God Without Religion
Page 15
Judaism Developing Features of a Creed Religion?
What are these “basic Jewish beliefs”? As an essentially communal religion Judaism has no established or official set of beliefs or principles of faith. Maimonides’s Thirteen Principles are accorded a good deal of respect and are recited in most Jewish religious services, but they were only formulated in the 12th century CE, so are not really very ancient in terms of Jewish history. Also, they are a compilation of Maimonides’s personal beliefs and therefore include some beliefs that are not shared by all Jews. Among these are the following beliefs:
The Pentateuch (the first five books of the Jewish Bible) was dictated to Moses by God;
The coming of the Jewish Messiah;
The resurrection of the dead.
There is no religious “test” for Jews and there is no compulsion to accept any particular set of beliefs. However, as we have seen in connection with the accusations of “heresy” levelled against Rabbi Louis Jacobs and more recently against Chief Rabbi Sacks himself, Judaism seems to be developing more and more features of a creed religion, with orthodox and ultra-orthodox rabbis identifying the religion with beliefs such as:
The superiority of Judaism over all other religions;
The divine authorship of the Pentateuch (the Five Books of Moses);
Divine authorship of the “Oral Law” as well as of the written law;
The literal truth of the Jewish Bible.
The idea that God dictated the Pentateuch, or Five Books of Moses, to Moses on Mount Sinai is difficult enough to accept. Moses must have been a very fast shorthand writer indeed! But the belief that Moses received the “Oral Law” as well places just too much of a strain on credibility. The fact that the “Oral Law” only surfaced in written form in the shape of the Talmud many centuries later shows that the contents of these rabbinic compilations date from a period long after the destruction of the Temple when the rabbis had taken over the religion.
Acceptance of these extreme positions as core Jewish beliefs inevitably makes Judaism more intolerant than it was in ancient times and also more intolerant than is normally the case with communal religions. Hence the title of this chapter. Judaism is now at the cross-roads between remaining a true communal religion and becoming a hybrid between a communal and a creed religion resulting in the worst features of both.
Cheating God
Some of the rabbinic injunctions are so pettifogging as to be amusing. Rabbinic law insists on strict observance of some extremely literal interpretations of Biblical commandments. For example, the injunction in the Ten Commandments against working on the Sabbath is interpreted as including a prohibition on the carrying of any object from one house or “precinct” to another. The rabbis then ingeniously got around this awkward problem — which was entirely of their own making — by allowing the construction of an eruv, or ritual enclosure, often made simply of a few strands of wire, connecting different premises together to create a virtual single precinct, within which carrying was now permissible! The idea that God could be cheated in this way is only slightly less ludicrous than the idea that God had decreed that even a prayer book could not be carried in public on the Sabbath in the first place.
The Worst of Both Worlds
If Judaism is to be burdened with the need to accept fundamentalist beliefs such as these, then intolerance will have captured the very heart of the religion. This rotten heart is the worst feature of creed religions but there is absolutely no need for it to infect communal religions, which are mostly free from it.
Judaism is now quite literally at the crossroads. By burdening itself with pettifogging beliefs Judaism is in danger of going down the road of a creed religion like Christianity while lacking Christianity’s great strengths, namely ease of conversion and undemanding practices. By contrast, orthodox Judaism combines pettifogging beliefs and elaborate rules with a negative attitude towards conversion.
Judaism, the oldest and by far the smallest of the three main monotheistic religions, is in a more precarious position than either Christianity or Islam. Today Judaism is more divided than ever, conversions are discouraged by most orthodox authorities, and some of the most orthodox denominations even refuse to recognise the state of Israel. The long-term future of Israel is seriously under threat, and there is no sign of reconciliation among the fragmented Jewish groups around the world.
This fragmentation and mutual hostility of the different Jewish sects in the modern world is not the sort of thing we would expect of a communal religion. Because communal religions do not normally have a fixed set of beliefs, they generally cannot and do not label anyone as a heretic. However, Judaism is no longer a typical communal religion in this regard.
The internal fissures suffered by Judaism in the modern world resemble the splits typically found in creed religions, like that between Catholics and Protestants or between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims. But the weakness Judaism suffers as a result of this fragmentation is exacerbated by the reluctance of orthodox rabbis to allow conversion to Judaism and their refusal to recognise conversions performed by non-orthodox rabbis. As a result, Judaism’s small size (with its main growth deriving ironically from the high birthrate of the ultra-orthodox) places it at a severe disadvantage in a world in which success is increasingly a numbers game.
