I am kind of hesitant to raise this topic, but I feel it needs addressing. Especially, since I recently had my Gnostic beliefs shot down as being anti-semitic, because I believe the Jewish god is evil. Why is it that every time someone says something that Jews find insulting we're suddenly anti-semites? I mean I've seen this called on the most ridicilous things, like simply criticizing the Jewish religion.
Well, I think first of all that there is a difference between critiquing and criticizing. I may not agree if someone says that Jewish theology seems difficult to them, but that is a perfectly tenable statement, in that it is a critique-- it describes a difficulty that one has with something as they understand it. To say that the Jewish God is evil is a criticism: it is a judgment-- in this case, a sweeping judgment-- which is almost certainly likely to be untenable because unless one happens to be fairly well-schooled in Judaism and Jewish theology, it is almost certainly made from ignorance.
It is natural to have feelings about something that one encounters. If one reads a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures and finds the material unpleasant, that is an inarguable emotional reaction.
However, if one stops there, and simply decides based on that that the Jewish God is evil, or that Judaism is bad, that is massively ignorant. Someone doing so has not even read the text in the original language, let alone all of the myriad attendant texts that Judaism says are absolutely necessary for correct understanding of even the simplest meanings of the Hebrew Bible. Someone doing so has also not read any of the hundreds or thousands of books of Jewish philosophy, theology, mysticism, exegetical parable, and other such products of Jewish culture to determine not only how the Bible has been read and interpreted by Jews, but how Judaism has evolved and reshaped itself over the millennia in regard to beliefs about God, and what we think God wants from us.
A poor and pale analogy would be someone who has never met a British person reading a poor to mediocre translation of Chaucer's
The Canterbury Tales in Cantonese, and presuming that a) they have understood the tales perfectly, and b) that presents an absolutely clear and accurate portrait of the English today.
Even in this thread, it is clear that people are unaware of what the meaning of elements in Jewish theology are, such as chosenness. I have seen several times a common misconception that the term "chosen people" (which is a mistranslation anyhow) is thought to indicate superiority or supremacism, as though we think that we're God's favorites. And that is not at all what it means: we have been chosen to accept additional responsibilities and duties that other peoples have not been taxed with. Nor does it indicate exclusivity: we have been chosen to be the Jewish People, those who keep the Torah. Presumably, God could and would choose other peoples for different responsibilities, with different responsibilities and duties.
It is all too clear that most are ignorant of the concept of Oral Torah, that the Written Torah that we have represents only one half of a whole, and the Oral Torah, including both oral traditions now written down, and all the scholarship that those traditions have spawned, is an absolutely integral part of Torah as a whole, and to ignore the Oral Torah is to comprehend less than half of a whole, at best. And it is equally clear that most are unaware that the Jewish tradition does not ascribe the entirety of the Hebrew Scriptures to Divine Authorship, but only the Torah (the Five Books of Moses) and perhaps not even all of that.
These concepts that are just a few of those which are vital to even a basic understanding of Judaism and Jewish theology cannot be dismissed. People cannot gloss over them and presume that they have a perfect understanding of the many things Jews have thought and do think, merely because they have read second- or third-hand information about Jews and Judaism written from a Christian perspective, and with Christian knowledge, perhaps with a spicing of excerpts of Wikipedia entries on Judaism.
What is offensive is not that people don't care for Jewish theology. Nobody is asking them to care for it. Jews do not proselytize or missionize, so if you don't like Judaism, it is quite easy to simply not be Jewish. What is offensive is that people are presuming that they know what Judaism and Jewish theology are, are in fact presuming themselves expert in those subjects, enough to publicly voice the opinion that the beliefs of an entire socioreligious ethnic group that has been around and evolving for over 3000 years are not only entirely erroneous but actually evil.
And there is still no clarity about why Jews would find this problematic enough to presume that anyone who does so might simply dislike us? Really??
If that is the case, I cannot say how dismaying that is.
