Many of the injunctions in the Torah appear immoral from a human perspective. God commands us to kill innocents and allows us to take advantage of (exploit) those who are dependent on us for their safety and well-being. Deuteronomy 13:13 commands us to indiscriminately kill all the inhabitants of a condemned city, regardless of their individual culpability…

ed note–and as we like to say, buckle up and prepare yourselves for a very bumpy yet enlightening ride, ladies and Gentile-men.

Imagine for a moment that a house is being built, which obviously requires strict and accurate measurements for things. Imagine that the tape measure being used is one where the feet, inches, and all the subdivisions of inches are randomly marked and where there is no fixed standard. Imagine as well the level that is used in making sure the floor and walls are built in perfectly horizontal and vertical fashions as they are supposed to be is not set in the proper 90 degree angle that is required.

The house–assuming it could be built at all–would be absolute chaos with nothing meeting up properly, nothing being level, squared, or stable. It would be a monstrosity to view from the outside and a nightmare to live in.

Welcome to the world of Judaism and everywhere that this chaotic moral tape measure has had any influence whatsoever.

Our unesteemed Rabbi makes several issues Kristol clear–

1. That indeed, as we point out here regularly, that it is the Torah (Old Testament) that serves as the starting point for all Judaic belief and behavior, and

2. That within that Torah (Old Testament) are the commandments from this ‘higher power’ that his ‘chosen people’ engage in murder of innocents and in general behave in ways that are considered criminal and barbaric by every other moral tape measure that has existed throughout human history, to wit–

‘God commands us to kill innocents and allows us to take advantage of (exploit) those who are dependent on us for their safety and well-being. Deuteronomy 13:13 commands us to indiscriminately kill all the inhabitants of a condemned city, regardless of their individual culpability. Exodus 21:7 tells us that a father has the right to sell his daughter as a maidservant.’

Read then how our unesteemed Rabbi rationalizes all of this, using what is the typically Judaic mental process of confusing and clouding what is otherwise a very CLEAR case of evil, to wit–

‘It is not that God is better than we are. It is actually the other way around: God is God because God is not us. God transcends humanity. Human attributes are not attributable to God. God is neither kind nor mean, neither harsh nor forgiving, and — as regards our dilemma — neither moral nor immoral. God is amoral.’

As well as–

‘When we read stories that to the human eye seem immoral, we are using the wrong metric by inappropriately applying human criteria to evaluate divine behavior.’

Is it any wonder then why there was/is/always will be such a visceral reaction to/rejection of Jesus Christ and His teachings when His position was/is/always will be–

‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’?

The bottom line is as follows–

The history of the adverse effects of Judaic ‘morals’ upon human behavior is beyond dispute. Everywhere and everywhen  this destructive cult mindset has gone, it has acted as an acid of sorts in dissolving and breaking down what have been/are the basic moral tenets of those peoples where it has ensconced itself. When you are dealing with a people who believe in a ‘god’ who one minute says ‘thou shall not murder’ and then in the next minute tells his ‘chosen’ people to go and slaughter every living thing in sight, the result is a form of religious/spiritual schizophrenia where there are no absolutes. In Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and just about every other ‘ism’ there is (minus Judaism, of course) there are indeed absolutes–Murdering innocent persons is wrong. Stealing is wrong. Lying is wrong. Defrauding is wrong. Rape, pillage, despoiling, etc, are wrong.

Within Judaism however, it is all a question mark, the deciding factor of which is whether or not such ‘thou shalt nots’ benefit the ‘chosen’ or hinder them from enriching and empowering themselves. Every patriarch/matriarch as featured in the Torah/Old Testament was a gangster and warlord of sorts who–by the very words printed in black lettering on white paper describing them–engaged in every act of imaginable criminal behavior known to be such by any civilizational standard, including murder, rape, prostitution, sex slavery, human trafficking, theft, chicanery, fraud, etc, etc, etc.

Within such a paradigm therefore, is it any wonder why we today see the followers of this type of spiritual schizophrenia cheering at the murder of innocents in Gaza–

When indeed, their ‘religion’ commands such a thing be done?

