What can I say about my religion? I am so unqualified to explain the richness of Judaism to an outsider that I have dragged my feet for years over adding this page to my Web site. I am a knowledgeable layman at best, reader of some books and articles, attentive listener to many sermons and lectures and a participant in a few formal classes. Experts have written many outstanding books on Judaism and I plan to add a few favorite references later in this article. For now, however, allow me simply to explain why I am a Jew. That is personal and within my area of expertise.
First of all, I was born a Jew and have not recanted my status by adopting any other religion. That makes me, in the eyes of my peers, a Jew. My wife converted to Judaism, making her, in the eyes of Jewish law, also a Jew, a "Jew by choice." Those are the two ways to become a Jew - to be born a Jew or to convert in. No one can force another person to convert to Judaism and no one can convert another to Judaism in absentia or posthumously. To become a Jew by choice, one must make that choice him- or herself.
In centuries past, Jews lived largely apart from the rest of humanity. Our laws made it difficult to socialize with others and those outside our communities wanted nothing to do with us, often passing their own laws to disadvantage or fully exclude Jews from the greater community. In the so-called Western world today, however, Jews are allowed and usually welcome to participate in the broadest range of society. We can convert into or out of Judaism at will. We have streams of our religion with relaxed rules, with no restrictions on religious behavior. Here in the West, we are all, in a certain sense, Jews by choice. We can ignore our identity, as do many, or we can acknowledge our identity and choose to do something about it. I choose to be an active, proud, concerned, reasonably knowledgeable and somewhat observant Jew, less observant than some but more than many. I like to explain my Jewish practice as "celebrating" the rules and holidays rather than strictly observing them.
My choice to be an active Jew is surprising to some of my secular peers. I am, like many of them, an engineer. In my profession we apply scientific knowledge to develop useful devices, practical processes and solutions to real-world problems. We understand and admire science. We tend to be deeply skeptical of poor designs, unrealistic plans and ill-conceived notions. We like to be pragmatic and not particularly idealistic, at least those of us who are most likely to succeed. We value provable or demonstrable truth - correct answers - much more than wishful promises and loosey-goosey hypotheses. To some, these proclivities seem to preclude parochialism. Those people often conflate religion with superstition and ask how a rational, modern human can believe in God or religion. I don't have that problem.
Religion is certainly a much softer pursuit than engineering. It involves postulates of things unknowable, or at least unprovable. It attempts to answer questions that science often can not answer. Basic texts of many religions pose answers to fundamental questions that appear to contradict science. This really annoys some people and drives them to atheism or agnosticism. These people read ancient texts (and more modern ones) and see statements that they can not reconcile with science. They assume that the only way to pursue religion is to accept it all in a fundamentalist way, an attitude to which they recoil in horror. If fundamentalism were the only approach to religion, I would reject it myself. But it is not the only approach and the ways that Judaism rejects fundamentalism is one of its primary attractions to me.
Judaism is not a fundamentalist religion. Although some of our sacred texts, like those of other religions, say things that only a fundamentalist can accept literally, the teachings that evolved from those texts, including our Talmud, the basis of rabbinic Judaism, are clearly and explicitly non-fundamentalist. The Talmud defines Judaism as a system of law. It specifies not only the original and early derivative laws but also formal rules of logic that must be used to derive future interpretations of those laws. It allows us, and in some sense commands us, to continually re-interpret the texts in the context of evolving technology and society. It acknowledges the difficulty of creating a broad legal system free of contradictions and conundrums and therefore suggests priorities as well as interpretive mechanisms.
Our most sacred value is human life. To save a life, one may violate almost any other Jewish law. Modern interpretation extends this to preventing illness or serious injury, even if death is not a likely consequence. There is no way to use Jewish law to justify murder. (...as opposed to killing. There is a big difference.) When innocent life is at stake, killing may be justified, even war. War is an unfortunate last resort in large-scale human relations, to be avoided at great cost but not at all cost. War is subject to ethical constraints but occasionally necessary and permitted. The only Jewish army in the world, the Israel Defense Force, has stricter rules of engagement and ethical procedure than any other armed force in the history of humankind. Evil can, should and must be fought. Jews are not fundamentalists but we are not pacifists, either. All of this resonates with me.
