My wife is Colombian, and from our research (initially going off a hunch she may have some Jewish blood because he paternal grandmother looked rather Jewish), it appears there were a healthy amount of conversos (and their descendants) who ended up migrating to the Antioquia region of Colombia (where that part of her family is from). I don't know how that compares to other reasons of Colombia, let alone the rest of Spain's former colonies, but it's a plausible explanation with exploring.
I am Chilean, and -as far as I knew- all of my ancestors were either from Spain or Andean natives. When I took a DNA test with Ancestry.com, to my great surprise, I was told that I had 51% Spanish, only 11% Native (Andean) American, and 25% "European Jewish". So the "converso" idea is something that could be happening significantly more than expected.
"See for comparison this story about Brazilian narco-gangsters who convert to Christianity to escape retribution. If they just left their gangs, the gangs would view it as a betrayal and kill them; if they leave because they convert, that’s a known quantity and they’re okay. I’m not saying all the Latin Americans converting to weird religions are trying to get out of gangs, but some of them might be trying to get out of a society that’s gotten stuck in a bad equilibrium, and religion is an accepted way of doing that."
Maybe I didn't read the article thoroughly enough, but it seems like the author was trying to suggest that evangelicalism is the cause, but never really presented evidence that it was true. Rather she used the fact that evangelicalism is on the rise and that attacks against minority religions is on the rise (maybe? not really clear how much it is increasing) and that the two must be linked. She also mentions evangelicalism being present in prisons as "evidence" that they must be working with the drug lords.
I think there are three factual claims that are linked:
1) Evangelical Christianity is on the rise, including at jails.
This one is undeniable, even Evangelicals agree, and, to give credit where credit's due, you can easily find articles about the good influence Evangelicalism has had over some former criminals.
2) "Converted traffickers control many Rio de Janeiro favelas, particularly in Baixada Fluminense, a sprawl of townships in the city’s poor northern outskirts."
3) Some Evangelical gangs are attacking non-Christian Black minorities.
I think there are enough credible reports that thete are Evangelical gangs supressing African-Brasilian religions and imposing more conservative patterns of behaviour on their turf. It probably gets drowned in the general human rights disaster caused by gangs in Brazil, but I, for one, am sure it is not trivial.
Thanks. I think my problem is that this article is all over the place. But I think your #3 is wrong. The article has links to reports that attacks against minority religions are on the rise and attacks by gangs-specifically against minority religions are on the rise. However no where is it explicit to evangelicals or evangelical gangs. And that connects to #2, where again this particular article does not mention any evangelical gangs. Rather it tries to imply that because they exist in the same space that the gangs must be evangelical or helped by the evangelical churches. It is a "guilt by association" thing, where the association is that they exist in prisons together and that some gangs favor evangelicals vs. these minority religions (the part where the article mentions that these minority religions are banned in some areas).
I'm not going to say that the rise in evangelicalism couldn't be fueling attacks against other religions or even that evangelicals themselves are doing the attacks, but this article doesn't point to any proof of it that I can tell. Sadly I can't read your WaPo article because I am not a paying subscriber.
finally was able to read the WaPo article. This article is much more focused on actual incidents and how they are connected to evangelicalism. On first read the WaPo article certainly gives evidence for #2 and #3. So my issue was only with the original article you linked, not the WaPo one.
Fair enough. I think we can say the phenomenon's existence is as well-established as possible even if we can not be sure of its magnitude. It is far from being the whole of the Evangelical expansion in Brazil, obviously, but it is a part of it (a surprising, if sad, one).
Dear Scott, not about this article, but I'm posting here since I think there's a good chance you'll see it: please write a new standalone version of your culture as cellular automata theory. It's a great idea, but many of my left leaning acquaintances won't read it because they dislike the larger thesis of the piece. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
But that post clearly separates the theory from the larger thesis, you can simply copy paste the first section and it would stand on its own just fine.
If people won't read something because they expect it to conflict with their already held beliefs they are fanatics and don't qualify as a full person to be considered, in my book.
By that definition a large percentage of the planet consists of "fanatics that don't qualify to be considered a full person". I don't think that is a very helpful approach.
> By that definition a large percentage of the planet consists of "fanatics that don't qualify to be considered a full person"
Yes.
> I don't think that is a very helpful approach.
If you play chess with a dove, it will knock over the pieces, shit on the board and strut away like it won. Not playing chess with doves is more helpful than doing so, unless you value frustration and despair.
I feel as if your mindset is like that of woke twitter users telling people to educate themselves (because if you're not already woke you don't qualify as a full person). You have to meet people where theyre at. If you can convince people of a true thing by circumventing their biases, you should do so.
I had the same thought. Those twitter users are not wrong either. It is useless debating someone who does not share and, crucially, does not want to share your assumptions and goals.
(I say that as someone who is not in the woke twitter camp, in fact they are my declared enemies since they encroach upon my territory via cultural warfare. But I get that since they just want to fight us, adversarially, there is no basis for collaborative debate, and in that way they are acting rational.)
Anyway your "they are fanatics and don't qualify as a full person to be considered" take is simply wrong, on the grounds that fanaticism is not a static biologically deterministic trait, and so considering it as an inherant aspect of "personhood" is incorrect on a technical, factual level.
And also anyway again, finally and most importantly, from a consequentialist angle, whether someone is fully a "person" or not isn't necessarily relevant to whether you should try to share information with them. The question is whether you create gains (personal, altruistic, whatever) from the interaction. Hypothetically if you had a literal pigeon that was hyper-intelligent and capable of changing its ways, it could be worthwhile to sit down and try to teach it something.
Same goes for actual humans who may act and think in bad ways, such as fanatics. Can a fanatic not be influenced to become less fanatical? Do fanatics not act in the world and create changes that affect us? Unless you'd seriously answer "no" to both of those, then there's a good chance it's rational to give them education.
My position I adopted groaningly, after many disappointments debating people who would refuse to follow the rules of debate. My solution was to classify people into those you can debate and those you can't. If I wanted to influence the latter I would use outright manipulation techniques, which I abhor, so I practice walking away instead.
If you want to educate someone first they need to be open to it, and many people just want to "win" a debate. They make so many mistakes that correcting them is be like chopping of hydras heads. And still, after many hours *they* will be the ones to walk away.
So my solution is that I am a big fan of walls with exams of intellectual continence at the gates.
That's a good point - in that case I need to clarify. The Daily Stormer I classify as blatant propaganda that cannot be trusted, SST I would consider nuanced enough. If the Daily Stormer would rewrite an article to appear less adversarial I would trust it even less. Also, if a close acquaintance would recommend a specific article in TDS I guess I would read it still, groaningly though.
Or put differently - I don't mistrust TDS because of conflicting beliefs but because of conflicting interests (fueling the evolution of my beliefs vs. convincing me unilaterally).
Very interesting read. Not sure if this will be of any assistance, but you can tell your left-leaning acquaintance that a lefty (in the context of politics in the southern United States) who you don't know (me ... I mean me) said Scott's article was very good and poses a useful way to think not just about fashion but possibly about political values and ideologies. The broad idea that we work hard to distinguish ourselves from those we don't want to be mistaken for is something I can recognize in my own life, as pushing me toward the left and the values of justice and fairness. Honestly, it's worth reading just for the insight on fashion. And because I'm a person who wears cargo shorts, clearly I'm a bit of an expert on fashion.
Hmm, I read something about a complicated way for a non-Jew to immigrate to Israel through aliyah if they convert to Judaism properly enough (and maybe keep it up for a while, I can't remember the details). Given that Colombia has much lower standard of living than Israel, might that be part of the answer? I mean, even if what I read was wrong, if I got this misconception some Colombians could've as well.
Maybe (and yeah, I think the answer to whether they can do it is "it's complicated"). But I think most Colombian converts aren't trying to emigrate to Israel.
Because of a weird quirk of Israeli politics, it is actually easier to immigrate to Israel if you are a Reform or Conservative convert as opposed to an Orthodox one.
I think it is older than that, but now that you mention it, I'm not so sure about the timeline. This article claims the change happened in 1988:
> In 1988, the High Court ruled that non-Orthodox conversions performed outside of Israel must be recognized for the purposes of aliyah and citizenship
"(Orthodox Judaism is about the least-hip and least Latin-American-culture-compatible religion imaginable)"
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though - it gives your religion the air of a mystical, unsullied tradition, untouched by wordly matters.
CS Lewis wrote about the shock some new Christians have when they attend church, and it's at a shabby building full of local randos dressed in weird clothes. "So...this is Christianity, huh? I expected something a little more special."
I attended church at a building that had recently been a casino. You could see square outlines on the carpet where poker machines had sat for years. It was kind of neat (and led to jokes about how the pastor had missed a trick for increasing the offering), but still, Cathédrale Notre-Dame it wasn't.
I could easily imagine a strange, out-of-kilter faith catching fire in a place where it doesn't belong, simply because it's so different to the local fare.
I think you hit the nail on the head. The most popular and growing religions seem to be the ones with more restrictions that put practitioners farther out of the mainstream of their local culture. The economist in me says it is probably to keep out of the riffraff and ensure members of the club are serious and likely to contribute. Yet I expect the separation from the normal culture is itself a big draw in addition, as a dissatisfaction with the culture is exactly what one wants to remedy by joining a religious group. If you wanted to be just like the rest of the culture, you would just do more of that.
May everyone find the strange *orthodox* community that suits them best! If you are going to join a community, best believe it is the true orthodox community and everyone else is the heretic.
It's worth pointing out that Mormons have a similar narrative about their faith being the "original" and uncorrupted form. The basic idea is that the religion as Jesus established it was corrupted and lost shortly after his death, and Joseph Smith (through direct revelation from God) restored it back to its original form. This narrative is taught very early on to potential converts.
Mormons even consider themselves part of the "house of Israel", and have a ceremony in which the person's "lineage" is revealed (i.e., which of the twelve tribes they belong to).
I have a longtime family friend -- like, 90 or so by now. His name is Ephraim and he pronounces it EEF-rum. Maybe the tribe is always different, I don't know.
It's "eff-RA-yim". No real difference here between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Hebrew.
But yeah, the Tribes are patrilineal clans that made up the Israelite nation. The idea of a non-Jew "identifying" with one of them sounds as silly to us as a Japanese person identifying as Black. Inability to pronounce the name of your supposed tribe does add to the hilarity, but getting it right wouldn't help all that much...
Is it really so much more laughable than the descendants of that Israelite nation "identifying" with a particular one of those patrilineal clans (hence "Jew") without claiming literal patrilineal descent from it? Given the natural divergence in the pronunciation of language over many years, are you quite sure that the members of the actual tribe of Judah, when it existed as such, could not similarly dismiss your modern pronunciation of their name? Perhaps most importantly, why do you use the first person plural in describing what is clearly your personal reaction to these statements?
I'm sorry if my previous paragraph comes off as unnecessarily combative (and I add this one in the hope of mitigating that). Being Jewish myself, it made me uncomfortable to see a sentiment I would not endorse being described as common to all of "us", which is why my own reaction to your words was more forceful than it might have been otherwise.
Okay, let me clarify. The truth is that the perspective I wrote from there is not even really my own; it's more what I see as the "naive" perspective common to Orthodox and/or Israeli Jews (such as my younger self) without too much exposure to other cultures. I did this to convey what it was that Brian's friends found so darn funny!
But sure, from a more "mature" perspective, this belief is not really much sillier than plenty of other stuff religions say, Jews included.
BTW, Jews do not generally claim descent from the tribe of Judah specifically. The name comes from the Kingdom of Judah, which was mainly of that tribe but not exclusively so. The Kohanim and Leviim do claim patrilineal descent from the relevant priestly castes, but even the Halacha doesn't treat these claims as fully reliable.
Re your last paragraph: that's really the point I was trying to make about modern Jews "identifying" with the tribe of Judah "*without* claiming literal patrilineal descent from it" [emphasis added this time around]. Without splitting hairs over the precise meaning of "identity", I just wished to point out the parallel between non-Judah-ites calling themselves, literally, Judah-ites by virtue of an affiliation (political or otherwise) with the tribe of Judah and non-Ephraimites calling themselves Ephraimites by virtue of an affinity they feel with the tribe of Ephraim. I don't claim the parallel to be exact, by any means, but it's close enough that I can't take the one as perfectly normal while finding the other ridiculous.
One of the things that happened with the expansion of Islam was that locals in the conquered territory sometimes became junior members of Arab tribes, so it isn't that silly an idea.
If you follow the link, you'll see that we view it as a form of "spiritual adoption". We believe in it as a part of the symbolism of entering into the same covenant and promises with God that He made with Abraham.
I think the preference for original, pure forms of religion in the west us all due to the Garden of Eden story and the fall. Which in turn is about regaining the innocence of childhood.
It's not an exclusively western thing. It's a big theme in East Asian Buddhism, with different sects claiming greater authenticity. Hell Journey to the West is a about travelling to India to collect original Buddhist texts
I have a pretty hard time believing that in an open market place of communities people are going to really try hard to find one that suits them best. I think most people are just gonna end up sticking around wherever they were born and doing whatever they’re familiar with whether or not it suits them well or not
I grew up in a tiny little town in Kansas and for whatever reason I’ve got the bug in me that makes me seek other places but most people I know from there don’t
I haves tayed in touch with several of them and it doesn’t exactly seem like they’re flourishing but they’re also not especially inclined to do anything else because that’s what they know
With a group of intently religious people though you have folks who are already wired to seek a deeper truth and some kind of spiritual order so it’s not so crazy that a compelling personality could convert them at scale
True, but there are so many people that when you subtract "most people" from "people" you're still left with quite a lot of people. Enough to be worth studying and, as appropriate, accommodating.
The connection to religion-as-route-out-of-gangs is good—religion can be a new kind of citizenship, and _sometimes_ the people around you agree with you that you've placed yourself under a new sovereign. I think a lot of people want to find a way to be in the world but not of the world. Being deliberate about this choice can look judgemental and make others defensive, unless they can explain it away as a crazy part of your new (known) faith.
>>To the best of my knowledge his was the only case of unmediated conversion to Judaism on the part of a village prophet in Italy or elsewhere in Europe; he seems to have believed that the post-biblical Jews were extinct and certainly in 1928-30 he was unaware that any could be found in Italy. In a sense he drew the strength of his prophetic vocation from the belief that God himself, by the dreams and visions in which he spoke, had given him the mission to bring ‘the Laws of the One God’ not just to the folk of San Nicandro, but back to a world that had forgotten them.
"(Orthodox Judaism is about the least-hip and least Latin-American-culture-compatible religion imaginable)"
The Kabbalistic flavored Orthodox Judaism may have been a much better fit for former Pentecostals. There is much more of a focus on personal spiritual experiences and interfacing with the divine.
