Understand Your Local Jewish People: Tikkun olam
I'm posting this in the interest of edifying all about the cultural and religious nature of modern Judaism and how it differs from my Christian worldview. There are many substantially uninformed posts on the topic of Judaism here on Christian Chat, so I assume I will need to cover a lot of background.
Background #1 - Lack on Historical Context - Postmodernism
The 20th century brought us mechanized war, mechanized genocide, airplane warfare, etc. It was significant but not the beginning or end of history, as we know. It also brought all sorts of "philosophers" which we define as "postmodern", literally one more horrible than the other.
link -> Criticism of postmodernism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (laugh or cry I don't know)
Really, it's more like...
"It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror... Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies!" Col. Kurtz, Apocalypse Now (1979)
I am a Christian--I seek Jesus Christ. I will not put up with forgetting history, racism, antisemitism, 20th- or 21-century "philosophy", genocide denial, commodity fetishism, advertising campaigns, television, know-nothingism, Bible versionism, false teachers, false prophets, false Jews, teachers who willfully continue to sin after they're born again, etc. because, really, I no longer care for anything other than God and what God said.
God told me to love my neighbors (that's the entire human race) so if no one's told you today that they love you, well I do!
That being said, Noam Chomsky isn't fooled by postmodern silliness and neither am I. Chomsky is a Jewish atheist anarchist (not Spirit) and I'm a born-again Christian, but that doesn't matter, we can both see right through linguistic devices and sophomoric propaganda and trickery.
None of this exists in a vacuum either, I live in the 21st century, in a post-9/11 world (cry) where it's hard to trust those who struggle for power. I may as well vote for Jesus Christ for U.S. President at this point because it's hard to separate the any White House administration or the global media from old Looney Toons cartoons. (cry)
So I look backwards in time, past the 20th century and the first thing I find is the U.S. Civil War--a necessary and just action--where over 600,000 Americans were killed. (cry again)
1 John 2:15 Love not the world, neither the things [that are] in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
I'm left with the what my grandmother said--"Believe in Jesus"--so I no longer love the world--I proclaim the Kingdom of God and the Blood of the Lamb, follow Him, not me.
Matt 22:36-38 Master, which [is] the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment.
1 Peter 2:24 Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.
Background #2 - Who's Who
Acts 11:26 ... And it came to pass, that a whole year they assembled themselves with the church, and taught much people. And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch.
Christians should, as much as possible use, the New Testament to interpret the Old Testament (the Tanakh) because we know that the New Testament is the word of God. Every word of the New Testament is better than anything my fleshy brain can come up with.
Modern Jews use other texts to interpret the Tanakh, or interpret for themselves, in case of the groups like Karaites.
link -> Who is a Jew? - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
If you quote the Bible to say that Christians are the real Jews then that's a semantic issue which completely misses the point of this post--I'm a Christian as my grandparents were Christians.
Background #3 - My Motive - "Sing, O Muse, of the rage..."
I'm concerned and angry with the following trends.
(1) Real Antisemitism - the worst
- tedious, quite often out-of-context, anti-Talmudic screeds here on Christian Chat and the internet which don't reflect the fruit of my local Jewish people at all that I can see
- real recent measurable rise in antisemitism in Europe, see "forgetting history" above -> Pogroms
- assertions about "Zionist" or "Jewish" media control
MY TESTIMONY:I've been to many sobriety-related meetings, 12-step and otherwise, in the Los Angeles area, the center of the entertainment industry, for the last ten years (since 2003), so I've heard various testimonies from many people "in the industry", many of them were Jewish I'm sure, and I can say for sure that giving any credit to the concept of "Zionist" or "Jewish" media control is psychotic
(that being said I don't own a TV set or go to the movie theater, I simply don't think there's anything in it for born-again Christians)
(2) "New Antisemitism"
- conflation of modern nation of Israel with my and your local Jews, these are not the same unless one actually lives in Israel, Israel is only a small minority of people in the world
- this conflation is dangerous from a social responsibility standpoint, because actions by the IDF have nothing to my local Jews and I'm concerned about blowback which blames anyone's local Jews for the actions of Israel
(3) Cultural and Religious Identity
- attempts to abscond with sacred Jewish rituals and laws by wannabe-Jews who were not raised Jewish and have no sort of rabbinical confirmation as to who they are--most can't even read Hebrew, I am embarrassed as a Christian (and for the Jewish people that I know) that they follow wannabe-Jew "teachers" who tell us to combine Judaism and Christianity in any manner other than the New Testament tells us to
Understand Your Local Jewish People: Tikkun olam - Love your neighbor
link -> Tikkun olam - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tikkun olam is a Hebrew phrase that means "repairing the world" (or "healing the world") which suggests humanity's shared responsibility to heal, repair and transform the world. In Judaism, the concept of tikkun olam originated in the early rabbinic period. The concept was given new meanings in the kabbalah of the medieval period and has come to possess further connotations in modern Judaism.