In the final analysis, what we are left to conclude is that there is no substantive difference between a religion such as that followed by the Jews that adheres itself to a god that commands and condones criminal, evil behavior and those barbaric religions of Meso-America (and elsewhere) that engaged in the very same practice and for the very same reasons–appeasing a violent god so that the worshipers of this ‘god’ will in some manner be rewarded.

The one difference is that the followers of those barbaric religions of the past indeed faded into the past, whereas today,

They possess several hundred nuclear weapons which they believe were gifted to them by their ‘god’ for ‘purifying’ the world and making it ‘Jooish’.

Rabbi Ysoscher Katz for My Jewish Learning dot com

Is the Torah immoral?

It is a perennial question almost every Jewish educator confronts this time of year, when Jews the world over restart the annual cycle of Torah study. A mere four weeks into the cycle, we read about our forefather Abraham, a paragon of kindness, being told by God to acquiesce to the demands of our matriarch Sara and banish his other wife and that woman’s firstborn child. Immediately thereafter we encounter God’s request of Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac.

These stories are not exceptional, but instead set the stage for a general idealogical thrust whereby morality does not always seem to be God’s metric for evaluating the legitimacy of God’s own demands. Conscientious readers, as a result, are horrified. How could a kind and loving God make such cruel demands of people? Where is God’s morality?

These questions grate on the contemporary reader’s conscience, but the discomfort these troubling stories generate is predicated on a paradigmatic fallacy.

To assume that any biblical story showcases God’s immorality is wrong. To expect divine adherence to our moral standards assumes that God is the best kind of human possible, by a factor of infinity. God is us, magnified. If moral perfection is a prerequisite for human greatness, then God, all the more so, needs to conform to the highest (human) moral code.

But that is incorrect. The reason God is God is not that God is better than we are. It is actually the other way around: God is God because God is not us. God transcends humanity. Human attributes are not attributable to God. God is neither kind nor mean, neither harsh nor forgiving, and — as regards our dilemma — neither moral nor immoral. God is amoral.

When we read stories that to the human eye seem immoral, we are using the wrong metric by inappropriately applying human criteria to evaluate divine behavior. God is beyond those categories. The demands made by God on human beings may appear capricious from a human perspective, but they are not immoral.

But what of the rest of the Torah, where the do’s and don’ts are spelled out? There too the reader encounters what seem to be divine obliviousness to contemporary moral standards. The examples cited above happened in the past and don’t make any demands on our behavior. But what of demands to do things which from a human perspective are immoral?

God commands us to kill innocents and allows us to take advantage of those who are dependent on us for their safety and well-being. Deuteronomy 13:13 commands us to indiscriminately kill all the inhabitants of a condemned city, regardless of their individual culpability. Exodus 21:7 tells us that a father has the right to sell his daughter as a maidservant.

Here the challenge is far more difficult. We are no longer evaluating God’s own morality. These are instances where humans are entitled or even enjoined to act immorally.

For those committed to Orthodox belief, our response is necessarily limited. These commandments cannot be excised from the text or assumed to have been inserted by anyone other than God.

One solution is to circumvent the problem, rather than solve it.

While these commandments indeed are problematic in the abstract, historical circumstances have conspired to render most of them immaterial. As such, they no longer have the power to make ethical demands on our conscience. Their applicability disappeared when we lost sovereignty and, as a result, have now been extracted from our religious purview. It is as if they do not exist. History eliminated their relevance, perhaps permanently. Presumably, even with the restoration of full Jewish sovereignty, those troubling laws will not be reactivated.

Such a claim, of course, is predicated on a metaphysics which believes that God operates in history. The historical events which caused the suspension of the “immoral” commandments therefore are not a fluke or accident, the divine hand played a role in them. One can perhaps assume that their elimination occurred with God’s acquiescence.

This is hardly the only solution to these perplexing questions, nor is it predicated on a universal understanding of Jewish beliefs. But it is one legitimate approach that can help the contemporary reader reconcile some of the overwhelming conflicts between our deeply held beliefs and strongly felt moral convictions.

