this post was submitted on 31 May 2026
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[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Chabad are mostly notable for being less insular than most Orthodox sects, doing a lot of outreach to secular/Reform/Conservative Jews, and thus ending up as one of the big names in overseas funding for Zionism in the modern day. They're really the mainstream face of Orthodox Judaism, and the fucked up abuse scandals in Israel have tended to come from fringe, Messianic sects that the state's Rabbinate and larger organizations like Chabad can at least pretend to distance themselves from.

As for the Talmud, it's weird how much it tends to get played up in antisemitic narratives, because in my (very limited) experience it is really, incredibly dry and mostly boring. It's like reading Reddit comments on every page of the scriptures, where 5 incredibly pedantic nerds are arguing over what exactly counts as a fork, or what a story about a wage dispute is supposed to say about contract law and social hierarchy. There's a predictably authoritarian "just listen to your boss and your rabbi" bent to the morals it extracts, but at the end of the day it's a couple thousand pages of mundane, day-to-day legal doctrine. Anyone can learn Talmud, it's just a lot of effort, and like a lot of difficult religious texts, it mostly ends up being a source local authority figures can pull out to settle arguments in their favor.

[–] ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago

Thank you for this context. I had actually suspected as much, especially in regard to how people use the Talmud for prooftexting (selectively pulling bits out of a text with which to authoritatively settle disputes) because that's exactly how the Christian bible is used by the same sort of people, But as I said above I'm not overly familiar with the Talmud, so this tracks. And yeah, it is really dry reading! I did try a few times, lol.

But it's depressing how similar some people are in their tactics to suppress real questions and debate, even across faiths.