This doesn't surprise me. Pretty much all of Latin America is Catholic with some pre-colonization religions tossed in (or sometimes surviving wholesale). But pre-colonization religions are associated with the Native Peoples. Many countries don't associate themselves with them in the same way the average American doesn't think of themselves as a Native American even if they have some blood.
The traditional battle lines are thus secularists/atheists (who don't claim any religion in particular) against Catholics. But there's always been groups of people who are uncomfortable with Catholicism but also secularism or atheism. A few of them turn to native religions, often as a form of extreme nationalism. But more commonly they turned to adjacent religions, especially if they have more internationalist leanings. This is especially in some countries where secularism are associated with rather extremist ideologies. An outright atheist in Colombia might get some side eyes about being a Communist.
Protestantism is the most popular but Judaism fits the bill. I suspect it probably fits roughly the same cultural niche. This is helped by the presence of Evangelicals and Jews on various trade routes. Plus Protestantism and Judaism have cultural presence. Every Latin American has at least a vague sense that Protestantism and Judaism exist even if they don't really have the strong feelings a 17th century Spaniard would have about them.
Plus there's some degree of cultural rebellion. Jews (and to a lesser extent Protestants) are in the weird position in Latin America. Spain and their colonies were really, really successful at quashing the Reformation and expelling the Jews. Hating Jews and Protestants is thus "normal" but also associated with the Ancien Regime. And no one in Latin America or even Spain is that interested in defending the pre-revolutionary monarchy anymore.
So yeah, tl;dr:
1.) Culturally rebellious that violates taboos no one is stringently enforcing anymore.
2.) Ambiguous enough that it doesn't precommit them to the existing Latin American cultural battle lines
3.) Gives them access to international networks of coreligionists.
I have suspected, on the basis of no firm evidence, that two of the factors behind the explosion of evangelical/charismatic protestantism in Latin America.are:
1. Protestantism is associated with North America and its money, power and success. "The USA is Protestant, and it is rich, powerful and successful, they must be on the side of God!"
2. Catholicism is, for better or worse, fairly or unfairly, seen as being a bit too chummy with the local power structures.
I think you can probably explain Protestant success easier than that, and Scott basically did it already: the liturgy is more flexible and adaptable. A lot of people don't enjoy going to Mass, and Protestant services can to some degree be whatever people want them to be. Also the entrepreneurial nature of Evangelicalism means that there's more of a free market, pastors have to compete on delivering an engaging and enjoyable service, while Catholicism is more accustomed to operating as a monopoly.
These are also big reasons why Evangelicalism has been taking market share in the US (i.e. declining slower than the other branches -- and note that Catholicism would look a lot worse if not for immigration). Per your point #1, this is despite the fact that Evangelicalism is lower-status than Catholicism in the US (at least nominally, Catholics now represent the President, Speaker, and 6 out of 9 SCOTUS Justices).
You're right about the local power structures thing. Less so about the United States. Actually Latin America is at best highly ambivalent about the US. A common saying is, "Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States." The entire concept of Latin America was developed as an ideological differentiation from the United States. But Latin Americans are perfectly capable of knowing the difference between elite, high church Anglicans and the low churches or the Jews. It's not a coincidence that the evangelicals, Mormons, etc are the ones finding purchase. Evangelicals are happy to talk your ear off about how they're the true Christians unlike those Catholics/Anglicans/whatevers. Which is appealing to people who think there's something rotten in the Catholic Church. It's kind of the Evangelicals' original message.
However, there is an effect of simple exposure. Americans and Latin Americans do a lot of international business. The US is the biggest trading partner of a lot of Latin America. And Evangelicals and especially Jews have a disproportionate share of the trade. Not for any kind of nefarious reasons: it just happens to shake out that the trade goods and geography favor that kind of thing. Evangelicals dominate construction and Latin American purchases a lot of construction. And a lot of the trade is run out of parts of the South with a disproportionate Jewish population. Like Southern Florida.
Oh, i understand that many Latin Americans are ambivalent at best about the USA, but they like money, power and success as much as anyone else. Just as many Latin Americans leave for the assumed better pickings to be had here, not to mention the general lack of American bombs, coups, American-sponsored death squads, etc..
The majority of migrants are from Mexico so I doubt American coups, bombs, or death squads are much of a motivation. The largest migrations in the region mostly come from native grown problems. The current largest movement is out of Venezuela, for example, and the US doesn't back the Mexican cartels. But the US serves as a useful bogeyman, especially for left wing movements.
No doubt they like power and success. But I've never seen a significant trend towards imitating the United States. Indeed, there's a strong sense in Latin America that they have superior cultural values in various ways. Of course, there are defectors from this consensus and they are likely to be disproportionately among the converts.
Although wanting to avoid the most gruesome features of cartel or gang violence also may be a motivational factor in places like Mexico, El Salvador, etc..
I should add that, according to a chart i have, outside Colombia and a few other countries, as of 2019, China and not the United States is the largest trading partner.
Really? What chart? I know that's true for a few countries, especially those with Pacific Coasts. Japan is another major trading partner. But the World Bank stats I've seen have the us as Latin America's second biggest trade source (about 30%), behind intraregional trade (about half). China is a distant third.
When I was in grad school, I once heard a story about an English conservative who converted to Eastern Orthodoxy because he lived in Northern Ireland, and wanted to a) be a conservative Christian not a liberal atheist, but b) express his neutrality between and or disdain for both the Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist and Catholic/Nationalist/Republican sides of the Troubles.
I think there is something distinct about converting to Orthodox Judaism that requires explanation that makes it different from evangelical Protestantism, Mormonism, Orthodox Christianity, or other religions, and that is the sheer difficulty of it. Ignore the philosophical and social ramifications of adopting a religion that denies the divinity of Jesus and the Trinity. Think about the work involved. There is the adoption of a new mode of dress, a swath of food that you can't eat, new dishes, and getting circumcised! There are the regular prayers (shacharit, mincha, and ma'ariv), and then the constant prayers over every action (eating, drinking, waking up, going to bed, seeing a rainbow). Keeping the sabbath, with no driving, music, electricity, cooking, or lights. Learning a new language just for prayer. Whatever hoops the other religions require, I don't think any are as overwhelmingly encompassing of one's life as orthodox Judaism.
My point is that people going through this process are taking on a huge life change. And it's not like they couldn't convert to reform or conservative Judaism for the same religious change with a fraction of the bother. They are looking to change their lives in a way that is different from other conversion paths. I am sure there is more to the sociology and psychology of this.
Come. A demanding initiation ritual is part of the secret sauce of recruitment for *all* cults. People are attracted to that stuff. The Heaven's Gate people thought you had to cut your nuts off to fully join, at least Orthodox Judaism doesn't ask that much.
It's really not as big as you think. You can wear anything you want, you just don't dress like a slob for shul. Davening is just something you do but if you're in a community it's pretty easy to get a minyan. "Constant Prayers" puts it wildly out of proportion. You can leave lights on on shabbos, just not change them. You don't really need to learn hebrew, people really just learn how to repeat it phonetically to zoom through it, you do learn the meanings but it's not as though you're fluent.
Extremely random but earnest thought: since (as I understand it) speech is not prohibited on the Sabbath, would saying "Alexa, turn on the lights" be permissible?
Speech is not itself prohibited, but halacha recognizes when you did an action that was a direct cause of something else. It gets more complicated and hotly debated when your action is an indirect cause and the result wasn't guaranteed.
This reminds me of a speaker I heard at a Border's bookstore, around 2005. He was a Jew who'd been sent to investigate a Christian church in Uganda that had written to some rabbis in the US saying they wanted to become Jews, but didn't know how.
A missionary had converted them to Christianity, and given them Bibles. (I don't remember what language the Bibles were in.) They read the Bibles, and decided that the Old Testament made sense, but the New Testament didn't. So they decided that Jesus was a false messiah, and they wanted to become Jews instead of Christians.
Anybody who actually reads the entire Bible with an open mind will notice the same things the Ugandans did: the Old and New Testaments don't fit together, the New Testament is full of contradictions on key points of theology and practice, and the religion Christians teach isn't the religion that Jesus taught.
So maybe increasing literacy is an important factor. The "Christian" parts of the world are made of peoples who converted to Christianity by about 800 AD, long before literacy was common. Hardly anyone in those areas ever had the chance to read the Bible objectively.
I think the NT contradicts the Old Testament in its view of God and of righteousness (though I think contemporary Judaism does too). I think the NT contradicts itself on many key points. The OT also contradicts itself on some points that people at the time thought were key, like whether the Temple should be permanent or movable, and whether animals should or shouldn't be sacrificed (which is odd, 'coz they were definitely sacrificed). But the OT tends to have fewer opportunities for contradiction, because it's more narrative and less theology.
"The "Christian" parts of the world are made of peoples who converted to Christianity by about 800 AD, long before literacy was common."
Russia and Poland and Lithuania and Moravia all were christianized after AD 800. Not to mention Scandinavia and Latin America.
In fact, in the case of Russia (and Moravia and Bulgaria) the missionaries invented written languages for the locals and translated the Bible and the services into those languages, in order to effectuate the conversion process.
You're right. I added the "or conquered" note partly to account for Latin America. My point was that they converted before literacy was common; I didn't think carefully about the date, sorry.
Yeah, I was thinking - if the thing to be explained is that there are 600 Jewish converts in Colombia, and 200 of them were all converted in one fell swoop, then it sounds like three weird individual incidents could do the explanation (particularly if one of them inspired the other two).
As a member of a culturally conservative religion that sends quite a few missionaries to Latin America and South America I can speak to the “Religion as a way out of a gang” thing. Basically, the cartels will only allow gang members to leave if they immediately join a church and attend every Sunday. If they miss to many services, they will get a “visit” from the cartel.
An unrelated thought, but religions that separate themselves from the rest of society become much more attractive in times of upheaval like the last 10 years. I can understand the attraction to Orthodox Judaism. Judaism offers a structure and tradition that is lacking in Latin American Catholicism. Despite its intimidating look Catholicism allows anyone in and does not ask anyone to change in any way. A murderous cartel leader can be a Catholic in good standing. This becomes decidedly unattractive to anyone who is trying to raise children and keep them of the streets and out of drugs.
That's my impression as a Conservative Jew, but at the same time, I've been to a Chabad house (Orthodox) that had more energy than I've seen at any other synagogue. It probably depends a lot on the congregation.
I hate to start sentences with "as an orthodox jew", but as an orthodox jew I don't think he's wrong. It only feels wrong because relative to your own experience, there's plenty of personal connection to God. But it's nothing compared to some other religions. Having a strong connection with God is emphasized, but it's rarely personal. In some evangelical contexts, for example, they talk about Jesus like he's their buddy. I simply can't imagine anything remotely like that happening in any frum community I've seen. Instead, the connection to God is intense, but without emphasis on the details, and discussed very little relative to other religious topics.
The ironic thing is that if the evangelicals would go back just a bit further, they would realize (perhaps) just how much the biblical scriptures owe to Near Eastern mythology, Greek cosmogony, mystery cults, eschatology, and a whole bunch of other traditions.
That includes the Jewish books. In fact, the earlier books of the Old Testament are even more deeply involved in this borrowing of neighbouring myths. So to me it makes no logical sense to stop at Judaism and not go back to say... Zoroastrianism - particularly for those people who find themselves longing for monotheism. Besides, the name Ahura Mazda is so much cooler than Yahweh.
Certainly, the Old Testament incorporated extant Near Eastern myths. But the idea that Zoroastrianism is a clear precursor to Judaism is a bit off. It's not definitely clear which came first! If Christianity is a branch off the original Jewish bush, then Zoroastrianism and Judaism are two traditions that came from the same ground, but are different plants.
Certainly. In fact, Zoroastrianism shares a much more direct link with the Vedic religion and some Indo-European traditions than anything else.
My point is that merely looking for the oldest strain of thought is misguided, since at some point or other all the traditions from that part of the world get mixed up into each other, and so there is no compelling reason to believe one cosmogonic story in particular on account of its purported age.
That's why I worship the thunder god (because you don't want to be in his bad books when hiking on a high ridge), the god of morning wood (when you're over 50 you understand), and Saccharomyces cervisiae (for medicinal use). Simple stuff, very accessible. On sacred holidays we drink and dance around an inflated wineskin and then fuck in assorted holy ways.
My daily supplication to the god of morning wood includes: Tongkat Ali extract, Fadogia Agrestes. Additionally three times a week my prayers look this: https://youtu.be/zyYR1_nazUU. My god hasn’t failed me in years and my faith is now strong.
Re: "seeking a personal connection with God” (Orthodox Judaism almost aggressively avoids providing this)."
Wow, have you got this wrong. Way off base. That is one of the most incorrect statements I have ever heard, the complete antipodes of the truth. Orthodox Judaism is in fact COMPLETELY and OBSESSIVELY focused on our constant deep and personal connection with the Almighty. We have hundreds of connection points throughout each day and night in thought, speech and action. The whole point of our life is what we call "dveykus": cleaving closely to God, and expressing our love for God and feeling God's love for us! The primary mission statement of the Jewish nation, the "Shma" prayer (which we recite twice per day) opens with: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your power"! You mentioned the Rambam, well, look in the 10th chapter of his Hilchos Teshuva where he describes our ultimate spiritual goal: to become madly in love with God, like a man obsessed with loving a woman to the point of love sickness, who eats, breathes and sleeps totally for his beloved! ... this is an elevated life of spirit, power, emotion and intellect harnessed together to power us higher and higher in our love relationship with the Creator, infusing all life, all our relationships and interactions and even the most physical of acts with illuminated Divine Godliness. That is the point of all the Mitzvos. (The word "mitzva" itself means to join together as in "tzevet" (team)). That is the point of all of this. That is why we are poring over sacred texts all day and night: we are God's lovers - obsessing over every nuance and every drop of ink in the love letters He gave us... and learning all the details and subtleties to best live our lives together with God, inside this deep and growing love relationship, always...
This might just be a difference in language / word interpretation. When average Protestants speak of "a personal connection with God" they mean that they pray conversationally to God, as if he is in the room, and God answers them. Kind of like an imaginary friend. It is quite different than the spiritual phenomenon you describe.
Wrong! Our prayers are not considered complete unless they are personal and conversational. We have prescribed prayers we say 3 times per day, but if it's rote and not fresh (and there are places built in for ad libbing!) and your mind is wandering away from a lovers' whispers, if you are not pouring out heart and soul then you are missing the opportunity. Many of the great Chassudic masters, especially Rebbe Nachman of Breslov specifically teach that real prayer is heartfelt conversation with God, pouring out your heart to a loving parent and closest friend. If you could see the fervor in the authentically Orthodox synagogues... God is indeed our friend... but not imaginary at all.
With all due respect, I'm not sure your reply is to the point. The most salient words [to me] in bbqturtle's comment are "and God answers them". That is, the Protestant "personal connection with God" includes the experience of a direct personal response from God.
