The title is very direct but I am not a newbie when it comes to all things Jewish. I went to a heavily Jewish university (Tulane), I spend most holidays with the branch of my wife’s extended family that is Jewish, and a disproportionate amount of my friends, neighbors, and coworkers tend to be Jewish. I have great respect for the culture.
What I don’t quite get is the religion itself. There are a few things that are throwing me off:
Judaism is an ethnic based religion that seems to require neither the religion nor the ethnicity. There are plenty of secular Jews but some converts are allowed and there are pockets of Jews seemingly unrelated to the original people in places like Ethiopia.
Judaism is a rule based religion. Orthodox Jews follow a system of rules much like an intricate legal system. Loopholes are seemingly allowed (see the Eruv).
I can’t figure out the final point. Most other religions are fairly easy to understand from a superficial, academic standpoint. In Christianity, you love God, do good things, accept Jesus as your savior and go to heaven. Islam isn’t really that different nor are Buddhism and Hinduism. As far as I understand with Judaism, you follow strict worldly rules and then ??? Heaven isn’t ruled out but isn’t explicitly stated. Why would anyone go to the trouble of following an ancient and seemingly arbitrary set of rules based on things like diet in this day and age with no obvious purpose?
I am making an honest attempt at learning rather than trying to start a true debate so this is where these things go. My non-Jewish brain can’t tie the whole thing together.
It’s been explained to me (and this might be totally wrong, but it’ll at least keep the thread visible for more answers) that Jews are obedient not to get something out of it, but because being obedient to G-d is an end in and of itself. It’s not a tit-for-tat, I do this, God does that for me sort of capitalist religion. You obey because it’s G-D, that’s why! “Loopholes” aren’t there to let us get away with things the way most of us think. Rather they’re finer determinations of what G-d wants of us. A gross rule like “no creating fire on the Sabbath” might have been useful when fire was only made by burning wood, oil or dung, but what does it mean in these days of electricity and solar power? Obviously, G-d has an opinion there, too, and it’s His opinion we (they) must follow, not their own reason - except so far as reason helps them to determine G-d’s opinion on the matter.
And, as someone struggling with Obedience as a spiritual concept right now, I do get it. It’s hard to explain without turning into at “tit-for-tat”, but when I stop fighting and questioning my teachers and just do what the heck they tell me, I do feel better. Something’s happening, and I’m learning a whole lot more about myself in the process. Every time I feel like whining, “But WHY should I have to do this stupid formulaic ritual prayer every stupid day when I could just dance in the forest and have fun?!”, instead I ask myself why the discipline is so hard for me, what that says about me as a person and the things I value in life and why. And the answers to those questions illuminate my struggles and give me new ways to act in all areas of my life, not just the stupid ritual prayer part.
There are also more mystical aspects of the religion, which have to do with spiritual bodies and other stuff, but I don’t know enough about that to have much to say.
You’ve actually unintentionally exposed one of the holes in Christian theology.
What sort of God would make his followers jump through arbitrary hoops to get a cookie? After all, God is omnipotent. He doesn’t NEED for humans to follow the rules. He can manage just fine on his own, thank you.
So if the rules exist they must exist for our benefit, not His. And if the rules are a good unto themselves, then why do we need the coercion of Heaven and Hell to follow them? In fact, doesn’t that coercion go against the very idea that mankind was given free will to choose between right and wrong?
Interestingly enough, the argument for following the rules of Judaism holds even if you don’t believe in God. It’s good to have structure in your life and rules and ritual provides that structure whether you believe in the supernatural aspects or not … .
I know they are different. However, they still have a point that is pretty easy to grasp by a 6th grader with 30 minutes of instruction on the high points. I am not criticizing Judaism or its practitioners in the least. It has been about 15 years now of much more than average exposure I still don’t understand how it works based on the points I listed in the OP. I have asked Jewish friends and family and we didn’t get too far in brief discussions because it seems hard for them to articulate. That is why I asked here. I know the many of the customs, rules and holidays but the entire thing has never clicked. A key sticking point as referenced above is that it is an ethnic based religion with many members not religious at all yet converts and the odd population are included as well. My wife’s aunt who is about as Italian and Catholic as you can get originally and still superficially is now officially Jewish by marriage and conversion. Another sticking point is that Jewish people tend not to criticize all people for following their important rules. That is probably a good thing overall but it confuses the matter in my mind.
