The Civil War as a Theological Crisis 

Thank you for including this interview. I learned a lot.

Moral authority and moral debt have a lot more to do with the start, the fighting and the outcome of war than anything else.

My argument is very simple. All Jews are descendants of slaves. That's who we are. It doesn't matter if Abraham kept slaves, that was before his descendants were enslaved themselves. This is why we don't accept converts except through marriage. Not because we're race purists or anything like that, but because the fact of slavery, the Exodus and our redemption, is a practical and concrete part of our shared identity. I personally am a descendant of the slaves of Egypt 3,500 years ago. I was a slave in Egypt. We were commanded to never forget either our enslavement or our liberation. 3,500 years later, we still haven't. We were told to identify with all enslaved and oppressed people of the world as our family. If Judaism was an intentional socially engineered project, then I am proud to be a product of social engineering if it has made me intolerant of empire and the denigration of select populations. (I would argue that our invasion of Palestine and subsequent sequestration of the Palestinians in apartheid conditions Is a troublesome breach of our promise.) When Jesus sermonized on the Mount, he was a son of slaves speaking to sons and daughters of slaves. We all had a shared experience then, and we have the same shared experience even now. Slavery is bad. It doesn't need to be said, because we all know it. It is a commonly held belief between many of us that the destruction of the 2nd Temple by the Romans, the European Diaspora, and the Holocaust were consequences of having had both slaves and kings at various points in our history. Judaic law, distributed by Paul to the Romans and their subjects, were distorted by the absence of the self-identification with slavery among his followers. The Protestant Transformation, again with no self-identification with slavery, could only further distort the meaning of the teachings of Jesus. The idea that God approves slavery is anathema to me. It has always been appalling that Christians at times have approved of it.

Nobody knows the colors they 've seen. The Bible does not come with a color chart, as far as I know. So who could argue with the "colors" of slaves in the Roman world around New Testament times? The Mediterranean space was multicultural and multiethnic; and so the slaves were most likely "of all colors", as much as free people.

What I see is virtual signaling but doing nothing. This is personal.