Israeli Irony
The final irony is that Israel, the only Jewish state in the world, is not helped in this numbers game by the high birthrate of the ultra-orthodox community in its midst, which at the time of writing accounts for about 10% of the population and is expected to grow to more than 20% of Israel’s Jewish population by the year 2028. In March 2014 a law was passed ending the exemption from military service enjoyed by thousands of ultra-orthodox seminary students, though it remains to be seen how effectively the law can be enforced. Moreover, some of the ultra-orthodox groupings are overtly hostile to the very existence of a Jewish state on the ground that the Messiah has not yet come! Some ultra-orthodox rabbis have even been prepared to join Israel’s bitterest enemy, Iran, in condemning Israel and in denying the Holocaust.
At the time of writing Israel defines itself as a “Jewish and democratic” state, but the government of Benjamin Netanyahu wishes to change that to “the national homeland of the Jewish people”, which is in effect an attempt to return to the communal model of ancient times.225 But this will undoubtedly be strongly resisted, because at present Israel allows Christians and Muslims to enjoy full citizenship. At the time of writing Israeli Muslims already account for about 20.7% of the population of Israel (not counting the West Bank or the Gaza strip) and have a far higher birthrate than the Israeli Jews.
As an essentially communal religion Judaism should be tolerant of other religions, and Israeli Muslims have full rights of citizenship and even their own political parties. But, with the high Muslim birthrate, this leaves Israel vulnerable to takeover by its own Muslim Arab citizens. In short, Judaism is in a much weaker position than the two main communal religions in the world today, Indian Hinduism and Japanese Shinto. (See Chapters 4 and 7.)
It is no doubt in order to reverse this trend that Netanyahu’s “Jewish State Bill” has been put forward, but it appears unlikely to succeed.
Review of Chapter Five
Judaism began life about three thousand years ago as a communal religion.
It had a priestly class but no clear-cut creed or belief in an afterlife, or even a distinctive name.
Ancient Judaism was tolerant of other religions and was not interested in converting non-Jews to Judaism.
There are only four episodes in the Hebrew Bible with any possible relevance to conversion. These concern: Ruth, Ezra, Dinah and Jonah — and of these only Ruth can be considered as a case of conversion.
Can the Jewish hostility to the Amalekites be regarded as a religious conflict or as a purely national and political one? The latter seems more likely as far as Biblical times are concerned, but there is a problem with the fact that three of the 6
13 commandments still supposedly incumbent on Jews today relate to the Amalekites.
As long as the second Temple stood (i.e. until 70 CE), all Jews were allowed to worship there and there was toleration across all Jewish denominations, despite the major differences between them.
In modern times, however, Jewish diversification has developed into fragmentation and mutual intolerance.
One of the ugliest chapters in the history of British Jewry is the “Rabbi Louis Jacobs saga” concerning the intolerance of orthodox Judaism towards the “Masorti” (conservative) wing of the religion.
The basis of this intolerance was doctrinal: Rabbi Jacobs had expressed a “heretical” view.
Reform, Liberal, Progressive and Masorti conversions are not recognised by the Orthodox United Synagogue in Britain.
In 1993 Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks went so far as to write: “Reform Jews are Jews, but Reform Judaism is not Judaism.”
However, Chief Rabbi Sacks adopted a more tolerant attitude towards non-Jewish religions, writing in Dignity of Difference published in 2002: “No one creed has a monopoly of spiritual truth” — a typical communal religion attitude of toleration. However, this remark was deleted when Sacks was faced with criticism from a number of orthodox rabbis.
In general, British orthodox Judaism has moved a step closer to becoming a hybrid between a communal and a creed religion.
Although this move towards hybridisation is a recent development, there are some much older precedents, such as Maimonides’s “Thirteen Principles of Faith” compiled in the 12th century CE, which, although generally recited in the synagogue service, has never reached the status of a creed or a religious “test”.
Besides developing something of a creed, orthodox Judaism has long adopted highly literal interpretations of practical commandments, notably the prohibition of work on the Sabbath, which has come to be used as a test of orthodoxy.
These features have turned Judaism into something of a hybrid combining the worst of both worlds — with the internal fissures of a creed religion coupled with the numerical weakness resulting from the typical aversion of communal religions to conversion.
These problems have impacted on Israel so as to weaken it.
But there is no reason to think that if Israel didn’t exist the various Islamic states in the area would be likely to coexist harmoniously.
CHAPTER SIX
Is Christianity True?
