Then you're in disagreement with a lot of rabbis who believe in Messianic prophesy - and I'm not restricting this to those who believe in Jesus as the Messiah.
There are no Jewish rabbis that believe that Jesus is the messiah. Anyone who holds that Jesus is the messiah is not a Jew but something else. Usually they are Christians claiming to be Jews.
There are a lot of Messianic traditions and theories, which come from those prophesies.
Right now, the disagreement between you and me appears to be mostly in semantics. The word prophesy and the title prophet doesn't quite have the same meaning in Judaism that it does in Christianity. Christians lump several different 'practices' (for want of a better word) together and use the word prophesy to denote them all where as in Judaism, these 'practices' are seperated out and prophesy is but one of them.
To give you an example, In Christianity, Daniel is considered a prophet but in Judaism, he is not. .
And who makes commentary? Rabbis.
Rabbis are schooled in the tradition and guidelines of the oral torah going all the way back to Sinai. They do not speak or comment of their own authority but work according to the guidelines set down by G-d at Sinai.
Part of what made Jesus so contraversial during his day was that he often spoke on his own authority as opposed to relying on the tradition of the oral Torah. This is the meaning of Matthew 7:28-29 when it says, "
28 When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching,
29 because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law."
Jews are encouraged to be skeptical of their rabbis and everyone else and to study and check things out on their own on a regular basis. Part of the reason it takes so long to convert is there is a lot of scholarly study one must go through.
I consider the language of mathematics to be just as much the language of G-d as the Bible and so I would liken rabbis to math teachers.
I'm not talking about proselytizing. I'm talking about telling people who are already Jews that X is the way you do Y, and btw God says we need to do Y. But they're relaying the command God gave to do Y, so don't pretend that that's not speaking for God in some fashion.
In Judaism, part of the keeping the Torah is to copy the entire list 613 mitzvot by hand oneself. Every Jew is to do this, not just the rabbis. Kings and other rulers are to copy the list twice.
I guess the best way of explaining is that Rabbis are guides.A person can study and learn a route on their own and so, strictly speaking, a guide is not necessary. It's just a matter of convenience as there is so much to learn and so it's easier to just pay some individuals to specialize in the law so that everyone else can focus on their own vocations.
I guess the same could be said in Christianity.
The specific go-between I was referring to was Jesus though.
No. What I said is dead on, and this illustration makes no sense, let alone gives anything resembling a reasonable case against what I said. When we say people should be Christians, it's the same as when a Jew cites the Noahide command that nobody should blaspheme God.
No, you were entirely off and the illustration makes perfect sense. But, appearently, it's not obvious and so I'll explain it.
It is more important to stop when you are supposed to because people are potentially harmed and killed if you don't. In the illustration of the traffic lights, if the light is red and you don't stop, you could potentially cause a traffic accident and kill people, including yourself. To compare this to our spiritual life, one of the commandments is that you shall worship G-d and G-d alone and have no other G-d before G-d. If you worship a false god, you are not stopping when you need to and are potentially harming yourself and others spiritually and that will effect every area of your life in a negative way.
If you don't go when the light is green, you hold up traffic and inconvenience people. You don't reap the benefit of getting to where you are going to a timely manner but there is no risk that you'll be killed or kill anyone else.
To relate this to spiritual life, Christians teach that one must accept Jesus as God. Considering the first commandment, if one is not absolutely certain that Jesus is G-d, then they potentially commit idolatry by worshipping Jesus. If one does worship a man as G-d and they are wrong, they invite upon themselves the penalty of idolatry.
Also, this leads to blasphamy as a worship of a false god often leads people to commit acts in the name of that god that are forbidden. For example, many people have been murdered in the names of false gods.
So just as it is much safer for all concerned to stop than it is to go, it is likewise much safer not to chance worshiping a false G-d.
If you want a temple, then that must be an improvement - but this temple would have priests, and priests by definition are go-betweens. If a temple with priests is an improvement, then perhaps your relationship with God isn't that direct after all. If you have a direct relationship, then it makes no sense that a temple would be an improvement.
I just realized that you are projecting the Christian interpretation onto the temple practice.
Also, I notice that you are assuming the position of the ultra-orthodox and ignoring the beliefs and attitudes of the vast majority of Judaism.
Although I haven't ruled out converting to orthodoxy, I am among those that see the temple sacrifice as being a primitive practice that was part of an earlier era of Judaism. I do believe in the coming of the messiah and so look for the temple to be built because that will signify the coming of the messianic age. But I do not see that sacrifices are a necessary part of Judaism. Judaism has functioned just fine without the temple cult for the last 1900 years.
A lot of the source of the percieved disagreement between you and me seems to be entirely due to you projecting Christian theology onto Judaism. As long as you do this, are you not going to understand Judaism. It would be helpful to our communication with each other if you first understand that Judaism is NOT an earlier form of Christianity and/or didn't evolve into Christianity but is an entirely different religions with a different theology and different practice.
There's a difference between speaking for God ("Thus saith the Lord") and claiming to be a go-between, like a cult leader would claim to do. I can tell people "You shall not steal," and in a sense I would be God's mouthpiece - I'm repeating what God said, and telling you that he said it. But it would be very wrong for me to tell people that they come to God through me, as though I were God's interpreter. That's being a go-between, and puts me in a position to do all kinds of horrible abuse.
I agree with you here.
If "many sermons revolved around" giving money to the church, and they were preached "on a regular basis" then I find it hard to believe very many people would have kept attending.
Money is something we touch on occasionally at my church, which is pretty big and not wanting for money. We just pass the offering bag without much ado except telling guests not to feel pressured to give. I've attended a decent amount of churches and money was pretty far from the emphasis of all of them that I can remember. We'd much rather emphasize what God has for us.
Actually, at the time I left the church, it had over seven thousand members.
I'm guessing from this that you are in your early 20's or younger. I say that because throughout the 70's, 80's and 90's it was quite common for Christian preachers to do this. If you have any doubts about this at all, just google Robert Tilton and see what comes up (I mention Tilton because he was my personal favorite. He was so obviously fake that it was hilarious to me that he was actually as successful at it as we was.)
It seems this practice has fallen by the wayside these days as so many "prosperity gospel" preachers were exposed as frauds (including Tilton and Jimmy Bakker, who even went to prison over it). Still, it was so much a part of Christian pop culture for so long that it hasn't entirely registered in my brain that it's no longer prevailent. Also, I left Christiantiy before the practice died out and so I didn't ever actually see it disappear. I'm just mostly taking people's word for it that it has.
