{"id":2779,"date":"2009-09-26T11:11:05","date_gmt":"2009-09-26T19:11:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=2779"},"modified":"2009-09-26T13:50:14","modified_gmt":"2009-09-26T21:50:14","slug":"political-hermeneutics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/political-hermeneutics\/","title":{"rendered":"Political hermeneutics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In his new book, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.randomhouse.ca\/catalog\/display.pperl?isbn=9780385529198\">Why Are Jews Liberals?<\/a>,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>[Norman] Podhoretz describes how liberal Jews\u2014rabbis and worshipers alike\u2014routinely cherry-pick passages from the Torah to buttress favored social policies,<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10001424052970204488304574427312061008166.html\">writes Wall Street Journal reviewer <\/a>Richard Baehr.<\/p>\n<p>It has been my impression that virtually all people who believe in the divine provenance of the Bible routinely cherry-pick passages that accord with their own mores.\u00a0\u00a0 But I may well be mistaken and would certainly have to defer to the experts.\u00a0 In any case, the patriarchal, pre-capitalist, tribal society of ancient Israel is so fantastically remote from our own era that it is not immediately obvious to me that Reaganite supply-side conservatism is more in accord with the Torah than FDR\u2019s New Deal.\u00a0 The hermeneutical challenges in deciding how the human authors of the Old Testament would have regarded a public option in health care, say, dwarf those of first discovering, then applying, the &#8220;original intent&#8221; of the Constitution.\u00a0\u00a0 But again, I may be wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In his new book, Why Are Jews Liberals?, [Norman] Podhoretz describes how liberal Jews\u2014rabbis and worshipers alike\u2014routinely cherry-pick passages from the Torah to buttress favored social policies, writes Wall Street Journal reviewer Richard Baehr. It has been my impression that &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/political-hermeneutics\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[193,345],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2779"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2779"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2779\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2789,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2779\/revisions\/2789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}