Judaism and Gentile religions

The Jewish People nowadays find themselves, usually inadvertently, committing a grievous sin. In the name of Political Correctness, tolerance, and the equality of all people, we, even the so-called Orthodox and the rabbis, espouse the lie that Judaism is on par with other religions, that our Torah and our creeds come from the same source as their’s. This is a disgusting lie, in which we not only deceive ourselves, if in fact we as Torah observant Jews believe that nonsense, but also deceive honest Gentiles in their search for a connection to the Almighty G-D. The Torah forbids us to put a stumbling block before the blind. Now of course, this has more than just the literal meaning to it. It can be interpreted to mean that a Jew is not to deceive one who is not knowledgeable intentionally. We, as the People of The Book, as the People to whom HASHEM revealed Himself, and to whom He sent his Prophets, the descendents and students of the Talmudic Sages, we have an advantage over the Nations of the Earth in respect to knowledge of the Divine. The Gentiles, on the other hand, as Yehuda Levi in his book Al Khazari(Ha Kuzari) explains it, are descended of Ham and Yaphet, to whom matters of the Divine are obscured, as they did not possess the essence of Noah, as did Shem, who passed it on to Eber, to Peleg, to Abraham, who in turn passed it on to us, the Children of Israel. The Gentiles are descended of idolaters, of Nations to whom HASHEM has not made Himself known. These are not my words, but this is the discourse between HASHEM and Moshe Rabbenu, during Moshe’s second set of 40 days atop Mount Sinai(after Het Egel HaZahav and the smashing of the first Luhot, carved out by HASHEM and inscribed by HASHEM). After the spiritual fall of Israel from the heights of angelic beings which they reached with the utterances of "Naaseh v’Nishma’"(We shall do and we shall obey. Onkelos renders "nishma’" as obey instead of "hear"). With this utterance, the People of Israel showed that they were totally submissive to G-D, as were the angels, and this was set upon the Jews as two crowns: one for we shall do, and the second for we shall obey. With the Sin of the Golden Calf, these two crowns were taken away from Israel, and so Moshe Rabbenu feared that HASHEM would depart from Israel and choose another nation or people. Ever the loving leader, Moses pled for Israel’s sake, not only that HASHEM would restore His Presence to Israel. He pleads, "If I have now found favor in Your eyes, my Lord, let my Lord go among us- for it is a stiff-necked people, and You shall forgive our iniquity and our error, and make us Your heritage." With this Moshe asked HASHEM to truly make Israel a Goy Kadosh (a separated, set apart, Nation). Rashi, based on Talmud Berachot, contends that Moshe’s request was that not only HASHEM not destroy Israel and restore His Presence to Israel, but that He not rest His Presence or grant prophecy to any other people or nation besides Israel. To this HASHEM replies, "Behold! I seal a covenant: Before your entire people I shall make distinctions(Niflaot, rendered as such according to Ramban, Rashi) such as have never been created in the entire world and among all the nations; and the entire people among whom you are will see the work of HASHEM-which is awesome- that I am about to do with you." Here HASHEM responds with favor to Moshe’s request, and from that moment on, anyone who proclaimed himself to be a newly arisen prophet among the Nations was to be discounted as a liar. Thus Mohammad, the Bhudda, Baha’u’llah, Guru Nanak, Krishna, and all others are outright false prophets and liars. Any claims they made are discounted solely based on this. Even if they were to preach the Torah verbatim and call the Jewish People to HASHEM, they are not prophets, for only a son of Israel can be a prophet. Jesus, yimah shemo u’zichro, is discounted by a multitude of verses in Deuteronomy. Before I go further, I must expound on a certain misconception we Jews have: Jews and Christians DO NOT worship the same G-D. HASHEM, the G-D of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the G-D of Israel who has given us the eternal Torah, is One(I.e. a Unity, unlike any other for He is Unique, Ayn Yahid Ki Yahido. I have contemplated this concept over and over, for in this world there is no such thing as an absolute one. Everything is made of parts, those parts made up of cells, the cells of molecules, the molecules of atoms, the atoms of neutrons and protons and electrons, and recently discovered is that those are made up of strings, and even these strings might be composed of smaller parts. HASHEM, on the other hand, being that He is Unique and Immaterial, is the Absolute One, for He is like nothing we know or can comprehend. As He said to Moses, none can see HASHEM‘s face and live. Here, so He will show Moses His Back. "Face" and "Back" are not literal, as HASHEM is not a man nor is He corporeal. Face is a full understanding of HASHEM and His ways. These are above even the level of