God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (37 page)

On Converts and Creeds

So why does Judaism, which affirms one and only one God, abide so many different interpretations of the good (and godly) life? Why are Jews divided today into Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and Humanist branches? Why, at the time of Jesus, were there already so many different types of Jews (Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots)? Why in the pages of the Talmud do Abbaye and Rava, two rabbis who are also fast friends, disagree so frequently, and so fiercely? Why does Judaism, more than any other religion, exemplify what poet e. e. cummings referred to as “whying”?
¹⁴

To begin, Judaism is not a missionary religion. Although there have been times when Jews have attempted to make converts, for the most part Judaism has survived through inheritance, not evangelization. In fact, rabbis traditionally discourage conversions, rebuffing potential converts three times before agreeing to take them in. So there has never been a practical reason for Jews either to define their message to outsiders, or to stay on that message.
¹⁵

In other words, Judaism has no real creed. Excommunications are exceedingly rare, and Jews have never tried to root out heretics by convening the equivalent of the Council of Nicaea or drafting the equivalent of the Nicene Creed.
¹⁶
The
Shema
does function as a creed of sorts, however. This formula, which is recited today in Jewish worship services and has lived for centuries on the lips of Jewish martyrs, begins with a clear affirmation of monotheism: “Hear (
Shema
), O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” It moves immediately from this doctrinal statement, however, to the ritual dimension: “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be upon thy heart; and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thy hand, and they shall be for frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the door-posts of thy house, and upon thy gates” (Deuteronomy 6:4–9). So even the
Shema
points beyond doctrine to practice, underscoring Judaism’s affinity for doing over believing, orthopraxy over orthodoxy.

Orthodoxy was, of course, an obsession of the early Christians who wrote and enforced acceptance of the Nicene Creed. But Jews have rarely given in to the impulse to define and defeat heresy. In fact, Jews got along just fine without a statement of belief until Maimonides (1135–1204) proffered his “Thirteen Principles,” but his quasicreed was controversial and not universally accepted.
¹⁷
So Judaism has always been more about practice than belief. What makes you a Jew is being born a Jew. What keeps you active is participating in the life of the Jewish community—showing up at synagogue, atoning for your sins on Yom Kippur, and honoring your parents by saying the Kaddish prayer for them when they die.

One reason defining orthodoxy and repelling heretics has never been a Jewish preoccupation is that Jews have long seen themselves not only as a people but as a people under threat. Other religions have founders who, by diagnosing the human problem in a new way and offering a novel solution, gather communities around them. With Judaism, however, the community itself was the starting point. The purpose of this tradition was not to solve the human problem but to keep a people together. Jews see themselves in collective terms, as a “holy nation” (Exodus 19:6) chosen by God. And why were they chosen? Not to believe something but to do something—to repair the world (
tikkun olam
). So Jews are knit together more by ritual and ethics than by doctrine.

Most fundamentally, however, Jews are knit together by memory. This memory speaks of one God who is personal but by no means should be understood as a human being. Unlike the Christian God who takes on a human body, the Jewish God stands above and beyond the world He created, which is to say that He is radically transcendent (though never without an immanent, and intimate, dimension). Like Muslims, Jews emphasize the radical qualitative distinction between God and human beings. Unlike Christians, they insist that God is not to be depicted in human form or worshipped in “graven images.” Although the
Tanakh
refers in places to God in almost embarrassingly human terms—He is said to have hands and eyes, to wrap Himself in a prayer shawl, and to put on phylacteries—Jews insist that God is beyond comprehension and description. Even writing the name of God is problematic for many Jews, who write the English word “God” as “G-d” in order to avoid disrespecting the divine when the paper on which that word is printed is thrown away. And so this tradition warns repeatedly against the temptation to confuse our opinions with the wisdom of God: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways” (Isaiah 55:8).

Exile and Return

Given this emphasis on peoplehood, it should not be surprising that the problem in Judaism centers on the community rather than the individual. This problem is exile—distance from God and from where we ought to be. The solution is return—to go back to God and to our true home. The techniques for making this journey are two: to tell the story and follow the law—to remember and to obey.
¹⁸
As a Jewish friend once explained to me, the motivating tragedy in Christianity is the death of Jesus. If Jesus is the Messiah who is supposed to rule the world, why were the rulers of the world able to kill Him? The motivating tragedy in Judaism is exile. If God is all-powerful and we are God’s people, why aren’t we in our land? And what are we to do elsewhere?

The Jewish God is a “God of movement,” and the Jewish people are forever on the move.
¹⁹
But their epic journey from garden paradise to desert wilderness to New Jerusalem is not yet complete, because the problem of exile is chronic. So the Jewish people live with hope for the place to which they are going, and with lamentations over the places they have left behind. Some hope for a messiah (literally, “the anointed,” which is to say, king), but this messiah has not yet come. Neither has the peace and prosperity his coming will usher in. So it is the job of the Jewish people to make things ready and to make things right—to “repair the world” and put an end to exile. However, until they complete this task (or the messiah does it for them), they live in the awkward middle space of almost and not yet.

The paradigmatic story for this pattern of exile and return centers on the destruction of the first Jerusalem Temple in 586
B.C.E.
According to the Tanakh, after the death of Moses, who never made it to the Promised Land, Joshua led the Israelites into Canaan. King Solomon later built the Jerusalem Temple, which served as the sacred center of Israelite religion, the proto-Jewish tradition out of which Judaism as we know it would grow. Israelite religion (also known as biblical Judaism) was a priestly tradition focused on sacrifice. The fact that the prophets of the Tanakh fumed so furiously against its feasts and sacrifices as distractions from the real work of doing justice only indicates how central these temple-based practices had become. In 586
B.C.E.
, however, the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem and razed the temple. Or, as the prophet known as Second Isaiah put it, “Thy holy cities are become a wilderness, Zion is become a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation. Our holy and our beautiful house, where our fathers praised Thee, is burned with fire; and all our pleasant things are laid waste” (Isaiah 64:9–10).

