| |
JUDAISM
Summary of Judaism
Ellis T. Rasmussen, Ensign, Mar. 1971, pg 40
Judaism is a term broadly embracing all the facets of the ways of life of the Jews.
In its theological aspects it embraces some distinctive doctrines concerning the one
God, whose name we pronounce “Jehovah.” However, the Jews never pronounced it;
for the sake of reverence, they called him Adonai, i.e., the Lord.
As a philosophy of life and living, developed over the centuries out of tenets from the
Torah and the teachings of the prophets and the great rabbis, Judaism has historically
reached into all activities of the life of Jews.
As a way of worshiping the Lord, Judaism’s rituals, liturgies, feasts, and fasts have also
arisen out of the Bible, with modifications through the centuries engendered by the
experiences of the Jewish peoples in many lands; but they have always had the basic
purpose of keeping the people in remembrance of God and their duty toward him.
As an ethic, Judaism’s most characteristic principle is justice. Such an ideal has seldom
been attained, either within the Jewish community or with other communities, but it
remains the great desideratum of those who have the faith to strive for the ideal.
Judaism is thus a term broadly embracing the way of life of a people without a land, but
inhabiting many lands for many centuries since their original descent from Judah and
other sons of Israel.
Historically, the sources of the doctrines, philosophies, ethics, morals, policies, and
practices of Judaism had their beginnings in the Bible. However, endless proliferations
of definitions, analyses, exemplifications, refinements, and elucidations have given rise
to secondary source-book collections such as the Talmud, the Mishna, the Gemara,
and the Midrash. These are the works of the great rabbis of the early centuries of the
present era. These fathers of Judaism have made its literature voluminous and the scope
of its interests almost infinite.
In spite of the many sources of its definitions, prescriptions, and proscriptions, Judaism
remained a surprisingly monolithic institution down to the dawn of the modern period of
secular “enlightenment.” This period has brought to Judaism, as to many other systems,
a century and a half of reexamination and modification.
One result of these later influences has been the rise of three major and several minor
diversifications of worship and practice. They are generally identified as the Orthodox,
the Conservative, and the Reform movements. These parallel, of course, like
movements in many other cultures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And also,
like other religious communities, those of the Jews are suffering in some modern lands
from the apostasy of a generation tending to assimilate into the larger cultures around
them. It is ironic that in free America, for instance, the “ethnocide” by assimilation may
accomplish what tortuous centuries of purges and pogroms never could accomplish.
How a new dispensation will dawn and bring Judaism to its destiny is largely unknown
by the leaders and the people of Judaism today, but many of them are vigorously
searching for the keys to it.
The word Judah is an anglicized form of a Hebrew-Israelite name more properly
pronounced “Yehudah.” It is traditionally thought to have been derived from the
Hebrew verb yadah, which means to praise. There are comments indicating awareness
of this root idea in the story of Judah’s birth and of his later reception of the patriarchal
blessing from Father Israel. (See Gen. 29:35 and Gen. 49:8.) The man named Judah
was one of the twelve sons of Jacob, who was also called Israel; Jacob was one of
two sons of Isaac; Isaac was one of the several sons of Abraham; Abraham was a
Hebrew (i.e., a descendant of Eber) and a Semite (i.e., descendant of Shem). (For the
genealogical sequence from Shem down to Israel, see Gen. 10:21-24; Gen.
11:14-27; Gen. 17:5; Gen. 21:3; Gen. 25:26; Gen. 29:35; Gen. 32:28.)
The term Jew is a late English derivation, abbreviated from old English Iudeas,
ultimately from Latin Jude(us). The Latin came, of course, via the Greek Iouda,
ultimately from the Hebrew Yehudah. Judaism as an English word is a loanword also
from Latin.
Obviously the Jews are not genealogically the only descendants of Israel, nor the only
descendants of Abraham, nor the only Hebrews, nor the only Semites. They are,
however, the people most commonly associated with these biblical names among the
peoples of the world today.
