The Talmud: Just a series of debates?

The Babylonian Talmud: Just a series of debates?

By Michael Hoffman

Our enemies and detractors among the rabbis and their allies insult the intelligence of the uninformed by deceitfully claiming that Hoffman’s "Talmud quotes only reflect a series of debates between rabbis," rather than serving as a law-making function within Judaism. 

In the course of attempting to forge a connection between the U.S. Constitution and the Babylonian Talmud which Thomas Jefferson mocked and despised, Benjamin Wittes of the “conservative” Brookings Institute writes the following nonsense:

"The Talmud is a series of debates—and commentaries on those debates—on a text called the Mishnah.” 

The concept of a multiplicity of interpretations is not something we deny. Orthodox Judaism is a situation-ethics religion whose disposable “morality" has a shelf life according to the zeitgeist, as for example, Rambam’s injunctions on killing gentiles, heretics and Christians, depends on whether Judaics are in the ascendant in a particular era, or not. 

Judaism’s situation ethics revolve around relatively few fixed, non-negotiable sacred dogmas, such as the superiority of the “Jew,” the inferiority of the gentile, the filthiness of the female menstruant, the evil of Jesus Christ and His Mother, etc.

Rabbinic law, the halacha, is derived first from the Mishnah, then from the Gemara, and then from successor texts having canonical status. How this halacha comes to be formed and exert authority is a matter of exegetical rules pertaining to hermeneutic and epistemological boundaries and determinations which do not derogate any portion of the Talmud Bavli (Babylonian Talmud). Almost all of the Talmud Bavli at one time or another can be valid and authoritative, depending on the circumstances of the time.

In Erubin 13b we observe that the school of Hillel and the school of Shammai differed. These schools are depicted as disputing for three years over whose ruling constitutes the halacha. In this case, even though it was subsequently determined that the halacha was according to Hillel, it is written that both Shammai and Hillel represent the words of the living God. [Cf.  Bar-Ilan University Prof. Avi Sagi, “Both are the Words of the Living God: A Typological Analysis of Halakhic Pluralism,” in Hebrew Union College Annual no. 65 (1995). Also cf. Prof. William “Zev" Kolbrenner, “Chiseled from All Sides: Hermeneutics and Dispute in Rabbinic Judaism,” Association for Jewish Studies Review, no. 28 (2004)].

Since both schools of rabbinic thought represent the word of God according to the authentic teaching of Orthodox Judaism, both represent the Torah sheBeal peh, the Oral “Torah" of the ancient Pharisees embodied by “Chazal," the Phraisaic and Talmudic “sages” who concocted the halacha. 

Viewed within the perspective of the rabbinic hermeneutic — which is so often denied in public — the exchanges between competing rabbinic views within the Talmud Bavli are 1. the basis of rabbinic law (halacha) and 2. have authority and validity even when in certain historical periods another view predominates. 

Therefore, when our opponents claim that the racist, demonic, anti-Christian, misogynist and insane statements from the Talmud should be dismissed as the mere flotsam of banal debates, they are lying, in the flagrant and familiar pattern that has come to be known as chutzpah. 

Hoffman is the author of Judaism Discovered and Judaism’s Strange Gods. This study is excerpted from his blog, The Truth About the Talmud: Judaism’s Holiest Book

***

On the Contrary blog is reader-funded. It comes to you today thanks to donations from truth-seekers, and the sale of Michael Hoffman's books, newsletters and recordings. Join other truth-seekers in giving something back for that which you have received, thereby helping to ensure the continuation of this service.

On the Contrary is a service of Independent History and Research • Box 849  

Coeur d'Alene, Idaho 83816 USA 

Donations |  Bookstore

***

Read More

"Nazarene Judaism” rebrands Jesus Christ according to their counterfeit gospel

by Michael Hoffman

www.revisionisthistory.org

Re: "Orthodox Jewish Scholar's Profound Words about Yeshua  

Nazarene Space"

 Nazarene Judaism blog:
 http://nazarenespace.com/profiles/blog/show?id=2182335:BlogPost:204813&xgs=1&xg_source=msg_share_post

This current move is a cunning strategy. I have also seen it in the pagan New Age movement where "the Christ" is embraced as a divine part of a "lineage" that includes Buddha and the Dalai Lama.

