Anti-Semitism at the Vortex?

Michael Voris normally has some pretty good videos.

This video one is not one of them.




The problem is multi-faceted.
First, the use of the word "Jew" repeatedly aloud is somewhat jarring.
Most people don't do it because the connotations are not good.

It's very difficult to listen to the first part of Voris' talk and hear what he is actually saying because so many alarm bells start ringing in your head as the word rings repeatedly in your ears.

Now, that having been said, there are additional difficulties with his argument, the first being that it's just wrong.

The argument he's making is composed of several elements.
Let's take them one at a time.

1) The distinction between the religion of Judaism and the "race" of Judaism
I hesitate to say this distinction can be made, because it is fraught with difficulties.

To begin with, it is certainly the case that Jews have historically considered anyone of Jewish ancestry to be a Jew, regardless of whether or not they actually practice the faith, but this turns out not to be as helpful as Michael Voris would like. In some ages, this Jewish heritage was said to have passed down through the child's father (the father had to be a Jew), in other ages (ours included), the mother had to be a Jew for the child to be considered Jewish.

In any case, the use of the word "race" in regards to the Jews is biologically absurd (as is the use of the word "race" in regards to ANY group of human beings).

You might call the Jews a "nation" and suffer no logical absurdities, but calling them a "race" hearkens back to the days of eugenics that immediately followed the publication of Darwin's The Descent of Man in 1871. Yes, people then considered each nation-state a separate race, to the extent that they spoke of the "German race" and the "French race" but doing that today is considered silly.

It is also considered rather dangerous. Viewing individual nation-states as individual races is the sense in which Hitler spoke of the Jews as a race - he considered them a nation within a nation, a group of illegal immigrants, as it were, and therefore a threat to Germany. Germany was kind of prickly about her nation-state status precisely because she had only become a single nation in 1871 as a result of the Franco-Prussian war.

And it was against the nation-race, not the religion, of the Jews that Hitler waged war. Few people realize that a Jew who had gotten himself or herself permanently sterilized was immune from deportation to the death camps. A sterilized Jew posed no threat to the genetic heritage of the nation-race of Germany, and so could practice the Jewish faith freely, without fear of persecution, even during the height of the German pogroms.

The problem comes in precisely because of the Jewish insistence that anyone born of a Jewish mother was themselves Jewish. Hitler took this as literal truth, insisting that Judaism was a race that needed to be exterminated, and of course he acted on it. So, today, if you call the Jews a "race," many Jews will hear "genetically distinct, genetically inferior nation-race" and accuse you of being a Nazi anti-Semite, even if you mean none of those extra words, but instead simply mean to agree with their own definition of what constitutes a Jew.

The word "race" in connection with Judaism is so heavily laced with the wrong connotations that it really should never be used.

Voris' point about there being such a thing as an atheist Jew is well-taken, however. Such a thing is perfectly reasonable from the Jewish point of view.

2) Does The Temple define what it means to be a Jew?
It is not possible to say that the destruction of the Temple destroyed the Jewish religion or destroyed Judaism. After all, the Temple that the Romans destroyed was the SECOND Temple - the first one had been destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC. It was rebuilt in 538 BC, but didn't get rededicated, and capable of bearing sacrifice, until 515 BC.

So, if we say Judaism REQUIRES a Temple, then we must admit that Judaism was destroyed in 586 BC. This poses numerous obvious problems, not the least of which is that Jesus can no longer be considered a Jew from a religious perspective, only from a "race" perspective.

If we accept Voris' contention, then we must accept the idea that Judaism existed until the first Temple was destroyed, then it popped out of existence for 70 years, then it suddenly popped back into existence simply because a few stones were laid on top of each other again. Then it popped out of existence again. So the covenant of the eternally faithful God was dead for 70 years?

Yeah, that doesn't work.

Alternatively, we could say Judaism died with the destruction of the first Temple, and stayed dead from then on. But if we say THAT, the whole salvation theology thing falls apart. We can't be grafted onto a dead tree, and the tree is dead if the first Temple was the real definition of Judaism.

In fact, we could go back and point out that the Temple system of sacrifice was instituted by God due to the way the Chosen People rebelled against Moses. But Judaism started with Abraham, not Moses. Between Abraham and Moses, there was neither a Temple, nor a hint that the Temple system was necessary. The earliest patriarchs did perform sacrifice, but any male head of household could offer it, and the rules were not nearly as spelled out as the Temple system had them.

So, in order to be theologically consistent, we have to admit that the Temple was really, really important, but that Judaism grew up without it, and even after it was instituted, Judaism can still limp along without it, if only because we have pre-Christ example of it having done so.

3) Is Judaism a man-made religion?
That's like asking if Christianity is defined by allegiance to the Pope. Well, yes, it is, but no, it isn't. That is, you can be validly baptized and therefore truly a Christian without accepting the Pope as the Vicar of Christ. There are a lot of flavors of Christianity, most of them man-made accretions onto a divinely created base.

The Jewish faith is no different. Orthodox Jews who try to follow the full 613 laws may well be considered the fullness of Judaism now that the Temple is gone, just as they were the fullness of Jewish faith the last time the Temple got knocked over.

You can easily argue that Reform Judaism is purely an invention of man, because it is - it was invented by a bunch of essentially atheistic Zionists in the mid-1800s. By the same token you can argue that Conservative Judaism, a reaction to Reform Judaism, is also man-made.

But Orthodox Judaism?
Nah, not so much.

