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Yeshua ben Yosef (Jesus) (6-4 BCE to 30 CE) was the eldest son of a working-class Jewish family in the Galilee. Historians tell us that the only confirmable historical facts about Jesus are, his existence, his baptism by his cousin; John the Baptist; and his death by crucifixion order of Pontius Pilate. The rest of the information about his life comes from the four Gospels (moderate-sized histories) Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John which are the holy Scriptures of the Christian church.  Little is known of his early life.

In the last three years of his life, Jesus became an itinerant Jewish preacher and faith healer in the synagogues and Jewish communities of the Galilee. He was a compelling personality fostering help for the poor, the infirmed and the underprivileged. Jesus drew many supporters, including 12 Jewish apostles who helped formed a Jewish Sect in his support, and occasionally regaled him as Messiah and King of Israel.  In Jerusalem, the Romans, mindful of his popularity, tried him as a threat to their rule, and with the result that he was consequently crucified.  Up to this point the only parties involved were the Jews and ultimately the Romans who crucified him.  Yeshua (Jesus) was born a Jew, he lived as a Jew, and he died as a Jew.

Several years after Jesus’s death, Saul of Tarsus (Paul), who never met Jesus, became active in the Jewish sect and induced many Gentiles to enter and ultimately control it.  The sect, while under the dominion of the Gentiles, declared Jesus to be the son of God, which resulted in a departure from the sect of the monotheistic Jewish membership.  About 130 years after the death of Jesus, the Gentile-controlled sect decided to make it a formal religion based on the life of Jesus.  However, it was too late for personal recollections and there was no real transcribed data upon which to support it.  There were, however, a few anonymous personal Gospels, written between 40 and 80 years after the death of Jesus from unknown authors, with no confirmed knowledge or history of Jesus.  Four of them were selected by one man Irenaeus, a Greek bishop, to constitute the four pillars of the Christian church. Among the pages of those Gospels it shows an alleged transcript of Jesus, 130 years after his death, articulating the most vile, vicious and ugly slanders against all Jews who do not recognize who he is.  Those slanders, encapsulated and iterated in religious Christian doctrine, started the Genesis of 2000 years of ungodly Christian anti-Semitism, which exists to this very day.  There is a simple solution at the conclusion of this article, which can ultimately silence the scurrilous accusations against the Jews and their clergy, give some peace to the millions who have been the victims of it and begin a new era of amistad under God.

Judea Under the Heavy Hand of Rome

To understand the first half of the first century CE, the period in which Jesus lived, it is vital to know the political and religious environment of the time.  

In 63 BCE, Jerusalem was captured by the military forces of Rome led by Gen. Pompeii.  Lands captured by Rome were generally ruled by a Roman Client King who allowed free religious practices in the captured territories.  After the capture by Rome, Second Temple Israel was named Judea by the Romans. 

The Written Torah, which contained a formal code of laws, earlier arrived with Ezra from Babylon in 440 BCE. It allowed a transition from individual responses to a Jewish tribal god to ultimately become a formal religion, and the religious law of the land which was uniformly applied to all residents.  It was that national and religious environment in which Jesus, his family, the apostles, and John the Baptist were born and lived.

John the Baptist

Yochanan ben Zechariah (John the Baptist) was a devoted, ascetic Jew, who concluded that a Jew could be spiritually cleansed by being immersed in, or sprinkled with water accompanied by prayer.  John the Baptist’s ministry took place in the period between 26 and 30 CE. He was devout in the application of the rules of the Torah, even regarding the political leadership.  That devotion to Torah cost him his head when he criticized the reigning Herod Antipus, Client King, for marrying his brother’s wife in violation of Leviticus 18 (16) and Leviticus 20 (21).

There was a great deal of mutual respect between John and his cousin Yeshua ben Yosef (Jesus).  They learned from each other and were respectful of their mutual roles in Judaism.  John’s baptism of Jesus was a significant event in Jesus religious life.

In the last three years before his death, Jesus served as a charismatic preacher (Magid) and faith healer who traveled mostly through rural communities in the Galilee. Most of his fame was accredited to reports of his healing the sick, and at least in one instance, restoring life to a decedent.  His teachings were focused on the religious law of the land, the Torah, with special emphasis on the needs of the poor, the infirmed and the underprivileged.

Neither Jesus nor John renounced his commitment to the Written Torah and to the Judaism of the day in favor of any other faith.  The same was true of 10 of the 12 original Jewish Apostles that followed and assisted Jesus in his preaching journeys.  Paul and Simon Peter were the exceptions.  Simon Peter served as the first Christian Pope. Saul of Tarsus (aka Paul) became an apostle after Jesus’s death and insisted on bringing the Jesus’s preachings and an altered commitment to the Old Testament to the Gentiles. All the others were born Jews, lived as Jews and died as Jews.

Mary, the Mother of Jesus

In some Christian churches, Mary, the mother of Jesus, had been raised to virtual adoration under the title of Virgin Mary.  That is a title which, for some, is difficult to contemplate given that she and her husband Joseph were the birth parents of several children: Jesus, James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas. See Gospel according to Matthew 13:55. Within Christendom, her title as Virgin is justified on the notion that she was allegedly with God’s child before she and Joseph consummated their marriage vows.

Honors Conferred

Jesus, during his three years of preaching, encountered many people who witnessed his compassion, his dedication to Torah and Judaism, and perhaps most important to them, his ability to cure and restore the sick.  Especially in rural communities, reputations grow quickly.  He was honored by the people with two gratuitously granted honorary titles: Messiah and Melech Yisrael (King of Israel).

Who and What is a Messiah?

In both Judaism and Christianity, the word Messiah means an anointed one.  The word “anointed” refers to a savior, one who has been selected for a prime leadership post for his people, and upon whose forehead has been placed a special oil to consecrate the appointment.  God would not be obliged go through the process of selecting himself and anointing himself.  God may well be the instrumentality that sends the Messiah to resolve an earthly issue. That was a title occasionally granted by the Jews in appreciation, as it was with the Persian King Cyrus, who helped in the reconstruction of the Second Temple after the Babylonian conquest.

Melech Yisrael (King of Israel)

It was the second honorary title granted by the Jewish community, “Melech Yisrael” (King of Israel), which was probably the procuring cause of Jesus’s death by the Romans. The Romans would brook no competition with their sovereign rule over Judea.                               

Jesus and His Apostles Dutifully Follow Jewish Law by Being Present in Jerusalem for Passover

It is noteworthy, that the presence of Jesus and his apostles in Jerusalem during that fateful Passover was not casually chosen by them.  It was consistent with the Jewish religious law of Shalosh Regalim (the three pilgrimage festivals). The Torah instructs all Jews to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem three times a year: in the spring before Passover, in the summer for Shavout and in the fall for Sukkoth.  Deuteronomy 16 (1, 9-10, 13, 16-17).  Even a few short days before his crucifixion by the Romans, Jesus and his apostles were following the mandates of the Torah.  Jesus rode into Jerusalem astride a donkey.  Crowds of Jews greeted him joyously as Messiah and King of Israel.  

 Jesus and the Temple Moneychangers

Noteworthy events occurred in Jerusalem when Jesus visited the holy Temple.  There, in the outer courtyard, he found a series of moneychangers and animal vendors.  Moved by the presence of raw commerce so close to the holy temple of God, Jesus reacted by overturning the tables of the moneychangers.  To say the least, that was impolitic for a number of reasons.  The moneychangers and the animal vendors were absolutely essential to the function of the temple, as well as the worshipers.  Many Jews would come to the temple during the festival holidays from peripheral areas outside of Judea.  They brought with them their own local currency, which was not useful in the markets of Judea.  If they wished to make a sacrifice of a food animal in the temple, they would be unable to do so without the presence and help of people who changed foreign currency into shekels. With an opportunity for currency exchange, purchasing an animal for sacrifice made the presence of the moneychangers and the animal vendors absolutely necessary.  To say the least, the temple administrators and the other persons present viewed the assault on the moneychangers as an act of outrageous vandalism. 

According to the New Testament Gospels, Jesus was then taken into custody and a hearing was held before the Jewish religious authority.  He was then delivered over to Pontius Pilate for a trial before Roman authority.  It was following that second trial that Pontius Pilate ultimately condemned Jesus to crucifixion.  Assuredly, Pilate did not retry Jesus for violation of Jewish religious law.  We are informed of the subject matter of the second trial by the actions of the Roman soldiers as they carried out the sentence.  They dressed Jesus in a scarlet robe, and placed a crown of thorns on his head and mocked him as King of the Jews.  The jeopardy to the continuum of Roman control over Judea was the obvious issue of the trial. 

After the death of Jesus, his sect of followers, who resided in Jerusalem and Galilee, continued to actively support him under the name Nazarenes.   James, Jesus’s brother, led the Nazarenes as an accepted Jewish sect within Judaism for the next 30 years.  However, the Jewish-Christian sect did not remain long in the hands of the Jews and the Nazarenes.

Saul of Tarsus, Paul

One of the most important people in the history of Christianity was Saul of Tarsus, also known as Paul.  Paul was born to a Jewish family in the Roman controlled city of Tarsus in Turkey, which qualified him as a Roman citizen. Paul never met Jesus, nor in all likelihood, ever heard him preach. He started out as an antagonist of the Christians until, on his way to Damascus, he had a dream in which he was confronted by the already-deceased Jesus, who asked why Paul was persecuting him.  From that moment on, he became devoted to the Christian cause. Perhaps, because of the origin of his birth in Tarsus (Roman controlled Turkey) he became a great advocate of bringing the Old Testament (Mosaic law) to the Gentile world.  While some of the original apostles were not in favor of that mission, he nevertheless traveled to many neighboring countries lecturing about Jesus’s promise of a brighter future, his miracles, and the gift of Mosaic law.

Most Gentiles contacted by Paul were willing to accept Mosaic law, but they were unwilling to become circumcised or to follow Jewish dietary restrictions and other unique aspects of the law.  Paul’s position was that Gentile converts did not need to become Jews, get circumcised, follow the dietary laws, or celebrate biblical festivals in order to be saved.

Christianity’s Fateful Transition from Jesus, as Jewish Messiah, to Jesus, as Genetic Son of God

As long as Christian thought and beliefs venerated the devoted and charitable life of Jesus as worthy of anointment as a Messiah, it hovered for several decades inside the periphery of Judaism.  When, however, it became evident that Christian thought had moved Jesus from a Messiah or Christ to the son of God, making him a deity, it was alien to the Jewish world and no longer acceptable.  After all, the patriarchs of Judaism: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, as well as Moses and Joshua, had each pledged, directly or indirectly, to the oneness of the God of Israel.  There was no way, that they could have accepted another deity.  Furthermore, the first of the Ten Commandments provides, “you shall have no other gods before me.”

The concept of Jesus as the genetic son of God, and thus an additional deity, did not arrive without problems in a Gentile Christian world.  Like Judaism, and later the Muslim faith, Christianity viewed itself as a monotheistic, Abrahamic faith.  However, one original God and one son of God makes two Gods and defeats any claim of monotheism.

 Where then could Christianity find an answer?  One of the first solutions was proposed by Tertullian, who was born around 152 to 160 CE (AD).  He expressly designed a Trinity as the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.  He did, however, note that the majority of believers in his day found issue with his doctrine.  An updated version of the same doctrine exists today with a similar response.  It was a formula for dividing God into three entities and then reassembling God to qualify Christianity as a monotheistic religion.

Until 312 CE, Rome had persecuted Christians within their domain.  In that year, Constantine, the Roman Emperor, converted to Christianity and issued the Edict of Milan.  That edict indicated that Rome was now favorably disposed to the Christian faith within its territorial limits.  During the lifetime of Jesus, Rome’s territories included virtually all of Europe, portions of North Africa and the Middle East.  In 380 CE, Roman Emperor Theodosius declared Christianity  the official state religion of the Roman Empire.  It was not by a mass spiritual calling that all of the populations of the Roman Empire became Catholic, but by official decree of the Emperor of Rome.  It was, in essence, religion by fiat, not by faith.  Today, more than 1,800 years after the Theodosius decree and 1,700 years after the fall of the Western Roman empire, Catholicism is still known as the Roman Catholic Church and is physically administered out of Rome and not the holy land.

Rome was in a Uniquely Hostile Relationship with Judea

Rome was the ruling force in Judea from 63 BCE, when it was captured by Gen. Pompeii.  By 65 CE, the Jews had long tired of Roman control and were ready to put up a fight for their own independence.  In 66 CE, a battle broke out in the provincial capital of Caesaria, which led to a seven-year unsuccessful effort by the Jews to remove the yoke of Rome. By 70 CE, the revolt led to the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and continued without success through 73 CE.  Discontent continued until a second revolt was initiated under Bar Kokhbar.

There were extremely heavy losses by the Roman military.  To their embarrassment, they were obliged to bring reinforcements from distant commands in order to ultimately prevail against a small nation that had been under their control for many years.  The damage to Rome’s military ego was not easily accepted or repaired, nor its ire easily assuaged.  It sold captive Jewish prisoners in the slave markets of Rome for less than the price a horse.  It changed its relationship with Judea by dissolving it as an existing conquered nation and incorporated it as a province of Rome.  It changed the name of the land from Judea to Palestina, naming it after the Philistines, the arch enemies of the Jewish people.

All of this occurred as the “Jewish Christian sect” passed out of exclusively Jewish hands into the control of the Gentile world, and Jesus transitioned from Magid to Messiah to Christian God.  The Romans, who had early-on opposed the growth and development of Christianity had not been idle.

This writer has often wondered how and why the Jews, who respected Jesus’s humanity and regaled him as a Messiah and even an honorary King of Israel, in the same week could be accused of his death.

The “why” is fairly easy.  The unification of interests that took place when the Roman Empire agreed to make Christianity the state religion was of critical importance to both parties.  Christianity could not, in good conscience, seek unity and sustenance from an entity that deliberately killed their God.  Rome could not endure the embarrassment of having adopted a state religion after having first deliberately killed the Godhead of that religion.  The continued unity of Roman Christianity would have little promise of success.

 The “how” was a little bit more difficult given the fact that Rome had openly crucified Jesus in the manner it customarily used  for executions.  Its only option, and a poor one at that, was that the Roman Empire, in total control of Judea, got talked into something that it didn’t want to do by a nominal group of Jewish spectators, who had earlier that week expressed their regard for Jesus as he entered Jerusalem.

Who was Doing the Killing and Who Were the Victims?

Yeshua ben Yosef (Jesus) was crucified in 30 CE at Golgotha upon the order of Pontius Pilate, Roman Prefect (Governor of Judea).

Yochanan ben Zechariah (John the Baptist) was beheaded upon the order of Herod Antipus, Roman Client King of Judea. 

St. Paul (Saul of Tarsus) was beheaded in Rome between 62 to 64 CE.

St. Peter (Simon Peter) was crucified in Rome in 64 CE.

Four of the most vital members of the Jewish Christian sect were murdered by the Romans before the Romans decided to make Christianity the state religion of the entire Roman Empire.

Transition from Sect to Religion

As the interest in Jesus grew in the Gentile community and the numbers increased, a new religion with Jesus at the center became inevitable.

There existed little, if any, documentation to support a viable Christian religion based on the life of Jesus. Present were the Judaic sacred documents: the Old Testament and the subsequent histories of the Prophets and the Scribes, which were received while the interest in Jesus was still in Jewish hands, but few, if any, actual transcriptions of Jesus’s life and teachings. Memories were getting vague about the years of Jesus’s preaching.  Where they could find them, the Gentile Christians sought individual accounts of the life of Jesus

 The Greatest Story Never Told

Christians were determined that four histories (Gospels) should be acquired in order to constitute the four pillars of a New Testament. One of the first things that was done was to seek out individual accounts of the life of Jesus.

Four Gospels were selected out of several by Irenaeus (130 to 202 AD), a Greek bishop.  Although all four Gospels were written between 70 CE and 110 CE, the date of their selection by Irenaeus seems somewhat more elusive.  I could find no date of selection of the Gospels.  The estimate of between 170 and 180 CE seems reasonable since that would make Iraneaus, then a Bishop, 40 to 50 years old and the selection of the Gospels between 140 to 150 years after the death of Jesus. History does not reveal that Irenaeus had any assistance in selecting the four critical Gospels, nor does it advise who selected Irenaeus to make that incredibly consequential judgment.

The Four Gospels: Mark, Matthew, Luke and John

What is known about the selection of the four Gospels by Irenaeus is that names of the original “authors” were simply unknown, or concealed.  Whether that was by design or inadvertence remains, to this day, a mystery.

According to Bart D. Ehrman (author of the Hidden Contradictions of the Gospels), Professor, scholar, and author of more than a dozen books on the origin of Christianity, the Canonical Gospels, as they were called, were written anonymously, but later ascribed to the names of evangelists.

The Jesus Seminar, McMillan, 1993, comprising 135 New Testament scholars, confirm author anonymity, and that authoritative names were later assigned to the Gospels by unknown figures in the early church using guesses, or pious wishes.  There are still a number of “conservative scholars” who tie the Gospels to the names later provided by a means that can only be described as cultural and religious hearsay. 

The lack of an author’s name, referring to the Gospels, had to be the subject of much confusion.  To correct the problem, the Church assigned the name of a Christian to each of the Gospels, concluding, I assume, that it was better to refer to them by a name than a number.  Those four names were Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John.  To the credit of the Church and to avoid misrepresentation, the Gospels were denominated by those four names in an unusual manner, i.e., The gospel according to Mark, The gospel according to Matthew, The gospel according to Luke, The gospel according to John.  Conventional identity of authorship would use the word “by” to identify an actual author.

These were Gospels written 40 to 70 years after the death of Jesus, by unknown persons of no confirmed connection with Jesus, which were being relied upon as the sole source to describe Jesus’s life, his preaching, his religion and his nature.

Although it is possible that one or more of the anonymous Gospel authors may have met Jesus or heard him preach, biblical scholars believe that is highly unlikely, given the sizable passage of time from the crucifixion to the authorship.   Koine, an elegant form of the Greek language in which the proffered Gospels were written, was not a regular form of communication in the world between Jesus and the 12 Jewish fishermen and carpenters that accompanied him on his preaching ventures.

Three out of the selected Gospels are joined together under a single heading called synoptic Gospels.  The name suggests that they cover similar periods of time and events in the life of Jesus and that they used each other as a source and a resource.  They are:

1. The Gospel according to Mark which was written on or about 70 CE.
2. The Gospel according to Mathew which was written on or about 70 CE.
3. The Gospel according to Luke which was written between 63 CE and 85 CE.
4. The gospel according to John which was written between 85CE and 110 CE is deemed unique and occupies a category of its own.

Undoubtedly, it must have troubled the churches’ fathers to realize that in the absence of earlier transcription, how could Gospels written 36 to 67 years after the death of Jesus, by unknown persons of no confirmed connection to Jesus, accurately be relied upon as the sole source to describe his life, his teaching and his religion.                                                                           

For some time after the death of Jesus, the church fathers had sought a history of Jesus in support of their faith, but were unable to do so.  Over 130 years after his death, in the Greek language, Ireneaus found not only one, but four anonymous Gospels, which tracked similar histories of Jesus and recounted events in such exquisite detail that they appear to be transcribed with the accuracy of a modern-day court reporter.

Provenance

Every religion is responsible for the provenance of its Holy Scriptures.  It is those Scriptures that speak to each congregant with the voice of its spiritual beliefs.  Christianity, as an emerging religion dedicated to the life of Jesus, decades after his death, recognized that it had a paucity of information about his life.

Because of the significant passage of time after the death of Jesus, the real authors of any biographies that did exist most likely never personally knew Jesus.  Their Gospels, or short histories, comprised a potpourri of generally accepted events, positions, “creative dialogues or monologues” and a smattering of the Gospel author’s own dispositions on those matters.  Significant all four Gospels that were chosen were selected by only one man, Irenaeus.  Since the Gospels were authored anonymously, nothing was known about the real author’s background or religious convictions, nor, for that matter, the views of Irenaeus, himself.

The Authenticity of the Four New Testament Gospels and Their Content

The four Gospels selected by Irenaeus, which became the four pillars of the New Testament, do not start life with an abundance of reliability. It is especially so when readers discover that they were written anonymously, and therefore the sources of their histories are unconfirmable.  The confidence ratio is also affected by the Church naming the anonymous Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, randomly chosen Christian names to give them an aura of authenticity.

The first Gospel in the New Testament, the Gospel according to Matthew, starts out with a verbatim recitation of the more than 2000 word “Sermon on the Mount,” reportedly given by Jesus, at the Beatitudes during his lifetime. Without a modern electronic recording device, or a highly skilled scribe in Hebrew and Aramaic shorthand, that would be a very difficult transcription to achieve. The fact that the sermon does not appear in any of the other three Gospels, nor is there proof of the actual presentation by Jesus, has led biblical scholars, including Dr. Bart Ehrman( in his October 26 2022, article “Did Jesus give the Sermon at the Mount?)” to conclude that he does not think that Jesus ever gave the Sermon on the Mount.  Given that fact, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the Sermon on the Mount might well have been authored by the unidentified, anonymous author of the Gospel accordingto Matthew, years after Jesus’s death.

The gospel according to Matthew 23 (drafted in 70 CE, placed in the mouth of Jesus) (who died in 30 CE)  a screed against all Pharisees and all Scribes, accusing them of the following:

1. Not practicing what they preach
2. Being showy and loving to be called Rabbi
3. Being hypocrites
4. Being “sons of those who murdered the prophets
5. Being serpents
6. Being a brood of vipers
7. In addition, it inquires how the Pharisees and scribes can escape being sentenced to hell

In the Gospel of Matthew 27 (24-25), it describes Pontius Pilate washing his hands and declaring that he is innocent of the blood of Jesus and it reports that some people in the vicinity then declare “his blood is on us and our children.”.  “A ruse is a ruse is a ruse.”  No Jew or Gentile would ever place the blood of a victim of Roman rule on themselves and especially their children.  It was through this media that Rome sought to escape the tragic irony of having killed the God of the religion that it later adopted.

The crucifixion of Jesus, was totally consistent with previous Jewish Christian murders of John the Baptist, Saul of Tarsus and Simon called Peter when Rome opposed the church.  The rate, however, diminished as they slowly approached a union in the Roman Catholic Church. 

The Gospel according to John 8 (44-47) Has Jesus (himself a Jew) saying to the Jews

1. You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires.
2. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him.
3. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar, and the father of lies.
4. The reason that you do not hear me is that you are not of God.

Is there any wonder why the “Jesus Seminar, a 200 member group of mainline biblical scholars in the 1990s, after six years of voting on authenticity in the gospel ruled out 80% of words attributed to Jesus?

The Gospels, especially that of John, contain other instances of patently anti-Jewish statements.

The foregoing slanders of all Jews placed in the mouth of Jesus, himself, a religious Jew, decades after Jesus’s crucifixion is a sad story.  How can they put in the mouth of the one they call sweet Jesus such a vile, ugly form of self-hatred?  How can they teach this to their children, packaged as a form of religious ideation?  What kind of a dark cloud does this place on the verity of the Gospels which they claim are divinely inspired?

By the time of the creation of the Gospel according to John, in 110 CE, Gentile Christianity was largely in the majority and committed to a path of deifying Jesus.

The following numerical data was obtained from public resources. 

1. There are in excess of 2 billion 600 million Christians in the world today
2. There are 37 million Christian churches in the world today,
3. There are 14.8 million Jews in the world today, fewer than the 16 million which existed before the Hitler regime.
4. While these numbers obviously varied over the 2000 years of coexistence of Judaism and Christianity, a ratio might be useful for any given time period.
5. The Gospels are the most fundamental element of the New Testament and of the Christian faith, and portions are read during daily, weekly and on special occasion Masses.  When the anti-Jewish Gospels are read, they are received by the congregation, not only as information, but with the authority of religious conviction

Finally, dear reader, you will get to contemplate and perhaps determine whether the Gospels described herein had a real direct effect on the tragic history of the Jewish people over the 2000 years since the dawn of Christianity. 

Treatment of Jews as a Vulnerable and Targeted Underclass

In the not-so-distant past, Jews in Europe lived in isolated communities known as ghettos, which were locked at night to avoid fraternization with the Christian community. Frequently, these ghettos were invaded by mobs of Christians who took the lives and property of the Jewish inhabitants while shouting as justification “Christ killer” or “you killed our God.” Intermarriage between a Christian and Jew was often prohibited and punished by the host Christian country.  The ownership of land by Jews, an originally agrarian people, and the right to hold public office were denied.  Because Jews had no homeland of their own, they were treated as an underclass.  Yet, they counted themselves lucky as they recalled some of the other treatment they received at the hands of members of the Christian population.

1. The death of thousands of Jews that resulted from the call of Pope Urban II, in 1095, to recapture the holy land from the Muslims (The Crusades).  Mobs of ill-equipped and ill-supplied Christians crossed Europe raiding and killing thousands of Jews in Jewish communities to steal enough supplies for the next day’s journey, and to sharpen their skills as warriors.
2. Being blamed as a scapegoat for the bubonic plague in the 14^th century, and suffering the wrath of the Christian community for the devastating illness that took Jews as well as Christians.  It is estimated that 100,000 Jews were burned alive for this and other false accusations including the blood libels.
3. In 1492, Queen Isabella of Spain issued an edict requiring all Jews to convert to Catholicism in order to remain in their home in Spain.  Their other alternatives were to leave Spain (the home of their families for over a thousand years) with virtually nothing, or to remain on pain of death.  Of those that remained and converted to Christianity, approximately 35,000 were burned at the stake in Spain and in the New World upon suspicion that they had reverted to their own religion.
4. Martin Luther, the Christian community leader of the German  Protestant Reformation, urged his followers to set fire to synagogues or Jewish schools.  He counseled that Jewish houses should be razed and destroyed, and that Jewish prayer books and writings should be taken from them.  Luther also urged that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them. See Martin Luther’s pamphlet published in 1545 and entitled “Jews and their Lies.”  The Nazis reprinted the pamphlet in 1935.

