Month: May 2019

The Virus of The Politics of Faith

Judaism, the religion of a people that has survived thousands of years and untold adversaries, is now in crisis mode. Antisemitism, its chronic foe- while ever present- is not the main culprit. It suffers from a malignant alchemy of external freedom and internal obstruction. The source of the jeopardy is buried deep within the early history of rabbinic Judaism.

Prior to 1800 there was but a single Jewish religious denomination. The amount of commitment to its faith varied with individuals and communities. However, the religion did dutifully serve its people, homeless from the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in70 C.E. and confined in the ghettos of the world, by locking out potentially invasive and destructive ideas, practices and temptations.

The Change

The cultural dynamics of Europe and the Middle East were altered in the early 1800s by Napoleon, who defeated feudalism, ended the Holy Roman Empire and opened the gates of the ghettos for those who wished to leave. For traditional Judaism, the exit from the ghettos was a Trojan Horse. Life was altered significantly for those Jews who exited to live in neighboring cities and communities. They challenged the traditional constraints of the rabbinical oral law (the Talmud, codified and transcribed from circa. 200 C.E.-550 C.E.) as being too limiting and inappropriate to their lives. As genetic Jews, they did not aspire to leave Judaism, but simply make it more relevant to how they lived.

A New Face of Judaism

A significant result in Germany and elsewhere was the development of Reform Judaism, later to be followed elsewhere by Conservative Judaism and other more liberal denominations. It is easy to place the blame for religious fragmentation on traditional Judaism which conducted itself in accordance with a fixed Talmudic code established during the 6th century A.D. The blame, however, must be shared by Reform Judaism which failed to seek and achieve change within the system but simply created for itself ”Judaism de novo”.

The Reform Movements are Judaism’s exit doors to unilateral assimilation, which happens when a Jew no longer identifies himself as a Jew, but his gentile neighbors continue to do so. This occurred dramatically in Germany in the 1930s and the 1940s. Even today, 500 years after the Spanish Inquis`ition, descendants of the forced converts to Catholicism are afraid to identify their origin for fear of rejection or exclusion from their current religious community. How tragic is it for Jews to abandon their birthright and the nobility of their mission (Tikkun Olam) only be identified by the scourge of antisemitism.

According to Wikipedia, approximately 38% of all of the Jews in the world live in the United States. Since the year 2000, 58% of all American Jews marry Gentiles. The Pew Research Center reports that nearly 48% of all of Jewish millennials have only one Jewish parent. This loss to the Jewish Community is not as a result of pogroms; forced conversions; or even on a battlefield defending the State of Israel. It is a casualty of a self-inflicted wound which occurred when traditional Judaism asserted that the rabbinical opinions of the 6th Century C.E. Talmud were inspired by God and delivered to Moses at Sinai. A deified Talmud stopped, in its tracks, the development of Judaism and prevented acceptance of different opinions and the accommodation of the Torah to modern life.

The Torah (The Scroll)

Traditional Judaism teaches that the contents of the Written Torah, or Pentateuch (The Five Books of Moses) was delivered to Moses during his lifetime for instruction to the Jewish people. That is an essential tenet of Judaism. What is not explained, is just how in the 13^th Century B.C. E., the era of Moses’ lifetime, the precise language of God’s instruction to Moses was transcribed for posterity. The modern Written Torah (Old Testament Bible) has over 400 pages, and 600,000 characters of textual material. Since Moses lived in a “papyrus era”, there is a question as to how God’s instruction to Moses remained intact and unaltered from his lifetime circa 1280 B.C.E. to that of Ezra circa 474 B.C.E. when history and archaeology ascribe the assembly and canonization of the Five Books of Moses. Some modern historians suggest that these books had been written by several different authors. Nevertheless, the Torah is the written constitution of the Jewish People and is mutable only by God.

The Second Temple

The first Temple -The Temple of Solomon- was destroyed in 586 B.C.E. by the Babylonians who carried off many Jews with them into exile. In 515 B.C.E. after the Persians defeated the Babylonians, they released the Hebrew exiles to go home and reconstruct a temple on the site of the original Temple Mount. This was done under the direction of Ezra and Nehemiah sent from Babylon to oversee the task.

Necessity for the Development of a Legal System

It soon became obvious that a Council or Assembly was necessary to apply the laws of the Torah to a flourishing Jewish community. This was accomplished by an integrated Sanhedrin System in which each city could appoint a lesser Sanhedrin comprised of 23judges. The nation, however, had one supreme or Great Sanhedrin, comprising 71 members, which took appeals from the lesser courts and which decided issues of national import.

Since the instruction of the Torah came directly from God to Moses, it was immutable and could not be challenged or altered. All subsequent articulation of Jewish law had to flow from the Torah or, at the very least, not be in conflict with it. However, the sages of the Second Temple, the Tannaim soon recognized that a Torah comprised largely of historical information, commandments and ritualistic prescriptions required interpretation, direction and more rules to control the daily lives of a living and breathing community. The Tannaim, approximately 120 in number, were uniquely gifted rabbis who orally expounded on those rules and interpretations necessary to maintain an orderly society. Their ranks included such notable rabbis as Hillel, Shammai, Johanan hen Zakkai, Gamaliel, Akiba and Judah the Prince. Lest their oral wisdom be lost, Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, before his death in 217 C.E. codified this assembly of tractates, statements of law and opinion into a document thereafter known to the world as the Mishna.

The Genesis of the Rabbinate

The Temple and its ordained ritual practices were in Jerusalem. With the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. the services of the Kohanim (lineal descendants of Aaron) became virtually irrelevant. In its stead houses of worship were erected in both Israel and Babylon and under the direction of religious teachers called rabbis. Mosaic law, however, did not provide for a cadre of rabbis. Authority appears to come from Numbers 27(18), in which God tells Moses to lay his hands upon Joshua as a means of transferring authority to him. Presumptively, but without express authority, Joshua in turn passed on his Mosaic ordination to a series of successors, including Ezra, and then on to rabbis like Hillel, Ben Zakki and so on.

The Dynamics of the Contest for Religious Power and Influence

The Second Temple generated an amalgam of different philosophies of faith which gravitated into politically oriented religious groups.

• The Sadducces represented an upper-class elite priestly caste whose main focus was the rituals associated with Temple practice. They were receptive to Hellenistic ideas and spurned the notion of an afterlife since it did not appear in the Written Torah.
• Insisting on a direct literal interpretation of the Written Torah they also rejected, out of hand, the rabbinically generated Oral Law, a position later adopted by the Karaites who are perceived as having succeeded them.
• The Pharisees were the largest and most middle-class of the groups. They adhered to messianic notions of redemption and subscribed to an afterlife in which God punished the wicked and rewarded the righteous, Most emphatically they insisted on keeping the law as interpreted by the rabbis and sages whose practice eventually gravitated to a type of religious formalism. It is from this group that the rabbinate of today originated.
• The Essenes rejected the liberality of the Sadducees and the corruptions of life in the Temple and retired to a monastic existence outside of Jerusalem. It is from the locale of that group that the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947.

These groups and other splinter sects competed for the minds and the hearts of the Jewish People.

The Mishna and The Gemara (The Oral Law) a.k.a. The Talmud

The Mishna’s oral recitations and rules promulgated by the Tannaim were codified circa 217 C.E. It was divided into six separate orders:

SEEDS (agriculture and the support of the poor)

HOLIDAYS (Sabbath and festivals)

WOMEN (rules of husband/wife relationships)

DAMAGES (civil and penal jurisprudence)

HOLY THINGS (Temple sacrifices and the laws of kashruth

PURITY (ritual purity and the laws of family purity).

The laws of the Tannaim, both in its original oral form and later as the Mishna, serviced the Jewish communities both in Israel and in Babylon.

It is important to note that a large number of the families who were originally exiled to Babylon chose not to be repatriated to Israel. They retained their identity and their religion, but appeared to remain quite comfortable in the Babylonian Diaspora.

The Tannaim were ultimately succeeded by the Amoriam, notable rabbis from both Babylon and Jerusalem. The Amoriam reflected upon the law and opinions stated in the Mishna. Their discourses were ultimately transcribed as the Gemara. As would be expected, their reflections were not always in concert with each other. Together, the Mishna, the Gemara and some selections from the Midrash, the Oral Law, constitute the Talmud. It reflected the interpretation of the Torah by the best minds of the Jewish community as it existed in that early era.

The Deification of the Talmud -Judaism’s Achilles Heel

The Talmud evolved out of rabbinical sources and was viewed as indispensable to the understanding of the Torah. As they do to this day, traditional rabbis advanced the notion that the Talmud was delivered with the original Torah to Moses at Sinai; or, at the very least, that it was divinely inspired by God and merited being referred to as the Oral Torah.

That notion- that Moses at Mount Sinai directly or indirectly, received from God, the same rules and laws espoused by hundreds of rabbis well over a thousand years later, stretches the bounds of human credulity. Worse than that, it canonized the Talmud’s rabbinical interpretation of the Torah with a Divine patina that forever locked Judaism into a long bygone era. After all, who can argue with the word of God?

The acuity of the Jews of recent generations in all fields of endeavor is legend. Their minds are of no greater or lesser quality than those of the sages of the Talmud. Modem Jewish thinkers, however, come armed with thousands of years of social and scientific development unavailable to the rabbis of the Talmud. What if the Talmud were loosed of its Divine protective veneer to flow freely with current Jewish thinking and interpretations of the Torah? Would the results be the same? Given DNA, would the progeny of Jewish fathers and Gentile mothers still be excluded from the Jewish People?

Would the simple biblical phrase that was interpreted to create the separation of meat and dairy, with all of its resultant complexities, still be construed the same way? What would constitute biblically prohibited “Sabbath work “in an electrified and mechanized world? Would the divisive six different flavors(denominations)of the Jewish religion still be relevant?

The Karaites

During the7th Century C.E., the Karaites a significant segment of the Jewish population, took issue with what they viewed as a usurpation of the reins of Jewish law by the rabbis. Within the Karaite group there was no objection to the idea of a body of interpretation of the Torah. They did reject the notion that the rabbis could bootstrap their own work product into Canonical law. The Karaites rejected the Oral Law (same as the Talmud which includes the Mishna and the Gemara), not because it was unworthy, but because the pretense that the Oral Law came directly from God made it unquestionable and unmodifiable. Amongst other reasons cited were:

The Mishna quotes many conflicting opinions

• The Mishna does not define in which opinion truth lies, but rather it sometimes agrees with neither opinion.
•  The Oral Law is not even mentioned in the Torah.
• The Torah states, “you shall not add to the word that I am commanding you, nor take away from it, that you may keep the commandments of YHVH, your God, which I command you.” Deuteronomy (4:2).

Why the deification of the Talmud? One need not be a prophet to understand that where there are groups competing for the minds and hearts of the Jewish people, it is helpful to have their work product canonized.

The Karaites believe that their lives must be directed by the express language of the Torah and not by the often conflicting disputations of the Talmud. It is estimated that there are approximately 30,000 Karaitic Jews presently living in Israel and an additional 20,000 in communities elsewhere in the world.

The Talmud’s Construction of the Torah divinely sealed in 6th Century C.E. has so frustrated the modem Jewish community that many have declared themselves secular Jews. They identify themselves with the state of Israel, Jewish communities and charities, but distance themselves from all aspects of normative religious Judaism. Following blindly the opinions and dictates ofa6th Century Talmud has caused no small amount of confusion and distress in the arenas of matrilineal Judaism, conversion, Sabbath observance, and the dietary laws.

Intermarriage

To understand the complexity of this phenomenon, we would do well to reflect on the ghetto communities of feudalistic Europe. Within the physical and social walls of those communities, young Jewish men and women were exposed to persons of similar religious and cultural rearing. Often, marriages were arranged by parents to whom intermarriage would be cause for mourning. As noted, until early 1800, there was only one Judaism, and Jewish intermarriage was virtually unknown. With the French Revolution, Napoleon’s unlocking of all of Europe’s ghettos, young Jews could now mix socially and economically with the rest of the populations of the host nations. They were exposed to education, ideas, temptations and world views that were alien to, and discouraged in the ghetto. The Judaism that had formerly embraced them in the ghetto was frozen into an era of over 1000 years earlier, and could not meet the challenges of liberation.

Especially was this true of those Jews who emigrated to the United States from the former ghettos and villages of the Pale in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Economic opportunities which quickly raised them to the socio-economic levels of their neighbors was another complicating factor. Their desire to “embrace the American Dream” generated an internal confrontation between an exciting and free country full of opportunities in education and commerce with a historic religion confined to the restraints ofa6th Century reality.

