I was raised Jewish. My family was part of a Reform synagogue, so we were very liberal about our religion. We celebrated major holidays, I went to religious school twice a week, and I had a Bat Mitzvah. Otherwise we never followed the conservative Jewish laws like keeping Kosher or having Shabbat services every Saturday and we never said prayers unless we were at a synagogue service. I always liked the Jewish culture and from my rather biased and ignorant perspective growing up, Judaism seemed like one of the less judgmental, more open and loving religions. Reading the psalms in class has made me reflect on my upbringing and the way I used to look at Judaism. I was surprised while reading the psalms and considering that they were part of the Old Testament. Phrases like "His wrath in a moment flares up" give me pause. All of the allusions to fearing God and his punishment were ideas that I stereotyped with Christianity. Even Psalm 37:28 "[The Lord's faithful] are guarded forever, but the seed of the wicked is cut off". This was not the benevolent, forgiving God of my childhood. Growing up, I never had any sense of fearing God. I grew up equating God to love.
Only recently have I seen the difference between the liberal, Reform belief system I learned and the fundamentalist beliefs that make Judaism in its purest form seem almost unrecognizable to me. As I’ve grown up and learned more about religion and moved away from my Jewish upbringing, I have become increasingly skeptical about Judaism’s moral compass. That’s not the say that Judaism is at all less moral than other religions, but I have come to see that they are certainly no better than the others, as my bias once lead me to believe. This past January, Israeli troops invaded Gaza and killed hundreds of civilians. While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has some political significance, it boils down to a fight between the Jews and the Muslims. I heard a report on the radio that said that rabbis where advising the Israeli troops to kill anything that moved. The Israelis have admitted to holding a lower value for Palestinian lives over those of Israelis.
I think it’s very shameful for a group that was persecuted and given a lower value of life in recent history to now be passing that same judgment on a different religious group. In two generations, the Jews have gone from being killed for their religion to killing others for theirs. True, in the Israeli-Palestinian case there is valuable land that is being fought over, but the price is still innocent human blood. Apparently the phrase “never again” doesn’t translate from Hebrew to Arabic.
There's a section in my Social Psychology book about Israeli and Palestinian negotiators and their "naive realism." Your post reminded me of it. Here's a quote from it:
ReplyDelete"[E]ven when each side recognizes that the other side perceives the issues differently, each thinks that the other side is biased while they themselves are objective and that their own perceptions of reality should provide the basis for settlement."
Each side likes the proposal written by their own side more than the proposal labeled as the other sides, even if the proposals are exactly the same. It's hard to get out of a bias about your side/religion/view, I admire how you have gotten away from that.