#rabbi david aaron
if anyone, jewish or not (because I feel that non jewish people could also benefit from throwing out any lingering false associations between our core theology and christian core theology), is curious about learning more about how jewish thought / theology differs a lot from dominant christian narratives, specifically how “god” and “prayer” are very poorly executed english translations of our concepts of HaShem and tefilah/l’hitpalel, especially if you’re a jewish person struggling with the idea of religious judaism because you don’t feel compatible with what the dominant meaning and concept (heavily influenced by christianity) of the english words/concepts “god” and “prayer” are, please please watch some videos by Rabbi David Aaron specifically this one (x) and this one (x)
neither of them really come from a denominational perspective so don’t worry about if you’re heterodox or orthodox it’s just a really good look at authentic jewish theology. and some of the misunderstandings that he clarifies are, if left unclarified, big stumbling blocks for a lot of jews who are hung up on things like “do I believe in God” “do I have some ambiguous faith” “when I pray does God listen”, and those stumbling blocks could be avoided by having these conversations about what jewish theology really holds as true, especially since a lot of those phrasings we absorb from our non jewish surroundings that lead us to be confused and doubtful about our judaism are based in concepts that are… entirely unjewish.
like as a brief summary, “do I believe in God” is a question that is steeped in this christian dominant perspective that you sort of absorb in a lot of english speaking christian majority countries, where God = metaphysical dude far off in the sky that you have to profess blind faith towards, which… could not be further from what the concept of HaShem is in Judaism, aka HaShem is everywhere, HaShem cannot be depicted by any of our human conceptualizations of embodiment (like seriously depicting HaShem as a man in a flowing robe is a huge no no) and HaShem is more scattered divinity of Being than some humanoid ruler up in the sky (the video is a lot more eloquent than on this than me lmao). “do I have faith?” often references this idea that faith is blind and that “faith” is a state of mind not a set of actions. in Judaism there’s a lot more weight to actions than sitting around and thinking “yeah I have blind faith that there’s a God” (again that perspective draws on these weird ideas of HaShem as a distant and metaphysical being that are extremely unjewish) and “when I pray does God listen” comes from a non Jewish perspective of prayer as begging God to change his mind or something like that, which is again a very unjewish perspective and that second video link talks a lot about what the real meaning of l’hitpalel / tefilah is in Judaism and what are we doing when we daven, if not this english/christian centric concept of “to pray”
anyway I feel like those videos really solidified some things succinctly for me; I had the ideas cemented in my head theologically before but this was the first time I had heard them verbalized this simply so like check it out! the first video is very short, like under 10 minutes, and should be watched first imo, the second video is like 40 minutes, if you’re really interested but don’t think you’ll get to the second one on tefilah at least watch the first one on HaShem.
I had the first link wrong before! this version has the right link
@stepsonthejourney Not sure if any of this might be helpful to you, but thought I’d tag you in anyway!