Lorraine Boettner predicted this circa 1957: they will have their Talmudic paganism and new-found ‘reverence' for Jesus (the semi-divine good man).

Our Lord Himself said: "So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth" (Rev. 3:16).

Here is a nonsensical statement from this Nazarene Judaism blog:

Have the Jews really rejected Yeshua?  The only "Jesus" that most Jewish people have ever been exposed to is the "Jesus" that supposedly came to "free them from the bondage of the Law". Yes, they have rejected this Torahless Jesus, and rightly so. But most of them have never been exposed to the real Yeshua. (End quote).

Jesus didn't free anyone from the Torah of Yahweh. True. He freed them from the spurious "Torah sheBeal Peh" of the man-made traditions of Babylon as encoded in the Mishnah, Gemara, Mishneh Torah, Shulchan Aruch, Tanya, Zohar etc. ad nauseum.

Notice that the "Nazarene Space" blog states that they will have their own New Testament, it will not be in Greek, but the "original  languages" of Hebrew and Aramaic. Really, the New Testament was first written in Hebrew and Aramaic? Textual falsification is key to gnostic diabolism and rabbinic diabolism.

Another statement from the blog, this one dripping in racial conceit and megalomania: "The Jewish people know that an anti-Torah Messiah is no Messiah at all, they know better than to accept the rank paganism attached to Gentile Christianity."

"The Jewish people know." Observe the self-worship and the insinuation of a collective racial wisdom. Notice that "gentile Christianity" is said to be pagan with the implication that a "Jewish Christianity" will be strictly in accordance with God's Word.

This kind of buncombe is an insult to the intelligence of anyone who knows anything fundamental about Orthodox Judaism's deep paganism, beginning with self-worship, and from there to astrology, amulets, curses, the evil eye, reincarnation and the idolization of the rebbe as wonder-worker. What of the money paid by devout Judaics for people to daven (pray) at the tombs of various rabbis considered wonder workers? What of the fellatio of the child by the mohel in the Hasidic bris? What of the overwhelming superstition endemic to Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidism (and every other Hasidism)?

Orthodox Judaism in its Talmud is the religion of the soothsayers of Babylon. Read Judaism Discovered; Judaism's Strange Gods and our forthcoming book, Testing the Talmud.

The Talmud Bavli is the blueprint of bureaucracy. The Talmud is anti-Jewish because it imposes tyrannical micro-management of Judaic daily life. Jesus came to free the Jews from dead rituals prescribed by men to enslave people to the cult of man. The Torah of Jesus is found in the New Testament's fulfillment of the Old Testament. Rabbinic Judaism's ersatz “Torah" is found, to give but one instance, in the dictatorial, trivial, legalistic, mind-numbing Shabbos (Sabbath) observance concocted by Pharisees and their rabbinic heirs. Here is the letter of the halacha that kills the human spirit:

http://www.nergavriel.org/uploads/תורה%20הקדושה/הלכה%20ברורה/HB0017%20-%20Opening%20Bottles%20and%20Food%20Packages%20on%20Shabbos.pdf

Gentile Christianity, so execrated by "Nazarene Judaism," rightly fled from this template of dictatorship, out of which sprang Bolshevik Leninism and many other destructive bureaucracies.

The "Nazarene Judaism" blog quotes Judaic Prof. Daniel Boyarin as follows: "Christology, or the early ideas about Christ, is also a Jewish discourse and not–until much later–an anti-Jewish discourse at all."

Jesus, Mary and the apostles were all Jews, so where is the anti-Jewish discourse? To the extent that first century Jews rejected the clear evidence that Jesus was the Moshiach (Messiah-Christ of Israel), they bore guilt for His crucifixion. The generations bearing that guilt are long dead, having largely perished in the Roman assaults on Jerusalem in 70 and 135 A.D.  Today the guilt for denying the doctrine and resurrection of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, is endemic not to people but to ideology, wherein is counseled rebellion against God; more specifically, in the continuation of the wicked ideology of the Pharisees, in the form of contemporary Orthodox Judaism. 

