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nominalist
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11 Oct 2007, 9:02 am

ouinon wrote:
To go completely off topic for tiny moment ! !!, that sounds AWFUL. Hideous.


It wasn't any fun. ;-)

Cheers,

Mark



Noa
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11 Oct 2007, 11:27 am

Isolation isn't really part of the "mindfulness, compassion, social justice" program, but the prophets among the Canaanites noticed that manymanymany of their tribespeople became less mindful the more they mixed with non-Hebrews. That coupled with the Hebrews' repeated defeats at the hands of neighboring empires caused them to search for answers as to why they weren't materially successful even though they theoretically had the Right Intention, to borrow a buddhist concept. The most popular answer which people gravitated toward was "we must not be doing it Right enough, and/or it's all these other people's fault that we aren't doing it Right enough."



ouinon
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11 Oct 2007, 1:36 pm

Very human reaction , to blame their own weakness on someone else!!
Is this an accepted explanation in jewish history for how they came to isolate themselves/be isolated ?



Noa
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11 Oct 2007, 4:24 pm

Not officially within Orthodox Judaism, no; the "official" position within Orthodoxy is that the Torah gives the histories roughly, more or less, sort of, accurately, at least in the broad outlines.

None of the other branches of Judaism have much truck with "official" explanations of anything. Most of Judaism (except *maybe* Chabad) is remarkably dogma-free. Even Modern Orthodox contains a much broader spectrum of thought than "outsiders" would suspect. To be honest, you'd probably find that a surprising percentage of modern Jews don't even believe that the exile in Egypt and the Exodus really happened *as such.*