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What Is Judaism?
Dennis Prager has a really interesting article out, called “What Is Judaism?” Mr. Prager has written and taught on the subject (including two years as a member of the Brooklyn College Department of Judaic Studies). This is how he leads:
If you’ve ever wondered what Judaism is, here is a list of its principal beliefs. This is not an official list, but these beliefs have been widely held by religious Jews for thousands of years.
The 27-item list boils down the essentials of Judaism. Here are the first three to get a feel for his article.
I. There is one universal God.
This God is the Creator of the world and the God of all humanity.II. One universal God means there is one universal morality.
III. God is:
a) Incorporeal (not physical): All matter comes to an end.
b) Eternal: All matter has a beginning and an end. But God exists outside of time.
c) Outside of nature: God is not in nature. And nature is not divine.
d) Personal: God knows each of us.
e) Good: God is moral, just and compassionate.
Of course, my mind went to how Christianity differs to any of his points. Excluding where obviously something is specific to Judaism, such as the Torah as central, I thought I found three points that were at least different in perspective or emphasis. Let me take them one at a time.
V. God’s primary demand is that people be good.
Therefore, God cares more about how we act toward one another than how we act toward Him — just as we humans care more about how our children treat one another than how they treat us.
Therefore, right behavior matters more than intentions and even more than faith.
(1) I don’t know if in Christianity one could say that God cares more about how we act toward each other than to God. When Christ is asked what is the greatest commandment He says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.” (Mat 22:37-40). It’s really equal, not one greater than the other. If anything, greater would be love of God.
(2) Intentions do matter. If your intentions are good, but you miscalculated, then it is not a sin. If you attempt to help an old woman across the street and you trip and fall and bring the woman down, then not only was it not a sin, but your conscience was working in the proper way. If you think that global warming is destroying the earth and you try to advocate laws to save the planet, that is acting morally. If you think that global warming is a waste of money and you are acting to stop the waste of money toward the environment, then you are also acting morally. Your intention matters.
VI. There is an afterlife — God rewards the good and punishes the bad.
If good people and bad people have the same fate, there is either no God or a God that is not just.
The fate of your soul is not a simple summation of good and bad. Obviously we all do good and bad things. The fate of your soul rests on the state of your heart at death. You can be a bad sinner all your life, but if you have a change of heart—a true and sincere change of heart—you can be saved. Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is a literary example. But the key is sincere contrition. God knows if it was sincere and the habit of constant sin leads to a hardening of the heart, making it extremely difficult to change.
VIII. Reward in the afterlife (“heaven”) is available to all good people, not just good Jews.
Now here you might have a variety of views within the various Christian denominations. On the one extreme, you have those where faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is absolutely fundamental. You cannot be saved without that as a founding principle. On the other extreme, salvation could be open to all people who have shown love to their neighbor. I lean to the latter but it comes down to the state of the heart.
Those are the ones I found distinctions. But, not being Jewish, I found this one very interesting.
XIV. Judaism, too, has a trinity: God, Torah and Israel (meaning Jewish peoplehood and the Land of Israel).
The removal of any one of them is no longer Judaism. It would be as if the Father, the Son or the Holy Spirit were removed from Christianity.
I never thought about Judaism that way, but I can see his point.
This all rests on Prager’s understanding of Judaism. He certainly knows more about it than I do. (Side note, I got one of my degrees from Brooklyn College, where he taught.) I wonder if any of the Jewish people here would dispute any of Prager’s points, and do any of the Christians here see other distinctions. Of course, do you even agree with my distinctions?
Published in Culture
They’re not the same. Love of G-d and love of neighbor are not in equal terms. One is based on the other.
I can see how “with all your mind” is an indirect phrasing of “with all your might.” I forget the rhetorical term for phrasing something indirectly. “With all your mind” is an almost superlative way of saying with all your strength. Perhaps Christ is trying to reach even beyond the scope of the Shema.
See my other comment. I think Jesus is trying to expand the scope of the Shema. Just like he makes other laws stricter, he is making this even more definitive or expansive.
Yes that’s right.
Eridemus up above in comment 7 has a link to a rabbi lecturing on the afterlife. It is well worth a listen. He speaks of resurrection.
In fact there’s a post on the main feed at this very moment with a quite detailed description of the Jewish afterlife that I’ve never heard before plus a comment on the first page disputing it.
Manny,
Thanks.
I’ve wandered through the world for many years wondering why I seemed to be alone in having been confused by just that question, and in coming to just that surprising answer, hidden in the smallest connective words of the text.
Now I’ve begun to discover the others. One, so far. Maybe I’ll discover more in the next few days, right here.
You’re welcome Mark. We’ve probably have gone through the same experience with that passage.
I am just going by his own words. He said “God cares more how we act towards each other than how we act toward him”. Also love wasn’t mentioned by Mr Prager or myself, we are talking about actions. I am merely pointing out that, in scripture, God does care how we act toward him. In the Old Testament, you have to be “clean” in order to be in the presence of the Lord, I would say that is further evidence that God does care how we ACT toward him. Also, I care how my kids act toward me. That too in the commandments “Honor your mother and father”. I just find this reasoning strange, especially from Dennis Prager.
exactly
Thanks Joseph.
Agree on all points.
I have a problem with V.