It would be pointless to try to describe the rise of the religion of Judaism apart from a
description of the rise of the people. The people of Israel were a people chosen of God
to live a specified way of life, and that way of life is what we call their religion. Though
their whole mission was to exemplify a religion, there was no word in biblical Hebrew
for religion. The concepts associated with what we call religion were referred to by Old
Testament writers with such terms as the way, the law, the Torah. People were not
designated as religious or irreligious, but only as obedient or disobedient to the Lord,
his word, and his way.
It all began with the divine call of Abraham. He was called of the Lord to be the
forefather of a great posterity who would become a blessing, or a source of blessings,
unto all peoples of the earth. These blessings would include not only acquaintance, but
also a covenant relationship with the Lord. The corollaries of such a covenant would be
the requirement that the people live and behave toward God and man in accord with
God’s laws and principles, and teach others to do so; and for those who fulfilled the
requirements, the Lord would provide help in life and salvation after death.
Moses expressed the requirements this way: “Behold, I have taught you statutes and
judgments, even as the Lord my God commanded me, that ye should do so in the land
whither ye go to possess it.
“Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the
sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation
is a wise and understanding people.
“For what nation is there so great, who hath God so nigh unto them, as the Lord our
God is in all things that we call upon him for?
“And what nation is there so great, that hath statutes and judgments so righteous as all
this law, which I set before you this day?” (Deut. 4:5-8.)
At the other end of Israel’s national existence, just before ten of the tribes were taken
into captivity and “lost” until the times of the latter days, the great prophet Isaiah also
made the mission plain: “It is a light thing that thou shouldest be my servant to raise up
the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel: I will also give thee for a light
to the Gentiles [i.e. the other nations], that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of
the earth.” (Isa. 49:6)
Both reechoed facets of the original call to Abraham: “Behold, I will lead thee by my
hand, and I will take thee, to put upon thee my name, even the Priesthood. …
“And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee above measure, and make
thy name great among all nations, and thou shalt be a blessing unto thy seed after thee,
that in their hands they shall bear this ministry and Priesthood unto all nations.” (Abr.
1:18, Abr. 2:9.)
Thus it was that, centuries after Abraham lived and died, the family of Israel, grown to
the proportions of a small nation, were led out of Egypt where they had been first
guests, then slaves, and were prepared by the Lord through the great prophet and
lawgiver, Moses, to become “a kingdom of priests, a dedicated nation,” and to be
God’s own “royal treasure” whereby he could extend, operate, and defend his
kingdom on earth (see Ex. 19:1-6). After a period of wilderness life during which the
older, more intransigent people perished and the younger, more tractable were
prepared to live according to the Torah of God (i.e., the “teaching,” “guidance,” and
“instruction” of God) as given to and through Moses, Israel was placed under Joshua’s
leadership to be led into the promised land.
They who were trained by Moses and established by Joshua were not very successful
in transmitting their standards and practices to the second and third generations after
them, and in the days of the judges after Joshua’s time “there arose another generation
after them, which knew not the Lord, nor yet the works which he had done for Israel.
And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord, and served Baalim; And they
forsook the Lord God of their fathers, which brought them out of the land of Egypt.
…” (Judg. 2:10-12.) At times, in the days of some of the great judges, there were
improvements for a few decades, but apostasy always returned, and the spirals of
change seemed to proceed ever downward. By the end of the period of the judges,
Israel had reached such ridiculous extremes of evil that the reader of the account can
hardly conceive that the nation would ever fulfill its destiny.
But another great leader, dedicated to the Lord before his birth, was raised up. Samuel
became priest and prophet, judge and captain of Israel, and brought about massive
reforms. However, a leader can lead only when the people will follow, and the people
requested a king like the nations around them had.