In this context, "imaginary friend" is simply an analogy that many who can't directly relate to this Protestant experience might relate to: the "imaginary friend" is not corporeal, his words are heard only in the listener's head and the listener himself knows that the experience is subjective. On the other hand, the connection is more ...defined (for lack of a better word) than simply feeling the presence of a sympathetic audience as one pours out his heart. I found the analogy rather enlightening, honestly (unless I've utterly mistaken it, of course).
Your reply makes the case that the fervor of the "authentically Orthodox" is genuine and personally felt, and that they relate to God as "not imaginary at all", but as their closest friend. Yet I don't think bbqturtle's comment disputed any of these points, nor that "imaginary" was intended as a diminishment of closeness (imaginary friends are often closer than any real ones, you know; otherwise there would be no need to imagine them). Indeed, "imaginary friend" was his analogy for the "average Protestant" experience of a personal connection with God, not the average Orthodox Jewish one, so it clearly could not have been intended to say anything about the latter, let alone diminish it.
TL;DR Does God answer your prayers with exact words that you could quote verbatim? That's the point at hand, IMHO.
I dunno, I just Googled "personal relationship with God", and most of what they talk about doesn't sound all that different from what Orthodox Jews have. Except the parts about Jesus and "salvation", of course.
If Protestants do hear God speaking to them, it's clearly not something they want to advertise too much.
It depends on the type of Protestantism. In the type I was raised in, no-one expected God to say anything back. It *could* happen, of course, but it was very very rare in modern times, if it happened at all. Certainly I never knew anyone who said it'd happened to them, not even the pastor.
Specifics here. In general in my searches on forums/Reddit, about one in four answers to questions about personal relationships with God, or speaking with God, are referring to actually 2-way communication.
Wait, really? It's common for Protestants to hear God speaking to them in words? We Jews only get a sense of empathetic listening and emotional reflection. Basically God acts a great therapist! But no, no speaking -- God is not believed to have spoken explicitly to anyone since the last of the Biblical prophets.
That is what they claim. Pastor's preach it and congregations claim it, and if you say you can't hear god, it's because you aren't praying hard enough. It's possible some believe hard enough that they are able to deceive themselves, but in private conversation with many, they say they pray as hard as they can but God still doesn't verbally answer their prayers, but that they can "hear his thoughts" as an inclination in their brain (just their own thoughts personified as him) and that's good enough for most people.
In the type of protestantism I was raised in, no-one expected to hear anything back, and I never knew anyone who claimed it had happened to them, not even the pastor. Maybe people did get 'a feeling in their hearts' sometimes, but if they did, they didn't talk about it.
As a child I expected to hear back and couldn't understand why I didn't while others claimed to. Eventually I decided that if I was God, I wouldn't bother responding to an insignificant kid either.
What Sabiola says. Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, United Methodist Church, and a smattering of other Protestant denominations I have experience with, none ever suggested that one might hear literal words from God in response to prayer. A warm fuzzy feeling of being on the right track was about it.
There may be Protestant churches or even denominations where pastors try to make their charges feel inadequate if they don't hear the literal voice of God, or turn them into delusional nutcases who hallucinate the voice of God. There may even be one that has figured out the trick of having God actually speak. But if so, this phenomenon is in practice more narrow than "Protestants", and it would help if you could pin down exactly which protestants you are talking about.
Yeah. I've had some online conversations with sincere American Protestants (Evangelical types) and they completely do speak of praying to God and hearing Him answer them vocally, not simply a sense of "this is what I should do" or listening to their conscience. As a Catholic, brought up to class this kind of intimate union with God as spiritual consolations https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/spiritual-growth-vs-spiritual-consolation/ which you only receive at a certain point when you are working on your spiritual life, this was very odd. I'm certainly not going to ask these nice people "but how do you know you're not imagining it?" but yeah, there definitely is this idea of actual perceptible presence and communication.
As an American evangelical, I'm surprised. I've never audibly heard God's voice myself. I've occasionally heard people saying they've audibly heard God's voice once in a while, but I've never talked with anyone who says He speaks to them routinely.
There's definitely "actual perceptible presence and communication," but not usually through audible speech.
Copying my reply from elsewhere: I hate to start sentences with "as an orthodox jew", but as an orthodox jew I don't think he's wrong. It only feels wrong because relative to your own experience, there's plenty of personal connection to God. But it's nothing compared to some other religions. Having a strong connection with God is emphasized, but it's rarely personal. In some evangelical contexts, for example, they talk about Jesus like he's their buddy. I simply can't imagine anything remotely like that happening in any frum community I've seen. Instead, the connection to God is intense, but without emphasis on the details, and discussed very little relative to other religious topics.
Adding something for this reply in particular: You're absolutely right that the biggest rabbis empathize a personal connection with God. But I can't say that that's what became emphasized by normal people. To use your example from prayer, people focus more on learning the words for davening than they do on any personal tefillot. And I get the impression that most people daven by rote. There's a shared sense that we all SHOULD be doing better. And there's a lot of real, sincere work put in into improving! But it's not like other religions in this regard at all.
I want to follow up with an analogy. Imagine if someone said that orthodox jews don't eat much meat compared to most Americans. You might say that's ridiculous. You could point to all the kosher meat restaurants. All the efforts people go through to have a siyyum during the nine days because they can't stand going for even nine days without meat even though shabbos is already a break in the middle. And that there's a requirement to have meat every shabbos and yom tov.
And then you look at how American cuisine throws meat into nearly everything, how some Americans don't understand how pizza could be kosher because how could it ever be vegetarian, and how "meatless Mondays" is meant to be a major accomplishment and not just what you do regularly when you brought a peanut butter sandwich to work and then had dairy for dinner. It's just not comparable.
Sometimes seeing the same phenomenon somewhere else can provide a useful check. Here is an account of a trip I took to Erode, India in 2015 (note I am not the author of this quote):
First of all, a short background. Several years ago, there was a man named Samuel who lives in Erode, a city of 500,000 in Southern India. He was a Christian minister of a congregation of 3000 members and a businessman as well. He began to realize on his own that the Christian teachings he had learned and taught for so many years were just not making sense anymore and the concept of one G-d was something much more sensible. He began to learn about Judaism and began secretly practicing the religion (to the best of his ability) in secret while still leading his congregation. Finally, when his son was about to be baptized, he decided to address his congregation about his feelings of becoming Jewish and asked who wanted to join him to create a new congregation that would attempt to take the necessary steps to becoming Jewish. Half of them agreed to continue to follow his path and so a new congregation was born. Samuel and his wife Anne realized they had little knowledge of Judaism and its authentic practices and searched for help as to how to acquire the necessary knowledge to attempt giyur[conversion].
Interesting. The phenomenon was first reported in a North American publication 5 years ago:
"The Faithful: René and Juan Carlos set out to convert their Colombian megachurch to Orthodox Judaism. This is what happened." By Graciela Mochkofsky in The California Sunday Magazine on April 28, 2016
The article mentioned the word "sicario," meaning "assassins" in Spanish. Interestingly, the sicarii were a splinter group of Jewish zealots back in Jesus' day. It has to have the same root.
Right. But the Latin was taken from Greek, sikarioi, “dagger men." A lot of people in the Roman Empire spoke demotic Greek. That's the extent of my linguistic knowledge.
"...if you avoid alcohol and violence out of pious Christian humility, that looks better than backing out because you’re not macho enough to handle it."
I've had a similar thought coming from my family's experience. My father was raised pentacostal and consequently a teetotaler, but as he and his brother left the faith they gradually became functioning alcoholics. I wonder how many conversions to alcohol-abstaining creeds were in some part a way to credibly escape alcoholism. It would be interesting to see if, within a given population with a decent amount of recent conversions such as South America, those alcohol-abstaining converts had a higher incidence of genetic markers predicting alcoholism.
It's worth noting that religious conversion is a powerful tool against addictions, even if the particular religion does not explicitly ban that particular vice. The AA 12-step process is based on this idea.
In Russia and Ukraine, a lot of converts to the Russian Baptist faith (adherents do not drink alcohol) are the wives, mothers, daughters and sisters of alcoholics.
Christianity is a mash-up of two major cultural forces in the Eastern Mediterranean during the Classical age -- Jewish and Hellenistic. Paul in his New Testament letters tries to synthesize them and make his religion, later known as Christianity, palatable to the non Jewish urban world of his time.
After Christianity becomes the official religion of the Empire and its successor states, rebellion involves heresy. One class of heresies is Hellenistic and roots it self in Neo-platonism. This is the Gnostic tendency. E.g. Paulicians, Bogomils, and Cathars. Another class is Judaizers.
The attraction is rooted in the Christian acceptance of the "Old Testament" as the word of God. In John 4:22 Jesus says that salvation comes from the Jews. In Matthew 5:18-20 Jesus says: "till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."
Scripture of course is not monophonic, and there are lots of passages that can be read in opposition to these.
Much of Protestantism is Judaising. Translating the "Old Testament" from Hebrew instead of Greek and Latin. Rejecting icons and statues. Are Judaising moves. Some sects have gone farther. The Seventh Day Adventists went back to the Jewish Sabbath. the Mormons wear undergarments modeled on the Tallit katan.
In context, the Columbian converts are more of the same.
My only advice to them would be find some Sephardi Jews to teach you how to cook. Ashkenazic food is greasy and bland.
Jesus is quite clear in some places that the law is to be unchanged. A compromise was reached at the so-called Council of Jerusalem which decided that non-Jewish Christians were bound by Noahide law, while Jewish Christians were bound by Mosaic law. However the scriptural basis for this, Peter's vision in the Acts of the Apostles, has always been weaker than the words attributed to Jesus which are quite clear. And Acts has always been a controversial book that was almost excluded from the Bible.
So to be a fully 100% compliant Christian you also have to follow Mosaic law, according to the most extreme fundamentalist interpretation. Going one step further and becoming orthodox Jewish is less of a leap if you already feel bound by Mosaic law.
More prosaically this could be an extreme form of Pascal's wager. More laws means more safety!
"Acts has always been a controversial book that was almost excluded from the Bible."
I don't think this is true. You can't really discard Acts without discarding Luke, because I think pretty much everyone, even skeptical modern scholars, has always agreed that Acts 1:1 is sincere and they share an author.
The historically more controversial/disputed NT books are listed as James, 2-3 John, 2 Peter, Hebrews, and Revelation.
As far as the major Middle-Eastern religions, I agree. The really cool thing is when you examine religious stories by seeing them as a traditional mythos rather than an unchanging corpus of rules. And then you can separate the mythologies which are more indigenous to one group of people or another.
Hence, I don't think it's extremely noteworthy that Christians in most any part of the world are converting to Judaism - they are adopting one set of standardized beliefs in place of another. The more interesting thing to study would be societal tendencies toward adoption of foreign belief systems generally, and then seeing whether that phenomenon can be compared on a structural level - i.e., between different classes, ethnicities, etc.
"I don't think it's extremely noteworthy that Christians in most any part of the world are converting to Judaism - they are adopting one set of standardized beliefs in place of another."
No, It's very strange. Judaism and Christianity are in opposition to one another first of all, and second, history.
Plus there's that whole Jewish peoplehood thing. There's no such thing as "the Christian people." These Colombians aren't just converting to a religion, they're adopting a new family!
When you're a Jew you're a Jew all the way from your first Torah reading to your last dying day.
Exactly. What I'm saying is that Judaism is a religion which is part of the traditional heritage of Jewish people.
The same doesn't go for Christianity - all of these Colombian Christians are practising a religion which has nothing to with their ancestral mythos. So one who converts to Judaism is still choosing a religion which has no basis in his own traditions - it's an odd leap from Christianity to Judaism, but why choose a foreign religion of any kind in the first place?
It's my theory that people who are predisposed to assuming the customs and habits of others would be more likely to adopt yet another religion that has nothing to do with their own indigenous beliefs. This is probably a thought process that can be studied, especially since it seems so common.
"With Some Passing on Gefilte Fish, A New Lure: Fish 'Meatballs': Manischewitz Takes Mediterranean Turn, Hoping to Spice Up Fare; 'What Is Cumin?'" By Lucette Lagnado Oct. 7, 2011
"Then there was the Cumin Crisis. Manischewitz had no cumin. The industrial kitchen had 'salt, pepper, garlic, onion—nothing exciting,' says Inna Rabinovich, the Russian-born food technologist charged with reproducing the Moroccan fish balls. She struggled to produce a version for mass production, summoning the boss each time she prepared a new batch, hoping he'd like it. 'Sometimes it wasn't very good—but he was very polite,' she says. They turned to Manischewitz's longtime chief of procurement, Yossi Ostreicher, to procure the large quantities of cumin required."
I should add that the starkest example of a Judaising heresy is Islam. Islam is formed in reaction to Byzantine Christianity which leaned towards the Platonic Hellenistic side of the Christian heritage. The whole structure of Sharia as a law that encompassed both religious and non-religious issues is an imitation of Halacha. The bans on icons and pork, the adoption of circumcision are all imitations of Rabbinic Judaism.
I'd be interested in seeing your friend's review of "The Reformation of Machismo". I loaned my copy briefly to my cousin who is a priest in Colombia, and my reading of it doesn't line up with your description.
I think one thing that Protestant groups offer is a closer connection to the minister, which helps both for counseling and for accountability. My cousin was one priest of 5 in a town of 40,000. A typical Evangelical congregation is closer to 150; this means the minister can actually directly offer help and advice to all of his flock, and can check in on all of them to make sure they're staying off booze and staying out of other sorts of trouble.
I like your hypothesis about envy for the culture and community that comes with a religion. When I visited Salt Lake City, I thought, yeah, their dogmas are silly, but those Mormons sure figured out how to build an impressively nice city under difficult circumstances and to keep it running smoothly. It was almost like Switzerland, just with desert instead of mountains. Likewise, Jews have managed to establish a pretty impressive country - especially compared to the oppressive shitholes that surround it - in an environment that is hostile in many ways. If Latin-American Mormons and Jews manage to tap into the secret sauce of that success, more power to them.
I cofounded a company with a mormon and a lot of our investors are from that international network. I have also been impressed by them. I guessed the mission they all do around age 18 is an excellent preparation for an entrepreneurial career.
Do you think there is any merit to the notion that they are converting to eventually get Israeli passports and citizenship? I was surprised that this was not at all explored in your article.
Orthodox Judaism absolutely does encourage forming a "personal connection to God".
You are supposed to pray and ask Him for anything and everything you want in your day-to-day life. If you have sinned, you need to apologize directly to Him; He may be upset at you but He will relent if you are sincere enough (and committed to improvement). Moral dilemmas are challenges designed by God specifically, to promote your personal growth. Etc, etc...
