#barbarism

Nearly every sf writer who's ever toured the west coast knows Duane - he's the encyclopedically knowledgeable sf buyer for the U Washington Bookseller, who has organized some of the best sf signings in Seattle history. He's a force of nature.

He's also broke. A two-week hospital stay left him drowning in medical debt - despite being insured! - and now he's being threatened by a collection agency.

Now, Duane is forced into participating in one of the most barbaric of contemporary American rituals, fundraising to cover his medical debt. He's raised $6k of the $10k he needs (I just pitched in $100).

[We're talking about this post] Anon is attempting to claim that smashing a Lebanese Christian religious icon is somehow ethical by Jewish standards.

If Anon actually cared about Jewish ethics, they'd know "the Torah says" is almost never the end of the conversation.

Talmud exists because Torah is often vague, contradictory, or culturally specific. If we lived by explicit mandates without the centuries of debate that followed, we'd be executing people for picking up sticks on Saturday. We don't do that, because we're not barbarians.

The Sages didn't just interpret the law - they placed massive guardrails around it. They took the "mandate" to smash idols and asked:

Whose idols?

In what territory?

Under whose authority?

Does it cause more harm than good?

The obligation to destroy idols applies specifically to idols owned by Jews or idols in a sovereign Jewish land under very specific historical conditions.

I'm not a Talmudist, but even I know this:

Avodah Zarah 44b-45b and later codifications (like Maimonides, Hilchot Avodat Kochavim 7:1) restrict the obligation to destroy idols specifically to Jewish sovereign lands. Outside of those lands, there is no general obligation for a Jew to destroy someone else's religious symbols.

(Modern Israel, of course, is rightly committed to religious freedom and protecting sites and objects held sacred by the faiths of others - because those are our ethics.)

For centuries, major Jewish authorities like the Meiri have categorized Christians as "nations bound by the ways of religion," not the pagans and idolaters the Torah was talking about. The Meiri argued that the entire Talmudic framework restricting interaction with idolaters was built around a specific historical category of paganism, namely communities with no organized moral or religious order. Christians, with their structured theology, scripture, and ethics, didn't fit that category.

The idol-smashing mandate was aimed at the cult of Ba'al, not the Maronites of Beirut. When Anon invokes it today against a Lebanese statue of Jesus, they're ignoring eight centuries of Rabbinic progress in order to justify a disgusting act of vandalism and desecration.

They're dressing up something profoundly ugly in religious language - demeaning us in the process.

When you smash a statue of Jesus, you aren't doing a mitzvah - you're acting like ISIS or the Taliban.

Fundamentalism is a suicide pact for a society. Whether it’s ISIS blowing up the temples of Palmyra or the Taliban dynamiting the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the motivation is generally the belief that their worldview is too fragile to share the universe with somebody's else's sacred symbols.

They justify their desecrations with their own fundamentalism, and in doing so, they declare war on history and humanity itself.

That, it seems, is where Anon wants to drag Am Yisrael.

@#$% that. and @#$% anybody who tries to justify barbarism with false, fundamentalist sanctimony.

To justify desecrations in the name of the Torah is to ape the desecrations of those who tried to erase us - Nebuchadnezzar, Antiochus, Hadrian, and Titus.