Moses, the greatest man to ever live, the father of the prophets before and after him. As HASHEM is inconceivable, so is His "make up", as it were. To call Him a Trinity is a disgusting oversimplification of HaKadosh Baruch Hu, into something our feeble minds can comprehend, yet we end up with a confusing anti-Biblical doctrine which makes less sense than a giant elephant carrying the earth on it’s back. As HASHEM is like nothing in this existence or any other, as He is the Unique One, as He is called in Genesis 3:22. Nothing in this existence is a true absolute unity, for they are material. HASHEM is not material, and He is an absolute Unity), Incorporeal, Eternal, Unborn, with no progeny(I,e, a literal son) unaffected by physical phenomena, untouchable, Immortal, with neither shape nor form, who cannot be killed or harmed in any fashion. The Christian idol on the other hand is a triune, three in one, composed of father, son and "holy" spirit, he was born of a woman’s legs, he is his own father and thus has a son by generation, he has a body, he has been tempted by what Christians call the Devil, he was challenged, killed as a criminal, requires blind faith as opposed to intelligent obedience and actions, and is claimed to have descended into hell and "resurrected". The same Deity CANNOT have both of these sets of characteristics. If a guy named Bob is fat with blue eyes and blonde hair, and another one named Bob is skinny with green eyes and red hair, they are NOT the same person. Now that we have established that Jews alone worship HASHEM, while Christians worship their own fancy, we are directed to the qualifications of a prophet from Israel to be recognized.
-Deuteronomy 13:2-11
On these grounds we see that Jesus tried to lead Israel to worship a god other than HASHEM, for we have not experienced the deity of which he speaks, only have we experience HASHEM, and there are no other gods or deities besides Him. Jesus by his many actions also violated Deuteronomy 13:1, forbidding adding or subtracting from the Law of G-D, the Torah. The fact that this verse comes right before the verses that tell us how to identify a false prophets indicates that a false prophet would try to change the Torah. Yes, we all know the "not one jot and not one tittle shall pass…" speech, but actions speak louder than words, and on many occasions Jesus not only violated the Torah, but encouraged others to do so as well. So therefore he is unequivocally a false prophet, preaching a non-Torah doctrine and whatever he says is not of HASHEM. The same, actually, applies to Mohammad, Baha’u’llah, and other preachers of new "Abrahamic" faiths. There is an age old adage which I paraphrase concerning these works of man’s fancy called religions and it states, "What is true is not new, and what is new is not true". As the Vilna Gaon said, there is no Torah among the Gentiles, meaning we can learn no religious truths from the non-Jews. ZERO. NONE.
Aside from this, Judaism has a unique character, a trait that it alone possesses among the religions of the world. The Torah itself testifies that never had a people experienced such a thing as the revelation of the Torah. This unique trait is mass witnessing of the Revelation at Sinai. Over 2 Million Children of Israel stood at the foot of Sinai and heard the Voice, they saw the fire and the thunder, they experienced it all firsthand. Now, is there any other religion under heaven which makes such a claim? Jesus supposedly performed miracles which are documented nowhere else but the "New Testament" in documents written at the earliest a century and a half after the supposed date of his death, and attributed to Paul, a man who had neither seen nor heard Jesus firsthand, but merely had heatstroke on the way to Damascus. Mohammad received his revelations from Gabriel in some obscure mountain, far away from the sight of anyone. No one else ever saw Gabriel descend and dictate the Qur’an to Mohammad. Al-Bab(Literally "The Door" in Arabic. NOT "The Gate" as the Baha’is would tell you. Gate is "Bawwaba") preached nothing new when he "foretold" the coming of a new prophet. In fact, his "predictions" arose from an ancient Islamic sect called the Khawarij who foretold the coming of a Persian prophet who would reveal a divine religion with a new sacred book on part with Judaism(lihavdil), Christianity and Islam. Baha’u’llah simply capitalized on this. No one ever saw him perform miracles, mass crowds never witnessed him receiving the Kitab-I-Aqdas, as he was in a prison cell the whole time it was "revealed" to him. As we can see, only Judaism has the aspect of mass witnesses. The others, just mass acceptance on the basis of blind faith. Judaism does not rely on faith. Not once in the Torah are we asked to BELIEVE in HASHEM, but always to KNOW. Judaism is based on logic, reason and knowledge. This with the Mass Witness of the Sinaitic Revelation makes the Torah the litmus test for all other prophets and creeds to come after it. If they do not agree with the Torah, then they are falsehood.