As the late Rabbi David Hartman correctly pointed out, rabbinic Judaism does not champion “a” theology. It instead presents us with a smorgasbord of theologies. None of them will suffice on its own, answering all questions all the time.

Rabbi Ysoscher Katz is the chair of the department of Talmud at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and the rabbi of the Prospect Heights Shul in Brooklyn, N.Y.

13 thoughts on “How to Handle Troubling Jewish Texts that champion immorality”
  1. For those committed to Orthodox belief, our response is necessarily limited. These commandments cannot be excised from the text or assumed to have been inserted by anyone other than God.

    Any being with 2 functioning brain cells would be able to figure this out given enough time but not the jews…
    Instead of dealing with the issue they construct convoluted theories and detours.
    Anyone of sound mind would realize that if God wrote/said those things, He wouldn’t be God… except the jews…

    Rabbi Ysoscher Katz is the chair of the department of Talmud

    The talmud makes the torah look holy by comparison.

  2. well
    the real God
    gave us fire for such texts
    and guantanamo
    and the mariana trench
    for the spawns of their little, incomplete god
    life can be good
    at least ok
    if the mind is strong

  3. Trouble is, the Mixing of JEWS and Zionists ! The First have God, the second Do NOT ! Was a time when God said to His Chosen People to eliminate some nations, in time of King David, but when in the time of Jesus, came another way to Please God, Jews Know, Zionists would Kill Jesus again !
    ed note–The Jews DO NOT have God, as evidenced by the words of Jesus Himself, to wit–
    ‘If God were your Father, you would love me, for I have come here from God. I have not come on my own; God has sent me. Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.’

  4. Well it’s possible, I suppose, that Jewes too are perplexed by their own double standards. Theirs is an ENTIRELY relativistic or context-based morality. How does one behave or respond, AS a Jewe, in any given situation? This is the question.
    This means they can NEVER engage with non-Jewes in good faith. They are always trying to second guess the ‘Gentile’ and work out their counter-response, as a ‘Jewe’. Tedious in the extreme. The devoted amongst them spend their lives pouring over their ‘holy’ texts and trying to work out the smartest, the cleverest, the most advantageous response in any given situation. They can never rely on a principle as simple as ‘do unto others’ to guide their response.
    Theirs is the same morality as any oligarch. Oligarchs NEVER engage with the hoy poloi in good faith. That would be against their ‘principles’. In fact their ‘principles’ can be boiled down to a single injunction … ‘Never give a sucker an even break’.
    I’m persuaded that Trump was put into the running as a spoiler to force traditional ‘Republicans’ to vote for Hitlery KKKlinton. KKKlinton would have brought a war with Iran and thence possibly Russia. But somehow people elected Trump. Largely because of his ‘America First’ message. The oligarchs are clearly furious and are doing everything in their power to destroy Trump AND America. But Trump is a wily player. He has been working in and around (((them))) all his life. He may be far from perfect but he does appear to be that thing they most despise … a nationalist.
    Then again, so was Berlusconi … corrupt as the day is long … but an Italian before all else.
    If they do get Trump, I hope it provokes uncontainable riots in America such as the ones breaking out in France. People have had ENOUGH of their grotesque machinations. May their well laid plans explode in their faces.
    Merry Christmas a bottle of rum!

  5. Being “jew” is a CHOICE.
    Divide and conquer satan’s Goddamn jews by attacking their satanic belief system.
    Judas-ism, the “religion” of jews, is, literally, a satanic mind-control cult.
    99% of jews march in lock step to satan’s zionist jew dictate.
    Any person (i.e., the jews) who takes the talmud as their holy book has been utterly brainwashed by PURE EVIL.
    WHY does he, the jew, make this choice, to be a jew, to be the enemy of all humanity?
    Jews CHOOSE to be the enemy of the non-jew.
    Jews INITIATE the cycle of hate.
    It’s EXPLICITLY stated over and over in their “holiest book,” the talmud.
    THESE ARE THE TEACHINGS OF SATAN.
    WHY, WHY, WHY would ANYONE want to have ANY association with this so-called religion of jews, this filthy judas-ism, this in-your-face PURE EVIL? WHY?
    It’s a satanic mind-control cult.
    WHY jew? Why do you CHOOSE to be a Goddamn jew?!!!
    WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY?

