Comments on: Jewish Mother Explains Her Road to Intactivism

By: Mao Li Osa

Mao Li Osa — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:01:15 +0000

Genital mutilation is genital mutilation, period! Would you cut off your daughters’ labia? I didn’t think so. Circumcision is barbaric, ritualized sexual abuse.

By: hamsa

hamsa — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:32:20 +0000

yes, i know what moshe rabeinu’s leanings were. his wife circumcised their son, remember?

i am not arrogantly interpreting anything. i am no torah scholar. but i do know that the jewish people have become so distanced from torah. we’ve gotten lost along the way. dude, there is no sand where we do brit milah these days. people come up with all kinds of excuses. it doesn’t matter what his leanings were. it is law. it is torah law. period. u have a problem with it, take it up with HaShem.

then they are not right wing enough. we have arabs sitting on jewish land. if they don’t want to live under jewish sovereignty, they have more than 20 other countries to go to, including the ones that their ancestors left in order to squat over here. any jew not willing to live here and defend our land, well, stay in ur comfy house, with the two-car garage, and manicured lawn. israel ain’t for sissies…

the torah states, implicitly, go in and take possession of the land that i have assigned to ur forefathers. how much more clear does it have to be?

yes, i am a right wing, religious jew. i have my opinions, just like everyone else. i don’t expect any of us to agree on everything all the time. but u have created this blog, which means that ur going to get other people’s opinions whether or not u like them. i have nothing against u personally cause i don’t know u. and i accept ur viewpoint for what it is. anyone who is right wing enough, will defend the land from trespassers. we were told to NOT make a covenant with any of the nations. well, we have, and now we are paying for this dearly. giving the land of israel to our sworn enemy will only bring us more death. was 6,000,000 not enough?

By: halfsours

halfsours — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:39:22 +0000

“No one on this site is going to take your insistence that the Torah clearly states such a specific right-wing Zionist policy for the State of Israel. Not even the right-wing readers.”

…

By: DK

DK — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:25:38 +0000

“perhaps if the torah was to be taken literally, today, we wouldn’t have all this garbage going of”

Just the opposite. A lot of these problems are exacerbated by an insistence on literalism that makes no sense at all and works badly.

i highly doubt that moshe rabeinu would allow any of this to happen.

Moshe had anti-circ leanings. Read the text and the midrashim you so arrogantly present yourself as the definitive interpretor of. He banned circ in the desert. Because there was sand.

“a government that is so willing to give up the golan heights to the syrians”

No one on this site is going to take your insistence that the Torah clearly states such a specific right-wing Zionist policy for the State of Israel. Not even the right-wing readers.

By: hamsa

hamsa — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:18:07 +0000

perhaps if the torah was to be taken literally, today, we wouldn’t have all this garbage going on – rabbis molesting children and women, as well as a government that is so willing to give up the golan heights to the syrians. i highly doubt that moshe rabeinu or yehoshuah would allow any of this to happen. as well, if the people were to approach either of these men, of blessed memory, with some whiny idea about how cruel and inhuman brit milah is, they’d either die laughing, or just look at someone with a look of “are u for real”? brit milah is part of jewish life. accept it, or not. we all make choices.

By: Sarah/froylein

Sarah/froylein — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:28:57 +0000

Funnily enough, the sages of old did not believe that the Torah had to be taken literally; they understood that Oriental narrative tradition validated intentions through stories, just as people still do in legends, myths fairy tales and many pieces of fiction. It was post-Modernism Orthodoxy that had also adopted the modrrn approach to reading texts that started thinking of the Torah as a piece of literature to be taken literally – decidedly switching off their minds at that, otherwise they would notice the inconsistencies and contradictions.

By: hamsa

hamsa — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 12:53:15 +0000

the torah, the way it is sposed to be lived, and taught, is all, or nothing at all. that’s just the way it is. u don’t pick andchoose. u either accept brit milah, or u don’t. u either accept the 10 dibrot, or u don’t. only man creates the gray area, not HaShem. He gave us the torah, the way that He saw fit. it’s mankind who has f*cked it up. the torah is our guidebook on how to live life, properly, as jews. unfortunately, as i said in the sentence previously, mankind has f*cked it up.

By: DK

DK — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 04:29:33 +0000

FWIW, there’s no way it is all. It doesn’t add up. If you push me the wall, and demand all or nothing, I choose nothing.

Most of non-Orthodox Jewry will choose the same. All makes less sense than nothing.

By: hamsa

hamsa — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 04:10:12 +0000

ur entitled to ur opinion, as we all are. i just put mine in writing, is all. if u don’t accept the torah as the word of G-d, i can understand why u think this way. we either accept it all, or none at all. we don’t accept a bissel here, and a bissel there. this is why there are so many divisions in judaism. people have taken it upon themselves to re-interpret the torah. a true torah way of life does not cause the pain and anguish that we see in today’s society. brit milah is part of what it means to be a jew, just as pidyon haben and bar mitzva are. the torah is not messed up. the people are.

By: DK

DK — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:49:58 +0000

brit milah is from HaShem.

That’s not what many of us believe. For good reason, many of us believe that is a narrative that was attached to a ritual whose practice began in East Africa.

His children? this is HIS law, HIS covenant.

I don’t really believe that. This is a practice shared by many middle eastern and African people, and violates basic child rights.