@Ekklesian - Just out of curiosity, why are you now typing the trademark symbol beside the name of Israel in every post? This seems to be a recent trend on your part.
Yes, it is a recent trend. Brand new, actually. It's too bad the UBB superscript/subscript tags don't work on this forum. The geopolitical state of Israel
TM is not the Israel of the Bible, nor the Israel of God. Neither is it the Israel of Judaism. Shapiro says that Zionism is stealing the Jewish identity for something that is not Judaism or Jewish. That strikes me as an apt description. So, Israel
TM seems an apt designation for the Zionist state.
I've had a book on my shelves for a number of years,
A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, by Jacob Neusner. He was considered by many the foremost authority on Judaism in the first centuries of Christianity. He wasn't an Orthdox Jew. He was a Reform Jew, but the way Shapiro identifies 'true Jews' reminded me of the way Neusner identified Israel.
Neusner spoke of an 'eternal Israel', by which he meant all Jews from Sinai forward, and of an 'Israel of the here and now,' by which he meant Jews practicing in a community. In one of his dialogues with the Jesus of his imagination drawn from the Gospel of Matthew*, Neusner saw Jesus preaching a new Israel in His commandment to seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness...
"But, sir, the Israel of home and family is where I am."
And that leads me to ask my other question provoked by my reckoning with the Ten Commandments: What of Israel where it is, what of Israel when it takes place? [he does not mean IsraelTM ] And to clarify these somewhat opaque questions and spell out why they matter, we turn to the one of the Ten Commandments that tells us to sanctify the Sabbath, the commandment that speaks of time and space: Israel in the here and now of home and village.
Neusner went on to describe how he saw Jesus preaching not just a new Israel, but also a new holy place in His defense of the disciples' plucking and eating ears of grain on the Sabbath day.
When, therefore, Jesus says that something greater than the Temple is here, he can only mean that he and his disciples may do on the Sabbath what they do because they stand in the place of the priests in the Temple: the holy place has shifted, now being formed by the circle made up of the master and his disciples.
Anyway. I bought the book, because I wanted to see what arguments the 'world's foremost authority on Judaism vs Early Christianity' would make. He didn't misunderstand Jesus at all. The Jesus seen by Neusner said, "I'm God. My disciples are the true kingdom, the true Israel, and the true temple." And that was just too much for him. But he saw that message where most of us unlearned in Judaism usually miss it, in the Gospel written primarily to the Jews.
But all of that to say, that Shapiro's and Neusner's identification of Jews and of Israel appear to be indicative of that of an orthodox Judaism, and it is not Israel
TM.
*
He could not conceive an argument with John's Jesus, because eternal Israel in [the Gospel of] John is treated with unconcealed hatred ...