  6. The “people” God commanded utterly killed were halflings, monsters, the descendants of fallen angels and human women. Also their cattle and flocks.
    Gen3, God speaking to Adam, Eve and the serpent prophesied war between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. Yes, the serpent had seed.
    Gen6 The fallen angels were hot to trot with the daughters of men. They left their first estate and impregnated human females. Their offspring were the giants of old, men of renown. The Canaanites were later descendants. Moses sent scouts. “We saw giants.” This was no hyperbole.
    Noah’s bloodline was “pure,” not moral or ethical or sinless, but pure human of the Adamic line. Human DNA had been near fully corrupted.
    Understanding the “seed war” is a crucial component of understanding the Torah and the rest of the pre-Christ scriptures.
    Believe what is written or run in circles trying to intellectualize and justify with your own “understanding.”
    ed note–as the readers of this website know, in the interests of maintaining a sane, rational, and productive discussion of the important subjects that affect all life on God’s green earth today, comments such as this are tossed immediately and with extreme prejudice.
    We went ahead however and allowed this one to be posted in order to make a point about the kinds of hurdles–both qualitative and quantitative–that we all face in this modern age where the mental patients have taken over the asylum and are now holding all of us hostage.
    This is not being done to abuse the commentor, although unfortunately he/she must–by virtue of this circumstance–be made the subject of what is to come.
    FIrst and foremost, the thing that needs to be remembered is that the Bible–both the Old and ‘New’ part of it–is a BOOK. This is what the word ‘bible’ means–‘book’. It was not ‘written’ by God, but rather by people with names such as Moses, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, etc. In that way, substantively, it is no different than other books such as Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, or the DaVinci Code.
    Now, does this mean that by virtue of having been the product of human hands that it is bereft of wisdom? No. Even Star Wars, which is a work of fiction, can be said to contain wisdom in its depiction of the battle between good and evil.
    However, it is obvious–based upon the reality that all face today where control of the world and all its resources, including war, has fallen into the hands of a statistically-insignificant group of people who not just believe whole hog in what is written in the first half of this book known as the Bible, but indeed, have made it their ‘how to’ guide in reforming/remaking the world and all its functions into the vehicle by which their own personal enrichment/empowerment is achieved, and unfortunately, Christians themselves have assisted in this measure by believing in the religion of Christ’s enemies as much as they believe in Christ Himself.
    Summing it all up, the obviously deranged comments/beliefs espoused by the individual going by the name PS Bindy have no place whatsoever in any intelligent and productive discussion involving the very serious political realities all are facing today as a result of the madness contained in at least the first half of this literary work known as the Bible. Talk of halflings, monsters, seed of serpents, etc, is the stuff of J.R.R. Tolkien and should have no role whatsoever in geo-political discussions where life and death on a PLANETARY SCALE is taking place, but unfortunately, it is precisely because it plays a central role in everything taking place today that all ife on earth has now been reduced to a mere question mark.

  7. yahweh is fundamentally, from the get-go, GOD OF ATHEISM, let’s throw in a few more terms for clarity:
    materialism, lying, injustice, inequality, darkness, decay and corruption, kol nidre, betrayal, doublespeak, hypocrisy, perversion, denial of spirituality apart from witchcraft that manipulates occult entities detached from the mainstream spirit, like jews are detached from the rest of humanity, to their nefarious ends.
    but it all boils down to the same thing: there is no such thing as a moral reference rooted in eternal equilibrium, maybe karma is the right word, i don’t know much about eastern scriptures.
    There can be no afterlife punishment or reward, so do whatever pleases you so long as:
    1) it propels the judaic master plan forward, and
    2) you don’t get caught, and
    3) if you get caught, invoke holocaust, and
    4) don’t worry about cognitive dissonance, logical inconsistency at the bottom line, neurosis is good, psychosis, better, psychopathy the best, and
    5) the tribe of yahweh shall overthrow the true God, His son Jesus, the Holy Spirit, The Virgin Mother and boil them in a vat filled with unspeakable, unmentionable substances that sarah silverman has been scraping off her putridity on daily and lunar basis.
    signed,
    freakin tikkun,
    Child Of Holocaust Surfers