The subsequent history of the kings of Israel, whether the three kings in succession over
united Israel or the score of them after Israel was divided, shows few exemplars of the
ideal in Israel. According to the estimate of the authors of the Bible, virtually all of the
people in the northern nation of the ten tribes of Israel “did that which was evil in the
sight of the Lord”; and so it came to pass that two hundred years after Ephraim and the
other tribes of the northern ten broke off from Judah and its few partial-tribe affiliates,
the land indeed “spewed out” the northern ten tribes. God withdrew his hand of
protection and the expanding empire of Assyria conquered them in 721 B.C. They have
been the lost ten tribes ever since, except for a few million members of the tribes of
Ephraim and Manasseh, predominantly, who are being identified by patriarchs of the
Church in these latter days.
Before they were taken away, the Lord sent the great “writing prophets,” such as
Amos, Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah, to warn Israel that unless they should speedily
repent, captivity was imminent. Failing to achieve repentance, the prophets then warned
that the Israelites would go into exile; but though they had forgotten God, he had not
forgotten them; he would send “hunters” and “fishers” (as Jeremiah later put it) to find
them, and they would eventually come out from the north countries to build the ideal
Zion and prepare for the setting up of the kingdom of the Messiah.
To some extent Judah’s descendants have remained as witnesses of the power of faith
and fidelity to the one God, and of the moral and ethical values and the validity of his
laws for man if man will live them.
Even the concise histories of Judah from the end of the Old Testament on require a
thousand pages to so much as touch upon the major movements of the long exile. Few
people outside the Jewish culture know about or read the valuable apocryphal books
about the significant days of the heroic Maccabees, who tried to lead Judah to
independence again (160-60 B.C.) after the Babylonians, the Persians, and the
Macedonian Greeks and Syrians had ruled them. The tragedy of the fraternal and
internecine strife that opened the way for the entrance of Rome’s legions into the
frequently unholy Holy Land is little known.
Better known to Christians, of course, is the history of the rejection of Jesus of
Nazareth as the Messiah by the religiopolitical leaders of the Jews and their instigation
of his crucifixion. It is less well known that Jesus’ disciples were also Jews, and that
thousands of converts during the mission of the apostles were also Jews (e.g. Acts
3:11 to Acts 4:5). And largely unthought and unspoken among Christians is the fact
that thousands of Jews then living and millions born since then have had nothing to do
with the rejection and crucifixion of Jesus.
Millions of so-called Christians have thought it a service to God to visit the sins of the
religious and political leaders who instigated the crucifixion upon the heads of the
children and children’s children of all Jews unto the third and fourth generation and
unto the three-hundredth and four-hundredth generation—piously or impiously ignorant
that God himself said through Moses, “The fathers shall not be put to death for the
children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers; every man shall be put
to death for his own sin.” (Deut. 24:16.)
So it has been that with little heed for the degree to which the Jew has kept or not kept
the commandments and the faith of God, and with malice arising out of malaise
engendered by a multitude of reasons, so-called Christians have persecuted and
pillaged Jews for nineteen hundred years from Italy to Spain, from Spain to Gaul, to
Germany, England, the Netherlands, Poland, and Russia.
Fortunately for the world there have been places where Judaism has been able to
flourish and has made its contributions to religion and to cultures since the earliest
postbiblical times. Jewish communities in Mesopotamia, descended from the early
Babylonian exiles, and later from exiles of Roman times, were able to produce many of
the important commentary works on the Bible. The biblical books inherited from Ezra’s
collection and “canonized” at Yavneh (also spelled Javneh, Jabneh, Jamnia) about A.D.
90 in the days of the great Johanan ben Zaccai were cherished and studied by scholarly
Jews in Mesopotamia for nearly ten centuries after the decimation of Jewry in Judea by
the Romans. Only the little group of Jewish scripturalists who managed to survive in
Galilee in the second century A.D. and who produced the Mishna (about A.D. 200)
rivaled the contributions of the Jews in Babylonia who produced the monumental
Babylonian Talmud. It is the codification of much of the ancient oral law that had
developed out of the teachings of the rabbis concerning the scriptures over the
centuries as a kind of “hedge about the Law.” It contains definitions and interpretations
of the applicability of many facets of the Torah, intended to keep the would-be
obedient from coming even close to violating the great, revealed Law of Moses. Only
after conflict arose between Jews and the followers of Islam was it urgent for major
Jewish communities to locate elsewhere.