Consider also the following excerpted reports from Wikipedia’s article on “Anti-Semitism in Christianity”:

As early as April 26, 1933, in a meeting with Roman Catholic Bishop Wilhelm Berning, Hitler reported that he had been attacked because of the handling of the Jewish question.  He stated that he recognized the representatives of that race as pestilent for the state and for the church, and that perhaps he was doing Christianity a great service by pushing them out of the schools and public functions.

Archbishop Robert Runcie (Archbishop of Canterbury) asserted that without centuries of Christian anti-Semitism, Hitler’s passionate hatred would never have been so fervently echoed.

Conclusion

The packaged hate of the Jews in the Gospels is available in any home that has a Christian Bible.  It is in multiple copies of the 37 million Christian churches throughout the world. It is available to young Christian children in Sunday school as they learn the rules of their faith.  It is available for readings daily, weekly and holiday at church masses.  It is indeed a self-priming pump of anti-Judaism, a perpetual motion machine that makes available anti-Judaic screeds to its 2,600,000,000 membership.

It has resulted, during my lifetime alone, as a major factor in the murder of 6 million Jewish men, women and children at the hands of a country where Christianity has been and is today the traditional and dominant faith.

In addition to the devotion to Jesus, Christianity credits the ethos of its faith to love, compassion, empathy, “doing unto others” and virtue.  Yes, inscribed in the most sacred of its religious documents, the four Gospels, the pillars of its creed, is violent, hateful language about those Jews that did not accept Jesus as a deity.  The language is so diminishing as to suggest that those Jews were altogether beyond redemption.

How ironic it is that from those selfsame disparaged Jewish people, the Gentile community joyfully accepted their Christianity and the person to whom they elevated as God.

One can only wonder why it was so necessary to show the origin of Jesus, as a descendant of King David, royalty of the Jewish people, a people the Gospels demean. Or, why they now choose to refer to the Christain faith as Judeo-Christianity if Jews are as they picture them in the Gospels. 

Anti-Judaism (Antisemitism) will never end until the vile, invidious, and insidious language is removed from the New Testament.

 We Cannot, and Will Not, Endure Another Holocaust

The Christian community knows what it needs to do in removing all vile and offensive language against the Jews in the Gospels and where else it appears in the New Testament.

Gentile Christians moved forward to make Jesus a deity, and the Jews withdrew because of their steadfast pledge to the one God of Israel.  While belatedly seeking to construct the elements of a formal Christian religion, Gentile Christians found a site to store their frustration with the Jewish commitment to monotheism.  They inserted it as a cancerous screed in the Gospels that they were obliged to adopt in order to establish a historical basis for the Christian religion.  Admittedly, during the ensuing 60 generations it

served quite handily in blaming the Jews for every natural disaster, pestilence, war, depression, blood libel, fraud, attempt to control world politics and economic markets and a host of other accusations.

Within 10 years after the Holocaust (which some construed as a (mea culpa) the Catholic church issued a document entitled Nostra Aetate in regard to the question of Jewish culpability in the death of Jesus.  The language of the document was highly contested by the conservative elements within the church, and resulted in a statement to the effect that the death of Jesus cannot be charged against all Jews, certainly not those who became Christians, then and since, nor the Jews of today.

While that went a substantial way in alleviating contemporary Jews from fault in the death of Jesus, it did not, as many thought exculpate the Jews and place the issue of deicide firmly at the feet of Rome.

While the Nostra Aetate was certainly a step in the right direction.  The significant contemporary increase in anti-Semitism in the United States and elsewhere in the world teaches us that you cannot treat a cancer by lecturing to it.  The cancer of anti-Semitism that is contained in the Gospels can only be treated by excision.  That is the vile language in the Gospels against the Jews in the Christian churches must be identified and summarily removed. One would imagine that such an act of purification of religious doctrine would bring joy to the church and those who wish goodwill to all humanity.

The church, however, needs to be mindful that its failure to remove the anti-Semitic language from its Gospels will compel a conclusion that anti-Semitism is the sine qua non (that without which a thing cannot exist) of Christian doctrine.

Douglas Kaplan

On May 8, 1945, World War II ended in Europe. I was 14 years old and my mother took me to Manhattan to observe the jubilation of the victory of the Allied forces over Nazi Germany. There was a public celebration like never before seen in this country. People were laughing, crying, embracing total strangers, especially anyone in uniform. Dead by his own hand was Adolf Hitler, the bestial Nazi leader and self-styled genealogist, who used a single inquiry to identify his next victim: Is his or her grandmother or grandfather Jewish?

The Aftermath of the War

During a brief period of time following the War, many of the diverse segments of the US population, having successfully fought together, socialized without significant overt racial and religious overtones. For the Jews, however, the loosening of the social and racial constraints was both a benefit and a danger. They appreciated the expressions of compassion by the Gentile community for the loss of six million Jews in Europe. However, Jewish parents feared the loosening of religious restraints on their children could lead to intermarriage. While there had been isolated instances of intermarriage earlier, those events generated such angst in some Jewish parents that they would reject their offending child and go into mourning, as if the child had died. After all, a mixed marriage would have the effect of breaking their family’s link in the genetic chain of Jewish identity, which originated with the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The result might well be that their grandchildren and successive generations would no longer be Jewish. Was this anxiety just a cultural instinct or a simple religious and scientific fact?

To find the answer, one must first identify who and what is a Jew and how is that status achieved or lost. Before answering that question, we should note that there were a number of available groups of people at the time God first spoke to Abraham. God did not select them for the special task He required. Rather, He chose Abraham and Sarah, an aged and childless couple, from whom he could design de novo a unique people that would satisfy His requirements.

The Genesis of the Jewish Identity

The word Jew is derived from the name Judah, one of the 12 sons of Jacob, who was also known as Israel. Jacob, his father Isaac, and his grandfather Abraham constitute the patriarchs of the Jewish people. All of the three patriarchs granted their fidelity to the God of Israel and received in return God’s promise of support and protection, and the assurance that God would make their descendants a great and mighty nation.

A famine brought Jacob’s family to Egypt, where they resided for a period of time. Eventually, a later Pharaoh, fearing that the Jews would rise up against his rule, enslaved them. After several hundred years of slavery in Egypt, God, aided by Moses, led the Jewish people out of captivity and enabled the capture of Canaan, the land which God had promised to the descendants of the patriarchs.

Following the conquest of Canaan, the descendants of nine of Jacob’s sons, representing eight tribes and two half tribes, living in Northern Israel (Samaria), were conquered and dispersed by the Assyrians. They constituted the 10 lost tribes of Israel. The remaining three tribes of Judah, Simon and Benjamin became the Southern Kingdom of Judah. Although that Kingdom was ultimately subdued by the Babylonians, they survived intact until repatriated to the land of Israel (Judea) by the Persians. It is from that segment of the tribes of Israel that the Jews of today stem and derive their identity as Jews.

The Arrival of the Written Torah

The Children of Israel were designed by God to render unique services on His behalf. That is likely why God chose to create his own nation rather than to select among the extant nations of the world. After the Persians freed the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, they provisioned Jews to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the Holy Temple. In 516 BCE, the Second Temple was completed on the original Temple site in Jerusalem.

A Curious Coincidence

In the middle of the fifth century BCE, two significant, synchronous events took place: 1) The prophecy of Molokai, the last of the Hebrew prophets, ended and 2) Ezra the Scribe brought the Masoretic Text of the Torah from Babylon to the Second Temple. The transcribed laws of the Written Torah, uttered by God at Mount Sinai, was now available to govern all of Judea and God chose to no longer communicate, one and one, directly with human recipients.

Thereafter, if Jews were to follow the word of God, they would be obliged to glean it from the Written Torah. Thus, the answer to who qualifies as a member of the Jewish people is found in the Written Torah.

The Instructions

The answer to that query is both simple and ample. God spoke through the Written Torah and instructed the creation of a chain of semen (biblically translated as seed and described in Hebrew as Zera). That chain starts chronologically with the Patriarchs and then proceeds successively through each Jewish male to the next generation.

There are at least six instances in the Written Torah that confirm the foregoing:

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.”
   
   
2. 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.
   
   
3. 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. 
   
   
4. 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. 
   
   
5. In Genesis 28(14), God tells Jacob that his seed shall be as the dust of the earth.
   
   
6. In 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 every one of the foregoing instances, the operative word describing the continuum of the Jewish people is Zera (semen, translated as seed). The early rabbis (Tannaim) erroneously rejected crucial parts of the Written Torah and declared Jewish women to be the source of the continuum of the Jewish identity. 

The main reason offered by the modern Rabbinical community is that the mother of a child is known, but the father is not. That is a rationale which wanders in the dark, in search of logic. For 2000 years, from the birth of Abraham through both the First and Second Holy Temples, until the advent of the Rabbinical authority in the third century A.D, patrilineal-ism was the standard used by the vital, Israelite people.

1. Even today, patrilineal-ism is the only standard used by Rabbinical Jews in determining who is a Kohen, who is a Levi, and who falls into the rest of the Jewish community identified as Kol Yisrael.
   
   
2. The alteration by the rabbis, rejecting God’s design for the Children of Israel and substituting an alien concept, is in direct violation of the Written Torah itself, which prohibits Torah modification in Deuteronomy 4(2).
   
   
3. Last, but assuredly not least, is the fact that women cannot produce semen to qualify for the continuing, unalterable seed chain of Jewish identity.

Modern Science Confirms the Biblical Formula for Jewish Identity

Interestingly, it has taken 3000 years for science to confirm the Biblical formula for the continuum of the Jewish people. In 1905, Nettie Stevens, of Bryn Mawr College, and Edmund Breecher Wilson independently discovered the mechanisms of the unique Y chromosome. All 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 establishes the male sex of the child and passes its genes unaltered from father to son.

A Child Born to a Jewish Woman with a Gentile Man

Under current Rabbinical law, a child born of a union between a Jewish woman and a Gentile man will be told that he or she is a Jew, when, in fact, that child is not. All successive generations from that child will be told that they are Jews, when, in fact, they are not. With the passage of time, the swath of that erroneous conclusion becomes exponentially wider and wider.

A Child Born to a Jewish Man and a Gentile Woman

A child born to a Jewish male and a Gentile female will be told that he or she is not a Jew when, in fact, that child is a Jew. Such children are often denied a Jewish education, entry in the Jewish community, access to a Jewish spouse, and their entitlement to the rich culture to which they were born. They will see themselves as a Gentile and ultimately be lost to the Jewish people.

As an accommodation to the large number of intermarried couples, Reform congregations now include as a Jew a child of a Jewish father who has raised that child as a Jew. Additionally, all Rabbinical Judaism congregations provide for conversion to Judaism of a Gentile woman so that she may comply with their requirement that the mother of a Jew must be a Jew. Neither of the foregoing thinly veiled constructs have any effect on the genetics of the child.

Identity as a Jew is exclusively a function of genetics, which are vested at birth, and has nothing to do with a person’s subsequent rearing or of religious conversion, neither of which can alter one’s genetic identity

The Bottom Line

It should be obvious from the foregoing, that at the present time, thousands of Gentile children are being erroneously identified as Jews and that number is destined to grow exponentially as time progresses.

On the other hand, thousands of genetically Jewish children are being denied their Jewish identity and heritage and are being abandoned to the Gentile world.

These two factors are destined to produce two sequential periods of great injury to the Jewish community.  The first period, which we have already entered, is one in which confusion abounds as to who is a Jew. The second period will occur when the majority of people who identify themselves as Jews are not, in fact, Jews.  When that occurs, Judaism will cease to be a significant player on the world stage. In recent years, the Pew Research Center has identified that 58 percent of all Jewish marriages are intermarriages. The era of loss of Jewish identity looms in the not too distant future.

The Price of Indifference to Judaic Identity

The world’s acquiescence to the establishment of a Jewish state in Israel is irretrievably tied to the Old Testament, wherein God promised to deliver the land to the descendants of the patriarchs. If it should appear that the contemporary Jewish community is not now genetically the community for whom God’s covenant was made, Muslims and others would likely describe Jewish occupancy of the Land of Israel as a sham and react accordingly.

The 4000-year-old strength and vitality of Jewish culture, which survived Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Greece, Rome, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Diaspora and Nazi Germany, would give way to an admixture of peoples of different and diluted cultures and would lack the dynamic strength and vitality of investiture by the God of Israel.

Jewish culture would find its way to that sorrowful dark hole in world history where the remnants of the Egyptian, Greek and Roman and other cultures are buried.  Ironically, the cause of such a terrible loss would not be by a superior military power, but rather by the intransigent nature of Judaism’s own religious clergy.

Survival of Jewish Identity

Since the end of World War II, matrilineal-ism has done significant damage to Jewish identity and its culture. If allowed to continue intact for just a couple of additional generations, the Jewish people as an identifiable entity will no longer exist. What will remain is an anomalous assemblage of people, of different origins and cultures, with a faint notion that a family member may have been connected to a historical group known as Jews. The spiritual house that God built for his people will have a new and indifferent tenant.

The Ashkenazi Community is Matrilineal-ism’s Achilles Heel

Eighty percent of the 14.8 million Jews in the world today are of Ashkenazi extraction. Ashkenazi Jews stem from a modification in genetic Jewish origin.  It occurred when Jewish prisoners of war, businessmen and residents on the European Continent were unable or unwilling to return to Judea following the failed Bar Kokhbar revolution against Roman rule. Modern genetic sciences disclose that the largest number of their children were issue from European women who did not qualify as Jewish birth mothers under Rabbinical matrilineal-ism.  Sadly, that might be you and me.  Under biblical patrilineal-ism, however, children of Jewish fathers are Jews.

Rabbinical Judaism’s modern Rabbinate was not alive when its Tannaim erroneously planted the tainted tree of matrilineal-ism. Today, however, Rabbinical Judaism holds sway over more than 90% of the American Jewish religious community. In that position of numerical authority, it holds in its hand the last clear chance for the continued survival of the identity of Jewish people. It is not a time for hand wringing, temerity or accusations.

Only with decisive action by the Rabbinate to restore patrilineal-ism to its vital role in the origin, growth and continuity of Jewish identity will the nation of Israel survive.

Douglas Kaplan

Rabbinism (Rabbinical Judaism) has been the principal form of Judaism since the sixth century CE (AD).  Its thesis is that Moses received not one but two Torahs at Mount Sinai.

Rabbinism advances the proposition that one Torah, the Written Torah, was transcribed from the preserved laws and history provided to Moses and was delivered to the Second Temple in Judea by Ezra, on or about 440 BCE. That Torah, the Written Torah, is the one which is known as the Masoretic text and today resides in the sanctuary of temples worldwide.

Rabbinism maintains that there was another Torah delivered at Mount Sinai at the same time as the Written Torah, called the “Oral Torah”. Rabbinism insists that God simultaneously provided the Written Torah with the Oral Torah so as to help interpret and understand the Written Torah.  That proposition, of necessity, compels several questions. 1. Why would God create a document so complex that the people to whom it was directed would not understand it? 2. If the Torah were difficult to understand, why did God not just provide the explanations within the Written Torah itself? 3. What was the value of an explanatory document that was not reduced to writing until almost 1000 years after the Written Torah was delivered to the Jewish people at the Second Temple?

Rabbinism’s thesis suggests that the Oral Torah passed orally for a period of 1785 years (1285 BCE-500 CE) from person-to-person, i.e., 58 generations, before it was finally “accurately” transcribed on or about 500 CE.  The Oral Torah is in fact the recharacterization of the rabbinically produced Talmud, which includes the Mishnah and the Gomorrah.

The Mishnah was commenced at the beginning of the third century AD by Yehudah ha-Nasi who, fearing that the oral traditions of the second Temple might be forgotten, undertook the mission of consolidating various opinions into one body of law. The Mishnah, together with the Gomorrah, a series of commentaries and debates regarding the Mishnah, constitute the “Talmud”. Within Rabbinism, especially amongst the more traditional branches, the Talmud is identified as the Oral Torah. It is important to note that while all Jews apparently respect the rabbinical concepts and effort of the Talmud, there are Judaic religious disciplines which do not adopt its credo and remain dedicated only to the express provisions of the Written Torah.  During biblical times, they included the Sadducees and the Essenes. Existing Judaic disciplines include Karaites, Samaritans, and Beta Torah.

The Analysis

For many Jews (especially those whose Jewish education was limited to one or two hours of Hebrew School focused on Bible stories and holidays) a review of the elements of their faith might well be helpful. Be forewarned, however, elements are not necessarily elementary.

The Written Torah

A divine code for Judaic conduct, coupled with the early history of the Jewish people, the Torah, was delivered by God to Moses at Mount Sinai on or about 1285 BCE.  It is the only historical record of the Israelite/Jewish people from the birth of Abraham in the 19^th century BCE until the Israelites were released from slavery and poised for the conquest of Canaan.  It is the embodiment of the sacred laws given to the People of Israel by their God, and was later compiled and ultimately delivered by Ezra to the Second Temple in 440 BCE as the Written Torah. Many Orthodox Jews of today believe that the Torah was written by God. Within conservative Judaism, one would more frequently hear that the Torah was divinely inspired. However, current academics who studied the text of the Torah believe that the Masoretic text of the Torah was assembled and transcribed by four different individuals.

Jews

The Written Torah recounts that Jews are genetically the direct lineal descendants of the zera (zerais Hebrew for semen or seed) of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Patriarchs. See Genesis 12(7), Genesis 17(6-8), Genesis 17 (10-12), Genesis 26 (2-4), Genesis 28 (14), and Deuteronomy 34 (4-5). The Written Torah does not provide for conversion, or any other means by which a person can become a Jew. A person born a Jew does not cease to be a Jew because he is an atheist or has adopted a different faith. Conversely, a person not born a Jew does not become a Jew because he or she has adopted the Jewish faith. The Written Torah does, however, exquisitely provide and protect the rights of non-Jews who are residing in Jewish communities.

Judaism

Judaism is a religious faith that originated with the God of Israel, and whose tenets and requirements are documented in the Written Torah. Without a transcribed series of religious laws available to a population which it serves, no formal religion would be viable.  Without such available transcription, there would be no way in which a community could identify, engage or confirm a common faith or practice.

Although there were laws and history described to Moses at Mount Sinai, no written document was available to the Jewish population until the Masoretic text of the Torah was delivered to the Second Temple. It was only at that point that the God of Israel curtailed his direct communication to the tribes of Israel through prophecy, and allowed his documentation of the laws of the Torah to establish a faith by which the Jews could conduct their lives in accordance with His precepts. 

Resolve in Judaism must be born of faith study and conviction.  Jews and Judaism have often been the subject of unjustified criticism.

Most have heard the tale of Jesus overturning of the tables of the money changers in the entry of the Temple. The suggestion of such act, for which he is acclaimed, is that he confronted wickedness in the Temple which took place with the permission and authority of the temple priests.  Nothing could be further from the reality.  Jesus and his disciples were Jews who were present, as it was customary to be, in Jerusalem for the holiday of Passover.  For many, it was an opportunity to make a sacrifice of animals for foostuffs at the temple.  If they did not have the local currency, there was a need for exchange to acquire the appropriate animal for sacrifice.  The persons who were professionally engaged in that exchange were absolutely essential to the normal operation of the temple.  It was not at all, as implied by some, a “wicked” activity.  How many of those who criticized its necessary function would achieve a spiritual experience by throwing a brick through the window of an airport currency exchange?

Rabbi

With the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD and the inability to sacrifice food animals and agricultural products, the Jews did not end their relationship with the God of Israel. They gathered together to read the law as the Torah required. Instead of sacrifices, they substituted prayers and benedictions. For religious leadership, they often used the same Pharisees who served them in the temple. The term priest no longer applied, and so, the term Rabbi (teacher) ultimately evolved.

The original concept of the designation rabbi (between 360 –425 CE) was one who achieved Semikhah “transmission of authority from Moses”, pursuant to Deuteronomy 17 (9-11). It was presented to be the transmission by Moses of his authority to the priests and the judges in a similar manner as he did for Joshua by laying on of the hands.  Of course, recipients of such authority could have no more power than Moses himself. No one, including Moses, had the authority to change, add to, diminish, or reject God’s law expressly articulated in the Torah. Deuteronomy 4 (2) provides: “You shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall you diminish ought from it, that he may keep the commandments of the Lord, your God which I command you.”.  The only authority was to apply Torah law to a given fact situation over which they had jurisdiction.  There has been an attempt over the years to revive the notion of Semikhah, but without significant success.

Today, in the contemporary Jewish community, the Rabbi functions as a teacher, and often the religious leader and authority in a Hebrew congregation. Modern Jewish life has conferred upon today’s rabbis a multitude of other social and community obligations. The Rabbi has no closer connection to God than anyone else in the Jewish community. The title of Rabbi, in former years limited to men only, is now conferred on women.Now women rabbis frequently occupy the pulpit of many synagogues, save and except those of strong Orthodox orientation.

Jewish law is that law which is expressed in the Written Torah and which was accepted by the Jewish community as the sacred law provided to them by the God of Israel. There is no credential that authorizes alteration of the Torah by interpretation or any other means.  The Torah is not a Wikipedia amendable by the reader.

Tradition

For centuries, Jews have been charmed by notions of “tradition”.  It is a form of cultural and religious connective tissue that binds Jews and their community together and often serves in lieu of prayer.  It is lionized and regaled in Jewish theater, as in the case of “Fiddler on the Roof”.  Yet, tradition is singularly one of the most dangerous cultural tools that the Jewish community can use.  It celebrates age and endurance without examination of the verity or relevance of the event about to be iterated.  An appropriate protective label should be assigned to all traditions: Read the history and use with care.

From Temple Sacrifice to Synagogue Prayers

In both the First and Second Temples, Jews would commune with their God through the sacrifice of food animals and foodstuffs.  With the gift of the sacrifice from both their heart and their pocket, Jews could ask God for his forgiveness or convey appreciation for a happy event in their life.  The sacrifice served another significant purpose. The animals and foodstuffs ultimately went to the priests and the Levites and their families as a source of income for their services.

When the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD, the Pharisee/rabbis, in the inventive phase of their stewardship, designed prayer in lieu of sacrifice, which, because of the destruction, could no longer be performed.  Presumptively, it was a temporary measure until the temple could be reconstructed, but it never was.  Because the Torah required the periodical reading of the law, community prayers were added to the agenda.  More and more, the communal prayer phase became the focus of the gathering.  The prayers were largely devotionals written and designed by the early rabbis and uttered by the congregants.  With the advent of printing, they became part of the universally accepted prayer book (Siddur) from which congregants could read and recite simultaneously.

While individual or personal, spontaneous prayers were not prohibited or discouraged, rabbis suggested that a more efficacious communication would occur if done uniformly in the presence of a minyan (ten males over the age of 13 years).  Presently, some prayers cannot be uttered in the absence of a minyan.  Ultimately, prepared prayers were designed to be recited with the presence of a minyan three times a day (Shachrus (morning), Minchah (afternoon) and Maariv (evening)).

With a small exception for the prayers of Sabbath and holidays, Rabbinism has, for hundreds of years, required those three sets of stylized prayers to be uttered by religious Jews every day of their lives. Sadly, in many synagogues, those prescribed prayers are uttered with such speed, acquired by repetition, that is more like a mantra than a heartfelt communication with one’s deity.

It is a sign of a sincere religious commitment that Jews would repeat the same scripted prayers three times a day during all of their lives.  It is a sign of a loving God, that He would endure such a continuum without giving up his human experiment.  Examination of the Torah, and especially Deuteronomy, confirms God’s goals for His designed people.  The service required of the Jewish people was, and is, faithfulness to the one God of Israel, and to the commandments and laws provided to Moses and the Jewish people at Mount Sinai.  Infinite daily repetitive lip service was not one of them.

While it may be argued that the real benefit of a lifetime of communal repetition of designer prayers is for the benefit of the supplicant, that argument appears more than marginally specious.  Any such assembly would best serve both God and man in pursuit of the goals of Tikkun Olam by precept, example, and outreach for which the Jewish people were originally designed.

Can the Torah be Updated?

In most synagogue services, the reading from portions of the Torah which occur on Saturday, Monday, and Thursday are flanked by communal prayers.  In the Torah scroll itself, the Hebrew script is without vowels and is not capable of being read by most of the Hebrew reading congregation.  For that reason, many temples have a special Bal Korah (Torah reader).

Since it was accepted that the Torah originated from the revealed word of God, it was viewed as immutable and as a divine resource. The Mishnah and the Gomorrah, on the other hand, surfaced as rabbinical opinions in service of the interpretation of the Torah. Occasionally, the zeal of the rabbis, in trying to identify the outer limits of Mosaic law, resulted in creative endeavors, not unlike their antecedent Pharisees. However, alterations, additions, or rejection of Torah law were absolutely prohibited by the Torah itself, as we have seen in Deuteronomy 4 (2).

Clearly, this did not mean that biblical law could not be interpreted fairly and honestly within the spirit and intent of the Torah. With equal clarity, it did mean that one could not enlarge, diminish, distort or reject the letter and spirit of Torah law by interpretation or devious device.

Since the Torah would not allow modification of its language, spirit or intent in any form, why could it not be broadened by amendment,like the United States Constitution?  The answer, of course, lies in the source of authority from which the document originated.  With regard to the United States Constitution, its source was the people of the United States of America.  They, through their elected representatives, agreed to be governed by the language of the law of the Constitution.  Additionally, the Constitution, itself, provided for its amendment in the event of a desire for change.

The Torah, on the other hand, contained laws that were promulgated by the authority of God, who is the only entity authorized to amend that document.  Unfortunately, the world has not had word from God for a very long time. Indeed, who would step forward and suggest that he or she had the power to amend the Torah?

Yet, ironically, Rabbinical Judaism was, in fact, changing the Torah in multiple ways, most often under the guise of rabbinical interpretation.  Traditionally, rabbis have never served as intermediaries between God and humans.  The profession of rabbi is not an occupation found in the Torah. There has never been a process in which rabbis who, by interpretation or declaration, had any right to effectively change the Written Torah.

