Judaism- An Introduction, page 2
The Reform Movement in Europe began in the late 1700s and early 1800s as an attempt to modernize Judaism. While Orthodoxy retained a traditional notion of divine revelation and the centrality of all halakhah, Reform Jews could no longer believe in an unbroken chain of tradition, beginning with Moses on Sinai. Reform Jews believe that, while moral laws are binding, ritual laws may need to be adapted or even discarded in modern circumstances. Women, in Reform, may lead others in public prayer at set times, while, in Orthodoxy, they are judged to be exempt from this major time-bound obligation. Conservative Judaism, like Reform, originated in Germany and then developed and grew in North America.
Jewish laws about food are known as kashrut, from the Hebrew word kasher/kosher, meaning ‘fit’ (to be eaten). These food laws determine that certain fish, poultry, and meat, and their by-products, are not permitted. The laws are meant to set Jews apart as a holy people at the basic level of eating. Orthodox Jews believe that these laws (in the Bible, in the Talmud, and in the law codes) come directly from God and must be obeyed. Others adopt varying positions about their value.
Rites of passage are significant expressions of the Jewish belief in the sanctity of human life. Circumcision does not make someone a Jew but symbolizes his membership of the covenant people. In Orthodox Judaism, a boy becomes Bar Mitzvah, taking on the obligations of his religion, at 13. A girl becomes Bat Mitzvah at 12. In Reform Judaism, there is no differentiation between boys and girls in terms of the age and the obligations of religious majority. Judaism emphasizes the value of sex within the sacred relationship of marriage, and Orthodox Jewish women practise laws of ritual purity as an expression of this value. A Bet Din handles laws of Jewish religious status such as adoption, conversion, and divorce. There are significant differences in how branches of Judaism approach these laws. Varied customs surrounding death come from different places and periods of Jewish history, but they are meant to express the equality of all human beings and the involvement of the community.
The various forms of prayer are ways to bring all human life under God’s scrutiny and guidance. Jewish prayer can be offered anywhere but the usual settings are the synagogue and the home. The prayer books contain prayers for both locations. Prayer may be spontaneous or individual but there are three daily prayer times and certain prayers require a minyan. The paradigmatic prayer of Judaism is the berakhah, in which God is blessed, be it for a mitzvah, for food or drink, for an event, or for whatever moment is being celebrated. The fundamental prayer, the Shema, comprises three biblical passages. The other twin pillar of communal prayer is the Amidah.
‘Synagogue’ comes from a Greek word meaning ‘a formal gathering/congregation’. The equivalent term in Hebrew, knesset, also denotes the people gathered rather than a building. The terms Bet Knesset, Bet Midrash, and Bet Tefillah indicate the main functions of a synagogue today, as a house of assembly, of study, and of prayer. The two vital features of a synagogue are an ark for housing the scrolls of the Torah and a desk from which to read them. Judaism’s main religious leader is the rabbi, his role being to teach and interpret the Torah, in which he (or, in Progressive synagogues, she) is an expert.
The word ‘Sabbath’ translates the Hebrew Shabbat from the Hebrew verb for ‘to cease’. Ceasing creative work in order to remember God as creator is the purpose of this festival. From ancient times, the characteristic way of marking Shabbat was to refrain from creative work, defined as anything involved in building the mishkan, God’s sanctuary in space. Beginning on Friday evening and ending on Saturday evening, Shabbat includes a range of celebrations designed to set the day apart from the rest of the week. The main synagogue service of the week is on the Saturday morning. It is a family occasion and keeps Jews part of a worshipping community.
In Judaism, there is a strong sense of the passage of time and of its significance, with its many festivals giving the year a religious rhythm. The five major festivals are Pesah, Shavuot, and Sukkot – all designed to commemorate and recreate the historical religious experience of the Jew – and Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Yom Kippur is also a major fast. All the other festivals and fasts are not commanded in the Bible and consequently not subject to the same work restrictions as the biblical festivals and fasts. The major festival of Pesah celebrates the beginnings of the Jewish people, when God delivered them from slavery in Egypt. The highlight of this freedom festival is the opening meal, the seder. Shavuot is the Feast of Weeks, falling seven weeks after Pesah. Because of this 50-day interval, it also takes the name ‘Pentecost’. Shavuot concludes or completes Pesah by celebrating the giving of the Torah to Moses on Sinai. The last of the three Pilgrim Festivals is Sukkot, celebrating God’s protection of the Israelites during their 40-year journey from Egypt through the wilderness. At the end of Sukkot comes Simhat Torah, which celebrates the cycle of Torah readings in the synagogue.
The most important days in the Jewish calendar are the Days of Awe, stressing the need for reverence of God. Admitting that they have done wrong, Jews believe that they need to turn back to God. To help create an atmosphere of repentance the shofar is sounded. Both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur combine a great sense of festivity with an emphasis on God’s judgement.
For Jews, the Holocaust raises immense questions about their belief in an all-powerful, all-loving God who has given them a particular role in the world. Holocaust museums and memorial days exist in many countries, both to commemorate the dead and to educate the living. Theologians have made attempts to address the spiritual challenge of the Holocaust.