[OP: like anything other subject, you should read and learn all you like about medieval Judaism and kabbalah, but it's not for Christians to practice]
The role of ritual mitzvot
Jews believe that performing of ritual mitzvot (commandments, connections, or religious obligations) is a means of tikkun olam, helping to perfect the world, and that the performance of more mitzvot will hasten the coming of the Messiah and the Messianic Age.
Building a model society
Some Jews believe that performing mitzvot will create a model society among the Jewish people, which will in turn influence the rest of the world. This idea sometimes is attributed to Biblical verses that describe the Jews as "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (Exodus 19:5-6) and "a light of the nations" or "a light to the nations" (Isaiah 42:6 and Isaiah 49:6).
Verses from -> Jewish Bible (JPS 1917)
Shemot 19:5 Now therefore, if ye will hearken unto My voice indeed, and keep My covenant, then ye shall be Mine own treasure from among all peoples; for all the earth is Mine; 6 and ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel.'
Yisheyah 42:6 I HaShem have called thee in righteousness, and have taken hold of thy hand, and kept thee, and set thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the nations;
Yisheyah 42:6 Yea, He saith: 'It is too light a thing that thou shouldest be My servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the offspring of Israel; I will also give thee for a light of the nations, that My salvation may be unto the end of the earth.'
Tikkun olam lunches nourish those in need
By Jared Sichel, Los Angeles, July 17, 2013
© Copyright 2013 Tribe Media Corp. All rights reserved.
link -> Tikkun olam lunches nourish those in need | Los Angeles | Jewish Journal
For 13-year-old Odelia Safadel, serving lunch to Pico-Robertson’s poor and homeless puts things in perspective.
“Sometimes, I think to myself, ‘Oh, there’s nothing to eat. I want a new phone, I want this.’ But then when I come here, I see that these people — they are actually in desperate need,” she said, standing next to a buffet table filled with meatballs, rice and other filling dishes for the dozens of hungry people who came to B’nai David-Judea Congregation’s most recent tikkun olam — repairing the world — lunch.
At this particular meal, on a Wednesday afternoon, about 60 people filtered into two separate rooms at the Pico Boulevard Orthodox synagogue — Jews, non-Jews, blacks, Russians, mothers with babies, and people just looking for a meal and some spiritual inspiration from B’nai David’s rabbi, Yosef Kanefsky.
Odelia, a seventh-grader at Yeshivat Yavneh in Hancock Park, was one of several girls who came to serve food to the lunch’s attendees.
The tikkun olam lunches, which are held seven times per year, were inspired by congregant David Nimmer. As Nimmer tells it, at a Sukkot lunch at least 10 years ago, a rabbinic intern at the synagogue was teaching attendees a text that covered the concept of a sukkat shalom, a welcoming sukkah.
“What do I, God, want of you [the Jewish people]?” Nimmer recalled learning. “To feed the hungry, visit the sick, clothe the poor.”
When he heard that, Nimmer knew that learning tzedakah was not enough. He had to give tzedakah.
“Let’s not just learn about it in this beautiful setting of Torah study,” he remembered saying. “Let’s implement it.”
And that’s precisely what Nimmer and Kanefsky did. The first version of the tikkun olam lunch was during Sukkot of that year. But it wasn’t a lunch; it was a breakfast. And unlike the recent lunch, 60 people didn’t come — only one did.
“The first lunch literally had one semi-homeless person,” Nimmer said. “And he wasn’t terribly homeless, either. He was a very high-functioning guy.”
But since that first meal, the tikkun olam lunch has grown rapidly, so rapidly that there are now two separate meals at each lunch, one for Russian speakers who populate the neighborhood and one for others. Every lunch, before and sometimes after the meal, Kanefsky hands out $15 gift cards for Ralphs grocery store to guests.
Hurrying between the upstairs lunch — for English speakers — and the downstairs lunch — for Russian speakers — Kanefsky described how B’nai David has created a home for those in need, even if it’s only for several hours per year.