The race-obsessed Talmudists insist on imposing their ethnic, warping prism on the religion of the New Testament and calling it "Nazarene Judaism." They even claim that Christ kept kosher! Do they mean by this that He kept his meat and dairy products separate according to the crazed fulminations of the Talmudic Chazal? See if you can find anything in favor of the insane halachos of  kashrut in I Timothy 4: 1-8. These "Nazarene" Judaics must derogate or falsify the Apostle Paul in order to proceed with their counterfeit gospel. 

"The Spirit has explicitly said that during the last times there will be some who will desert the faith and choose to listen to deceitful spirits and doctrines that come from devils."

Beware.

***

Read More

At Christmas the Pope invokes the Grand Rabbi

The wages of situation ethics

Post-Renaissance Church of Usury continues its Union with the Synagogue of the Talmud

By Michael Hoffman

www.revisionisthistory.org 

In his 2012 Christmas address to the Roman curia, Pope Benedict XVI invoked Gilles Bernheim, the Grand Rabbi of France, as a valiant defender of family values. The pope declared:

"The Chief Rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, has shown in a very detailed and profoundly moving study that the attack we are currently experiencing on the true structure of the family, made up of father, mother, and child, goes much deeper. While up to now we regarded a false understanding of the nature of human freedom as one cause of the crisis of the family, it is now becoming clear that the very notion of being – of what being human really means – is being called into question. He quotes the famous saying of Simone de Beauvoir: “one is not born a woman, one becomes so” (on ne na?t pas femme, on le devient). These words lay the foundation for what is put forward today under the term 'gender' as a new philosophy of sexuality. According to this philosophy, sex is no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society."

But does the Grand Rabbi and his Talmudic Judaism represent the eternal verities to which the pope must ultimately appeal? Certainly not! Judaism is a fount of nullification and revolutionary overthrow of God's law in favor of man's law and situation ethics. The pope builds on sand when he builds on the words of Grand Rabbi Gilles Bernheim.

"As the well-known Talmudic story of Akhnai’s oven illustrates, halacha – Jewish religious law – is not made in heaven. It is created by human beings. This freedom when it comes to the law is not merely legal. The earlier rabbis developed an ideological and legal system that allowed them to construct a religion that would adapt to a changing situation and take an active role in improving it. For all practical purposes, rabbinical discourse offers us a radical reading of the very idea of 'law.' The law does not present an objective situation that exists in the world.” --Ron Naiweld and Yaara Alon.

Look at the effects of papal situation ethics, which entered the Church at the dawn of the Renaissance with nominalism, the financial chicanery of Medici Florence and its pope of usury, Leo X. Situation ethics have ever since bedeviled the papacy. Observe the shabby strategy of the current pontiff: he imagines that he is going to advance the cause of the sanctity of marriage by cleverly invoking a grand rabbi as his ally in the fight, thereby supposedly blunting media criticism and advancing the family values' cause.

The True Catholic Church as it existed for nearly 1500 years prior to the Renaissance would have condemned Benedict XVI for using an antichrist rabbi to "defend" marriage and morality.

The Grand Rabbi of France believes, according to his Talmud Bavli, that Jesus Christ was an idolater and magician who deserved death. His holiest book, the Talmud, declares Christ's Blessed Mother Mary to be a harlot. None of these abominations deter Pope Benedict XVI from declaring a grand rabbi a defender of family values!

 Jesus and Mary are two-thirds of what was formerly known in Christendom as the "Holy Family" (St. Joseph, the foster-father of Jesus, being the third). How can they be cast aside — as they are when the pope praises a representative of a religion that slimes them -- in any battle for the family that God would bless? Does Pope Benedict imagine that God will approve an alchemical union of good and evil in the struggle for good? Or could it be that Benedict is not seeking God's blessing, but that of the world?

Moreover, as an Orthodox Judaic and high religious figure of authority, Grand Rabbi Bernheim imposes the ungodly halachos of Niddah (rabbinic menstrual laws) on women. These are derived not from the Old Testament, but from Chazal (the corpus of rabbinic situation ethics). The halachos of Niddah constitute one of the most oppressive and misogynist collections of psychopathic regulations for human behavior in the history of mankind (cf. pp. 729-748 in Judaism Discovered). As such, the halachos of Niddah  in their very essence, are a corruption of family values.

The apostle Paul taught: "Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial?" (2 Cor. 6: 13-15).