G-d’s primary demand is that people follow His commandments. As a corollary to doing so, you will be good. But to say “G-d’s primary demand is that people be good” is just too fuzzy. If you follow the 10 Commandments, you will be good, but nowhere in those Commandments does it say “be good.” There is the famous quote from Hillel (a rabbi who lived 2,000 years ago) in the Talmud, that the Torah can be summarized like this: “don’t do what is hateful to your fellow; the rest is commentary, go and learn.” I suppose you could say this exalts being good in a backhanded sort of way. That being said, the Torah/Judaism elevates caring for widows and orphans above all other human endeavors.
The criticisms of our faith (or the intersection of our two faiths, if you like) that depend upon unintentional wordplay are the most difficult to respond to.
I’m glad we have a pro around to handle them.
(More than just this one Jewish guy, of course. My squad has a star quarterback on Ricochet, too, and some high-draft number backups.)
Well, when it comes to G-d and Israel, I am definitely an amateur (the word means lover), not a pro.
Yes, I could not see where Prager was coming from with that. His whole minimizing of reverence to God is striking.
Well played!
Is Judaism primarily identified as a set of beliefs? That’s true of Christianity, but then Christianity is an orthodoxic religion, whereas I thought Judaism was more an orthopraxic religion. Jews are identified not so much by what they believe, but by what they do and by their connection to the historic Jewish people, with whom God made His covenant thousands of years ago. “Judaism” is the continuing story of Jews and the working out of their covenant with God through history.
Am I wrong about this?
I couldn’t answer since I’m not Jewish, but here’s a speculation. Judaism is multi dimensional. It has orthodoxic and orthopraxic elements. As I think about it, aren’t all religions both orthodoxic and orthopraxic?
Religion has more than one definition. If I had to give a first definition, one which could be used to give other definitions, it would be
It follows that every religion(1) is orthdoxic and nothing else (if orthodoxic means “characterized by certain beliefs or faiths”).
A religion(1) will often include beliefs about practice. Thus, most religions(1) are orthodoxic and nothing else, and to subdivide them according to just what it is that is believed, some are orthopraxic (if that word means “characterized by prescriptions about works”).
Thus, Judaism and Christianity as instances of the class religion(1) are completely orthodoxic, and both are orthopraxic.
I would add a second definition:
religion: 2. (Sociology) n. a social group characterized by …
Then, one could be a member of a religion(2) and not be a believer in an associated religion(1).
It’s my speculation that only a small proportion of members of the Christian religion(2) believe in the Christian religion(1). That there was a shift in the ratio starting sometime after Pentecost, when it stood at 100%.
You Bible studiers can give the Scriptural references for my speculation. Christ’s own parables and other teachings, Revelation, others. I would like to know if there are any foreshadowings of this teaching in the O.T. One might answer, well, the Jews and none of the many other humans were G_d’s chosen people, so there it is. But our Scriptures say that Abraham was saved by faith, not by birth.
Could you restate the teaching, please? I’d love to answer if I can, but I don’t think I understand the question.
You are not wrong. I think you got to the guts of the materr J-Cli, well done.
I am not an expert on the subject but nearly everything in Christianity comes from Judaism, with the exception of the trinity. We do not impart to human beings divine status.
I sense, somehow, that our star has now read this. I don’t think he knows of his celebrity status, and let’s keep it that way. Pride goeth before the fall.
Indeed.
I wouldn’t even classify that as an exception. At a minimum, it is clear that Christians get their theology of the Trinity by interpreting both the old Old and the New Testaments. It’s also said that discussions internal to Judaism precedented this.
I dabble in this topic myself; see the penultimate section of this old post. Better than I is one very fine Bible scholar, Father Stephen Young, an eastern orthodox guy; see this post on his blog and his citations.
Does Scripture say that only a few of those who call out their faith aloud will be saved from death?
I don’t believe so, no.
The Greek pistis is faith, but also faithfulness, as it is translated in, e.g., Galatians. James tells us faith is demonstrated by works. From what I can tell, Hebrews 11:1–instead of telling us that faith means belief without evidence–tells us that faith is the life-change required by our belief in G-d’s testimony and in the unseen deeds of Christ (from a little earlier Hebrews).
The story of Jeremiah and the Recabites suggests that the faith that saves is covenant faithfulness–not works that earn G-d’s favor (the usual Protestant misunderstanding of Catholicism), and certainly not belief without reference to action (a false caricature of Protestant theology).
Naomi at the beginning of Ruth observes that her family has been found guilty in G-d’s lawcourt–a judgment reversed by the end of the book. What sort of faith does Ruth have–belief, works, or something else? “Your people will be my people, and your G-d my G-d” is not the Shema from Deuteronomy 6, or much of a summary of Torah monotheism. It’s still a commitment to an orthodoxy, one she probably doesn’t even understand very well. But what it really is–encompassing both belief and action–is a commitment to faithful living in the covenant with this G-d.
Oh, and there’s my old post on Noah.
Yeah, me too. I agreed with everything up to this point.
Is that true? Could you still be a Jew if you believed in the Greek gods as dieties, even though you are ethnically Jewish? There has to be some level of fundamental belief. That’s what Prager in his article was delineating, the core beliefs.
I guess it depends what you mean “comes from Judaism.” Manna in the desert is a foreshadow of the Eucharist, but there is a world of difference between heaven sent bread and bread transformed into the body of Christ. Yes, the root came from Judaism, but the end is significantly different. And no the Trinity is nowhere in the OT. Suggestions of the various persons of God do not equate to the Trinity. My opinion, of course.