  8. I personally don’t buy into the Jews’ claim that they are a separate race of people. What distinguishes them from others is their religion- Judaism. That’s all. The Jews claim they are descendants of Shem, one of the three sons of Noah. So if they are descendants of Shem and claim they are a separate race of people with unique genetics then one must conclude that Shem was of a different race than his other two brothers Ham and Japheth. Three different races of people within one family? I don’t buy it.

  9. The Gentiles fight other Gentiles and even the Jews over their book. It is their book. Sorry.. The gentile tries endlessly to claim it. It is too painful to question the good book. They tell the Jews and non-Jews to read the Jewish Bible. It is very painful for the Gentile to question the Bible in any way. They the Gentiles, the Christians, say to the Jews you have your own book wrong./ How do they have it wrong? How? They kill and conquer, as their book instructs. People can not deal with this kind of reality. They want, they NEED to be the special characters in THE BOOK. The Talmud did not exist when the people did the awful things written in the Bible. Zionism is a retentively recent political movement but it was inspired by the Torah. The good Catholic and Russian or Greek Orthodox will offer up some resistance to “Zionism” but never the good Old Bible.. in this regard they are no better then their dreaded foe the “Protestants..” And no Bible? The people of the UK have thrown religion out almost completely, and yet they also fight wars for SOI. So this is a huge problem. Way beyond even Talmud and Zionism. The problem of the Torah making war came before these ideas. Oh and people don’t care about war (and the killing) they care about their soul being ‘saved’ by this book. . .

  10. Thank you for letting my earlier comment remain. I know it is nonsense to most. Heck, most Christian or Jewish believer sites would think my position too “out there.” No sweat. I won’t bother you by stating my position in such terms again. It wasn’t a defense of the Jews by any means but of God, who is often accused of being a psychopath with the attempted genocide of the Canaanites as evidence.
    I’ll continue to read here and will self moderate my comments, if they’re allowed at all, staying away from the Christian fringe.
    I’ll ask: Is there a solution to the JQ that the readers here are more or less in agreement with? Do you think any solution is implementable?
    I would like to respond to some points raised in the response to my post but that might seem to be arguing points declared non gratis, so I won’t do so.

    ed note–yes, there is a solution to the JQ and it begins thus–
    Recognizing that Judaism, beginning with its very first utterance found in the book of Genesis, is a bad tree that bears bad fruit. End of discussion. If it’s a bad tree and its fruit is bad, we don’t eat it, not even as much as a nibble. It obviously failed the ultimate test in how it dealt with Jesus Christ, and for those calling themselves Christians, this is all we need to know in adjudging that it is a foreign, dangerous ideology that has no place in our hearts or heads.

  11. ” God, who is often accused of being a psychopath with the attempted genocide of the Canaanites as evidence.” Yes P.S. that is the point. The god of the OT kills everything. Or rather he instructs his people who are better than other nearby tribes better then anyone to kill or make them slaves. No?

  12. “When we read stories that to the human eye seem immoral, we are using the wrong metric by inappropriately applying human criteria to evaluate divine behavior.”
    One of the cult/thought control “teachers” tells his zombies, YOU don’t question the Jewish “god”. Yours is to obey, not to question what we tell you is “divine”.
    “Judaism does not champion “a” theology. It instead presents us with a smorgasbord of theologies. None of them will suffice on its own, answering all questions all the time.”
    It’s a smorgasbord of expediency, or do what thou wilt, and pretend “god” told you to do it. When normal people tell you you’ve behaved criminally, use the chosenite-oppressed-victim-card as your first and best defense.
    Jews truly are, on average, the most willingly led people on earth who are herded by the best of the psychopaths amongst them. This is of no small consequence to our dire situation, given that this psychosis/pschopathy has been inbred over a period of millenia, and I think has actually become epigenetically encoded within their biology.

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