“A sukkat shalom is a sukkah that everyone is welcome to come into, and everyone feels at home, and everyone feels part of the community.”
The Russian lunch, held in B’nai David’s large banquet hall, included a local resident stopping in to play guitar for the guests and an introduction by a representative of The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles explaining how people at the lunch can use the organization’s resources. Everything was translated into Russian by a volunteer, Gary Reznik.
One 76-year-old Russian woman said that she has been coming to the tikkun olam lunches for seven years. She described them as something “close to the heart,” whether she sat next to friends or just tikkun olam acquaintances.
“The food is great here, the music is great here, and the holiness of this place ...” her voice trailed off.
Upstairs, about 40 people were sitting around multiple tables, eating, chatting and singing “Sweet Home Alabama” as a B’nai David congregant led the song on guitar. When that tune ended, some of the participants — the non-Jewish ones, it turned out — began an alternate version of the same song: “Sweet Home Israel.”
“Sweet home Israel, Lord I’m coming home to you,” sang many of the guests. The most passionate singers, in fact, seemed to be devout Christians who belong to local churches. For 46-year-old Shana Gudger, this was her first lunch at B’nai David. After finishing her meal, she said that she felt good coming to a synagogue for some food and feeling welcomed. Her church, like her, is struggling financially.
“Honestly, we need to have this in our congregation,” Gudger said. “It was just good to come to another place — a different denomination — and see that they still accept us.”
Over the past decade, Kanefsky has come in touch with hundreds of people who are homeless or at least in serious financial distress, and he has developed personal bonds with many of them. That, he said, makes it tough to see people who are able to stand on their own for a few months return to a tikkun olam lunch, again in need.
“Over the many years, I’ve seen people whose lives have gotten dramatically better,” Kanefsky said. “Then six months later or a year later, they are kind of back where they started.”
As tragic as this is, it does give Kanefsky a chance to build a sort of community.
“The civic and religious obligation that we have is to extend assistance and friendship to the poor people who are in our community,” Kanefsky said. “Those people include many who are Jews and includes people who are not Jews.”
Back downstairs at the Russian lunch, a homeless Jew in his 20s, Andrew, who would only give his first name, said a prayer in Hebrew. Later, he made his way upstairs and explained that this was his first lunch. He intends to come back.
“It means love and togetherness,” he said. “It was beautiful.
I'm posting this in the interest of edifying all about the cultural and religious nature of modern Judaism and how it differs from my Christian worldview. There are many substantially uninformed posts on the topic of Judaism here on Christian Chat, so I assume I will need to cover a lot of background.
Background #1 - Lack on Historical Context - Postmodernism
The 20th century brought us mechanized war, mechanized genocide, airplane warfare, etc. It was significant but not the beginning or end of history, as we know. It also brought all sorts of "philosophers" which we define as "postmodern", literally one more horrible than the other.
link -> Criticism of postmodernism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (laugh or cry I don't know)
Really, it's more like...
"It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror... Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies!" Col. Kurtz, Apocalypse Now (1979)
I am a Christian--I seek Jesus Christ. I will not put up with forgetting history, racism, antisemitism, 20th- or 21-century "philosophy", genocide denial, commodity fetishism, advertising campaigns, television, know-nothingism, Bible versionism, false teachers, false prophets, false Jews, teachers who willfully continue to sin after they're born again, etc. because, really, I no longer care for anything other than God and what God said.
God told me to love my neighbors (that's the entire human race) so if no one's told you today that they love you, well I do!
That being said, Noam Chomsky isn't fooled by postmodern silliness and neither am I. Chomsky is a Jewish atheist anarchist (not Spirit) and I'm a born-again Christian, but that doesn't matter, we can both see right through linguistic devices and sophomoric propaganda and trickery.
None of this exists in a vacuum either, I live in the 21st century, in a post-9/11 world (cry) where it's hard to trust those who struggle for power. I may as well vote for Jesus Christ for U.S. President at this point because it's hard to separate the any White House administration or the global media from old Looney Toons cartoons. (cry)
So I look backwards in time, past the 20th century and the first thing I find is the U.S. Civil War--a necessary and just action--where over 600,000 Americans were killed. (cry again)
1 John 2:15 Love not the world, neither the things [that are] in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
I'm left with the what my grandmother said--"Believe in Jesus"--so I no longer love the world--I proclaim the Kingdom of God and the Blood of the Lamb, follow Him, not me.
Matt 22:36-38 Master, which [is] the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment.
