IB World Religions 6.5.1. a Holy People: History Relived, Diaspora and Cultural Variation Notes

6.5.1. A Holy People: History Relived, Diaspora and Cultural Variation

Belonging to a holy people

1. Jewish religious experience is corporate before it is individual. The primary unit is Am Yisrael, the people of Israel, and a Jew's experience is first of all an experience of belonging to it.
2. Kedushah (holiness) here means being set apart by obligation rather than raised above others. What marks the people out is what it is required to do.
3. The markers are practical and daily: Shabbat, kashrut, the Hebrew calendar, b'rit milah and the Hebrew of prayer.
4. Worship itself assumes the group. Many prayers need a minyan (quorum), which Orthodox practice counts as ten men over thirteen and which Reform and Liberal congregations count without regard to gender.
5. Shevuot 39a states the principle that all Israel are responsible for one another, and the phrase is quoted constantly in communal life.
6. This is why many Jews describe Judaism as peoplehood as much as faith. Someone who does not believe is still counted a Jew and still welcomed into the community.

History relived

1. The central Jewish religious experience is history interpreted religiously. God is met in what happened to the people rather than chiefly in nature or in private vision.
2. The Pesach Haggadah makes the claim explicit, instructing that in every generation a person must see themselves as though they personally came out of Egypt.
3. The Hebrew phrase is b'chol dor va-dor, in every generation, and the Haggadah says that God brought us out, not that he brought them out.
4. The seder is built to produce that effect, using matzah, maror (bitter herbs), reclining at the table and the questions asked by the youngest child.
5. Sukkot puts families in temporary booths recalling the wilderness, and Shavuot marks the giving of Torah at Sinai with the community hearing the Ten Commandments as though standing there.
6. Later deliverances were absorbed into the same pattern at Purim and Hanukkah, and the twentieth century added Yom HaShoah and Yom HaAtzmaut.
7. Remembering is itself commanded. The verb zakhor, remember, recurs through the Torah, and the festival calendar is the machinery that carries the command out.

Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mizrahi

1. Ashkenazim are Jews whose ancestry runs through the Rhineland and then central and eastern Europe. Sephardim trace theirs through the Iberian peninsula before the expulsion of 1492, and afterwards through the Ottoman lands and North Africa.
2. Mizrahim are the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa, most of whose communities left Arab countries in the years after 1948.
3. The differences between them are cultural and customary rather than doctrinal. All accept the same Torah, the same Talmud and the same halakhah.
4. Worship differs audibly. Each follows its own nusach (liturgical rite), and melodies and Torah cantillation differ markedly between the traditions.
5. Hebrew is pronounced differently, and modern Israeli Hebrew broadly follows the Sephardi pattern. Custom differs too, which is why kitniyot (legumes) are avoided at Pesach by Ashkenazim and eaten by most Sephardim.
6. Each carried its own everyday language, Yiddish among Ashkenazim, Ladino among Sephardim and Judeo-Arabic among Mizrahim. Israel's Chief Rabbinate has both an Ashkenazi and a Sephardi chief rabbi, which builds the parallel traditions into the state.

Diaspora and homeland

1. Diaspora is a Greek word meaning scattering, and it names Jewish communities living outside the land of Israel.
2. Hebrew has two words for the condition. Galut means exile and carries a theological charge, while tefutzot means dispersion and is more neutral.
3. Exile is read religiously in two ways at once, as a consequence of failure and as a vocation, since the people is held to carry Torah among the nations.
4. The major dispersals are remembered specifically: the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles, the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the expulsion from Spain in 1492, the Shoah, and the departure from Arab lands after 1948.
5. Diaspora conditions produced enormous local variation in food, music, dress and language, while the shared calendar and shared texts kept distant communities recognisable to one another.
6. Movements read the condition differently. Classical Reform rejected exile language and described diaspora life as a mission to the nations, while Orthodox liturgy keeps the prayers for ingathering unchanged.
7. The relationship changed after 1948. Many Jews now experience the land as somewhere they can reach rather than only pray towards, and the balance between Israel and the diaspora is argued over inside every movement.

Kabbalah and mystical experience

1. Kabbalah, a word meaning receiving, is the main stream of Jewish mysticism, concerned with the hidden life of God and the soul's part in it. The earlier Merkavah (chariot) and Heikhalot (palaces) literature was built on the vision in Ezekiel 1.
2. The central text is the Zohar, published in thirteenth-century Spain by Moses de Leon and attributed by tradition to the second-century sage Shimon bar Yochai.
3. Two ideas anchor the system: Ein Sof, the infinite beyond all description, and the ten sefirot, the channels through which God is held to act in the world.
4. Isaac Luria, working in sixteenth-century Safed, taught tzimtzum, God's self-contraction to make room for a world, followed by the shattering of the vessels meant to hold the divine light.
5. That teaching made every mitzvah cosmically consequential, since each is said to raise a fallen spark, and it is one root of the phrase tikkun olam.
6. Hasidism, founded by the Baal Shem Tov in eighteenth-century Poland, brought mystical devotion within reach of ordinary Jews through devekut (cleaving to God), joy, song and dance.
7. Study was traditionally restricted, with authorities requiring maturity, marriage and prior Talmudic learning. Kabbalistic texts are now widely published, and popularised versions sold to a general audience are criticised by many Jewish scholars.

Assimilation and its questions

1. Assimilation means absorption into the surrounding society to the point where distinctive Jewish practice and identity fade away.
2. The question became urgent with emancipation from the late eighteenth century, which opened citizenship, universities and professions that had been closed.
3. Responses divide sharply. Samson Raphael Hirsch argued for Torah im Derekh Eretz, full observance combined with participation in wider society.
4. Haredi communities answered instead by limiting contact and building separate institutions, while Reform Judaism answered that adaptation is itself a faithful response.
5. Chaim Potok's novel The Chosen, published in 1967, dramatises the tension through Danny Saunders, son of a Hasidic rebbe, and Reuven Malter, son of a Modern Orthodox scholar, in 1940s Brooklyn.
6. Its conflict is not belief against unbelief but two ways of being faithful, and Danny's decision to study psychology is presented as costly rather than as an escape.
7. Communities today track the question through intermarriage rates, day school attendance and synagogue membership, and answer it with schools, summer camps, Israel programmes and kiruv (outreach) work. The argument is internal to Judaism and remains unsettled.