For most of the emigres, the religious teachings of their youth sustained them against the temptations of America. As each generation succeeded them Jewish education gave way to training that would better equip the youth in this new land of opportunity. The transition was from “Jew” to” American Jew” to “an American of Jewish extraction”. The education went from “Yeshiva” to “Hebrew School” to “Bar Mitzva training, if you want it”.

Is it any wonder that a large percentage of Jewish youth have started families whose children will no longer identify themselves as members of the Jewish community? It is difficult not to consider whether the outcome would have been different, and Judaism more relevant, had the interpretation of the Torah not been exclusively bound to a Talmud completed in the Sixth Century A.D.

Matrilineal Descent

What is a Jew? The answer to that historic conundrum can best be attempted by a series of inquiries:

• Did your mother and /or father, or someone on their behalf, tell you that they and their antecedents were Jewish?
• If so, does the fact that you consider yourself totally secular, or even anti-Semitic exclude you from Jewish identity?
• If you are born Jewish and voluntarily convert to one or more other faiths are you still a Jew? Should you decide to return to the Jewish community is it necessary to convert back to Judaism, or is the abandonment of the other faith sufficient?
• If you sincerely declare yourself to be a Jew, although you were not born of Jewish parents or converted, are you Jewish?
• If your parents were not Jewish, and you were converted to Judaism by a rabbi who was not of an Orthodox or traditional denomination, are you Jewish?
• What, if anything, do your answers to the forgoing questions tell you about the role of genetics in Judaism?

The Patriarchs, in the growth of Jewish identity, were mindful of the selection of their wives. They left Canaan for Egypt as a family to avoid famine. Subsequently, slavery in Egypt molded them into an identifiable and cohesive people, who subsequently returned to their ancestral home where they lived until dispossessed by the Babylonians.

Years later, when Ezra returned from Babylonian exile to rebuild the second Temple, he viewed the Jews as a people of common genetic origin, an essential condition worth preserving. When he found on his arrival that an earlier contingent of Temple builders had taken indigenous wives who had borne children, Ezra went ballistic. He insisted and received compliance in the separation from their wives and children. The obvious rationale for the act was that one could identify the mother of the child but would never be sure of the child’s paternity. While that vision was clear, it was a rather strange edict, given the fact that the wives of Joseph, Moses, Solomon and others were not Jewish, yet their children were not denied inclusion in the Jewish people.

The Torah Describes Prohibited Marriages

Scriptural opponents of intermarriage point to Deuteronomy 7(1-4) for authority. It referred specifically to intermarriage with the seven named nations that occupied Canaan and to no other nation.

Deuteronomy 7(1)”When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou;”

Deuteronomy 7(2)”And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them;”

Deuteronomy 7(3) “Neither shall thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son”

Deuteronomy 7(4)”For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods; so will the anger of the Lord be kindled against you and destroy thee suddenly.”

G-d, having specifically named the seven Canaanite tribes that were destined for annihilation as being unacceptable for Jewish marriage, can we assume that God meant, but did not include, everyone in the world who was not born of Jewish parents? Ifni fact that were true, how do we include into the Jewish community the progeny born of Jewish mothers and Gentile fathers? On the other hand, if God meant to exclude only the seven enumerated tribes, how does Judaism exclude the progeny of Jewish fathers with Gentile mothers who were not of the seven excluded tribes?

Matrilineal Judaism

It is difficult to see how the Talmud (Mishna Kiddushin 68b) relying on Deuteronomy 7(3- 4) could have promulgated matrilineal Judaism. Ironically, the Torah does not explicitly discuss the conferring of Jewish status through matrilineality. On the other hand, the Karaites who are not bound by the Talmud, and directly interpret the Deuteronomy 7(3-4), conclude that Judaism is passed through the father and therefore maintain patrilineal origin of Jewish children.

The Talmud’s endorsement of matrilineal Judaism not only appears out of context with the Written Torah but lacks the wisdom of modem biological sciences. It makes little sense today when we recognize that each parent contributes 23 chromosomes to the creation of child.

How can one justify that the chromosomes provided by the Jewish mother are significant in the creation of the Jewish child while the chromosomes provided by the father may be randomly abandoned. Indeed, how can the Talmud’s practical solution of accepting only children from a Jewish womb be accepted today, when DNA can easily and accurately identify the father?

As long as traditional Judaism maintains that the product of the learned religious jurists of the Talmud are divinely inspired by God, no real development or change can take place. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish children, descendants of Jewish fathers, are denied their heritage due to the deification of some of the archaic laws of the Talmud that both science and time have made irrelevant.

Conversion

For many Jews who are born issue of the blessed seed of Abraham, it is difficult to understand how anyone not so endowed can be converted to Judaism. After all, neither education, circumcision, nor immersion will change their genetic composition. Indeed, how can someone with Gentile genes breed Jewish children? Parenthetically, the opposite is true as to those Jews who were forcibly converted to Catholicism during and after the Spanish Inquisition. Why would they require conversion on their return to Judaism? Does your genetic composition change with the prayers that you were instructed to recite, or with the adoption of a belief in one who you were taught was “God’s real Messiah “?

The notion of conversion is generated out of the practical necessity for an open Jewish community. Every living religion or societal community, of necessity, must have an entrance and exit. Closed societies, such as the Essenes, were destined to oblivion.

Early Biblical Period

In the early biblical period Judaism did not constitute a religion. Rather, the Hebrews were a people whose God was a national God who oversaw their needs, i.e., release from slavery, oversight in the desert, victory in the conquest of Canaan, etc. During that time, Judaism as a faith had not as yet been formalized. When the Jews left Egypt, reportedly a number of other individuals who melded into the Jewish community. Non­ Jewish women simply came to live with their husbands. They and their children were just absorbed into the community.

Several things, however, changed after the destruction of the first Temple and during the early Babylonian exile. The God of the Jews remained with the Jewish community in Babylon, and was not tied to the homeland in Israel.

The absence of the Temple sacrifices following the destruction of the first Temple was replaced by an assembly, with rabbis offering prayers to God – the beginning of collective worship.

Subsequently, in the Fifth Century B.C.E., with the construction of the second Temple, a sea change took place. Ezra saw the Jewish people as a genetically connected nation. He roiled against inclusion of men from tribes of other nations. For a number of years there were major controversies about what to do with strangers who wished inclusion in the Jewish community. The Sadducees, rabbis who were contemporaries of the Pharisees, opposed inclusion of strangers, while The Pharisees supported it. A method was generated by the Pharisees and their successors, the Tannaim, in which persons not born of the seed of Abraham could conclusively become members of the Jewish Nation. It was a prescription not found in the Written Torah. The formula involved circumcision for males, education and the immersion for both sexes and an expressed desire to become part of the Jewish people. The formula remains the same today.

More Recent Times

There has been a disinclination to open wholesale proselytization to groups wishing to enter the Jewish community. The formula for conversion can easily be used to discourage Gentiles by simply expanding the amount of time necessary for the educational element required for the conversion process. Ironically, in prior years, large groups have rarely sought conversion to Judaism because in several of the Christian and Moslem countries that was considered a capital offense.

Ultimately, the Jewish people have, for practical reasons, allowed for the inclusion of strangers. For sundry reasons, there has always been a genuine need for conversion. Because the numbers of applicants are rarely large, the notion is that the inclusion of strangers would not significantly impact the genetic pool.

The philosophical question regarding conversion raises a totally different issue. In Genesis 12(7) God gave the land of Israel to the seed of Abram. Since the Written Torah does not provide for conversion, by whom, and how, is conversion authorized to be performed? Where do the rabbis obtain such authority? They are neither authorized by God nor elected by the Jewish people. Judaism has a strong, but not exclusive, genetic component. But what is Jewish conversion? What authorizes the person performing the conversion to give an individual and their progeny genetic access in perpetuity to the people of Israel?

The Sabbath Shabbos

Singularly, the Sabbath is one of the most important gifts from God. Both Exodus 31(12-17) and Exodus 35(2-4) are among the many Torah references that provide “Six days may work be done; but in the seventh is the Sabbath of rest, holy to the LORD”

So important was the Sabbath in the eyes of God that it provided a capital offense if violated. In the Written Torah we are not treated to a definition of the word “work”. Clearly the underlying thesis is that the seventh day is a day forest. God created the universe in six days, and recognized the importance and value forest, reflection and renewal on the seventh day. Given man’s propensity for continuous work it was totally an enduring and necessary gift. What is work?

Is work in the 21st Century C.E. the same as work in the 5^th Century C.E.?

The problem with identifying the appropriate way in which to comply with the Sabbath is that the Torah provides very little example and instruction. Essentially the Torah tells us in multiple sites that we are not to work on the Sabbath. It does instruct us however that there are two specific things that we cannot to do on the Sabbath:

·       “Abide ye every man in his place, let no man go out of his place on the seventh day. Exodus 16(29)

·       “Ye shall kindle no fire throughout your habitations on the Sabbath day” Exodus 35(3)

The Meaning of the Word Work

While the Torah cannot change without being altered by God, the nature and description of the word work changes in every generation with the advent of design, science, invention, and ingenuity. Creating a fire in a biblical desert is not the functional equivalent of simply striking a match.

When put to the test, the Tannaim defined the word work by including 39 prohibited activities which were needed for the construction of the tabernacle while in the desert. It is no secret that the Jews of the world today live a different life from that of our ancestors. Lives have been changed by thousands of years of development, innovation, science, agriculture, invention and engineering. One can only imagine how the authors of the Talmud would have construed the word work had they been tasked with the obligation while living in a world that contained electricity, smart phones, airplanes, autos, elevators air conditioners and the like.

What is more work, walking up six flights of stairs to an apartment, or pressing an elevator button?

Is it more work to drive to shul on the Sabbath or to walk 1 ½ miles in the hot sun to get there? 3)Societal changes, as well, must be taken into consideration. Who can deny that pulpit rabbis and cantors who earn a salary for working on Sabbath are in fact violating classical notions of the Sabbath

“Let no man go out of this place on the seventh day” Exodus 16(29)

When God instructed Moses the Jewish people were in a vast desert in route to the holy land. There was nothing of value or interest around them and synagogues had yet not been envisioned. The instruction that all Jews were to remain in their habitation during the entire Sabbath might not have appeared so strange.

A thousand years later the Tannaim recognized that the environment and society had changed and that confining Jews to their homes for 24 hours during the Sabbath was no longer relevant to God’s will. The Tannaim had the courage to propose, ex nilo, the idea of encircling all or part of a community with a Rube Goldberg concoction offences, doors and wires so as to suggest an enclosure qualifying as” one’s place” and allowing exit to attend synagogue and for other non­work purposes. This ability to honestly recharacterize the nature of work in a modem society is denied traditional rabbis because of the limitations of a deified Talmud.

Kindle no fire

“Ye Shall kindle no fire throughout your habitations upon the Sabbath day”. Exodus 35(3). That one sentence alone has engendered a fierce controversy within the Jewish Community as to which modem innovations violate the Sabbath, and promote such questions as:

• Does the word kindle, in this context, mean start, or start and maintain?
  • Why would anyone be prevented from starting a fire if it were lawful to maintain it, as the Talmud apparently allows by Shabbos Candles and pre- lit cooking elements? A possible answer lies in the fact that the creation of the fire during biblical times required work which would be prohibited on the Sabbath.
  • Does the fact that we can now strike a match and produce fire suggests that it is no longer work and therefore not in violation of the Sabbath?
  • If work were the consideration, why was lighting a fire limited only to habitations? Isn’t maintaining and feeding afire as much, or more, work as starting one?
  • Was it Gods intention to restrict the Jews to their habitation on the Sabbath (Exodus 16(29) and provide no warmth during the cold nights in the desert? Or, did the no fire rule relate to cooking Friday’s manna on Saturday since manna was not provided on Sabbath?

There is a significant controversy as to whether the use of electricity is in fact the use of fire. Most traditional sources suggest that using a switch to complete a circuit is an act that constitutes work prohibited on the Sabbath and thus they avoid the characterization of electricity.

Is there a traditional shul that does not utilize electric lighting, air conditioning/heating, some form of amplification that considers their use authorized so long as it was not turned on and off by a Jewish person or member of the congregation. That conclusion would compel the notion that one could use fire, or its stepchild electricity, as long as that person himself did not initiate, or kindle it. But, how can you use the services of another to violate the Sabbath when the Decalogue itself, Exodus 20(10) expressly prohibits the use of a manservant, maidservant or stranger in order to violate the Sabbath? How is the utilization of the Shabbos goy justified?

God is a better Lawyer

The act of a Jew to avoid violation of sabbath, whether by mechanism initiated prior to sundown, or by Shabbos goy after its commencement, is still that Jew’s act and still violates the Sabbath. Try escaping liability for a wrongful act against another for a plan put in place prior to the event, or for an injury to another caused by a person you hired to do the job.           ·

Constraining the definition of work to an experience 3000 years earlier has boxed Judaism into ill­ conceived notions of the word, and occasional deceptive workarounds: e.g.

