One-third of our Western civilization bears the
mark of its Jewish ancestry. What lifted the Jews from obscurity to
permanent religious greatness was their passion for meaning.
A. Meaning in God.
From a very early date, possibly from the very
beginning of the biblical record, the Jews were monotheists.
The supreme achievement of Jewish thought was
not in its monotheism as such, but in the character it ascribed to the God
it intuited as One. God is a God of righteousness, whose loving-kindness is
from everlasting to everlasting and whose tender mercies are in all his
works.
B. Meaning in Creation.
Judaism affirms the world's goodness, arriving
at that conclusion through its assumption that God created it. "In the
beginning God created the heavens and the earth" and pronounced it to be
good.
To affirm that existence is God-created is to
affirm its unimpeachable worth.
The Semitically originated religions emerge as
exceptional in insisting that human beings are ineradicably body as well as
spirit and that this coupling is not a liability.
C. Meaning in Human Existence.
The striking feature of the Jewish view of
human nature is that without blinking at its frailty, it went on to
affirm its unspeakable grandeur. We are a blend of dust and divinity.
Human beings, once created, make or break
themselves, forging their own destinies through their decisions.
People are God's beloved children.
The ingredients of the most creatively
meaningful image of human existence that the mind can conceive - grandeur,
sin, freedom, divine parentage; it is difficult to find a flaw in this
assessment.
D Meaning in History.
1. For the Bible, history is neither Hinduism
maya, illusion or a Greek circular process of nature; it is the arena
of God's purposive activity.
2. Second, if contexts are crucial for life, so
is collective action; social action.
3. Third, nothing in history happens
accidentally; God shapes each sequence as a teaching experience for his
people.
4. Finally, all events are important but
not equally important. Each opportunity is unique, but some are decisive.
For India, human destiny lies outside history altogether. Judaism, by
contrast laid the groundwork for social protest. It is in the lands
influenced by the Jewish historical perspective that the chief thrusts for
social betterment have occurred.
E. Meaning in Morality.
Without moral constraints, human relations
would become as snarled as traffic in the Chicago loop if everyone drove at
will. The Jewish formulation of "those wise restraints that make men free"
is contained in her Law. The Hebrew Bible contains no less than 613
commandments that regulate human behavior. Four of these will suffice for
our purposes: the four ethical precepts of the Ten Commandments, for it is
through these that Hebraic morality has had its greatest impact.
Appropriated by Christianity and Islam, four of
the Ten Commandments constitute the moral foundation of most of the
Western world. There are four danger zones in human life that can cause
unlimited trouble if they get out of hand:
1. Force - You can bicker and fight, but
killing within the in-group will not be permitted, for it instigates blood
feuds that shred community. Therefore thou shalt not murder.
2. Wealth - As for possessions, you may make
your pile as large as you please and be shrewd and cunning in enterprise.
One thing, though, you may not do, and that is pilfer directly off someone
else's pile, for this outrages the sense of fair play and builds animosities
that become ungovernable. Therefore thou shalt not steal.
3. Sex - You can be a rounder, flirtatious,
even promiscuous, and though we do not comment such behavior, we will not
get the law after you. But at one point we draw the line: Sexual indulgence
of married persons outside the nuptial bond will not be allowed, for it
rouses passions the community cannot tolerate. Therefore thou shalt not
commit adultery.
4. Speech - You may dissemble and equivocate,
but there is one time when we require that you tell the truth, and nothing
but the truth. If a dispute reaches such proportions as to be brought before
a tribunal, on such occasions the judges must know what happened. If you lie
then, while under oath to tell the truth, the penalty will be severe. Thou
shalt not bear false witness.
F. Meaning in Justice.
It is to a remarkable group of men we call the
prophets more than to any others that Western civilization owes its
convictions (1) that the future of any people depends in large part on the
justice of its social order, and (2) that individuals are responsible
for the social structures of their society as well as for their direct
personal dealings.
