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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28496 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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The secular Jew is still Jewish and they want him to be like them.

Is an Evangelical flyover state Republican who desperately wants to convert blue tribe Americans, preaches to them, sees them as brothers going down a lost path, and does everything in his power to bring them to the church part of the same ‘in group’ as them? This is what you’re implying in this case. Wanting to convert someone you hope or dream will be sympathetic to your tribe doesn’t make that person part of the ingroup.

The only difference is that because of the Jewish prohibition on proselytization, the pool of ‘potential converts’ who can be openly evangelized to is limited to secular Jews.

The evangelical does not define his membership by genealogy. He does not make daily prayers to a people and a tribe and a nation. A better example would be an evangelical trying to save a different evangelical who is living in sin. In this case, yes, they are the same ingroup. The Orthodox are compelled by their belief system to consider lapsed Jewry to be their ingroup due to their qualitatively distinct divine spark as described in the Tanya and spoken about by Schneerson, their quasi-messiah. This is a very fitting parallel — per Forward,

The Rebbe believed that every Jew, even one who had helped Stalin to murder other Jews, could be saved. “When you go back the next time,” the Rebbe said to a Jewish dignitary who was to have an audience with Lazar Kaganovich, “you should tell him he should still do teshuvah,” referring to repentance. “[H]e still has a chance.”

That belief that all Jews contain a spark of the divine undergirded his belief in kiruv, or outreach, at a time when most Orthodox Jews believed that less observant Jews were something like possible contaminants. Today, other Orthodox groups do outreach work, and even leaders of the Reform movement point, perhaps with a gulp, to the Chabad model.

Schneerson identifies with secular Jews to an extreme degree:

”Every Jew, regardless of differences and levels of observances, is part of Am Echad.”

”Anyone who berates any Jew is touching the apple of God’s eye.”

The Rebbe believed that every Jew, even one who had helped Stalin to murder other Jews, could be saved. “When you go back the next time,” the Rebbe said to a Jewish dignitary who was to have an audience with Lazar Kaganovich, “you should tell him he should still do teshuvah,” referring to repentance. “[H]e still has a chance.”

Is an SSPX hardcore ultra-tradcath who believes the only just form of government is Catholic monarchy under the Pope (but not the current one) the same in-group as a (sex-having) gay liberal Catholic who believes women should be ordained as priests, that Jews don’t have to convert to go to heaven, and that abortion isn’t a sin? This seems like a semantic difference in our positions more than anything.

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