 Rabbinical Judaism Speaks in “Tongues”

Since the beginning of the 19^th century and the advent of Reform Judaism, there are now multiple independent segments of Rabbinical Judaism, which include Orthodoxy, Conservatism, Reform, Reconstruction, Renewal, Humanistic and others.  There is no hierarchy and no central authority in Rabbinical Judaism that supervises the singularity of operative Jewish law.  Among Rabbinism’s denominations, there is no one single standard of ordination, Torah compliance and authority to effectuate change. Rabbinical Judaism does not, and cannot, speak or interpret with one mindset or voice.

Sadly, over the centuries, Rabbinism has knowingly altered a significant number of the express provisions of the Written Torah.  Some of the more prominent alterations are:

1. Early on, it rejected the Torah’s genetic patrilineal origin of Jews by substituting a Jewish mother in place of a Jewish father in order for the child to qualify as a Jew.  This change alone is sufficient to change the identity and character of the Jewish people.  It might even pose the question as to whether the current composition of the Jewish community includes those to whom God had promised the Land of Israel.

2.  While Rabbinical Judaism’s Talmud does not discuss future worlds, it is not uncommon for its adherents to postulate a world to come, known as Leolum Habah or Gan Eden, where one who did good deeds, or was scrupulous with Halacha, might reside after his earthly journey.

 3.  The Torah’s warning against changing its law applies equally to additions as to subtractions or alterations. A classic example of such prohibited additions is found in the Torah’s thrice expressed provision which instructs: “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk” (Exodus 23 (19). 

That simple mother-child animal relationship has Rabbinically been expanded to include: a) the milk and meat of unrelated animals of the same species, b) the milk and meat of unrelated animals of any specie or species, c) the meat of birds like chickens or other fowls that do not even give milk, with the milk of any specie.  Yet, in what appears to be a clear violation, it permits the consumption of a kosher chicken and its egg in the same meal.  What was it that the rabbis did not understand about a mother-child relationship?

For two centuries, in order to accommodate meat and dairy for both regular and Passover use, that bizarre interpretation has caused Jewish households to maintain four sets of dishes, pots and pans, silverware, dishtowels, etc.  Was this really what God intended with this simple moral provision?             

4. There are few religious moments that are as sensitive, warm and welcoming as observing the women of one’s household, with a napkin over the head, and hands over the eyes, blessing the Friday evening candles.  The candle blessing, Rabbinical in its origin, recites as follows: “Praised be thou O, Lord our God, King of the universe, who hast sanctified us by Thy commandments, and hast commanded us to light the Sabbath candles.”  In truth and in fact, God never commanded the lighting of Sabbath candles.  Such command was a fiction created by the rabbis to allow light into one’s household after sundown on Friday evening because fire could not be kindled after dark.  Howsoever charming the blessing of the candles may be, it is nevertheless a blatant untruth.  More important than that, it is violative of the third of the 10 Commandments, which enjoins us not to take God’s name in vain.

Growing Resistance Against Rabbinical Changes to Torah Law

By the eighth through the tenth century AD, there was a sizable part of the religious diaspora Jewish community, called Karaites, who were disturbed and offended by the way in which Rabbinism altered the Torah.  Historians see Karaites as having channeled the views of the Second Temple Sadducees in order to protect the integrity of the Torah.

Karaites maintained that the Jewish people are patrilineal in origin and rejected the biblically unauthorized change to matrilineal-ism.  They did not accept the notion of life after death in a world to come.  The Karaites were especially affronted by Rabbinism’s attempt to bootstrap themselves to the level of the deity by elevating the Talmud to the Oral Torah. Karaites established their own institutions, and, at one point, represented 40% of world Jewry.

In the tenth century, the Saadia Gaon (Gaon, usually referred to the head of a yeshiva), led Rabbinism’s organized effort against Karaism, which, though weakened by the controversy, survived and is alive to this day.

Karaite Jews today, most of whom remain very religiously oriented and dedicated to the Written Torah, do not light Friday evening candles because of the absence of God’s direction to do so. They do not utilize phylacteries or mezuzahs because they deem less as words curious mean the Torah language “and thou shall bind them for a sign upon thy hand and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes” as figurative, metaphorical and aspirational, in the same spiritual category as the Torah reference to the circumcision of one’s heart in Leviticus 26 (41). It is estimated that there are now approximately 40,000 Karaites living in Israel, with smaller communities in Turkey, Europe and the United States.

Rabbinate’s Infinite Additions to Torah Law

Not at all discouraged by its battle against Karaism, Rabbinical Judaism kept adding to Rabbinism infinitely more spurious rules, regulations, extensions and traditions.  Nowhere is it more evident than in the Shulchan Aruch (Code of Jewish Law), assembled and written by Joseph Karo in 1563.  Reference to some of his chapters might prove enlightening:

Laws relating to the conduct upon rising in the morning

Laws relating to dressing and manner of walking

Laws relating to decency in the lavatory

Laws relating to making up of omitted prayers

Laws concerning the separation of (Hallah) dough

Laws concerning the bread, cooked food and milk of a non-Jew

Laws regarding one who desires to eat or drink before meals

While the foregoing codes and others in the Code of Jewish Law may be well-stated practices relating to cleanliness, physical health, and orderliness, they do not, for the most part, state Torah laws or reasonable interpretation thereof.  If this is, in fact, the case, then they are in clear violation of Deuteronomy 4 (2), which prohibits adding to the rules provided in the Torah.

The Deification of the Talmud into the Oral Torah

The Talmud, a work of the rabbis, was viewed by them as indispensable to the understanding of the Written Torah.  Traditional rabbis refer to the Talmud, as “the Oral Torah”. Examination of the two sets of laws, the Written Torah and the alleged Oral Torah, identified that they are uniquely different in significant ways.  For example:

1. The people to be served by these biblical laws are genetically different. Under the Written Torah, Jews are children of Jewish fathers.  Under the Oral Torah, Jews can only be children of Jewish mothers.  In the modern American era of over 50% of mixed marriages, those are two different populations.

2.  The Written Torah creates only one world.  There is no mention of afterlife or resurrection.  The Rabbinical world appears comfortable, in the ideation of a world to come called Leolam Habah in which Jews can receive their just reward after death and in notions of resurrection (see prayer in the Amidah which exalts God for M’chai Hamaysim [God who calls the dead to life everlasting] and “The Treatise on Resurrection” by Maimonides.

3.  The Written Torah does not support or provide for conversion of Gentiles to Jews.  Rabbinical Judaism conducts such procedures regularly.

4.  The Written Torah does not allow modifications, additions, reduction or rejection of its laws.  There are multiple examples of Rabbinical modification of the Torah, including a pervasive one relating to rules regarding the mixing all meat with all milk from any source.

 5.   For Rabbinical Judaism to maintain that the Written Torah and the “Oral Torah”, which contain conflicting provisions, are the product of the same God, delivered at the same time, for the same population defies credibility. The alternative to that concept is that there are two different gods promulgating two different codes of law, a notion that would fly directly in the face of Judaic dedication to monotheism.

A more plausible concept is that Rabbinic Judaism could not sustain its rejection of, and changes to, portions of the Written Torah without some divine authority.  By dubbing the Talmud (opinions of its rabbis) as a Torah emanating from Mount Sinai, it sought to provide a divine veneer or patina on those Rabbinical writings.

Doing that is worse than a Chillul Hashem (the desecration of the name of God).  It is worse than taking God’s name in vain in violation of the third Commandment.  It is, in fact, co-opting God’s persona in service of their own agenda, which includes rejection or modification of portions of the Written Torah.

Sadly, not all of Rabbinical Judaism’s avoidance of total precepts are accomplished by rejection or alteration.  Sometimes, they involve avoidance by sham or device.  This is especially sad because it can involve the assistance of the Rabbinate:

 1.The Eruv- Jews are required to remain and rest in their home during the entire Sabbath, Exodus 16 (29).  However, that would not allow them to attend services in the synagogue, visit with friends and neighbors or other outside activity.  With the help of fictional imagination, the Rabbis allow for the extension of one’s home, often by miles, by public power or telephone lines. On the island of Manhattan, a home can be as much as 18 miles long.

2. The Documented Sale- The Torah does not permit business activities during the Sabbath. Not infrequently, Jews who wish to keep their business open during the Sabbath enter a sham contract of sale with a Gentile, which is effective Friday afternoon, with repurchase on Sunday morning.

3. The Lease of Israeli Agricultural Land Every Seventh Year-The Torah mandates, under the laws of Shmitah, Exodus 23 (10-11), that agricultural land in Israel must be allowed to rest uncultivated every seventh year.  A number of Israeli farmers, during the seventh year, lease their farm to an Arab neighbor. The owners have the benefit of that year’s lease income, but the land is not rested during that year.

4. Painful, but relevant, is viewing the ceremony of lighting of Friday evening candles to welcome the Sabbath, when you know that its real purpose was simply to provide light for a dining room or kitchen on Sabbath.

5.  The Shabbos Goy – is simply a device to avoid the violation of the Sabbath by assigning the task of turning on the lights or air conditioning or other prohibited act to one who is not Jewish.  Under no system of law or civilization can a principle avoid responsibility for a prohibited act by assigning it to an agent.  Imagine the response if someone hired an assassin to do in his neighbor and then claimed innocence because “He did it.  I didn’t do it.”.

6.  The Use of Baking Powder on Passover- In prescribing for the holiday of Passover, the Torah provides that “no leaven shall be found in your houses for seven days.  For whoever eats what is leavened, that person shall be cut off from the community of Israel” Exodus 12 (15-20)  The Torah does not identify any particular form of leaven that would escape that injunction.  In recent years, Rabbinism, through some unjustified rationale, has concluded that baking soda and baking powder, modern chemical products, are authorized for use on Passover, although they are clearly chemical leavening agents.  That Rabbinical notion stems from the alleged “logic” that since the original biblical leavening experience occurred when water was added to flour and resulted in in fermentation, then fermentation is the only form of leaven that is prohibited.  Such a clear violation of the Torah leaves one to wonder who, if anyone, benefits from such illogic.

While these and similar devices may appear clever to some, they nevertheless, originate in sham and are directed to fool none other than the God of Israel, who claims the right of vengeance.

Conclusion

Rabbinical Judaism maintains and endorses as sacred the Written Torah.  It does so while, at the same time, it has rejected, altered and expanded a number of those provisions by means other than reasonable interpretation.  That situation prompts the old Yiddish expression “one cannot dance at two weddings at the same time”.

If Rabbinical Judaism, now fragmented into multiple, incongruent denominations, wishes to survive, it must distance itself from asserting total Torah compliance and establish its own unique individuality.  That can include the position that Rabbinical Judaism recognizes the spiritual inspiration of the Torah, but reserves, for itself, the right to alter such policies or practices as it deems appropriate.

A similar, but reverse posture has been adopted by both the Karaites and the Samaritans.  The Karaites and the Samaritans are totally dedicated to the language and the law of the Written Torah.  However, though familiar with and respectful of the Talmud, neither require its adherence to comply with its precepts.

Douglas Kaplan

                                      Preface

The children of Israel existed for over 2200 years before the Written Torah was delivered by Ezra to the Second Temple on or about 440 BCE.  With the Written Torah, the Jews had a transcribed set of laws by which they could conduct their lives in accordance with the laws given to Moses at Mount Sinai.

The relationship between the Jewish people and the God of Israel is unique.  To truly consider it, one must necessarily view the historical and political events in which that relationship came to life. 

In this article, the word Torah, or Written Torah, refers to the Masoretic text of the Torah that presently resides in the sanctuaries of synagogues throughout the world. When references are made to the Talmud or the Oral Torah, they will be specifically identified as such.  Additionally, Rabbinical Judaism and Rabbinism refer to the same religious doctrine and are used interchangeably throughout the document.

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The Written Torah is the only existing history of the Israelite people from the birth of Abraham in the 19th Century BCE until the 12 Tribes of Israel were poised to enter and conquer Canaan in 1285 BCE.  That document revealed not only God’s formula for the genetic origin of the Israelite people, i.e., direct lineal descendants through the “Zera” (semen) of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but also the nation of Israel’s appointed mission (Genesis 12(7), Genesis 17 (6-8), Genesis 17 (10-12), Genesis 26(2-4), Genesis 28 (14), and Deuteronomy 34 (4-5). That mission was to disseminate to the known world God’s rules of civil conduct, so as to ensure that his creation would not descend into the wickedness that he sought to erase with the “flood”.

While many Orthodox and Conservative Jews believe that the Torah

was entirely written by God, or at the least inspired by God, modern scholars suggest that it had four independent transcribers.  That study implies that they used existing oral history and records in an effort to transcribe the origin of the people of Israel and their relationship with their God. When the Written Torah was received in the fifth century BCE at the Second Temple, it was adopted by the Jewish people as their sacred history and of the law which God had delivered to them at Mount Sinai.

Many great historic civilizations, like those of Egypt, Greece and Rome, sought to assign to their early founding fathers and deities imaginary powers and extraordinary capabilities in an effort to magnify their authority and that of their community.  In some instances, their founders were identified with sexually active gods who produced a host of other deities and half deities whose exploits, they believed, magnified the importance of their culture.

The Torah, on the other hand, is singularly one of the most candid historical documents to describe the genesis of a nation. The patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, were simple individuals who were called upon by God to originate a people dedicated to His service.  For that commitment, God promised to provide and protect them and their descendants, and to make them into a great nation.  It is interesting, and perhaps a bit disconcerting, to examine those three men whose seeds were, and are, the wellspring of the Jewish people.

Abraham, Paternal Origin of the Israelite People

Late in life, Abraham, in good faith, entered into a covenant of mutual commitment with God.

Since Abraham’s wife, Sarah was childless, she offered her servant Hagar to her husband so that he may have an heir to survive him.  After Hagar became pregnant, the relationship between Sarah and Hagar disintegrated.  When Sarah inquired of Abraham for a solution, he responded to her that she should do whatever she wished with Hagar because Hagar was her servant.  Some 13 years later, after Sarah gave birth to Isaac, her relationship soured with Hagar.  In that event, Abraham agreed to send Hagar and their son Ishmael into the desert with bread and water.  The two were ultimately saved by the angel of God, Genesis 16(1-16) 21(8-21).

                                                                                                                                                Seeking proof of Abraham’s personal commitment, God required Abraham to sacrifice his only lawful son, Isaac.  Abraham’s loyalty to God was dedicated and true, and thus he commenced to prove his fidelity.  But, who among us could or would find any moral authority in proving their loyalty to God by slitting the throat of their son?  It was an act that was only stayed in the last moment by the hand of an angel of God. Did God have the right to request a human sacrifice to prove fidelity?  Should Abraham have said no? 

 As a footnote to history, on the death of Sarah, Abraham’s wife and mother of Isaac, Abraham remarried and had six additional sons.  The Torah tells us that he ended up giving his entire estate to Isaac, and provided only nominal or token gifts to Ishmael, his child with the handmaiden, Hagar, and the six sons of his old age.

Isaac

Isaac, too, entered into a mutual covenant with God, agreeing to accept God’s direction and control.  The greatest part of his life constituted a pleasant, interesting but ordinary spacer between the lives of his father, Abraham, and his son, Jacob.

Jacob, Also Known As Israel, Father of the Israelite People

Jacob was the father of the 12 sons, who became the 12 Tribes of Israel. It was he, after whom the Israelite people are named.  When gloss is removed, his unenviable character is revealed.  For a mess of pottage, he swindled his starving brother Esau out of Esau’s right of the firstborn. That right entitled the firstborn to a double portion of the father’s estate.

The real firstborn, Esau, was also entitled to an important special blessing from his father Isaac.  With the help of his mother Rebecca, Jacob appeared to his aged and blind father Isaac, dressed in Esau’s clothes and other prepared coverings, to deliberately suggest the presence of his brother Esau.   When asked by Isaac, Jacob fraudulently identified himself as Esau and accepted the blessing directed to his brother.  On learning the truth, Esau threatened the life of Jacob, who then took refuge in the home of his mother’s brother Laban.  After a period of time, Jacob cozied his father-in-law Laban out of a good portion of his flock of domestic animals, and then stole away quietly before he was confronted.

These were the patriarchs of the Israelite people as their lives were candidly and honestly described without embellishment or concealment in the Torah.

The Torah’s Unenhanced Description of God

The Written Torah was no less candid and forthright in the description of God, the Creator.  It is not uncommon, in other faiths and disciplines, to describe God as the embodiment of love, kindness, warmth and forgiveness.  The Written Torah candidly views the Creator in the context of the Creator’s own self-description and documented responses to biblical events.  To identify the God of Israel as jealous and vengeful is simply to recite back God’s own description of himself in Exodus 20 (5) and Deuteronomy 32 (35).

The candor, detail, and honesty of the Torah simply challenge those who dismiss it, out of hand, as an allegory. It would make all Jews bit players in a 4000-year-old allegory.

By virtue of the jealousy of his 11 brothers, Joseph, favored son of Jacob, was sold into slavery in Egypt. While there, because of his ability to read the dreams of the Pharaoh, he was awarded an elevated position in the Egyptian court. After a dramatic episode where he revealed himself to his brothers, Jacob’s entire household was invited to Egypt to reside in Goshen. After the death of Joseph, as the Jewish community grew in Goshen, the new Pharaoh feared that the descendants of Jacob might rise up against his rule. To prevent that occurrence, Egypt enslaved the descendants of Jacob for nearly 400 years. Ultimately, with the help of God, under the leadership of Moses, the Hebrew people were able to leave Egypt.

The Hebrews who escaped from slavery in Egypt were a motley group of former slaves.  Each person’s principal identity was with the tribe of the children of Israel from which he or she originated.  Moses, on advice from his Midianite father-in-law, appointed Judges (Shoftim) to head each tribe.  The duties of the Shoftim were not only judicial in nature, they also served as tribe administrators and military governors of the tribe to which they were appointed.

The Israelite People, Who Received the Torah at Mount Sinai

When God, early on, recognized that the slave mentality of those freed from Egypt lacked the spirit necessary to conquer Canaan, the judgment was made to abide in the desert and await a new and more vital generation.  During that period, the number of tribes changed from 12 to 13.  Joseph and his later descendants had remained part of the community of Egypt.  His first two sons, Efraim and Manasseh, were substituted as half tribes in his stead, thus raising the number of tribes to 13.

Ultimately, after 40 years in the desert, with the assistance of the God of Israel, and the combined effort all of the tribes of Israel, they were successful in conquering and occupying the land of Canaan.

Occupancy of Canaan and the Nationalization of the Tribes

In conducting the aggressive battles against the tribes of Canaanites who had long occupied the land, God directed the Israelites to slay all living creatures, including men, women, children and animals, and to thereupon take occupancy of the land, Deuteronomy 7 (1-2), and Deuteronomy 20 (16-18). It must have been very difficult for those Israelite soldiers who had internalized the morality of the Torah’s 10 Commandments against killing and stealing, Exodus 20 (2-17), to enter passive communities and kill all inhabitants, and take their land.

It did not take long for the individual tribes to recognize that they were surrounded by hostile neighbors and that their interest would best be served by a strong, unified Israelite monarchy.  That joinder of the tribes took the form of the United Kingdom of Israel, under Kings Saul, David and Solomon.  While it did provide a strong national existence, it lasted only a little over 100 years.

The Torah Makes No Mention of the City of Jerusalem

Both King David and King Solomon, his son, were from the tribe of Judah.  King David, who was beloved by all the tribes, established his capital in the south in a conquered old Canaanite city called Jerusalem, which was close to the land assigned to the Tribe of Judah.  While David was still alive, he acquired property in the city of Jerusalem for the purpose of building a temple to the God of Israel.  That Temple was built after David’s death by his son, King Solomon.  It is important to note that the name Jerusalem appears nowhere in the Torah, nor does the Torah designate that site for a temple mount.  In fact, the Written Masoretic text of the Torah (which resides in all of our temples today), in all likelihood, did not even exist at the time of the construction of Solomon’s Temple.  Its first appearance takes place when Ezra delivered it from Babylon to the Second Temple on or about 440 BCE.

By the time of Solomon’s death, on or about 931 BCE, there were a number of accumulated grievances between the majority of the tribes in the north (Samaria) and three tribes in the South, whose territory included the Temple at Jerusalem.  They involved:

1. Both the Capital and the Temple in Jerusalem were located too far from the population center in the north, making it difficult for the majority of people to get there for worship and administrative purposes.

2. Members of David and Solomon’s Tribe of Judah appeared to be getting special prerogatives that were not available to the other tribes.

3. There was an element that believed that the appropriate place for a temple mount was on Mount Gerizim in Samaria and not in Jerusalem.  That locale was specifically mentioned in the Torah, in Deuteronomy 11(29). To this day, the Samaritans, which comprised the Tribes of the Efraim and Menasha, still maintain that position and live and pray in that vicinity.

4. By far, the most aggravating factor between the North and the South was brought about under the reign of Solomon, who, in addition to the temple, was building pavilions and palaces for himself and his many wives and concubines.  To do this, he placed a weighty burden on the people by way of heavy taxes and personal labor.  When he died in 931 BCE, elders of all the tribes met with his son and successor, Rehoboam, to make sure that there would be some relief under his administration. When asked about his future reign, Rehoboam responded that his father disciplined the tribes with whips, but he would discipline the tribes with scorpions.  The effect of that response was immediate. The 10 Northern tribes severed from the United Kingdom and established their own monarchy called “Israel” in the north. The remaining three tribes in the south, Judah, Simon and Benjamin, whose adjoining territories included Jerusalem, became the Southern Kingdom under the name of “Judah”.  Each kingdom had its own series of kings. 

Judah’s Real and Imagined Salience Amongst the Tribes

Why was the Southern Kingdom called Judah, the name of only one of the three tribes?  For the longest time, Judah had been asserting its prominence amongst the tribes.  It had two out of three Kings from the Unified Kingdom.  It was prominent in the selection of Jerusalem and the construction of Solomon’s Temple.  Judah fostered the notion that any king of Israel had to be a direct lineal descendant of King David (from the Tribe of Judah) which ensured Judah’s continued leadership amongst the tribes.   It is from that remnant of Israelites that the Jewish community of today survives and why its members are called Jews.

In Disunity There is Weakness and in Weakness There is Submission

The defenses of both Israelite tribes were substantially weakened by the split.

It did not take long for the two weakened Israelite states to fall under the dominance of Assyria, a rising military power.  In 722 BCE, the Assyrians successfully invaded the Northern Kingdom of Israel and exported the vast majority of population to other lands that the Assyrians had conquered.  That dispersion identifies what is known as The Lost 10 Tribes of Israel.

The monarchy of Judah continued to exist, struggling with other neighbor states, until it was invaded by the Babylonians in 587 BCE, during which struggle Jerusalem and Solomon’s Temple were destroyed.  Instead of exporting Judah’s population, (as the Assyrians had done in Northern Israel), the Babylonians, over a period 30 years, transferred the elite of the Judah population to Babylon.  The rest of the Jews were allowed to remain in Judah.

The Persian Act of Kindness

In 539 BCE, Persian “King Cyrus the Great” conquered Babylon and took possession of its captive Jewish community. King Cyrus and his successors, in a historical act of kindness, sent a group of Jews to Jerusalem to rebuild their temple.  The Persians were so committed to that project that they authorized the return to the Jews of all of the items confiscated by the Babylonians from Solomon’s Temple.  King Cyrus furnished the reconstruction crews with food and supplies to assist them in their endeavor.

Sometime later, the Persians received word that issues in Jerusalem were unsettled and they sent an additional contingent of Jews to resolve the issues.  This group was led by Ezra, a respected scribe, who still resided in Babylon. The Second Temple was completed in 516 BCE. Thereafter, the Persians allowed those Jews who wished to return to Jerusalem the freedom to do so. Ironically, the expatriate Babylonian Jewish community was doing quite well for itself, and many chose, at that time, not to return to Israel.

The Transition from Tribal to Spiritual Community

Prior to the advent of the Torah, the Jewish people were comprised of patriarchal families that evolved into a series of related tribes.  Judaism, as a religion, did not evolve until the Torah’s transcription of a uniform set of written laws and rules which identified one’s relationship with God and with the rest of society.  While the Torah was delivered in 1285 BCE at Mount Sinai, it lacked documentation until the arrival of the Masoretic text in the fifth century BCE when a Jewish faith became possible.

The Written Torah Arrives in Judea

Ezra brought to the Second Temple in Judea the Masoretic text of the Torah. It was accepted by the religious community as the authoritative and sacred history and law of the Jewish People.  On Ezra’s arrival, he noticed that many of the first contingent, who had been sent from Babylon, had partnered with, or married, indigenous wives.  Ezra then went into mourning mode, assembled the partners and husbands, and convinced them to abandon the women and to sever their relationship with their children.  The irony of that direction was that in the patrilineal society that then existed, those children, sired by Jewish fathers, were in fact Jews.  Some scholars believe that it was this act, that later erroneously motivated the Tannaim of the Mishna to change the origin of Jews from patrilineal to matrilineal.

Second Temple Israel became a faith-based community under the authority of the Written Torah. It was interpreted by a large group of scholars called

Anshei Kh’nesset Hagedolah (Men of the Great Assembly), with the Sanhedrin as a judicial and enforcement arm.  The Second Temple itself functioned under the authority of the Cohanim, who were then principally from an elite “Sadducee” group dedicated to the text of the Written Torah.

For the purposes of uniformity and clarity, Second Temple Israel will hereinafter be referred to as “Judea”.

