Posted by:
Tevai
(
)
Date: July 26, 2019 12:36PM
elderolddog Wrote:
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> I can appreciate your desire to apologize for this
> Rabbi, but I don't see how you can apologize on
> behalf of all Jews, the world over!
Apologizing for Jews who, by their own words and actions, bring dishonor (or far worse, including death) on Jews as a "whole," is deeply Jewish. It is, more or less, the foundation of Jewish humor. If you can laugh at the oddities and absurdities, then you take some of the sting out of the offense.
Underneath the surface humor, though, there is an ingrained knowledge and wisdom, among Jews as a whole, that:
"Every bee that brings the honey,
Needs a sting to be complete.
And we all must learn to taste,
the bitter with the sweet."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxzR9Z-kG6Q> Is 'absolution' even a Jewish concept?
I'm on shaky ground here, but I don't think it applies to Judaism. I'm running hypothetical scenarios in my mind, and what I know about "absolution" (in a Christian sense), doesn't seem to exist in Judaism.
There is the Jewish concept of teshuvah ("returning"), but it is not analogous (in any way I am able to evision) to what I know of Christianity (which is: Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, in Catholicism)....or alternatively (in Protestantism): Jesus will take away your sins if you accept him as your Savior.
[If someone Jewish had previously been less observant, or not observant/secular, and then decided to become relatively more observant than they had been previously, they would be called a baal teshuva. Henry Abramson, the history teacher on YouTube, calls himself a baal teshuva, because the woman he met at his place of employment, and who he decided he definitely wanted to marry, wanted to have an observant family, and he agreed to this.]
> Can a forgiveness be applied to him?
This is hard, because two different traditions are being simultaneously mixed-up here. There is a very practical, and long honored (it was written in the 1500s), book on this general subject, titled "Tomer Devorah" ("The Palm Tree of Devorah"), and the guidance given in the book, in this kind of situation, is to find SOMETHING about the person [you need to "forgive"] that is good--and then (because, by Jewish belief, the concept we refer to as God has this goodness as a part of "God's" "nature"] you can "forgive" [in your terms], or "release" [in Jewish terms] the person because of this GOOD part of them, because [the Jewish concept of God] would do the same.
So, for example, if someone had done some kind of harm, if you could figure out that, in "THIS" particular aspect you are able to identify, that person is good, then you could personally [in effect] "release" them on the "bad" parts, because God [means: the concept of God] would take care of any further balancing which needed to be done--your further input of disdain is no longer needed.
I think this is the nearest Jewish concept which might relate to the Christian concept of absolution (but I am not sure; my Christianity is sparse and comes mostly from Unity School of Christianity, which many Christians would not consider "Christian" at all).
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/26/2019 01:37PM by Tevai.