I Am Not Bob

Operation Solomon • Jewish Museum London

Ethiopian Jews being airlifted from Addis Ababa to Israel on May 24, 1991, as part of Operation Solomon. This covert operation involved 34 jumbo jets of the Israeli air force, hundreds of soldiers and the evacuation of 14,200 Jews. It was prompted by the worsening political situation in Ethiopia under the government of Mengistu Haile Mariam.

A Jewish community was first established in Ethiopia sometime after the destruction of the First Temple in around 587 BCE. The origin of the Ethiopian Jews is unclear though most believe that they are the descendants of King Solomon and Queen Sheba. Throughout its history, the community has been referred to by numerous names like ‘’Falasha’’ which means ‘’stranger’’ which shows how their Christian neighbours viewed them as strangers in their land and ‘’Beta Israel’’ which literally means ‘’house of Israel’’. This name shows the community’s own deep connection to the Torah and their faith.

Declining birth rates means fewer young to support the social safety nets of the olds (think Social Security and Medicare), not to mention the squeeze on elderly support and healthcare workers. Now you may be thinking, "Fuck the Boomers and Gen X'ers. They made this world, and now they have to live in it. Ha ha."

My dear, sweet children, the next 40 years are going to go by real fast, and you will be the old, and Social Security and Medicare will be bankrupt, and you will have no savings because you have to spend your paycheck to keep up with bills, and you will have no home equity because you will never be able to afford to buy a home.

By then, I'll be long gone. But see, I'm sitting on a fat IRA plus a couple of metric fucktons of equity in the house I bought in 2007, when I sold the apartment I had bought in 1994, which in turn had been half funded by my Greatest Generation father from his share of his immigrant parents' house.

The Jewish people have spent thousands of years asking to be left alone. And some of y'all are more determined than ever to not leave us alone. It’s not that we haven’t heard the word. We’ve heard what you have to say. We’ve studied our scriptures and interpretations and YOUR scriptures and interpretations, and we have come to the solid conclusion that we are not interested in Jesus. Thanks, but no thanks. This decision is final. I am personally so certain about this, in fact, that even if I accept the Xtian premise that I am betting my experience of eternity on this, I will take that bet.

On top of everything else, everything about my culture and my history and my people that I would have to give up (because, yes, these things are inextricably linked to Judaism), I, like many Jews, do not accept the most fundamental basic tenet of Xtianity. This is non-negotiable. Please leave the Jews alone.

Anyone feel like sharing exactly what the Torah has to say about the messiah and explaining why Jews reject Jesus’s claims of messiah-hood?

And if, as the comments say, Jesus wasn’t even a proper Jew, how are his abilities explained? There are plenty of accounts of him preforming miracles. If those weren’t done by divine will, what were they? An incredible string of coincidences? An elaborate con? Witchcraft?

It is amazing what you can back-fill prophecy-wise if you willfully mistranslate everything you read.

One of the most classic things that Christians cite to regarding the messiah is this particular verse in Isaiah:

Assuredly, my Lord will give you a sign of His own accord! Look, the young woman is with child and about to give birth to a son. Let her name him Immanuel [lit. “Let her name him With-us-is-God”]. By the time he learns to reject the bad and choose the good, people will be feeding on curds and honey.

Seems like a pretty clear proclamation about the very immediate political circumstances of the time that it was written in, right? There is a woman (we don’t know who), and she’s already pregnant, and her son will be a symbol of the fact that God is with us, and by the time that son is old enough to understand morality, (ie. within a few years from the prophecy, which was given in ~800 BCE) the Ephraimite-Syrian coalition will be destroyed, and the Nation of Israel will be restored to its former agricultural glory (ie. “feeding on curd and honey”).

Except for some reason, the King James Bible translates this line:

Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good.

…Hmm. 

Well, yeah, sure – it sounds a lot like Jesus once you remove all of the clear references to the historical events it was actually about, and once you add in a reference to a virgin birth and the boy “refusing to know evil”. 

Like, imagine if some activist today stood on the US-Mexican border and told a notable political figure, “By the time the pandemic is cured, we will have a new administration, and we will all be ready to dismantle the walls that have been put up between us.” 

Now imagine that three-thousand years from now, that quote gets translated into whatever language we’re all speaking by then, and its translated to read:

The sick will be cured miraculously. A new king shall arise in this land, and behold! He shall demolish the siege-tower between us.

And imagine that those same translators are arguing that this line was actually a prophecy about how in the year 2800, a messianic figure would lay hands on a woman and cure her cancer, and then go on to demolish a siege-tower with prayer alone (which they say we know that he did, because in the year 2900, many decades after his death, some of his followers wrote that he did that, and we just all think that they’re really trustworthy, I guess).