As a creed religion Christianity, and every individual Christian denomination or grouping, claims a monopoly of “the truth”, acceptance of which vouchsafes “salvation” to its adherents. This belief manifested itself in intolerance of other religions and also in the persecution of some Christian groups by other Christian groups. Most branches of Christianity are now much more tolerant of other religions and of one another than ever before, without however giving up their claim to have a lock on “the truth”. But is there any truth to the Christian claims?
Christianity is the world’s biggest religion, with nearly 2.4 billion adherents.226 It is often lumped together with Judaism and Islam as a monotheistic religion. This, however, as we have seen, is a rather superficial classification. For, although Christianity derives from, or rather was a breakaway from, Judaism, it is a fundamentally different type of religion from Judaism. While Judaism is in its essence a communal religion, Christianity is a creed religion.
Jesus as “the Christ”
The central tenet of the Christian creed is the belief that a particular man who lived two thousand years ago was not a mere mortal but was “the Christ”, the Son of God who died for the sins of mankind and who forms part of a divine Trinity. There are a number of versions of the creed, but the central tenet is summed up in several verses of the New Testament. For example: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”227 And: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father but by me.”228
It is not surprising that these comforting and uplifting messages have attracted millions of converts to Christianity over the centuries. They offer the individual a sense of security and the prospect of salvation and eternal life. Judaism is much less attractive, and as a communal religion it is geared to the nation or the community rather than to the individual. And, while even today Judaism (particularly orthodox Judaism) does its best to discourage prospective converts and makes conversion an ordeal, Christianity goes out of its way to attract converts, often by means of energetic missionary activity.
The Christian Creed
Most Christian denominations have a creed, or confession of faith, which lies at the heart of that denomination and is generally recited at a pivotal point in the church service and also in catechisms and for the purposes of baptism. The so-called Apostles’ Creed is one of the most widely used creeds, being used, among others, by the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists and Congregationalists. Here is the wording of the English translation of the Apostles’ Creed as it appears in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
I believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.
He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.
Under Pontius Pilate, He was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again.
He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.229
No fewer than six of the twelve articles relate to Jesus. The specific beliefs are:
That Jesus is the Christ, “our Lord” and the Son of God;
That Jesus was fathered by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary;
That Jesus was crucified;
That Jesus rose from the dead;
That there will be a “second coming” when Jesus “will come again to judge the living and the dead”.
Only one of these beliefs is factually correct: that Jesus was executed by crucifixion. The rest are either demonstrably false or are speculative. Three of the articles begin “I believe in…” They are:
I believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth;
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord; and
I believe in the Holy Spirit.
These three articles together establish a belief in the Trinity, a three-in-one form of godhead, which may raise doubts about whether Christianity really is a monotheistic religion at all. And, when it comes to Jesus, most Christian denominations require their adherents not only to believe that he was born of a virgin, that he rose from the dead and that there will be a second coming, but they also require belief in Jesus: “I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.”
The contrast with Judaism could not be starker. Judaism rests on no one figure — not even Moses, who can lay claim to no more elevated a title than that of prophet, an appellation which he shares with a score of other Jewish leaders and teachers. What is more, neither Moses nor any of the other Jewish biblical figures — including the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob — is ever portrayed in the Jewish scriptures as anything but fallible, frail and highly imperfect.
Jesus’s Teachings
Jesus was born and died a Jew. So how did this sea-change come about? The short answer is that it came about not as a result of anything done by Jesus himself but by dint of the major makeover and public relations exercise on the part of Paul, who effectively created Christianity and managed to establish a large following among non-Jews.
Some of Jesus’s teachings were at variance w
ith standard Jewish doctrines in his own day. For example, when criticised by Pharisees for allowing his disciples to pluck ears of corn on the sabbath, Jesus retorted, “The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.”230
Orthodox Judaism would have done well to adopt this eminently sensible position itself. Orthodox Judaism has a much more narrowly pedantic and indeed irrational attitude to such rules, and never more so than at the present time. (See Chapter 5 for more on this.)
Some of Jesus’s other teachings were less practical. His injunctions to “turn the other cheek” and “love your enemy” were clearly intended to contrast with the “eye for an eye” and “love your neighbour” doctrines of mainstream Judaism and to show that Jesus’s movement was more humanitarian. And the same goes for the well-known exhortation, “And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.”231 If these teachings were indeed preached by Jesus — because none of them are mentioned by Paul — they certainly have not been practised by the Christian churches in the two millennia since Jesus’s death.