A religion, meaning a mode of organizing the social order that encompasses [1] a worldview, or ethos (belief), [2] a way of life or ethics (practice), and [3] a community of practitioners who identify themselves by appeal to that worldview and through the practice of that way of life (community). Judaism is a religion that, for its world view, knows God through the Torah; [2] for its way of life carries out the religious obligations of building a holy community that the Torah sets forth; and [3] regards the community of the faithful as continuing that same “Israel” as the one to which the Scriptures are addressed, thus, a community that is covenanted with God through the Torah.
Within Judaism, no single creed rules everywhere, no minimal principles of the faith govern through time. The documents accepted as normative within Judaism contain contradictions, and different communities of Judaism hold divergent opinions. Like the other ancient and enduring religions, Judaism is hardly uniform, so that it is more appropriate to speak of “Judaisms” than of a single, uniform, harmonious Judaism. Over time, opinions change, and new writings are viewed as authoritative. But no teaching authority, such as the Pope and the Bishops for Roman Catholic Christianity, exercises institutional authority in Judaism to define the teachings of the faith. Nor does a consensus of the faithful tell us which teachings enjoy broad acceptance and represent the faith and which prove marginal or schismatic. So how are we to know what are the principal, normative teachings of Judaism?
The SIDDUR, or prayerbook, serves as the authoritative source of the teachings of Judaism because it defines what praying Israel means by God, Torah, Israel, Creation, Revelation, Redemption, and other principal components of theological Judaism. The Siddur (and associated liturgical texts), in its classical formulation followed by Orthodox and Conservative Judaisms, and, with revisions, by Reform and Reconstructionist Judaisms as well, functions as the model for nearly all communities of Judaism and by its nature serves as a compendium of the main teachings of the faith. While there are thousands of editions and translations, the principal parts of the Siddur are uniform, or nearly uniform for most communities of Judaism today and all of them for long centuries before our own time.
The order of prayer, weekdays and holy days, always entails three units: the recitation of the SHEMA, which is a proclamation of God’s unity and dominion; the Amidah, which presents prayers of supplication, said standing in near-silence, then repeated; and the ALENU, the statement of the praying community of its obligation to praise God alone (see SHEMONEH ESREH). These three components of public worship iterate the community’s faith about the central issues of Judaism: its view of God, of the Israel comprised by the worshipping community, and of the human situation of humanity addressing God.
The teachings of Judaism involve three principal components—a story of creation, one of revelation, and one of redemption—that can be articulated in a single sentence: God created the world, revealed the Torah, and will redeem the people of Israel—to whom God revealed the Torah—at the end of time through the sending of the Messiah. This set of mythic statements expresses the covenant between God and Israel: the keeping of the religious requirements of the Torah as an expression of loyalty to the covenant between God and Israel will lead to redemption.
Why should these principal teachings of Judaism have made sense and proved plausible for the community of Israel over a long period of time, even until our own day? The reason is that the critical issues of the Jews’ historical life—Why do we matter? Why should we go forward? How long will this situation last?—are dealt with in the liturgy and its doctrines in a profound and transcendent way. The Jews have had to suffer for their faith and accept the condition of a despised minority, a pariah people, everywhere they have lived. Even in Europe and North America today, many people look down on the Jews and think ill of them, and in the Muslim world Jews are despised. The faithful Jews, for their part, have always had the choice of accepting the dominant religion of their place of residence—Christianity in the West, Islam in the Middle East—and so of leaving their condition as a pariah people. And some did. But most did not, just as the Jews of the modern period chose and continue to choose to be Jews, no matter what. Why should they do this? Why do they do this? And what does it mean?
In the classical story of Judaism, the meaning is found in the correspondence of heaven and earth. The world was created for the sake of the Torah; the Torah was revealed for the sake of Israel; and Israel, keeping the covenant through the Torah, will be redeemed in the end of time. To the world, the holy community may seem to be pariahs, but Judaism knows they are God’s children—princes and princesses. The life of Torah is sweet and serene. The rhythms of creation and Sabbath, revelation and Torah-study, and redemption and festivals (Passover, Tabernacles, Pentecost) join the lives of individual men and women to the patterns of the transcendent and the holy. From the perspective of Judaism lived by the Jewish people, the suffering has been the proof and vindication of the faith of Torah. The very regularity of creation—the waves on the ocean, the majesty and permanence of the mountains and the valleys—stands as witness to the truth of the faith of Torah, which is what Judaism is.
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