Convert to Taoism! You get to skip church on Sundays, get to brag to all your friends about how detached you are, and when you die, you can force your kids to fold little pieces of gold and silver to send up to you in heaven! You can also get a swanky house, servants, and even a computer and an iPhone if your kids cash out for the burnable paper models!
POLYTHEISM RULES! Only in a free marketplace of gods can there be true religious progress! Competition is essential to the health of any particular god!
I knew guy in college who converted from evangelical Protestantism to Judaism. He started off in Reform Judaism but he was in the process of moving on to Conservative Judaism because it felt more authentic. I think he would have considered Orthodox too, but he was convinced that they probably wouldn't let him in (at the time)
Sort of OT but not entirely, I have read that one reason Islam is popular in prisons is that it provides prisoners a way to go straight but not be seen to be selling out.
"Yet, to Juan Carlos’s surprise, 600 parishioners declared that they trusted him and would follow him into Judaism."
If some 600 parishioners woke up one morning as Messianic Jews, then followed their pastor into Judaism that evening, were they not really following the pastor?
Something similar could be said about a pagan Dark Ages king converting to Christianity and then his entire people or tribe or whatever immediately following suit, except that the king had a lot more power to hand out the goodies and lay out the smackdowns than any pastor does.
"If I had a nickel for every time someone converted to Orthodox Judaism in Columbia, I'd have 5000 nickels. Which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened to 0.0004% of the population."
For those not familiar, The Diamond Age is a novel by Neal Stephenson about a not-too-distant future where governments have collapsed due to a combination of factors, and society is now organized into "phyles", distinct identity groups which may be ethnic, religious, or ideological. The book goes out of its way to emphasize that the most powerful phyles tend to ask a tremendous amount of their members, much like Orthodox Judaism. It is, in fact, why they are powerful.
>Orthodox Judaism is about the least-hip and least Latin-American-culture-compatible religion imaginable
Tisches and some services can get pretty hype. Really depends on the crowd, if you checked out a good hillel or a shul with a good bnei akiva presence you might be impressed.
My question is, who's going to make the second shul in the area? You're not a real jew if you don't have one shul you go to and another shul you wouldn't be caught dead in
Hey, scott -- quick point here about "The number one reason cited by new Latin American converts to Protestantism is that they are “seeking a personal connection with God” (Orthodox Judaism almost aggressively avoids providing this)." -- even modern orthodox judaism, the least personal-connection-with god wing of orthodox judaism, has some 'connect to god as father' -- e.g. Shir Hashirim/song of songs and Avinu Malkeinu/'our father, our king' (and more generally half the high holy day liturgy) and the more traditional sides of OJ have much more personal connection to G-d as a liturgical/communal focus (don't even get me started on the chassidic relationship with G-d)
Judaism has more holidays than Christianity and Islam combined. Most of them are meant to be enjoyable and the major one that isn't, Yom Kippur, forces a lot of reflection.
Judaism has the shabbat, which is a really good time for families to bond and for people to break their social media addictions.
Orthodox Judaism has a lot of prohibitions and requirements, but those prohibitions and requirements have a way of increasing social cohesion within the group. If you go to a daily minyan, how can you not become friends with the other people who go to minyan too?
If you have to live within walking distance of your synagogue and walk to and from synagogue, forming friendships is easier than if people live scattered about and drive independently away together.
I tried to translate what I thought was the core 'spirit' of shabbat – to rest – into terms that make sense to me.
I opted to 'observe' it from 6p Friday to 6p Saturday – instead of from sunset to sunset. (I do like the idea of 'anchoring' to a naturalistic phenomena, but I don't think I'd be comfortable explaining to my employer's why I can't work past 3-4 in the afternoon in the middle of winter!)
My only real restriction is that I don't 'have to' do anything that otherwise I have to (or really want to) do. But I can do anything I _want_ to do. I don't schedule anything, even personal stuff, during that time, but I'll make exceptions for 'interfacing' with 'non-observant' people, for fun mainly, and I'll respond to work 'emergencies' if they're sufficiently severe (and, of course, 'real' emergencies too). And if I do schedule something, particularly on a Saturday, I'll almost always do so in the late afternoon, at the earliest, so I don't have to 'work' to get to bed early Friday night and wakeup at any particular time Saturday.
Mostly I relax, e.g. watch TV, read, and play games, but it's also great for working on personal projects that I've otherwise neglected (or been unable or unwilling to schedule time for). My 'metric' for what's 'okay' to do is whether (or to what sufficient degree) that task/project is intrinsically rewarding, and enjoyable/relaxing/energizing/meditative.
I have mostly 'observed' this myself – my ex-partner didn't seem to ever appreciate it when we were together. My ex and I have a child and I intend to kind of 'passively' include them in it when I get a chance. (I will be happy to explain my reasoning to them if they ask and are interested tho!)
I don't otherwise have any family nearby, but I'd think 'observing it' with them (or a 'super-family' consisting of close friends) would mostly consist of hanging out having fun.
I'm in NYC and have been, mostly, for the past decade plus. I think a big part of why I was open to the idea was because I've met a few very nice Orthodox Jewish people that were kind enough (and probably interested on their own too!) to explain enough about how they observe shabbat (and other elements of their practices/rituals/observances) that I was able to appreciate it greatly. One aspect that I thought was particularly cool when I first thought about it is that observing shabbat requires a good bit of preparation and discipline (outside of shabbat). One of the very nice Orthodox people told me once that they've abandoned their car on a highway (in NYC!) when they weren't able to make it home by sunset Friday! I thought (and still think) that was an impressive demonstration of their dedication. And it occurred to me that that kind of dedication is an interesting 'handicap' but that by (strongly) committing to it, they probably were 'strengthening/training' a whole bunch of other useful skills, attributes, and habits that are generally extremely good, useful, and helpful in basically every other area of their lives.
I'm pretty 'allergic' to social media in general – I find it extremely dispiriting! So my 'shabbat' doesn't help with that :)
But you seem like you might know a good bit about how 'real' shabbats are observed. Are there any other aspects that you think might be usefully/helpfully translated for me or others like me that are doing something like a 'secular shabbat'?
THat's interesting what you do, with 6 PM to 6 PM, Friday-Saturday period of rest. I also liked reading how you liked how Orthodox Jewish people do their own, more structured shabbats. I agree with you that preparation for shabbat is a lot of work; even if shabbat is very peaceful, getting ready for it is chaotic.
Unfortunately I do not keep shabbat. When I was a teenager I spent a few weekends with Orthodox Jews and loved the family togetherness of a shabbat meal and the downtime of Saturday. I also enjoyed how social walking to and from synagogue was. Even as an adult now, I'm jealous when I drive through a Jewish neighborhood on Friday night or Saturday and see big clusters of people walking together. I think a walk to and from synagogue is an opportunity to make new acquaintances and grow acquaintanceships into friendships. Since the requirement to walk keeps a spiritual community physically compact, I think it fosters socialization in that way too.
When Orthodox Judaism offers so many opportunities for socialization, I don't see any mystery as to why people of non-Jewish ancestry, like in Colombia, convert.
Unfortunately, I personally lack the willpower to keep all the rules of shabbat. I cannot stay away from pointless conversations/arguments on social media. I cannot resist watching something late Friday night with my wife. I have decided not to deprive my kids of extracurricular activities on a Saturday.
But I'm ambivalent about my activity on shabbat. I admire people who can keep the day reserved for personal reflection, prayer (even if the practical benefit of prayer is socialization), and family time.
The only day of the year where I strictly keep shabbat is Yom Kippur, where I do not use the internet. I find that Yom Kippur does give me a sense of calm I don't have on the the other 364 days of the year and I am usually able to read 10x more pages of whatever book I'm reading than I am the mundane days of the year.
It seems like you _do_ keep shabbat, but, like me, just not "all the rules". (I think that's totally sensible!)
Another aspect of Judaism that I like a lot, and admire, is the kind of ritual 'over-thinking' that seems (to me) to be much more common. I love the idea of thousands of years of rabbis (and others) arguing with each other over how to interpret/translate/adapt their scriptures to different circumstances. I like to think I would have been drawn to join that 'ongoing conversation' myself had that been possible for me!
The average Colombian wants to get the hell out of Colombia, because the average Colombian is stuck in an unofficial caste system where they're placed within a very tightly defined socio-economic strata that will determine what kind of education, jobs, and social connections are available to them.
Conversion to Judaism, to the average Colombian, would represent mainly:
1. Personal connections to wealth (politically incorrect, sure, but the idea of Jewish wealth and status are very firmly planted in the average Colombian's mindset)
2. The possibility of emigrating from Colombia.
Really, the aspiration of one day leaving Colombia is one of the most firmly rooted ideas in any Colombian's mind.
Ii.
I discussed this article with a very wealthy, highly respected member of the Jewish community in the capital, who is of direct European descent, and learned that the conversions have become a source of concern for the traditional Jewish community in the country.
Their stance is that of skepticism towards the converts, as they suspect that the reason behind conversions boil down to the two points above.
and in part, the conversions spark scorn among some members of the Jewish community because the converts have not lived through so many of the tragic shared experiences in the history of the Jews.
Iii.
Now, a bit about the traditional Jewish community in Colombia: From the 16th to 18th centuries there was a large influx of Sephardic Jews to Colombia that largely converted to catholicism and blended into the typical Colombian mestizo over the course of time. This followed, among other things, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, which was only officially repealed in 1962, if you can believe that! ( A bit more on this later)
In summary, a lot of Sephardic families entirely lost any sense of their Jewish heritage, passing from secretly hiding stars of David in their families' catholic burial sites, to eventually becoming your average bible-touting Colombian family.
It seems that a core part of Colombia's traditional Jewish community is comprised of Ashkenazi Jews that migrated around WW2. As such, the link between religion, ethnicity, and family history are more strongly intertwined than in the case of most catholic families, for example, which also has made them, to an extent, a self-segregating outgroup. (Curious about how prevalent this is in other places.)
Now, let's frame all of this in terms of socio economics in Colombia. Colombia is one of the most economically unequal countries on earth.
Lighter skinned folks of European descent tend to dominate all areas of business and politics, and represent the greatest concentrations of wealth in the country, while being a relatively small proportion of the total population.
For purposes of this conversation, we have a sudden influx of Ashkenazi (lighter skinned) Jews around WW2, in contrast with the older generations of generally assimilated Sephardic Jews, a lot of which have been entirely assimilated into mestizo Catholics. They stand out among the mostly brown average Colombian populace. Even if they are poor European migrants, further empoverished by the war, Colombian inequality is so extreme that the newcomers are in all likelyhood wealthier and better educated than the average Colombian mestizo locals, further strengthening the myth of the wealthy Jew.
Again, they are perceived as an outgroup by the average Colombian...
...until 2015??
Spain, out of some sense of apparent historical guilt, (but also possibly wanting to revive its stagnant economy?) decides it will grant Spanish citizenship to the descendents of all the wronged Sepharic Jews.
So they publish a list of last names. If you do a little legwork and digging through your long list of last names, you have a chance to swap castes and become a bona-fide Spanish citizen. Play your cards right and you too can have the chance to move up in life and scrub toilets in Barcelona. (Which likely pays better than a lot of office jobs back here)
Suddenly, it turns out that every other Colombian is a Sephardic Jew.
Now, I don't want to suggest that these policies are necessarily behind the boom conversions to Judaism. As far as I know, there's no requirement of actually practicing Judaism in order to be granted citizenship. Apparently, it's your bloodline that counts, no kidding.
But between skipping out to Israel or Spain, or even Portugal, too, now, there's never been a better time to be a Jew. (Or to be one again... I guess)
Anyways, hope that provides some additional context for the conversation.
My wife is Colombian, and from our research (initially going off a hunch she may have some Jewish blood because he paternal grandmother looked rather Jewish), it appears there were a healthy amount of conversos (and their descendants) who ended up migrating to the Antioquia region of Colombia (where that part of her family is from). I don't know how that compares to other reasons of Colombia, let alone the rest of Spain's former colonies, but it's a plausible explanation with exploring.
*regions
I am Chilean, and -as far as I knew- all of my ancestors were either from Spain or Andean natives. When I took a DNA test with Ancestry.com, to my great surprise, I was told that I had 51% Spanish, only 11% Native (Andean) American, and 25% "European Jewish". So the "converso" idea is something that could be happening significantly more than expected.
"See for comparison this story about Brazilian narco-gangsters who convert to Christianity to escape retribution. If they just left their gangs, the gangs would view it as a betrayal and kill them; if they leave because they convert, that’s a known quantity and they’re okay. I’m not saying all the Latin Americans converting to weird religions are trying to get out of gangs, but some of them might be trying to get out of a society that’s gotten stuck in a bad equilibrium, and religion is an accepted way of doing that."
On the other hand, https://theconversation.com/evangelical-gangs-in-rio-de-janeiro-wage-holy-war-on-afro-brazilian-faiths-128679 . People. Are. Complicated.
Maybe I didn't read the article thoroughly enough, but it seems like the author was trying to suggest that evangelicalism is the cause, but never really presented evidence that it was true. Rather she used the fact that evangelicalism is on the rise and that attacks against minority religions is on the rise (maybe? not really clear how much it is increasing) and that the two must be linked. She also mentions evangelicalism being present in prisons as "evidence" that they must be working with the drug lords.
I think there are three factual claims that are linked:
1) Evangelical Christianity is on the rise, including at jails.
This one is undeniable, even Evangelicals agree, and, to give credit where credit's due, you can easily find articles about the good influence Evangelicalism has had over some former criminals.
2) "Converted traffickers control many Rio de Janeiro favelas, particularly in Baixada Fluminense, a sprawl of townships in the city’s poor northern outskirts."
There are, I think, enough credible reports about the existence of Evangelical criminal gangs, although I am not sure how many they are. The biggest players (PCC, CV, etc.) are still "secular", sometimes loose associations of diferent gangs with different inclinations. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/soldiers-of-jesus-armed-neo-pentecostals-torment-brazils-religious-minorities/2019/12/08/fd74de6e-fff0-11e9-8501-2a7123a38c58_story.html%3foutputType=amp
3) Some Evangelical gangs are attacking non-Christian Black minorities.
I think there are enough credible reports that thete are Evangelical gangs supressing African-Brasilian religions and imposing more conservative patterns of behaviour on their turf. It probably gets drowned in the general human rights disaster caused by gangs in Brazil, but I, for one, am sure it is not trivial.
Thanks. I think my problem is that this article is all over the place. But I think your #3 is wrong. The article has links to reports that attacks against minority religions are on the rise and attacks by gangs-specifically against minority religions are on the rise. However no where is it explicit to evangelicals or evangelical gangs. And that connects to #2, where again this particular article does not mention any evangelical gangs. Rather it tries to imply that because they exist in the same space that the gangs must be evangelical or helped by the evangelical churches. It is a "guilt by association" thing, where the association is that they exist in prisons together and that some gangs favor evangelicals vs. these minority religions (the part where the article mentions that these minority religions are banned in some areas).