Alexander the Great, the Macedonian Conquest of Persia, and the Greek Culture’s Confrontation with Judaism and the Torah Community

In 332 BCE, Judea capitulated to Alexander the Great as part of his Macedonian conquest of the Persian Empire.  The consequence of the victory of the Macedonian forces was significantly increased by the seductive Greek culture that it brought with it.  That culture captured the attention of many, including the Sadducees who found it attractive and compelling.  Religious zealots, on the other hand, found it alien and a negating influence to the Torah. Upon the death of Alexander, the territory of his conquests was divided among his generals.  Judea ultimately became part of the Seleucid Empire and consisted of Anatolia, Persia, the Levant, and significant other neighboring territories.

In 167 BCE, Antiochus IV, the then Seleucid ruler, ordered an altar to Zeus to be erected in the Second Temple, the cessation of all circumcisions, and the dissolution of the religious laws of Israel. In response, a group of Jewish zealots under the leadership of Mattathias, the Hasmonean, sparked a revolt against the Seleucid Empire.  Mattathias’s son, Judah the Maccabee, led an army of Jewish dissidents to victory over the Seleucid dynasty. The name Maccabee appears to be an acquired one, based on the Aramaic word for “hammer”.  Thus, we have the holiday of Hanukkah which celebrates the cleansing of the Temple and the return to Judaic worship.

Hashmonean Rule

Ultimately, Judah was killed in battle in 160 BCE and succeeded by his brother, Jonathan.  In 142 BCE.  Jonathan, himself, was assassinated by a pretender to the Seleucid throne and was succeeded by the last remaining son of Mattathias, Simon the Maccabee. With the advent of Simon, the politics of the region changed.  Simon supported Demetrius II, the Seleucid King.  In 140 BCE, he was recognized by an assembly of Jewish priests, leaders and elders as the high priest, military commander and ruler of Judea, essentially the initial king of the Hasmonean dynasty.

While the Maccabees had won autonomy, they still remained in a province that was under Seleucid control.  As if it were a family tradition, Simon was murdered, in 134 BCE, by his son-in-law, Ptolemy, and was succeeded as the King and high priest of Judea by John Hyrcanus. John was briefly succeeded by his elder son, Aristobulus, and subsequently by his younger son,  Alexander Janneus, in 103 BCE.  

During this period of time we begin to see the identification and hardening of politico-religious factions within Judea.  When the Second Temple was opened, its priesthood largely came from descendants of those families who had served in the First Temple.  They were called Sadducees, a name believed to have been derived from Saduk, a high priest of the First Temple.

The Sadducees represented an aristocratic, wealthy and traditionally elite group within the hierarchy of Judaism.  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, and that there is no afterlife.  They did not subscribe to the notion that there are rewards and penalties after death.  They were very receptive to the influences of Greek culture that arrived with Alexander the Great and his successors.

The Pharisees, on the other hand, were a group from the middle and lower classes.  They maintained that an afterlife existed and that God punished the wicked and rewarded the righteous in the world to come.  They believed in the notion that a Messiah would come who would herald a new era of world peace.  Ultimately, upon the destruction of the Second Temple, they became the spiritual fathers of the rabbis.

The Essenes were a group that emerged out of the dissent and 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 were a group closely related to the Sadducees.  They did not believe in an afterlife or the resurrection of the dead.  While the Sadducees were politically opposed to the Pharisees, the Boethusians advanced the religious arguments against them.

During his administration, Alexander Janneus supported the Sadducees and their classic approach to the Torah.  At one point, he became very irritated with the Pharisees, and they were obliged to leave the country in order to save their lives.  Amongst those who left was his bother in law, Shimon Ben Shetach, who was closely associated with the Pharisee movement.  While the Pharisees openly supported the Torah, they had no difficulty in discussing such alien concepts such as “the immortality of the soul” and “reward and punishment after death”.  Ultimately, Alexander lamented his hostility to the Pharisees and encouraged his brother-in-law to return from Egypt, where he took refuge.

Faith and Politics

On the death of Alexander, he was succeeded by his queen, Alexandra, who shortly thereafter, appointed her brother Shimon as head of the Sanhedrin.  From that position of authority, Shimon worked assiduously to politically eliminate Sadducee priests from the temple.  He was so successful that by the time of the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 AD, there were no longer any Sadducees functioning within the temple.  One of Shimon ben Shetach’s other claims to fame was that he sentenced 80 women to death by hanging for witchcraft.

Queen Alexandra’s reign ended in 69 BCE.  Succession to her throne resulted in a battle between her two sons, Hyrcanus and Aristobulus II. Aristobulus sought the help of Rome’s military, then in Syria, which assisted in placing him briefly on the throne.  However, in 63 BCE, Pompeii, motivated by the interests of Rome, marched into Judea and conquered it on Rome’s behalf, thus marking of the end of the largely self-indulgent Hasmonean monarchy.

Rome and Herod, Son of a Jewish Convert

In 40 BCE, after the Romans deposed the ruling Hasmonean dynasty, the Roman Senate declared Herod the Great “Tetrarch King of the Jews” (king under Roman authority). Herod, whose father, Antipater, was an Idumean convert to Judaism, was a friend of Julius Caesar, who was the real source of Herod’s authority.  Much of the Judean population was repelled by Herod’s brutality and disturbed by the absence of his genetic Judaic identity. Herod, however, was known for his colossal building projects throughout Judea, including the renovation of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and the expansion of the Temple Mount.  

In six CE, after the Herodian reign, Judea came under direct Roman rule, and was placed under the supervision of a Roman governor.  The Jewish population eventually became resistant to Roman rule and launched a revolt against Rome, in 70 CE, during which conflict the Second Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed.  The destruction of the Second Temple ended all sacrificial worship and changed the way in which the Jewish community could commune with their God.  Not satisfied with the outcome of the revolt against Rome in 70 AD, zealots once again arose under the leadership of Bar Kokhba to initiate a hard-fought revolt (132-135 CE).  It, too, was ultimately unsuccessful and led to the end of all Judaic input and control over the holy land.

The Surviving Jewish Communities Following the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 135 CE

1. Most Judean Jews initially elected to remain in Judea, in what was then newly called by the Romans “Palestina” (Palestine).  The Romans renamed the country after the Jew’s arch enemy, the Philistines.  During the third century, many Judaean Jews emigrated to Babylon, lured by economics and the ability to live a full Jewish life.  Some traveled by sea to the Spanish coast.

In the fourth century CE, Palestine came under the control of the Byzantine Empire, which was the eastern portion of the Roman empire.  It was oriented to Greek rather than Latin culture, and became the center of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, with its capital in Constantinople.  Resident Jews were prohibited from constructing houses of worship, serving in public offices and owning slaves.

In 638 CE, Palestine came under Muslim rule.  With them came an era of liberalization in both religious and civic life.  Later, in 1096 CE, with the first Crusade, Jews in Palestine were indiscriminately massacred and sold into slavery.  This resulted in a major exodus of Jews from Palestine.  By the time that the Turks had conquered Palestine, in 1516, there were just a few thousand Jews still remaining there.  Most of the exiting Jews emigrated to Egypt and other Middle East Arab lands.

 2.  Although the Jews were principally agriculturalists and engaged in animal husbandry, there were several existing Jewish trading posts in lands commercially accessible to Judea.  There were a number of such trading posts on the coast of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain) to which the Jews could travel by ship along the Mediterranean.  During this period, it is believed that there were also small Jewish communities in Afghanistan, Yemen, Tadjiki.  Bukhara, Kaifeng China, the Judeo Berbers of Morocco, Libya, Tunisia, and Ethiopia.

3.  There was still many Jews who had remained in Persian controlled Babylon and who were content with their lives there.  In fact, that is the site from which the Masoretic text of the Torah came to the Second Temple. Some modern scholars believe the Torah was edited and assembled in Babylon. In fact, Babylon remained vital and active in Jewish life for some time. It was ultimately the source from which the Babylonian Talmud originated. 

4.  In Samaria, there remained the remnants of those Israelite tribes that were part of the Northern Kingdom of Israel.  They were the half-tribes of Menasha and Ephraim, who were the replacement sons for Joseph who had remained in Egypt.  They were either not displaced by the Assyrians or returned shortly thereafter.  They had their own Torah similar to the Masoretic text and continued to function as an Israelite community.  Today, they are known as the Samaritans

5.  In Europe, there were a number of Jews who had taken up residence on the European continent for commercial, academic or other reasons and who were present during the wars between Rome and Judea.  Added to them were those Jewish soldiers who ended up in Europe in order to escape Roman captivity and those who were sold as slaves and ultimately released.  They could not, and would not, return to the former Judea which was under the control of the Romans, as their lives might be at risk.  Many remained on what is identified today as the Italian Peninsula, where they married women of European extraction.  This unique group ultimately became the source of the Ashkenazi Jewish community.

The Vital Resilience of Judaism

Yavne: While superior Roman forces were able to destroy the Second Temple, and much of Jerusalem, they were not able to destroy the commitment of the residents of Judea to their God and to their community.  Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, realizing that Jerusalem was about to fall, sneaked out of the city and asked Vespasian, the Roman commander, for the right to settle in Yavne and teach his disciples.  Ultimately upon the fall of Jerusalem, Yavne became a center of Jewish learning and the site for the reestablishment of the Sanhedrin. Yavne played a major role in adapting Judaism to a circumstance where there was no central Temple and where liturgy became the basic Jewish religious practice.  

Babylonian Jewish community: This community retained its Judaic identity even with the fall of its cooperative Persian overlords to the forces of Alexander the Great, in 334 BCE.  Its faith remained dynamic, even as it provided the Babylonian Talmud. In one of those unique twists of Jewish history, this is the group which, several hundred years later, helped develop the Karite movement, which opposed Rabbinical alterations of the Written Torah.

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Obviously, the history of the Israelite people (from whom the modern Jewish community generates) did not end with the Roman destruction of the Second Temple, the death of many brave Jews, or the declaration that their land was thereafter to be a province of Rome called Palestina. Those painful contractions were the events that produced the birth of the Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities in Europe, which now constitute the majority of the Jews in the world today. The growth, pain and suffering, and accomplishments of those two communities during the 2000 years of diaspora is a story well worth being told individually and in detail.

Douglas Kaplan

Preface

The shock of learning that Rabbinical Judaism (a.k.a.) Rabbinism authorizes the use of chemical leavening agents such as baking powder and baking soda during Passover was dispiriting. More disappointing, however, was Rabbinism’s tenuous rationale for that justification.

In this article, which examines that subject, the use of the word Torah refers to the Masoretic text of all the Torahs that reside in the sanctuaries of synagogues throughout the world. It does not refer to the Mishnah, Midrash, and Gomorrah, which is sometimes collectively is identified as the “Oral Torah”.

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Although it should have spontaneously come from the people of Israel who God extricated from hundreds of years of slavery, the holiday of Passover was exclusively designed and proclaimed by God, himself. God apparently created Passover as a memorial in perpetuity so that the people of Israel in each successive year, would celebrate his successful efforts in freeing them from a lifetime bondage.

The holiday of Passover was officially declared in Exodus 12 (15-20), and later repeated in Deuteronomy 16 (2-6). It is important to note that the declaration of the holiday of Passover took place before the 10th plague in which the smiting of the firstborn of Egypt occurred. That means that the creation of the holiday of Passover was inaugurated by God before the Hebrew people ever left Egypt, Exodus 12 (14-37). Accordingly, with the exception of the first nine plagues, all of Gods post exodus miracles, which extricated the Jews from slavery and delivered them to Canaan had not yet occurred. Thus, the Torah’s description of how Passover was to be celebrated could not have incorporated those incomparable events.

While Passover was decreed in the 13th century B.C.E., its relevance, importance and scope equally applies to all successive years. The annual recollection of the Israelite transition from slavery to freedom becomes more important as time distances us from its actual occurrence.

In over 3,300 years since the establishment of the annual holiday of Passover, there have been numerous Rabbinically authored Haggadahs which suggest an appropriate way in which the holiday is to be celebrated. Fifty years ago, such documents were frequently printed by manufacturers and vendors of Passover foods and distributed to potential customers without cost.

More recently, some families have been inclined to formulate their own imaginative Haggadah to generate interest and special family traditions for the holiday. Most of the contents of such Haggadahs, although historically relevant and symbolic, were not prescribed by the written Torah for the celebration of the Passover. In fact, the description of the celebration of the Passover in the Torah was clear and precise, leaving virtually nothing to the imagination. To truly examine the spirit and rules of the celebration of the Passover, we must first create for ourselves a virtual “clean room of the mind” and confine ourselves to the four comers of the express language of the Torah which gave birth to Passover.

The specific Torah provisions for the celebration of the Passover, (Exodus 12 (15-20) as translated into English by the highly accredited Jewish Publication Society Tanakh, reads as follows: “Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread; on the very first day you shall remove leaven from your houses, for whoever eats leavened bread from the first day to the seventh day, that person shall be cut off from Israel. You shall celebrate a sacred occasion on the first day, and a sacred occasion on the seventh day; no work at all, shall be done on them; only what every person is to eat, that alone may be prepared for you. You shall observe the Feast of Unleavened Bread, for on this very day I brought your ranks out of the land of Egypt; you shall observe this day throughout the ages as an institution for all time. In the first month, from the fourteenth day of the month at evening, you shall eat unleavened bread until the 21st day of the month at evening. No leaven shall be found in your houses for seven days. For whoever eats what is leavened, that person shall be cut off from the community of Israel, whether he is a stranger or a citizen of the country. You shall eat nothing leavened; in all your settlements, you shall eat unleavened bread.”

Extrapolated from the foregoing quote is the following:

1. All bread which is eaten during the seven days of Passover must be unleavened i.e., must be made in such a manner as it is absolutely not permitted to rise.
2. Leaven, a unique substance which, when introduced into dough will cause it to rise may not reside in a Jewish household during the seven days of Passover, and may not be introduced into any product which will be consumed during that period.

While it might be academically interesting to contemplate how those rules applied to the Israelites of biblical times, that is not within the scope of this inquiry. What is under consideration is, given the Torah’s express rules of Passover, how are those rules to be applied today.

Although It is easy to connect unleavened bread with the speed necessary to exit Egypt, that notion in itself, might be an oversimplification. In the Torah, God mandated the use of unleavened bread on a number of occasions that apparently have little or nothing to do with the Exodus e.g:

1. In Leviticus 2 (11) “no meat offering, which he shall bring unto the LORD, shall be made with leaven: for Ye shall bum no leaven, nor any honey, in any offering of the Lord made by fire”.
2. In referring to a meat offering to God in Leviticus 6 (16-17), God directs “and the remainder thereof shall Aaron and his sons eat; with unleavened the bread shall it be eaten in the holy place; in the court of the tabernacle of the congregation. They shall eat it. It shall not be baked with leaven.”
3. In Leviticus 2 (4), Aaron and his sons are instructed that if they bring an oblation of a meat offering baked in an oven “it shall be unleavened cakes of fine flour mingled with oil or unleavened wafers anointed with oil. And if thy oblation be of a meat offering baked in a pan, it shall be of fine flour unleavened, mixed with oil.”

The God of Israel appears fond of identifying enduring commitments with relevant symbols. For the promise not to destroy the world again by flood or other means, God selected the rainbow. For his covenant creating the bond between Abraham and God in the creation of the Israelite people, God selected male circumcision. For God’s selection of the Passover as Israel’s eternal recollection of God’s gift of freedom, he selected freedom from leaven and consumption of “unleavened bread” as the affirmative obligation, which was required to be eaten over the seven days of the holiday.The apparent purpose of excluding leavening during the Passover was to grant subsequent Hebrew generations equal spiritual passage with the freed Hebrew slaves in the “God provided” journey between slavery and freedom. As a corollary obligation, Israelites were required to remove all leaven from their households and to eat no leavened bread or other leavened products during the self same period.

The Torah, however, in referring to leaven, does not identify any specific product or procedure wich effectuates the leavening process i.e., that which raises bread or other baked substance from a flat and dense status to a raised, aerated and substantially less dense product. The Torah’s reference is to the leavened and unleavened product itself and not to the manner in which the state of one was altered into the other. Its reference to the word leaven describes an item or procedure in which unleavened bread can be altered into leavened bread. It does not limit it to any kind of leaven or specific leavening process.

As time advances, science and the methods of production change. What is under consideration here are the rules of Passover, as articulated in the Torah. We are not, of course, at liberty to cut Passover to four days or to eliminate the first and last sacred days because the pace of modem life is more demanding. The rules of Passover, as articulated in the Torah are immutable.

Today there are a number of ways to effectuate leavening:

Spontaneous process: The spontaneous leavening process is generally thought to have originated in ancient Egypt. While there is no historical confirmation, it is considered that a batch of dough was allowed to stand before it was baked. Wild yeast cells settled in and grew, producing a fermentation process in which tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide resulted, making the dough to rise. Essentially, when wheat flour is mixed with water, enzymes break down the dough to starches in which the yeast and lactic acid bacteria, naturally present, together make acids and gases that leaven the bread. For that reason, manufacturers of matzoh under rabbinical supervision, do not allow the dough to exist for more than 18 minutes before the baking process commences, or the spontaneous leavening will have started. While fermentation may have been the initial historical leavening process, it is certainly not now the only one.

Biological leavening agents: These include such substances as baker’s yeast, live yeast, kefir, and sourdough starter.

Chemical leavening agents: Baking powder and baking soda are both used to increase the volume and lighten the texture of baked goods. It works by releasing carbon dioxide gas into the batter or dough through an acid-based reaction, causing bubbles in the dough to expand, and thus leavening the dough. The first single-acting baking powder was developed for all by Alfred Byrd in England in 1843. It later became double-acting baking powder which releases some carbon dioxide when dampened and later releases more of the gas when heated by baking, Thus, baking powder and baking soda were both both created, as leavening agents.

Mechanical leavening: included in mechanical leavening is creaming, which is the process of beating sugar crystals and butter together in a mixer. This integrates tiny air bubbles into the mixture. Cream mixtures are usually further leavened by a chemical leavening agent like baking soda, and are often used for cookies.

The language specifically recounted in Exodus 12 (15 – 20) is exquisitely clear as to the requirements of Passover. “No leaven shall be found in your houses for seven days and whoever eats what is leavened, that person shall be cut off from the community of Israel .” As observed, the Torah does not particularize what is leaven, nor does it identify any special process in which leavening is accomplished. Leaven is, in any generation, that which makes dough to rise. Leavened baked products are those which have been caused to rise by any leavening process.

Rabbinism, through some unjustified rationale, has concluded that baking soda and baking powder, modem chemical products, are authorized for use on Passover, although they are actually chemical leavening agents. That notion stems from the “logic” that since the original biblical leavening experience occurred when water was added to flour, and resulted in in fermentation, that fermentation is the only form of leaven that is prohibited. An example of that “logic” would reject the use of stainless steel surgical implements from being used in modem circumcision because stainless technology did not exist during biblical times.

Rabbinism is so fragmented by division into Orthodoxy, Conservatism, Reform, Reconstruction, Renewal, Humanistic, and distinctions such as Ashkenazi and Sephardic that it has difficulty speaking with one voice. Yet, within Rabbinism, there appears to be no significant opposition to accept chemical leavening agents for use during Passover.

In human

Rabbinical Judaism should fourthwith declare that all leavening agents are prohibited during the seven days of Passover and that baking powder and baking soda are indisputably prohibited leavening agents. Its failure to do so would be tantamount to a knowing and intentional puncture wound into the scroll of worldwide Torahs since they make absolutely no distinction among leavening agents or leavening processes.

Sadly, Rabbinism’s rejection of, and confrontation with, the rules inherent in the Written Torah are not at all novel. Occasionally they generate out of genuine doctrinal differences. Frequently, however, deviations originate from reasons like notions of untimeliness, inconvenience, discomfort, economic considerations and the like. The methods of avoidance of uncomfortable Torah prescriptions most frequently used are a type of sham and occasionally contorted interpretation of Scripture:

Sham, however, appears to be a more subtle way of seeking to avoid fault for deviation from the Torah. It takes many forms, including:

1. The “Eruv” a fictional extension of one’s house by public power or telephone lines (sometimes extending for miles and miles), so as to get around the biblical commandment requiring Jews to remain in their place (home) during the Sabbath. Exodus 16 (29).
2. The “documented sale” of one’s business to a Gentile on Friday afternoon with repurchase on Sunday morning in order to justify the business remaining open on the Sabbath without the fault of the owner.
3. The lease of one’s agricultural land in Israel to a Gentile every seventh year to avoid the obligation of Shmitah, the biblical obligation, requiring agricultural land in Israel to rest every seventh year. Exodus 23 (10-11) . The owner gets the economic value of the seventh year of the land but the land does not get rested.
4. The creation of the fiction that God “ordered” us to light Friday night candles which is recited as part of the Friday evening candle blessings. It conveniently allows the use of that candle light in our homes during Friday evening when lighting a fire would be prohibited. No such order by God appears in the Scriptures. The imaginative creation of such an “order” is little more than a violation of the third of the 10 Commandments, which prohibits taking God’s name in vain.

Positions like these, often with Rabbinical assistance, are little more than a hoax and must be insulting to God who is really the object of that deception.

Creative Dialog

Sham Originator:

Come on God! Have you never heard of Confession and Avoidance?

God:               

Schemer! Have you never heard that Vengeance is Mine Sayeth the Lord. Deuteronomy 32 (35)

Douglas Kaplan

The Written Torah describes the creation of the world. It identifies biblical law and recounts the historical origin of the Jewish People.  For many in the Orthodox Jewish Community, the entire Torah is written by the finger of God.  Conservative Jews appear more inclined to describe the Torah as being divinely inspired.  Those notions persist although the Torah itself cites God’s authorship only to the Ten Commandments (Exodus 31(18) and Deuteronomy 9(10)).

Modern scholars suggest that there were four distinct authors of portions of the Written Torah, which were ultimately assembled prior to the erection of the Second Temple in 515 BCE.  Unless otherwise designated, all references herein are to the Written Torah, and not to the rabbinically scripted documents of The Talmud, which was completed about 500 CE,and which traditional rabbinical Judaism refers to as the “Oral Torah”.

The Torah is an incredibly candid document.  It is not like an epic poem designed to exalt its heroes.  On the contrary, it is often brutally frank about the character and motivations of all of its subjects, including God.  The Torah identifies God as a jealous deity, one who will not hesitate to punish an individual who shows interest or fealty to other gods (Exodus 34(14) and Exodus 20(5)).  The Torah also identifies God as a vengeful deity. In Deuteronomy 32(35), God declares that vengeance belongs to him.  The Torah provides a number of examples of God’s vengeance for failure to serve his ordinance (Deuteronomy 28(47-48)).

The focus of this article deals with the Torah’s description of the faulted character of Jacob, a.k.a. Israel, the father of the Israelite people, including their surviving remnant, the Jews.

According to the Torah, Israelite people originate and descend from the seminal line of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Deuteronomy 34(4)).

In 1047 BCE, after the Israelite tribes (who descended from the 12 sons of Jacob) left slavery in Egypt and occupied Canaan, they combined into a single “Unified Monarchy of Israel”.  That Monarchy, under Kings Saul, David and Solomon, lasted a little over 116 years.  Substantial issues generated within the Unified Monarchy which then, in 930 BCE, divided into two separate Kingdoms: The Northern Kingdom of Israel which was comprised of eight tribes (and two half tribes) and the Southern Kingdom of Judah which was comprised of three tribes.  Today’s Jews, with some exceptions, are the lineal descendants of the three Israelite tribes of the Kingdom of Judah (the tribes of Judah, Simon and Benjamin).  Thus, the name Jews. 

The bulk of the remainder of the Israelite people, nine full tribes and two half tribes comprised of the descendants of the sons of Joseph (Manasseh and Ephraim) constituted the Kingdom of Israel.  They were overrun by the Assyrians in 722 BCE and were removed by the Assyrians to other areas of Assyrian Empire.  That population is often referred to as the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.  Segments of that lost population, like the Samaritans, (lineal descendants of the half tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh), have been identified and acknowledged by the state of Israel as Israelites and accorded Israeli citizenship.  There is always the hope that by endogamy (tribal intra-marriage) other lost tribes could have preserved their genetic identity, and will be found and restored.  The people of Israel truly want to be their brother’s keeper.

Firstborn

Primogeniture, the superior right of the firstborn son to inherit from the estate and title of his ancestor, is often thought to have originated in the Middle Ages.  In truth, its origin is much earlier and stretches back to biblical times, where the firstborn son was entitled to a double share of the estate of a deceased parent, as well as the ultimate helmsmanship of the family.

The Torah recounts that after a number of years of marriage, Rebecca, wife of Isaac, gave birth to twin boys, Esau and Jacob.  At that time, in the event of a multiple birth, the first male child to exit the mother’s womb was entitled to be designated the “b’chor” or firstborn male.  Esau exited before Jacob, and thus was entitled to the “rights of firstborn”.  The two boys grew up with significantly different interests.  Esau favored the outdoor life of a huntsman, while Jacob’s life was more reflective and less physical.

In Genesis 25(28-34), the Torah describes a singularly selfish and morally bankrupt act that took place in the relationship of the twins.  Esau was returning from a day of hunting in the field, famished from hunger.  He came upon his twin brother Jacob who was in possession of cooked food.  Esau asked his twin brother for some of the food to slake his hunger.  Jacob refused Esau’s request.

Jacob did, however, indicate that he would provide the food, if Esau would transfer to him Esau’s right and entitlement as the firstborn son of Isaac.  The famished Esau agreed.  Only then did Jacob provide his brother with some of the food in his possession.

Within the tradition of the family, it was customary for an aged father to grant to the firstborn a special blessing.  Isaac, then both old and blind, resolved to provide the blessing to his eldest son Esau.

Rebecca, mother of the twins, who preferred Jacob, conspired with Jacob for him to receive those blessings rather than Esau, to whom they were to be directed.  Mindful of Isaac’s blindness, Rebecca prepared food which Isaac liked (Genesis 27(14)).  She then dressed Jacob in the clothing of Esau (Genesis 27(15)).  Rebecca saw to the covering of Jacob’s hands and arms with animal skins that would emulate the feel and texture of Esau, the outdoorsman (Genesis 27(16-17)).  When he was totally prepared by his mother, Jacob appeared before his father, delivered the food that his mother had prepared, and announced, “my father, here I am” (Genesis 27(18)).  Isaac responded, “who are you, my son?”.  Jacob responded, “I am Esau your firstborn. I have done as you told me. Sit up and eat my game, that your soul may bless me”.  Isaac then said to Jacob, “come near me, I pray thee that I may feel thee, my son, whether thou be my very son Esau, or not” (Genesis 27(21)).

