Your comments are a lot to absorb. You will not accept it when a person offers you a soft way out of an unending dialogue and want to keep "fighting" until there is no soft way out of the situation. I am not of that nature. I still offer you an easy way out of agreeing that you and I will not agree.
However, I must address your concerns.
1. Do not feel badly because you were so caught up in your fever to defend your own kind that you failed to see the suttle hint that my belief system is different.
2. I fail to see how telling someone that service is not available is treating someone badly. Unless you think that the person may be starving and in immediate need of food. In that case, yes we are obligated to feed the stranger at no cost to them. However, AZ ranks in the top 20 of the state with the most obese people. That makes me think that there are not that many people starving to death in AZ. Also, in AZ cities, there is a eatery about every .10 mile. There are no lack of bakeries, bars, clothing outlets, and so on to sell to all people. Most will not concern themselves with those they service, their focus is on their income and profit.
3. Most Jewish people stay within their communities. We have never been treated well by non-Jewish, this has been going on from the time we left Egypt. Nothing has changed and nothing is likely to change. Therefore we have a tendency to stay within our own community and not try to tell others how to live their lives.
4. The death camps you speak of was a horrible spot on the world. The issue started in 1933 and the final solution was enacted in 1941. I could go into the history and point out that WWII was not a fight to free the people being murdered by the N**i, but that would be offensive to some. I can recommend several books, but due to your reaction to my last recommendation I will not encourage you to read or try to research.
5. Muslim have h**ed Jewish people from the 7th century. It is only recently that others have recognized that there may be a problem. And that problem only became of importance to most people on 9-11. They have had their laws regarding women from the origin of the religion. It is up to those people who believe as they do to change. It can not be done from outside.
6. We, speaking of Jewish people, do not convert others. We are raised to respect your beliefs and to understand as well as possible why your religion has evolved. I would not encourage any Christian, or for that matter any other religion, to convert. Historically, converting others has not worked out well for us. Let me give you a history lesson:
In the time of Abraham, Abraham did try to convert many people. He did this by having an open tent which allowed people from every direction to come and learn about Gd. Then, in the time of the Exodus from Egypt, the Jewish people again, accepted any converts who would come to the Jewish people and become part of the nation. In Jewish tradition these people were referred to as the "Eruv Rav" or the "Mixed multitudes of people" who did not come from the Israeli tribes, but who saw the miracles that happened in Egypt and wanted to attach themselves to Gd.
Traditionally, the Eruv Rav was the source of many bad things that the Jewish people did. Some explain, that this happened because while they were awed and inspired by Gd, they were not truly loyal to the Jewish people.
Jump forward a few hundred years, and before the time of Christianity, the leaders of the Jewish state, were fighting a war with the Idumeans. After winning the war, and being tired of the constant fighting over generations, the leaders decided to convince the Idumeans to all convert to Judaism. They did so, and centuries later, some Jews of Idumean decent (namely King Herod) attached themselves to Rome, became leaders of Israel and were very cruel to the Jewish people. Again, their loyalty to the Jewish people was questioned.
So Jews in general, do not like mass conversions of people who are joining the "winning team". There is a question of their loyalty to Judaism and the Jewish people. In other religions like Christianity and Islam, this is not such a big deal, because those are religions made up of many nations, while Judaism is a religion only made up of a single nation. You can't be Jewish and not be part of the Jewish People.
On another level, we are not concerned about losing many members, or not having enough Jews around. In the Torah, Gd says not to count the Jewish people directly, or else a plague will come about. We are also promised that we will be an eternal nation. We will never die out. Because of this promise, and a general statement that our numbers should not really be counted (except when absolutely needed, like to build community projects or help the poor) there is no concern that we are "too small", or that other groups of people are larger than us.
From the perspective of Judaism, we know what is correct and right for our people. We know the T***h, and we are not in competition with anybody else in the world. We share what we know about Gd and his unity, and about living in a Just society. The rest of the details of how other nations live is not our concern. As long as people act Justly and Peacefully and don't try to take away our home from us, we let other people live however they wish to live.
I hope now, with my response that you will see the sanity of letting the conversation between you and I, specifically about religion and beliefs, fade and become part of memory or history.
V***l wrote:
I should have picked up on that bit of obviousness when you mentioned kosher. Not sure why that escaped me, sorry about that.
I fail to see how allowing someone to be treated poorly falls in line with "not to wrong anyone in speech or in business", or with "acts of loving kindness". It allows others to wrong people, and is most certainly not an act (legal play on words) of loving kindness.
It is State sanctioned discrimination and having the revelation of your faith, it honestly surprises me about your support for it. Do not misunderstand that my stance to this is purely built on support for the L**T community, it is built on a mutual respect for my fellows. This Bill authorizes antisemitism in addition to others. This is perhaps the most perplexing thing from my point of view; you, being Jewish, are ok with State sanctioned discrimination for business, but I'm guessing you're not ok with it when it means rounding them up into camps? The only difference is the end game, both are discriminatory.
And now to play to the fears of some:
This law allows a Muslim to enact parts of Sharia law in their places of business. They can deny service to an unaccompanied woman. I'm sure there are others, which I'll have to look up later.
In regards to history, does this book touch on how Christianity absorbed the Pagan holidays (saturnalia, lupercalia to name a few) in an effort to convert more people?
I should have picked up on that bit of obviousness... (
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