I'm not going to say that the rise in evangelicalism couldn't be fueling attacks against other religions or even that evangelicals themselves are doing the attacks, but this article doesn't point to any proof of it that I can tell. Sadly I can't read your WaPo article because I am not a paying subscriber.
finally was able to read the WaPo article. This article is much more focused on actual incidents and how they are connected to evangelicalism. On first read the WaPo article certainly gives evidence for #2 and #3. So my issue was only with the original article you linked, not the WaPo one.
Fair enough. I think we can say the phenomenon's existence is as well-established as possible even if we can not be sure of its magnitude. It is far from being the whole of the Evangelical expansion in Brazil, obviously, but it is a part of it (a surprising, if sad, one).
Dear Scott, not about this article, but I'm posting here since I think there's a good chance you'll see it: please write a new standalone version of your culture as cellular automata theory. It's a great idea, but many of my left leaning acquaintances won't read it because they dislike the larger thesis of the piece. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
But that post clearly separates the theory from the larger thesis, you can simply copy paste the first section and it would stand on its own just fine.
I've considered that, but it would be much better to share a link to a published piece than to send a huge wall of text as a DM.
Well, SSC was published under a free license, so you can repost it in part on medium or wherever.
If people won't read something because they expect it to conflict with their already held beliefs they are fanatics and don't qualify as a full person to be considered, in my book.
By that definition a large percentage of the planet consists of "fanatics that don't qualify to be considered a full person". I don't think that is a very helpful approach.
> By that definition a large percentage of the planet consists of "fanatics that don't qualify to be considered a full person"
Yes.
> I don't think that is a very helpful approach.
If you play chess with a dove, it will knock over the pieces, shit on the board and strut away like it won. Not playing chess with doves is more helpful than doing so, unless you value frustration and despair.
I feel as if your mindset is like that of woke twitter users telling people to educate themselves (because if you're not already woke you don't qualify as a full person). You have to meet people where theyre at. If you can convince people of a true thing by circumventing their biases, you should do so.
I had the same thought. Those twitter users are not wrong either. It is useless debating someone who does not share and, crucially, does not want to share your assumptions and goals.
(I say that as someone who is not in the woke twitter camp, in fact they are my declared enemies since they encroach upon my territory via cultural warfare. But I get that since they just want to fight us, adversarially, there is no basis for collaborative debate, and in that way they are acting rational.)
It helps to remember that humanity is an element of everything in the Sturgeon's Law sense.
You seem confused about the purpose of spreading ideas to people. They're education is as much for the benefit of the teacher as for the learner.
*their
Anyway your "they are fanatics and don't qualify as a full person to be considered" take is simply wrong, on the grounds that fanaticism is not a static biologically deterministic trait, and so considering it as an inherant aspect of "personhood" is incorrect on a technical, factual level.
And also anyway again, finally and most importantly, from a consequentialist angle, whether someone is fully a "person" or not isn't necessarily relevant to whether you should try to share information with them. The question is whether you create gains (personal, altruistic, whatever) from the interaction. Hypothetically if you had a literal pigeon that was hyper-intelligent and capable of changing its ways, it could be worthwhile to sit down and try to teach it something.
Same goes for actual humans who may act and think in bad ways, such as fanatics. Can a fanatic not be influenced to become less fanatical? Do fanatics not act in the world and create changes that affect us? Unless you'd seriously answer "no" to both of those, then there's a good chance it's rational to give them education.
My position I adopted groaningly, after many disappointments debating people who would refuse to follow the rules of debate. My solution was to classify people into those you can debate and those you can't. If I wanted to influence the latter I would use outright manipulation techniques, which I abhor, so I practice walking away instead.
If you want to educate someone first they need to be open to it, and many people just want to "win" a debate. They make so many mistakes that correcting them is be like chopping of hydras heads. And still, after many hours *they* will be the ones to walk away.
So my solution is that I am a big fan of walls with exams of intellectual continence at the gates.
That’s a really foolish definition. I personally choose to pass on reading the daily stormer - am I thus a fanatic?
That's a good point - in that case I need to clarify. The Daily Stormer I classify as blatant propaganda that cannot be trusted, SST I would consider nuanced enough. If the Daily Stormer would rewrite an article to appear less adversarial I would trust it even less. Also, if a close acquaintance would recommend a specific article in TDS I guess I would read it still, groaningly though.
Or put differently - I don't mistrust TDS because of conflicting beliefs but because of conflicting interests (fueling the evolution of my beliefs vs. convincing me unilaterally).
Very interesting read. Not sure if this will be of any assistance, but you can tell your left-leaning acquaintance that a lefty (in the context of politics in the southern United States) who you don't know (me ... I mean me) said Scott's article was very good and poses a useful way to think not just about fashion but possibly about political values and ideologies. The broad idea that we work hard to distinguish ourselves from those we don't want to be mistaken for is something I can recognize in my own life, as pushing me toward the left and the values of justice and fairness. Honestly, it's worth reading just for the insight on fashion. And because I'm a person who wears cargo shorts, clearly I'm a bit of an expert on fashion.
Hmm, I read something about a complicated way for a non-Jew to immigrate to Israel through aliyah if they convert to Judaism properly enough (and maybe keep it up for a while, I can't remember the details). Given that Colombia has much lower standard of living than Israel, might that be part of the answer? I mean, even if what I read was wrong, if I got this misconception some Colombians could've as well.
Maybe (and yeah, I think the answer to whether they can do it is "it's complicated"). But I think most Colombian converts aren't trying to emigrate to Israel.
Because of a weird quirk of Israeli politics, it is actually easier to immigrate to Israel if you are a Reform or Conservative convert as opposed to an Orthodox one.
That’s very new, right? Like in the last year?
I think it is older than that, but now that you mention it, I'm not so sure about the timeline. This article claims the change happened in 1988:
> In 1988, the High Court ruled that non-Orthodox conversions performed outside of Israel must be recognized for the purposes of aliyah and citizenship
https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/israel-to-recognize-reform-conservative-conversion-for-law-of-return-660592
That court case was about conversions performed in Israel. Non-orthodox conversions performed outside of Israel were already recognized.
"(Orthodox Judaism is about the least-hip and least Latin-American-culture-compatible religion imaginable)"
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though - it gives your religion the air of a mystical, unsullied tradition, untouched by wordly matters.
CS Lewis wrote about the shock some new Christians have when they attend church, and it's at a shabby building full of local randos dressed in weird clothes. "So...this is Christianity, huh? I expected something a little more special."
I attended church at a building that had recently been a casino. You could see square outlines on the carpet where poker machines had sat for years. It was kind of neat (and led to jokes about how the pastor had missed a trick for increasing the offering), but still, Cathédrale Notre-Dame it wasn't.
I could easily imagine a strange, out-of-kilter faith catching fire in a place where it doesn't belong, simply because it's so different to the local fare.
I think you hit the nail on the head. The most popular and growing religions seem to be the ones with more restrictions that put practitioners farther out of the mainstream of their local culture. The economist in me says it is probably to keep out of the riffraff and ensure members of the club are serious and likely to contribute. Yet I expect the separation from the normal culture is itself a big draw in addition, as a dissatisfaction with the culture is exactly what one wants to remedy by joining a religious group. If you wanted to be just like the rest of the culture, you would just do more of that.
May everyone find the strange *orthodox* community that suits them best! If you are going to join a community, best believe it is the true orthodox community and everyone else is the heretic.
It's worth pointing out that Mormons have a similar narrative about their faith being the "original" and uncorrupted form. The basic idea is that the religion as Jesus established it was corrupted and lost shortly after his death, and Joseph Smith (through direct revelation from God) restored it back to its original form. This narrative is taught very early on to potential converts.
Mormons even consider themselves part of the "house of Israel", and have a ceremony in which the person's "lineage" is revealed (i.e., which of the twelve tribes they belong to).
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/patriarchal-blessings?lang=eng
So it seems very plausible that the two religions appeal for similar reasons.
I told my Jewish friends once that I was of the tribe of Ephraim, and boy did they laugh.
(After a minute of trying to parse the bizarre pronunciation of "Ephraim" that I had learned in Sunday school)
What's the accepted Jewish pronunciation? The ones I heard in Sunday School were "EEF-rum" and "EEF-raym"
Eff-rye-am
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM2yk-zx7rk
Doesn’t matter that much in this case but be aware that the speaker in that video is clearly Israeli and they pronounce Hebrew the Sephardic way.
Thanks. My friends were Israelis, so that's what I heard coming back at me after I had said "EEF-rum" like a dimwit.
I have a longtime family friend -- like, 90 or so by now. His name is Ephraim and he pronounces it EEF-rum. Maybe the tribe is always different, I don't know.
It's "eff-RA-yim". No real difference here between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Hebrew.
But yeah, the Tribes are patrilineal clans that made up the Israelite nation. The idea of a non-Jew "identifying" with one of them sounds as silly to us as a Japanese person identifying as Black. Inability to pronounce the name of your supposed tribe does add to the hilarity, but getting it right wouldn't help all that much...
Is it really so much more laughable than the descendants of that Israelite nation "identifying" with a particular one of those patrilineal clans (hence "Jew") without claiming literal patrilineal descent from it? Given the natural divergence in the pronunciation of language over many years, are you quite sure that the members of the actual tribe of Judah, when it existed as such, could not similarly dismiss your modern pronunciation of their name? Perhaps most importantly, why do you use the first person plural in describing what is clearly your personal reaction to these statements?
I'm sorry if my previous paragraph comes off as unnecessarily combative (and I add this one in the hope of mitigating that). Being Jewish myself, it made me uncomfortable to see a sentiment I would not endorse being described as common to all of "us", which is why my own reaction to your words was more forceful than it might have been otherwise.
Okay, let me clarify. The truth is that the perspective I wrote from there is not even really my own; it's more what I see as the "naive" perspective common to Orthodox and/or Israeli Jews (such as my younger self) without too much exposure to other cultures. I did this to convey what it was that Brian's friends found so darn funny!
But sure, from a more "mature" perspective, this belief is not really much sillier than plenty of other stuff religions say, Jews included.
BTW, Jews do not generally claim descent from the tribe of Judah specifically. The name comes from the Kingdom of Judah, which was mainly of that tribe but not exclusively so. The Kohanim and Leviim do claim patrilineal descent from the relevant priestly castes, but even the Halacha doesn't treat these claims as fully reliable.
Thanks for clarifying that.
Re your last paragraph: that's really the point I was trying to make about modern Jews "identifying" with the tribe of Judah "*without* claiming literal patrilineal descent from it" [emphasis added this time around]. Without splitting hairs over the precise meaning of "identity", I just wished to point out the parallel between non-Judah-ites calling themselves, literally, Judah-ites by virtue of an affiliation (political or otherwise) with the tribe of Judah and non-Ephraimites calling themselves Ephraimites by virtue of an affinity they feel with the tribe of Ephraim. I don't claim the parallel to be exact, by any means, but it's close enough that I can't take the one as perfectly normal while finding the other ridiculous.
One of the things that happened with the expansion of Islam was that locals in the conquered territory sometimes became junior members of Arab tribes, so it isn't that silly an idea.
Why did you believe you were of that particular tribe?
If you follow the link, you'll see that we view it as a form of "spiritual adoption". We believe in it as a part of the symbolism of entering into the same covenant and promises with God that He made with Abraham.
Hey my patriarchal blessing says I'm of the tribe of Ephraim too!
I think the preference for original, pure forms of religion in the west us all due to the Garden of Eden story and the fall. Which in turn is about regaining the innocence of childhood.
It's not an exclusively western thing. It's a big theme in East Asian Buddhism, with different sects claiming greater authenticity. Hell Journey to the West is a about travelling to India to collect original Buddhist texts
I have a pretty hard time believing that in an open market place of communities people are going to really try hard to find one that suits them best. I think most people are just gonna end up sticking around wherever they were born and doing whatever they’re familiar with whether or not it suits them well or not
I grew up in a tiny little town in Kansas and for whatever reason I’ve got the bug in me that makes me seek other places but most people I know from there don’t
I haves tayed in touch with several of them and it doesn’t exactly seem like they’re flourishing but they’re also not especially inclined to do anything else because that’s what they know
With a group of intently religious people though you have folks who are already wired to seek a deeper truth and some kind of spiritual order so it’s not so crazy that a compelling personality could convert them at scale
I don’t know that it generalized to secular folks
True, but there are so many people that when you subtract "most people" from "people" you're still left with quite a lot of people. Enough to be worth studying and, as appropriate, accommodating.
The connection to religion-as-route-out-of-gangs is good—religion can be a new kind of citizenship, and _sometimes_ the people around you agree with you that you've placed yourself under a new sovereign. I think a lot of people want to find a way to be in the world but not of the world. Being deliberate about this choice can look judgemental and make others defensive, unless they can explain it away as a crazy part of your new (known) faith.
Are you familiar with the Italian village who converted to Judaism... and believed that they were the only Jews in the world? https://primolevicenter.org/printed-matter/the-jews-of-san-nicandro/
>>To the best of my knowledge his was the only case of unmediated conversion to Judaism on the part of a village prophet in Italy or elsewhere in Europe; he seems to have believed that the post-biblical Jews were extinct and certainly in 1928-30 he was unaware that any could be found in Italy. In a sense he drew the strength of his prophetic vocation from the belief that God himself, by the dreams and visions in which he spoke, had given him the mission to bring ‘the Laws of the One God’ not just to the folk of San Nicandro, but back to a world that had forgotten them.
A group in Uganda beat them to it by 100 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abayudaya
Their album is 🔥
https://www.amazon.com/Abayudaya-Music-Jewish-People-Uganda/dp/B000S9CBAK
"(Orthodox Judaism is about the least-hip and least Latin-American-culture-compatible religion imaginable)"
The Kabbalistic flavored Orthodox Judaism may have been a much better fit for former Pentecostals. There is much more of a focus on personal spiritual experiences and interfacing with the divine.
Also Kabbalah gets you lots of fun superstitiouns
This doesn't surprise me. Pretty much all of Latin America is Catholic with some pre-colonization religions tossed in (or sometimes surviving wholesale). But pre-colonization religions are associated with the Native Peoples. Many countries don't associate themselves with them in the same way the average American doesn't think of themselves as a Native American even if they have some blood.
The traditional battle lines are thus secularists/atheists (who don't claim any religion in particular) against Catholics. But there's always been groups of people who are uncomfortable with Catholicism but also secularism or atheism. A few of them turn to native religions, often as a form of extreme nationalism. But more commonly they turned to adjacent religions, especially if they have more internationalist leanings. This is especially in some countries where secularism are associated with rather extremist ideologies. An outright atheist in Colombia might get some side eyes about being a Communist.