The preservation of learning by an important Jewish community in Spain in the ensuing
centuries was accomplished by the great poets, philosophers, and learned
men—Samuel the Nagid, Solomon Ibn Gabriol, Jacob al-Fasi, Judah Ha-Levi,
Abraham Ibn Ezra, Moses Maimonides. These are the names of but a few of scores.
In the twelfth century in Spain the Jewish communities came to grief in their
relationships with Islam, and that grief was matched by the despair and death suffered
by the Jewish communities of the Franco-German areas of the Rhineland. Jews had
migrated there since the early centuries of the Roman empire and had lived with
heathens and Christians in tolerable coexistence until the time of the crusades.
There were times, however, when the great rulers themselves sought benevolences
from Jewish doctors in the dark ages, recognized Jewish philosophers in the
renaissance, borrowed from Jewish financiers in the early era of liberation, or listened
to Jewish musical compositions in later times of culture and enlightenment.
There were by the nineteenth century great waves of migration of Jews from Europe to
America, Africa, Australia, and elsewhere, depending upon the pressures in one place
and the tolerances in another.
There were times when there was a rise of hope and idealism, such as that which once
centered around a so-called messiah, Sabbatai Zevi (1626-1676); that which attracted
the enlightened to the scholarly, liberal, quasi-assimilationist emancipator, Moses
Mendelssohn (1729-1786); or that which led the despairing to the mystic who created
a mode of “joy in misery” (Hasidism), “The Besht”—Israel Baal Shem Tob
(1700-1760); or the intellectual aura that surrounded the great publicists, essayists, and
poets of the late nineteenth century.
It was the poets and the essayists who stirred the hapless people to new hope and
resolution and led them to seek new places and ways of survival after the
disenchantment of seeing the failure of the great humanitarian enlightenment movement.
During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the leaders of Jewish communities
throughout Europe realized that there was nothing more to hope for in “enlightened”
western Europe. Even cultured France, with the much-touted “liberty, equality, and
fraternity,” showed that there was no guarantee of such privileges for “Frenchmen of
the Mosaic persuasion” in the Dreyfus affair. And the interruption of the trend toward
relaxation of the economically disabling and discriminatory laws against Jews in
Germany left more frustration and disillusionment.
Intermittent favors from an occasional, kindly disposed czar or czarina in Russia were
more than counterbalanced by intermittent pogroms. The very word pogrom came
from there, being a Russian word for organized massacre, devastation, destruction. The
poverty-stricken “Pale of Settlement” in eastern Poland and western Russia became
one large and nonviable ghetto. The confined Jewish quarters of the cities—the original
ghettos—were intolerable to people beginning to see that things should not be so in
civilization.
It was the urgent need for relief from the whole morass of human degradation that gave
birth to the hope and stimulus to the plans for a Jewish homeland. Though it soon
became evident that neither Uganda, nor Madagascar, nor Argentina, nor any other
place but the ancient homeland would satisfy more than a modicum of people, practical
plans for purchasing land there were often frustrated by the difficulties of negotiating
with the Turkish overlords of the time. The political plans of those who hoped to move
enough people into the ancient homeland so that they could gain recognition as a de
facto state seemed to many unpracticable. The whole idea of a man-made Zion was
repulsive to the religious who looked forward to the coming of the Messiah to establish
Zion. Yet the pressures of persecution, and the urge of their tired souls to find some
way to survive, took wave after wave of immigrants to the ancient homeland. Best
known of the Zionists was Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), whose proposal for a Jewish
State (in the essay Judenstaat) appeared in 1896, and under whose aegis the first
Zionist Congress took place in Basel in 1897.