Recently, it has been reported that traditional Jews who, rather than close their business on a sabbath, prefer to sell it to a Gentile for Friday night and Saturday only. The fact that a contract is used does not conceal the sham nature of the undertaking. Assuredly, God knows that the real party in interest is the purported vendor, who would have a heart attack if the place burned down on Saturday in the hands of his surrogate. The vendor prefers to keep the comfort and goodwill of his customers rather than close his place of work on the Sabbath.

A sixth century Talmud operating in the 21st century has also promoted an era of Trap Door devices designed to avoid the consequences of stubborn reliance on some anachronistic interpretations of work in the Written Torah, e.g.:

• Sabbath elevators Shabbos Goys
• Kosher lamps
• Kosher clocks
• Shabbos safe hotplates
• Kosher Fridge (holds down the refrigerator light on Saturday) Pre-cut Toilet paper
• Sabbath contracts
• Eruv (An artificial means of expanding the area of the Torah’s Sabbath home limitations.

WHAT HATH MAN WROTH?

Dietary Law (Kashruth)

The basic laws relating to food that a Jew can consume come directly out of the written Torah and are immutable. They include:

• The animals that can and cannot be eaten (See LeviticusI1(39) and Deuteronomyl4(6 9andl l);
• How slaughter of animals is to be arranged (See Deuteronomy 12(27) and Numbers 1(22);
• The requirement for the elimination of blood before consumption

Derivative laws and rules include:

•  The separation of meat and dairy; Talmud
• Utensils used in the food preparation process; Talmud

Jews who choose to avoid the dietary laws frequently claim that the laws were imposed for antiquated hygienic reasons and that they are no longer relevant in the modern society. Many whose lives are irretrievably involved with the dietary laws find in it a spiritual, benign and respectful treatment of the food animals. While the rationalizations for the existence of these laws are interesting, they are nevertheless fundamental principles of Judaism and require compliance by observant Jews.

Some issues regarding the dietary laws arise from the Talmud’s confounding interpretation and construction of the Written Torah’s laws.

The laws relating to mixing milk and meat stem from the following reference in the Written Torah: Exodus23(19) 34(20) and Deuteronomy 14(21): “thou shall not seethe(cook) a kid in his mother’s milk”. The interpretation of the foregoing ten words by the Talmud and subsequent rabbinical commentators has, for generations, dominated Jewish lives and Jewish households. It has required the strictest separation of all sources of meat from all sources of milk products, including separation of all dishes, pots, pans, cooking utensils, dishtowels, and even periods of digestion.

Would dedicated modern Jewish minds, unbound by the restraints of the” Talmud” come to the same conclusions, if they asked questions like these?

• Why did the exact language at three separate Torah sites limit itself to only a goat and its milk if its intention was to include all Kosher food animals and all milk? Certainly, God in other parts of the Written Torah was very precise as to His meaning?
  • Why did the language on all three separate sources limit the origin of the milk to the mother of the goat rather than milk from any source? Do the specifics help to identify that it was intended as a humane rule?
  • Why, and by what authority, is the scope of the provision expanded from milk of a single goat to all milk of whatever source and the meat of a single kid to all meat of whatever source?
  • More importantly how could anyone have come to the foregoing expansion in the light of God’s direct mandate in Deuteronomy 4(3)”Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish aught from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you”

If that were not a sufficient quandary, consider the fact that chicken is considered as a meat and cannot be consumed with milk or milk products. Is this not adding to the law in violation of Deuteronomy 4(3) considering the fact that chickens do not even give milk. They give eggs which are allowed to be consumed with the chicken and with milk products. Strange?

The burden on Jewish Women

The rabbis have ordained that each traditional household should have a separate set of dishes and silverware for meat and for dairy use, and separate sets of each for Passover. This was not ordained by the Written Torah, but obviously generated out of the rabbinical desire that not even a scintilla of milk from any source should ever touch a scintilla of meat.

However, traditional rabbis have already acknowledged that glass does not retain residue in its pores when properly washed. Modern glazed dishes and flatware are likewise free of residue when properly washed. Is it not suitable now that the unnecessary and perhaps unjustified burden of multiple sets of dishes and silverware be alleviated for Jewish wives, for whom God also promised Sabbath rest from her labors?

Conclusion

The Written Torah embodies the history, the character and the faith of the Jewish people. It is immutable because that Torah was delivered by God to Moses at Sinai as the life force of the Jewish nation.

The Oral Law (The Talmud) contains the opinions, ideas, and interpretations of a coterie of brilliant religious scholars. The frame of reference from which they viewed the Torah was from circa 150 B.C.E. to 550 C.E. Although many interpretations and judgments may still be relevant, their views and conclusions were made in the context of that period.

A serious misjudgment took place when the Oral Law, opined by man, was reported to have been delivered to Moses at Sinai or, at least, to have been divinely inspired by God. That position had the effect of freezing all access to the interpretation of the Torah to the world as it existed in the Sixth century CE. Politics and religion are a hazardous admixture.

As collateral damage, by having the word of God exit from hundreds of the rabbinical mouths of the Tannaim and the Amoraim it implied a core of prophets to which the rabbis themselves laid no claim. Minhag, custom and tradition -as they are charmingly identified in “Fiddler on For the Roof’- are not a substitute for Torah or Judaic values.

What was done by man, man can undo.

The dated brilliance of the Tannaim and the Amoraim must be uncoupled from the silent implied authority god. It must be allowed to flow confluently with the great Jewish minds and times of today. No generation or era has a monopoly on wisdom. In that way, the Torah will be free to express God’s will for every generation.

For the 2000 years of diaspora, stateless Jews of the world floated on a life raft of sixth century Talmud. The State of Israel has been in existence for more than 68 years during which time it has generated great strides in defense, science, medicine, electronics, engineering, agriculture, music, films and literature.

Weare no longer a wandering people without will or resource to demonstrate God’s relevance and presence in contemporary life.

It is time for the Jewish scholars of the world, including our respected rabbis to review our Talmud in the light of the 21s1 century; to retain that which is still relevant; to discard what is extraneous; to reestablish a reunited strong Jewish faith; and to rebuild Judaism for the next 4000. years.

By Douglas C. Kaplan

1. Jeremy Kalmanofsky in Foward.com March 8, 2015

2. Gregory Smith, Pew Research Center, November 12, 2013

3. Max Dimont, The Indestructible Jews

More than 85 percent of World Jewry lives in the United States, Canada and Israel, countries where they enjoy high standard of living, education, freedom of expression and movement. Yet, thousands of descendants of the Jews forcibly converted to Catholicism by sword or extreme duress remain in Third World nations, unaware of their true identity. Except for a number of devoted individuals and several dedicated organizations, relatively little is done to find, educate and return these descendants, remnants of the Spanish Inquisition -hostages of a captor culture and religion.

Affiliation with any religion is subject to change by wits, whim or whip. Given a choice, one can choose to be Jewish today, Catholic tomorrow, Protestant the next day and Muslim the following day. What is not mutable or changeable is one’s genetic inheritance, the 23 chromosomes that each parent invests in the creation of a child.

Today, collectively, millions of genetic descendants of the stolen Jews of the Spanish Inquisition live in the Americas, Europe and Africa, unaware of their people, their culture and their spiritual inheritance.

In the 14th century, before many Jews were forcibly converted to Catholicism, approximately one million Sephardic (Spanish) Jews lived in Spain. Ashkenazi Jews, those from Germany, France and East Europe constituted no more than half that number. Thus, there were roughly two Sephardic Jews for every one Ashkenazi Jew. Yet, of the 14.2 million Jews in the world today, more than ten million are Ashkenazi and roughly 4 million are Sephardic. Given relatively equal birthrates between the two groups, we are missing in excess of 15 million Spanish Jews, a giant population.

The missing Sephardic Jews (also referred to as Conversos, Crypto-Jews and Marranos) and their descendants have been captive of and tethered to an alien faith and culture for over 500 years. No more pitiable form of captivity exists than where the captives themselves are unaware of their captivity.

During the 2000 years that the Jews have constituted a diaspora population, in virtually every generation, Jews have stepped forward to ransom their brethren. Yet, not until post World War 11 and the stirring of the Sleeping Converse Giant has the Jewish community started to marshal significant efforts to awaken the Giant and bring it home.

Where It All Began

Since the first century C.E., some Jewish trading settlements could be found along the coast of the Iberian Peninsula (hereinafter referred to as “Peninsula”). The Peninsula included modern day Spain and Portugal and was originally part of the Roman Empire. After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 C.E., the Peninsula’s population was increased by additional”Jews who fled the Romans or were forcibly settled there by the Roman legions.

The Visigoths, in control of the Peninsula at the time, were initially indifferent to the growing Jewish communities. However, two events occurred to alter that circumstance: the Visigoths adopted Christianity as their official religion in the fourth century and the Moors invaded Spain from the south in the eighth century. Both the Christian and Muslim communities imposed special taxes and severe restrictions on the Jews. Nevertheless, those Jewish communities demonstrated a distinct vitality, growing in size strength and influence.

While all of Europe was immersed in the Dark Ages from the ninth to the twelfth centuries C.E., the Jewish communities of the Peninsula were producing a vibrant scientific, artistic, philosophical, cultural and religious era of enlightenment. Notables such as Moses Maimonides, Solomon lbn Gabrial, Benjamin of Tudela, Moses lbn Ezra and Yehuda Halevi impacted the scientific, religious and cultural life of that era.

Despite the limitations, restrictions and taxes imposed upon them, Jews enjoyed a virtual Golden Age in Spain until the twelfth century when religious extremism became a dominant force, fed by the fires of the Crusades. By the fourteenth century, Jews were forced to wear identifying insignias, isolating them from their Christian neighbors. Jewish communities became the subject of anti-Semitic attacks by Christian zealots, who were bent on destruction or converting Jews to Catholicism.

On June 6, 1391, a Catholic mob attacked the Juderia in Seville. Four thousand Jews were killed, while most of the rest submitted to baptism to escape death. Communities of Jews in Catalonia, Aragon and Mallorca were not spared a similar fate. On August 5th of that same year, hundreds of Jews were slain in Barcelona. The bloody excesses of 1391 continued unabated and were exacerbated by the Dominican Vincent Ferrer, who is said to have forcibly baptized 4000 Jews in Toledo. The remaining Jews were prohibited from holding public office, practicing medicine, hiring Christian servants and dealing in bread, wine, flour or meat.

The Reconquista And The Granada Decree

By 1492, Christian forces had repatriated all of the Iberian Peninsula from occupancy by the Moors (known as the Reconquista). The final victory was at Granada where, on March 315\ the reigning monarchs of Catholic Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, issued their edict of expulsion. The Jews were given 120 days to convert to Catholicism or leave Spain. Those leaving could not take with them currency, precious metals or jewels. The travail of the Jewish community was of legendary proportions.

It is estimated that nearly half of the Jewish population of Spain was baptized and remained in Spain. The remaining Jews, devoted to the faith of their fathers, fled to Portugal, Turkey, Greece, Morocco, Holland, Italy and elsewhere. The vast majority of those remaining in Spain as converts were known as Anusim, a Hebrew word meaning those who had been forcibly converted. However, some converts undoubtedly accepted baptism out of personal religious conviction or their perception of certain social and economic benefits.

The Jews who fled to Portugal were offered a period of eight months of sanctuary. If they remained beyond that time, they became subject to being slaves of the realm. Sadly, many could not leave in time and ended up in servitude. Several of the children of these unfortunate souls were taken to an island off of Brazil to be raised as Christians. When a subsequent king came to the throne, he recognized the economic value of having Jews in his realm and reversed the decree of slavery. In order to entrench his power, the new king felt obliged to marry the daughter Ferdinand and Isabella. They would not agree to the union until he rid his nation of its Jewish population. To retain the Jews of Portugal and still have a totally Catholic nation, he gathered them in one place and, without their consent, baptized them. Thus, he had both his Jews and his new queen.

In Spain, Jewish converts were called “New Christians,” thus distinguishing them from Spain’s old Christian population. Conversion, which some Jews thought would bring safety, peace and stability, simply opened the door to a nightmare of pain and anxiety. The old anti-Semitism that had given rise to the destruction of Spain’s Jewish communities did not simply disappear. Many viewed “New Christians” as Jews hiding under a thin, protective camouflage of Catholicism. To a significant degree, that was true. Predictably, the change of overt religious practices by the baptized Jews did not affect their inclination for advancement and achievement, greatly provoking the “Old Christian” community.