Protestantism is the most popular but Judaism fits the bill. I suspect it probably fits roughly the same cultural niche. This is helped by the presence of Evangelicals and Jews on various trade routes. Plus Protestantism and Judaism have cultural presence. Every Latin American has at least a vague sense that Protestantism and Judaism exist even if they don't really have the strong feelings a 17th century Spaniard would have about them.
Plus there's some degree of cultural rebellion. Jews (and to a lesser extent Protestants) are in the weird position in Latin America. Spain and their colonies were really, really successful at quashing the Reformation and expelling the Jews. Hating Jews and Protestants is thus "normal" but also associated with the Ancien Regime. And no one in Latin America or even Spain is that interested in defending the pre-revolutionary monarchy anymore.
So yeah, tl;dr:
1.) Culturally rebellious that violates taboos no one is stringently enforcing anymore.
2.) Ambiguous enough that it doesn't precommit them to the existing Latin American cultural battle lines
3.) Gives them access to international networks of coreligionists.
I have suspected, on the basis of no firm evidence, that two of the factors behind the explosion of evangelical/charismatic protestantism in Latin America.are:
1. Protestantism is associated with North America and its money, power and success. "The USA is Protestant, and it is rich, powerful and successful, they must be on the side of God!"
2. Catholicism is, for better or worse, fairly or unfairly, seen as being a bit too chummy with the local power structures.
Thinking it over, perhaps something similar can be said about Jewishness and its potential association with money, power and success.
I guess the California Sunday article insinuates something like that.
https://story.californiasunday.com/colombian-church-orthodox-judaism
I think you can probably explain Protestant success easier than that, and Scott basically did it already: the liturgy is more flexible and adaptable. A lot of people don't enjoy going to Mass, and Protestant services can to some degree be whatever people want them to be. Also the entrepreneurial nature of Evangelicalism means that there's more of a free market, pastors have to compete on delivering an engaging and enjoyable service, while Catholicism is more accustomed to operating as a monopoly.
These are also big reasons why Evangelicalism has been taking market share in the US (i.e. declining slower than the other branches -- and note that Catholicism would look a lot worse if not for immigration). Per your point #1, this is despite the fact that Evangelicalism is lower-status than Catholicism in the US (at least nominally, Catholics now represent the President, Speaker, and 6 out of 9 SCOTUS Justices).
You're right about the local power structures thing. Less so about the United States. Actually Latin America is at best highly ambivalent about the US. A common saying is, "Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States." The entire concept of Latin America was developed as an ideological differentiation from the United States. But Latin Americans are perfectly capable of knowing the difference between elite, high church Anglicans and the low churches or the Jews. It's not a coincidence that the evangelicals, Mormons, etc are the ones finding purchase. Evangelicals are happy to talk your ear off about how they're the true Christians unlike those Catholics/Anglicans/whatevers. Which is appealing to people who think there's something rotten in the Catholic Church. It's kind of the Evangelicals' original message.
However, there is an effect of simple exposure. Americans and Latin Americans do a lot of international business. The US is the biggest trading partner of a lot of Latin America. And Evangelicals and especially Jews have a disproportionate share of the trade. Not for any kind of nefarious reasons: it just happens to shake out that the trade goods and geography favor that kind of thing. Evangelicals dominate construction and Latin American purchases a lot of construction. And a lot of the trade is run out of parts of the South with a disproportionate Jewish population. Like Southern Florida.
Oh, i understand that many Latin Americans are ambivalent at best about the USA, but they like money, power and success as much as anyone else. Just as many Latin Americans leave for the assumed better pickings to be had here, not to mention the general lack of American bombs, coups, American-sponsored death squads, etc..
The majority of migrants are from Mexico so I doubt American coups, bombs, or death squads are much of a motivation. The largest migrations in the region mostly come from native grown problems. The current largest movement is out of Venezuela, for example, and the US doesn't back the Mexican cartels. But the US serves as a useful bogeyman, especially for left wing movements.
No doubt they like power and success. But I've never seen a significant trend towards imitating the United States. Indeed, there's a strong sense in Latin America that they have superior cultural values in various ways. Of course, there are defectors from this consensus and they are likely to be disproportionately among the converts.
Honduras also comes prominently to mind.
Although wanting to avoid the most gruesome features of cartel or gang violence also may be a motivational factor in places like Mexico, El Salvador, etc..
I should add that, according to a chart i have, outside Colombia and a few other countries, as of 2019, China and not the United States is the largest trading partner.
Really? What chart? I know that's true for a few countries, especially those with Pacific Coasts. Japan is another major trading partner. But the World Bank stats I've seen have the us as Latin America's second biggest trade source (about 30%), behind intraregional trade (about half). China is a distant third.
The chart is a .pdf that I pulled off the internet so I am not sure how to link it here.
When I was in grad school, I once heard a story about an English conservative who converted to Eastern Orthodoxy because he lived in Northern Ireland, and wanted to a) be a conservative Christian not a liberal atheist, but b) express his neutrality between and or disdain for both the Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist and Catholic/Nationalist/Republican sides of the Troubles.
I think there is something distinct about converting to Orthodox Judaism that requires explanation that makes it different from evangelical Protestantism, Mormonism, Orthodox Christianity, or other religions, and that is the sheer difficulty of it. Ignore the philosophical and social ramifications of adopting a religion that denies the divinity of Jesus and the Trinity. Think about the work involved. There is the adoption of a new mode of dress, a swath of food that you can't eat, new dishes, and getting circumcised! There are the regular prayers (shacharit, mincha, and ma'ariv), and then the constant prayers over every action (eating, drinking, waking up, going to bed, seeing a rainbow). Keeping the sabbath, with no driving, music, electricity, cooking, or lights. Learning a new language just for prayer. Whatever hoops the other religions require, I don't think any are as overwhelmingly encompassing of one's life as orthodox Judaism.
My point is that people going through this process are taking on a huge life change. And it's not like they couldn't convert to reform or conservative Judaism for the same religious change with a fraction of the bother. They are looking to change their lives in a way that is different from other conversion paths. I am sure there is more to the sociology and psychology of this.
Come. A demanding initiation ritual is part of the secret sauce of recruitment for *all* cults. People are attracted to that stuff. The Heaven's Gate people thought you had to cut your nuts off to fully join, at least Orthodox Judaism doesn't ask that much.
A demanding initiation is key to cognitive dissonance.
You have to make people feel like they have well and truly sacrificed something and that they therefore cannot turn back now.
There might be a practical difference between a demanding initiation and a demanding set of requirements post-initiation.
It's really not as big as you think. You can wear anything you want, you just don't dress like a slob for shul. Davening is just something you do but if you're in a community it's pretty easy to get a minyan. "Constant Prayers" puts it wildly out of proportion. You can leave lights on on shabbos, just not change them. You don't really need to learn hebrew, people really just learn how to repeat it phonetically to zoom through it, you do learn the meanings but it's not as though you're fluent.
Extremely random but earnest thought: since (as I understand it) speech is not prohibited on the Sabbath, would saying "Alexa, turn on the lights" be permissible?
No. The prohibition is against starting fire which interprets into electricity which expands into any form of electricity
Unsurprising but clarifying, thank you
Speech is not itself prohibited, but halacha recognizes when you did an action that was a direct cause of something else. It gets more complicated and hotly debated when your action is an indirect cause and the result wasn't guaranteed.
This reminds me of a speaker I heard at a Border's bookstore, around 2005. He was a Jew who'd been sent to investigate a Christian church in Uganda that had written to some rabbis in the US saying they wanted to become Jews, but didn't know how.
A missionary had converted them to Christianity, and given them Bibles. (I don't remember what language the Bibles were in.) They read the Bibles, and decided that the Old Testament made sense, but the New Testament didn't. So they decided that Jesus was a false messiah, and they wanted to become Jews instead of Christians.
Anybody who actually reads the entire Bible with an open mind will notice the same things the Ugandans did: the Old and New Testaments don't fit together, the New Testament is full of contradictions on key points of theology and practice, and the religion Christians teach isn't the religion that Jesus taught.
So maybe increasing literacy is an important factor. The "Christian" parts of the world are made of peoples who converted to Christianity by about 800 AD, long before literacy was common. Hardly anyone in those areas ever had the chance to read the Bible objectively.
er, "made of, or were conquered by, peoples who converted to Christianity by about 800 AD"
> the New Testament is full of contradictions on key points of theology and practice
I'm curious if you mean that it contradicts the Old Testament, or that it contradicts itself more than the Old Testament contradicts itself.
I think the NT contradicts the Old Testament in its view of God and of righteousness (though I think contemporary Judaism does too). I think the NT contradicts itself on many key points. The OT also contradicts itself on some points that people at the time thought were key, like whether the Temple should be permanent or movable, and whether animals should or shouldn't be sacrificed (which is odd, 'coz they were definitely sacrificed). But the OT tends to have fewer opportunities for contradiction, because it's more narrative and less theology.
"The "Christian" parts of the world are made of peoples who converted to Christianity by about 800 AD, long before literacy was common."
Russia and Poland and Lithuania and Moravia all were christianized after AD 800. Not to mention Scandinavia and Latin America.
In fact, in the case of Russia (and Moravia and Bulgaria) the missionaries invented written languages for the locals and translated the Bible and the services into those languages, in order to effectuate the conversion process.
You're right. I added the "or conquered" note partly to account for Latin America. My point was that they converted before literacy was common; I didn't think carefully about the date, sorry.
Apologies if I was being a pedant.
Or it could just be a small sample/clustering issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion; https://dataremixed.com/2015/01/avoiding-data-pitfalls-part-2/
Yeah, I was thinking - if the thing to be explained is that there are 600 Jewish converts in Colombia, and 200 of them were all converted in one fell swoop, then it sounds like three weird individual incidents could do the explanation (particularly if one of them inspired the other two).
As a member of a culturally conservative religion that sends quite a few missionaries to Latin America and South America I can speak to the “Religion as a way out of a gang” thing. Basically, the cartels will only allow gang members to leave if they immediately join a church and attend every Sunday. If they miss to many services, they will get a “visit” from the cartel.
An unrelated thought, but religions that separate themselves from the rest of society become much more attractive in times of upheaval like the last 10 years. I can understand the attraction to Orthodox Judaism. Judaism offers a structure and tradition that is lacking in Latin American Catholicism. Despite its intimidating look Catholicism allows anyone in and does not ask anyone to change in any way. A murderous cartel leader can be a Catholic in good standing. This becomes decidedly unattractive to anyone who is trying to raise children and keep them of the streets and out of drugs.
"Orthodox Judaism almost aggressively avoids providing [a personal connection with God"
---this is so wrong as to almost be antisemitic.
That's my impression as a Conservative Jew, but at the same time, I've been to a Chabad house (Orthodox) that had more energy than I've seen at any other synagogue. It probably depends a lot on the congregation.
Correct. See my response to this.
You are aware Scott is Jewish?
I wasn't, but that doesn't change my opinion of that particular sentence.
Well, it really should? You can say he's misinformed or prejudiced against orthodox Jews. But saying he's antisemitic seems absurd
I hate to start sentences with "as an orthodox jew", but as an orthodox jew I don't think he's wrong. It only feels wrong because relative to your own experience, there's plenty of personal connection to God. But it's nothing compared to some other religions. Having a strong connection with God is emphasized, but it's rarely personal. In some evangelical contexts, for example, they talk about Jesus like he's their buddy. I simply can't imagine anything remotely like that happening in any frum community I've seen. Instead, the connection to God is intense, but without emphasis on the details, and discussed very little relative to other religious topics.
Might you provide a bit more detail on this? I'd be interested in learning more.
I'm not sure which part you're asking for detail about. Unfortunately, my thoughts aren't fleshed out enough to go on further without a prompt.
The ironic thing is that if the evangelicals would go back just a bit further, they would realize (perhaps) just how much the biblical scriptures owe to Near Eastern mythology, Greek cosmogony, mystery cults, eschatology, and a whole bunch of other traditions.
That includes the Jewish books. In fact, the earlier books of the Old Testament are even more deeply involved in this borrowing of neighbouring myths. So to me it makes no logical sense to stop at Judaism and not go back to say... Zoroastrianism - particularly for those people who find themselves longing for monotheism. Besides, the name Ahura Mazda is so much cooler than Yahweh.
Certainly, the Old Testament incorporated extant Near Eastern myths. But the idea that Zoroastrianism is a clear precursor to Judaism is a bit off. It's not definitely clear which came first! If Christianity is a branch off the original Jewish bush, then Zoroastrianism and Judaism are two traditions that came from the same ground, but are different plants.
Certainly. In fact, Zoroastrianism shares a much more direct link with the Vedic religion and some Indo-European traditions than anything else.
My point is that merely looking for the oldest strain of thought is misguided, since at some point or other all the traditions from that part of the world get mixed up into each other, and so there is no compelling reason to believe one cosmogonic story in particular on account of its purported age.
That's why I worship the thunder god (because you don't want to be in his bad books when hiking on a high ridge), the god of morning wood (when you're over 50 you understand), and Saccharomyces cervisiae (for medicinal use). Simple stuff, very accessible. On sacred holidays we drink and dance around an inflated wineskin and then fuck in assorted holy ways.
My daily supplication to the god of morning wood includes: Tongkat Ali extract, Fadogia Agrestes. Additionally three times a week my prayers look this: https://youtu.be/zyYR1_nazUU. My god hasn’t failed me in years and my faith is now strong.
Re: "seeking a personal connection with God” (Orthodox Judaism almost aggressively avoids providing this)."
Wow, have you got this wrong. Way off base. That is one of the most incorrect statements I have ever heard, the complete antipodes of the truth. Orthodox Judaism is in fact COMPLETELY and OBSESSIVELY focused on our constant deep and personal connection with the Almighty. We have hundreds of connection points throughout each day and night in thought, speech and action. The whole point of our life is what we call "dveykus": cleaving closely to God, and expressing our love for God and feeling God's love for us! The primary mission statement of the Jewish nation, the "Shma" prayer (which we recite twice per day) opens with: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your power"! You mentioned the Rambam, well, look in the 10th chapter of his Hilchos Teshuva where he describes our ultimate spiritual goal: to become madly in love with God, like a man obsessed with loving a woman to the point of love sickness, who eats, breathes and sleeps totally for his beloved! ... this is an elevated life of spirit, power, emotion and intellect harnessed together to power us higher and higher in our love relationship with the Creator, infusing all life, all our relationships and interactions and even the most physical of acts with illuminated Divine Godliness. That is the point of all the Mitzvos. (The word "mitzva" itself means to join together as in "tzevet" (team)). That is the point of all of this. That is why we are poring over sacred texts all day and night: we are God's lovers - obsessing over every nuance and every drop of ink in the love letters He gave us... and learning all the details and subtleties to best live our lives together with God, inside this deep and growing love relationship, always...
