here’s the thing, gentiles. there is pretty much no “critique” of judaism you can make that a jew hasn’t already made.
“circumcision is bad!!!!!!!!”
plenty of jews agree and have been wrestling with this practice for decades.
“the bible says being queer is bad!!!!!!!!!”
these verses have been torn to shreds by jews for decades if not centuries. i know dozens of queer rabbis, and most of my friends are queer jews. my rabbi has a trans kid and frequently goes to our state capitol to yell at the government for being transphobic.
“what even is the point of keeping kosher!!!!!!!!!!”
we have entire books written about this and discuss it frequently.
“but israel!!!!!!”
congrats! ur just antisemitic.
in conclusion, there is no Hot Take you as a non jew can have abt judaism and jews that hasn’t already been discussed to death by jews. your dumb one liner has already been pondered for 200 years by a bunch of nerds in kippot on a tuesday afternoon. your revolutionary opinion is old news. you are boring. make some jewish friends and learn something.
So my Jewish friend showed me the Talmud, and, not even kidding, it's like the old Tumblr nested reblogs, but in print.
Gentiles discovering Talmud like this because of the ways it’s like the internet is unironically and wholeheartedly one of my favorite intercultural things. <3
Very strongly disagree with OP. The fact that something's been discussed in depth before doesn't mean it's not a good point. Nor does it mean that you are not free to disagree with the conclusions that the people discussing it reached.
congrats on missing the point so spectacularly
OPs point is that it’s impossible for an outsider to point out something that the people in the community (in this case, Jews) haven’t already discussed or noticed. Because guess what: the people in the community are aware of themselves and their ideals and their flaws. A goy just learning about Judaism for the first time isn’t going to be able to point something out that Jews don’t already know and haven’t already had discussions about.
OP is not saying that you cannot rehash discussions and topics. However, to be able to discuss those things and not be a fool about it you have to know what your talking about deeply, and in the case of Judaism, it’s hard to do that if you’re not in it without years upon years of study, in my opinion. Because without that study you don’t see the nuance, you don’t see the difference of opinion between minhagim, you don’t see the setting specific reasons for various opinions (there are very good reasons why there are different rules of kosher for Passover re: rice, for example, based on the location of the minhag having the conversation) among other things that you aren’t going to see much less understand if you are just learning about it.
If you have not done the work to learn about it, or have not grown up in it, it’s hard to rehash a conversation without making a fool of yourself.
Also: Jewish intracommunity discussions about our own laws and customs is not a debate open to goyim. Because (1) goyim are not Jews, and (2) we don’t care what your opinion on them is.
To keep with the Tumblr comparison, imagine looking at a screenshot of the OP of a 500K note post from 2008 without bothering to read any of the other comments, reblogs, or tags in subsequent years, and trying to say something authoritative about all of the people in that conversation based on the original note — also without any regard for the context of that original note which also was responding to something.
That would be absolutely ridiculous and arrogant.
But many people, usually cultural Christians, are willing to do exactly that with a religious tradition thousands of years old with much, much more internal and external conversation than half a million Tumblr notes.
Because supersessionism endures inside Christian atheism.
