Jewish faith question.

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i just like the title of this site

@casheroo thanks

It’s kind of a cop-out though, because they could always just rebuild the Temple.

The Temple itself was actually the Second Temple. The first one got destroyed by the Babylonians around 585 B.C.

I think a more accurate reason is that sacrifice fell out of fashion and Judaism adapted.

I traced the links put up by @casheroo and read a little further on one of the links and found something that I strongly disagree with and I thought that this must be one of those pages created by Messianic Jews or some other phony group. But the credentials of the author seem ok, she states she is a layperson, not a Rabbi and attends a conservative synagogue in Pennnsylvania.

I looked at the other two links and the opinions seem believable.

But you have to be very careful when discussing “Jews”. For example @Qingu says “they ” could always re-build the temple and that the practice was stopped because it fell out of fashion and Jews adapted. Thinking like that is very dangerous.

There are many reasons that the Temple can not be rebuilt, some would look to the political realities of getting anything done in Jerusalem, others would state that the site is occupied partially by a mosque, you must take the Diaspora into account whereby the Jewish people are dispersed around the world and don’t live as one contiguous and discrete nation. You simply can’t make a broad statement about the practice of Judaism that is going to be entirely true.

The Roman Catholic Church is headquartered at St. Peter’s in Vatican City. There is nothing comparable in Judaism, not in Israel and not in the US, although there is a a chief Rabbi in the UK. It is not a centrally controlled religion and there are many ways of practicing Judaism: reform, conservative, orthodox, there are Haredi Jews, Hasidic Jews, Reconstructionist Jews and amongst these groups there are factions and varying practices and opinions. You can’t pigeonhole a vast group of peopkle with a generalization about “they”....

But the real reason you can’t get a simple answer to this question is the old line:

Two Jews,

Three Opinions…
SRM

(if this message is a little less coherent than some of my others, blame it on the painkillers that I am taking cause of the surgery yesterday)

I disagree that my thinking is “dangerous.” I understand the complexities of the Jewish political situation and the history of the Diaspora. And yes, my statement was overly broad—I don’t think that’s “dangerous” though.

The fact that there are many different ways of practicing Judaism today doesn’t preclude rebuilding the Temple. There were also many ways of practicing Judaism during late antiquity, before the Second Temple was destroyed. Compare the Essenes to the Pharisees to Romanized Jews like Josephus.

If you actually read the Old Testament (specifically, Leviticus) animal sacrifice is incredibly important to the religion and is a central preoccupation of Yahweh. I find it hard to believe that—broadly speaking—Judaism post 70 A.D. lost interest in animal sacrifice merely because of internal theological reasons and a lack of a Temple. It’s hard to believe that the broader cultural move away from animal sacrifice (largely popularized by Christianity’s hegemony) had nothing to do with it, or that the almost modern view that animal sacrifice is “barbaric” today has nothing to do with it either.

And just to be clear, I think animal sacrifice gets a lot worse of a rap than it deserves today. I think it’s a bit silly that people think animal sacrifice is barbaric when they buy food from factory farms. But that’s modern culture, and I think it’s naive to deny that it has a lot to do with why Jews don’t sacrifice anymore.

I really doubt that there was much of a Christian hegemony by 70 A.D.

Um. I was talking about the Christian hegemony long after the Temple’s destruction.

For the same reason that Fundamentalist Christianity has rejected the so-called prohibition of homosexuality in the Bible and has openly accepted gays into their midst.

Oh, no wait…