This might just be a difference in language / word interpretation. When average Protestants speak of "a personal connection with God" they mean that they pray conversationally to God, as if he is in the room, and God answers them. Kind of like an imaginary friend. It is quite different than the spiritual phenomenon you describe.
Wrong! Our prayers are not considered complete unless they are personal and conversational. We have prescribed prayers we say 3 times per day, but if it's rote and not fresh (and there are places built in for ad libbing!) and your mind is wandering away from a lovers' whispers, if you are not pouring out heart and soul then you are missing the opportunity. Many of the great Chassudic masters, especially Rebbe Nachman of Breslov specifically teach that real prayer is heartfelt conversation with God, pouring out your heart to a loving parent and closest friend. If you could see the fervor in the authentically Orthodox synagogues... God is indeed our friend... but not imaginary at all.
Sorry, typos. Should say: "lovers" and "Chassidic"
With all due respect, I'm not sure your reply is to the point. The most salient words [to me] in bbqturtle's comment are "and God answers them". That is, the Protestant "personal connection with God" includes the experience of a direct personal response from God.
In this context, "imaginary friend" is simply an analogy that many who can't directly relate to this Protestant experience might relate to: the "imaginary friend" is not corporeal, his words are heard only in the listener's head and the listener himself knows that the experience is subjective. On the other hand, the connection is more ...defined (for lack of a better word) than simply feeling the presence of a sympathetic audience as one pours out his heart. I found the analogy rather enlightening, honestly (unless I've utterly mistaken it, of course).
Your reply makes the case that the fervor of the "authentically Orthodox" is genuine and personally felt, and that they relate to God as "not imaginary at all", but as their closest friend. Yet I don't think bbqturtle's comment disputed any of these points, nor that "imaginary" was intended as a diminishment of closeness (imaginary friends are often closer than any real ones, you know; otherwise there would be no need to imagine them). Indeed, "imaginary friend" was his analogy for the "average Protestant" experience of a personal connection with God, not the average Orthodox Jewish one, so it clearly could not have been intended to say anything about the latter, let alone diminish it.
TL;DR Does God answer your prayers with exact words that you could quote verbatim? That's the point at hand, IMHO.
I dunno, I just Googled "personal relationship with God", and most of what they talk about doesn't sound all that different from what Orthodox Jews have. Except the parts about Jesus and "salvation", of course.
If Protestants do hear God speaking to them, it's clearly not something they want to advertise too much.
It depends on the type of Protestantism. In the type I was raised in, no-one expected God to say anything back. It *could* happen, of course, but it was very very rare in modern times, if it happened at all. Certainly I never knew anyone who said it'd happened to them, not even the pastor.
It could definitely vary by denomination.
https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-tell-the-difference-between-my-own-thoughts-and-Gods-voice
Specifics here. In general in my searches on forums/Reddit, about one in four answers to questions about personal relationships with God, or speaking with God, are referring to actually 2-way communication.
Completely agree with your comment and the distinction here!
Wait, really? It's common for Protestants to hear God speaking to them in words? We Jews only get a sense of empathetic listening and emotional reflection. Basically God acts a great therapist! But no, no speaking -- God is not believed to have spoken explicitly to anyone since the last of the Biblical prophets.
That is what they claim. Pastor's preach it and congregations claim it, and if you say you can't hear god, it's because you aren't praying hard enough. It's possible some believe hard enough that they are able to deceive themselves, but in private conversation with many, they say they pray as hard as they can but God still doesn't verbally answer their prayers, but that they can "hear his thoughts" as an inclination in their brain (just their own thoughts personified as him) and that's good enough for most people.
In the type of protestantism I was raised in, no-one expected to hear anything back, and I never knew anyone who claimed it had happened to them, not even the pastor. Maybe people did get 'a feeling in their hearts' sometimes, but if they did, they didn't talk about it.
As a child I expected to hear back and couldn't understand why I didn't while others claimed to. Eventually I decided that if I was God, I wouldn't bother responding to an insignificant kid either.
What Sabiola says. Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, United Methodist Church, and a smattering of other Protestant denominations I have experience with, none ever suggested that one might hear literal words from God in response to prayer. A warm fuzzy feeling of being on the right track was about it.
There may be Protestant churches or even denominations where pastors try to make their charges feel inadequate if they don't hear the literal voice of God, or turn them into delusional nutcases who hallucinate the voice of God. There may even be one that has figured out the trick of having God actually speak. But if so, this phenomenon is in practice more narrow than "Protestants", and it would help if you could pin down exactly which protestants you are talking about.
Hmm- I guess that shows my limited perspective. It was prevalent in both Baptist, vineyard, and Evangelical groups I was in in the 90s-10s.
I think the best term for it is "charismatic", that probably describes bbqturtle's experience of church.
Yeah. I've had some online conversations with sincere American Protestants (Evangelical types) and they completely do speak of praying to God and hearing Him answer them vocally, not simply a sense of "this is what I should do" or listening to their conscience. As a Catholic, brought up to class this kind of intimate union with God as spiritual consolations https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/spiritual-growth-vs-spiritual-consolation/ which you only receive at a certain point when you are working on your spiritual life, this was very odd. I'm certainly not going to ask these nice people "but how do you know you're not imagining it?" but yeah, there definitely is this idea of actual perceptible presence and communication.
As an American evangelical, I'm surprised. I've never audibly heard God's voice myself. I've occasionally heard people saying they've audibly heard God's voice once in a while, but I've never talked with anyone who says He speaks to them routinely.
There's definitely "actual perceptible presence and communication," but not usually through audible speech.
Thank you for writing this. I'm sorry you've taken so much flak.
Copying my reply from elsewhere: I hate to start sentences with "as an orthodox jew", but as an orthodox jew I don't think he's wrong. It only feels wrong because relative to your own experience, there's plenty of personal connection to God. But it's nothing compared to some other religions. Having a strong connection with God is emphasized, but it's rarely personal. In some evangelical contexts, for example, they talk about Jesus like he's their buddy. I simply can't imagine anything remotely like that happening in any frum community I've seen. Instead, the connection to God is intense, but without emphasis on the details, and discussed very little relative to other religious topics.
Adding something for this reply in particular: You're absolutely right that the biggest rabbis empathize a personal connection with God. But I can't say that that's what became emphasized by normal people. To use your example from prayer, people focus more on learning the words for davening than they do on any personal tefillot. And I get the impression that most people daven by rote. There's a shared sense that we all SHOULD be doing better. And there's a lot of real, sincere work put in into improving! But it's not like other religions in this regard at all.
I want to follow up with an analogy. Imagine if someone said that orthodox jews don't eat much meat compared to most Americans. You might say that's ridiculous. You could point to all the kosher meat restaurants. All the efforts people go through to have a siyyum during the nine days because they can't stand going for even nine days without meat even though shabbos is already a break in the middle. And that there's a requirement to have meat every shabbos and yom tov.
And then you look at how American cuisine throws meat into nearly everything, how some Americans don't understand how pizza could be kosher because how could it ever be vegetarian, and how "meatless Mondays" is meant to be a major accomplishment and not just what you do regularly when you brought a peanut butter sandwich to work and then had dairy for dinner. It's just not comparable.
Sometimes seeing the same phenomenon somewhere else can provide a useful check. Here is an account of a trip I took to Erode, India in 2015 (note I am not the author of this quote):
First of all, a short background. Several years ago, there was a man named Samuel who lives in Erode, a city of 500,000 in Southern India. He was a Christian minister of a congregation of 3000 members and a businessman as well. He began to realize on his own that the Christian teachings he had learned and taught for so many years were just not making sense anymore and the concept of one G-d was something much more sensible. He began to learn about Judaism and began secretly practicing the religion (to the best of his ability) in secret while still leading his congregation. Finally, when his son was about to be baptized, he decided to address his congregation about his feelings of becoming Jewish and asked who wanted to join him to create a new congregation that would attempt to take the necessary steps to becoming Jewish. Half of them agreed to continue to follow his path and so a new congregation was born. Samuel and his wife Anne realized they had little knowledge of Judaism and its authentic practices and searched for help as to how to acquire the necessary knowledge to attempt giyur[conversion].
https://www.ouisrael.org/ou-israel-india-adventure-blog-day-7-erode/
Interesting. The phenomenon was first reported in a North American publication 5 years ago:
"The Faithful: René and Juan Carlos set out to convert their Colombian megachurch to Orthodox Judaism. This is what happened." By Graciela Mochkofsky in The California Sunday Magazine on April 28, 2016
https://story.californiasunday.com/colombian-church-orthodox-judaism
The article mentioned the word "sicario," meaning "assassins" in Spanish. Interestingly, the sicarii were a splinter group of Jewish zealots back in Jesus' day. It has to have the same root.
It does: 'sīcārius' is Latin for 'assassin' or 'murderer' (though etymologically-literally it means 'dagger bearer', from 'sīca' meaning 'dagger').
Right. But the Latin was taken from Greek, sikarioi, “dagger men." A lot of people in the Roman Empire spoke demotic Greek. That's the extent of my linguistic knowledge.
"...if you avoid alcohol and violence out of pious Christian humility, that looks better than backing out because you’re not macho enough to handle it."
I've had a similar thought coming from my family's experience. My father was raised pentacostal and consequently a teetotaler, but as he and his brother left the faith they gradually became functioning alcoholics. I wonder how many conversions to alcohol-abstaining creeds were in some part a way to credibly escape alcoholism. It would be interesting to see if, within a given population with a decent amount of recent conversions such as South America, those alcohol-abstaining converts had a higher incidence of genetic markers predicting alcoholism.
It's worth noting that religious conversion is a powerful tool against addictions, even if the particular religion does not explicitly ban that particular vice. The AA 12-step process is based on this idea.
In Russia and Ukraine, a lot of converts to the Russian Baptist faith (adherents do not drink alcohol) are the wives, mothers, daughters and sisters of alcoholics.
and then maybe helping to reduce the chance their children end up in the same place as their husbands, even if the husbands never convert?
Christianity is a mash-up of two major cultural forces in the Eastern Mediterranean during the Classical age -- Jewish and Hellenistic. Paul in his New Testament letters tries to synthesize them and make his religion, later known as Christianity, palatable to the non Jewish urban world of his time.
After Christianity becomes the official religion of the Empire and its successor states, rebellion involves heresy. One class of heresies is Hellenistic and roots it self in Neo-platonism. This is the Gnostic tendency. E.g. Paulicians, Bogomils, and Cathars. Another class is Judaizers.
The attraction is rooted in the Christian acceptance of the "Old Testament" as the word of God. In John 4:22 Jesus says that salvation comes from the Jews. In Matthew 5:18-20 Jesus says: "till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."
Scripture of course is not monophonic, and there are lots of passages that can be read in opposition to these.
Much of Protestantism is Judaising. Translating the "Old Testament" from Hebrew instead of Greek and Latin. Rejecting icons and statues. Are Judaising moves. Some sects have gone farther. The Seventh Day Adventists went back to the Jewish Sabbath. the Mormons wear undergarments modeled on the Tallit katan.
In context, the Columbian converts are more of the same.
My only advice to them would be find some Sephardi Jews to teach you how to cook. Ashkenazic food is greasy and bland.
I'm surprised this wasn't brought up earlier.
Jesus is quite clear in some places that the law is to be unchanged. A compromise was reached at the so-called Council of Jerusalem which decided that non-Jewish Christians were bound by Noahide law, while Jewish Christians were bound by Mosaic law. However the scriptural basis for this, Peter's vision in the Acts of the Apostles, has always been weaker than the words attributed to Jesus which are quite clear. And Acts has always been a controversial book that was almost excluded from the Bible.
So to be a fully 100% compliant Christian you also have to follow Mosaic law, according to the most extreme fundamentalist interpretation. Going one step further and becoming orthodox Jewish is less of a leap if you already feel bound by Mosaic law.
More prosaically this could be an extreme form of Pascal's wager. More laws means more safety!
"So to be a fully 100% compliant Christian you also have to follow Mosaic law, according to the most extreme fundamentalist interpretation."
No. Paul and successive Fathers got rid of all that. No more kashrut, and more importantly, no more circumcision.
"Acts has always been a controversial book that was almost excluded from the Bible."
I don't think this is true. You can't really discard Acts without discarding Luke, because I think pretty much everyone, even skeptical modern scholars, has always agreed that Acts 1:1 is sincere and they share an author.
The historically more controversial/disputed NT books are listed as James, 2-3 John, 2 Peter, Hebrews, and Revelation.
"Ashkenazic food is greasy and bland." Not in my grandmother's home, sir!
"Scripture of course is not monophonic, and there are lots of passages that can be read in opposition to these."
It's a mixed bag. All religions are.
As far as the major Middle-Eastern religions, I agree. The really cool thing is when you examine religious stories by seeing them as a traditional mythos rather than an unchanging corpus of rules. And then you can separate the mythologies which are more indigenous to one group of people or another.
Hence, I don't think it's extremely noteworthy that Christians in most any part of the world are converting to Judaism - they are adopting one set of standardized beliefs in place of another. The more interesting thing to study would be societal tendencies toward adoption of foreign belief systems generally, and then seeing whether that phenomenon can be compared on a structural level - i.e., between different classes, ethnicities, etc.
"I don't think it's extremely noteworthy that Christians in most any part of the world are converting to Judaism - they are adopting one set of standardized beliefs in place of another."
No, It's very strange. Judaism and Christianity are in opposition to one another first of all, and second, history.
Plus there's that whole Jewish peoplehood thing. There's no such thing as "the Christian people." These Colombians aren't just converting to a religion, they're adopting a new family!
When you're a Jew you're a Jew all the way from your first Torah reading to your last dying day.
Exactly. What I'm saying is that Judaism is a religion which is part of the traditional heritage of Jewish people.
The same doesn't go for Christianity - all of these Colombian Christians are practising a religion which has nothing to with their ancestral mythos. So one who converts to Judaism is still choosing a religion which has no basis in his own traditions - it's an odd leap from Christianity to Judaism, but why choose a foreign religion of any kind in the first place?
It's my theory that people who are predisposed to assuming the customs and habits of others would be more likely to adopt yet another religion that has nothing to do with their own indigenous beliefs. This is probably a thought process that can be studied, especially since it seems so common.
Your grandmother was unusual. mine were more like the vast majority.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203476804576613141530897616.html
"With Some Passing on Gefilte Fish, A New Lure: Fish 'Meatballs': Manischewitz Takes Mediterranean Turn, Hoping to Spice Up Fare; 'What Is Cumin?'" By Lucette Lagnado Oct. 7, 2011
"Then there was the Cumin Crisis. Manischewitz had no cumin. The industrial kitchen had 'salt, pepper, garlic, onion—nothing exciting,' says Inna Rabinovich, the Russian-born food technologist charged with reproducing the Moroccan fish balls. She struggled to produce a version for mass production, summoning the boss each time she prepared a new batch, hoping he'd like it. 'Sometimes it wasn't very good—but he was very polite,' she says. They turned to Manischewitz's longtime chief of procurement, Yossi Ostreicher, to procure the large quantities of cumin required."