Blind as Isaac was, his language, expressed doubt as to which son was addressing him. Isaac felt the covered arms and hands of Jacob and then exclaimed the now famous utterance expressing his inconclusiveness: “The voice is the voice of Jacob the hands are the hands of Esau” (Genesis 27(18-22)).  Once again, Isaac said, “are thou my very son Esau?”  Jacob responded, “I am” (Genesis 27(24)). Ultimately, Isaac concludes that it is Esau before him and after partaking of the meal presented, kissed him and blessed him.

Shortly after Jacob left, Esau appears with venison and is prepared to receive his father’s blessing.  Isaac recounted to Esau what had just occurred, in response to which Esau issued a bitter outcry.  Esau then requested an additional blessing for himself. Isaac responded, “behold, I have made him thy Lord and all his brethren I have given to him for servants; and with corn and wine I have sustained him” (Genesis 27(37)).

Esau hated Jacob for having taken from him both his rights of firstborn and the blessings to which Esau was entitled, and he resolved that he would slay his brother.

The Torah appears to suggest that notwithstanding Jacob’s fraud, the blessing delivered to him by Isaac cannot be amended, and thus the rights and priorities established thereby are unalterable.  Both Isaac and Rebecca, fearful of fratricide between their sons, send Jacob off to Haran to live with Rebecca’s brother Laban.

Beth-El 

While en route to his uncle’s home, Jacob dreams of a ladder set up on the earth with the top going into heaven.  Angels are ascending and descending on it.  He sees the image of God above it.  God identifies himself as the God of Abraham and Isaac. God states that he will give to Jacob and his seed the land upon which Jacob is lying.  God promises that Jacob will be the father of a great nation, and that God will be with Jacob wheresoever he goes (Genesis 28(12-15)).

Rather than elation and humility for the direct contact with God, and God’s commitments to Jacob, Jacob’s response is both transactional and conditional.  “If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and raiment to put on so that I come to my father’s house in peace, then shall the Lord be my God” (Genesis 28(20-21)).  The text appears to suggest that God must first prove his promises before Jacob would accept the God of his father and grandfather.

Interestingly, Jacob’s quid pro quo attitude towards the God of his fathers is compromised later in his life by the introduction of a single element: “fear”.  Twenty years later, while en route to his father’s home, he is advised that his brother, who has sworn to kill him, is en route with 400 men.  In Genesis 32(11), he prays: “Deliver me, I pray thee from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau.  For I fear him, lest he will come and smite me”.

Haran

Jacob ultimately arrives at Haran, the community in which his uncle Laban lives.  He falls in love with Rachel, the youngest daughter of his uncle and agrees to work for his uncle for a period of seven years to acquire Rachel as his wife.  At the conclusion of that seven-year term, a wedding was arranged.  The bride’s face was covered with a veil.

In the morning, after the veil was uncovered, Jacob discovered that he was married to Leah, Rachel’s older sister and not to Rachel (Genesis 29(25)).  When he confronted Laban for having switched daughters, Laban responded that in his community a younger daughter may not be given in marriage before the firstborn daughter.

As with the deceptions done by Jacob to secure Issac’s blessing, the marriage ceremony, having been completed with a fraudulently placed person, appears to be unalterable.  Laban then offered Rachel as a wife to Jacob in exchange for another seven years of employment to which Jacob agreed (Genesis 29(28-29)).

Like Rebecca’s fraudulent assistance to Jacob to secure the blessings of the firstborn from Isaac, candor and honesty were probably not outstanding genetic features of the Laban family, from which Rebecca originated. 

Leah and Rachel

Leah is one of the more tragic figures of the story of Genesis. Her father deceptively substituted her for her younger sister in what was destined to be a loveless marriage.  In Genesis 29(31), the Torah describes God’s pathos for Leah when God sees that Leah is hated by Jacob.  In an effort to balance the equities, God opens Leah’s womb to the birth of Reuben, Simon, Levi, and Judah while, for an extended time, denying children to Rachel, her younger sister.

Out of frustration for lack of pregnancy, Rachel offers her handmaiden Bilhah to Jacob so that, at least, she could enjoy surrogate motherhood. Bilhah gives birth to two sons, Dan and Naphtali.  After Leah’s children stop coming, she too offers her handmaiden, Zilpah to Jacob.  Zilpah gives birth to Gad and Asher.

One of the most poignant and personally sensitive events ever described in the Torah occurs in this context. It is apparent that for some time, Jacob has enjoyed the love, companionship and proximity of Rachel while paying little attention to her older sister.  It was obviously a situation that caused Leah significant pain and distress.  During that period, Reuben, Leah’s firstborn son, came upon some mandrake roots and brought them to Leah.  Mandrake roots were a delicacy of that time.

Rachel asked Leah for several of the mandrakes, to which Leah responded, “Is it a small matter that you have taken my husband and would you also take away my son’s mandrakes”?

Rachel, apparently understanding the sensitivity of Leah’s response, replied, “I promise, he shall lie with you tonight in return for your son’s mandrakes” (Genesis 30(15)).  When Jacob came home from the field that evening Leah went out to meet him and said, “thou must lay with me; for surely I have hired you with my son’s mandrakes”.  Jacob did lay with her that night (Genesis 30(17)).  Eventually, following that episode, Leah gave birth to two additional sons and a daughter: Issachar, Zebulun, and Dinah.  Ultimately, Rachel herself became pregnant and gave birth to two sons: Joseph and Benjamin.

Jacob’s marriage to Leah was not Leah’s fault.  Both she and Jacob were victims of her father’s deception.  However, that did not justify Jacob’s hatred and indifference to Leah, and reflected poorly on the character of the man hailed as the father of the People of Israel.

In modern times the Reform Rabbinate, has sought to identify and exalt the contribution of matriarchs along with their spousal patriarchs, a reasonable and respectable goal.  However, in identifying the matriarchs, rabbinical Texts often enumerate Rachel before Leah and omit Bilhah and Zilpah.

The mention of the matriarchs often appear in the birkat avot at the opening blessing of the Amida and read something like this:  Praised are You, Adonai our God and God of our ancestors, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah.

While that matriarchal naming order may pay homage to Jacob’s first love, it is neither chronologically correct nor ethically appropriate.  It pursues one of the less admirable aspects of Jacob’s nature.  Leah was the elder of the two sisters.  She was the first wife of Jacob.  She bore .Jacob more sons than any of the other women with whom he mated and more children (six sons and one daughter) than the rest of his wives and concubines together.  The entire Jewish people are named after one of her sons “Judah”.  The priority of Leah in the relationship with Jacob should be respected.

More important, perhaps, is the rabbinical identification of only four matriarchs, when in fact there were actually six.  Deliberately omitted were Bilhah, mother of two sons with Jacob, Dan and Naphtali, and Zilpah, the mother of two sons with Jacob, Gad and Asher.  Given that biblical Judaism was a patriarchal society, these sons were of the same accepted stature and dignity as the other eight sons sired by Jacob with Leah and Rachel.  Each of the 12 sons was an originator of one of the tribes of Israel.  Why then were Bilhah and Zilpah not included in rabbinical Judaism’s identification of matriarchs.  The classical response often heard is that they were handmaids and not wives, a notion challenged by the Torah itself.  The word matriarch itself describes a relationship between a mother and child and not between a husband and wife.

Both Leah and Rachel had periods of their marriage to Jacob where they could not provide him with children, though they had a maternal desire and need to do so.  What they did was to introduce their handmaids into their marriage relationship, as an additional party so that Leah or Rachel could be the surrogate mother of the progeny of that expanded relationship.  The Torah tells us that this was not merely a practical way of expanding the number of children but actually enlarged each of the marriage relationships to three persons.  Genesis 30(4, 9), referring to Rachel, states that she gave Bilhah to Jacob, “to wife.”  Similarly, when Leah saw that she had left all bearing, she took  Zilpah and gave her to Jacob “to wife”.  Keep in mind, that these additions to the marriage were not meretricious relationships, but arose out of the consent of both the original husband and wife.  The Torah confirms the marriage relationships with Bilhah and Zilpah in Genesis 37(2), where it provides, “At 17 years of age, Joseph tended the flocks of his brothers, as a helper to the sons of his father’s wives Bilhah and Zilpah.”

Any possible question concerning the genuine spousal relationship between Jacob and Bilhah is abandoned by Jacob’s response to the adultery between Ruben (Leah’s first son with Jacob) and Bilhah (Genesis 35(22)).  In Genesis 49(4), while describing the future of his sons, he describes Ruben as “unstable as water, thou shalt not excel; because thou went to up to thy father’s bed; then defiledst thou it; he went up to my couch”.

Could it be that modern liberal rabbinical Judaism, while elevating the status of biblical women, has omitted Bilhah and Zilpah as matriarchs because of their diminished social or economic standing as handmaids or perhaps their coloration from what may have been Egyptian origin?

Laban

Jacob sojourned with his uncle/father-in-law Laban for 14 years, during which he married Laban’s two daughters.  At the conclusion of his two seven-year commitments, he planned to leave with his family.  Laban, recognizing the value of Jacob’s services as a skilled shepherd, suggested that he remain in Laban’s employment.  Jacob agreed, but requested that he receive, as his compensation, all of Laban’s ringstraked, spotted, speckled and brown goats and sheep. Given the experience of both Laban and Jacob as husbandry men, animals with those markings could reasonably be anticipated to be a modest portion of Laban’s flock and thus suitable wages for his son-in-law.  Laban agreed to Jacob’s proposal.  What Laban did not know was that Jacob had learned how to produce those specific markings and colorations in the next generation of those animals.

In Genesis 30(37-43), the Torah describes how Jacob dealt with Laban’s livestock by placing uniquely peeled rods before the animals in the gutters of the watering holes.  Mating occurred when the animals came to drink.  The animals that conceived after being affected by the rods brought forth young that were ringstraked, speckled and spotted.  He then took those animals and placed them into his own herds.  Jacob’s flocks increased dramatically, while Laban’s were depleting.

Jacob began to hear that Laban’s sons were complaining that Jacob had taken all that was their father’s in building up his own wealth.  Jacob also noticed that Laban’s attitude to him was changing (Genesis 31(1)).  At or about the same time, God directed Jacob to return to Isaac, his father and his ancestral home. Jacob took his wives, children, and the wealth that he had amassed and fled from Laban’s home without telling Laban that he was leaving.  When Laban became aware of Jacob’s secret exit, he took his kinsman with him and pursued Jacob a distance of seven days.  He caught up with Jacob in the country of Gilead.  Laban, however, decided to do nothing dramatic because God appeared to him in a dream telling him to be wary of attempting anything with Jacob, good or bad (Genesis 31(24)).

The Wrestling Match

Even the most token instruction in Jewish biblical history involves the story of Jacob’s victory in an all-night wrestling match with the person speculated to be the angel of God.  As told, it concludes with Jacob’s demand of a blessing from his assailant and his receipt of a name change from Jacob to Israel, instead.  The assailant explains in Genesis 33(28), “for as a prince hast thou Power with God and with men, and hast prevailed”.  The number of scholars, rabbis and Torah authorities who have reflected on this portion is legion.  Their conclusions are, however, diverse.  It is therefore essential that we go back to the raw data provided by the Torah itself.

Jacob and his family are en route to his family home.  He learns that his brother Esau, who had threatened to kill him, is accompanied by 400 men and heading in Jacob’s direction. 

Genesis 32(24) commences with the following description “and Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man until the breaking of the day.”  We are not informed as to the identity of the assailant or where he came from.  Why did the two engage in a wrestling match?  The assailant appears vanquished by Jacob, who refuses to release him without a blessing.  Why would Jacob ask to be blessed by the assailant unless Jacob believed that the assailant was God or a representative of God?  The assailant asks to be released because “the day cometh”.  Does God, or his angels only function in the dark?  Interestingly enough, the assailant was obliged to ask Jacob his name before he granted him the new name of Israel.  Assuredly, if the assailant were God or his angel, they would have known the name of Jacob. 

The most confounding aspect of the encounter is the explanation as to why the new name was granted: “for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and thou hast prevailed.”  Does this mean that the creator, God, has been bested by his own creation and that Jacob has been granted a new name as a token of that victory?  Such an acknowledgment of defeat by God, whose strength, pride and ego are spread throughout the pages of the Torah stretches credulity beyond the point of rupture.

In truth, we find a very frightened man, alone and in need of self- assurance.  He is a person whose Torah reputation for candor, honesty and selflessness is more than a bit wanting.  There appears to be a present and immediate need to garner courage for the encounter with his brother. After all, who can defeat and destroy a man who’s been victorious over God? Inasmuch as the identity of the assailant is unknown, the report of the event could only have come from Jacob himself.  One is left with the question as to whether the report of the encounter and the granting of the name Israel are fact or fantasy.

Jacob ben Isaac “Father”

1. The Torah tells us that Jacob loved Joseph, son of Jacob and Rachel, more than all of his children (Genesis 37(3)).  In effect, he was carrying to the next generation the same destructive attitude that he brought to his marriages with Leah and Rachel.  His preferred love for Joseph was not at all a secret from his other sons.  To demonstrate his preferences, he gave to Joseph a coat of many colors, a kindness he did not share with any of his other children.  Little did Jacob know, or perhaps care, how destructive was his overt preference for one son over his 11 others sons.
2. Sadly, even the son who was the beneficiary of his affection, Joseph, was severely compromised by delusions of grandeur from his father’s attentions.  Joseph foolishly recounted to his brothers his dream that there were twelve binding sheaves of grain in the field when suddenly Joseph’s sheaf stood up and remained upright while the sheaves of the other brothers gathered around and bowed low to his sheaf.  He dreamed another dream, which he recounted to his brothers, in which the sun, the moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to him. (Genesis 37(7-10)).   Ultimately, it created a depth of jealousy in Joseph’s 11 brothers so deep that they designed to kill Joseph.  It was only when Ruben, the eldest, suggested that Joseph be sold as a slave instead, that his life was preserved.  The brothers soaked Jacob’s many-colored coat in animal blood and brought it back to Jacob, suggesting that Joseph had been killed by a wild animal.

Conclusion

Jacob is the Sire of 12 sons that evolved into the 12 tribes of Israel.  The Children of Israel, and their descendants, the Jews, are not known as Abrahamites or even Isaacites but rather as Israelites, adopting the name given to Jacob, who is often identified as the father of the Children of Israel.  In that capacity, he is respected by the Jewish community, who frequently name their male issue Jacob, Jack, Jake and derivations of that name.  Though not the originator of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob he is viewed by many as the most important, and certainly the most prolific of the three.

Yet, this is the same Jacob, who, for a mess of pottage, swindled his starving twin brother Esau out of his significant rights and entitlement as firstborn.  Then, conspiring with his mother Rebecca, created a charade of events and dress that defrauded his father, the blind Isaac, out of the blessing that was the entitlement of Esau, her other son.

It is the same Jacob who adopted a “show me first attitude” before making any commitment to the God who pledged that Jacob would be the father of a great nation and would receive God’s loyalty, support and protection.

Yes, this is the same Jacob, whose unjustified hatred for his first wife Leah, evoked God’s compassion to open Leah’s womb to Jacob’s children while, for a long time, rendering Jacob’s preferred wife Rachel childless.

Indeed, this is the identical Jacob who tricked his father-in-law Laban into a form of compensation which Jacob knew he could manipulate.  When the situation became apparent to Laban and his sons, Jacob quietly stole away with his family, and ill-gotten gains.

We are talking about the same frightened Jacob, who reported a dream in which he won a wrestling match with an unidentified stranger who he presumed was an angel of God, or perhaps God himself.  Jacob then reports that he asked for a blessing from his assailant and received instead a new name “Israel”.

That God in his omnipotence would lose a wrestling match with one of his own creations, is both bizarre and unthinkable.  That God would then award the victor a new name to memorialize God’s defeat by his own creation, tests any limits of credibility.  Rather, it is consistent with the anxieties of a man about to be confronted by a brother who has vowed to kill him and needs to garner his strength to confront that challenge.

Finally, how ironic it is that we ascribe the paternity of the entire people of Israel to a father who was so overtly prejudiced in his preference for one of his 12 sons, over the interests of his 11 other sons, that he drove them to the brink of fratricide.

The punishment meted out in the Torah for curiosity is often severe.  Adam and Eve were thrust out of the garden the Eden, where they enjoyed continuous life and the benefit of God’s bounty, because they could not resist the curiosity about the fruit of the tree of knowledge, a.k.a. the tree of good and evil.  Lot’s wife could not resist the curiosity of looking back upon the destruction of all the community in which she had resided, and thus was turned into a pillar of salt.

Given the ungracious history of the character of Jacob, who among us would not fear to express curiosity as to why he was chosen as the father of the people of Israel, a people designed to spread the morality of God’s code of laws.

Perhaps the answer will be suggested in some benign rabbinical gloss that presupposes that God was aware of a number of events of self-sacrifice and nobility in Jacob’s character, events that never reached the pages of the Written Torah.  Perhaps….

Douglas Kaplan

Preface

The Written Torah provides that all children born of Jewish fathers are Jews (patrilineal-ism). In the early part of the 3^rd century CE, the Rabbis of the Mishna rejected the patrilineal-ism of the Written Torah and adopted matrilineal-ism in its stead. Since the beginning of the 21^st century, geneticists in the United States, Israel, and England have determined that a significant percentage of the Ashkenazi founding mothers were of European (non-Judaic) origin. Since 80% of all Jews today are of Ashkenazi origin, Rabbinical Judaism must determine who amongst its members and clergy are really Jews.

                                      __________________

Inasmuch as 80% of all of the 14.7 million Jews in the world today claim Ashkenazi origin, the question posed by the title is of significant consequence. To provide an answer to that question, three preliminary identities must first be established:

1. Who is a Jew, and how is that identity determined?
2. Who is Ashkenazi, and how is that identity determined?
3. What accepted legal authority has the right to determine whether Ashkenazis are Jews, and how is that determined?

 Who is a Jew?

The identity and origin of the Jew is a question that can only be answered by reference to the Written Torah. No other relevant historical data exists for that era. It is in the Torah that the Creator of the World served as the designer and originator of the Israelite nation.  That sacred and venerated Torah, alone, tells the story of the Israelite people who are the root source of Jewish identity.

The history of the Israelite nation began when God spoke to Abram (a.k.a. Abraham) and told him that he would make him a great nation, that he would bless him and curse those who cursed him, and that through Abram all families of the earth would be blessed (Genesis 12(2-3)). At that moment of time, Abram was 75 years old and married to Sarai, who was 65 years of age and childless. From that unlikely beginning, the Israelite people were designed and created. The Written Torah subsequently recounts God’s hand in the lives and events of Abram’s son Isaac, and his grandson Jacob, a.k.a. Israel, the biblical patriarchs. It is through the patriarchs and the continuum of their seminal line that the people of Israel originated and continue in perpetuity.

On no fewer than six occasions in the Torah does God identify how the nation promised to Abraham will repopulate itself.

It is critical to observe and acknowledge that the continuity of the Israelite Nation promised to Abraham occurs genetically as it passes through the semen of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and subsequently through the semen of each successive paternal generation in perpetuity. Neither education, nor religious doctrine, nor a desire for gender equanimity are factors in identifying those who are members of the Israelite nation. It is also helpful to be mindful of the fact that women are not a source of semen.   

The real subject of our inquiry in this section is the identity of the Jew. Jews are members of a sub-community classification of the Israelite Nation. To identify the source of the Israelite Nation, we need to focus on the 12 Israelite tribes, which conquered Canaan on or about 1250 BCE. Each tribe represents descendants of the 12 sons of Jacob, a.k.a. Israel. Following their conquest, the tribes felt the need for a king to bind them together to form a unified and strong monarchy.

King Saul was anointed the first king of the unified monarchy in 1040 BCE, and was succeeded by King David in 1010 BCE. On the death of King David in 970 BCE, his son King Solomon succeeded him, built the Holy Temple in Jerusalem in the South, and died in 931 BCE.

Upon the death of King Solomon in 931 BCE, a delegation of the tribes confronted Solomon’s son and successor, Rehoboam, and requested assurances that they would be treated kindly and thoughtfully under his reign. Rehoboam’s response was “My father disciplined you with whips. I will discipline you with scorpions.”

Upon that response, the ten northern tribes of Israelites broke away from the United Kingdom of Israel and formed the Northern Israelite kingdom of Israel. The remaining three southern tribes of Judah, Benjamin and Simon formed the Southern Israelite Kingdom of Judah.

In 722 BCE, the Assyrian armies marched into the Northern Kingdom of Israel and destroyed it. The Assyrians removed virtually all of the 10 Israelite tribes and replaced them with people from tribes which they had previously conquered. Those 10 removed Israelite tribes constitute “The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel” whose whereabouts today, if they still exist, are unknown.

There remains today, by DNA confirmation, a small segment of 750 Israelites from the Northern kingdom of Israel who are descendants of those not removed by Assyrians and who identify themselves as Samaritans.

Those Israelites who remained in the southern Israelite kingdom of Judah were able to successfully survive defeat by the Babylonians, conquest by the Persians, subjugation to the Greeks and the Romans and 2000 perilous years of diaspora, wandering from nation to nation. Those Israelites are identified as Jews because they stem from the three southern Israelite tribes of the Kingdom of Judah, to wit: Judah, Benjamin, and Simon. In addition to those tribes, there were several priests from the tribe of Levi who served in the temple in Jerusalem.

The essential elements of Jewish identity

To be a Jew, a person must be a direct lineal descendant of the patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. By definition, this excludes the possibility of inclusion by conversion. Conversion, in any form, is never mentioned or authorized in the Written Torah. Indeed, there is no formula for conversion that can alter the genetic identity of an individual in order to qualify him a lineal descendent of the patriarchs.

A male lineal descendent of the patriarchs must be circumcised on the eighth day.

Genetic lineage from the patriarchs must be provided by means of transmission through semen ( Zerah). While this requirement may appear both unusual and puzzling, its logic has been confirmed by modern science:

Males have two sex chromosomes: a Y (male) chromosome (which the male received from his father) and an X chromosome (which the male received from his mother. Females, on the other hand, receive two X (female) chromosomes, one from each parent.

If the Jewish male delivers an X chromosome, the resultant female child inherits X chromosomes from both her mother and her father.

If, at the time of mating, the Jewish male delivers a Y chromosome, the resultant male child inherits that Y chromosome and its genes from the father and a separate X chromosome and its genes from the mother. As long as there is a continuum from Jewish fathers, the chain from the patriarchs remains unbroken. The introduction into the line of a Y chromosome from a Gentile male would abort the lineal continuity of the Y chromosome and its genes from the patriarchs.

Because women are not a source of Y chromosomes, a Jewish mother and a Gentile father would not be capable of delivering the seminal continuity from the patriarchs required for a Jewish child.

The scientific elements of the procreation system were only identified as recently as 1903 by a brilliant scientist, Nettie M. Stevens of Bryn Mawr College. It is equally important to note that the process regarding the X and Y of genetics, which gave rise to patrilineal-ism, evolved long before human life began. Accordingly, the occasionally expressed notion that patrilineal-ism is a cabal in support of male domination, is “ill conceived.”

The Torah was very careful to avoid adventurous or imaginative ways to get around or avoid its laws or design. In Deuteronomy 4(2), God directs that “you 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.”

Who Are the Ashkenazis?

Who are the Ashkenazis? Where did they come from? When did they appear on the European continent?  Most writers seem to avoid a specific time or era as to when the Ashkenazis arrived on the scene. History begins to take note of the footsteps of the Ashkenazis in the early 500s A.D.

The Ashkenazi name alone seems to generate more confusion than enlightenment with regard to its origin. The conventional wisdom, which is informed by the Ashkenazi practice of the Jewish faith, appears to suggest that they originated from remnants of the Southern Israelite Kingdom of Judah, who were thrust into Europe as slaves and servants by the Roman legions.

That episode began in 132 CE with an insurrection against Roman domination brought by a zealot, Simon bar Kokhba, who was joined by the noted Rabbi Akiva. The final Roman act that ignited the flames of revolution was the Roman plan to construct a Roman city over the ruins of Jerusalem, and the erection of a temple to Jupiter on the Temple Mount.

The Judeans fought valiantly and caused the Romans to bring into Judah seven full legions to quell the uprising. 580,000 Jews were killed. Fifty fortified towns and 985 villages were razed. The Romans suffered massive military casualties as well. The last battle of the war in 135 CE occurred at the fortress of Betar. The Jerusalem Talmud relates that the number of dead in Betar was enormous, and that the Romans went on killing “until their horses were submerged in blood up to their nostrils.”

After the war ended, the Roman forces went on a rampage of systematic killing, which included Rabbi Akiva and 10 other Rabbinical martyrs. Following the war, many more were killed, exiled or sold into slavery. There were so many captives auctioned at “Hadrian’s market” that it was reported that the price of a Jew was as low as the price of a horse.

When the insurrection was put down by the Romans, Hadrian, the Roman leader, sought to root out Jewish nationalism by prohibiting Torah law and the Hebrew calendar, and by executing Judaic scholars.

These tragic events were to change the course of Jewish history for centuries to come. As a result of the loss of the Bar Kokhba insurrection, the surviving Jewish community fled in many directions to avoid death or enslavement at the hands of the Romans. Jewish slaves and their children who eventually gained their freedom migrated out of Judah and settled in southern Europe. Not infrequently, the expatriates, set adrift in a Gentile world, were obliged to find mates amongst the indigenous European population.