This pope is, at best, profoundly confused. If he wanted to be ecumenical he could have found an articulate opponent of homosexuality among the top imams of Islam, but he would not invoke them because quoting the admonitions of Muslim clerics will win him no accoloades in the western media. What is more, at this time Islam is seen as particularly alien to Christendom, whereas the message from the western media and the Vatican is that the adherents of Talmudism are our “elder brothers in the Faith."

The pope seeks to achieve the goal of upholding marriage and the dignity of men and women not through reliance on God's grace, but upon the glamor and prestige of a Christ-denying, Mary-hating, Talmudic Grand Rabbi, with whom the pope is unequally yoked. This cynical papal ploy will represent, in the double-minds of those who are perennial losers in the war for morality, a great victory.

The infernal union of the post-Renaissance Church of usury with the synagogue of the Talmud continues apace.

***

Michael Hoffman’s latest book is Usury in Christendom: The Mortal Sin that Was and Now is Not.

***

Read More

The New York Times retails a Talmud hoax - again

The Hoax Begins: poignant scene from "Schindler's List" as grateful survivors of "The Holocaust" present Oskar Schindler with a brass ring containing a phony Talmud inscription.

By Michael Hoffman

We found the latest installment of this perennial media hoax (see here [NY Times again] and here [Yad Vashem Holocaust museum official] for past instances, among a profusion), published on the website of the New York Times, despite the fact that it is marked "International Herald Tribune" (which is owned by the New York Times Company):

This hoax was first fueled by Steven Spielberg in his movie "Schindler’s List," where it was given credibility, both as dialogue in the movie itself and as the film’s motto, reproduced on countless posters that probably still adorn schoolrooms to this day.

As readers of Judaism Discovered (pp. 526-528) know, this is supposed to be a quote from Talmud tractate Sanhedrin 37a, but the Talmud contains no such humanistic, universalist statement. The uncensored Babylonian Talmud is concerned only with the welfare of fully human beings, i.e. those described in its text as “Jews.” The actual Talmud text reads: “Whoever saves a single life in Israel, Scripture regards him as if he had saved the entire world” (emphasis supplied).

What is most instructive about this hoax is the extent to which the corporate media are sublimely indifferent to correcting the fraud they peddle. This writer has sent numerous letters of correction to editors, including of the New York Times, alerting them to the truth. But since the falsified quotation fosters the propaganda image which the corporate media seek to propagate concerning Orthodox Judaism’s holiest book, they obstinately refuse to let something as insignificant as mere facts get in the way of their Talmudic PR campaign.

Another contributing factor: no influential person has stood up to offer a challenge to this hoax. I think it’s safe to say that any reasonably literate person who reads the section in Judaism Discovered debunking this deception and then performs a corroborative search in the Steinsaltz Talmud (Random House), can fail to appreciate that the phrase ascribed to the Talmud in this letter reproduced above (and a thousand other regurgitations published and showcased in media around the world since 1993), is a big lie which functions as an effective advertising gimmick for the Talmud -- depicting it as a warm, fuzzy book of universal love and concern for all. What a joke.

Will anything ever be done about this? Or will the macabre joke continue to roll merrily along in the media, unchallenged, as it has for eighteen years, since “Schindler’s List” premiered?

What kind of comment is it on human nature, worthy of the bitterest satire of Mark Twain, that people mindlessly believe and endlessly parrot a statement from a Hollywood movie without any form of corroboration, and do so with the kind of insufferable self-righteousness that is the mark of this brand of "Holocaust" hype?

***

Michael Hoffman's research and writing are entirely reader-funded.

Buy a book or newsletter or send a donation today.

***

"Gold-plated brass ring with Hebrew inscription from Schindler’s List, presented to Liam Neeson as 'Oskar Schindler' (Universal, 1993) Brass ring with Hebrew inscription in the inside edge, taken from the Talmud, which translated reads 'He who saves one life, saves the whole world.' This ring was presented to Liam Neeson’s character at the end of the film by all of the grateful Jewish workers he had saved from certain death at the hands of the Nazis. Fashioned from gold taken from one of his worker’s teeth, it’s after Schindler receives this ring that he breaks down, remorseful that he did not sell every one of his worldly possessions to save more Jews. An important and highly symbolic piece from the most poignant moment of the film. From the personal collection of Batia Grafka, the film’s prop master...”

***

Read More