"What is cumin?" he said."
I should add that the starkest example of a Judaising heresy is Islam. Islam is formed in reaction to Byzantine Christianity which leaned towards the Platonic Hellenistic side of the Christian heritage. The whole structure of Sharia as a law that encompassed both religious and non-religious issues is an imitation of Halacha. The bans on icons and pork, the adoption of circumcision are all imitations of Rabbinic Judaism.
I think it's pretty clear that Mohammed viewed himself as a Jewish prophet. The local Jewish tribes didn't agree.
I'd be interested in seeing your friend's review of "The Reformation of Machismo". I loaned my copy briefly to my cousin who is a priest in Colombia, and my reading of it doesn't line up with your description.
I think one thing that Protestant groups offer is a closer connection to the minister, which helps both for counseling and for accountability. My cousin was one priest of 5 in a town of 40,000. A typical Evangelical congregation is closer to 150; this means the minister can actually directly offer help and advice to all of his flock, and can check in on all of them to make sure they're staying off booze and staying out of other sorts of trouble.
I like your hypothesis about envy for the culture and community that comes with a religion. When I visited Salt Lake City, I thought, yeah, their dogmas are silly, but those Mormons sure figured out how to build an impressively nice city under difficult circumstances and to keep it running smoothly. It was almost like Switzerland, just with desert instead of mountains. Likewise, Jews have managed to establish a pretty impressive country - especially compared to the oppressive shitholes that surround it - in an environment that is hostile in many ways. If Latin-American Mormons and Jews manage to tap into the secret sauce of that success, more power to them.
I cofounded a company with a mormon and a lot of our investors are from that international network. I have also been impressed by them. I guessed the mission they all do around age 18 is an excellent preparation for an entrepreneurial career.
Do you think there is any merit to the notion that they are converting to eventually get Israeli passports and citizenship? I was surprised that this was not at all explored in your article.
Wouldn't converting to reform Judaism be enough, and much easier?
Orthodox Judaism absolutely does encourage forming a "personal connection to God".
You are supposed to pray and ask Him for anything and everything you want in your day-to-day life. If you have sinned, you need to apologize directly to Him; He may be upset at you but He will relent if you are sincere enough (and committed to improvement). Moral dilemmas are challenges designed by God specifically, to promote your personal growth. Etc, etc...
Convert to Taoism! You get to skip church on Sundays, get to brag to all your friends about how detached you are, and when you die, you can force your kids to fold little pieces of gold and silver to send up to you in heaven! You can also get a swanky house, servants, and even a computer and an iPhone if your kids cash out for the burnable paper models!
POLYTHEISM RULES! Only in a free marketplace of gods can there be true religious progress! Competition is essential to the health of any particular god!
And if you do Taoism right you get to be practically immortal and have all sorts of magical powers. Especially if you start out as a stone monkey.
I knew guy in college who converted from evangelical Protestantism to Judaism. He started off in Reform Judaism but he was in the process of moving on to Conservative Judaism because it felt more authentic. I think he would have considered Orthodox too, but he was convinced that they probably wouldn't let him in (at the time)
Sort of OT but not entirely, I have read that one reason Islam is popular in prisons is that it provides prisoners a way to go straight but not be seen to be selling out.
"Yet, to Juan Carlos’s surprise, 600 parishioners declared that they trusted him and would follow him into Judaism."
If some 600 parishioners woke up one morning as Messianic Jews, then followed their pastor into Judaism that evening, were they not really following the pastor?
Something similar could be said about a pagan Dark Ages king converting to Christianity and then his entire people or tribe or whatever immediately following suit, except that the king had a lot more power to hand out the goodies and lay out the smackdowns than any pastor does.
Oh I think 'for sure' they were following the pastor. Does that matter?
Not necessarily, but worth noting.
Scott, Thank you for founding this strange schismatic community. I'm glad I found you.
"If I had a nickel for every time someone converted to Orthodox Judaism in Columbia, I'd have 5000 nickels. Which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened to 0.0004% of the population."
0.0001% whoops. Can't even meme right.
This gave me extreme The Diamond Age vibes.
For those not familiar, The Diamond Age is a novel by Neal Stephenson about a not-too-distant future where governments have collapsed due to a combination of factors, and society is now organized into "phyles", distinct identity groups which may be ethnic, religious, or ideological. The book goes out of its way to emphasize that the most powerful phyles tend to ask a tremendous amount of their members, much like Orthodox Judaism. It is, in fact, why they are powerful.
>Orthodox Judaism is about the least-hip and least Latin-American-culture-compatible religion imaginable
Tisches and some services can get pretty hype. Really depends on the crowd, if you checked out a good hillel or a shul with a good bnei akiva presence you might be impressed.
My question is, who's going to make the second shul in the area? You're not a real jew if you don't have one shul you go to and another shul you wouldn't be caught dead in
Hey, scott -- quick point here about "The number one reason cited by new Latin American converts to Protestantism is that they are “seeking a personal connection with God” (Orthodox Judaism almost aggressively avoids providing this)." -- even modern orthodox judaism, the least personal-connection-with god wing of orthodox judaism, has some 'connect to god as father' -- e.g. Shir Hashirim/song of songs and Avinu Malkeinu/'our father, our king' (and more generally half the high holy day liturgy) and the more traditional sides of OJ have much more personal connection to G-d as a liturgical/communal focus (don't even get me started on the chassidic relationship with G-d)
Here's a theory:
Orthodox Judaism is a really good religion.
Judaism has more holidays than Christianity and Islam combined. Most of them are meant to be enjoyable and the major one that isn't, Yom Kippur, forces a lot of reflection.
Judaism has the shabbat, which is a really good time for families to bond and for people to break their social media addictions.
Orthodox Judaism has a lot of prohibitions and requirements, but those prohibitions and requirements have a way of increasing social cohesion within the group. If you go to a daily minyan, how can you not become friends with the other people who go to minyan too?
If you have to live within walking distance of your synagogue and walk to and from synagogue, forming friendships is easier than if people live scattered about and drive independently away together.
I think your theory is pretty common in 'these parts'.
I've been partially 'converted' myself – I've been observing a (secular) 'shabbat' for a good while now and it's great!
That's wonderful to read. What are your secular "shabbats" like? Do you observe them alone, with a partner, or with a family?
If you don't mind my asking, where do you live?
I tried to translate what I thought was the core 'spirit' of shabbat – to rest – into terms that make sense to me.
I opted to 'observe' it from 6p Friday to 6p Saturday – instead of from sunset to sunset. (I do like the idea of 'anchoring' to a naturalistic phenomena, but I don't think I'd be comfortable explaining to my employer's why I can't work past 3-4 in the afternoon in the middle of winter!)
My only real restriction is that I don't 'have to' do anything that otherwise I have to (or really want to) do. But I can do anything I _want_ to do. I don't schedule anything, even personal stuff, during that time, but I'll make exceptions for 'interfacing' with 'non-observant' people, for fun mainly, and I'll respond to work 'emergencies' if they're sufficiently severe (and, of course, 'real' emergencies too). And if I do schedule something, particularly on a Saturday, I'll almost always do so in the late afternoon, at the earliest, so I don't have to 'work' to get to bed early Friday night and wakeup at any particular time Saturday.
Mostly I relax, e.g. watch TV, read, and play games, but it's also great for working on personal projects that I've otherwise neglected (or been unable or unwilling to schedule time for). My 'metric' for what's 'okay' to do is whether (or to what sufficient degree) that task/project is intrinsically rewarding, and enjoyable/relaxing/energizing/meditative.
I have mostly 'observed' this myself – my ex-partner didn't seem to ever appreciate it when we were together. My ex and I have a child and I intend to kind of 'passively' include them in it when I get a chance. (I will be happy to explain my reasoning to them if they ask and are interested tho!)
I don't otherwise have any family nearby, but I'd think 'observing it' with them (or a 'super-family' consisting of close friends) would mostly consist of hanging out having fun.
I'm in NYC and have been, mostly, for the past decade plus. I think a big part of why I was open to the idea was because I've met a few very nice Orthodox Jewish people that were kind enough (and probably interested on their own too!) to explain enough about how they observe shabbat (and other elements of their practices/rituals/observances) that I was able to appreciate it greatly. One aspect that I thought was particularly cool when I first thought about it is that observing shabbat requires a good bit of preparation and discipline (outside of shabbat). One of the very nice Orthodox people told me once that they've abandoned their car on a highway (in NYC!) when they weren't able to make it home by sunset Friday! I thought (and still think) that was an impressive demonstration of their dedication. And it occurred to me that that kind of dedication is an interesting 'handicap' but that by (strongly) committing to it, they probably were 'strengthening/training' a whole bunch of other useful skills, attributes, and habits that are generally extremely good, useful, and helpful in basically every other area of their lives.
I'm pretty 'allergic' to social media in general – I find it extremely dispiriting! So my 'shabbat' doesn't help with that :)
But you seem like you might know a good bit about how 'real' shabbats are observed. Are there any other aspects that you think might be usefully/helpfully translated for me or others like me that are doing something like a 'secular shabbat'?
THat's interesting what you do, with 6 PM to 6 PM, Friday-Saturday period of rest. I also liked reading how you liked how Orthodox Jewish people do their own, more structured shabbats. I agree with you that preparation for shabbat is a lot of work; even if shabbat is very peaceful, getting ready for it is chaotic.
Unfortunately I do not keep shabbat. When I was a teenager I spent a few weekends with Orthodox Jews and loved the family togetherness of a shabbat meal and the downtime of Saturday. I also enjoyed how social walking to and from synagogue was. Even as an adult now, I'm jealous when I drive through a Jewish neighborhood on Friday night or Saturday and see big clusters of people walking together. I think a walk to and from synagogue is an opportunity to make new acquaintances and grow acquaintanceships into friendships. Since the requirement to walk keeps a spiritual community physically compact, I think it fosters socialization in that way too.
When Orthodox Judaism offers so many opportunities for socialization, I don't see any mystery as to why people of non-Jewish ancestry, like in Colombia, convert.
Unfortunately, I personally lack the willpower to keep all the rules of shabbat. I cannot stay away from pointless conversations/arguments on social media. I cannot resist watching something late Friday night with my wife. I have decided not to deprive my kids of extracurricular activities on a Saturday.
But I'm ambivalent about my activity on shabbat. I admire people who can keep the day reserved for personal reflection, prayer (even if the practical benefit of prayer is socialization), and family time.
The only day of the year where I strictly keep shabbat is Yom Kippur, where I do not use the internet. I find that Yom Kippur does give me a sense of calm I don't have on the the other 364 days of the year and I am usually able to read 10x more pages of whatever book I'm reading than I am the mundane days of the year.
It seems like you _do_ keep shabbat, but, like me, just not "all the rules". (I think that's totally sensible!)
Another aspect of Judaism that I like a lot, and admire, is the kind of ritual 'over-thinking' that seems (to me) to be much more common. I love the idea of thousands of years of rabbis (and others) arguing with each other over how to interpret/translate/adapt their scriptures to different circumstances. I like to think I would have been drawn to join that 'ongoing conversation' myself had that been possible for me!
Colombian here. Wanted to add a bit more context.
I.
The average Colombian wants to get the hell out of Colombia, because the average Colombian is stuck in an unofficial caste system where they're placed within a very tightly defined socio-economic strata that will determine what kind of education, jobs, and social connections are available to them.
Conversion to Judaism, to the average Colombian, would represent mainly:
1. Personal connections to wealth (politically incorrect, sure, but the idea of Jewish wealth and status are very firmly planted in the average Colombian's mindset)
2. The possibility of emigrating from Colombia.
Really, the aspiration of one day leaving Colombia is one of the most firmly rooted ideas in any Colombian's mind.
Ii.
I discussed this article with a very wealthy, highly respected member of the Jewish community in the capital, who is of direct European descent, and learned that the conversions have become a source of concern for the traditional Jewish community in the country.
Their stance is that of skepticism towards the converts, as they suspect that the reason behind conversions boil down to the two points above.
and in part, the conversions spark scorn among some members of the Jewish community because the converts have not lived through so many of the tragic shared experiences in the history of the Jews.
Iii.
Now, a bit about the traditional Jewish community in Colombia: From the 16th to 18th centuries there was a large influx of Sephardic Jews to Colombia that largely converted to catholicism and blended into the typical Colombian mestizo over the course of time. This followed, among other things, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, which was only officially repealed in 1962, if you can believe that! ( A bit more on this later)
In summary, a lot of Sephardic families entirely lost any sense of their Jewish heritage, passing from secretly hiding stars of David in their families' catholic burial sites, to eventually becoming your average bible-touting Colombian family.
It seems that a core part of Colombia's traditional Jewish community is comprised of Ashkenazi Jews that migrated around WW2. As such, the link between religion, ethnicity, and family history are more strongly intertwined than in the case of most catholic families, for example, which also has made them, to an extent, a self-segregating outgroup. (Curious about how prevalent this is in other places.)
Now, let's frame all of this in terms of socio economics in Colombia. Colombia is one of the most economically unequal countries on earth.
Lighter skinned folks of European descent tend to dominate all areas of business and politics, and represent the greatest concentrations of wealth in the country, while being a relatively small proportion of the total population.
For purposes of this conversation, we have a sudden influx of Ashkenazi (lighter skinned) Jews around WW2, in contrast with the older generations of generally assimilated Sephardic Jews, a lot of which have been entirely assimilated into mestizo Catholics. They stand out among the mostly brown average Colombian populace. Even if they are poor European migrants, further empoverished by the war, Colombian inequality is so extreme that the newcomers are in all likelyhood wealthier and better educated than the average Colombian mestizo locals, further strengthening the myth of the wealthy Jew.
Again, they are perceived as an outgroup by the average Colombian...
...until 2015??
Spain, out of some sense of apparent historical guilt, (but also possibly wanting to revive its stagnant economy?) decides it will grant Spanish citizenship to the descendents of all the wronged Sepharic Jews.
So they publish a list of last names. If you do a little legwork and digging through your long list of last names, you have a chance to swap castes and become a bona-fide Spanish citizen. Play your cards right and you too can have the chance to move up in life and scrub toilets in Barcelona. (Which likely pays better than a lot of office jobs back here)
Suddenly, it turns out that every other Colombian is a Sephardic Jew.
Now, I don't want to suggest that these policies are necessarily behind the boom conversions to Judaism. As far as I know, there's no requirement of actually practicing Judaism in order to be granted citizenship. Apparently, it's your bloodline that counts, no kidding.
But between skipping out to Israel or Spain, or even Portugal, too, now, there's never been a better time to be a Jew. (Or to be one again... I guess)
Anyways, hope that provides some additional context for the conversation.