In many ways, Judaism is not only non-fundamentalist but also anti-fundamentalist. We consider ourselves descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Jacob's other name was Israel, which means "struggles with God." We are allowed to doubt, to struggle with our religious beliefs, even not to believe. A Jewish atheist who obeys all the rules without belief is more respected in Judaism than one who believes but sins. Judaism tells us how to live decent lives, how to be good people, how to treat others. It provides a sacramental framework for its laws in the form of an ancient covenant, a contract if you wish, between God and our people. It describes that covenant as binding on all of us, through all generations, even stating metaphorically that we, all of us today, those of us who were born Jewish and those of us who converted or whose ancestors converted, all stood together at Mount Sinai as Moses received the Torah. But we are not required to believe that literally. Some do. Some do not. There are some ultra-religious Jews whom some might consider to be our fundamentalists. But unlike the fundamentalists of some other religions, these people do not consider it their mission to harm those with whom they disagree. If they did, their actions would be condemned unequivocally by us and our institutions and we would help to prosecute them to the full extent of both civil and religious law. (Yes, there are a few, a very few, violent exceptions. They are deviants.) Our sages teach us that we will be judged after our days have ended, not against our faith, not against our belief in the sacraments of our religion, but against our deeds in the real world of commerce and inter-personal relations. I like that.
Most non-religious humanists approve of what is often called the Judeo-Christian ethic but they reject the fundamentalist-sounding scriptures, sacred texts and seemingly non-productive rituals. "How can an educated, modern citizen accept such pre-medieval language and behavior?" Many do, but I write here only for myself. I accept these things in a highly metaphorical sense. I do not believe in an anthropomorphic God, a conceivable entity enthroned on high and purposefully controlling everything we mortals do. Even our texts say that God is "ineffable," impossible for a human to understand fully. Some of our sages explained over a thousand years ago that God completed the work of creation, helped to establish the Jewish people (and many other peoples) and then gradually withdrew from active intervention in the world. Many modern Jews understand petitionary prayer, regardless of its language, to be a plea for strength to endure rather than a naive request for specific acts of benevolence. We say that the Torah and our other texts were written in a way that people could understand when it was first written down. Although we try to preserve the original texts in their original languages and style, we often interpret liberally when we translate into modern vernacular. No amount of interpretive translation, however, can honestly disguise the fact that the original text describes an activist God. That's OK with me. I love the original for its universal and enduring appeal, for its ability to be adapted into the ethos of wildly different societies. I have never found a passage that I could not explain metaphorically, even some that make us very uncomfortable in our time.
There is another aspect of Judaism with which I resonate - freedom. The central narrative of our people is liberation from slavery in Egypt. Slaves are not free. They do not control their lives, their livelihoods, their environment, ... anything. When we, perhaps historically, perhaps metaphorically, left Egypt, we became a free people. We "received" the law (the Torah) describing a way to live our lives and we returned to our national homeland. There we built a thriving society, ruled by kings who were nonetheless themselves ruled by the law. It was a monarchy of the strangest kind, with prophets and judges free to criticize misbehaved rulers. That was thousands of years ago and interrupted by several defeats and exiles. From about 70 C.E. until 1948, we lost sovereignty in our land. Judaism evolved through the centuries, replacing the destroyed holy temple with the institution of the synagogue, replacing the rites of the priests with universal, individual prayer, interpreting the ancient laws to make sense in new times, new technologies, new languages, and new civil orders. But we remained throughout a primary exemple of the importance of freedom. [This pgh is two concepts - freedom and the capsule history of our people. Separate them.]
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Most religions, like Judaism, specify rules to live by. Most religions specify some priorities. Most religions provide a rich calendar of celebrations, rituals, stories and devotions. I like our rules and our priorities because they make sense to me. I like our celebrations, rituals, stories and devotions because they are warm, familiar and comforting. I don't pretend that they are any better or worse than those of any other religion. They are just mine and I love them. [rearrange this pgh]
[more? maybe this with noted additions is enough?]
[references]