There are signs that the freedom and acceptance Jews have enjoyed in the United
States may, ironically, bring about by assimilation what no despotism has been able to
bring about by persecution, purge, or pogroms. This danger is recognized in leading
Jewish journals today. There is a continuing discussion of ways, plans, and programs to
interest Jewish young men and women in marrying only within the Jewish ethnic group
and in raising their children to be practicing, observant Jews.
For the rising generation in Judaism, the luster, the appeal, or indeed the needs for the
old ideals and hopes have been dimmed. Community survival against militant enemies
has been a strong motivator. A sense of mission, a hope for Zion, a trust in the Lord, a
belief in the Messiah, a vision of a better world to come—these have all strengthened
Judaism in the past. But something has happened in the minds of many young Jews, as
in the minds of many of their contemporaries of other faiths. Some of the factors can be
briefly characterized.
The hope for a return to Zion, for instance, is different today. The Zion achieved by the
men and the movements of the turn of the century and hastened by the fearsome Nazi
holocaust of this century does not look like the Zion that people of the past longed for.
The Zion seen today in tightly ringed and trouble-plagued little Israel seems to many to
have little of the promise the prophets told about; and the cataclysm of six million
executions in the 1930s and 1940s left some survivors with questions about the
availability of divine aid in time of dire need. The absence of any evidence that the
Messiah and redemption will indeed appear soon has invited skepticism.
The question, therefore, that arises in the minds of the young generation of today is:
Why should I raise my children to be Jewish? A survey of the articles of the last five
years in such journals as Judaism, Commentary, and the Journal of Jewish
Communal Service gives the impression that no set of ready answers has yet been
found to satisfy those who ask that question.
The best known voice of the Orthodox Jews is that of Mordecai Kaplan and the
“reconstructionist” movement. Its approach is not unlike that of those who are
concerned about holding to the tried-and-true ideals among the orthodox of the
Christian churches.
The voices of the great middle-road body of Judaism, the multifaceted Conservative
movements, are the thousands of socially conscious, progressive, yet tradition-oriented
rabbis and their thousands of programs, such as the young peoples’ activity groups,
action groups, and interaction groups in community centers, synagogues, and schools.
The softer, more alluring, and less anxiety-ridden voices of the leaders of Jewish
Reform congregations are also calling Jewish youth. They appeal for the effective
continuation of Jewish fellowship and brotherhood and for retention of some modified
forms of traditional worship, but they are permissive of integration of Jews with others
in the common milieu of the socioeconomic and political world of the modern state.
For Judaism in the rest of the world, the problems of American Judaism are
quantitatively and qualitatively significant. There are more millions of Jews in America
now than there were in all of Europe before the holocaust. The spiritual problems of
American Jewry are of the same urgency as are the spiritual problems of Jews
elsewhere in all of the progressive cultures of the world. Only a vital religious culture
that possesses a rational theology will be able to survive. A proven, practical, and
effective educational, social, and marriage and family program is needed. A philosophy
of life, a promising eschatology, and a concept of a Savior, salvation, and eternal life
are all urgent today in a viable religious culture.
The state of Israel is an explosive human aggregate under tetrahedral pressures. (1) It
has socioeconomic problems sufficient to destroy its viability. (2) There are political
problems that would likely have disabled it already except for other problems, the
urgency of which have forced political coalitions and cooperation for survival. (3) Most
threatening are the international relations with immediate neighbors, and through them
some dangerous ramifications among the superstates of the world. These are capable
of triggering a war of annihilation for the entire world. (4) There are religious problems
for which no man among them has a practical solution. The fulfillment of the
prophetically predicted program of the Messiah would be needed to save the Jews in
Israel, for if any one of the four sides of the tetrahedron were to collapse, the other
forces would crash in upon it in confusion.
The irony of the religious problem is that the religious leaders in Israel should be able to
offer solutions rather than adding aggravations to the many other national ills.