Whereas the Pre-Writing Prophets Such as Elijah
and Elisha challenged individuals the Writing Prophets such as Isaiah and
Jeremiah challenged corruptions in the social order and oppressive
institutions.
Thanks to the Prophets, what other nations
would have interpreted as simply a power squeeze, the Jews saw as God's
warning to clean up their national life: establish justice throughout the
land, or be destroyed.
Stated abstractly, the Prophetic Principle can
be put as follows: The prerequisite of political stability is social
justice, for it is in the nature of things that injustice will not endure.
Stated theologically the point reads: God has
high standards. God will not put up forever with exploitation, corruption,
and mediocrity.
One thing is common to all the Jewish prophets:
the conviction that every human being, simply by virtue of his or her
humanity, is a child of God and therefore in possession of rights that even
kings must respect. Wealth and splendor count for nothing compared with
purity, justice, and mercy.
G. Meaning in Suffering.
From the eighth to the sixth centuries B. C.,
during which Israel and Judah tottered before the aggressive power of
Syria, Assyria, Egypt, and Babylon, the prophets found meaning in their
predicament by seeing it as God's way of underscoring the demand for
righteousness.
God was using Israel's enemies against her. The
experience of defeat and exile was teaching the Jews the true worth of
freedom.
Another lesson was that those who remain
faithful in adversity will be vindicated.
Stated abstractly, the deepest meaning the Jews
found in their Exile was the meaning of vicarious suffering: meaning that
enters lives that are willing to endure pain that others might be spared it.
"the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all."
H. Meaning in Messianism.
The West, influenced by the
Greek partiality for abstract reason, emphasizes theology and creed, the
East has approached religion through ritual and narrative.
Ritual plays a part in life
that nothing else can fill. In Judaism it aims to hallow life - ideally,
all life.
The name for the right
approach to life and the world is piety. The secret of piety consists in
seeing the entire world as belonging to God and reflecting God's glory.
The Jews preserve this sense
of the sanctity of all things through tradition. Judaism the most
historically minded of all religions finds holiness and history
inseparable.
The basic manual for the
hallowing of life is the Law, the first five books of the Bible.
The Jews in their interpretation of the
major areas of human experience arrived at a more profound grasp of
meaning than any of their Mediterranean neighbors; a grasp that in its
essentials has not been surpassed.
The Jew's say they did not reach these
insight on their own. They were revealed to them.
For the Jews God revealed himself first and
foremost in actions - not words but deeds. It was through miracles,
divine intervention.
God took the imitative.
The God that the Exodus disclosed was
powerful and a God of goodness and love. A God who was intensely
concerned with human affairs. It followed that God would want people to
be good as well.
Finally, suffering must carry significance
because it was unthinkable that a God who had miraculously saved his
people would ever abandon them completely. All this took shape for
the Jews around the idea of the covenant.
Yahweh would continue to bless the
Israelites if they, for their part, would honor the laws they had been
given.
The idea that a universal god decided that
the divine nature should be uniquely and incomparably disclosed to a
single people is among the most difficult notions to take seriously in
the entire study of religion.
The Jews did not see themselves as singled
out for privileges. They were chosen to serve, and to suffer the trials
that service would often exact.
Isaiah's doctrine of vicarious suffering
meant that the Jews were elected to shoulder a suffering that would
otherwise have been distributed more widely.
It is the doctrine that God's doings can
focus like a burning glass on particular times, places, and peoples - in
the interest, to be sure, of intentions that embrace human beings
universally.
Judaism cannot be reduced to its biblical
period. In 70 A.D. the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem and the
focus of Judaism shifted to Rabbinic Judaism - from the sacrificial rite
of the Temple to the study of the Torah and its accompanying Oral
Tradition in academies and synagogues around the world.
Today, almost two thousand years later,
there are four great sectors of Judaism that still constitute its
spiritual anatomy - faith, observance, culture, and nation.
The reasons for the establishment of the
modern of Israel in 1948 present complex problems. Without presuming to
answer these problems, we can appreciate the burdens they place on the
conscience of this exceptionally conscientious people.