn't these Muslims accept Israel back again?  The land was empty.  It had been worked on by Jews who came in the late 1800's and worked to restore it.  The land had gone to waste and had been full of weeds, swamps and mosquitoes.  No one lived here for all the time the Jews had been forced to leave.  Any Arabs who had land had decided they couldn't work it and made a profit by selling to the crazy Jews who wanted it.  Now they in turn were attacking Jews who wanted to live there again?  
                                                                      
Judea and Samaria becoming a Palestine while attacking Israel

Again I ask.  What is it in Islam that is so against Jews returning to their own land?  They are people like the Muslims, most likely sharing some segments of chromosomes as well, who believe in one unseen G-d like the Muslims profess to do.  Because our messengers, our teachers are not the same, is not the message the same?  Doesn't Islam look upon Moses as a prophet?  Or has G-d changed his message since Moses?  Those who heard Jesus's message certainly seemed to change the focal point of it all from the Mosaic teachings Jesus was brought up with.  

I ask again, what is the most important lesson to be learned through Moses, Jesus and Mohammad?  What were they telling everyone?  Religion has gone a different route, from the message of G-d to the importance of the teacher, not the message.  As a teacher myself, I want my students to remember the lesson, not me.  I am not the important lesson, what I do, how I wear my hair, but what the lesson is about.  

Here we see Sunni terrorists called ISIS slaughtering other Sunnis and of course slaughtering Shi'as because they are following a different teacher.  Are these teachers not teaching the words of Mohammad who himself was a teacher of G-d's word?  Is this what G-d wants people to do?  Cut them apart in pieces and kill everyone who disagrees with you?  Because you understand one teacher and not the other, are they not teaching the same thing?  What does it matter who the teacher is?  The lesson is to be learned regardless of the teacher.  That is, if the message is understood  well, both teachers should be giving the same message.

We have Presbyterians attacking Israel by the BDS movement.  Using their religion to force someone to follow  their political misguided goals is just throwing a monkey-wrench in the works that were helping both Jews and Arabs in Judea and Samaria.  Meddlers and idiots!  Followers like sheep of their uneducated leaders.  Using religion to do this is despicable.  A voting program by people who know nothing about the issues at hand.  Not only are they being anti-Semitic, but they are being anti-American as well, for the things they are against are made by American companies, so their business is being hurt.  "In a close vote at its annual assembly in Detroit on Friday, the church voted 310-303 to divest $21 million from Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola Solutions."

These same people probably think it's wonderful to have an al-Jazeera TV programming when someone like Qaradawi, Muslim religious leader is on every week from Qatar telling people to kill Jews and who has said himself that he would kill Jews with his bare hands.  Maybe he's the religious leader of ISIS.  I don't see them practicing their BDS on al-Jazeera.  

The good side of Islam is lost in the intolerable acceptance of Jews in their own homeland again.  Because of their meddling, they helped to cause 6 million Jews to die in the Holocaust.  Their leader talked with Hitler and encouraged him to kill Jews.  They kept Jews from entering during WWII years which caused their deaths.  Whatever goodness Mohammad wanted to teach didn't come through in the followers' actions.  The same goes for Christianity.  Very few people actually treated Jews according to how Jesus would have expected.  
                                                                           
650,000 Jews in 1948 faced thousands more Arabs in an attack and held their land.  They would have had land to place the 6 million who were slaughtered during WWII's Holocaust had the Western countries held to their promise of the Jewish Homeland.  Instead, Israel lost 80% of promised land which became TransJordan and are down to the 20% that is now divided to accommodate a Palestine.  Notice that Judea and Samaria are in the blue section.  

Religion came about through G-d or through mankind, whatever you wish to believe for the purpose of making people nice.  It was so that we would be a step removed from the Cave Man and his club to hit people over the heads with to get his own way.  It came about because people were frightened of nature's effects; storms, earthquakes, volcanoes.  It is to advance a civilization so that we aren't sacrificing the best of the land by ripping their hearts out for a certain god. We stopped sacrificing our children long ago, but have started again by using them as soldiers in  wars.   We haven't advanced much.  That means we either didn't understand the message or we refuse to do so.  We aren't using clubs anymore; we're using A bombs.  We've turned out to be a big disappointment.  Mankind.  Bah! 

How is Israel being affected by other religions?  Israel stands quite alone except for some special people.  .  Even the USA has not been the friend it had been.  Why?  Religion may be the cause.  Islam has been against Jews occupying their own ancient land.  Why?  They were virtually empty of a population.  The land was waiting for their return.  The Arabs evidently want only Muslims sitting on the land.  Why?  What does religion have to do with caring for the land that once was theirs in the first place?   Christianity is not helping matters except in the acts of Evangelicals.  .  Using BDS is just a lot of BS.  It's really anti-Semitism.  Jews are still being punished for being Jews.  Even the Pope made efforts to make friends with the Arabs but not the Jews on his recent visit.  

We, on the other hand, are in awe of the intelligence of our lesson as taught by Moses.  We're proud of what we have learned this way and are appalled by our neighbors' behaviors.  We haven't gone out to harm anyone, and are staying the way we have been.  We've upgraded ourselves all along with the prophets and others such as Rashi.  Such people continue to comment and learn in Yeshivote and share with us in our synagogues.  We haven't stagnated, but we haven't altered our original lessons, either.  

Resource:  From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haj_Amin_al-Husseini
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration
http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/21/us/presbyterian-church-palestinians/
http://www.ifcj.org/site/PageNavigator/sfi_about_war_league
http://www.rabbisletter.org/faq/ reason of divestment and how they help Israel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi




                                                

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