The troubled religious situation there originated in the days of the rise of such
movements as political Zionism, practical Zionism, and cultural Zionism in the late
1800s. The nonreligious Zionistic movements brought many people to the ancient land
of Israel for urgent practical, political, and cultural reasons, but they did not accomplish
age-old religious ideals. In the opinion of the orthodox, the other movements usurped
the domain of the Messiah and set up merely another secular, mundane, political nation
in the Near East. When the religious leaders could not counter the success these
movements had, they joined the immigrations. They also organized pioneers to go to
the land of Israel, striving to keep religion from perishing there for lack of adherents and
active worship. Their religious organizations abroad became religiopolitical parties in
the Jewish substate during the British mandate, and remain as such in the nation since
independence. Because there are so many political parties in Israel, the small group of
religious voters (about 14 percent of the electorate in all elections during the first twenty
years) can command enough seats in the Knesset (parliament) to merit a place in the
cabinet and on occasion demand concessions for their programs. Their gains have only
imitated the nonreligious parties, however. Religion in Israel awaits fulfillment through
other means.
The mission of Abraham’s descendants through Israel was, as earlier noted, to bear the
witness of the true and living God unto the nations of all the world, and to bring the
blessings of his acquaintance and his covenants to all. Paul, in his famous letter to the
gentile Christians of Galatia, made it plain that all people who are of the faith in Christ
Jesus and baptized unto his name become the adopted seed of Abraham and heirs to
the mission and joint heirs to the promise inherent in the Abrahamic covenant with God.
But there is almost no similarity in the concept of this mission as seen by Jews and by
Christians. Those among the Jews who still feel there is a mission for Judaism to
accomplish do not think in terms of converting the world to Judaism, as many
Christians think of converting all to Christianity. The mission is conceived by the
orthodox more in terms of living in such a way that others may see that the laws and the
ways of those who worship the one God are good, and that he is good.
There are also differences in Jewish and Christian concepts of the work of the Messiah,
the saving of the world, the setting up of the kingdom of the Lord, and the identity of
the Messiah. Jews expect the Messiah to be a mortal descendant from the loins and
lineage of David. Most Christians expect him indeed to be the descendant of David but
see him specifically as Jesus of Nazareth.
What, then, is the concept of the “chosen people” today? David Ben-Gurion, who lives
in the quiet of a Negev agricultural settlement after his many years of working for the
founding and the defending of modern Israel, sums it up:
“If a Jew had been asked two centuries ago: What is a Jew?—he would have
answered simply and with complete inner confidence: A Jew is a descendant of
Abraham our father, who obeys the commandments and hopes for the coming of the
Messiah. This answer would at that time have been satisfactory to any Jew wherever
he might live, but today it would not satisfy a large part of our people, perhaps the
greater part. Ever since the Emancipation, the Jewish religion has ceased to be the
force which joins and unites us. Nor is the bond with the Jewish nation now common to
all Jews, and there are not many Jews in our times who hope for the coming of the
Messiah.
“If those who fought for Jewish Emancipation in Germany and France had been asked
a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago: What are the Jews?—they would have
replied: a religious community—the Jews are Germans or Frenchmen of the Mosaic
faith.
“Most of the Jews of Russia, Poland, Galicia, or Rumania would have replied a
century ago: The Jews are a minority in exile completely different from the people
among whom they live; and fifty years ago many of them would have added: And they
aspire to return to Zion. Not many of the Jews of America, even those who continue to
call themselves Zionists, would give the last answer today, for it is their desire to
become rooted in their new country, as an organic part of America, like all the other
religious and national groups which reached America a generation or a few generations
ago. Nor is religious Jewry any longer an integral and internally united entity.” (David
Ben-Gurion, “Vision and Redemption,” in Jacob Baal-Teshuva, ed., The Mission of
Israel [New York: Robert Speller & Sons, 1963], p. 219.)
Nevertheless, this prophetic destiny remains to be fulfilled. The Old Testament
prophets were explicit about it, and the Book of Mormon prophets are very explicit:
When they shall come to know the true Messiah, they and all families of the earth shall
be blessed and the covenant shall be fulfilled. (See 3 Ne. 20:25-46.)
|