[MD] The SOM/MOQ discrepancy.

[Krimel]

Krimel said:
...It requires no intellectual underpinning...

mel:
Which Jews are you talking about?

I have never seen so much over-intellectualization
as I have with a room full of rabbinical folks arguing.
-in high school-at a friend's house-and they all
sounded like bad immitations of Mel Brooks or Billy
Cristal doing Yiddish immitations.

Makes us look like the sandbox kids making motor
noises.

[Krimel]
Jewish ethics as laid out in the Torah consist chiefly of a series of "Thou
shalts." There is no reasoned justification for them. Certainly nothing like
we see in Bentham, Mill, Kant or Pirsig.

Rabbinic Judaism like Christianity is a direct product of the Jewish Revolt
that ended in 70 A.D. with the destruction of the Temple built by Herod the
Great around 20 B.C.. The revolt ended when the Roman army leveled the city
of Jerusalem. Gentile Christianity, as I described it earlier, emerged in
part because everyone who might have countered it was either dead or
scattered across the planet.

The Jews, who survived, were faced with a difficult situation. The Temple
was gone and thus those whose faith revolved around the priests and temple
sacrifices had nowhere to go. In northern Israel, Judea or Galilee, this had
always be something of a problem. The lack of access to the temple had
resulted in earlier times in the development of the prophets and the
Pharisees. (In Jewish history after Solomon there was a tradition of tension
between the priests who controlled the temple in Jerusalem and the prophets
in the north). 

Following the Jewish revolt, the Jews in exile began to develop the Talmud
which is an extended and exhaustive analysis of the Torah. It was nit picky
in the extreme. Here the rabbis, decedents of the Pharisees, argued mainly
over how to apply the law. This went on for about 300 years from 200 A.D. to
500 A.D.. A foreshadowing of this is presented in the gospels by Jesus who
pronounced a series of "whoa unto you scribe and Pharisee..." He complained
that they sought to tithe the herbs in their gardens while letting widows
starve. Ironically, at least one New Testament scholar claims that Jesus was
himself a Pharisee.

In any case the modern Jews that you are referring to are descendant of this
tradition. Unfortunately, not much is known about the specific practices of
Jews prior to the Jewish revolt but one does not find within the canonical
Jewish writing much in the way of philosophical justification for its moral
precepts.