Everywhere within the Peninsula, New Christians were obliged to prove that they had not reverted to their former Jewish practices. These New Christians were so frightened of being labeled heretics that they attempted to demonstrate their loyalty by hanging pork to dry in front of their homes, arranging card games in lieu of Friday night Sabbath worship or attending regular church services.

The baptized Jews demonstrated a varying degree of commitment to Catholicism. While Converses practiced a kind of recalcitrant acceptance of the faith imposed upon them by the circumstances, Marranos (a Spanish word for “pigs,”), outwardly practiced the new Catholic faith, but inwardly adhered to the essential tenets of Judaism. Jews prefer to use the term Crypto-Jews instead of Marranos.

The Inquisition

By the 1480s, Spain had begun to realize that many forced converts were returning to Judaism. To combat such heresy, Torquemada, an extremist priest, who was the Confessor to Queen Isabella, adapted for Spain the infamous Inquisition trials employed late in the twelfth century by Pope Innocent Ill. Inquisitions assembled a court of inquiry into the religious fidelity of Roman Catholics. Those found wanting or even questioning these tenets of the faith, were dealt with severely. Punishment for even a marginal infraction or reversion to Jewish practices meant having one’s property appropriated by the tribunal, then being sentenced to life in prison or being burned alive in a public execution. In some instances, if a Jew admitted to an active reversion, that person might then be “charitably” garroted before submitting his or her body to the flames.

Thousands of Conversos were presumably executed or died in Inquisition prisons between 1480 and 1808. The Crown and ultimately the Inquisitors were rewarded by the appropriation and distribution of their victims’ property. The converts were second-rate citizens in a land which submitted them to the agonies of the Inquisition and the loss of life and property. In a unique and painful irony, the scourge of the Inquisition was used against people who the Church and State forced to convert, but could not be used against those retaining their Jewish faith, as they could not be charged with heresy.

Many sought to escape the Inquisition by leaving the Peninsula for lands that might be free of the Inquisition and provide an opportunity to resume their lives as Jews. Spanish and Portuguese realms in this New World seemed like attractive options for the converts. There, the converts could retain their customs and language, free of the anxieties of the Inquisition. However, as fate would have it, the Inquisition followed Converses and Crypto-Jews to Mexico in 1571 and to Cartagena, Peru and elsewhere in the Spanish and Portuguese New World in 1610.

The Inquisition continued in full force and effect in both Europe and the New World for 345 years. By 1834, considerable numbers of Conversos and Crypto­Jews had moved to Mexico, portions of which later became New Mexico, Texas and Arizona following the Battle of the Alamo. Others settled in Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. Many of these people revived some of the practices of their Jewish ancestors, the culture constrained and rejected by the religion that was imposed by conversion.

The Awakening

Although the Inquisition had officially ended in 1834, it did not result in an immediate abandonment of Catholicism by lineal descendants of the forced converts. Those Latin American communities in which many found themselves were committed religiously and politically to Roman Catholicism. Descendants were born into and reared in the Catholic faith. Any suspicion that they were “different” from the others in their Catholic community arose from occasional whispers among kinfolk or from strange religious customs unwittingly continued by family members. Secrecy was the byword, lest they be identified as returnees to “that despised faith that caused the death of the Christian God.”

Nevertheless, by some programmed genetic mandate, many in the Converse and Crypto-Jewish community continued to marry among themselves, thus preserving the uniqueness of the group and their heritage. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a subtle but doctrinaire form of anti-Semitism, preserved in many of the Christian communities in Europe and Latin America, frequently found expression in selected religious texts or from Church pulpits.

In the years following World War II, however, with the universal awareness of a Holocaust in which six million Jews were systematically exterminated by the Germans (occasionally with the support of other Christian nations), important transitions occurred that would impact the Converse and Crypto-Jewish communities. The post World War II environment was altered significantly for Converses and Crypto-Jews in that:

1. The perceived infallibility of the Catholic Church as a moral foundation eroded with multiple accusations of deviations, concealment, and failure to root out faulted priests.
   
2. The Catholic Church became conflicted from within by contentious issues like contraception and celibacy of the priesthood.
   
3. Catholicism, in Latin America, became weakened by the rapid growth of the Evangelical Church.
   
4. In the mid-twentieth century, there arose, like a Phoenix out of the ashes of Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen Belsen and other death camps, a new and vital Jewish national existence. As the State of Israel grew, so did its pride and ability to defend itself against multiple enemies. With Statehood came extraordinary strides in agriculture, science, medicine, philosophy, electronics, literature and poetry. Jews were no longer itinerant occupiers of other people’s countries. They had a land and a nationhood of their own.
   
5. For those living in rural communities, whose vistas rarely had extended beyond the villages or towns in which they resided, the availability of radio, television and Internet, as well as affordable education and transportation, opened minds, eyes and hearts.
   
6. Although anti-Semitism did not disappear, it was no longer popular to be an overt anti-Semite.
   
7. The Catholic Church and its Prelates, accused of moral indifference to the events of the Holocaust, became more ecumenical in their views; more liberal Popes were elected; and the Church, confronting the Judea­Christian origin of its faith, de-emphasized the polar positions between Christians and Jews.

These and other developments fertilized the dormant seeds leading to a rediscovery and prompted such questions as:

Why did my great grandmother light candles on Friday nights?

Why did my parents say that pork was not good for us?

Why did members of my family cover the mirrors when a family member died? Why does my family salt meat before cooking it?

Why do the children in our family have Old Testament names?

Why do we say adio (one G-d) instead of adios?

Those queries in thoughtful minds would assuredly lead to soul-searching questions like: Why do I feel like an alien in my own community? Why do I feel more comfortable with Jewish friends and professionals? What is the origin of my interest in the welfare of the State of Israel? Why have I not pursued family rumors about a different or unique origin?

A Beacon Back

Such inquiries have spawned organizations with a mission of providing history, information and assistance in finding a path back to Judaism. These include groups like Shevei Israel, Kulanu, The Society of Crypto-Judaic Studies, B’nai Anusim and SephardicGen. Some organizations are focused on descendants in a specific Latin American country, others concentrate on returning descendants to Orthodox religious practices and still others focus only on Crypto-Jews

(seemingly abandoning Converses as a lost cause). Albeit all do a great service to the descendants and to the Jewish community, these groups resemble a series of unrelated notes in search of a single, unified melody. The absence of an orchestrated cohesive and funded international Jewish effort to bring back the “descendants of the Stolen Jews” speaks less of what they have become and more of what we have become.

The first step back to a personal rediscovery frequently starts with one’s own family name. An ample history of Sephardic family names is easily accessible on such Internet sites as: Sephardim.com, SephardicGen Resources, Nameyourroots.com.

These sites and others provide not only Sephardic names, but demonstrate where those names are used historically in Sephardic context. Once an individual can identify that his matrilineal surname is Sephardic in origin the next step is to trace family history. Although a number of genealogical organizations can be helpful, it is doubtful (though not impossible) that one can trace lineal origin back to Pre-Inquisition times. Genie Milgrom, a Cuban expatriate reared in Catholic Miami, Florida, succeeded in tracing her heritage through 15 grandmothers to identify her personal Jewish roots. A firebrand in the process of rediscovery, Genie now lives a traditional Jewish life.

DNA, another magical “genie,” facilitates the discovery of one’s way back along a trail of ancestors to a particular point in history. lgenia, a recognized DNA Service, maintains that “(a) DNA test by lgenia provides you with clear evidence of whether you have Jewish roots.” Another respected company, Family Tree DNA, represents that its services will help you “discover your Jewish Ancestry” and touts that its comparative databases are the “largest in the world.”

Those descendants who returned to the Jewish People are often the most ardent and selfless guides to other returnees. The number of inquiries by individuals seeking their true identity have increased dramatically. It is as if the events of the twentieth century cured the collective paranoia born of the anxieties and excesses of the Inquisition. A visit to the Internet and to the stories of those who have struggled their way back to Judaism is enough to generate tears of joy in the eyes of the clay Golem.

The Road Back Has Many Challenges For The Descendants

Many in the religious community maintain that 500 years of separation from the Jewish people (over 15 generations) is too long a hiatus for a continuum of Jewish identity. Without proof of a direct matrilineal line of Jewish ancestors, many in the rabbinate require conversion for reentry. Such historical genetic evidence is virtually impossible to achieve. Sadly, absent such proof, Crypto­Jews and Converses seeking reentry would merely be treated as gentiles seeking to convert to Judaism.

Resistance to the restoration of Conversos and Crypto-Jews into the core of the Jewish community may come from multiple sources:

• Family and Friends: The greatest hurdle to rediscovery and adoption of Jewish identity can be someone’s own family. Parents, siblings and children are often active members of a Catholic church and kindred organizations. Public awareness that a member of that family is re­identifying himself as a Jew often strikes angst in the hearts of blood kindred. Will they now be viewed as Jews and excluded from the religious, social and commercial relationships in the Catholic community in which they have lived all of their lives? Re-identification is a difficult hurdle for those seeking to retain the love of their families, while simultaneously rediscovering their Jewish heritage.

• The Catholic Church: how will the Church respond to effective efforts by the Jewish community to recapture the lineal descendants of those forcibly converted? Admittedly, the Catholic Church of today is quite different from that which existed in the Middle Ages. Considering the manner in which Spanish Jews were converted, under what moral grounds (Christian or otherwise) could the Church resist the return of the descendants? Indeed, the Church should and will responsibly provide its records and encourage and assist those who genuinely wish to return to Judaism.

• The Jewish Religious Community: The sheer will and effort necessary to wrest oneself from the bonds of a lifetime’s religion and face rejection by one’s own family takes uncommon dedication and commitment. Should that effort be confronted by a Jewish response that insists that you need to be converted because you are really not one of us? The same benefits can be achieved by simply requiring a program of education to acquaint that re-entrant with the duties, obligations and joys of life in the Jewish community. Ironically, there are so many accepted versions of Jewish life, i.e. Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, Secular, Sephardic, Ashkenazi and others, that one would be hard put to know who could provide a returning descendant with the key to re-entry.

• The State of Israel: Many of the Converses and Crypto-Jews seeking return will come from lives of poverty within Latin American countries or certain sectors of North Africa. How will Israel qualify these persons if they seek the privileges of Israel’s Law of Return? Must there be a separate judicial determination in addition to any religious accommodation? How, too, will Israel deal with Converses and Crypto­Jews of mixed blood? It is doubtful, even with the benefit of modern DNA, that a person of pure Jewish blood could be identified. What percentage of Jewish blood is necessary to qualify under the Law of Return? Can the relatively compact size of Israel today accommodate the infusion of an additional large new population? Ought a statue be erected in Haifa Harbor with an outstretched hand beckoning the return of the descendants of the “Stolen Jews”?

• Descendants of Those Who Did Not Submit to Conversion: The current Sephardic Jewish Community consists of descendants of those who elected to flee with little or nothing, rather than convert. Their ancestors presumably were subject to the same violence, threats and duress that changed their former brethren into New Christians. Yet, those who fled remained faithful to Judaism. Is there the perception that the descendants of the New Christians are merely the fruit of a poisoned tree and should not be received in the body of the Jewish People? Or, more likely, will they be welcomed back by the ironical use of the Christological doctrine of “the Return of the Prodigal Child”?

Conclusion

It is nothing short of miraculous that a rivulet of descendants, after 500 years, has found its way back to the mainstream of their people. This may be our last clear chance to bring back the descendants to the core of the Jewish People. We have a moral, historical and religious obligation to inform, educate and welcome the children of our lost brothers. The ultimate irony lies in the fact Spain and Portugal, in an obvious effort to return to the days of their glory, have offered citizenship to the descendants of the traumatically expelled Sephardic community. Can the Jewish community do less?

It is estimated that today 20 percent of the people of Spain and Portugal are of Sephardic descent. An even larger percentage would have immigrated to the New World to escape the Inquisition. Mere casual academic interest or delivery of responsibility for the descendants to a handful of underfunded organizations, represents an abandonment of our brothers’ children. The Jewish community must assemble itself into a unified force and provide the funding and leadership necessary to bring our people home. “Home” is the community and does not necessarily relate to the degree of religious practice.

It is no surprise, that one of the most fundamental tenets of membership in the Jewish community is the principal of Pidyon Shvuyim, the obligation to redeem one or more Jews from captivity. That is a sacred obligation of membership in an extraordinary and ancient people. The Israelis were so sensitive to that obligation that they did not rest until one Jew, Sgt. Gilad Shalit, was returned to his people even at the price of a thousand Palestinian prisoners.

Every time a child, who is a lineal descendant of the Stolen Jews, reaches maturity and does not know of his origin and heritage or is fearful to acknowledge it, a new captive is born. It is the obligation of every Jew to educate and assist those descendants in learning their identity, reclaiming their Jewish heritage and thus releasing them from their captivity.

