Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Judaism, Fiddler on the Roof, and Humanity
Author: Paul Snively Posted: 8/29/2000; 4:04:47 PM Topic: Judaism, Fiddler on the Roof, and Humanity Msg #: 20522 (In response to 20518) Prev/Next: 20521 / 20523
Seth Gordon: I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this, and I hope you're not confusing certain varieties of Christianity (which have a mandate to proseletyze built into the religion) with Judaism (which doesn't).I took the comments only to mean that Torah/Talmud was to be propagated throughout the Jewish community, which even without an explicit mandate to proseletyze was expected to grow until the children of Avraham were as numerous as the sands in the desert or the stars in the sky, presumably through childbearing, a significant blessing; or through conversion without force of proseletyzing, as in Ruth's case.
Regardless of the reasons for anticipated explosive growth of a community, any such explosive growth demands a means for teaching that community about its identity and values, and arguably, the man history knows as Moishe, Moses, and whatever the Islamic tradition calls him :-) did a brilliant job (Divinely-inspired job?) of establishing/promulgating that identity and those values, by creating the written Hebrew language, the Torah, and the tradition that Torah must be protected, verbatim, at all costs, which, some four or five millenia later, would result in rabbis throwing themselves on top of their Torah scrolls to be killed rather than allow the Torah to be destroyed by the Nazis.
I'd call the viral-meme of the Torah extremely successful, given that it has resulted in this kind of behavior and informs the beliefs of three major world religions.
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