I dunno, religion just kinda sorta makes ya feel good.
Here’s a rough analogy: religion is as illogical as love. How many times have you known a couple and said to yourself “wow, that’s weird match. I wonder what she sees in him? --it doesnt make any sense”. If you ask them about it, you probably won’t get a good answer, because it’s “hard for them to articulate”. It just feels right.
You ask about a couple different issues:
1–Jews who follow the rules.(Orthoxdox Jews who perform all the rituals)
Some Jews are ,like Christian fundamentalists, totally convinced of the unerring truth in the bible,and every act in life must be lived according to the bible So God’s commandments to eat kosher, etc, are laws that must be obeyed, just because they are written in sacred texts. But (unlike Christians), they obey not out of fear of punishment, but just because it’s the law. This may seem weird to you, but it is actually pretty logical, once you accept the basic premise.
(As for your mention of loopholes, like the eruv: This isn’t so different than what you do in your personal life when you file your taxes. You obey the law (I assume) not just because you fear punishment, but because obeying the law is a good moral thing to do.[del]God[/del] The IRS has spoken. But you are allowed to look carefully for allowable deductions.)
2–Jews who don’t follow the rules. (non-Orthodox Jews )
This one goes back to my analogy about love. It ain’t logical, but it makes you feel good. People like to be part of something important, which is larger than themselves, and will continue on in history after you are gone. You feel the warmth that comes from shared experiences, not just with immediate friends, but with their grandparents and your future grandchildren.People you have never met, but feel their presence around you when you perform a few rituals on special occasions.
Judaism originally was more of a code of laws than a religion. It existed to keep communities happy and productive and working together. That tends to work a little better than ‘every man for himself’.
Traditionally, most religions were more concerned with the group than in creating a slick, neato-keen religion in a can.
The deities cared about you because you were their people, and you wanted to do good by the deities so that you did good by your people as well. This, of course, limits the scope of the religion to your people. Buddhism and Christianity dropped the race element, added in a bunch of multi-interpretable, obfuse teachings and bam, they spread across the land.
But a lot of the old religions don’t have a particular view of the afterlife. Ancient Greece and the Viking pantheon both have a sort of heaven for heroes, but there’s not much specific to anyone else. And personally I would guess that the Elysian Fields of Greek mythology were only popularised later on, since in the Odyssey Achilles is just another shade and isn’t in the fields (while as some others are.)
Overall the image of death (from Greek mythology) seems to be a sort of waiting state, where you are still as you were, but unable to do anything any more. If you are a happy person, then you might be happy in death, and if you were a vain person, then you might find yourself hating the lack of being able to do anything. I would personally imagine that this is similar to the traditional Judaic image of the afterlife when the Tanakh was written. And you can see how this ties into the Christian idea where if you were a good person then you enjoy the afterlife, and if you were bad, you don’t. Just, unlike Christianity, it’s not something that’s imposed on you, it would just be a natural occurence for that to happen when the person doesn’t like himself, and can no longer change.
But back to the ethnic angle. Even up through the new Testament, you’ll see that Christianity was intended to be for the Jewish people, and reform the religion to be less rule-bound, and instead to be more caring (ignoring Paul.) It’s relatively easy to read Revelations as inferring that only the Jewish people are guaranteed to go to God, but others will have to be judged (though this admittedly pretty unclear.)
The Jewish god was most likely a regional god at one time (like the saint of a town), as were most gods. I think it was Genesis which mentions the other river gods, forest gods, the gods of other peoples and other towns, and assumes that they all are real and all exist. But unlike other religions, instead of tying together these various gods into a pantheon (probably to unite the various towns into a single religion), Judaism decided to only allow one god as being worthy of worship (the one who created everything.) This might have come from influences from Zoroastrianism, or some sort of attempt to singly unify the Jewish people (probably both.)
