Kaninchen, where are you? I was hoping for a “bunny” response to where I may be wrong. I’m no expert.
You’ve never heard of Shabbat? You google around Chassidic ideas and are so blinded by ‘Holy Sparks’ that you’ve never heard of not working on Shabbat?
Well, KyivAndrew, all those posts rather forcibly remind me of why, after years of being the ‘resident Jew’ on religious message boards doing all the lengthy explaining and parsing of responses – as people like Valke used to do here, I gave it up and determined to talk only in more general terms, try to use analogies in an attempt to get ideas over, try to be brief and to the point, try to be very careful how I express things so as not to encourage cascading responses and questions. Life’s too short, as Mr Kaninchen rather determinedly pointed out at the time.
So, the question is whether anything you’ve said actually negates what I’d said, that the focus in Judaism is more on ‘here and now action’ rather than ‘correct belief’. Well, if one were to pretend that Judaism ‘works’ like Christianity, then, KyivAndrew, what you said might be a devastating rebuttal. The thing is that Judaism doesn’t ‘work’ like Christianity but, looking at the question of Chassids, for example, perhaps I’ll give a Catholic analogy a try in the hope that it might help.
There are ‘traditional’ Catholics, people who believe in multiple appearances of Mary, rather ‘Dantean’ visions of Hell and Paradise, rather attached to the old simple devotion amongst the peasant ‘masses’ (ie people en masse), masses (religious gatherings) in Latin, Gregorian Chant etc, etc, attached to the views of old Popes on various subjects (the teachings where you don’t have to believe but they are supposed to be influential in some way); there are others, quite as ‘orthodox’, who are more impressed by the teaching emphasis of more modern Popes and ‘Vatican II’, who may be personally highly skeptical of spinning-suns at Fatima etc, rather embarrassed by ‘folk devotionality’, prefer vernacular masses and so on. Both sides may get cross with one another from time to time, but they’re all ‘Catholics’ – despite all their apparent differences, they follow the teachings of the Pope and Magisterium. They are not a different religion, more, perhaps, the expression of human creativity and imagination based on a shared orthodox core and discipline – an example of how constraints can have a positive rather than negative effect – which means that Catholicism can hold within itself the sternest intellectual aesthete and the most emotionally-responsive charismatic who just instinctively ‘believes’.
My original family background isn’t the shtetl of rural Eastern Europe, it’s big city Germany and Italy – in some ways, almost more ‘German’ than the Germans and more ‘Italian’ than the Italians (led to rather interesting family gatherings). I may think a lot of Chassid stuff as rather charming and ‘folksy’, even tapping my feet to klezmer bands, and a lot of it as many Catholics might think about other Catholics who get excited about seeing Jesus in a pizza (as I expect they would see me as lacking in ‘spirituality’ and ‘spontaneity’ for want of better words) but they’re Orthodox Jews,
Torah-observant Jews. The day they decide to celebrate Passover with Easter Eggs and pork roasts, then that’d be different.
The italics above should give you a clue to the central divisions in Judaism and the question of ‘correct action’ rather than ‘correct belief’.
Perhaps a little googling on that theme might be rewarding.