1 Peter 2:24 Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.
Background #2 - Who's Who
Acts 11:26 ... And it came to pass, that a whole year they assembled themselves with the church, and taught much people. And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch.
Christians should, as much as possible use, the New Testament to interpret the Old Testament (the Tanakh) because we know that the New Testament is the word of God. Every word of the New Testament is better than anything my fleshy brain can come up with.
Modern Jews use other texts to interpret the Tanakh, or interpret for themselves, in case of the groups like Karaites.
link -> Who is a Jew? - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
If you quote the Bible to say that Christians are the real Jews then that's a semantic issue which completely misses the point of this post--I'm a Christian as my grandparents were Christians.
Background #3 - My Motive - "Sing, O Muse, of the rage..."
I'm concerned and angry with the following trends.
(1) Real Antisemitism - the worst
- tedious, quite often out-of-context, anti-Talmudic screeds here on Christian Chat and the internet which don't reflect the fruit of my local Jewish people at all that I can see
- real recent measurable rise in antisemitism in Europe, see "forgetting history" above -> Pogroms
- assertions about "Zionist" or "Jewish" media control
MY TESTIMONY:I've been to many sobriety-related meetings, 12-step and otherwise, in the Los Angeles area, the center of the entertainment industry, for the last ten years (since 2003), so I've heard various testimonies from many people "in the industry", many of them were Jewish I'm sure, and I can say for sure that giving any credit to the concept of "Zionist" or "Jewish" media control is psychotic
(that being said I don't own a TV set or go to the movie theater, I simply don't think there's anything in it for born-again Christians)
(2) "New Antisemitism"
- conflation of modern nation of Israel with my and your local Jews, these are not the same unless one actually lives in Israel, Israel is only a small minority of people in the world
- this conflation is dangerous from a social responsibility standpoint, because actions by the IDF have nothing to my local Jews and I'm concerned about blowback which blames anyone's local Jews for the actions of Israel
(3) Cultural and Religious Identity
- attempts to abscond with sacred Jewish rituals and laws by wannabe-Jews who were not raised Jewish and have no sort of rabbinical confirmation as to who they are--most can't even read Hebrew, I am embarrassed as a Christian (and for the Jewish people that I know) that they follow wannabe-Jew "teachers" who tell us to combine Judaism and Christianity in any manner other than the New Testament tells us to
Understand Your Local Jewish People: Tikkun olam - Love your neighbor
link -> Tikkun olam - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tikkun olam is a Hebrew phrase that means "repairing the world" (or "healing the world") which suggests humanity's shared responsibility to heal, repair and transform the world. In Judaism, the concept of tikkun olam originated in the early rabbinic period. The concept was given new meanings in the kabbalah of the medieval period and has come to possess further connotations in modern Judaism.
[OP: like anything other subject, you should read and learn all you like about medieval Judaism and kabbalah, but it's not for Christians to practice]
The role of ritual mitzvot
Jews believe that performing of ritual mitzvot (commandments, connections, or religious obligations) is a means of tikkun olam, helping to perfect the world, and that the performance of more mitzvot will hasten the coming of the Messiah and the Messianic Age.
Building a model society
Some Jews believe that performing mitzvot will create a model society among the Jewish people, which will in turn influence the rest of the world. This idea sometimes is attributed to Biblical verses that describe the Jews as "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (Exodus 19:5-6) and "a light of the nations" or "a light to the nations" (Isaiah 42:6 and Isaiah 49:6).
Verses from -> Jewish Bible (JPS 1917)
Shemot 19:5 Now therefore, if ye will hearken unto My voice indeed, and keep My covenant, then ye shall be Mine own treasure from among all peoples; for all the earth is Mine; 6 and ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel.'
Yisheyah 42:6 I HaShem have called thee in righteousness, and have taken hold of thy hand, and kept thee, and set thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the nations;
Yisheyah 42:6 Yea, He saith: 'It is too light a thing that thou shouldest be My servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the offspring of Israel; I will also give thee for a light of the nations, that My salvation may be unto the end of the earth.'
Tikkun olam lunches nourish those in need
By Jared Sichel, Los Angeles, July 17, 2013
© Copyright 2013 Tribe Media Corp. All rights reserved.
link -> Tikkun olam lunches nourish those in need | Los Angeles | Jewish Journal
For 13-year-old Odelia Safadel, serving lunch to Pico-Robertson’s poor and homeless puts things in perspective.