So this god is the God of the Jewish people. They are promised certain things by him, and he has provided them with a set of rules which are good things. And they want to do those things because those are the things that are known to be good things to do. Why wouldn’t you want to do what will make God and your people proud? Fire and brimstone is just a scare tactic, as would be getting reborn as a hyena in your next life. Certainly fire and brimstone makes it easier to convert people to your religion, but when your religion is concerned with the people, converting others doesn’t really matter.
Whence comes this assertion that “we need the coercion of Heaven and Hell”? God created the world as a Paradise, sort of like an extension of Heaven. Satan invaded the world and put members of the human race on the road to Hell. Jesus died and thereby provided a pathway for human to get to Heaven. That’s the metaphysical nature of the situation.
Heaven and Hell were not created because they were needed to coerce the human race. That would be like saying that Colorado was needed in order to coerce people to drive I70. In fact, both Heaven and Hell existed long before the human race did.
In any case, human beings will not generally follow rules that work for their own benefit even at the best of times. That’s a fact of nature that even the bulk of atheists would probably agree with.
but God let Satan invade the earth for whatever reason. Nothing happens without God’s say so. So who is to blame?
Back to the OP. The old Jewish religion was concerned not with the afterlife, but with the here and now. Worship God and everything will be OK. Dont, and face his wrath now. Thus it made perfect sense back then.
For cultural reasons the rules stayed but the reason became less clear, and belief in an afterlife and hell started to come in as it became clear that fortune and worship no longer seem to go hand in hand.
One of the points is monotheism. God is one. Not three, not 45. That, anyway, is the notion on paper. Perhaps it’s about where you’re standing. I don’t find Judaism hard to get, but don’t really understand Christianity at all.
I had a post worked out detailing what I thought were the bullet points of Judaism, but I just wasn’t happy with them. It’s a complex faith. I certainly have defined ideas about what I’m doing in this religion, but some are hard to put into words, and I don’t believe my list is comprehensive; I have plenty of religious growing to do. That’s what I have a lifetime for.
To a certain extent, I think that’s a strength of the religion; I mean, I would be a bit scared if the faith that I had received, as part of a chain that began thousands of years ago, from the infinite and omnipotent G-d, could be really summed up in bullet points.
The goal of a Jew is to serve G-d, but the details of that service took and entire Torah, written and oral, to define, and we’re still going.
Sage Rat has it right, I think, and it’s not surprising that members of more modern religions don’t see it. Judaism doesn’t have a point. Judaism is something you inherit, something you are born into. If you lived 4,000 years ago, in a village with village gods, you don’t ask what the point of worshipping the gods is. God is there. I never went to Temple for salvation, I went because it is part of my culture. The Covenant is not an individual thing, it is a cultural thing. A bris is not about personal salvation, but is no doubt left over from the rituals done to make someone a full member of the tribe. A bar mitzvah is a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood.
Sometimes it’s useful to point out what isn’t part of Judaism.
[ul]
[li]Original Sin[/li][li]Emphasis on Faith[/li][li]Heaven and Hell[/li][li]Satan[/li][li]Hostility towards Sex[/li][li]Articles of Faith[/li][li]Imperative to Convert Others[/li][li]The Idea that it’s the “One True Path” for Everyone[/li][/ul]
I see where you’re coming from mks57, but quite a few of these not only exist in Judaism, but in at least a prototype of the way Christians understand them, actually originated there.
Satan and Original Sin (or perhaps more correctly, the idea of The Fall) might mean different things in Jewish theology, but they’re certainly there. There are analogues of Heaven and Hell, although there is not a universally believed in version of either that you need to subscribe to in order to be considered piously Jewish. There is no actual hostility towards sex, but there are more rules than you can poke a proverbial stick at that relate to sexual relations.
The last one is the most problematic, because although there is an idea that not everyone in the world needs to be Jewish in order to gain a part of the world to come (sort of the Jewish equivalent of Heaven), there is still the usual certainty that the Torah is 100% correct, and that the principles of monotheism, and so on are the only way towards truth.