The sense of peoplehood is vital to what it means to be Jewish and a focal point of this is the land of Israel. Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948 rooted ‘Jewishness’, whether centred on faith ideals or on the Jewish community, in the land of Israel as home-base. Judaism challenges its adherents, both inside and outside Israel, to work out their understanding of fidelity to God’s purposes not only for themselves but also for humankind.
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Approaching Judaism
In this chapter you will learn:
about the origins of the term ‘Judaism’
the importance of history in the development of the Jewish religion
about the way in which Judaism centres on God, the Torah, and the Jewish people.
Judaism and Jewishness
It is said that it is the outsider who is anxious to name and to define a religious system. Those within a religion tend not to see it as a system, an ‘ism’. Nothing could be more true of the Jewish religion. Strikingly, the sacred language of Jews, Hebrew, contains no word for ‘Judaism’. Indeed the Hebrew language does not really have a word for ‘religion’. These facts are significant and should make us cautious about defining and describing Judaism as a religion.
It was in the 1880s that the term ‘Judaism’ became widely used and this because social and political emancipation then made it necessary for Jews to work out for non-Jews, and to a lesser extent themselves, what it was distinguished them from adherents of other religions. It was particularly against the backdrop of Christianity that describing Judaism as a religion, with specific beliefs and practices, began. To a large extent, this is still the case. It is often within university and college departments of Theology or Religious Studies that the study of Judaism takes its place alongside the study of other religions, and predominantly Christianity.
That this is one of a series of books on World Faiths assumes that there are recognizable faith systems which can, if desired, be studied comparatively. The series does not, however, want to superimpose on the major world religions an artificial system by approaching each of them under uniform headings such as Beliefs, Scriptures, Ceremonies, Festivals, and so on. Such an approach runs the severe risk of missing what is distinctive about a religion as understood by its adherents and thus of seriously distorting it. This is done all too commonly when trying to put Christianity and Judaism side by side. Even more dangerous is the tendency to regard Judaism simply as the forerunner of Christianity (as if Judaism were not a living religion) or as Christianity unfulfilled. Christians tend to define their religion in terms of beliefs, a creed. Flowing from their beliefs are practices, moral and ritual. Apart from when the term ‘Christian’ is used in the vaguest sense of good or humane (with unfortunate implications for non-Christians), a Christian means someone who holds specific theological beliefs. Can the same be said of a Jew?
According to Jewish Law, as codified in the Talmud and defined by rabbis from late antiquity to the present day, a Jew is a person who is born of a Jewish mother or has been converted to Judaism. This definition is important for determining legal status as in Jewish marriage (see Chapter 9) or the right to an Israeli passport (see Chapter 17). Yet it is a circular definition, for the question can still be asked: what constitutes the Jewishness of the mother? The definition of a Jew has, therefore, been formulated in terms of someone who, besides having a Jewish mother or having converted to Judaism, adheres to no other religion and gives indication of affirming identity with other Jews.
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Insight
Matrilineal descent is sometimes misunderstood as a matter of race or ethnicity. The crucial point to remember is that Jewish Law is religious law. When Orthodox and other Jews disagree over the ‘Jewishness’ of someone, it has to do with whether his or her mother is judged to be Jewish, by either birth or conversion, according to the Orthodox standards.
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Difficulties in treating Judaism as a religion
It is when we try to work out precisely what this means that we see some difficulties with regarding Judaism as a religion. There are things about Judaism which challenge conventional ideas of what we mean by a religion. If we define Judaism in terms of conviction, centred on belief in one God, we have to acknowledge at least two apparent contradictions. First, it is an undeniable fact that there are Jews who deny the tenets of the Jewish religion, however basically formulated. A Jew who repudiates Judaism is not regarded as having severed all links with the Jewish community. Someone with a Jewish mother might reject both belief and observance but still be accounted a member of the Jewish people (albeit, in some cases, virtually excluded from religious rights and consideration in matters pertaining to synagogue or burial). Such a person is not spoken of as ‘a lapsed Jew’. If such a person returns to the faith (according to most but not all authorities) no ‘conversion’ procedure is applied. By contrast, a Roman Catholic or a Baptist who gives up his or her religion is indeed likely to be described as ‘lapsed’. There may be remaining influences, but he or she is unlikely to feel closely linked to the community of those who may be described as ‘practising’ Roman Catholics or Baptists. The defining factor of a Christian community is belief and once the belief has been removed no one is likely to state: ‘I am a Roman Catholic’ or whatever, in response to a question about what matters to his or her identity. The defining factor of a Jewish community is belonging to a people and someone might well assert: ‘I am Jewish’ even when no belief is present.
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Insight
It can be puzzling when someone born of a Jewish mother but who is committed to no Jewish belief or practice is judged Jewish ‘religiously’, that is according to Jewish Law. ‘Is it a matter of race or religion?’, an outsider might ask. It is a matter of religious status even though ‘religion’, as usually understood, may not be in evidence.
