(no subject)

[feotakahari]

I don't really get the whole "Jews don't proselytize" thing. If I thought I knew something about God, I'd want to tell people for the same reason I tell people when I learn something cool about spiders.

Comments

[random_thought_depository]

I think the idea isn't "you shouldn't tell people about God," the idea is "you have no moral obligation to try to convince non-Jews to become Jews."

I think it's partly that Judaism hasn't broken completely with the old national/city god paradigm: originally the Jewish god was just the patron god of Israel like Athena was the patron goddess of Athens and it was assumed that non-Jews had their own deals with other entities. I think now the thinking is something like "the Jewish covenant is between the Jewish people and the Jewish god so the gentiles aren't obligated to obey its rules" but I don't know much about Jewish theology so somebody else can probably explain this much better than I can. I think it's also partly a result of Jews having lived as a minority in Christian and Muslim lands for most of two thousand years; a non-proselytizing posture was a way to avoid angering the Christian and Muslim majorities they were surrounded by. IIRC, first century Judaism did proselytize (I've read speculation that as much as 10% of the Roman Empire's population may have converted to Judaism).

[entanglingbriars]

Yeah, we used to proselytize but when the Romans became Christian they tended to... frown on that and so we stopped evangelizing and mostly just tried to survive. Reform Judaism began with the belief that the purpose of Judaism was to introduce the world to monotheism, but that lofty idea has fallen out of favor in Reform in recent generations.