WHY RELIGION?

[Yonadav]

For me, it was a passionate love affair with Jewish law. If you've never been there, you just don't know what it's like-- studying Jewish law, talking Jewsih law, living Jewish law, interacting with others who are living Jewish law. It's so passionate and addictive and you just love the others who are having the same experience.

A Talmudic scholar, here. Great stuff.

I have an inking of just how fulfilling such study can be.  

May I ask if, first, if you are Jewish? A practising or cultural jew?  Orthodox or Reform?

Perhaps we can have some views by some one who actually knows the Torah;

Eg: Brief explanation of the term 'mitzvot',  including its source according to Jewish tradition

Prophecy about the Messiah , as apposed to christians claims. In my experience, Christians rarely seem to bother asking WHY Jews don't except Jesus as the Messiah.


Does the idea of an eternal hell appear in the Torah?

An odd question perhaps; I read/ heard that "revenge is not Jewish". Correct in principle? . 

A lot o questions , I know, and a couple are a bit intrusive.I ask from curiosity and because I want an informed opinion.

  I have problems  accepting the views of evangelical Christians as being informed on the Torah or New Testament . Imo, the opinions I come across here  tend to be simplistic and dogmatic.

 I was brought up Catholic. We were not encouraged to read the Bible (so naturally, I did ,at age 16) From what I've seen over a lifetime, Catholic  faith is not based on personal knowledge of scripture, but on church teaching about scripture.

I'm Jewish but I didn't grow up religious. I became very religious (Orthodox) later in life-- what we call a Baal Teshuvah (Master of Return).
I spent several years studying for several hours every day with a kollel.
Mitzvot (or mitzvos in Ashkenaz) means 'commandments. We say that there are 613 of them, but that's sort of based on some difficult to explain traditions. We have a couple of different lists of what the 613 mitzvot are but one list will have things that the other doesn't, and so on. The basis for the mitzvot all come directly from verses in the Five Books of Moses, which is the part of the Old T that we call the Torah (instruction).

From our perspective, the that xian guy can't possibly have been Moshiach. He just didn't do any of the things that Moshiach must do in order to claim that title. We have pretty strong reason to believe that he wasn't even Jewish, since turning a Jew in Judea over to gentiles for trial and execution is highly problematic in Jewish law (halakhah). I have never read the xian new testament, but my understanding is that the king of Judea asked the guy some questions that seemed like maybe he was questioning whether he was Jew or gentile, and then handed him over to the gentile authorities.

Honestly, I am the wrong guy to ask about Jewish understandings of prophecy. We call the study of prophecy Nach, and it is studied by women. Educated Jewish women know prophecy better than most Jewish men. Men concentrate primarily on the Five Books and halakhah, as well as naviim rishonim (the early prophets- Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings).

We don't have the concept of eternal hell. We have Gehinnom. We burn there. It burns away our impurities, leaving whatever is left of us after that. The longest time that we can spend there is one year. We do pray for the resurrection of the dead in our thrice daily prayers, but we generally don't think about the afterlife very much. Judaism is about how you live, not what happens to you after you die.

Revenge and bearing grudges are forbidden in Judaism. Rashi gives a good explanation of what this means. A man says to his neighbor, 'Let me borrow your axe." The neighbor says no. A year later, the neighbor goes to the man and says, "Let me borrow your sickle." The man says, "I will let you borrow my sickle even though last year you would not let me borrow your axe." That's grudge bearing. Or the man says, "I won't let you borrow my sickle because last year you wouldn't let me borrow your axe." That's revenge.