And now imagine that there are people who still speak English, and have been speaking it since 2020, and have the newspaper clippings about the actual historical event. And what’s more, these English-speakers really respect that activist because of the other things he wrote about, such as criminal justice reform and ending homelessness. Except, whenever they try to talk to other English-speakers about how this activist was really pretty awesome, but not because he prophesied a messiah (which he very clearly didn’t), but because he stood against injustice and advocated for governmental reforms, a bunch of non-English-speaking cultists barge into the room and demand that they convert to a non-English-speaking religion.

“Don’t you see how this speech proves that we have the only correct religion?” the cultists demand.

“No, it doesn’t?” the English speakers say. “We literally have the receipts. He was talking about Trump and the Border Wall.”

“Well then why would he have foretold the Miraculous Cure?!?” the cultists yell back. “Have you even read your own texts? They are clearly prophesies of the coming of the Lord Nargarth the Merciful!”

“But we don’t care about Nargarth the Merciful!” the English speakers say. “We barely even know who he is, and the historical evidence for the things you claim he did is vanishingly slim. There was an actual historical figure named Trump, and he wanted to build a xenophobic border wall, and this line was clearly referring to the global pandemic which was happening at the same time as he was in office. There are English-language historians and literary critics who have been writing about this political speech for centuries. It has nothing to do with your cancer-curing story, or with this Nargarth guy!”

“HOW DARE YOU DENY THE EVIDENCE OF THE MIRACULOUS CURE! WHICH IS IN YOUR OWN TEXTS, NO LESS!” the cultists scream. “BURN THE ENGLISH-SPEAKERS, FOR THEY WORSHIP A GOD THAT IS NOT NARGARTH!”

*cue several hundred years of genocide*

…So, yeah.

To be blunt about it: As far as we Jews are concerned, Jesus didn’t fulfill any prophesies, and most of the prophesies that Christians cite? We literally don’t even think that they were prophesies in the Christian sense at all. Most of them were just poetry, or political calls to action, or literary descriptions of current events that were meant to encourage people to act better and resist oppression – and they may very well have been inspired by the divine, but even if so, they were in no way cliffhangers than Hashem planned to fill in or “complete” centuries later.

The Jewish view on supposed miracles that Jesus performed is, in a word, “citation needed”

One thing people need to remember is that we have no surviving manuscripts of the New Testament from early than around 200 CE, and even assuming that the text is older than that, most scholars agree that no portion of it was composed before ~50 CE, and most of it probably wasn’t composed until at least 100 CE. None of the New Testament is contemporaneous with the life of Jesus (if we take Jesus as a real historical figure). This was people writing about him a generation or more after his death.

So, what do Jews think about Jesus curing blindness, or turning water into wine? Well basically, we think that it’s very concerning that people who could not possibly have been eyewitnesses to those events nonetheless confidently recorded them and passed them off as absolute truth. And this is especially concerning because our own texts, the Tanakh, actually warn us in quite explicit terms against believing in the acts of supposed miracle-workers – any claimed miracle from after the codification of the Tanakh is already pretty religiously suspect to us, and claimed miracles where our only account is second-hand, and by people who were actively engaged in serious apostasy during the time that they were writing things down is more than suspect. Our baseline assumption is that these accounts are literally false and were being peddled, at least in part, by people who had a vested interest in misleading others in this specific way… but if we’re being especially generous, we might go so far as to concede that some of them may have been simply exaggerated tall-tales rather than intentional falsehoods.

The stories may or may not have merit. My own, personal view of Jesus is that the words he said/were put in his mouth in many cases were kind, decent and thoughtful. So to my mind, the biblical Jesus was a rabbi, a teacher. Would that more of his followers actually listened to and practiced those teachings.

Religion is a tool, like a hammer. It is neither good nor evil, which depends entirely on how you use it. I have a really simple way to evaluate your religion. If your religion teaches you to be kind and decent, and to accept people who are different from you as being worthy of equal dignity and respect as you and the people like you are, then your religion is awesome, and I endorse it 100%. I don't care if it's based on Jesus or the Flying Spaghetti Monster -- if you do unto others as you would have done unto you AND refrain from doing unto others what you would NOT have done unto you, I support you and your religion.

On the other hand, if your religion teaches you to hate people who are or believe differently than you, that they are not as worthy of freedom, peace and life as you and your co-religionists, then you are an evil piece of shit, and I truly hope you die soon, because your absence from this world will make it a better place.

The plot:

Bobbie: The sex might kill me, but what a way to go!

Camina: The sex probably would kill me, but what a way to go!

Chrisjen: She might have me killed after the sex, but what a way to go!

For once I'm not actually doing a bit; those "any resemblance to real persons living or dead" disclaimers genuinely exist because of Rasputin.