Regretfully, six million victims of the Holocaust are beyond our salvation. The descendants of the Stolen Jews of the Spanish Inquisition are not. It is time to awaken our sleeping giant.

By Douglas C. Kaplan

In the beginning

The People of Israel were born with God’s selection of Abram, as their patriarch, almost 4000 years ago.

The Nation of Israel was born at Mount Sinai, in 1280 B.C.E., hardened by the contractions of 400 years of slavery, and nourished by the receipt of the civilizing statutes of Torah.

Until the Roman destruction of the second Temple in 70 C.E., the Hebrew People’s relationship with their God was that of a tribal deity. Worship was largely accomplished in the Temple by gifting and sacrificing food animals whose flesh was used to sustain the families of the priests and the Levi support personnel.

When animal sacrifices were no longer possible, Jews assembled in community meeting places for the purposes of reading the law received at Sinai and uttering devotions to their God. Learned men stepped forward to lead such congregations and to author communal prayers. Thus, out of Temple deprivation was born the synagogue, the rabbinate and a more organized form of a Jewish community.

Rabbis, as distinguished from the early sages, do not appear on the scene until about 200 C.E., and are the philosophical successors to the Pharisees. While this congregational activity resembled a religion, it was not simply accessible by the same kind of pledges of faith and formalities which opened the doors to both Christianity and the Muslim faith. Anyone could reflect and mimic classic Jewish religious procedures, but for one to actually practice Judaism, he or she must first be a Jew.

The laws which God requires of his people were delivered in the desert at Mount Sinai during the thirteenth century B.C.E. Historians believe that those laws, together with the narrative history of the Jewish people in the form of the written Torah, first appeared with Ezra upon the construction of the second Temple in the middle of the sixth century BCE.

It is axiomatic that no code, however explicit, can anticipate all of the circumstances to which it will be applied. For it to have universal application there must be a body politic that interprets and applies that code.

Analogously, for the United States Constitution, that body is the United States Supreme Court. With regard to the Torah, during the second Temple period, that task fell to The Men of the Great Assembly (Anshei Knesset HaGedolah), a group of 120 scribes, sages and prophets, and to the San Hedron. It was their responsibility to discuss, interpret and apply the Mosaic law. The Torah was quite explicit, in that such interpretations and applications must totally be within the spirit of the laws expressed. Under no circumstances was there authority to add or subtract from the law as given to Moses (Deuteronomy 4(2)and(13-32)).

Early Jewish Religious Philosophies

The introduction of the written Torah during the second Temple period brought with it several schools of thought as to its meaning and application:

• The Pharisees: The Pharisees were the spiritual fathers of Rabbinism (Rabbinic Judaism). They maintained that an afterlife existed and that God punished the wicked and rewarded the righteous in the world to come. They also believed in a Messiah who would herald a new era of world peace.

• The Sadducees:  Sadducees represented an aristocratic, wealthy, and traditional elite within the hierarchy of Judaism. They were much more receptive to the influences of Greek culture that arrived with Alexander the Great and his successors. They were firm in their belief that there is no fate and that man has free will and can choose between good and evil. They strongly believed that the soul is not immortal, that there is no afterlife, and that there are no rewards or penalties after death. They rejected the pharisaic use of many observances which were not written in the law of Moses and of the Oral Law created by the Pharisees to consolidate their power. Their rejection of afterlife was in direct opposition to emerging Christianity in which afterlife was an important element.
  
• The Essenes: This group emerged out of the dissatisfaction with the other two. They believed that the others had corrupted Jerusalem and the Temple. Their conclusions led them to the desert where they adopted strict dietary laws and a commitment to celibacy. It is from their collection of documents that the Dead Sea Scrolls were ultimately found.

• The Boethusians: This was a group closely related to the Sadducees. They did not believe in afterlife or the resurrection of the dead. While the Sadducees were politically opposed to the Pharisees, the Boethusians advanced the religious arguments against them.

Birth of the Talmud

The opinions and disputations of the scholars of the Men of the Great Assembly were at risk of disappearing into obscurity. Fearing that oral traditions might be forgotten, Rabbi Judah HaNasi in 189 C. E., undertook the mission of consolidating the various opinions of the sages into a code of law which became known as the Mishnah. It consisted of 63 tractates which codify Jewish law and which constitute the basis of the Talmud .

The Mishnah was followed by two different works, each called Gemara which comprised rabbinical analysis and commentaries on the Mishnah. One of them originated from the Babylonian Jewish community and the other from Jerusalem. These efforts involve the work of rabbinical scholars known as Amoraim.The Mishnah and the two Gemaras together with the Midrash, (a hybrid of commentaries on the Written and Oral Torah), constitute the Talmud also known as the Oral Torah. The Talmud, transcribed from 189 C.E. to 500 C.E., is uniquely a work of the rabbis.

Inasmuch as the Torah was revered as having been originated from the revealed word of God, it was viewed as immutable and as a divine resource. The Mishnah and the Gemara, on the other hand, arose out of rabbinical opinions from the Jewish community, in service of the interpretation and application of the Torah. Occasionally the zeal of the rabbis, in trying to identify the outer limits of Mosaic law, resulted in creative endeavors. Consistency gave way to imagination, and the laws of the Torah began to change.

Countering those efforts were, however, elements of the Jewish community who were awed by the imaginative excesses of the Tannaim and the Amoraim and sought to restore the Torah to a more personal relationship with the people it served.

Karite response to Rabbinical excesses

By the middle of the eighth century, there arose Persian biblical scholars who took issue with the excesses of rabbinism and founded the Karite movement. Just as the rabbis were the philosophical heirs of the Pharisees, the Karites arose out of the ashes of the Sadducees who disappeared after the destruction of the second Temple.

While the  Karites took no issue with the reasonable construction of the Torah, they rejected, out of hand, those man-made laws which repudiated portions of the Torah, or gratuitously added to it.  The Pharisees/rabbis believed that the interpretation of a particular teacher was divine and elevated these teachings to the level of the Torah itself. After a time, these teachings were incorporated in the Oral Torah. The rabbis went so far as to claim that when two teachers taught diametrically opposed interpretations of the Torah that they both originated with God.

Despite efforts by the rabbinists such as the Saadia Gaon to eliminate all other forms of normative Judaism, the Karites have survived to the twenty first century. Some 40,000 are believed to reside in Israel with smaller communities in Turkey, Europe and the United States.

One People …One God … One Faith … One Torah

Rabbinism asserts that there is more than one Torah. It confirms the existence of the Written Torah, which contains the law given by God to Moses at Mount Sinai in the 13^th century B.C.E. It then alludes to the existence of a second Torah which it refers to as the Oral Torah which includes the Mishnah, the Gemara, and the Midrash, together known as the Talmud.

It is difficult to conclude that the Oral Torah is a Torah at all, Since it is essentially an attempt to create a body of law based upon rabbinical interpretations of the Written Torah. Even the traditional rabbinate who seek to bootstrap the Talmud to the divine level of the Torah have their own, not so well concealed misgivings.

Traditional Judaism’s body language of distinction

In the Holy Ark of every synagogue appear multiple Torah scrolls, while the volumes of the Talmud are notably absent. To be kosher, the Torah must be handwritten by a sofer (a dedicated and knowledgeable scribe), while the Talmud appears in multiple commercially printed volumes. It is the Torah, and not  the Talmud, that is lifted during the Hagbah portion of every Torah service.  It is only the Torah that is kissed by the parishioners as it makes its way through the aisles of every synagogue. The traditional fasting imposed on those who have viewed a Torah drop is not imposed if a similar event occurs to a volume of the Talmud.

The authority to create is the authority to amend

The United States Constitution, like the Torah, is an instrument that incorporates a body of rules for the maintenance of a sustainable and orderly social structure. However, the two differ in the source of original authority by which they were created. The United States Constitution was an instrument created in 1789 from the authority, and by the will of ,those whose conduct was to be governed by that instrument. The Torah, on the other hand, originated from the divine authority of the tribal God of the Jewish people gathered at Mount Sinai in the 13^th century BCE. Both documents are universal, inasmuch as their authority seeks to endure long beyond the time of their origination.

The United States Constitution provided for a manner in which it could be amended and it was, in fact, amended on 27 different occasions. The source of authority for authorizing the amendment was the very body politic of citizens that created it in the first place. They had simply reserved the right to make the document a living instrument which could be changed in accordance with social and physical changes which occur regularly within a community.

Since God was the authority for the creation of the Torah and since the Torah did not provide for the manner in which it could be amended to accommodate change, only God could alter its provisions. But God has not presented himself recently to assist with the modification of the Torah in order to accommodate a more modern society.

There was, however, one exception to Torah amendment authority.  In Deuteronomy 18:(15-19), we are told that God will raise up from amongst the people a prophet and then God will put words in his mouth to which the people shall heed. The passage warns the nation to be aware of false prophets who can be identified when their prophecies does not come to pass. Of special note was the fact that the prophet would come from amongst the people through whom God could send a message to Israel. The passage presages the era of the prophets and is clearly not intended to create another deity or semi-deity in competition with God.  The rabbis were in a quandary as to how to keep pace with both physical and social changes.

The Torah prohibited all additions, subtractions, or alterations to the rules in the original document. In the exercise of their authority to interpret and apply the law, the rabbis made a number of sweeping changes and additions, often tantamount to the rejection of portions of the Torah.

• From what might well may have been a political expedient, the rabbis created, out of whole cloth, L’olam Habah (the world to come). That is, if one faithfully obeyed rabbinical law, that person would be admitted to the domain inhabited by God, the Angels, and others who passed life’s tests to merit entry into this promised, joyful domain. The difficulty with this concept is that there is not one scintilla of mention of the world to come in the Torah. It is as if God were so tired on the sixth day, from creating our world that he forgot to mention the other world that he had created for afterlife. No doubt that those who struggled for a living with little reward in this world found such a promise hopeful and that they would be moved in the direction of rabbinism.

• For approximately 2000 years (from Abraham to the destruction of the temple by the Romans in 70 A.D.), the Jews were a patrilineal society. That is, the 12 tribes of Israel carried the names of Jacob’s sons; children were named by the origin of their father; and the laws of inheritance and those of religious hierarchy were patrilineally influenced. Most importantly, the Hebrew entitlement to the holyland flowed directly through the Zerah (semen) of the patriarchs and their male descendents. By the end of the second Temple, and in accordance with rabbinical fiat, the rabbis changed the required origin of Jewish children from a Jewish father to a Jewish mother. Certainly, it was then easier to identify the mother of a child rather than the father. Could that fact alone justify the rabbis to negate the Torah and overturn the underpinnings of the Hebraic social structure?                                                                                                                                        

• Interpretation by the rabbis of a single statement in the Torah could result in distortion of its meaning beyond any reasonable concept. Classically, the rule concerning mixing meat and milk is one of the most egregious. Exodus 23 (19), 34(20), and Deuteronomy 14(21), all provide “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk.”  A reasonable construction of that provision would tell us that it prohibits the cooking of a kid in the milk of its mother. A more expanded, and perhaps ethical, interpretation would tell us that no animal should be cooked or eaten in its mother’s milk. There is no suggestion by the biblical text that all meat should be excluded from all milk, a statement that God could easily have prescribed should that have been his intent.

The very fact that it was limited to a mother-child relationship in one species of one animal attests to the fact that it was not a universal theme. To expand the restriction to the milk of one animal as relates to the issue of  another animal, or the milk of one species and the meat of another, is a distortion and a violation of the rule against adding to Torah laws. Perhaps the most curious application of this law is the fact that chicken is considered meat and cannot be consumed with milk, even though chickens don’t give milk, and chicken and eggs may be consumed together.

Homemade Divine authority

To justify the conflict between the Torah, the revealed word of God, and the Oral Torah, a rabbinical product, divine authority had to be found or manufactured. In order to justify modifications to the Torah, traditional Judaism created a retrofitted bridge from the end of the Talmud era approximately 500 C.E. to God’s appearance at Mount Sinai in 1312 B.C.E. (1812 years). The Talmud was then identified as the Torah Shel Bial Pe Misinai (The Oral Torah that originated at Mount Sinai).

To accept the Oral Torah as divinely originated one must believe that:

• God deferred his instruction of the Oral Torah for over 1800 years, until it outed from the mouths of the Tannaim, the Amoraim and the rabbis at the conclusion of the Talmudic Era.

• God who spoke definitively and without equivocation in the Torah was now presenting multiple disputations on the law without conclusive mandates.

• God was amending and making additions to the rules He provided at Sinai at the very same time he was declaring those rules.

• God saved those disputations to be uttered from the mouths of rabbis who were not acknowledged prophets.