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Second, there are many Jews who describe themselves as secular but who take part in activities which are, on the face of it, religious. In Israel, for example, there are members of non-religious kibbutzim who observe the Sabbath and other Jewish festivals. In North America and other Diaspora (outside Israel) communities, there are branches of what is called the International Federation of Secular Humanistic Jews. The British Jewish Chronicle newspaper of 21 January 1994 reported that a meeting of this federation at King’s College, London opened ‘with the traditional lighting of candles … but with a kibbutz-style blessing instead of a religious prayer’. A professor from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem remarked, in the report, that some people want to take part in secular celebrations of Jewish festivals, while others ‘want to get away from religion entirely’. The previous year, the same newspaper ran many pages headed: ‘Can you be Jewish without Judaism?’ The debate reflected a wide range of opinion from the secularists to the Chief Rabbi who asked: ‘Who would want to be Jewish without Judaism?’ He may be puzzled and so may many non-Jews trying to understand what Judaism is, but the fact remains that there are Jews who call themselves secular or humanistic, but who light the Sabbath candles, and there are also Jews who reject the term secular and even call themselves ‘religious’, but who may have difficulty in defining precisely what is religious in their lives. This should reinforce our determination to avoid forcing Judaism into categories which are alien to it.
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Insight
The terms ‘secularism’, ‘humanism’, and ‘religion’ are also being redefined in the Jewish Renewal Movement. Those who belong to it claim to practise Judaism and they express disappointment that they are largely unrecognized by other branches of Judaism.
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Judaism as a religion
Yet the inadequacies of viewing Judaism as a religion can be greatly exaggerated. There are, after all, many aspects of Judaism which can be described as religious in the normal sense of the word.
PEOPLEHOOD
Judaism does not replace religion by peoplehood but combines the two distinctively. Judaism is the religion of the Jewish people, upon whom its faith and obligations are binding. The relationship between God and the people of Israel is fundamental. Someone who converts to Judaism does enter the Jewish people, but the affirmation of the Jewish faith is crucial and decisive. In its absence, the conversion process is nullified, even if the formalities are correctly administered (see Chapter 9). Ruth’s famous declaration, on adopting the faith of her Israelite mother-in-law, is the paradigm: ‘Your people shall be my people, and your God my God’ (Ruth 1:16). Conversely, someone who converts from Judaism to another religion, rather than simply ceases to practise Judaism, ceases to be part of the community as understood by those who have not converted. Culturally and historically, the convert (to, say, Christianity) may retain a strong affinity with the Jewish people into whose life he or she was born. Though much debated in the Middle Ages, a differentiation can be made between belonging to the am (‘people’) of Israel and belonging to the kehillah (‘community’) of Israel. The kehillah has a collective set of meanings and these incorporate belief. If someone converts and, therefore, changes at a critical point of belonging, he or she leaves the community. It is sometimes objected that what might be described as ‘choosing to love God in a different way’ (as when a Jew becomes a Christian) should not exclude people from their former community. But, as we shall see when looking at the Law of Return in Israel (Chapter 17), converting from Judaism is judged to change one of the meanings of what it is to be Jewish. What was said earlier about remaining part of the Jewish people is true but what this belonging amounts to has very little practical significance and this is because the community’s self-definition includes belief.
BELIEF
Furthermore, it is not correct to reduce Judaism to ethics, to describe it as simply ‘a way of life’, as if beliefs are incidental. Early self-definition, showing how the people of Israel saw themselves as different in a pagan world, expresses distinctiveness through theological belief and the practice that goes with it. One striking expression of this is Deuteronomy 26 where a declaration of belonging to a people brought out of Egypt by God accompanies the offering of the first fruits in recognition of this fact. Another is the ancient prayer known as the Alenu (see Chapter 10). In the Alenu, Jews state their difference from other peoples in terms of the God they worship: ‘For we bend the knee and offer worship and thanks before the supreme King of kings.’ Both passages focus on the relationship between God and Israel. Further, the same rabbinical tradition that clarified peoplehood (where there was debate as to whether someone with one Jewish and one non-Jewish parent was Jewish) in terms of matrilineal descent was equally concerned with the boundaries of the faith. The locus classicus for fundamental beliefs is the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 10:1). It is stated that Israelites who deny certain doctrines stand to forfeit their ‘share in the world to come’.
A MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION
In addition, Judaism can reasonably be regarded as one of what is called the ‘monotheistic family’ of religions, along with Christianity and Islam. In terms of both geographical origins and theological beliefs, these three religions have much in common. The Christian theologian, Hans Küng, makes much of this as he writes about the crucial need for dialogue between Jews, Christians, and Muslims today (in Judaism: the Religious Situation of our Time, SCM, 1992). However, Küng’s own writing demonstrates one of the major difficulties here. Though he purports to be presenting Judaism on its own terms ‘as an independent entity with amazing continuity, vitality, and dynamism’, his approach, his phraseology, his conclusions, and the amount of space he devotes to Christian comparisons all betray a desire to appraise Judaism from a Christian theological standpoint. He does, in fact, impose one religion upon another. That this is an unfortunate tendency does not, however, alter the fact that Judaism can rightly be regarded as a religion. It simply makes more vital the need to approach this religion in terms of how it is lived by Jewish people rather than as others might perceive it.
