On Jun 11, 9:02Â am, "John Smith"
yahoo.com> wrote:>> From what is below, again from Rabbi Ken Spiro, one can see that
>> Einstein for instance was a Sadducee. Â The long running conflict about
>> St. Paul is settled by realizing that Paul leaned toward the
>> Hellenized Sadducees, as well. Â His Ascended Master name, Hilarion, is
>> a Greek name. Â Spiro is against Hellenization, but there is a real
>> problem for Jews with that position, because the Greek Gods and Heroes
>> are parts and parcels of the body of God, i.e. the Kingdom of God.
>> For instance, both Apollo and Hercules are Elohim. Â There are seven of
>> those just as there are seven Archangels. Â A Jew who is alienated from
>> the spirits of these Elohim will have severe imbalances in his soul.
>> That is why the traditional Jews seem to me to be so mentally
>> defective that one cannot fruitfully debate or discuss anything with
>> them.
>
>> JEW VS. JEW
>
>> The Chanukah story is often portrayed as a struggle for national
>> liberation -- the Jewish revolt against the Greek occupation of
>> Israel. In reality it is much complicated that that. The real conflict
>> was not physical but intellectual. Chanukah was ultimately an
>> ideological-spiritual war between paganism and Judaism. It was also
>> not a struggle purely between Greeks and Jews. It was first a foremost
>> a civil war of Jew against Jew. The initial impetus for the Greek
>> attack against Judaism came from a certain splinter group of the
>> Jewish people -- the Hellenized Jews.
>
>> These were Jews who were sucked into Greek culture. And it is no
>> wonder why; Greek culture was the major culture milieu of the ancient
>> world.
>
>> We see this as a pattern in Jewish history. A world culture comes
>> along which is enlightened and progressive and is changing the world,
>> and some of the upper class Jews always get into it. Why? Because they
>> are rich, sophisticated, and have lot of spare time. Then they say to
>> the rest of the Jewish people: "Let's get modern. Forget this ancient
>> Jewish stuff." (We will see this pattern repeated in Spain, and in
>> Germany, and even today in America and Israel.)
>
>> At this time, we have a small but very vocal and powerful group of
>> Jews, who align with the Greek authorities and who become Hellenized.
>> They do everything the Greeks do.
>
>> They send their children to the gymnasium, and they reverse their
>> circumcisions -- a very painful operation -- since so much of Greek
>> stuff is done naked and the Greeks would consider them mutilated
>> otherwise.
>
>> To make matters worse, the schism between the Hellenized Jews and
>> mainstream Jews is paralleled by another schism -- between two
>> factions of religious Jews.
>
>> It begins in the third century BCE when two students named -- Zadok
>> and Bysos -- begin preaching a new form of Judaism, devoid of belief
>> in the Divinity of the Oral Torah. There is little doubt that Greek
>> thought played a significant role in creating this early break with
>> mainstream Judaism. Their followers are called the Sadducees and
>> Bysosim, though it is the Sadducees that go down in history. The
>> mainstream observant Jews, who follow the Rabbis and keep Jewish law
>> as it has always been practiced, are called ironically "Pharisees,"
>> meaning "separatists," to distinguish them from the others.
>
>> Since the Sadducees do not believe that the Oral Torah comes from God,
>> they maintain that they are only obligated to keep the laws of the
>> Written Torah, which they read literally. (This denial of the Oral Law
>> will occur later in Jewish history with the Karaite schism in
>> Babylon.) But so many of the laws of the Written Torah are
>> incomprehensible without the Oral Torah. Their answer? Each man for
>> himself; anyone can decide what it means and act accordingly.
>
>> The Sadducees find natural allies among the Hellenized Jews, as Rabbi
>> Berel Wein explains:
>
>> The Sadducees were always more acceptable in the eyes of the Hellenist
>> Jews than their rabbinic foes. The alliance of the Hellenists and the
>> Sadducees against traditional Judaism guaranteed constant turmoil in
>> Jewish life throughout the time of the Second Temple and even
>> thereafter. (Echoes of Glory, p. 38)
>
>> (We shall discuss the Sadducees in greater detail in future segments
>> when we come to the Roman Empire and its domination of the Jews.)
>
>> This is how the ancient historian Josephus explains the beliefs of the
>> Jews at this time:
>
>> The Pharisees [who are considered most skillful in the exact
>> explication of their laws and are the leading school] ascribe all to
>> fate and to God and yet allow that to do what is right or to the
>> contrary is principally the power of men, although fate does cooperate
>> in every action. They say that all souls are imperishable but that the
>> souls of good men only pass into other bodies while the souls of evil
>> men are subject to eternal punishment.
>
>> But the Sadducees are those that compose the second order and exclude
>> fate entirely and suppose that God is not concerned with our doing or
>> not doing what is evil. They say that to do what is good or what is
>> evil is man's own choice and that the choice of one or the other
>> belongs to each person who may act as he pleases. They also exclude
>> the belief in immortality of the soul and the punishment and rewards
>> of the afterworld.
>
>> Moreover, the Pharisees are friendly to one another and cultivate
>> harmonious relations with the community, but the behavior of the
>> Sadducees towards one another is to some degree boorish, and their
>> conversation with those that of their own party is barbarous as if
>> they were strangers to them.(5)
>
>> You can see how the Sadducees were influenced by Greek thought. They
>> are part of the reason that the High Priesthood and the Temple service
>> became so corrupt (as many of the priestly class, an upper class at
>> that time, became Sadducees). And this is why the Talmud says that so
>> many High Priests died during the service of Yom Kippur.
>
> Damn!
> Now that I've opened this post - I have to scrape it off my shoe!
This is the crux of the matter, fool!
