April 20, 2021 - Iyar 9, 5781
The Questions
- Question 1: Did the Jews Require Seeing to Believe?
- Question 2: Does the Torah Condone Hate and Immorality?
Question 1: Did the Jews Require Seeing to Believe?
The Jews were of little faith and did not advance (across the sea) until they saw dry land. Only until the death and Resurrection of Yeshua did people begin to have faith without seeing. I never seen our Lord and Savior, but I believe.
You also haven't seen Krishna or Quetzalcoatl, yet you don't believe in them. Not seeing is not the means by which you establish faith, but to the contrary; seeing. True, you may accuse people who have not seen of weak faith, but humanity is guilty of so many false claims that the only way to bridge the gap between belief and knowledge is national witness, which is probably why the Torah says "And Israel saw the great hand, which the Lord had used upon the Egyptians, and the people feared the Lord, and they believed in the Lord and in Moses, His servant." (Exodus 14:31)
It is true that the Jews experienced this faith relatively late, i.e., only after the whole ordeal of the ten plagues (said to have taken about one year), but it can be said that up until this very moment it was not clear that God's promise to Abraham (Genesis 15:16) had really come to fruition. Unarguably (we) the Jews are a stiff-necked people, but when a stiff-necked person becomes convinced, he never turns away. This is what God wants of the Jewish People, His treasured nation; He gave them what He didn't give to any other nation, which is a national revelation, so that the basis for their belief would be unshakable (notwithstanding the imperfect record of the nation as a whole).
What really gets under Christians' skin is that God did not duplicate any form of national revelation in any of His "subsequent revelation updates." A national revelation can only be replaced by another at least as convincing; instead there are four books that differ on relevant details and a series of scattered reports of eye witnesses penned by third parties between 20 and 70 years after the apparent resurrection. Could you imagine if the Exodus account had been recorded this way? Four accounts of the Exodus differing in significant details penned between 20 and 70 years later by authors that did not experience it themselves.
Question 2: Is The Torah Immoral?
I have read the Bible. It made me sick, full of rage, hate, and immorality.
Response
It's important to distinguish between reporting and condoning; the Torah reports on many things that it doesn't condone. Regarding upsetting things that the Torah does condone, even the most disturbing and difficult concepts need to be studied in a disciplined fashion and in context. The explanations that secular (and sometimes Christian) thinkers offer for such passages often differ greatly from traditional (Orthodox) Jewish scholarship on these subjects, and we don't try to find some obscure cultural or anthropological explanation. This is because we treat the Torah as having been revealed by God and is one coherent whole that is essentially eternal.
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