IB World Religions 1.5.4. How Do We Get There? Covenant, Mitzvot and the Shema Notes

1.5.4. How Do We Get There? Covenant, Mitzvot and the Shema

The House of Israel

1. Judaism answers this question collectively before it answers it individually. Jews understand themselves as the House of Israel, the people brought into covenant with God, and the covenant is what they are asked to live out.
2. Exodus states the role at Sinai: the people are to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. Jews read this as a job description rather than as a compliment.
3. Being chosen is therefore explained as being chosen for something. Isaiah calls Israel a light to the nations, and the tradition takes the point to be responsibility, not rank.
4. Chosenness carries extra obligation rather than easier terms. The prophet Amos has God say to Israel: you only have I known of all the families of the earth, therefore I will punish you for all your sins.
5. Jews hold that non-Jews do not need to join Israel to stand well with God. The rabbis teach that all humanity is bound by seven commandments given to Noah, and that the righteous of every nation have a share in the world to come.
6. The covenant also binds Jews to each other. The Talmudic principle that all Israel is responsible for one another underlies communal charity, care for the sick and the effort to redeem captives.

The mitzvot

1. The covenant is lived through the mitzvot (singular mitzvah), the commandments given in the Torah. Keeping them is how Jews understand obedience to God's will in practice.
2. Rabbinic tradition counts 613 of them, divided into 248 positive commands to act and 365 prohibitions. Many concern the Temple or the land and cannot be performed today, so the working number is much smaller.
3. The rabbis sort them by direction. Some govern the relationship between a person and God, such as prayer and Shabbat, and others govern relationships between people, such as honest weights, paying wages on time and returning lost property.
4. They also sort them by reason. Mishpatim are laws whose sense is evident, like the ban on theft, while chukim are statutes kept as God's decree without a stated reason, like the dietary laws.
5. Motive matters in Jewish teaching. The rabbis prize the person who acts because God commanded it, and the tradition treats reward as God's business rather than the point of the act.
6. Commandments are treated as opportunities rather than burdens. Jews say a blessing before performing many of them, and the word mitzvah is used in ordinary speech to mean a good deed.

The Shema

1. The Shema is the closest thing Judaism has to a declaration of faith. Its opening line, from Deuteronomy, runs: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.
2. The line states Jewish monotheism in one sentence. Everything else in Jewish practice is presented as following from the oneness of God and the covenant with the people addressed here.
3. What follows is a command to love God with all your heart, all your soul and all your might, and then a set of instructions for keeping that in front of you at all times.
4. Those instructions are physical. Jews are told to teach the words to their children, to speak of them at home and on the road, to bind them as a sign on the hand and between the eyes, and to write them on the doorposts of their houses.
5. Practice follows the text literally. Tefillin (small boxes of scripture bound to arm and head) are worn for weekday morning prayer, and a mezuzah containing the passage is fixed to the doorpost of a Jewish home.
6. The Shema frames a Jewish life from end to end. It is recited morning and evening, taught to children as their first Hebrew words, and said as a dying declaration.

Law into daily life

1. The system that turns commandments into daily decisions is halakhah (Jewish law), a word built on the root meaning to walk. Jews describe it as the way one walks rather than as a set of beliefs.
2. Shabbat shapes the week. From Friday sunset to Saturday nightfall observant Jews stop work of the kinds the rabbis defined, light candles, bless wine and bread, eat with family and close the day with havdalah.
3. Kashrut shapes the table. The dietary laws permit some animals and forbid others, require particular slaughter, and keep meat and milk apart, which makes the ordinary act of eating a moment of covenant.
4. Prayer shapes the day. Traditional practice sets three services, morning, afternoon and evening, and adds blessings before food, on seeing natural wonders and on receiving good or bad news.
5. Tzedakah shapes what is done with money. The word comes from the root for justice, so giving is presented as an obligation owed rather than as generosity offered, and Maimonides ranked its forms with the highest being help that makes a person self-supporting.
6. The life cycle is marked the same way, with brit milah for boys, bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah at the age of responsibility for the commandments, marriage under a canopy and burial by the community.

Movements on the mitzvot

1. The movements agree that the covenant is lived through action and disagree over how far the commandments bind. This is the sharpest practical difference between them.
2. Orthodox Judaism holds that God revealed both the written and the oral Torah, so all the mitzvot bind permanently. Rabbis may apply the law to new questions, but only by the law's own rules of reasoning.
3. Reform Judaism holds that the ethical commandments bind absolutely while ritual commandments are open to informed personal choice. Reform teaching stresses tikkun olam (repair of the world) and social justice as the covenant's first demand.
4. Reform practice has moved over time. Nineteenth century Reform set much ritual aside, while many Reform communities today have taken back kashrut, Hebrew liturgy and tefillin as chosen rather than commanded practice.
5. Conservative Judaism, called Masorti outside the United States, holds that halakhah binds but develops. Its rabbinic assembly has issued rulings that depart from Orthodox practice, including the ordination of women as rabbis.
6. Reconstructionist Judaism treats the tradition as the evolving civilization of the Jewish people. Mordecai Kaplan summed up its approach by saying that the past has a vote but not a veto.