Our mistake as Jews, as those who know the truth, is to allow these Gentiles to believe that 1) Religion is based on faith and not on hard evidence. 2) That their religious creeds have some respect in the eyes of Jews and Judaism and 3) engaging in dialogue with these religions, thus giving them importance and legitimacy, for a dialogue always implies that we have something to learn from their religious creeds(The Vilna Gaon strictly opposed this, he said only in secular matters we can learn from them). Here we break three commandments of the Torah, 1) not to add nor subtract from the Torah, 2) Idolatry and 3) Placing a stumbling block before the blind.
By saying that the doctrines and books of other religions are from G-D, seeing as how they contradict the Torah, we are adding new things to the words and Laws of HASHEM. We are proclaiming that worshipping a dead man on a cross, an idol from Arabia or the pantheon of Hindu gods are acceptable in the eyes of HASHEM. This is not so. HASHEM revealed only one creed to man, and all others are unacceptable, their creeds and modes of worship are worthless. For a Gentile to enter Olam HaBa, they must not blaspheme in the name of HASHEM or commit Avoda Zara. We are supposed to be a Light unto the Nations, HASHEM’s Chosen to spread knowledge of the Holy One to all the nations of the earth. We are not doing our job. I am not saying bring them to Torah as Jews, but simply to expose the falsehood of their creeds, and not to pander to their whims, to what they want to hear, to what will please them and make them like us while we betray our roots and our Torah. The Rambam states that it is forbidden even under penalty of death to deny Him or His Torah. We are denying Him and His Torah for a kind word and approval of idolaters!
"Al taamod al dam ra’echa" the Torah tells us. Do not stand idly over your fellow’s blood. We are standing idly by while Gentiles destroy their souls with man-made religions of falsehood, and we do not lead them to the true and rightful path. It could be said because of our idleness that the Crusades, the Inquisitons, the progroms, the Islamic conquest and modern Islamic terrorism is our fault. Our failure, as the standard bearers of humanity, to stamp out these corrupt man-made ideologies led to their spread by the sword, and their perpetuation by the sword. The sins of Christianity and Islam are our fault, for with our knowledge of HASHEM and His Torah, we could have eliminated these ideologies before they started. I believe that leaving the early Christians to their devices, to continue to preach and spread their idolatry in the midst of Israel, is but one of the reasons that we were exiled. Christians would contend that it was because we did not accept Jesus, but that is an idiotic statement as we were returned to the Land of Israel without accepting Jesus. So Jesus is irrelevant. Obviously is was some other sin of ours, for which we are still being punished, this time with the rod of Islam. It is time that the Jewish People lived up to their name as HASHEM’s Chosen People to be a Light Unto the Nations and that we begin reversing the tide of these idolatrous faiths, as now they have begun to consume Israel. The words of Eliyahu HaNavi ring clear in this situation, "How long will you tarry between two masters? If HASHEM is G-D, then follow Him. If the Baal, then follow it." So to my Jewish brethren, especially those steeped in Torah, how long will you recognize other deities in HASHEM’s presence? If our Torah and our G-D are Truth, then are we not obliged as the Light Unto the Nations to spread this word among the Gentiles, so that He will be One and His Name will be One?
Do we as Jews realize that, according to the Rambam based off of the Talmud, Christians and Muslims have no share in Olam Haba? Who does not have a share in the world to Come? He who denies the Torah(I.e. the one we have today) was divinely revealed and the apikoros. This is from the Mishna. So the Muslims who believe the Torah in our hands today is corrupted have no share in the World to Come, and the Christians who believe that the Torah is no longer valid after the death of Yoshke have no share in the World to Come, unless they believe that this is the Torah of Sinai and is still in effect today. According to the Rambam, in Yad Teshuva 3:6-8 states, "The following have no share in the world to come, but are cut off, and perish, and receive their punishment for all time for their great sin: the minim, the apikorsim, they that deny the belief in the Torah, they that deny the belief in resurrection of the dead and in the coming of the Redeemer, the apostates, they that lead many to sin, they that turn away from the ways of the [Jewish] community... Five are called 'minim': (1) he who says there is no God and the world has no guide; (2) he who says the world has more than one guide; (3) he who ascribes to the Lord of the Universe a body and a figure; (4) he who says that God was not alone and Creator of all things at the world's beginning; (5) he who worships some star or constellation as an intermediating power between himself and the Lord of the World.
"The following three classes are called 'apikorsim': (1) he who says there was no prophecy nor was there any wisdom that came from God and which was attained by the heart of man; (2) he who denies the prophetic power of Moses our master; (3) he who says that God has no knowledge concerning the doings of men.