Ultimately, the ham-handed way in which divine authority was manufactured by the rabbis painted all of Judaism into a static corner. The rabbis could not again go back to the Sinai well and conjure more divine authority to accommodate changes after the Oral Torah (the Talmud).

From the sixth century onward, Jewish law was condemned to live in a sea made turbulent with the conflicting legal opinions of the Tannaim of the Mishna and the Amoriam of the Gemorah.  Decisions, of necessity, were made by consensus. While the Written Torah spoke with one voice, the Oral Torah spoke with many. Worst of all, as time progressed Jewish law remained locked in the sixth century since the Sinai well remained closed.

A time to make choices

However, by the twelfth 12^th century and the birth of Moses Maimonides, help was to come. The Rambam, as he was known, recognized the difficulty of rabbinical law with no specific accepted and acknowledged rules. In his masterful work called the Mishnah Torah, he selected from the multiple rabbinical choices on each legal issue one specific interpretation and rule which was to be followed and rejected the others. In the Mishnah Torah, he wisely omitted the names of the rabbis whose opinions were rejected. Since there was one accepted opinion for each issue of law in the Mishnah Torah it significantly reduced the study of the raw and conflicting opinions in the Mishnah and the Gemara. Sadly, the Rambam’s choices were of necessity rooted in the world of the sixth century, since there was no divine authority for real change beyond the Talmud.

A similar but less extravagant work was done in the sixteenth century by Joseph Caro who created the Shulchan Orach, a virtual handbook on the applicable laws and rules governing how a person should conduct himself in accordance with Jewish law.

Napoleon…Liberation and Fragmentation

While the chaos of disputations of the Talmudic era had largely been addressed, the basic rules of Jewish law were still sourced in the sixth century of the Oral Torah. In the ghettos and shtetls of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe, there was little personal or social contact with the Gentile community. That constraint was viewed by some as a gift that kept the Jewish people together in troubled times. However, those times changed with the onset of the Napoleonic era. The Royal houses of Europe were beginning to lose dominance.

The ghettos were opening and their residents given access to the urban communities of the host countries. In sites such as Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, England and Holland, Jews began to engage socially and commercially with the Gentile community. They acquired homes in formerly forbidden areas, competed in commerce, entered their school children in public schools, and sought parity with their Gentile neighbors. In doing so, they were hobbled by interpretations of the Torah rooted back to the sixth century. In Germany, especially during the early 1800s, Jews confronted multiple choices:

• Conversion

• Abandonment of the more restrictive rules of historic rabbinic Judaism

• Reinterpretation of the Torah so as to liberalize Jewish practices

• Retain traditional classic rabbinic Judaism 

For the most part, conversion was not a popular choice. While it was recognized that one can change one’s religious practices, the convert cannot change his genetic identity, either in his own eyes or in those of his Gentile neighbors.

A number of German Jews chose to retain their identity but to abandon many of the trappings of traditional Judaism. This included the wearing of traditional Jewish identifiers, such as skull caps, beards,prayer shawls, sideburns, etc. It evolved into the abandonment of much of the Hebrew in- temple worship, and into the shortening of their services. The restrictions on Sabbath activity and the prohibition against eating non-kosher food were also significantly eroded.

Thus in 1818, Reform Judaism was born in Germany and ultimately was transported to other Judaic enclaves. As the process continued in the United States and other Jewish communities, it became even more liberalized by the creation of denominations, such as Reconstruction Judaism and Humanistic Judaism. All of this occurred while traditional rabbinic Judaism remained vital and active in Jewish communities throughout the world.

As some communities liberalized, Orthodoxy circled the wagons

Orthodox Jewish communities were not unaffected by the rigid and anachronistic nature of the Oral Torah. Those communities, however, dealt with it in three different ways:

 1) Accommodation by relating current activity to an analogous circumstance in the early Biblical era

Orthodox communities related every new physical or social innovation back to a biblical origin. A cardinal rule in Jewish law is that the seventh day (the Sabbath) is a mandated day of rest. No work can be performed on that day since Jews are taught that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. But, what constitutes work? For a definition of work, early Jewish law looked to the building of the Tabernacle, the portable temple of God used by the children of Israel. The notion is that any activity necessary in the creation of the Tabernacle constituted work. One of those activities was the creation of fire, which in 1200 B.C.E., and assuredly required significant effort and constituted work. The idea that creating a fire was a work effort was further confirmed in Exodus 35(3) where the Jewish community was directed “Ye shall kindle no fire throughout your habitation on the Sabbath day.”

The advent of electricity and its many uses became challenging. Electricity was viewed as a form of fire and thus all uses of electricity constituted work and were prohibited on the Sabbath. The idea that the effort of making a fire, in the matchless world of thirteenth-century B.C.E. (Mount Sinai) was not the same as the Zippo lighter era of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, either was never considered or dismissed out of hand. Thus, the religious Jews of today live in an anachronistic world.

Today, it is not considered working on the Sabbath to walk upstairs to your apartment on the sixth floor, but it is considered work to press a button in an elevator to arrive at the same location. It is not considered work to walk, in a driving rainstorm, a mile to your favorite synagogue on the Sabbath, but driving your car to the same destination is a gross violation.

Orthodox homes or establishments often provide stacks of separated toilet tissues so that one is not obliged to tear sheets from a roll on the Sabbath day. Listening to a dissertation on the weekly portion of biblical law on an electronic device which requires an off and on button is equally a violation.

The restrictions of this relation back doctrine, analogizing modern life to laws or events that existed thousands of years earlier, exists in multiple other aspects of Jewish life today.

2) The prayer mantra

By the late 1400s, the Jews, as an itinerant, landless people, had traveled from host nation to host nation for centuries. With them, they carried their Torah scrolls, which was the source of the instruction they were to provide to their neighbors and themselves. In their synagogues, the reading of the Torah remained paramount. Nevertheless, prayer in a formalized fashion gained significant momentum.

The circumstances of the Jew in the diaspora was rarely favorable and thus there was much to ask of God. Eventually, the prayers, often in the form of poems and supplications, became formalized both with reference to language and time of presentation. Personalized prayer, as a means of communication with one’s God, took a backseat to prepared prayers, prescribed for specific times and dates. The advent of the printing press and the printing of prayer books accelerated the process. Those most devout demonstrated their devotion by how quickly they could read the prayer or recite it from memory. Spontaneity, in supplication, became a lost art. It has been suggested, undoubtedly in jest, that God’s failure to appear since biblical times may be as a result of boredom with the thoughtless and repetitious utterances of the rote daily prayers.

In addition to stylized prayers, traditional Jews have often adopted the dress of host countries (black hats, fur hats, long black coats, etc.). This dress would be more familiarly found in seventeenth-century Poland than in biblical Israel or elsewhere in the modern world.

3) Create a work-around that frequently has the appearance of a sham

In Exodus 16(28-29), God reproved the Jewish people for violating his commandments by leaving their home on the Sabbath day. He requires “let no man go out of his place on the seventh day.” That requirement represented a significant problem for rabbinic Judaism. How could the Jewish community attend services, if restricted to their home site?

From that quandary, the notion of eruv was born. It was an artificial way of extending one’s place or household beyond the normal household limits. The idea was that if one can create a confined area in which the household is located, it becomes part of that household. Virtually every traditional Jewish community has its own eruv. The eruv of the borough of Manhattan, New York, is constructed by eighteen miles of translucent wire around most of that community, essentially declaring that all homes in the eighteen mile circumference are part of a single residence. Any comment on how this might comply with the express words of the Torah appears superfluous.

To be sure, the Sabbath elevator was not an invention of the early sages of Israel. Nevertheless, it is a feature of many hospitals in which there are Jewish physicians and patients. To avoid having to press an elevator button, and thus create an electrical impulse, which has its religious origin in fire, Sabbath elevators in many hospitals are obliged to automatically stop on every floor. Curiously, how a Sabbath elevator that runs on electric avoids the criticized use of electricity on the Sabbath is a conundrum worthy of deep thought.

Many religious Jews are disinclined to leave lights or air conditioning on from before the Sabbath on Friday so that it may be used on Saturday. To avoid that dangerous and expensive alternative, they turn to the use of what has traditionally been called “the Shabbos goy.” That is a Gentile who is procured to come during the Sabbath and initiate the electrical system that provides the light, air conditioning or heat. The rationale is that inasmuch as he is not a Jew, he is not prohibited by doing work on Sabbath.  It is as if the introduction of a Gentile third party to perform a Sabbath violation insulates the person who acquired the service. Nothing could be further from the truth in any civilized society. The act of the agent is the act of the principal. Otherwise one could, with impunity, hire a hitman to do in an adversary.

Some observant Jews are owners of business establishments that need to be open on Saturday in order to be viable. It has become a popular device to create a sales contract wherein the business is sold to a Gentile on Friday afternoon, only to be repurchased by the original owner on Sunday morning. The rationale here is that it is not owned by the religious Jew during the Sabbath, when it is open for business on that day. This shameless sham, which purports to be a bona fide transaction, would be fully revealed if the weekend owner set fire to the business on Saturday afternoon.

Conclusion

After the destruction of the second Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. and the futile revolt against the Romans by Simon bar Kokhba in 132 CE, the control of the Jewish people passed into the hands of the rabbis as successors to the Pharisees.

The Torah had no provision for alteration or amendment in order to accommodate to physical, environmental or social changes. God no longer appeared directly or through prophets to accommodate to the changing circumstances of the people. Essentially, the rabbis had two choices in order for the Jewish people to keep pace in a changing world:

• The rabbis could broadly construe the Torah to accommodate the changing times in such a manner as to stay true to the spirit, focus and intent of the Torah.

• The rabbis could depart from portions of the Torah by rejecting them, out of hand, and/or by adding rules and regulations that were alien to the original provisions.

Whether by design, frustration or misadventure, rabbinical law (Halacha) began in part to depart from the Torah and to establish a jurisprudence of its own in direct violation of the provisions of Deuteronomy 4(2) and (13-32).

There obviously came a time when the rabbinate realized that they could not offer the Torah as the revealed word of God and then depart from portions of it at will. There had to be some divine authority which would authorize rabbinical departures from the strict letter of the Torah. In what may have been an act of desperation, the rabbis reached back more than 1800 years from the completion of the Talmud (500 C.E.) to the delivery of the Torah at Mount Sinai (1320 B.C.E.) in order to “borrow” divine authority for its Oral Torah, the Talmud.

As a result of rabbinical creativity, the Judaism of today is significantly different from that of our ancestors. The rabbis created their own world, their own people and their own Torah.

The New Rabbinical Jewish World

In the Torah we find only one world, the world created by God, in which all of his creatures dwell. From the rabbinate, we have acquired a new world, L’Olam Habah, the world to come. It is a world that promises afterlife and benefits for living a life mindful and in compliance with rabbinic halacha. Has anyone consulted God?

The New Rabbinical Jewish People

For approximately 2000 years from God’s selection of Abram, a Jew was an individual who is born of a Jewish father (a patrilineal society). By rabbinical fiat, that rule was changed to replace the requirement of a Jewish father with the requirement of a Jewish mother (a matrilineal society). The change constitutes a direct rejection of the Torah and is an alteration of the composition of the Jewish people. Who are we?

The New Rabbinical Jewish Torah

The Torah was given to Moses and the Jewish people in the fourteenth century B.C.E. The Written Torah, from the days of Ezra the scribe, serves the Jewish people today as the sacred and disclosed word of God. The rabbinate has provided the world with the Mishna, the Gemoras, and the Midrash, together the Talmud. They are the writings and opinions of multiple rabbis, often in disputation with each other with regard to the interpretation, and application of the Written Torah. The rabbis have chosen to elevate the status of the Talmud to that of an Oral Torah, albeit it is a series of rabbinical texts and opinions in service of the written Torah. Both God and his Torah are singular. Even under the guise of service, no one claim equivalency with the Creator or the divinity of his teachings.

May the Jewish people and their Torah wander no more.

By Douglas C. Kaplan

Intermarriage

The miracle of 4000 years of Jewish survival is legend.  Virtually half of that existence occurred as a landless people escaping anti-Semitism by traveling from host nation to host nation while still retaining Jewish identity and faith.  Ironically, one of the greatest challenges to Jewish existence occurred when the Jewish law of inclusion was changed to encompass only children born of Jewish mothers, regardless of the religion of the father.

Prior to the construction of the second Temple (Circa 450 BCE), the wives of Jewish males, from whatsoever origin, sojourned with their families within the Jewish community and they and their children were simply accepted as part of that community.  Intermarriage was quite frequent in the early Israelite society.  The practice was well reflected in the story of Ruth, a Moabite woman.  On the death of her Jewish husband, she pledged to her mother-in-law Naomi that, “wherever you go, I will go.  Wherever you live, I will live.  Your people shall be my people and your God will be my God.”  The Scriptures do not describe a formal conversion of Ruth because undoubtedly there was no formal conversion ceremony nor did any rabbis then exist to perform it.  King David, Ruth’s great-grandson, is a testament to the inclusion of Ruth and her descendents into the covenant of Israel. 

