The reverend’s thesis that Jews prospered due to educational and cultural practices aligns with what I’ve been saying on a parallel thread - which has earned me the wrath of liberals, naturally - that failure or success isn’t due to outside forces such as racism (toward blacks) or antisemitism (toward Jews).Speaking of which.....
How the Talmud Became a Best-Seller in South Korea
bout an hour’s drive north of Seoul, in the Gwangju Mountains, nearly fifty South Korean children pore over a book. The text is an unlikely choice: the Talmud, the fifteen-hundred-year-old book of Jewish laws. The students are not Jewish, nor are their teachers, and they have no interest in converting. Most have never met a Jew before. But, according to the founder of their school, the students enrolled with the goal of receiving a “Jewish education” in addition to a Korean one.
...their teacher, Park Hyunjun, was explaining that Jews pray wearing two small black boxes, known as tefillin, to help them remember God’s word. He used the Hebrew words shel rosh (“on the head”) and shel yad (“on the arm”) to describe where the boxes are worn. Inside these boxes, he said, was parchment that contained verses from one of the holiest Jewish prayers, the Shema, which Jews recite daily. As the room filled with murmurings of the Shema in Korean, the dean of the school leaned over to me and said that the students recited the prayer daily, too, “with the goal of memorizing it.”
The reverend’s thesis is that the Jews have thrived for so many years because of certain educational and cultural practices, and that such benefits can be unlocked for Christians if those practices are taught to their children.
Outside, over bulgogi, Park Hyunjun laid out the goals behind his curriculum. “I would like to make our students to be people of God and to have charity just like Jewish people,”.....
How the Talmud Became a Best-Seller in South Korea
In 2011, the South Korean Ambassador to Israel said on Israeli public television that “each Korean family has at least one copy of the Talmud.”www.newyorker.com
Rather, it is the choices people make that, as a whole, lead to success or failure, and that the two biggest choices American blacks could make to reduce their poverty rates are not having babies out of wedlock and completing high school and learning a marketable skill, at a minimum.
The emphasis on education among Jews pre-dates the Talmud, and of course getting pregnant as an unmarried schoolgirl was a “shonde.” These are the two choices, life paths, whatever, that make the difference in 95%+ of the cases between having a successful life and one plagued by poverty.