The Babylonians also trounced Judah, the southern kingdom that would later lend Judaism its name, and sent many Israelites into exile in Babylon (in modern-day Iraq). While in exile, these refugees were separated not only from their promised homeland but also from their monarchy, their sacrificial rites, and their God, who was said to reside in the temple’s “Holy of Holies”—an inner sanctum so sacred it could be entered only by the High Priest and only on Yom Kippur. This exilic experience led to the development of the synagogue as a place of prayer and study and to the widespread adoption of portable practices such as circumcision that the Israelites could take with them as they moved. This tragedy also led the Israelites to see that God’s covenant with them was conditional. Yes, they were a people chosen by God, and that meant He would bless them if they walked in the path He had set before them. But it also meant that He would punish them if they deviated from that path.

After the Babylonians were themselves defeated in 538
B.C.E.
by the Persian king Cyrus, the Jews (as the Israelites were now called) were allowed to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple. Most did not return. But those who did got to tell the story. They told their story in the five books of Moses, which were codified in the fifth century
B.C.E.
and read by Ezra—a Second Moses, some say—in Jerusalem’s Second Temple, which was dedicated in 515
B.C.E
. And the story they told was one of exile and return—a pattern that now provides, in the words of Judaic Studies expert Jacob Neusner “the structure of all Judaism(s).”
²⁰

This theme announces itself in the first chapters of Genesis, when the first three human beings are punished by exile—Adam and Eve for eating the forbidden fruit and Cain for killing his brother. It reappears in the story of Abraham who follows God’s instruction to wander west from his home in Ur in Mesopotamia toward modern-day Palestine and, as God puts it, “unto the land that I will show thee” (Genesis 12:1). It surfaces again in the story of Moses, who leads God’s people out of Egypt and across the Red Sea only to find himself wandering for forty years in the wilderness of the Sinai Desert. Neither Abraham nor Moses arrives in the Promised Land.

In 70
C.E.
, all but the Western Wall of the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans, and the Jews were sent once again into exile. Together these exilic experiences prompted a literature of longing and turned the Jewish community into a “people of the book.” The book of Psalms gives voice to this longing, recalling a people who lay down by the rivers of Babylon and wept as they remembered Zion—a people who asked, as immigrants the world over continue to ask today, “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” (Psalms 137:4). Tears also drop off the pages of the Talmud, where we encounter the figure of the messiah. With their people scattered from Egypt to Babylon, and the great kingdom of David a distant memory, the Jews begin to hope for a redeemer with the might to end their exile, to gather the Jewish people back home, and to make of that home a heaven on earth.

For roughly two millennia after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, this theme of exile and return lived more in the imagination than on the land. The founding in 1948 of the state of Israel, whose Declaration of Independence speaks of a people “forcibly exiled from their land” yet never ceasing to “pray and hope for their return to it,” brought this story down to earth.
²¹
Now it was possible, as it had not been for centuries, for Jews to live in and govern their homeland. As in the time of the Babylonian conquest, today some Jews choose to remain in exile—to make common cause with Moses the wanderer rather than David the settler, and even to reject the distinction between homeland and diaspora altogether. Others choose to make
aliyah
, namely, to put Israel under their feet instead of merely in their hearts. The temple has not been rebuilt, however. Though Orthodox Jews pray three times a day for its restoration, the land on which it once stood now houses the Dome of the Rock, the world’s oldest Muslim building. So Jews remain a “people of the book” rather than a “people of the temple.”

This exile and return theme also leavens much Jewish art and literature. But its motifs of desire and fulfillment, dislocation and reconciliation, destruction and restoration resonate far beyond Judaism, in diasporic communities worldwide and wherever immigrants struggle to sing an old song in a new land. Exile and return is also acted out in Jewish families every year during the holidays and whenever the touchy topic of intermarriage arises. (“Is my Jewish daughter going into exile by marrying a Protestant?” “Will her children return?”) It informs individual lives, making sense of our own dramas of God’s concealing and revealing, our estrangements from God and homecomings to Him. After six million Jews died at the hands of Hitler and the Third Reich in the Holocaust, many Jewish thinkers asked where God was when the Nazis turned on the gas chambers in Dachau and Auschwitz—whether God, too, had gone into exile. Throughout their history, however, Jews have refused to see their story merely through a lachrymose lens. While this tradition does give voice to longing for what was, and desire for what will be, it also speaks of celebrating life as it is right now:
L’Chaim
(“To life!”).
²²

Liberation and Law

While Jews now live between exile and return, they also live between liberation and law. In the Exodus narrative, Pharaoh takes the Israelites into slavery in Egypt and murders their male sons. One of these sons, Moses, escapes due to the compassion of Pharaoh’s daughter. As an adult, Moses returns to command Pharaoh to “Let my people go.” When the hard-hearted Pharaoh refuses, God sends down ten plagues. Eventually, Pharaoh sees the errors of his ways and agrees to let the Israelites go. But as they are fleeing, he changes his mind, sending his armies after them. At the Red Sea, it looks as if Moses and the Israelites are trapped. But God parts the waters, allowing them to cross over into freedom. He then commands the waters to return, drowning the Egyptians.