The Blessed Seed of the Patriarchs

Four of the twelve tribes of Israel (Dan, Naphtali, Gad and Asher) resulted from Jacob’s relationships with Zilpah and Billah, the servant women of his wives Leah and Rachel.  Joseph was married to Asenath, an Egyptian woman, who the Pharaoh gave to him as a wife.  Kings Saul, David, Solomon and successor monarchs married many foreign wives, often the result of international agreements.  Moses was married to a Midianite woman.  No one would suggest that their progeny were not part of the Hebrew nation.  What all of the children of these mixed marriages had in common was that they were conceived with the blessed seed of the patriarchs. 

Why are the seeds of the patriarchs the golden thread into which is woven the fabric of the Jewish people?  The answer is quite simple.  It is because God, in the Old Testament, repeatedly prescribed it and presumptively designed it to fit within his blueprints of human genetics: 

1. In Genesis 12(7), God appears to Abraham (then Abram) and in referring to the land of Canaan tells him, “Unto thy seed will I give this land.”

• In Genesis 17(6-8), God tells Abraham that he will make him exceedingly fruitful and that he will sire Kings.  God promises that he will give to Abraham and to Abraham’s seed all of the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession. 

• In Genesis 17(10-12), God reminds Abraham of the earlier covenant negotiated between God, Abraham and the seed of Abraham and requires that a token of that covenant be represented by the circumcision of every male child. 

• In Genesis 26(2-4), God confirms to Isaac the covenant with Isaac’s father Abraham.  God promises to make Isaac’s seed multiply as the stars of the heaven and in Isaac’s seed will all the nations of the earth be blessed. 

• In Genesis 28(14), God tells Jacob that his seed shall be as the dust of the earth.

• Deuteronomy 34(4-5) God allows Moses, prior to his death, to look at the land to which he has brought the Jewish people and reminds Moses that he has given this land to the seed of the patriarchs.

• In all biblical references in which the word seed is used the Bible employs the word “ZERAH” which, even today, is translated as semen.

All of the described biblical conversations between God and the patriarchs expressly included reference to the seed of the patriarchs.  It is as if the patriarch’s seed were an essential party to the prediction that Israel would become a great nation and to God’s covenant granting the land of Canaan to Israel.  None of the predictions or covenants were addressed to the matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca, Leah or Rachel or to the fruit of their womb. 

Prohibited Relationships

Supporters of Matriarchal Judaism point to Deuteronomy 7(1-4), which names seven Canaanite tribes with which Jewish men and women cannot marry.  In Deuteronomy 7(4), the Scripture explained that the purpose of this provision was, “for they will turn away thy son from following me that they may serve other gods.”  Two thoughts naturally proceed from the express language of that provision: 

• Although it is a prohibited relationship, God treats the issue of a Jewish man and a female from one of the prohibited tribes as belonging to his people of Israel.  Why else would God be concerned with the mother talking the child into other gods and religions?

• No mention is made concerning possible religious redirection of the daughter from such a prohibited union, presumptively because the daughter does not pass on the blessed seed of the patriarchs. 

Some resources have expanded this provision to mean that Jewish men and women cannot marry outside of the Jewish community.  Yet, ironically, traditional Judaism today confirms that the issue of a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father is born into the Jewish community. 

The express directions of God in the Torah have never been circumspect.  God specifically describes those animals which are prohibited to be consumed by the Hebrew nation (Leviticus 11(3-8) and Deuteronomy 14(4-8)).  In a similar vein, God specifically identifies how the holiday of Passover should be observed (Exodus 12).  In God’s infinite wisdom, he recognizes the editorial nature of his creations and enjoins his people, “ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall you diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you” (Deuteronomy 4(2)).

 In Deuteronomy 7(1), God actually names the seven specific local tribes that Jews are prohibited to marry into:  Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites.

To expand the list of the seven tribes to all persons of non-Jewish extraction would:

• Suggest that God went to a lot of trouble to name all seven tribes when he really intended to prohibit marriage to anyone outside of the Jewish community.

• Violate God’s injunction to the Jewish people not to add to his directives.

• Conflict with traditional Judaism’s acceptance of children born from a relationship between a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father. 

Rabbinical Challenge to Divine Authority

In all of the Tanach (compendium of Torah and Books of Prophets and Scribes), the identity of each individual is established through the name of his or her father.  This is especially true in regard to the thousands of persons named in the book of Ezra, the Scribe where lineage is traced through the male parent.  Yet, in one of the great ironies of Jewish history, a sea change appears to take place when Ezra arrives from Babylonia to the construction site of the second Temple in Jerusalem.  Many of the Jews in that community have fathered children with women of the indigenous tribes which were those expressly prohibited in Deuteronomy 7(1).

 Ezra was so distressed by what he saw that he prayed, wept and cast himself down.  In crisis mode, he appropriately demanded that those unions espoused to women of the prohibited tribes be set aside, but then erroneously went one step too far.  He demanded that the issue of these relationships, children born of the blessed seed of the patriarchs, be abandoned to their mothers and rejected from acceptance as Jewish children.  In doing this, Ezra brings into fruition God’s expressed concern in Deuteronomy 7(4) that these children will be turned away from God and will serve other gods. 

There appears little doubt that Ezra’s erroneous decision was buoyed by the rationale that you can identify the mother of a child but not the father.  That unauthorized rationalization, if it had any merit, long ago disappeared with the science of DNA.  Ezra’s decision and its subsequent acceptance by the authors of the Talmud effectively abandoned the seed of the patriarchs as the instrumentality for the continuum of the Jewish people.  As the Jewish female was presumed to produce a Jewish child, a Jewish male could only breed a Jewish child when in union with a Jewish female.  The seed of the patriarchs was held for naught.

Who had the authority to change God’s directive that the people of Israel would be forthcoming only from the seed of the patriarchs?  Who had the authority to change the source of the Jewish people from the seed of the patriarchs to the ovum of Jewish women?  Was there some Divine directive wherein God directed the sages of the Talmud to change his early plans for the development of the Jewish people so that they would be generated from a different source?  It is interesting to note that the Sadducees and their presumptive successor the Karites, whose interpretation of the Torah differed from the Pharisees\ Rabbis, declined to abandon the seed of the patriarchs as the source of Jewish children. 

The Y Chromosome and the Seed of the Patriarchs

Although many biblical Jews were engaged in animal husbandry, they lacked the knowledge of modern geneticists.  They had no special awareness about how genetic traits were passed down through the generations.  It was not until 1905 when Nettie Stevens of Bryn Mawr College and Edmund Beecher Wilson independently discovered the mechanisms of the unique Y chromosome.  All normal males have both an X chromosome and a Y chromosome while all females have two X chromosomes.  The work of these two scientists and subsequent contributions by other geneticists proved that the Y chromosome established the male sex of a child and passed its genes unaltered from father to son. 

Given these facts, one has to wonder how the early Jewish community knew and understood that the priesthood, the Kohens, (which stemmed from Aaron’s lineal descendents) could only descend from father to son.  The uniqueness of the Jewish nation originated with the Creator’s inclusion of the Y chromosome’s unchanged path from father to son as part of the design of the human species.  By providing in Genesis 12:7, 17:6 – 8, 17:10 – 12, 26:2 – 4 and 28:14, that the seed of the patriarchs, which incorporated the Y chromosome, was the root stock of the people of Israel, God assured that the integrity of his people, would remain pure and un-diluted.

The Benevolent Autocracy of the Creator

In every structured society, the governing rules of conduct are established either by man or law.  Where they are created and enforced by man, such as a monarchy or an oligarchy, the laws are subject to change on the whim of the king or oligarch.  Where the rules governing the society stem from a written instrument, such as a constitution, the instrument remains the paramount and exclusive source of authority in that society.  Customarily, such instruments provide for the manner in which they can be amended.  However, the rules are different in a religious community, where the basic document contains the direct or transcribed word of the Creator.  The Torah can only be amended by God, its source, and not by man.  Man may, however, make rules and regulations in concert with the express provisions of the instrument but not inconsistent with it.

 In Genesis, the patriarchs are told that God’s covenant is with them and their seed.  Meaning no disrespect, the covenant is not with the matriarchs or with the fruit of their womb.  The Torah advises that it is through the patriarch’s seed that Israel will become a great nation and it is with that seed that God has covenanted to deliver the land of Canaan as an everlasting possession. 

Who then had the authority to decree that Jewish women, through whom that holy seed could not pass, were the exclusive instrumentality for the origin of Jewish children?  Today, the child of a righteous Jewish husband with a non-Jewish mate is not Jewish, but the child of an atheist Jewish woman fathered by a gentile Holocaust denier is Jewish. Not all of the brilliant scholars of the Mishna, Gomorrah, Gaonim, Rashi or Maimonides have the authority to change God’s covenant with the patriarchs and their seed or to alter the physiological path through which membership in the Jewish people is delivered.

Conclusion

For the last seven decades, we have maintained to the world our just entitlement to the land of Israel.  That right is largely based upon God’s biblical covenant with our patriarchs and their seed.  For 2000 years, we have wrongfully rejected that seed as the avenue for the continuity of our people.  What terrible damage has been done to the authority of our entitlement to the land? 

Over the last 2000 years (except in modern reform and liberal congregations), hundreds of thousands of Jewish children and their successor generations have been wrongfully denied access to their own people.  Every time a child is born to a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother and is denied entry into the Jewish community a gross injustice has been done.  It is a wrong that demands prompt remediation. 

The erroneous matrilineal path is deeply rooted in traditional Judaism and thus therein lies the affirmative obligation for correction.  Before we, as Jews, can undertake the repair of the world (Tikkum Olam), we must first have the courage to repair ourselves.  Tradition, which is seeped in thousands of years of erroneous misdirection, is not justification for the denial of birthright into the People of Israel.

In the correction of this wrong, may the wisdom of the patriarchs lead us to a path where we promptly return to the ample blessings of God’s covenant.

By Douglas C. Kaplan

Genesis, the first Book of the Old Testament, is imperiously dismissed by some as an imaginative allegory about the creation of the universe and the origin of the Jewish People.

Hidden in the treasure trove of its narrative are many answers to the mysteries of an ancient people, its obligation to repair the world and the origin of anti-Semitism

A vengeful God’s remorse

Genesis begins with God’s creation of the earth and its wondrous inhabitants. It identifies a Garden of Eden in which Adam and Eve lived a beautiful, exotic, and carefree existence. It was a perfect world. Yet, when God’s human creatures failed to obey a single order, He threw them out of the garden, consigned them to a finite life in which they were obliged to support themselves through their own efforts.

At a subsequent time when God’s human creatures did not comply with His moral code, His anger was once again kindled and, with the exception of Noah and the contents of his ark, He flooded the earth and all living things were destroyed.

When wickedness became rampant in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah God once again became wroth. With the exception of Lot, his wife and two daughters, He destroyed both communities. However, when Lot’s wife, out of natural curiosity, but against instruction, turned to see the destruction, she ended up as a pillar of salt.

God was quick to anger, and aware of His vengeful nature (Deuteronomy 32(35)). In one of the most sensitive moments of biblical literature, God, the creator of the world, turned to His own creations, Noah and his sons, and pledged to them that He would never again destroy the earth (Genesis 9(11-17). So contrite was God that He pledged that every rainbow in the sky would iterate His covenant in perpetuity to humanity.

In the very same chapter (Sedra) of Genesis, called “Noah,” we meet “Abram” and begin to learn how God intends to put guardrails on His anger. If He can control the wickedness of His creations, He will not need to respond with vengeance. What is needed is an on-site presence that can instruct the peoples of the world, God’s creations to whom He has granted free will, how to live in accordance with God’s law and mandate.

God chose Abram as the rootstock of a people whom He designed. There was no chosen people

The notion of a chosen people is an erroneous and contentious concept. It generates from Genesis 12(2-3), and elsewhere, where Abram is made a unique offer by God, who pledged that he would make Abram and his descendents a great nation. At that point of time, Abram had no children and only a barren wife. He was certainly not a people or nation. However, in the selection of Abram, God uses some interesting language: “In thee shall all families of the earth be blessed”. It is an expression that foreshadows God’s intended use of Abram’s descendents to spread God’s declared rules of civility (Torah), so as to repair a wicked world and thus to save it from His vengeance.