Anyway, I know that Alessan was riffing on a current meme, but he’s pretty much got it down - the point of it is mostly ‘it’. You just need to be in the frame of mind to see the rules for what they are - tangible things that connect you to other people of your religion, and also to God. Most importantly, they are there to put spirituality into even the most mundane things.
For example, there is even a rule about the order that you put your shoes on in the morning. Now, the first thing that most people do when they hear that is laugh, and mock how stupidly extreme a religion is that would have such a thing legislated. And then the people who want to find the purely practical root from all religious practice will say that it’s a good idea to have both shoes on first, even untied, rather than one on and fully tied, if you are going to be chased by an attacker through the woods.
But both of those are missing the point. The real idea is that even doing something so mundane, you are thinking about the fact that you are following a law. Even five years since I’ve considered myself religious, I still can’t put on my left shoe first without feeling strange in the same way that indicating left and then turning right would make you feel when driving.
If you want a bit more information from a very orthodox (but modern leaning) source, here’s not a bad starting point: Aish Hatorah
And this thread is exactly why ‘Judeo-Christian’ values tick me off so much. It’s just another way of saying ‘Christian.’ Judaism is different on a very deep level.
The fact that there are “pockets” of Jews in places like Ethiopia and Nigeria and the like shouldn’t be surprising. Jews have been in exile around the globe for thousands of years. The fact that some Jews were exiled to remote places and lost contact with the general Jewish population for centuries shouldn’t really be a difficult concept to understand.
IMHO, Judaism, in the end, is a religion. The fact that there are Jews who identify as areligious or irreligious doesn’t really change that.
Loopholes aren’t really as common as you think, and the Eruv is a bad example of a loophole. To the uninformed, it looks like one, but it’s not. Allow me to briefly explain the origin and function of an Eruv.
According to Torah Law, one cannot carry four cubits in a public domain on the Sabbath. The term “public domain” has a very specific halachic definition. A public domain, for the purposes of Sabbath law, must be 16 cubits wide, open at both ends (no dead ends), be unroofed and have a very large volume of daily traffic. A private domain is an area enclosed by walls. Thus, there are many areas that are public, but do not meet the halachic definition of a public domain. In these areas, one is permitted to carry according to Torah law.
However, there are many areas, including the vast majority of streets, fields, bodies of water, etc. that do not meet the definition of a public domain or a private domain. These areas are called a karmelis. Again, according to Torah law, one can carry in a karmelis.
The Rabbis were afraid that if one were allowed to carry in a karmelis (which includes most public areas) one may come to forget and carry in a true halachic public domain. As a result, they forbade carrying in a karmelis. However, they also decreed that if the area were demarcated, then one would not forget since it is obvious that it is demarcated. Hence, one is forbidden to carry in a karmelis by Rabbinic decree unless there is an eruv. However, an Eruv will not allow one to carry in a true public domain - since the purpose of the eruv is to serve as an exception to the Rabbinic decree, not to permit something which is forbidden.
As a result, the Eruv is a really bad example of a “loophole,” as that is not its function at all.
In short, we keep the commandments because God told us to. Ultimately, that’s what it boils down to.
However, it should also be pointed out that reward and punishment are also essential beliefs in Judaism. We believe in a God who balances His books. People are rewarded for the good they do and punished for the evil they do. If the reward doesn’t come in this world, then it does in the next.
The Talmud will often discuss a person who was otherwise a miserable, rotten human being and then discuss how they were rewarded for some good deed that they did. The fact that they were otherwise evil does not negate the good that they did, and they deserve reward for it. Likewise, the Talmud will sometimes discuss a righteous person and find that they may have committed some misdeed and then discuss the punishment that they got for that misdeed.
But even though reward and punishment are essential components of Judaism, we don’t (or at least we shouldn’t) observe the commandments solely out of the desire to be rewarded. We observe the commandments because we want to serve God – there doesn’t have to be any utilitarian purpose other than to make God proud of us, so to speak. The best analogy I can think of is when I bring a drink to my mother – I don’t do it because I need her to reward me at this point of my life – I do it because I want to make her happy.
