As for my Christian brethren who regularly quote to me Jesus’ famous saying, “Love your enemies,” my response is that our enemies and God’s enemies are different parties altogether. Jesus meant to love those who steal your girlfriend, cut you off on the road or swindle you in a business deal. But to love those who indiscriminately murder God’s children is an abomination against all that is sacred. Is there a man who is human whose heart is not filled with moral revulsion against terrorists who target a rabbi who feeds the hungry? Would God or Jesus ask me to extend even one morsel of my limited capacity for compassion to fiends rather than saving every last particle for their victims instead?

While op-ed pieces are not known for theological nuance, the attitude of Judaism towards sin and sinners is, as with many things, multi-vocal. Here is one example which calls for a Jew to hate the sin, but not the sinner.

Certain criminals lived in the vicinity of R. Meir and they subjected him to much harassment, and he prayed that they might die. His wife Beruria said to him: How do you justify such a prayer? Is it because it is written: “Let sinners cease from the earth (Ps 104:35)? But the word as written means literally “sin,” not “sinners.” Moreover, consider the last part of the verse: “and let the wicked be no more.” When sins will cease, the wicked will be no more. You should rather pray that they repent, and then the wicked will be no more. He prayed that they repent, and they repented.
B. Berachot 10a (trans. Ben Zion Bokser)

A number of years ago R. Meir Soloveitchik wrote an article in First Things, The Virtue of Hate, which touched upon many of these questions and was discussed quite a bit. See here for some responses to it. Here is a sermon by R. Haskel Lookstein on the Soloveitchik article and here an editorial by the Reverend Christopher M. Leighton.

State Sen. Ernie Chambers is suing God. He said on Monday that it is to prove a point about frivolous lawsuits.

Chambers said senators periodically have offered bills prohibiting the filing of certain types of suits. He said his main objection is that the constitution requires that the doors to the courthouse be open to all.

Well it seems as if God got off this time, (emphasis mine)

A Douglas County District Court judge tossed out Ernie Chambers’ lawsuit against God on Tuesday .

The state senator says he may appeal the decision.

Judge Marlon Polk threw it out stating that Chambers can’t sue God if he can’t serve papers on him.

Chambers disagreed with the judge’s order, saying that since God knows everything God had notice of the lawsuit.

The lawsuit was filed over a year ago. It sought a permanent injunction to prevent God from committing acts of violence such as tornadoes and earthquakes.

One of the goals of the lawsuit, according to Chambers, is to make the point that anyone can sue or be sued.

The state senator has 30 days to appeal the ruling.

What is a good lawsuit without some discussion of God’s omniscience. As I mentioned in my previous post, ome may be familiar with Elie Wiesel’s book The Trial of God. The play, although set in 1649, is, according to Wiesel, based upon a trial that occured in Auschwitz. See here for an account of Wiesel defending the historicity of the trial that occured in Auschwitz. An anthology of related material is Arguing with God: A Jewish Tradition.

The “perceiving of the voices” has been interpreted endlessly since these words were first written. When Professor Benny Shanon, professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, reads the verse, he recalls a powerful hallucinatory experience he had when he visited the Amazon and drank a potion made from a plant called ayahuasca.

“One of the things that happens when you drink the potion is a visual experience created via sounds,” he says. Shanon presents a provocative theory in an article published this week in the philosophy journal Time and Mind. The religious ceremonies of the Israelites included the use of psychotropic materials that can found in the Negev and Sinai, he says.

See the rest here. Hopefully the truth of the Torah will hold up a bit better than Castaneda’s work.

I’ll end with a quote from what I think is one of the most important chapters of modern Jewish theology, chapter 27 (“The Principle of Revelation”) from Abraham Joshua Heschel’s God in Search of Man.

The essence of our faith in the sanctity of the Bible is that its words contain that which God wants us to know and to fulfill. How these words were written down is not the fundamental problem. This is why the theme of Biblical criticism is not the theme of faith, just as the question of whether the lightning and thunder at Sinai were a natural phenomenon or not is irrelevant to our faith in revelation. The assumption of some commentators that the Decalogue was given on a raining day does not affect our conception of the event.

The act of revelation is a mystery, while the record of revelation is a literary fact, phrased in the language of man. (God in Search of Man, p. 258)

Cardinal Francis George of Chicago said in an interview with the National Catholic Reporter last week that he favored changing language in the Missal that calls for the conversion of the Jews, “because the intention is to be sure that our prayers are not offensive to the Jewish people who are our ancestors in the faith.”

He added: “It does work both ways. Maybe this is an opening to say, ‘Would you care to look at some of the Talmudic literature’s description of Jesus as a bastard, and so on, and maybe make a few changes in some of that?’ This is an opening for discussion. Everybody’s theological position has to be respected.”

I would hope that this Cardinal, who is apparently going to be the president of the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, can tell the difference between a prayer and a text such as the Talmud which is the object of study. Maybe the Cardinal isn’t aware that many, if not all of them, have already been removed from most editions of the Talmud. Are there Jews who would profess derogatory beliefs about Jesus? I am sure that there are, but do Jews pray “Jesus is a bastard”. Find me a Jewish prayer that Catholics find offensive that refers to Catholics and hasn’t already been changed (see these articles on the censorship of Jewish books). Are some Jews asking the Church to “make a few changes” in writings of the Church Fathers? For more on the Latin Missal and the Jews see here. Maybe he’s been reading too much Peter Schäfer.

Update:  Also see this post by Iyov on the Tridentine Mass.