Knowing

My classes at the Synagogue involved a learning. The classes: consisting of a written material of history, thoughts, and ideas, and supported by teaching and discussions, involved thinking. This thinking involved a freedom. That there was needed within each person a freedom in their thinking. A freedom that created the needed thinking to learn. My mind then, being free, and actively involved in this thinking of learning, was also simultaneously learning to think, an improvement in my ability to think. The classes then, created within each individual a learning of thinking that affected the becoming of being their own, of becoming more.

People have said to me, “Oh, the Jews are so smart.” “Yes.” I would answer them. “But the ability to think is learned.”

Another learning was in the material presented. The thoughts and ideas of individuals, whose thinking created a needed development of a learning of self. The thinking needed in becoming and being their own; that affected everyone in their learning, development, and becoming more. Did you ever wonder why all the great psychiatrists and psychologists like Freud, Fromm, and Maslow are Jewish? There must be a reason.

I have seen, and myself at the time included, as a person makes an anti-Semitic statement, and then nobody really agrees or disagrees with the anti-Semitism because they don’t know. They have never learned anything about Judaism, and the anti-Semitism goes unchecked. 

The idea of forty, and many other ideas, knowledge of Judaism are not taught in Christianity even though both are of a common religious root. 

I think this is a holdover from societies fear of Judaism, of anyone learning the freedom of Judaism. The freedom of becoming one’s own, the freedom of self.