“Sometimes, I think to myself, ‘Oh, there’s nothing to eat. I want a new phone, I want this.’ But then when I come here, I see that these people — they are actually in desperate need,” she said, standing next to a buffet table filled with meatballs, rice and other filling dishes for the dozens of hungry people who came to B’nai David-Judea Congregation’s most recent tikkun olam — repairing the world — lunch.
At this particular meal, on a Wednesday afternoon, about 60 people filtered into two separate rooms at the Pico Boulevard Orthodox synagogue — Jews, non-Jews, blacks, Russians, mothers with babies, and people just looking for a meal and some spiritual inspiration from B’nai David’s rabbi, Yosef Kanefsky.
Odelia, a seventh-grader at Yeshivat Yavneh in Hancock Park, was one of several girls who came to serve food to the lunch’s attendees.
The tikkun olam lunches, which are held seven times per year, were inspired by congregant David Nimmer. As Nimmer tells it, at a Sukkot lunch at least 10 years ago, a rabbinic intern at the synagogue was teaching attendees a text that covered the concept of a sukkat shalom, a welcoming sukkah.
“What do I, God, want of you [the Jewish people]?” Nimmer recalled learning. “To feed the hungry, visit the sick, clothe the poor.”
When he heard that, Nimmer knew that learning tzedakah was not enough. He had to give tzedakah.
“Let’s not just learn about it in this beautiful setting of Torah study,” he remembered saying. “Let’s implement it.”
And that’s precisely what Nimmer and Kanefsky did. The first version of the tikkun olam lunch was during Sukkot of that year. But it wasn’t a lunch; it was a breakfast. And unlike the recent lunch, 60 people didn’t come — only one did.
“The first lunch literally had one semi-homeless person,” Nimmer said. “And he wasn’t terribly homeless, either. He was a very high-functioning guy.”
But since that first meal, the tikkun olam lunch has grown rapidly, so rapidly that there are now two separate meals at each lunch, one for Russian speakers who populate the neighborhood and one for others. Every lunch, before and sometimes after the meal, Kanefsky hands out $15 gift cards for Ralphs grocery store to guests.
Hurrying between the upstairs lunch — for English speakers — and the downstairs lunch — for Russian speakers — Kanefsky described how B’nai David has created a home for those in need, even if it’s only for several hours per year.
“A sukkat shalom is a sukkah that everyone is welcome to come into, and everyone feels at home, and everyone feels part of the community.”
The Russian lunch, held in B’nai David’s large banquet hall, included a local resident stopping in to play guitar for the guests and an introduction by a representative of The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles explaining how people at the lunch can use the organization’s resources. Everything was translated into Russian by a volunteer, Gary Reznik.
One 76-year-old Russian woman said that she has been coming to the tikkun olam lunches for seven years. She described them as something “close to the heart,” whether she sat next to friends or just tikkun olam acquaintances.
“The food is great here, the music is great here, and the holiness of this place ...” her voice trailed off.
Upstairs, about 40 people were sitting around multiple tables, eating, chatting and singing “Sweet Home Alabama” as a B’nai David congregant led the song on guitar. When that tune ended, some of the participants — the non-Jewish ones, it turned out — began an alternate version of the same song: “Sweet Home Israel.”
“Sweet home Israel, Lord I’m coming home to you,” sang many of the guests. The most passionate singers, in fact, seemed to be devout Christians who belong to local churches. For 46-year-old Shana Gudger, this was her first lunch at B’nai David. After finishing her meal, she said that she felt good coming to a synagogue for some food and feeling welcomed. Her church, like her, is struggling financially.
“Honestly, we need to have this in our congregation,” Gudger said. “It was just good to come to another place — a different denomination — and see that they still accept us.”
Over the past decade, Kanefsky has come in touch with hundreds of people who are homeless or at least in serious financial distress, and he has developed personal bonds with many of them. That, he said, makes it tough to see people who are able to stand on their own for a few months return to a tikkun olam lunch, again in need.
“Over the many years, I’ve seen people whose lives have gotten dramatically better,” Kanefsky said. “Then six months later or a year later, they are kind of back where they started.”
As tragic as this is, it does give Kanefsky a chance to build a sort of community.
“The civic and religious obligation that we have is to extend assistance and friendship to the poor people who are in our community,” Kanefsky said. “Those people include many who are Jews and includes people who are not Jews.”
Back downstairs at the Russian lunch, a homeless Jew in his 20s, Andrew, who would only give his first name, said a prayer in Hebrew. Later, he made his way upstairs and explained that this was his first lunch. He intends to come back.
“It means love and togetherness,” he said. “It was beautiful.
