Noah –

I know. For the benfit of those who might be ignorant of the subject, perhaps I should have explained that the Talmud — like the Bible — more often than not uses the Hebrew word “eved”, usually translated as “slave”, more in the sense of “indentured servant” or “dependent” than in the sense of actual slavery.

However, saying there is “no connection” between the meaning of “eved” and the modern meaning of “slave” is going too far. Sometimes, at least, “eved” DOES mean an actual slave. There is no doubt that slavery — buying and selling human beings in servitude — did exist, and was legal, in Talmudic and Biblical times.

But my point wasn’t to apologize for Jewish law allowing slavery. There’s no need to: one can hardly blame the Rabbis of the Talmud for being men of their time and not men of our time. It is enough to their credit that even the (real) slave in the Talmud often had more rights than most nominally free peasants or workers had until recent time.

My point is simply to point out an obvious fact: namely, the mere fact that slavery is part of Jewish law hardly means that anybody who obeys Jewish law is ipso facto a supporter of slavery, let alone that, say, American coroporations producing Kosher food are “surrendering to Halacha [Jewish law]” and are making slavery come closer.

Similarly, the mere fact that Sharia says awful things about the infidel hardly means those who wish to invest in companies that obey its business laws are also looking for infidels to kill, or that the Wall Street Journal is about to surrender to having people’s heads chopped off.

P.S.

As for the person who doesn’t think I’m an Israeli Jew… Ma ani yachol le’hagid le’cha? Ani nishba be’elohim she’zoo ha’emet. Im ata lo ma’amin li, al ta’amin li; ma ani yachol la’asot? Biv’racha, rav-samal be’miluim…