And it gets still worse. There are a LOT of splinter groups within each of the above general divisions, and each one has its own flavor. There is no Jewish equivalent to the Pope (the only religion I can think of off-hand which has anything close to the Pope is Tibetan Buddhists and the Dalai Lama, but even there, most other flavors of Buddhists don't recognize his authority).

The point is, there is no longer a monolithic Judaism - there wasn't during Jesus' time (remember how the Pharisees and Sadducees fought?) and things haven't gotten better since. So blanket statements about "the Jews" just don't begin to grasp the kind of problem you're looking at when you want to talk about Judaism intelligently.

NB: If it's any consolation to Mike Voris, I've had Jews make the same mistake when they try to converse with me. Indeed, I once had a Jew accuse me of anti-Semitism because he didn't like my Catholic interpretation of the Old Testament. When I pointed out to my Jewish critic that a lot of Jews wouldn't like HIS interpretation any better, he suddenly left the conversation.

4) Did the Jews who rejected Christ start a man-made religion?
No, at least, not in the sense that Martin Luther did. God established covenant with Abraham. He made several modifications to the covenant with various patriarchs, most especially with Moses. But the rejection of the greatest modification, the perfection supplied by Christ, is not a rejection of the covenant that came before.

When Martin Luther, et. al, rejected portions of Catholic Faith, they truly did start a new faith. But the Hebrews simply didn't accept the perfection of the covenant that God had already given them. The Hebrew covenant is entirely from God, at least as the Orthodox Jews try to live it. You could argue that the synagogue system, which came into being between the two Temple periods, is not specifically ordained by God, but that system exists simply to help the Hebrews live the divinely proclaimed ordinances. In this sense, the synagogue system is much like Catholic canon law - neither is divinely ordained, but both are necessary to living out what is divinely ordained.

So Judaism isn't a new faith, it's simply a faith that hasn't thought through the last bits of divine revelation. The Protestant faith, on the other hand, was invented from whole cloth. It invents an entirely new theology, divesting itself of a major tenet of not only Judeo-Christian theology, but of nearly every faith the world has ever seen - the concept of Purgatory.

But even if we were to say that Judaism was similar to Reformation theology (which it isn't), we don't say Lutherans aren't Christians, aren't part of the covenant, or that their baptism doesn't save, so neither can we say that the Jews are not part of God's covenant.

God established the covenant, not us.
He doesn't break His word.
They are part of the covenant regardless of what they do or what they recognize.

Now, the Jews have rejected part of the single covenant between God and man, but that's not unusual for the Chosen People - they did that numerous times in the Old Testament and God never wrote them out of this single covenant.

True, this last rejection is quite a bit worse than previous ones, but we don't have any theological evidence to think they are completely out of the covenant, if only because that's not how God works. When He makes a covenant, it's eternal.

We just have to keep in mind that the "Old" covenant and the "New" covenant are the SAME covenant in the sense that God always intended salvation for everyone to come to us through the Jews.

The difference between the Old and the New Covenant is the difference between the skeleton of a half-built house and the house completed and nestled among 50-foot pines twenty years later. We can speak of the "old" house as we remember how it was built and how we walked through the skeleton so carefully, wearing our hard hats and steel-toed boots, and compare this to the "new" house that we live in now, in which we wear slippers, cozy housecoats and drink tea. The Jews refuse to live in the finished section, but they are still in the house.

Voris is correct to allude to the fact that Catholicism is just the completion of Judaism. He is correct to say that ancient Judaism looks a lot like Catholicism sometimes, but it is different. But by failing to acknowledge the common core covenant, he creates a lot more problems than he solves.

Question:
Now, some of you may be asking "Kellmeyer, does that mean you think the Jews can be saved without water baptism? That they have their own path to salvation?"

Answer:
No, the Jews do not have their "own" path to salvation.
There is no salvation except through Jesus Christ.
But it is a basic theological principle that God is not bound by the sacraments.
He instructs us to use the sacraments, but He is free to save people in ways known to Himself and without any sacraments at all, if He wishes. He can give the coin of salvation to any laborer He meets in the road, whether He sends them to the vineyard at 8 AM or at 8 PM, and He isn't bound to give us the coin to give to the laborer - He can give that sanctifying grace directly as and whenever He wishes.

Now, we don't know any other way to be saved except the sacraments, so it behooves us to help as many people as we possibly can to those waters. We are duty-bound to do so, and insofar as we don't, we are going to be judged for failing in our duty.

But God isn't going to send some poor man to hell because of MY failure to preach the Gospel. Apart from the problem of original sin, we don't go to hell for other people's failures, we go there for our own failures.

I may send myself to hell, but God will take into account that I failed in my duty towards this poor man when this poor man is judged, and "the natural law written on his heart may, perhaps, excuse him on that day of judgement which I preach," as Paul explains in Romans.

So, can an unbaptized Jew attain salvation?
Most assuredly.
And if that man is saved, he will be saved only through the merits of Christ's cross.

So, should I refrain from preaching the Gospel to him out of sensibility towards his feelings and in the faith that this will happen?

If I fail to preach the Gospel to someone, I may end up in hell, because I didn't show any real love towards my neighbor. I didn't preach God's love to Him. Instead, I worried about whether or not he would be offended by the Gospel. I put fleeting emotional concerns above God's desire that this man know and properly respond to His eternal love. It's akin to letting someone die of pneumonia because I am worried that they may hate swallowing antibiotic pills.

That's not love - that's just stupid.

If that's the way I treat my neighbor, my unbaptized neighbor may very well be saved, but I won't be.

Conclusion:
In summary, this video has enough serious errors in it that it should really be pulled.
It is theologically WAY off base.