Who was the other? Not the literal Nazi who showed up?

Posted the first topic! (I'm Abraham)

I wouldn't go so far as to pigeonhole 'Jewish teaching' - which is very far from the monolith a lot of these Jewish outreach people caricature it as - to one side in the contemporary American immigration debate. You see, while Halacha clearly sets limits on the entry of idolaters to the Land of Israel, it's worth noting that these restrictions are unique to (a) a Jewish State (b) in the Land of Israel. Simply put, neither Jewish thought nor Jewish law really care to dictate for gentile nations - with the exception of the seven laws, of course.

But even if we were to assume that the Jewish laws pertaining to God's 'Kingdom of Priests' are indeed applicable to our western nation-states, I suspect that we would find them more open to immigration than the populists who style themselves "conservatives" might like. As per Maimonides (and really the Talmud, if you want to just go back to Maimonides's source), a gentile who formally accepts to worship the One and refrain from idolatry is considered a Ger Toshav, or resident alien, and he is granted significant rights and is considered a part of the general commonwealth. 

In other words, so long as a gentile accepts God's sovereignty - which is of course the primary (the only?) constitutional principle in the Jewish commonwealth - he is granted the right of residency and significant social rights. In my opinion, at least, that exemplifies a far more expansive view of immigration than the linked speaker suggests.

But this is all assuming that God's instructions for his own commonwealth are equally relevant to the gentile nations. In reality they aren't, and as such every nation has the moral right to decide what the measure of its sovereignty is and what it takes to become a member of that nation. The Torah is only very narrowly applicable to the gentile nations, and I believe that turning it into a partisan cudgel only demeans its sanctity and debases it. It is analogous to cutting up a beautiful tap

The rabidly anti zionist orthodox (Satmar etc) are largely  fools. They don't know how to interpret a page of Talmud. 
The conventional (and correct) view is to criticize secular Zionism and its usurpation of religion, while still supporting the state as such.
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I'll also say that while I wish war wouldn't exist, it unfortunately does and we need to partake in it. The destabilizing forces in the Islamic world need to be crushed, lest they spread to America as they have to Europe .

RomanJoe wrote:

Etzelnik wrote:

In my early teenage years I made the transition from my fideist upbringing to rational investigation of what I believe and why. It wasn't really much of an epiphany; it was more like a process spanning a number of years. The primary catalyst for this shift was my activity of several internet forums, where I peddled my beliefs. After getting my face rubbed in the mud I realized that I basically sounded like a moron, so I started actually using my head and investigating. 

Any new opinions or beliefs you developed in this time?

It's hard to pin it down, but I would say that I generally became more humanist in outlook, with an overall focus on how my religion (Orthodox Judaism) can incorporate all of humanity rather than just an extremely narrow subset of it. On the flip side, I've also (ironically) become more hardline on the so-called traditional values which underpin Christianity and Judaism alike, largely as a result of understanding the necessity and truth of those moral frameworks.