steve7150 wrote:
You can see that a person's heart should be involved with obedience but i think one can mechanically follow these 9 commandments,
But a person who follows commandments mechanically is not
following them to their ultimate fulfillment. Perhaps you are acquainted with the concept of
kavannah?
And I suppose you might admit that every Christian principle can be
followed in half-measures by persons who don't understand better, or who don't attempt to do better.
steve7150 wrote:
so you claim that i see it through Christian eyes and i could say that you are presenting this in the best light of judaism and maybe both views have validity.
Your Christian tradition may have predisposed you to view Judaism in a worse light. It is very common for Christians to caricature and bad-mouth Jewish religion. Many will mock and belittle the commandments of the Torah - with some even going so far as to imagine that these commandments are not the word of G-d. But if one holds to a mainstream Christian view, then one will accept (however grudgingly) these commandments as the word of G-d himself.
And if the Christian bible is to be believed, these commandments were the G-d-given paradigm for Israel's faithful relationship with G-d. For centuries, people would have lived their entire lives with this paradigm as their way for experiencing and interrelating with G-d.
Real people. Real lives. Would G-d have given these people
drek to live by, and to experience him by, and to interrelate with him by?
Many Christians do not mentally treat the ancient Israelites and Jews as real people. Instead, these figures are abstractualized: characters in a sacred drama; pawns on a theological stage; and/or impoverished denizens of the past, humanized no more than the other faceless masses in history, who languished in such-and-such an obscure circumstance, and had stuff happen to them on this-or-that faded date. With the exception of phenomenal individuals like David, ancient Israelites and Jews do not mentally register as persons with the same dignity and full-blooded humanity as present-day believers.
But these persons were fully, vitally human. And presumably their souls were no less dear to G-d than those of heartland Baptists or of hipster house-churchers. Presumably, G-d wanted to dignify their lives, to spare them from degradation, to liberate them from falsehood, to be personally intimate with them, to lead them into true life. Nahshon the son of Amminadab. Bani the Gadite. Seraiah the son of Azariah.
Real people. Real souls. Real lives.
Many Christians would imagine that G-d threw these people under the bus. He gave them burdens that they could not bear, substandard morals, and empty rituals that held no meaning except to point cryptically to a figure whom they never would meet in this lifetime, and whom they scarcely would imagine. And he let them toil and stumble in the shadows – generation after generation, untold numbers of lives from cradle to grave. A sad spiritual poverty, but eventually their pathetic existences could be cherry-picked by Christians for object lessons and flannel-graphs.
Whether in whole or in part, this is the sort of sense that many Christians make of Israelite and Jewish religion – a sense that revolves around Christian mythos and redounds to the aggrandizement of Christian religion. It is also a sense held by persons who (in all but an infinitesimal number of cases) have had no personal experience of a life that is immersed in Torah. These persons have never slept in a
sukkah or taken up
tzitzit. They have never humbled their souls in the context of Yom Kippur, nor have they dwelt within the bounded rhythms of
shabbath or conjugal abstinence. When it comes to jurisprudence, business conduct, and family life, they have never inhabited the holistic paradigm of Torah for these matters – though they may have selectively drawn upon it, and/or conveniently proof-texted from it.
These Christians lack a real understanding of Judaism; they just have a mishmash of inklings and impressions – including many that come second-hand from sources antagonistic toward Jewish religion.
So I have little esteem for most Christian eyes on Jewish religion. Those eyes tend to be handicapped by substantial ignorance and parochial narcissism – a combination that does not recommend itself for reliable or respectable judgment.