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...true that a reader of the Torah could find homophobic regulations in the text. But virtually no question of Jewish law is settled by literal application of the Torah, as Webb and DeGiorgio would have it. Traditional Jewish scholars spend years and lifetimes arguing the meanings of every sentence. It is from those discussions that Jewish law is made...
Jewish tradition has reinterpreted many undesirable passages of biblical text. For example, the Torah enumerates many offenses that should incur capital punishment--among them eating bread on Passover or showing excessive disrespect to one's parents. Yet no Jewish community has carried out such executions in thousands of years. (Israeli law has no death penalty.) Today, Jewish legal scholars can argue that penalties for homosexuality should be similarly ignored...
NEARLY 1200 years ago, a Jewish sect known as the Karaites tried to reject the tradition of rabbinic interpretation in favor of literal readings of original text. Finding this approach fundamentally un-Jewish, the Jewish community banished Karaism. Exegesis, discussion and reinterpretation are central to Jewish tradition. AALARM's co-presidents would have the Jewish community abandon that tradition and replace it with a literal devotion to translated text, something notably representative of certain Protestant sects...
When Webb and DeGiorgio declare that our society is based on Judeo-Christian tradition, they really mean that our society is based upon Christian tradition, which appropriated Jewish sources and overlayed them with new, often alien, interpretations. Their citation of the "Old Testament" as a central Jewish text is a case in point. Give a Jewish book a Christian name and a Christian interpretation, and the result is--Christianity...
...early scenes of the play, Costumer Phoebe Faux clothed the characters in World War II-era garments. Only Hamlet, dressed completely in black and his father's ghost, in armor, deviate from this theme. This idea, coupled with interesting staging, gives the text an appealing freshness...