With the destruction of the Second Temple and the failed revolt against the Romans in 135 CE, the Jewish passion for a relationship with their God did not end. From 125 CE to 550 CE, Rabbinical Scholars in Judah and Babylon developed new forms of Jewish law and worship that could serve in the absence of the Temple. Eventually, the European Jewish expatriates, including itinerant Judean merchants and tradesmen, coalesced into a group that was dubbed Ashkenazi.

 In 465 CE, Ashkenazi communities were identified in Brittany; in 524 CE, in Valence; and in 533 CE, in Orleans.  Later, for economic opportunities, during the early Middle Ages, they moved on to the Rhine River in Germany and to northern France. Stability, however, was difficult to maintain. French residence for Jews ended abruptly in 629 CE, when the King Dagobert I, on the Frank throne, expelled the Jews from his kingdom. However, by 800 CE, Charlemagne expanded the Frankish Empire and brought on a brief period of stability and unity.

Jews in the former Roman territories confronted harsh anti-Jewish church rulings. Some Jews, to stop the pain, assimilated into dominant Greek and Latin cultures by way of conversion to Christianity.

It is estimated that prior to 1096 CE, the first Crusade, the entire Jewish population of Germany comprised only 20,000 people. However, by that time, numerous massacres of Jews were occurring during the first Christian Crusades. Mobs in France and Germany perpetrated the Rhineland massacres of 1096 CE, devastating Jewish communities along the Rhine River.

England in 1290, France in 1394, and parts of Germany in the 15^th Century gradually pushed Ashkenazi Jews eastward to Poland, Lithuania and Russia. By the 15^th Century, the Ashkenazi Jewish community of Poland became the largest Jewish community in the diaspora. Ultimately that community fell under the domination of Russia, but remained the center of Ashkenazi Jewry until the Holocaust.

There was little assimilation amongst the Jews in Central and Eastern Europe. They lived almost exclusively in shtetls. Jewish education was provided for males, and the communities were under strict Rabbinical leadership. Intermarriage was strongly discouraged by both Jews and Gentiles

Daniel Elazar, of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, summarizes Ashkenazi history in the last 3000 years by noting that at the end of the 11^th Century, 97% of world Jewry was Sephardic and 3% was Ashkenazi. By the middle of the 17^th Century, Sephardim outnumbered Ashkenazim 3 to 2. By the end of the 18^th Century, Ashkenazim outnumbered Sephardim 3 to 2. By 1930, however, it was estimated that Ashkenazi Jews accounted for nearly 92% of world Jewry.

The Turkic Connection – A Different View of Ashkenazi Origin

In recent years, innovative technology, cumulative skills and new and distinct ideas have developed with reference to the origin of the Ashkenazi community.

In March 2016, Dr. Eran Elhaik, together with Ranajit Das, Paul Wexler and Mehdi Pirooznia published on the internet the results of their investigation of the origin of the Ashkenazis. It appears under the title “Localizing Ashkenazic Jews to Primeval Villages in the Ancient Iranian Lands of Ashkenaz.”

Dr.Elhaik and his associates used a computer modeling system to convert Ashkenazi DNA into geographical information which revealed that Ashkenazis descended from the Greeks, Iranians and others who colonized northern Anatolia (now northern Turkey) more than 2000 years ago, before converting to Judaism. He points to three still-surviving Turkish villages: Iskenaz, Eskenaz, and Ashanaz, located in North Eastern Turkey, which made up part of the original Ashkenazi homeland. Dr.Elhaik concludes that Ashkenazis originated during the First Millennium when Iranian Jews Judaised (converted) Greco-Roman, Turk, Iranian, southern Caucuses, and Slavic populations inhabiting the lands of Ashkenaz in Turkey.

Even if true, without patrilineal lineage, which the Torah requires of the Jew, Ashkenazis from that source could not possibly be deemed as Jews. They would have been born as genetic Gentiles. No process of conversion then, or now, could make them Jews. By the way, the same is true of the Turkic Khazars whose descendants are occasionally proposed as the source of the Ashkenazi Jews.

Several prominent scholars with significant and authoritative credentials have declared Dr.Elhaik’s conclusions to be without merit. That, of course, in and of itself, does not foreclose the possibility of Dr. Elhaik’s hypothesis regarding the origin of the Ashkenazis.

Some unique aspects of Ashkenazi culture:

Language: Until recently, in addition to the language of the country of their residence, Ashkenazis spoke Yiddish. The world appears to have discovered the Ashkenazis while they were resident in lands connecting both Germany and France. It is therefore no strange thing that the Yiddish language, occasionally referred to as “Judeo-German,” should have its birthplace in that locale. In its various forms, Yiddish is a composite of high German fused with elements of the Hebrew and eventually parts of Slavic languages.

As the Ashkenazi community moved eastward into Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia, the need for a common language amongst the Ashkenazis grew. For them, Yiddish became a kind of Ashkenazi Esperanto, binding together a people of common background, interest and faith. Eventually, Yiddish became so pervasive amongst the Ashkenazis that it became the independent source and embodiment of their culture, known as “Yiddishkeit.” Books about their lives, poetry, plays, and musical lyrics, were all written and performed in Yiddish. Formal prayer, however, remained the province of Hebrew, which was considered a sacred tongue.

As the Ashkenazis expanded into other continents, i.e., the Americas, Australia, and South Africa, the utilization of Yiddish started to decline. The major blow to the Yiddish language occurred through the Nazi extermination of 6 million persons, most of whom were Ashkenazis and Yiddish speakers. Today, based upon an estimate by Rutgers University, there are approximately 600,000 Yiddish speakers in the entire world, a large contingent of which is found amongst Haredi (orthodox) Jews.

Religion: Ashkenazis who are neither atheists, agnostics, nor indifferent about religious faith are most likely practitioners of the Jewish religion. For the vast majority of such persons, the Jewish religion functions through the organs of Rabbinical Judaism. That is, Rabbis of different denominations serve as teachers, interpreters and supervisory religious authorities over the Judaic laws approved by them. Rabbis are not, as in some other religions, intercessors between God and members of their congregation.

There are, however, sects of Judaism, such as the Karites and the Samaritans, that do not subscribe to Rabbinical control and construction of the written Torah. Their members are nowise bound to the Talmud or Rabbinical interpretations of the Torah.

The fact that most Ashkenazis of faith practice Rabbinical Judaism a.k.a. Rabbinism does not make them Jews. To be a Jew, and thus part of the Israelite Nation, one has to have been born a Jew. It is a matter of genetics and not a matter of belief or religious practice. From the time of Abraham, approximately 2000 BCE, until the Torah was orally presented by God to Moses and the Israelite People at Mount Sinai in 1285 BCE, a period of 715 years, no Jewish religion or faith existed. The God of Israel was simply a tribal god of the people of Israel whose orders needed to be obeyed in order to survive and grow. That period could well be extended for an additional 700 years until Ezra the Scribe brought the Masoretic text of the Torah to the Second Temple.

The word “Jews” refers to people, human beings. The Jewish religion is a compilation of moral beliefs, religious practices and obedience to a deity. They are not one and the same. If a person is born a Jew, that person’s genetics does not change if he or she should decide to become an atheist or to observe a religion other than Judaism. If that does occur, that person need not convert back to Judaism because he or she never lost his or her Jewish genetic identity. Conversely, if a person who is not born of Jewish parents decides on pursuing the Jewish faith, that does not make him a Jew.

In some quarters there is the idea that a Gentile male can become a Jew simply by becoming circumcised. Indeed, you could circumcise an elephant, but that does not make him a Jewish elephant, although, it would undoubtedly make him a bit angry.

While a Gentile can, as an act of conviction, dedication, or relationship, convert to practice the Jewish faith or religion, a person can never convert to being a Jew. Such a male can never be the source of Jewish children.  Similarly, a person can convert to the Muslim faith without being an Arab or a Turk. An individual becomes a Jew when conceived by persons authorized by the Torah to transmit that heritage to their issue. Neither learning the history and rules of a faith that they wish to adopt, nor immersion in a mikvah, nor the receipt of blessings by a representative of that faith, can alter one’s genetics so as to fabricate or create a Jew. Converting a Gentile to a Jew, is little more than Rabbinical theater, in which each denomination features the same fictional play, adjusted only by the cast and the credo of their movement.

It is important to be mindful that the process of conversion appears nowhere in the Torah. However, the Torah does encourage the presence of non-Jews whose souls seek identity with the God of Israel or the people of Israel. Those are persons whom the Torah identifies as “Gers,” and whose rights and privileges are exquisitely protected by the Torah itself. There are close to 50 references to the word “Ger” in the Torah, a circumstance which would not likely occur in the event that one could easily transition into being a Jew.

Unique Characteristics of the Ashkenazis: As previously noted, of the 14.7 million Jews in the world today, 80% claim Ashkenazi origin. The remaining Jews are identified as Sephardic (originating from Iberian Jewish lineage) and Mizrahim (Middle Eastern Jews).  There is a perceptible, but nominal, difference in the coloration between those who claim Ashkenazi origin and those who are Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jews. Ashkenazis tend to be modestly lighter in skin and hair coloring.                                                                                      

A significant difference, however, appears in those diseases that uniquely impact the Ashkenazis. In a June 14, 2017 article from the National Gaucher Foundation, the five most common Ashkenazi genetic diseases are listed:

• Gaucher disease (1 in 10)
• Cystic fibrosis (1 in 24)
• Tay-Sachs disease (1 in 27)
• Familial Dysautonomia (1 in 31)
• Spinal Muscular Atrophy (1 in 41)

Those distinctions have, for some time, suggested an apparent difference in the Ashkenazi genetic profile and history from those of the rest of the Jewish community.

Additionally, “Among women of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, about 11% of all breast cancers are caused by one of only three BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations. These three mode mutations are called founder mutations, because they are ancient mutations in the Ashkenazi Jewish world, so were “founded” in that community and thus appear in many modern Ashkenazi Jewish families.” (Breast Cancer Research Foundation).

Scientific confirmation of the uniqueness of Ashkenazi genetic origin

That genetic difference was first scientifically identified by David Goldstein, Ph.D., from the Center for Genetic Anthropology at the University College in London, in 2002. He found that Ashkenazi Jewish women appeared to be descended from non-Jewish Europeans. In 2006, Doron Behar and Professor Karl Skorecki, of the Technion medical faculty at the Rambam Medical Center in Israel, found that 40% of the current Ashkenazi population is descendent from just four indigenous women, who originated from mixed European and Middle Eastern origin.

Professor Martin Richards, of the Archaeogenetics Research Group of the University of Huddersfield in England, concluded that the male lineage of Ashkenazi Jews, based on Y chromosome studies, traced back to the Middle East, but the female mitrochondrial (mt) origins are most closely related to Southern and Western European lineages. He estimated that between 65% to 81% of Ashkenazi Mt-DNA is European in origin, including all four founding mothers, and that most of the remaining lineages are also European.             

Harry Oster, Professor of pathology, genetics and pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Director of genetic testing at Montefiore Medical Center in 2014, published the results of his research suggesting that today’s Ashkenazi Jews are descended from 350 individuals mixed between European and Middle Eastern ancestry.

Antonio Torroni, a geneticist at the University of Pavia in Italy and a leading expert in the genetics of Europeans, reported that recent studies of DNA from the cell nucleus have shown “a very close similarity between Ashkenazi Jews and Italians.”                                                                                                                             

The Bottom Line…Are Ashkenazis Jews?

The elements and considerations that compel a conclusion:

1. By far, Rabbinical Judaism is the most dominant force in the Jewish world today. With the exception of the small populations of Karites and Samaritans, virtually all of the remaining communities that practice Jewish faith identify with it, and fall within its orbit.

2. During the entire Biblical era, and beyond, for more than 2000 years, Israelites and Jews conducted themselves as a patrilineal society in accordance with the structures prescribed in the Written Torah.

3. In the latter part of the Second Century CE, early Rabbinical Jews, under the auspices of the Tannaim of the Mishna, rejected and abandoned patrilineal-ism and substituted matrilineal-ism as the code for determining who was a Jew. Matrilineal-ism effectively provided that if a child were born of a Jewish mother and a Gentile father, that child was a Jew. Conversely, if a child was born of a Jewish father and a Gentile mother, that child was not a Jew.

4. There is an entire panoply of illnesses and physical disorders that identify with persons of Ashkenazi extraction and that do not relate to Sephardic or Mizrahim (Middle Eastern) Jews. Such a difference reasonably and logically compels the notion of a unique and different genetic origin.

5. Geneticists in Israel, England and the United States have identified that a significant part of the Ashkenazi population is matrilineally descendent from European women. The estimates range from “mixed origin” to “between 65% and 81%.”.

6. Although the genetics of a child are fixed at the moment of conception, some Rabbis declare, or strongly imply, that a conversion, properly performed, can actually change a Gentile into a Jew. Alternatively, a phrase is used to suggest that the convert is now “Jewish.” That phrase appears to run the gamut between suggesting that the convert is now a “philo-Jew”, committed to live a Jewish-style life, and actually is a Jew.

7. Rabbinical Judaism’s matrilineal policy was and is already stumbling from having retroactively rendered as Gentile the children of biblical mothers who were not born Jewish: 1) four of Jacob’s sons, Dan, Naphtali, Gad and Asher, children of his concubines; 2) the children of Joseph with his Egyptian wife, Asenath; 3) Manasseh and Ephraim, the children of Moses with his Midianite wife Zipporah; 4) all of the  children of King Solomon from his many concubines and foreign wives including his successor son, Rehoboam; and a host of many others.

8. Even more damaging today, when more than 50% of Jewish men are intermarrying with Gentile women, is Rabbinical Judaism’s resorting to the sham of genetically ineffective spousal conversions in order to pretend that the Gentile mother is now a Jew and thus can qualify her children as Jews under Rabbinical law. If there is a harsh truth here, it lies at the feet of the Tannaim, and those who follow them blindly, and are too anxious to abandon the patrilineal-ism of the Written Torah in favor of religious adventurism.

9. Ashkenazis constitute 80% of the Jewish community. How does one respond to those who contest the right of Jews to their homeland in Israel when they learn that a very large part of the people we identify as Jews do not legally qualify as Jews under the laws of Rabbinical Judaism?

Analysis and reflection

The current Masoretic text of the Torah was delivered to the Second Temple on or about 450 BCE. It described, in multiple places, how the Israelite people would regenerate themselves by continuing to follow the seminal line of the patriarchs. It was both a simple and an understandable formula.

Approximately 750 years later, on or about 250 CE, the Tannaim (the early Rabbis of the Talmud) decided to reject the patrilineal formula of the Torah and to substitute matrilineal-ism in its stead. However, since the Torah requires seminal transport of “Zerah,” semen, and women cannot provide semen, the system will not work with matrilineal-ism. In fact, under matrilineal-ism, with each new Gentile male who fathers a child with a Jewish woman, it changes the identity of the Israelite people. In that case, the confusion of Israelite identity gets more expansive with each successive generation following that union.

Given the fact that a period of 1800 years has expired since the Rabbinical alteration of the biblical system, one would expect that the identity of the Jewish people would be corrupted beyond the recognition.

However, in one of the great ironies of history, the identity of the Jewish people was preserved by the very poison that sought to destroy it, i.e., “anti-Semitism.” It was anti-Semitism which forbade Christians from marrying Jews and consigned the Jewish community to the ghettos and shtetls of Europe. The Jewish reaction to that anti-Semitism was to cluster close within their communities and to make intermarriage both an anathema and an abandonment of community and family responsibility. So strong was the Jewish response to intermarriage that when, on the rare occasion that it occurred, the family would enter into mourning, as if their child had died.

With the exception of a brief period following the liberalizing effect of the Napoleonic wars, intermarriage did not become a problem until the post-World War II era. Now, during our lifetime, the rate of intermarriage exceeds 50% of all American Jews who marry. Nevertheless, many Jewish men who marry Gentile women want their children to be Jews. That, however, cannot take place under the current matrilineal status of rabbinical law. Instead of acknowledging the problem, and returning to biblical patrilineality, which would have rendered those children Jews, the rabbis sought a different solution. They have chosen to compound the error by suggesting that genetically ineffective spousal conversions can change a Gentile wife into a Jew and thus capable of breeding Jewish children under rabbinism’s matrilineal standard.

Truly, after 1800 years, one can understand Rabbinism’s disinclination to eliminate matrilineal-ism, one of the essential elements of its faith system. However, errors, and false premises do not improve with age. If it were so, the arks of our temples would house an array of golden calves.

It is in this environment that we examine the place of the Ashkenazi community within Rabbinical Judaism. Beginning with the science of the 21^st century, it has become progressively clear that the Ashkenazi community resulted from Jewish males who found themselves in the Roman Empire after the destruction of the Second Temple in Israel and the beginning of the Diaspora a number of them married indigenous European females, but continued to maintain their identity as Jews.

Under biblical law, though not encouraged, intermarriage would not have created a major problem. However, Rabbinism’s rejection of patrilineal-ism in favor of matrilineal-ism is a serious problem in that it can result in total confusion of Judaic identity.

Currently, 80% of the 14.7 million Jews amounts to an Ashkenazi community of 11,760,000 persons. Scientific investigation has established that the Ashkenazi Jewish community originated from a significant number of indigenous European women. The estimates went from 40% of all Ashkenazis stemming from an unquantified intermix of European and Middle Eastern founding mothers to somewhere between 65% to 81% of all Ashkenazi’s originating from founding European mothers. Rabbinical Judaism cannot dance at two weddings at the same time. If, under matrilineal-ism, Gentile mothers breed Gentile children, how can Ashkenazis born of Gentile European founding mothers be Jewish?

Which of us, who claim Ashkenazi identity, are really Jews under rabbinical law? Are our rabbis and cantors Jews? How do we know whether our children are marrying Jews or Gentiles? If we are married by a rabbi who himself may not be Jew, are we really married? Is the Torah in our sanctuary kosher if the Ashkenazi scribe (sofer) is not a Jew under rabbinical law? If we are not Jews, under rabbinical law, what are we?

Since Rabbinical Judaism has adopted an aberrant form of Jewish identity, it behooves the Rabbis to identify those of us who are, and who are not, Jews by its matrilineal standards.

In truth and in fact, Rabbinical Judaism’s matrilineal-ism cannot coexist with the Jewish community composed principally of Ashkenazis. The Jewish world is, however, favored by the fact that matrilineal-ism, though conceived many years ago, has only really come into play during our lifetime, and we still have the opportunity to abandon it before it fully sows its pernicious seeds into the soil of Jewish identity.

Conclusion

The Jewish community owes respect and dignity to our sages of old, who helped to fashion our enduring faith. However, the God that freed us from bondage did not free us from the obligation to use our minds in support of our free and honest will. Slavish obligation to an ancient idea, which is patently erroneous and destructive, does not honor our history, but it will destroy our future. Men are constructed differently from women and one cannot always be substituted for the other. Neither men nor women selected their role in the creation of successive generations, and neither men,nor women can alter it, even in the service of sexual parity.

Rabbinical Judaism (Rabbinism) is the acknowledged representative of Normative Judaism and bears a strong responsibility for the religious welfare of the Jewish community. Millions of Ashkenazis have for centuries believed that they were Jews, and have now learned that Rabbinism’s matrilineal-ism was a total bar to that status.

If Rabbinical Judaism continues to sponsor the aberrant rule of matrilineal-ism, with each new generation it will geometrically broaden the confusion of who really is a Jew. The Rabbinate must act quickly and decisively to abandon matrilineal-ism, lest we become a mongrel people, bereft of our history and of our God, and ultimately consigned to the refuse dump of forgotten civilizations.

Douglas Kaplan

The Written Torah was delivered to the site of the Second Temple by Ezra the Scribe in the middle of the fifth century BCE. It was received by the people of Israel as the transcribed word of God, revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai in 1285 BCE. From the time of Ezra’s arrival, it was accepted as a sacred scripture which told the story of the origin of the people of Israel and their committed relationship with their God. Until the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D., it constituted the established law of the land.

By its own prescription, in Deuteronomy 4 (2), the Torah is immutable. It cannot be altered, enlarged or diminished. Those to whom the Torah granted the right of judgment were entitled to apply the law as long as their judgment complied with the spirit and intent of the Torah. In that sense, the Torah has survived as a cherished, and studied, living document to the Jewish people for 2500 years.

While singing its praises, both liberal (Reform) and traditional (Orthodox) Jews have distanced themselves from the governance of the Torah, albeit in different ways. Today’s liberal Judaism resembles in many ways the Judaism of its more traditional brothers. However, it eliminates those practices of Rabbinical Judaism which it deems excessive and grants its membership the right to ignore, with impunity, biblical laws deemed incompatible with modern lifestyle. Traditional, or Orthodox, Jewish practice has involved overt rejection of portions of the Torah, creation of their own competitive Oral Torah, and expansive interpretation of the Written Torah’s provisions and practices. To avoid the discomfort of their own enlargement, they often employ fictional or shameful devices.

During the latter part of the Second Temple, Judaism, as a religion, was awash with scriptural controversies and faith-based political challenges. It was an era in which many sages like Hillel and Shammai, under the auspices of “The People of the Great Temple” (Anshe Hakeneseth Hagadol), ruminated over the Written Torah’s real meaning and interpretation.

Politics and Religion

In the Second Temple itself, there was a schism between the Sadducees, who took the view that “The Torah says what it means and means what it says”, and the Pharisees, who were significantly more expansive in their interpretations. The Sadducees were resolute in their rejection of Conversion, the concept of an immortal soul and the existence of an afterlife.

Ultimately, the Pharisees politically sought to eliminate the voice and authority of the Sadducees in the Temple. This was effectively undertaken by Shimon Ben Shetach, the brother-in-law of King Alexander Jannaeus. When King Jannaeus appointed Shimon as the head of the Sanhedrin, Shimon skillfully maneuvered the removal of the Sadducees from the priesthood. On April 14, 70 CE, the Romans laid siege to the city of Jerusalem. The siege ended on August 30 of that year with the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple. By the time of the Temple destruction by the Romans in 70 A.D, there were no Sadducee priests left in the Temple.

The Birth of Rabbinical Judaism

After the destruction of the Second Temple, Jews began to assemble communally to read and learn the law. But that was not enough. Individuals had a need to tell their God about their anxieties, express their love, and request God’s help on behalf of their families and their people. These communal sessions were generally conducted under the direction of the Pharisees, remnants of the Temple personnel. Personal prayers were often replaced by prepared communal prayers. Pharisees eventually became the rabbinate, who served instead of the Levites of the temple. The communal assembly became the synagogue of Rabbinical Judaism.

In the latter part of the second century CE, Yehuda ha-Nasi (Judah the Prince), a revered scholar, together with a number of Associates, undertook the project of codifying the multifarious opinions of the sages of the Second Temple. The group was known as the Tannaim and the product of their efforts, called the Mishnah. It was the first, and perhaps the most significant work of Rabbinical Judaism and was the inspiration of other efforts, including the Midrash and the Gomorrah. Together, they constituted the Talmud.

Like the Pharisees, Rabbinical Judaism’s proponents felt unduly constrained by the four corners of the Written Torah. Rabbinical Judaism ultimately unbridled itself from the Written Torah in a unique way, by totally altering the biblical origin of who is a Jew, from the child of the father (patrilineal) to the child of the mother (matrilineal).

The creation of the Jewish People and their relationship with their God was expressly designed in the Written Torah. Without the Written Torah’s design, the Jewish people and Judaism did not exist. The Talmud’s Tannaim expressly rejected the Jewish father as the origin of Jewish people and substituted instead the Jewish mother. Effectively, that created two separate and distinct genetic peoples. There were genetic Jews, children of Jewish fathers according to Torah design, and there were persons born of Jewish mothers who the Rabbis, on their own authority, declared were the only Jews.

Until modern times, virtually all Jewish marriages were between Jewish men and Jewish women. Such marriages, of necessity, bred Jewish children. However, with the advent of modern times, as in 21st Century America, where 58% of Jewish men marry non-Jewish women, matrilinealism identifies the issue of such marriages as Gentile. With its Rabbinically designed population of “Jews”, Rabbinical Judaism loosened itself from the tether of the Torah requirements and granted to itself the authority to add to, modify, or reject Torah provisions. In essence, Rabbinical Judaism generated a people of its own, on the periphery of the Torah.

Rabbinical Judaism was, and is, remarkably successful. However, success is not a measure of authenticity. Rabbinical Judaism, also known as Rabbinism, is the faith practiced by the vast majority of Jews worldwide. It purports to offer Rabbinical Jews the existence of an immortal soul, life after death in a world to come (l’olam Habah), and reward and punishment in that afterlife. Indeed, it offers even more: a plethora of rules, regulations, laws and interpretations not contemplated by, nor reasonably deduced from, the Written Torah. It provides a second and competitive Torah known as the Oral Torah (Torah Shel B’al Pe) comprised of Rabbinical writings derived from the Talmud, which is, not infrequently, at odds with the original Written Torah.

One cannot deny the vast success of Rabbinical Judaism, or of the other religious disciplines, such as Christianity, that find their origin in the original text of the Written Torah. Couldthe Jewish people have continued to exist for 4000 years without the modificationsengendered by Rabbinical Judaism? That question appears to be answered in the affirmative by the current existence of Karite Judaism, the Samaritans of Israel, the Beth Israel Jews of Ethiopia, and members of remote and exotic Jewish communities that remain unknowledgeable of, and or unbound by, the Talmud.

The real questions are: Is Rabbinical Judaism the same Judaism as that faith which arose out of God’s covenant with the Patriarchs?  Is the Written Torah immutable, as its text requires in Deuteronomy 4 (2)?  Or, are its provisions amendable by man? If it can be amended, who has the authority to do so? If it cannot be amended, is Rabbinical Judaism a true and honest Guardian and custodian of its immutability? Is Rabbinical Judaism’s totally redesigned matriarchal “People of Israel” the same nation to whom God promised the land of Israel? If not, under what authority do we claim title?