"The following three are called 'koferim ba-Torah': (1) he who says the Torah is not from God: he is a kofer even if he says a single verse or letter thereof was said by Moses of his own accord; (2) he who denies the traditional interpretation of the Torah and opposes those authorities who declare it to be tradition, as did Zadok and Boethus; and (3) he who says, as do the Nazarenes and the Mohammedans, that the Lord has given a new dispensation instead of the old, and that he has abolished the Law, though it was originally divine"
You disagree with the holy Rambam? Fine. But can you disagree with David and Shlomo? In Tehillim 110:10, King David states, "Reshit Hochma Yirat HASHEM" , In Proverbs 1:7, Shlomo states, "Yirat HASHEM reshit da’at hochma". In Proverbs 9:10, he states, "Tehilat hochma Yirat HASHEM v’da’at kdoshim binah". This might seem irrelevant, but ok. Bear with me. Knowledge of HASHEM is the beginning of Wisdom. So one must be wise. The Talmud says, "ain am ha’aretz hasid". The first Law for the Ben Noah is to worship HASHEM. How can you worship Him properly, if you are following a corrupt line of thought? The only way to truly know how to worship and believe in HASHEM is through Torat Moshe. Without that, who knows what you are worshipping? Take the Qur’an. Allah is NOT HASHEM. Allah is the name of a pagan moon god from Mecca, whose name was Allah Hubal, Hubal the Deity. He was the Cheif Deity of Mecca. Is this HASHEM? NO! When a Muslim says the Shahada, he is in fact saying that there is not god but Hubal! So he is breaking the essential commandment, the miztvah reshit of all the mitzvot. The first commandment for Jew and Gentile is, "Ani HASHEM Elokechem". It is also halachically agreed that if one performs the mitzvot because, simply, they make sense, without first understanding that HASHEM, G-D of Israel, revealed and requires them, then it is not acceptable. As we can see, only Jews and proper Bnei Noah have this understanding. But we are a tiny, tiny, tiny drop in the bucket for the rest of humanity. Without Torah, no man can come to a proper understanding of HASHEM, for HASHEM revealed the Torah and ONLY the Torah as His Law, as the path to Him. The Qur’an, the Vedas, the New Testament, the Kitabi-Aqdas, these are all falsehoods and lies, the rationalizations of man, the works of mortals, and that imperfect at best and way off the mark at the worst. If this is the case, if this is what our sages are telling us, then what gives us the right to tell the Christians, the Muslims, the Baha’is and the Hindus that they are on the straight and narrow? We are lying, placing a stumbling block before the blind! These people did not have prophets to lead them to HASHEM, that is our job! Our tikkun in this world is to spread recognition of the Almighty, not to allow these people to continue in their self-delusion. This will be called into account more so against us than them, if it will be called against them at all. If their religions are acceptable to HASHEM, why then do we do all in our power to prevent Jews from attaching themselves to these false ideologies? There shall be one law for you and for the stranger among you. There is only ONE G-D, Perfect , Who does not make mistakes nor does He recant, His Word is Eternal. HASHEM did not create Jew and Gentile, He created Man and Woman. So why would it be proper for a Gentile to worship a stone, while we worship Him? It is NOT! In the Flood, He punished all of Mankind for disobeying Him. Since He does not recant nor change, that standard is still the same today as it was then. Are they not our fellow human beings? Do we not have an obligation towards them as well as Jews( Jews must come first, of course). Surely, if it is bad and harmful for us, we should not wish it on other people nor allow them to continue in it. If your cousin were doing drugs, would you allow him to do it, even though you yourself know it is bad and evil and harmful, and would never do it yourself? Why then is it ok for our fellow Man to be immersed in idolatry, while this is so repulsive and harmful to us and to HASHEM, yet we allow and encourage them in their path to spiritual destruction? And for what? So they will remain happy with us, and pleased with themselves? Is this true love of one’s fellow man? Pro 27:5 Better is open rebuke than love that is hidden. As Rabbi Hillel said, Love your fellow as yourself, the rest is just commentary. In no way am I endorsing through this that we love the Gentile more than the Jew or that we place the interests of the Gentiles above out own. But bringing these people into a proper understanding of G-D would virtually remove any animosity they have for us, and would usher in an era of Peace and Knowledge of HASHEM under the banner of Mashiah ben David. So in a way, it is in our best interest as well that the Gentiles truly know that HASHEM, He is The G-D, in Heaven above and on Earth below there is NO OTHER.