The American Spectator

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/p> p> DEFANGED ENLIGHTENMENT br> Re: Mark Goldblatt's Fear and Fanaticism at the Times : /p>

Your characterization of the Jewish thought has having been "defanged" by the enlightenment is historically inaccurate. It rests on the ignorant assumption that Jewish law and tradition are accurately reflected in literalist and tendentious Christian interpretations of the written Torah. These interpretations derive from Christian polemics and post-Enlightenment American Jewish ignorance of our own traditions. The Christians like to highlight the imaginary distinction between a merciful tender New Testament Christianity and a legalistic, tribal and vengeful God of the "Old Testament." The Jews just don't know any better.

As any one minimally familiar with Jewish history and law will know, in ancient Judah, in pre-Christian and pre-Roman times, Jewish authorities rarely imposed the death penalty for any crime. A Sanhedrin (court) that executed one man in seventy years was disapprovingly characterized in the Talmud as the "bloody" Sanhedrin. Rabbi Akiba declared that had he served on that Sanhedrin, not even that one would have been executed. With respect to the death penalty for homosexuality or anything else, the Enlightenment came more than 2,000 years after the fact and gets no credit whatsoever.

p>I would have expected Mark Goldblatt to know this, were I not sadly familiar with the pathetic state of Jewish education today. br> -- Joe Vass br> Maplewood, Minnesota /p> p> Mr. Goldblatt is mistaken about his assessment that the Enlightenment has somehow "de-fanged" the Bible so that it is no longer taken literally. It is the New Testament not the Enlightenment that reorganizes the truths of the Old Testament and sends these truths to the nations as the gospel. The New Testament denounces homosexuality (Romans 1) but removes the power of death from the Church (Romans 13). The New Testament Church has spiritual authority and can excommunicate (1 Corinthians 5), but does not have the authority of the state to execute. Instead the Church is commanded in the Great Commission to convert the nations -- not kill them. And these New Testament truths are to be taken "literally." In fact it could be argued that the Enlightenment has worked its man-centered ideas out in our culture through liberalism, not the Church.

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