The Birth of the Reform Movement

In the ghettos, as in the shtetls of Eastern Europe, the communities fell under the authority of the Rabbis who governed every aspect of human behavior including, administrative, religious, social, marital, commercial and holy relationships.

With the advent of liberalism brought on by the Napoleonic Era with its notions of liberty equality and fraternity, ghetto doors were opened. In Eastern Europe, ghettos gave way to the shtetls, where Jewish life changed little. However, the horse was out of the barn, and many Jews found themselves living and working in the cities and engaging commercially and socially with their Gentile neighbors. For them the religious restrictions of the ghettos and shtetls were no longer relevant. In Germany, liberated Jews felt a need for a new kind of Judaism, one with fewer restrictions and one which resembled more closely the religious institutions of their new neighbors. That impetus led to the creation of the Reform movement in Judaism, which began in 1819 in Germany. Members of the movement did not wish to abandon their heritage as Jews, but sought to tailor Judaism to their new and more liberal lifestyle. By 1842, Reform Judaism was formally adopted in Great Britain. By the end of the 19^th Century, with Jewish immigration from Germany, Reform Judaism found itself firmly rooted in America.

To Eastern European Jews, the United States had the image of the “Goldena Medina” (the land of golden opportunity). Most brought with them the religious training, mindset and paraphernalia of traditional Jewry, and went about creating traditional synagogues wherever they settled. However, a significant number could not wait to cast off the poverty, fear and subjugation of shtetl life, adopt the American lifestyle, and therefore, they left their Judaism at the port of entry.

By the mid-Twentieth Century, Reform Judaism, and a variation on its theme called the Reconstruction movement, represented the liberal wing of Judaism in America. Traditional Judaism was vested in Orthodoxy and by the Conservative Movement, which although traditional in policy, sought to temper some of the more extreme elements of the Orthodox position. Though liberal and traditional movements were significantly different from each other, they were all part of Rabbinical Judaism. Their members felt the burden of the many rules, regulations, practices and laws which early Rabbinical Judaism imposed upon the Jewish community and the Written Torah. Each movement undertook to alleviate itself of that burden, but in significantly different ways.

Liberal Judaism’s Early Policy of Abandonment

Reform Judaism in the United States established itself with many of the same structures and concepts which came over with the early migration of Reform Jews from Germany. Reform services in Berlin held prayers without phylacteries, prayer shawls, head coverings, or the blowing of shofar.

In the United States, two day festivals were abandoned in favor of the one original day. Services were conducted in English with just a smattering of the Hebrew, which was transliterated for those who could not read Hebrew text. Many Reform synagogues discouraged the presence of head coverings or prayer shawls during the temple service. Musical instruments found their way into devotional services. Not only did early Reform Judaism eliminate many of Rabbinical Judaism’s classical proprietary religious practices, but it specifically rejected a large part of the basic Torah obligations. The extent to which the early Reform movement distanced itself from the normative Jewish religious practices of that day is best told by segments of the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform of the American Reform Movement in Judaism adopted by the Union of American Hebrew congregations, which is provided herein only in paraphrased pertinent part:

1. The Bible reflects the primitive ideas of its own age, and at times clothes its conception of Divine Providence and Justice dealing with men in miraculous narratives.
2. We recognize Mosaic legislation as a system of training the Jewish people for its mission during its national life in Palestine, and today we accept as binding only its moral laws, and maintain only such ceremonies as elevate and sanctify our lives, but reject all such which are not adapted to the views and habits of modern civilization.
3. We hold that all such Mosaic and Rabbinical laws as regulate diet, priestly purity and dress originated in ages and under the influence of ideas entirely foreign to our present mental and spiritual state. They fail to impress the modern Jew with a spirit of priestly holiness, thus their observance in our days is apt to obstruct, rather than to further modern spiritual elevation.
4. We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship unto the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish State.

Though couched in flowery language, the 1885 platform seems to retain little more of Judaism than a vague allusion to its moral precepts, which it does not identify. It eliminates the existence of a Jewish national identity with the concomitant right to independent statehood. The Platform envisions a Judaism that can only exist as a religion. Under this Platform, the Torah and Rabbinical Judaism are equal opportunity amputees.  ClassicalJudaism’s effort to emulate its Christian neighbors appears to have derived its name from the Christian Reformation Movement on the Continent which challenged the primacy of Catholicism.

As young children start to grow into maturity, so too did Reform Judaism. In 1937, Reform Judaism issued its Columbus platform, modifying and restating the principles of Reform Judaism. It inched its way back into Rabbinical Judaism by supporting traditional customs and ceremony, the use of liturgical Hebrew and the recognition of both the Written and the Oral Torah. More significantly, it affirmed the obligation of all Jewry to the upbuilding of a Jewish homeland as a center of Jewish culture and spiritual life. However, it acknowledged that significant changes made in modern science and social innovation of lifestyle authorized Reform Jews to ignore those portions of the Torah that appear to be prohibiting those activities. Specific laws were not mentioned.

In San Francisco in 1976, Reform Judaism issued what they called a Centenary Prospective. Essentially, it was a 100 year update of Reform Judaism in America. More than acknowledging that the Jewish People were entitled to their new national existence in Israel, it demonstrated Israel’s important contribution to Jewish culture and religion. The Prospective acknowledged the plenary role of women in Reform Judaism. It acknowledged a parity between those who were born to the Jewish faith and those who came to it through conversion. Finally, it touched vaguely on the right of Reform Judaism to interact with modern culture in such a manner as to reflect the contemporary aesthetic.

In 1999,the central conference of American rabbis issued a Statement of Principles for Reform Judaism. In a very real sense, it moved Reform Judaism away from the radical Pittsburgh platform of 1885 and towards centrism in the American Jewish community. It affirmed the oneness of God and that every human being was created in the image of God. It acknowledged that Reform Jews respond to God daily through public and private prayer and through study and performance of Mitzvot (sacred obligations). The Statement affirmed that the Torah is the foundation of Jewish life and acknowledged the truths revealed in its text. For the first time, it affirmed the importance of studying Hebrew, the language of the Torah and of Jewish liturgy.

The Statement committed to an ongoing study of the entire array of Mitzvot. It emphasized the importance of the Sabbath as the culmination of the work week and as the concept that ended the work week with both rest and holiness. It emphasized the importance of charity and the Jewish obligation of tikkun olam (the repair of the world). The Statement opened the doors of Reform synagogues to all regardless of sexual orientation, those who have converted to Judaism and those who have intermarried. Finally, it affirmed that both Israeli and Diaspora Jewry should remain interdependent and that those who reside outside of Israel should strive to learn Hebrew as a living language.

Today’s American Reform Judaism has, in many ways, positioned itself closer to the liberal wing of the Jewish Conservative movement in that it embraces classic Jewish values which have become more inclusive and liberalized over the years. It avoids stressing principles of core beliefs and focuses more on personal spiritual experience and communal participation. What it does not have, and appears to scrupulously avoid, is a statute book of do’s and don’t’s, rules and regulations found elsewhere in Judaism. It is a faith that acknowledges the importance of contemporary scientific and social lifestyles and allows the avoidance of guilt when those lifestyles violate the express tenets of the Torah. Each and every modern Reform Jew carries the authority and responsibility of how far his allegiance to Modernism will take him from Torah rules and laws. In a sense that means that there are as many versions of Reform Judaism as there are persons who practice it and that infuses ambiguity in its practices.

Orthodox (Traditional) Rabbinical Judaism

Rules of law, civil or religious, standing alone are static and do nothing until they are applied to a specific factual situation. However, laws can be subject to multiple interpretations. That was the case with the Written Torah when it arrived at the site of the Second Temple. In order to apply that law, those charged with application are obliged to extract the intent and spirit of the law, the process called interpretation. When, however, an agency charged with applying the law defeats the intent of the lawgiver by inserting its own extraneous agenda into the process, then that is known as interpolation. Deuteronomy 4(2) prohibits any addition or modification of the express language of the Torah, howsoever it may occur. Yet, on multiple occasions, Orthodox Judaism appears to arrive at interpretations of the Torah that defy rational reasoning.

Conversion an Artificial Byproduct of Rabbinical Judaism’s Matrilinealism

The Rabbis did not understand that abandoning patrilinealism would delegitimize as Jews: 1. four of the sons of Jacob (Dan, Naphtali, Gad and Asher, originators of four of the Tribes of Israel), 2. the children of Joseph, 3. the children of Moses, and 4. a large number of the children of King David and King Solomon, all of who had Gentile mothers.

Because of the change to matrilineality, a cottage industry has developed within the rabbinate of converting Gentile wives to Judaism so that the Jewish fathers can maintain that their children are Jews. It is worthy of noting that in addition to matrilineal origin, Reform Jews have now also accepted patrilineal origin only if the children are reared as Jews — whatever that means. Jewish identity is a function of genetics and birth and is vested at the instant of conception. It takes a special kind of audacity to suggest that one can change a person into or out of being a Jew. Jewish identity is more than just a faith.

Rabbinical Judaism’s Allegation that the Written Torah Cannot be Understood Without the Benefit of the Talmud and its Transfiguration into the Oral Torah

An additional assault on the Written Torah took place when Rabbinical Judaism maintained that the Written Torah was incapable of being understood without the benefit of the Talmud and its multiple conflicting views, as articulated in the Oral Torah. It is that same Oral Torah that claims origination from Mount Sinai almost 1500 years before the appearance of the Written Torah, and that was not completed until almost a thousand years after the Written Torah.

Separation of all Meat from all Dairy

In three different places in the Written Torah (Exodus 23 (19), 34 (26) and Deuteronomy 14 (21)) the following simple repetitive statement appears:                                                            

            “thou shalt not seethe (boil) a kid in his mother’s milk”.

It was a simple statement that should require no extraordinary interpretation. The relationship between the two animals was that of mother and child who were, of necessity, of the same species.

Rabbinical interpolation, however, expanded a simple parental directive so that it included the meat of all animals, with the milk of all animals, regardless of relationship or species. What was it that the Rabbis did not understand about a mother and child relationship in the animal kingdom? Did they believe that God was incapable of prohibiting the consumption of all meat with all milk, if that were his intention? Into the mix was added an additional non sequitur by including chicken in the meat category when, in fact, chickens do not give milk. It then allowed chickens and their eggs to be consumed in the same meal. This inscrutable ideological interpolation, which is frequently a subject of “Rabbinical supervision” has, for generations complicated kosher food preparation and induced Jewish women, to maintain four sets of dishes silverware, pots, pans, and towels.

Sabbath, a Day of Rest (The Sabbath Mandate)

The concept of a seven-day week, wherein the seventh day is a day of rest, is uniquely Judaic. It surfaced out of God’s description of his creation of the world as recounted in Genesis and appears over 100 times in the Torah. The thesis is that people should engage in their normal work activities for six days but, on the seventh day, work is to cease and to be substituted by a day of rest. The Sabbath, as a day of rest, is a vital part of Judaism. A frequent refrain is that “more than Israel has kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept Israel.” Christianity, sourced in Judaism, also provides for a seven-day week ending in a day of rest. Emperor Constantine, on March 7, 321 CE, for reasons that are not totally apparent, changed Christianity’s day of rest from Saturday to Sunday.

While the Ten Commandments, and other relevant provisions of the Torah, require rest from work on the seventh day (the Sabbath mandate) nowhere in the Torah is there a description of what activities constitute work. Did the Torah contemplate the word “work” to be defined as those activities which each individual performed during the previous six days? In that case, there are as many definitions of “work” as there are persons to whom it applies. Or did “work” mean any activity which required unique and described effort? In God’s infinite wisdom, He recognized that people support themselves by different kinds of work activities and that it would be impossible to enumerate every effort that people do during six work days of the week. The clear intent of the Sabbath mandate was to stop doing what you do during the workweek and go home and rest.

During the second century CE Rabbi Akiva and his students, seeking a way to accommodate the law, came to the ungodly conclusion that they had to list all kinds of work to comply with the Sabbath mandate. They prepared a list of 39      Melochot (activities) which they believed constituted work. The list was derived from the description of the kinds of work done in constructing the tabernacle in the desert hundreds of years earlier.

By way of point of reference, the list includes: 1. Carrying 2. Burning 3. Extinguishing 4. Finishing 5. Writing 6. Erasing 7. Cooking 8. Washing 9. Sewing 10. Tearing 11. Knotting 12. Untying 13. Shaping 14. Plowing 15. Planting 16. Reaping 17. Harvesting 18. Threshing 19. Winnowing 20. Selecting 21. Sifting 22. Grinding 23. Sorting 24. Combing 25. Spinning 26. Dyeing 27. Chain-stitching 28. Warping 29. Weaving 30. Unraveling 31. Building 32. Demolishing 33. Trapping 34. Shearing 35. Slaughtering 36. Skinning 37. Tanning 38. Smoothing 39. Marking

While some activities might universally apply, a quick glance at the 39 Melochot work activities listed above should be sufficient to inform that its relationship to today’s American Jewish community is so distant as not to be useful or relevant. It obviously relates to skills and occupations of a project in the desert which occurred more than 3000 years ago. However, interestingly enough, inasmuch as rabbinical and cantorial services are not listed, pulpit personnel like rabbis and cantors can get paid for working on the Sabbath since their activities are not listed as work.

The Jewish community of America, and that of most of the rest of the world, are not farmers or involved in animal husbandry. Two thousand years in the diaspora changed the focus of Jewish livelihoods from agriculture and animals to portable occupations in medicine, law, finance, commerce, and other occupations and skills that can be brought to the next place of refuge. The skills of the Sinai Desert no longer are relevant and apply.

Fault does not lie with the Torah, which never sought to articulate individual acts of work that violate the Sabbath. It does not even lie with the sages of old, who needed a list of possible violations over which they could ruminate. It lies at the doorstep of the contemporary traditional Rabbinate and its professional organizations, which are committed to tradition over relevance. The Written Torah is a living instrument, and in each generation must be nourished with the relevant data necessary so that it may be interpreted in a way to keep its people spiritually alive and in tune with the God of Israel. The spirit of the Torah is broad enough to accommodate every generation.

For traditional, Orthodox Jews, there are two additional Torah provisions which come into play in conjunction with the basic rule against working on the Sabbath. Exodus 17(29) obliges every man to abide in his place and not to go out of his place on the seventh day. Exodus 35 (3) instructs that no fire should be kindled throughout one’s habitation upon the Sabbath day. Collectively, the message seems to be simple. On the seventh day you can do no work, you must stay home, and you can have no fire in your habitation. However, what appears simple develops enormous complexities with the advent of remote synagogues, electricity, and the internal combustion engine.

Thou Shalt Not Leave Your Place on the Sabbath (Exodus 17(29))…The Eruv

It helps to realize that when Sabbath provisions were inscribed in the Written Torah, synagogues did not exist for another 600 years. In fact, there were no Rabbis or prepared devotional prayers.

For access to offsite synagogues Rabbinical Judaism was obliged to create a solution, and it did. After all, one was not permitted to leave one’s habitation on Sabbath and carrying outside of one’s household fell under the definition of work. Witness the creation of the “Eruv,”. The Eruv is a way of extending the perimeters of the habitation to include, amongst other possible destinations, the location of the temple. That is done by identifying or creating a wire, or physical perimeter, from the habitation that includes the Temple or other desired site. Usually telephone or electric wires installed by the local utilities will serve. In the event of a hiatus monofilament can be used to connect the open spaces. The Eruv on Manhattan Island is 18 miles long.

While truly the invention of the Eruv was masterful and ingenious, one has to wonder as to God’s response to such a patent sham devised to avoid his Sabbath gift of rest to the Jewish people.

Thou Shalt Not Kindle a Fire Throughout Your Habitation on the Sabbath Day Exodus 35(3)

Electricity plays a pervasive role in all aspects of modern human life. It: 1) allows us to see in the dark, 2) preserves our food, 3) cools our homes, 4) enlightens and entertains us via radio and television, 5) provides the media of our communication by telephones, smart phones and computers, 6) does our laundry, 7) is essential in our motor vehicle, 8) lifts us to the top of the tallest buildings, and 9) functions in a host of other critical aspects of our daily life. The Orthodox Jewish community early on confronted the role of electricity in relation to the Jewish Sabbath and its constraints. Unsurprisingly, there were a number of different opinions.

Some Rabbis took the position that electricity itself was tantamount to a form of fire and, therefore, prohibited on the Sabbath. Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, when asked “is electricity fire” replied that it was not because electricity is not a chemical process, while fire is. Other Rabbinical scholars took the view that electricity, per se, is not violative of the Sabbath, but to the extent that it operates equipment that is violative, it makes it prohibited.

A more complex question arises with the use of devices calculated to get around the conclusion that electricity is prohibited on the Sabbath. If electricity is really violative of the Sabbath, then what about timers or thermostats which allow the user, on Friday afternoon, to turn electrical appliances on after sundown. In what way does that not violate the spirit of the Torah?

Most, if not all, civilized legal systems do not allow one to do indirectly that which is directly prohibited. Sadly, it is a principle not highly regarded by Rabbinical Judaism:

Feigned Compliance

1. Witness the Eruv which enlarges one’s habitation by miles of telephone and electric wires.

2. Until about 500 CE, the households of the Hebrew nation were dark on Friday evening. During the sixth century CE, the Rabbinate created the Friday evening blessing over candles which provided that God had commanded Jews to light candles in their home to welcome the Sabbath. The resulting benefit was that people had light in their home on Friday evenings. There is no evidence in the Torah or elsewhere in the Holy Scriptures that God ever uttered such a command. Worse of all, it is a classic example of taking God’s name in vain in violation of the third of the Ten Commandments.

3. It is a common practice in religious Jewish homes and synagogues to employ the services of a “Shabbos Goy” to turn on lights, stoves, air-conditioners or other appliances. In that way, the person who makes the request believes that he or she has avoided violating the Sabbath. In every civilized community, the act of the agent is imputed to the principal. For instance, one cannot direct an agent to take the life of another and then walk away with impunity. The act of the Shabbos Goy is the act of the person who made the request.

4.  Some entrepreneurs whose business is required to be open on the Sabbath enter a contract for sale and purchase of the business with a Gentile. The business is sold and delivered before sundown on Friday evening and repurchased on Saturday night or Sunday morning. In that way, the Sabbath observing vendor claims that he did not own and operate a business on the Sabbath.

5. In the Torah, along with the requirement that the Jews must cease all work on Sabbath, God created a seven year agricultural cycle called Shmita,                                                                              which required that all agricultural land must be left idle every seventh year. It is a law that is still in effect in contemporary Israel. However, segments of the Israeli Rabbinate authorize the “selling” of the agricultural land for the year of Shmita to Gentiles, thus giving the owners the income without the technical sin or a violation of the law. What it does do, is to deny to the land the rest and regeneration granted by God in the Torah.

6. There is the entire industry dedicated to producing products that may possibly comply with the letter of the law while still avoiding the spirit of the law: Sabbath elevators, kosher lamps, kosher clocks, Shabbos-safe hot plates, Shabbos switches, precut toilet tissue to avoid tearing, and other similar products.  

Conclusion

This review concludes with an imaginary dialogue between Rabbi Ezra Omniwitz, Executive Director of the Institute for the Preservation of Rabbinical Judaism, and God.

Rabbi:  God! God! Is that you?

God:  Yes, my son. Oh! Please don’t consider the word son in the genetic sense.

Rabbi: I’ve been anxious to get in touch with you so that I can report on how well your people are doing with the lessons that you provided in the Torah.                           

God: What can you report that I don’t already know?

Rabbi: First, we have done a remarkable job in distributing your Torah throughout the known world. It now appears, together with the Prophets and Scribes, as the Old Testament in the Bibles of 2.2 billion world Christians. That is, of course, in addition to its presence in most hotel rooms in the United States.

But, to be brutally frank, we have been obliged to make a few alterations. While I am an Orthodox Rabbi, our Institute does include a sizable liberal wing called Reform Judaism. They view the Torah as a magnificent instrument more in tune with the era in which it was created. While they have not added to or modified the Torah, they feel comfortable in ignoring those provisions that they deem out of context in modern existence. I have tried to explain to them that this approach generates a form of anarchy in Judaism inasmuch as there is no uniformity as to which laws apply. Frankly, God, they don’t appear to be convinced by that argument.

But I am happy to report that the Traditional, or Orthodox, wing of Rabbinical Judaism has been incredibly in support of the Torah, with the exception of a little fine-tuning. For example:

1. While you designed the Nation of Israel to come from the direct lineal descendents of the male semen (seed) of the Patriarchs, we felt that it would have a more nurturing context if the mother were identified as the origin of Jewish children. However, I must admit that we ran into a problem when we switched from patrilineality to matrilineality. Jewish fathers, married to Gentile women, could no longer have Jewish children. With a little ingenuity, we resolved that problem by converting Gentile women into Jewish women. Admittedly, it did provide a little extra revenue to the Rabbinate. You may want to try that yourself. We are hopeful, of course, that the change in the origin of the people of Israel from male to female will not affect your promise of the land of Israel to the seminal descendents of the Patriarchs

2.  God! In regard to your creation of the world, most of our congregants felt that you stopped too soon. You should have continued on, or started again after the Sabbath to create an additional world to come, (a Leolum Habah or a Gan Eden).  With such a plan, human Jewish existence would not terminate with death, but would continue on in the form of a surviving Spirit, available for rewards in the world to come. Their suggestion was a beautiful and practical thought so we incorporated it into our Talmud. I hope you don’t mind, but we were reluctant to ask you to do that for us.

3. Frankly, God, your Written Torah, the Five Books of Moses, is virtually undecipherable, but with the Mishna, the 63 tractates of the Midrash, the 38 volumes of the Gomorrah and an infinite number of volumes from interpreters such as Rashi, the Rambam, and other scholars, we finally got a handle on it. Just in case we may have missed something, our Rabbis have created a Second Torah which we call the Oral Torah, which we cherish. I know that there are some significant differences between the two Torahs, but we plan to work that out in the future.

4. We Orthodox Jews so love your law that we are inclined to enlarge it at every turn. For instance, we have taken your provision about not consuming the kid in the milk of its mother and expanded that to require that milk from all animals be separated from meat from all animals. In that way, our Jewish people will have to think about you, God, every time they reach for something to eat.

By the way, we have generated a lovely Friday evening candle lighting prayer to welcome in the Sabbath. Frankly, it was our idea, but we attributed it to an imaginary command by you so that we could give you the honor. Incidentally, it does provide light in our homes on Friday night, but may be subject to the criticism of taking Your name in vain, in violation of the Ten Commandments.

I don’t want to appear critical, but you never defined the kind of work that is prohibited to be done on the Sabbath. Because of that, we conjured 39 activities necessary to build the Tabernacle in the desert and designated them as the prohibited work activities. Unfortunately, they are a bit dated today, but they do have the advantage of omitting occupations such as Rabbi and Cantor, thus allowing pulpit personnel to get paid for working on the Sabbath. Ultimately, to be safe, we declared virtually every activity on the Sabbath to be prohibited. However, that got a bit restrictive and even prohibited people from attending Temple. So, we utilized some of the marginal workarounds that we learned during our 2000 years in the Diaspora: the Eruv, the Shabbos Goy, and pretending to sell our business for the day of Shabbos so we did not appear that we were in violation. In Israel, they followed a similar tactic of leasing their land during its seventh year to get the income without the sin.

I trust, God, that you appreciate our efforts on your behalf.

God: Take your shoes off in my presence! You are on holy territory. But, keep them near you as you may really need them soon. Are you a direct lineal descendent of my servant Aaron in whom I have entrusted all of my religious affairs?

Rabbi: No, God.

God: By whom were you elected from amongst the people of Israel?

Rabbi: I was not elected. I was chosen as an Executive Director of a religious organization.

God: Then, what authority do you have, or pretend to have, that would authorize you to change my Holy Torah? The Torah which I gave to my people was a universal living document, never subject alteration or amendment, because its truths applied in all generations. How dare you, or those you represent, to maim and distort that Holy document. Your lack of trust in it is a manifestation of your lack of faith in me. If you took the time to read my Torah you would learn that I am a jealous and vengeful God.

When you elevate the writings of the Rabbis of the Oral Torah to be of superior or equal dignity with my Torah, you create a different world in which there is perpetual human existence beyond death. You distort the origin and composition of my people. You demean my laws and degrade my plan for the descendents of your Patriarchs. In fact, you depart from me to another God of your own making. You have turned your face from me. I warned you not to be lured from me by the gods of other nations. I never considered that you would generate your own from within. I should have learned from those who followed Jesus out of the camp of Israel.

Mark these words and convey them to your principals: more than 70 years ago I forgave my people for their transgressions and returned them to the land of Israel for a new beginning. They have incredibly succeeded in the human fields of endeavor such as medicine, agriculture, engineering, electronics, science, and a host of other categories. What they have not done is to change their loyalty to the rules of those who have altered and desecrated my Torah. What they need to do is to return to the teachings of my Torah, refine its spirit, versatility and authority and through honest interpretation apply it to the ethos of their contemporary lives.  Remind them that I am not known for infinite patience.

Douglas Kaplan

The origin of the Jewish people is found in a single tome (the Torah scroll), containing five separate books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. In other disciplines, it is referred to as the Pentateuch, the Old Testament, the Bible, the Septaugint and the Five Books of Moses. It exists in at least two different forms of the Hebrew language: the Samaritan Torah and the Masoretic Torah. While those two documents contain thousands of technical differences, they essentially tell the same story, differing principally in the site for the establishment of God’s Temple and the Holy Land.

No other historical source exists or confirms the history of the Jewish (Israelite) people from the birth of Abraham through the death of Moses.  Some historians have actually cast doubt on whether that epoch ever occurred.

That history, as recounted in the Torah given at Mount Sinai, is nevertheless critical because it identifies and gives definition to the relationship between the Jew and the God of Israel. While the Samaritans claim an earlier transcription of their Torah, the Masoretic text (the Torah used by Jews today) was originally delivered by Ezra the Scribe to the site of the Second Temple, in the late Fifth Century BCE.

