IB World Religions 6.4.2. Statements of Belief: the Shema, the Covenant and Maimonides' 13 Principles Notes

6.4.2. Statements of Belief: The Shema, the Covenant and Maimonides' 13 Principles

The place of creeds

1. Judaism has produced very few formal creeds. The rabbinic tradition puts its weight on obeying the mitzvot (commandments) rather than on subscribing to a list of propositions.
2. Membership follows birth or conversion, not assent, so a Jew who doubts is still counted in the community and still holds the same obligations.
3. Beliefs are nonetheless taught, and mainly through prayer, so the siddur (prayer book) is where most Jews meet doctrine. The two statements it carries most prominently are the Shema and the Thirteen Principles of Maimonides.
4. Neither functions the way the Nicene Creed functions in Christianity. Jews recite them, argue about them and hand them on, but no body has ever made signing them the test of belonging.
5. The movements differ over how binding such statements are. Orthodox communities treat the Thirteen Principles as normative, while Reform and Liberal Jews more often read them as an important historical statement rather than a required one.

The Shema and God's oneness

1. The Shema takes its name from its first Hebrew word, meaning hear. Its opening line, Deuteronomy 6:4, reads: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.
2. In the liturgy the Shema is not one verse but three passages: Deuteronomy 6:4 to 9, Deuteronomy 11:13 to 21 and Numbers 15:37 to 41.
3. Jews recite it at shaharit (morning prayer) and ma'ariv (evening prayer). It is traditionally the last thing said before sleep and the words a dying Jew hopes to say.
4. The oneness it declares is not simply that there is one God rather than several. Maimonides read it as absolute unity, a God without parts, without body and without any second beside him.
5. The first passage commands love of God with all the heart, soul and might, which makes the human response part of the statement rather than an addition to it.
6. That same passage tells Jews to teach the words to their children, to bind them as a sign on the hand and between the eyes, and to write them on the doorposts of the house.
7. Those instructions became practice. Tefillin (small leather boxes holding the passages) are worn at weekday morning prayer and the mezuzah holds the same texts on the doorpost, so the doctrine is worn and fixed to the house as well as said.

Holiness and election

1. Kedushah (holiness) means being set apart for God's purposes. Jews hold that God is holy and that Israel is called to reflect that holiness in how it lives.
2. The founding statement is Exodus 19, where God tells the people at Sinai that if they keep the covenant they will be a treasured possession, a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.
3. This is the doctrine usually called election or chosenness. Jewish teaching presents it as a task rather than a privilege, and the task is keeping the b'rit (covenant) through the 613 mitzvot counted by tradition.
4. The prophets press the point hardest. Amos 3:2 has God say: you only have I known of all the families of the earth, therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.
5. Practice states the doctrine every week. At Havdalah, the ceremony closing Shabbat, Jews bless God who separates holy from ordinary, light from darkness, the seventh day from the six days of work.
6. The movements read election differently. Nineteenth-century Reform thinkers recast it as a mission to bring ethical monotheism to the nations, while Mordecai Kaplan and the Reconstructionist prayer books removed chosenness language altogether.

God in history and justice

1. Jews hold that God acts in the history of the covenant people. He is met in events that happened to Israel rather than chiefly in nature or in private vision.
2. Deuteronomy 5 shows this directly. Moses restates the Ten Commandments to the generation about to enter the land, and tells them the covenant at Sinai was made with them, here, alive today.
3. God is also confessed as King and Creator. The Rosh Hashanah liturgy is built around three sections named Malkhuyot, Zikhronot and Shofarot, on God's kingship, God's remembering and the shofar blast.
4. The justice of God is treated as something a Jew may argue with. In Genesis 18:25 Abraham challenges God over Sodom: shall not the Judge of all the earth do justly?
5. Rabbinic language distinguishes middat ha-din, the attribute of strict justice, from middat ha-rachamim, the attribute of mercy. Prayers ask God to rise from the seat of judgement and sit on the seat of mercy.
6. Yom Kippur turns the doctrine into a day. God judges, and teshuvah (repentance and returning) is held to change what the judgement will be.

Maimonides and the Yigdal

1. Moses ben Maimon, known as Maimonides or Rambam and living from 1138 to 1204, set out Thirteen Principles in his commentary on the Mishnah.
2. The first five concern God: that God exists, is one, has no body, is eternal, and alone is to be worshipped.
3. The next four concern revelation: that prophecy is real, that Moses was the greatest of the prophets, that the Torah is from heaven, and that it will not be replaced.
4. The last four concern judgement and hope: that God knows human deeds, rewards and punishes them, will send the Mashiach (Messiah), and will raise the dead.
5. They were contested from the start. Hasdai Crescas and Joseph Albo argued for shorter lists, and no rabbinic body ever formally ratified Maimonides' version.
6. They entered ordinary worship in two forms. Ani Ma'amin, meaning I believe, states each principle in prose, and the Yigdal is a metrical hymn that sets all thirteen to verse.
7. Reform and Liberal prayer books often keep the hymn but adjust its lines on bodily resurrection and on a personal Messiah, which shows how a statement of belief can be inherited and edited at once.

The Holocaust and belief

1. The murder of about six million Jews between 1941 and 1945, called the Shoah in Hebrew, pressed hardest on the belief that God acts justly in the history of his covenant people.
2. There is no single Jewish answer, and the positions below are those of named thinkers rather than the teaching of the community as a whole.
3. Richard Rubenstein, in After Auschwitz of 1966, argued that the God who acts in history could no longer be affirmed, and that Jewish life would have to be grounded in peoplehood instead.
4. Emil Fackenheim answered with what he called the 614th commandment: Jews are forbidden to hand Hitler a posthumous victory by abandoning Judaism.
5. Eliezer Berkovits, in Faith after the Holocaust, drew on the biblical idea of hester panim, the hiding of God's face, arguing that God's restraint is the price of genuine human freedom.
6. Elie Wiesel wrote as a witness rather than a theologian, keeping accusation and prayer in the same breath and declining to settle the question.
7. Some Orthodox thinkers, among them Joseph Soloveitchik, refused to explain the cause at all and directed attention instead to what the survivor is now obliged to do.
8. The argument continues inside worship. Yom HaShoah on 27 Nisan, the memorial prayer El Malei Rachamim and new readings in movement prayer books all mark the event without settling what it means.