#iconoclasm

[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.

Hochaltar, St.-Laurentius-Kirche (Lutherisch), Nürnberg, Bayern, Deutschland, 2024.

citizen action is not dismantling the police state at this time. cameras aren't being destroyed, there's twice as many today as yesterday and there will be twice as many again tomorrow.

ICE has increased the kidnappings and murder

software to trick and ultimately capture you is hot, coprorations and governments are very interested in it and funding it enthusiastically

the enclosure is tightening and mass genocide is underway, gaining steam

their solution to the problems they've created is to kill us.

“Man cannot ‘incarcerate’ the all-transcending divine glory in a finite form. For this reason, Balthasar is somewhat sympathetic towards historical iconoclasm—there is an important sense in which biblical religion has, following the second commandment, ‘rightly forbidden pictorial representations’ of God. This applies to secular art but especially to sacred or ecclesial art, including even some of the historical excesses of Byzantine iconography: as Balthasar remarks in a famous passage of Herrlichkeit, ‘we cannot say that the theological arguments proposed in favour of icons always sound very convincing.’ (Here he echoes John Calvin, who notes in the Institutes that the biblical arguments of the iconophiles are so hermeneutically suspect ‘that it is painful even to quote them.’) By the same token, Balthasar’s whole project of ‘theological aesthetics’ cannot be seen as simply a stimulus to include better, more ornate art in churches—as if beautifying sanctuaries (or the liturgy itself) with ‘statues and paintings’ would suffice to summon the immeasurable glory of God. Balthasar recognizes that there are many works of art—he lists Bach, Mozart, Rouault and Messiaen as examples —where there is an ‘authentic and pious transparency’ to the divine glory. (As Karl Barth recognized, there is a sense in which Mozart belongs to theology!) But on the whole, as Balthasar notes elsewhere, the great age of the intertwining of ‘human art and Christian revelation’ (the age of icons and basilicas) is over, and perhaps this is a blessing in disguise; we are now able to realize the great dissimilarity between earthly (especially artistic) beauty and glory which surpasses and relativizes any aesthetic similarities we can find (and overdraw) between the two.”

The Hundred Thousand Martyrs of Tbilisi

In 1227 Sultan Jalal al-Din of Khwarazm and his army of Turkmen attacked Georgia. On the first day of the battle the Georgian army valorously warded off the invaders as they were approaching Tbilisi. That night, however, a group of Persians who were living in Tbilisi secretly opened the gates and summoned the enemy army into the city.

According to one manuscript in which this most terrible day in Georgian history was described: “Words are powerless to convey the destruction that the enemy wrought: tearing infants from their mothers’ breasts, they beat their heads against the bridge, watching as their eyes dropped from their skulls.…”

A river of blood flowed through the city. The Turkmen castrated young children, raped women, and stabbed mothers to death over their children’s lifeless bodies. The whole city shuddered at the sound of wailing and lamentation. The river and streets of the city were filled with death.

The sultan ordered that the cupola of Sioni Cathedral be taken down and replaced by his vile throne. And at his command the icons of the Theotokos and our Savior were carried out of Sioni Cathedral and placed at the center of the bridge across the Mtkvari River. The invaders goaded the people to the bridge, ordering them to cross it and spit on the holy icons. Those who betrayed the Christian Faith and mocked the icons were spared their lives, while the Orthodox confessors were beheaded.

One hundred thousand Georgians sacrificed their lives to venerate the holy icons. One hundred thousand severed heads and headless bodies were carried by the bloody current down the Mtkvari River.

Been SO crazy-busy, although I recorded this Tuesday night, I'm only now getting it up.

A video that I promised to do on a somewhat recent chapter that came out, on Alexander's annihilation of the Branchidai, and what he may have thought he was doing. Discussion of religion in warfare in Greece and in the ancient near east.