Specifications of a designed people

God’s design starts with the selection of one man, Abram, whose name is later changed to Abraham. It then grows into a family, a tribe, a series of tribes and ultimately into the Hebrew nation. In Genesis 12(7), 17(6-8), 17(10-12), 26(2-4), and 28(14), God covenants with Abraham and subsequently with his son Isaac and grandson Jacob that from their semen (Zerah) there will be forthcoming a great nation. God covenants to them that He will protect them, but they must abide by his requirements. As to qualified males, however, God (in (Genesis 12 (7)), additionally requires circumcision of the instrument through which the Zerah is delivered, as an everlasting memorial to His covenant with the Hebrew people. In anticipation of the work to be done by the people whom God created, God commits to grant them the land of Canaan (Israel) as an everlasting possession.

Thus, a female, or a circumcised male, as a descendent of the semen (Zerah) of the patriarchs, is a Jew whether or not that person is secular, adherent of another faith, agnostic or atheist. By the same token, one who is not born of the Zerah (semen of the patriarchs), who so loves Judaism that he or she strives to comply with all of the 613 Torah mitzvot is not a Jew perforce of that commitment or dedication alone.

In the waning days of the Second Temple, by virtue of rabbinical fiat and contrary to the express Torah prescription, a Jew was identified as one born of a Jewish mother, without regard to male zerah origination. It is a thesis that is still maintained within traditional Judaism today. Query, can a designed people change the design of their own origination?

The change from patrilineal descendants of the patriarchs to those born of female Jews has obviously modified the composition of the Jewish people. They are different from those with whom God covenanted, through the patriarchs, to deliver the land of Canaan in perpetuity. We must ask ourselves the difficult question as to whether the change in the composition of the Jewish people has adversely affected our entitlement to the Land of Israel.

Reform Jews, in 1983, reintroduced Jewish patrilineality by proposing that a child born of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother is a Jewish child if the child is reared in the Jewish home. While that is a desirable step, the notion of rearage is irrelevant to identity.

A child born of a Jewish father originates from the Zerah of the patriarchs and therefore is a Jew, not a Gentile and not a half-Jew. Jewish identity, by definition, is a function of birth, not of rearage.

Intermarriage

With the exception of seven named Canaanite tribes (Deuteronomy 7(1-4), the Torah does not preclude Jewish men from relationships with Gentile women. In biblical times, relationships with non-Jewish women were most common. Of the 12 tribes of Israel, the tribes of Dan, Naphtali, Gad, and Asher were the result of Jacob’s relationships with two Egyptian women, Zilpah and Billah. Joseph was married to Asenath, an Egyptian woman whom the Pharaoh gave to him as a wife. The kings of Israel: Saul, David, Solomon and their successors married hundreds of foreign women in pursuance of political relationships with neighboring people. Moses was married to a Midianite woman. Who would suggest that the children born of these marriages were not part of the Jewish nation? What all of the children of these mixed marriages had in common was that they were conceived by Jewish men endowed with the blessed seed (Zerah) of the patriarchs. Assuredly, these Gentile women did not all convert to Judaism, especially since rabbis did not appear on the scene until hundreds of years later.

When man plays God

The requirements of Jewish conversion are different from that of the other major faiths. In both Christian and Muslim faiths, conversion takes place by ceremonies of acceptance and dedication to their special deities and religious practices. However, a Muslim convert is not automatically turned into an Arab and a Christian convert does not automatically become a Semite.

In Judaism, however, because it originated as a tribal faith of a single people, it requires the practitioner to to be a member of the tribe as well as to commit to the faith and its practices. Thus, Jewish conversion would be obliged to render the convertee a Jew as well as a co-religionist.

However, the rite of the conversion does not and cannot change the convertee into a Jew. A Chinese convertee still retains his Asian appearance, skills and attributes of birth. His or her children will remain Chinese in appearance and will inherit the genetic traits of that people.

Science has not as yet acquired the ability to change the total genetic makeup of a live person so as to re-create him or her as someone else. Assuredly, it is a skill not yet taught in rabbinical school and awarded with diplomas from yeshivas, or institutions like Hebrew Union College or Jewish Institute of Religion. Religious school credentials do not provide the ability to invest Gentiles with the seed (Zerah) of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. No study, blessing, or immersion can alter a person’s genetic heritage.

The DNA of a Gentile convert to Judaism will remain unchanged after the conversion process has been completed.

Attempts at conversion by rabbis are an embarrassment

The fragmented denominations of the Jewish faith, i.e., Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstruction, etc., all adopt their own standards and procedures for conversion. Recently, the chief Rabbi of Israel, where almost one half of all Jews reside, announced that only conversions performed by Orthodox rabbis will be recognized. The effect of this action is to attempt to legitimize an impossible and biblically unauthorized procedure, but only with regard to conversions conducted by Orthodox rabbis. At the same time, they would reject inclusion of children born of Jewish fathers (conceived with the Zerah of the patriarchs) if the mother is not Jewish. Conservative Jews are obliged to follow the same standard, but their conversions, according to the Orthodox, are unworthy.

Reform rabbis, who deal more frequently with intermarriage, are much more liberal with the conversion process. It is no wonder that in recent centuries, there is so much confusion as to who is a Jew. The issues have become one of the politics of religion.

It is not by inadvertence or indifference that the Torah makes no reference to conversion. It is high time for the rabbinate to abandon the perilous road of conversion and to resort to the effective clarity of the biblical law of Ger Toshav.

Ger Toshav, the biblical solution to the perils of conversion

During early biblical times, intermarriage between a Jewish man and a Gentile wife were handled more efficiently and with less formality. The Gentile wife simply entered the Jewish community and remained there with her husband and her children as a Ger Toshav. The term applied to a permanent sojourner with the Jewish people in the Jewish community. At the end of the day, their issue, having been sired by a Jewish father, were Jews and were automatically accepted as members of the Jewish community.

The Torah was especially mindful to instruct the community to treat such sojourners with kindness and equality.

In Deuteronomy 10(18-19), God teaches the obligation of loving the stranger (Ger) and in giving that person food and raiment. God reminds the Jewish people that they were strangers in the land of Egypt. Jews are informed that “cursed is the one who perverts the justice of the stranger” (Deuteronomy27 (19). The Torah, in Numbers 15(15), provides that “ there shall be one law for you and for the resident stranger; it shall be a law for all time throughout the ages. You and the stranger shall be alike before the Lord.”  In multiple ways the Torah goes to great lengths to equate the rights and living conditions of the sojourner to that of the populace.

In order to justify the rite of conversion, the modern rabbinate often turns to the Book of Ruth in the Tanakh, suggesting a historical justification for conversion. The book tells a simple story during the time of the Judges (600-400 BCE) of a Jewish widow by the name of Naomi with her two sons who married Moabite women. Both of her sons died and she was left with her two Moabite daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth. As Naomi prepared to return to her own people in Judah, she bade farewell to Orpah, but Ruth cleaved to her saying “whether thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.” These beautiful words by Ruth evince more of a dedication to her mother-in-law, Naomi, than a desire to convert to the God of Israel.

There is no indication in the text that Ruth was ever formerly converted to Judaism, or even that there existed at that time rabbis, or others, who could have effectuated such a conversion. Ruth entered the Jewish community as a Ger Toshav, accompanied by her mother-in-law Naomi. Nevertheless, in accordance with Scripture, she was provided with the rights of a Jewish widow and afforded a Leverite-like procedure to allow Boaz, a kinsman of Naomi to marry her. Notwithstanding the fact that Ruth was a Moabite, since Boaz her spouse was a Jew, the lineal descendents of that relationship, including her great-grandson King David, were Jews. 

The “Chosen People” misconception and anti-Semitism

To justify the animus against Jews, anti-Semites suggest such rationales and libels as: the Jews control the world economies; the Jews control the press; the Jews are always focused on money and wealth; the Jews killed the Christian God Jesus etc. Genesis, however, provides a more logical explanation.

In Genesis 17(6-8) God selects Abraham as the father of a designed future people who will act as God’s surrogate in instructing the world on living a moral and ethical life. In anticipation of, and reward for, the performance of their duties, God grants the people of Israel the land of Canaan in perpetuity. That is the origin of the often expressed, but little understood, notion of tikkun olam.

Israel was then a small nation, both geographically and in population. It had little chance to accomplish the work for which it was designed. Opportunity, however, did accrue as BCE changed to the CE.

Shortly after the death of Jesus in 32 CE, his disciple Paul, a Jew, was convinced that Jesus was the anticipated Messiah.  Thus, Paul undertook to export the Jewish tribal faith, as modified by the notion of the divinity of Jesus, to neighboring Gentile nations. He preached that one need not be a genetic Jew in order to partake of their faith. In support of his efforts, he provided the Torah and all of the books of the Tanakh, together with a history of the life of Jesus, to a pagan or godless world. This modified form of Judaism was ultimately identified as the Christian religion.

Christianity grew in the Middle East and in the Roman Empire under the nurture of the Catholic Church, only to be fragmented in the Middle Ages by the Protestant Reformation and by unique national interests. Today there are multiple Christian denominations who publish their own form of the Christian Bible. Significantly, all of the Christian Bibles, of whatever denomination, contain a verbatim translation of the Torah, as well as most of the books of the Tanakh (Phrophets and Scribes). Essentially the Christian world has adopted the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and a modified version of the Jewish faith to which they remain devoted. Many male Christians have received the rite of circumcision.

Howsoever devoted Christians are to the Old Testament, they lack the genetic lineage from the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and therefore are not includable in the people that they erroneously believe were chosen by God as his people.

For some Gentiles, devoted to the God of Abraham, anti-Semitism takes the form of anger over an erroneous notion that their love, in the eyes of God, occupies a secondary place behind that of the Jewish People.

Analogously, in Genesis, we see the tale of Cain and Abel. Abel’s gift to God is acceptable and Cain’s is rejected. Cain’s bitterness and jealousy, in what he perceives as the denial of God’s love, results in the murder of his brother.

Similarly, in Genesis, the sons of Jacob were angered over what appeared to be Jacob’s greater love for their brother Joseph, upon whom Jacob conferred a coat of many colors. Only upon the plea of one brother to sell Joseph into slavery was Joseph’s life saved from death at the hands of his jealous brothers.

For some Christians, even inflicting pain upon the Jews is not enough to soothe the wounds of shame of being second-class citizens in the world of the God that they have adopted and love.

The ultimate question

Was the creation of the Hebrew nation, for the purposes of spreading the civilizing effect of God’s Torah and to defeat world wickedness, successful? History strongly suggests that it accomplished little if anything. We live in a world bereft of morality and beset with national and personal greed. Our societies are rank with dishonesty, perversion of justice, rape, sexual promiscuity and wars of such magnitude that we have the capacity of total self-destruction.

The failure of the Hebrew nation’s mission is confirmed by the fact that, for 2000 years, Jews have been obliged to wander the surface of the earth, despised, landless and without Temple, going from host nation to host nation until rudely cast out.

Assuredly, the vengeance which God sought to deny himself through the creation of the Hebrew people, was directed to that very same people as a result of its failure to accomplish its mission.

Ah! But like all other Judaic critical self-examinations, there is always “the other view”.

God’s vengeance against all of his creatures has not been rekindled and he has not, as yet, again destroyed the world.

On reflection, what better way could God’s designed people have to spread the essential civilizing aspect of his Torah than to travel from nation to nation throughout the world for 2000 years educating its peoples on the essential aspects of God’s moral imperative through Torah.

Could it be that the Galus (2,000 years of wandering) was part of the Hebrew mission?

Viewed from yet a different perspective

The Christian world believes that the Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, born to Mary at the start of his Era, had a special relationship with the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob.

If that were so, he would join a number of other of God’s human creatures, Noah, Jonah, Moses, and others who God selected to perform designated tasks on behalf of the Almighty. While they were all men of honor and respect, none were deities or lesser deities, nor could they be, given God’s declaration of his exclusiveness in both the first and second of the 10 Commandments.

On reflection, the service performed by Jesus, John the Baptist, the Hebrew preacher, the 13 Jewish apostles, and the Pharisee Saul of Tarsus (Paul) was totally consistent with the mission to bring Torah to the world, assigned by God to their Jewish nation. Paul, along with Christian doctrine, introduced the Torah and the other sacred Hebrew texts to the known world.

Christianity today is the largest religion in the world and comprises 2.1 billion members. A survey by the Bible Society concluded that around 2.5 billion copies of the Christian Bible were printed between 1815 and 1975, but more recent estimates put the number at more than 5 billion. In every Christian Bible there appears the Torah, the Prophets and the Scribes (the Tanakh) as an essential part of their sacred text. How they are absorbed and considered is a function of God’s grant of freedom of will.

Did the early Christians know that their efforts were instrumental in bringing the Torah, given by God to the Jews at Mount Sinai, to the Gentile world?

At this stage of history Only God knows!

By Douglas C. Kaplan