A Recording Junkie Goes to College

Huston Smith writes in The World's Religions on the meaning of God in Judaism:      Where the Jews differed from their neighbors was not in envisioning the Other as personal but in focusing its personalism in a single, supreme, nature-transcending will . . . the basic contribution of Judaism to the religious thought of the Middle East was monotheism . . . [the other gods] are not Yahweh's rivals; they are God's subordinates. (273-4) How is this conception superior to that of the other Mediterranean peoples of the day, for whom "each major power of nature was a distinct deity" (273)? Smith answers:       The significance of this achievement in religious thought lies ultimately in the focus it introduces into life. If God is that to which one gives oneself unreservedly, to have more than one God is to live a life of divided loyalties. If life is to be whole; if one is not to spend one's days darting from one cosmic bureaucrat to another to discover...

Presentation (odp): https://docs.google.com/open?id=0Bw6xOu2-MD_5M2FKdWNLeUZqRkE Pdf: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0Bw6xOu2-MD_5cTBVamNic1F5UG8 History of Yemenite Jews: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/Yemen.html Nehemia Chapter 8 (Source of public Torah reading w/ Targum)  http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt35b08.htm Talmud Megillah 3a (on Onkelos and explanation of Nehemia 8): http://halakhah.com/pdf/moed/Megilah.pdf Shemoth "Names" (Exodus) in Hebrew / Aramaic: http://www.mechon-mamre.org/i/t/u/up0201.htm Yemenite Bibles: http://www.temanim.org/nosachteiman/y-b/2/1.pdf http://www.temanim.org/nosachteiman/tort_amt/2/1.pdf Targum and Rabbinic commentaries (including Targum Yerushalmi ) http://he.wikisource.org/wiki/%D7%9E%22%D7%92_%D7%A9%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%AA_%D7%92_%D7%99%D7%93 http://targum.info/pj/pjex1-6.htm (English Translation) Targum... Divinely inspired? http://www.jewishideas.org/articles/contribution-targum-onkelos-bible-...