Jesus always was compassionate towards regular people, but his righteous anger flared up at the proud and arrogant teachers of the law. When Jesus cracked the whip and chased the moneychangers out of the Temple, he was also overthrowing the high priests' livelihood. The Temple priests made their living on the backs of the poorest of people, and the more 'sinful' or diseased the priests deemed one, the more ritual baths and livestock was required of them to purchase as the way to get clean with God.
Jesus taught there was no need to pay one's way to God, and that God already loved them just as they were: poor, oppressed, widows, orphans, refugees, prisoners enduring under military occupation.
On October 8, 2007, Coulter was quoted as saying that Jews should be "perfected" into Christians and that Christians considered themselves to be perfected Jews. [Ibid]
If ONLY Christians would look within their own imperfect hearts, focus on the work needing to be done there and doing what Jesus actually taught, we would all inhabit a very different world.
August 9, 2008 was the 63rd anniversary of America's targeted atomic bombing of Nagasaki. In the Hebrew calendar, it is the 9th of Av; Tisha B'av, the day that Jewish tradition assigns to mourn.
The mourning begins with recollecting the destruction of the 1st and 2nd Temple and then the exile imposed by Rome who conquered Palestine, the Crusaders who slaughtered Jews, the expulsion of Jews from Spain, the murders and rapes of Jews by 'Christians' through 1600 years, and onto the devastations of the 20th century.
From an August 8th email from Rabbi Michael Lerner regarding the 9th of Av:
...we lament how our behavior as a people keeps up from finding the fulfillment that a "Promised Land" and "The Temple" was supposed to bring. Jewish tradition unequivocally says that "because we sinned we were exiled from our land."
The fate of the Jewish people, in other words, is a direct reflection of the level of our ethical behavior and our degree of holiness in the world.In our own day we mourn the sad ethical state of the State of Israel. We can mourn the consciousness of the many within the Jewish people who have made worship of Israel their central religious doctrine. Go into any shul these days and you can deny God, the relevance of Torah, the value of observing mitzvot-and you'll find a benevolent response from the community, who will quietly and gently try to instruct you about the Jewish perspective on these questions. But question the validity of a secular state in the Middle East called The State of Israel, talk about its immoral behavior toward Palestinians, and you'll be labeled an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew, and you'll find yourself surrounded by anger and hostility sufficient to drive you out of that community.
Why? Because Israel is the one thing that they believe in - it's their god, the center of their religious faith. The only close 2nd is the materialism and selfishness of the Western world, which Jews have embraced with the same eagerness as most other people on the planet.Because the form of our prayers and the way we are taught as children to think of God leads to this impossible outcome that God "should have, but didn't, intervene to save us, so therefore either there is no God or God is evil or at best irrelevant to us," the people grasped on to "being realistic" and becoming like all the other idolaters on the planet – worshipers of power and money.
The quintessence of that view became the dominant philosophy among Orthodox Jews after 1967 - "because the Israeli Defense Forces" captured the West Bank, holding the West Bank is God's will and therefore it would be a violation of God's will to abandon it." In other words, whoever triumphs in the world reflects God's will.
Sometimes the prophets are misunderstood as being filled with anger and rage at the people for abandoning God. Taken out of context, one can certainly read parts of Jeremiah and Isaiah that way, and some of the other prophets as well. These prophets were in agony over having to deliver hurtful and hard to hear messages, but they did so anyway because they saw how the behavior of the people was leading to its own future destruction.
Prophets are best understood as those who provoke us to think about God and they point out danger ahead so that the course will be changed and destruction avoided.
