IB World Religions 1.5.1. Judaism in Context: Covenant, People and Movements Notes

1.5.1. Judaism in Context: Covenant, People and Movements

Covenant and beginnings

1. Jews trace their religion to a covenant (Hebrew b'rit), a binding agreement between God and a people, first made with Abraham. Judaism expresses its monotheism through that relationship rather than through a creed.
2. In the biblical account God promises Abraham descendants and a land, and Abraham accepts brit milah (circumcision) as the sign of the covenant. Jewish boys are still circumcised on the eighth day.
3. The covenant is renewed at Sinai, where Jews hold that God gave the Torah to Moses after bringing the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. That rescue is retold each year at Pesach (Passover).
4. Jews describe the agreement as mutual. God undertakes to be their God, the people undertake to keep his commandments, and the biblical prophets read national disaster as the people failing that undertaking rather than as God withdrawing from it.
5. The covenant is made with a group and not only with individuals. Jews call themselves Am Yisrael, the people of Israel, and trace descent from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

From Temple to rabbis

1. Jewish worship was once centred on the Temple in Jerusalem, where priests offered sacrifices. The first Temple was destroyed by Babylon in 586 BCE and the second was rebuilt after the exile.
2. Rome destroyed the second Temple in 70 CE, and sacrificial worship ended with it. The Judaism practised today grew out of the rebuilding that followed.
3. Leadership passed from priests to rabbis (teachers), and the synagogue, a house of prayer and study, took over from the Temple as the place of assembly. Prayer and study filled the space sacrifice had held.
4. The rabbis recorded the Oral Torah, teaching they hold was given to Moses at Sinai alongside the written text. It was collected in the Mishnah around 200 CE and expanded into the Talmud by about 500 CE.
5. Jews therefore rarely read the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible: Torah, Nevi'im and Ketuvim) on its own. They read it through centuries of rabbinic argument, and Jewish law is drawn from that discussion rather than from a biblical verse by itself.

A people and a religion

1. Judaism is carried by a people as well as by a set of beliefs. Jewish identity is normally inherited, and someone born Jewish counts as Jewish in Jewish law whether or not they practise.
2. Traditional halakhah (Jewish law) counts a person Jewish if their mother is Jewish. Reform and Reconstructionist bodies also accept descent through the father where the child is raised as a Jew.
3. Conversion is possible but not actively sought. A convert studies for a long period, appears before a beth din (rabbinic court), and is then counted as a full member of the people.
4. Jewish communities differ by region and history. Ashkenazi Jews trace their communities to central and eastern Europe, Sephardi Jews to Spain and Portugal and the lands their families moved to, and Mizrahi Jews to the Middle East and North Africa, each with its own liturgy, pronunciation and food customs.
5. The word Israel carries several senses in Jewish use, and context decides which is meant. It names the patriarch Jacob, the worldwide Jewish people, the land of the covenant and the modern state.

The modern movements

1. Judaism has no single authority comparable to a pope. Denominational differences therefore run along lines of practice and interpretation rather than of formal jurisdiction.
2. Orthodox Judaism holds that the whole Torah, written and oral, was revealed by God and that halakhah binds absolutely. It runs from Modern Orthodox communities at home in secular education and work to Haredi and Hasidic groups that keep a sharper separation from the surrounding society.
3. Reform Judaism, which began in nineteenth century Germany, holds that revelation is progressive. Its rabbis teach that the ethical commandments bind while ritual law may be adapted, and that individual Jews should make informed choices about observance.
4. Conservative Judaism, called Masorti outside the United States, sits between the two: halakhah binds, but rabbis may develop it in response to new conditions. Reconstructionist Judaism, a twentieth century American movement, treats Judaism as the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people.
5. The movements divide most visibly over the position of women. Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative Judaism ordain women as rabbis and count them in the minyan (the quorum of ten needed for public prayer), while Orthodox Judaism does not.

Judaism today

1. Jews number roughly fifteen million worldwide, the smallest population among the religions studied in this course. The two largest communities are in Israel and the United States.
2. That distribution is recent. The Shoah (Holocaust) killed about six million Jews in the early 1940s and destroyed the centre of Jewish life in eastern Europe.
3. The modern State of Israel was established in 1948. Jewish views of it vary widely, from religious Zionism that reads the state in covenantal terms, to Haredi groups that deny it religious significance, to Jews whose attachment is cultural rather than political.
4. Diaspora, Jewish life outside the land, has been the ordinary condition for most of Jewish history. Jewish law developed largely under foreign rule, which is part of why it is portable and text-based.
5. Practice varies inside every movement. Many Jews who call themselves secular still keep Pesach, fast on Yom Kippur and mark bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah, which is why Jews often describe Jewish identity in terms of belonging as much as belief.