Who Wrote the Torah?

The authorship of the Torah is one of the greatest puzzlements of biblical Jewish history. Depending on one’s commitment to tradition, there are a number of different theories ranging from: 1. written by the finger of God,  2. dictated by Moses, 3. divinely inspired, transcribed from multiple recorded texts or 4. authored by four independent authors and assembled into a single tome. Whatever the authentic origin, from the time of the Second Temple it became Judaism’s sacred text and the source of the mutual covenants between God and the Jewish people.

The Torah’s Relationship Between God and the Jews

Traditionally, Judaism holds the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (the patriarchs) as the national God of the Israelite people, who delivered them from slavery in Egypt and gave them the Torah at Mount Sinai. God is understood as the absolute one, indivisible, and that incomparable being who is the ultimate cause of all existence. God is the only one we may serve and praise. There are no intermediaries between Jews and God. He is the source of morality and has the power to intervene in the world. He is a God that can be experienced but not necessarily understood because He is utterly unlike humankind.

Some recent Jewish thinkers have rejected the idea of a personal God and have sometimes pictured God as an ethical idea or a force or process in the world. Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, conceived God, not as a person, but rather a force within the universe that is to be experienced – thus, abstract, not incarnate and intangible.

A dichotomy exists in those religions that allude to God as the father. In Judaism, reference to God as the father, as in “Avinu Malkeinu” (our Father our King), addresses God as our Creator and our Monarch, who has continuing authority over our lives and to whom we ask for mercy and loving kindness. In no way does it suggest that we are his genetic lineal descendants. To do so would be to create multiple gods in violation of our commitment to one God, as expressed in the First and Second of the Ten Commandments.

However, the concept of God, the father, in Christianity, is totally different. In that instance, the perception is that God personally intervened with Mary in the conception and birth of Jesus and, thus, Jesus is the son of God and His coequal. It is difficult to understand how that notion can coexist with monotheism.

Human existence is part of the creative and artistic work product of God. It is axiomatic that a Creator reserves to itself the right to alter or destroy its creation. That judgment is not governed by any universal standard, but is generally exercised when the Creator deems that its creation is unworthy, requires alteration, is dangerous, or no longer serves the purpose for which it was created. In that regard, it is essential to be mindful that the power to create is the power to modify and/or the power to destroy.

Who is the God of the Jews

Jews know God by how He describes himself in the Torah and by God’s responses to events that occurred during biblical times. In a large part of the expatriate (diaspora) Jewish community, the love of the Torah, Jewish history and Jewish culture are acquired by birth, rather than in-depth study. Yet, that love alone nurtures organizational giving and declarations of undying fidelity.

The God of the Torah was both candid and direct. However,His candor frequently struck terror in the hearts of his Jewish people, often causing them to refer to themselves as “God-fearing” rather than “God-loving”.  Study of the Torah reveals that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is a jealous and vengeful God, a God to be feared. How do we know that? God himself told us so. In Deuteronomy 32(35), God says, “to me belongeth  vengeance”. In Exodus 34 (14), God warns, “thou shalt worship no other God: for the Lord, whose name is jealous is a jealous God.” Exodus 20 (5) combines a warning on both jealousy and vengeance by declaring, “I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.”

The Origin of the Jewish People

God did not choose the Jewish people. He designed them out of a unique and unlikely source: Abraham, a 75-year-old man and Sarah, his barren 65-year-old wife. Abraham was 100 years old and his wife 90 years old when their child, Isaac, was born, with the help of God’s intervention. Incidentally, that did not make Isaac the son of God.

An accepted notion for God’s design of the Israelite people was to create a nation that would disseminate the civil laws of God’s Torah throughout the world and thus avoid a civilization meandering into depravity.

God’s Covenant with the People of Israel

The biblical covenant between God and the people of Israel was simple. The people were obliged to acknowledge that there was only one God, the God of Israel, and they couldhave no other gods. Jews were required to follow God’s explicit directions, as they appeared in the Torah and as delivered by those chosen by God, like Moses, to communicate them. The Jewish people were to be a “light unto the nations,” teaching the Ten Commandments and God’s civilizing laws to a world that lacked moral structure and order. For those services and others, God would give to his people the land of Canaan, protect them from their enemies and provide amply for them.

God likely knew that jealousy and vengeance were traits and characteristics not admired by the humanity which he created. Nevertheless, if the bond between them were to endure, God requires discipline and total compliance from the Israelite people. Like a general with his troops in the field, if the relationship becomes too personal, the general loses his authority to command. Even where God describes a more benevolent attitude toward the people of Israel, as in Exodus 34 (6-7), He concludes with a vengeful threat, “I am Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgressions and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and upon the children’s children unto the third and fourth generation”.

Except for persons selected by God to perform specific tasks, there appears to be no personal relationship between God and individual community members. The Torah demonstrates a number of examples of the impersonal nature of that thesis:

• For the simple act of tasting the fruit of the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve, new to the world, without the benefit of childhood’s maturing lessons of compliance, are thrown out of the Garden of Eden to fend for themselves in a finite life.
• God chooses Noah to preserve some of the living elements of the world and proceeds to destroy the remainder because of what God views and appraises as wickedness. Was everybody in the world, with the exception of Noah and his family, wicked? Did God select from his vengeance those of his creations that were not wicked? Is wholesale elimination of God’s created creatures the inalienable right of the Creator?
• Abraham learned of God’s intention to destroy the cities of Saddam and Gomorrah and confronted God with the possibility that there were righteous people within the city whose lives should not be forfeited with the wicked. God acknowledges the fairness of Moses’ proposal, but the text informs that only Moses’ nephew, Lot, his wife and his two daughters left the site alive.
• The Hebrew spies who determined that it was unwise to invade Canaan were condemned to die before Israel retook the Holy Land. Those who favored the invasion remained alive to enjoy the fruits of the conquest. Were not both groups equally honest, although different in their recommendations? What was the justification for the disparity in the treatment of the Hebrew spies who recommended for and those who recommended  against the invasion?
• Since when is an oral challenge to leadership a capital offense? In Numbers 16 (1-7), Korah, a leader and activist, lodged a challenge against Moses’ leadership. God then drops Korah and 250 of his followers into a fiery sinkhole because they questioned Moses’ leadership (Numbers 16 (32)). Because many of the Israelite people were upset at the treatment of Korah and the others, they, themselves, fell into jeopardy. A plague beset and consumed 14,700 of them.
• While curiosity can be a fatal disorder for cats, it does not necessarily follow that the life of Lot’s wife should be forfeited for a moment of curiosity (she disobeyed the order not to look back at the destruction of Saddam and Gomorrah).
• The two eldest sons of Aaron were Nadab and Abihu. In the hierarchy of biblical Judaism, few could be of the rank that they enjoyed.  However, because of some administrative problem, described as bringing the wrong fire into the tabernacle, they were both struck dead by God in front of the eyes of their father (Leviticus 10 (2)).

The most significant civil document in the history of mankind is The Ten Commandments. Among those Commandments, we are instructed by God not to kill and not to steal. And yet, God, in Deuteronomy 20 (16-17), instructs us:“but the cities of these people which the Lord thy God does give thee for an inheritance thou shall save alive nothing that breatheth but thou shalt utterly destroy them namely, the Hittites and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.” Israelites were instructed to confront these tribes, who were occupying their own lands peaceably, and ruthlessly kill the men, women, children and animals, and possess and occupy their land. How could this act not be murder and theft in violation of God’s own Ten Commandments?  If “My commander ordered me to do that” were a proper defense, why did Israel hang Adolph Eichmann?

God’s Silence

Malachi, who lived in the Fifth Century BCE, was the last of the biblical Prophets. He describes God as being provoked by the Israelite people whom God has recently freed from Babylon and returned to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. His prophecy demonstrates a people who have such an indifferent attitude to God as to sacrifice animals that are blind or lame. Worse, perhaps, were the priests that allowed and supported such irreverent behavior. Malachi reports God’s anger at the Israelites who do not tithe for the upkeep and maintenance of the Temple. He advises that God is offended by many of the Israelites who have divorced their Jewish wives in order to establish relationships with Gentile women, and who have engaged in multiple other transgressions. Malachi’s prophecy describes a God who is so provoked by Israel’s lack of respect and compliance with God’s statutes and appreciation of God’s efforts on their behalf, that He is about to turn His face from them.

With the exception of the false Prophets of Israel, God’s voice was not subsequently heard, nor did his aid appear in the tragedies that have befallen his people: 1. the destruction of the Second Temple; 2. the forced removal of the Jews from their homeland by the Romans to serve as slaves and servants on the European continent; 3. the massacre of thousands of Jews during the Crusades; the Spanish Inquisition, where nearly half of the Jews were forcibly converted to Catholicism, and many, thereafter, burned at the stake as heretics; 4. 2000 years of landless wandering as classless people moving from country to country in advance of the pogroms; and 5. the ruthless murder of 6 million Jewish men, women and children by the Nazi regime in the 1940s.

In all the foregoing tragedies, it does not appear that the good, the moral, the God-fearing and the faultless were exempt from the tragic events that occurred to the rest of the Jewish community. God’s relationship with the Nation of Israel is that of a Creator/Created. While sometimes God appears to have affection for His designed people, He is often wrought with them and appears to reserve the right to discipline, amend or abandon his creation.

There is no evidence of even a quasi-personal relationship with any Israelites, outside of individuals God personally selected to perform services for Him or those He chose to punish.

Personal (One on One) Communication with God

The Why

It makes perfect sense to want to communicate with the authority that has total control over your existence and your fortunes. That is especially true if He will possibly punish you, your children and grandchildren to the fourth generation for your sins and transgressions.

 In some faiths, such as Christianity, because of the unlikelihood of accessing the Creator, intermediaries such as saints are used. In those Christian disciplines where Jesus and God are not one in the same, Jesus is, notably, the intermediary of choice. Whether motivated by fear, request, appreciation, love or merely a desire to keep on the good side of the Creator, human efforts to initiate communication are infinite.

The How and the Odds of Contact

Prayer is the most popular medium used by people who wish to communicate with their God. Consider that in addition to individual personal communications, the Jewish religion and many other faiths require formal prayer multiple times a day. Consider that there are 6.8 billion people in the world, many of whom might be seeking access during the same 24-hour period, and you can calculate the likelihood of God receiving a given prayer, even if the Creator were receptive to receipt of individual supplications.

How People Pray

An act of prayer can be as simple as a spontaneous and wordless reaching out to one’s Creator to communicate praise, thankfulness, a request or even relief from distress. However, most religions of today provide a ritualized act that requires exact dates, strict timing and sequence of defined words and actions. Prayer books and hymnals sanctify the words of others as if those words give special access and meaning to the domain of the Creator.

Different cultures have unique ways of expressing their prayers. Native Americans dance, Sufies whirl, Christians kneel, Muslims prostrate themselves, Jews shukkle (sway back and forth and bow) and Quakers maintain strict silence. One might ask, with tongue-in-cheek, which style is more effective to get their prayers to the highest plateau.

In religions such as Judaism and Catholicism, other considerations directly impair the possible efficacy of prayers. Orthodox Jews utter prepared prayers with such speed that one can hardly distinguish one word from the other. In many cases, the person uttering the prayer is not familiar with biblical Hebrew and, therefore is unable to adequately identify what was communicated. In Christendom, especially within the Catholic Church, Latin is frequently used to exalt the deity. Today, Latin is not the lingua franca of Western civilization, and few, even in the clergy, can provide an exact interpretation of the substance of the prayer.

What conclusions can the person offering the prayer make when there is no response to his or her prayers? Some might include:

• The Creator, armed with its august power to hear and internalize all prayers, will consider the merits of the petitioner and of his or her request and will render a divine judgment in due time.
• The Creator is so bored and troubled by the repetition and delivery of the pre-prepared mantra-like prayers that He has lost interest.
• The petitioner who utters the prayers is so unworthy that he does not deserve a response.
• People are simply works of art in the hands of the Creator for which there is no moral responsibility to reply.
• The Creator existed at the moment of creation but has since died or left. His creation and the repetitious mechanisms of his creation still exist and function, even in his absence.

With great trepidation, every Jew, indeed every thinking human being, confronts the question of his or her role in human existence. Was he or she uniquely and purposely selected or simply randomly produced? Two main theories do daily battle in the arena of constructive thought:

Creationism: That is the concept that God created the earth and everything within it. As part of that process, He created the design, the mechanism and the intricacies by which all living things can regenerate themselves in kind for successive generations. However, there has been no credible contact with God in over 2500 years (the date of the last biblical Prophets) during which the world has continued to function. His absence tends to raise such troubling questions as: Is God dead? Did God turn his face away from the people of Israel? Was there ever really a God?

Evolution: The theory of evolution describes genetic changes in the characteristic of a species over several generations and relies on the process of “natural selection.” Natural selection is a change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. Initially, as relates to the animal world, it purports to justify the march from an inanimate substance to the one cell amoeba and ultimately to the human, whose brain accounts for the creation of nuclear science, electronic communication, airflight, modern medicine and more.

Many question the meaning and origin of “natural selection”. Did “natural selection” appear on the scene out of nothing (ex nihilo) or is it sourced in a creative entity? Who programmed  “natural selection” to avoid a random response, such as, where a mama and papa lion give birth to a giraffe?

The Good

There are a few things that lift the step or heighten the spirits more than hope. When human intervention appears fruitless, there is always God. The military express it best when they observe that, “there are no atheists in foxholes.” It is that hope, accompanied by prayer that God will intervene to see us through, that often gives us the strength to endure. Prayer is the vehicle that summons hope. Even in the absence of divine intercession, the hope alone is frequently sufficient tether to subsist until the ultimate resolution, or until the person formulates his own answer to the problem.

Prayer begs the question of whether we live in a world that God designed and created or whether we choose to design and create our own God and our own world. Those who leave the realm of reality to create their own God are destined to live in a paper world of their own design. In that paper world, it takes only one spark of adversity to set that world aflame.

The Bad

There is an old adage that tells us that “God helps those who help themselves.” It is a quaint way of telling us that each person must pursue personal needs and wants through their own maximum effort. There are those who have prayed for something, or some outcome, and conclude that it is now in God’s hands. Assured that God will do what is requested of Him, they abandon constructive or positive efforts on behalf of the goal, and nothing moves forward.

Conclusion

The Hebrew nation was not created as a pet rock or puppy dog to serve as the outlet for the affections of the Creator. It was created out of the need to provide a service. Like Moses, who failed to comply with a single order of the Creator in the summoning of water, and thus was not permitted to enter the Holy Land, the people became subject to the Creator’s discipline.

Yet, there appears on the pages of the Torah a unique relationship between God and the Hebrew nation. Only in fantasies, like Pygmalion, does the Creator generate personal affection for his creation. That should not be confused with God’s creative pride in his design and utility of the Hebrew nation. However, when the Hebrew people strayed from their assigned path, God’s vengeance was swift and uncompromising, ending in 2000 years of painful and tragic wandering of the earth, followed by the slaughter of six million of its people. It was hardly a testimonial to affection.

The relationship between the Creator and the people of Israel, is one that is with that nation and rarely, if ever, with individual members of that community. The exception exists in those circumstances where God selects an individual to perform specific tasks or, as in the case of the Prophets, to deliver a message to the nation.

The Torah places the personal affairs of individual Israelites in the community domain. Violations of Torah laws and obligations are determined and resolved by that individual’s peers. He or she is adjudicated within the community, and is either acquitted or sentenced to expulsion, fine, or even stoning.

Reward or punishment does not come in the “afterlife” or the “world to come,” because there is no afterlife or world to come. The God of Israel, the God of the Torah, never described or suggested another world to come or the existence of life after death. The world to come and afterlife are part of the creative imagination of Rabbinical Judaism. It is a concept that Christianity adopted with great vigor and enlarged with unusual enthusiasm.

If, there is no afterlife or world to come, then good deeds, an exalted life of charity, righteousness, kindness and beneficence must, assuredly, be awarded to a person in his or her own lifetime. If that were so, then:

• Those who conducted their lives with honesty, kindness, charity, fairness and consideration would all be healthy, wealthy and wise.
• Those who are evil, cruel, depraved, selfish or immoral would all be poor, infirmed, unhappy and otherwise desperate.

Apparently, there is no reward for a righteous life in heaven or on earth. Yet there are those, armed with that knowledge who nevertheless live exemplary lives which reach out through the void in search of the presence of God.

Douglas Kaplan

The heroic story of the Maccabees (celebrated during the festival of Hanukkah) appears nowhere in the Torah or the other canonical collection of Hebrew Scriptures. Where then can you find it? It appears prominently in the Apocrypha section of most Catholic bibles. In a similar sense, most Jews, outside of Israel, are aware of the Samaritans (the Shamerim) only from reports about the “Parable of the Good Samaritan” told by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke.

The Samaritans are a group of 750 indigenous Middle Eastern people. Half of them live in Holon, a suburb of Tel Aviv, and the other half live in Nablus, near Mount Gerizim in Samaria, an area also known as the West Bank. Samaritans claim ancient ancestry from the Israelite Tribes of Menasha and Ephraim and from priests of the Tribe of Levi. They follow the Torah, but do not hold any other part of the Hebrew Bible sacred. They believe that the Torah selected Mount Gerizim, not Jerusalem, as the site of God’s temple in the Holy Land. The Samaritans are believed to have numbered more than a million in late Roman times, but diminished to less than 150 in 1917. That attrition was a result of forced conversions by both Byzantine Christians and Muslim invaders. The Samaritans maintain their identity by a significant amount of inbreeding. In fact, according to research done in the late 1990s, 84% of Samaritan marriages were between cousins, making them the most highly inbred population on the planet. To find the origin of the Samaritans, we must take a brief voyage through a somewhat murky segment of Jewish history and answer the following questions:

1. Who really were the Samaritans?
2. What were they doing in Israel during biblical times?
3. Was there only one good Samaritan?
4. Does that suggest that all of the other Samaritans were bad?
5. Were the Samaritans enemies of the Israelites or were they related to them?
6. Is the area just north of modern-day Israel (called Samaria) connected to the Samaritans?
7. Will insight into Samaritan customs and practices shed light on their identity?

The answers to these questions will lead us into a troubling epoch of Jewish, biblical history scarred by intra-family power struggles, special interests, civil strife, fratricide and enduring rejection.

In the Beginning

The Torah describes how the Israelite people suffered hundreds of years of slavery in Egypt, only to be redeemed by the hand of God, under the leadership of Moses. The people, former slaves, identified themselves in accordance with the specific Tribe of Israel from which they originated. The tribes themselves, however, were without structure or leadership. In order to provide both organization and leadership, Moses directed the appointment of Shoftim (translated as Judges) for each tribe. They functioned less like Judges and more like military governors who could organize their tribe for the battles that assuredly would be forthcoming.

The Conquest

By 1250 BCE, under the leadership of Joshua and the tribal judges, the loose confederation of Hebrew tribes were able to capture and take possession of the land of Canaan. The land was divided amongst the respective tribes, except for the Tribe of Levi, which was reserved for the priesthood. The suitability of some of the land for agricultural purposes was uneven and some of the tribes were unhappy with the portion given to them. With the acquisition of the land, the tribes began to see themselves as a single unified nation and petitioned for the appointment of a king.

The United Kingdom of Israel

On or about 1025 BCE, Samuel, an acknowledged Judge and Prophet in Shiloh (an important religious center in the area now known as Samaria), anointed Saul (of the Tribe of Judah) as King of the United Kingdom of Israel. King Saul spent most of his reign (1037-1010 BCE) defending Israel against the Philistines. He and his three sons died in battle against them. In 1010 BCE, Saul was succeeded by King David, who was honored by the Tribe of Judah as an ideal, but not a faultless monarch. He was the putative father of all successive royal households and of a future Messiah. During his reign, David subdued the Canaanite settlement of Jerusalem and made it the capital of the United Kingdom of Israel. He selected Jerusalem because it was located in the area of his beloved tribe Judah and situated on defensible terrain. It was not selected because of any discoverable direction in the Torah from the God of Israel. Under the United Monarchy, the Israelites were able to transition from a loose union of related tribes to a strong, sovereign nation with its own homeland.

King Solomon:  Adored by History, But Less So By His Contemporaries

King David was succeeded by his son Solomon. King Solomon had a number of successful military campaigns and acquired an ample amount of neighboring lands for the United Kingdom of Israel. He continued to recognize the city of Jerusalem as the capital of the monarchy and constructed the First Holy Temple to the God of Israel. With his death, the Twelve Tribes of Israel, united as one nation, came to an end after just 105 years. What solvent served to dissolve the unity of the Jewish nation into two divided, warring, adversary monarchies:  the Kingdom of Israel to the north (now Samaria and the West Bank) and the Kingdom of Judah to the south (which included Jerusalem and the Holy Temple)?

1. Ego and Excesses Led to a House Divided

King Solomon’s abusive relationship with his own people is the most frequently offered reason for the dissolution of the United Kingdom of Israel. History tends to immortalize and glamorize important historical figures. It portrays King Solomon as a paragon of wisdom under whose reign the first Holy Temple was constructed. His excesses and lavish living caused great consternation amongst the Israelite people.  It glosses over his personal excesses and self-indulgences, including having hundreds of wives and concubines. Much of this conspicuous consumption was derived from heavy taxes and personal labor requirements extracted from the people of Israel. On the occasion of his death, many Israelites viewed it as an alleviation of a burden and sought a promise of relief from his successor, son Rehoboam.

Rehoboam’s response was the final straw that severed the United Kingdom of Israel in two. Rehoboam answered the request to ease the King’s pressure on the nation by saying, “I will add to your yoke. My father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions” (One Kings, 12 (11)).

The people’s response was quick. The ten northern Israeli tribes broke and formed The Northern Kingdom of “Israel”. The remaining tribes (Judah, Simeon, Benjamin and some Levites, who were the Kohanim in the temple) remained in the southern monarchy, which renamed itself Judah. However, the foolish and arrogant statement of Rehoboam was not, by itself, enough to divide a kingdom without significant fissures that early affected the monarchy.

2. Judah’s Temple Mount or God’s Temple Mountain

The Torah ends with the death of Moses before the Hebrew people entered Canaan. Yet, in Deuteronomy 11(29), it directs that a blessing be made on Mt. Gerizim and a curse on Mt. Ebal, both mountains in Canaan which are located in modern-day Samaria. There was a growing resentment amongst the Northern Tribes (especially the Tribes of Ephraim and Menasha, sons of Joseph) that God’s Holy Temple was situated in Jerusalem (David’s Citadel) rather than the site named in the Torah. They found confirmation in the fact that Jerusalem was never mentioned in the Torah.

The city of Shiloh, in Samaria, was the primary religious center of Israel before the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem. In fact, the Tabernacle (the movable home of God containing the Ark of the Covenant) was brought by Joshua to Shiloh, in the north, where it remained for several hundred years. Shiloh was the site of the priestly House of Eli (who was succeeded by Samuel, the Prophet) and where the Kings of Israel were anointed.

3. The Judah Dynasty  

The Philistines, Israel’s arch enemy, were people who occupied the south coast of Canaan (now Gaza) between the 12^th Century BCE and 604 BCE. They were a maritime people (who originally came from Crete) and were often militarily engaged against the Hebrew tribes, especially Judah, whose lands were in close proximity to the Philistines. It is understandable why all three Kings of the United Monarchy of Israel (Saul, David and Solomon) were chosen from the Tribe of Judah. Jerusalem was selected by King David as his capital because it was a settlement situated in or near Judah with defensible perimeters. As the capital city of the United Monarchy of Israel, David’s son, King Solomon, chose it as the site for Israel’s Holy Temple. As observed, the Torah did not prescribe Jerusalem or the Temple Mount as the dwelling place of the God of Israel. More and more, the Tribe of Judah’s dominance in civil and religious matters irritated most of the remaining Tribes of Israel.

When the ten Northern Tribes broke from the United Kingdom of Israel, it occurred in an unusual way. Instead of adopting a new name for the breakaway Northern Kingdom, they adopted the original name of the United Kingdom, “Israel”. The remaining Southern Tribes (including Judah, Shimon, Benjamin and some priests from the Tribe of Levi) compromised their own tribal identity by submitting to the name of the Kingdom of Judah, thus reaffirming the dominance of the Tribe of Judah. To ensure Judah’s continued eminence, it fostered the notion that any future king or Messiah must be a direct patrilineal descendent of King David of Judah.

The End of the Divided Kingdom and the Birth of the Samaritans

In 931 BCE, when the split occurred, both the North (Israel) and the South (Judah) continued as independent sovereign monarchies. Lacking the strength of their earlier unity, they became subject to the neighboring powers. In 722 BCE, the Northern Kingdom of Israel was invaded and destroyed by the Assyrians. Most of the people were marched off to undisclosed locations, and their place in history as the “Ten Lost Tribes of Israel” became legend. However, there were remnants of the Tribes of Manasseh and Ephraim, who were not exported to other locations and ultimately became the rootstock of the Samaritan people.

In 587 BCE, the Babylonians destroyed the temple in Jerusalem, conquered the Kingdom of Judah and exported a sizable portion of Judah’s population to Babylonia. However, Babylonian reign lasted fewer than 50 years, when it was overrun and defeated by the Persians in 538 BCE. In that same year, Cyrus, King of Persia, assisted the Jewish population of Babylonia to return to Jerusalem and reconstruct the temple on the original Temple Mount. While it was his intent to make Judah a subject state and collect tribute, Cyrus was, nevertheless, viewed by many Israelites as a Messiah.

The Samaritan Identity Viewed Through Different Lenses

Most historians accept the fact that the original Samaritan people arose out of the Assyrians’ capture and destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. However, the evolution and composition of the Samaritan people often depended upon the political lens through which it was viewed.

Talmudic Judaism’s View of the Samaritans

The Second Temple was created and developed by Israelites from the Southern Kingdom of Judah who had been forcibly exported to Babylonia and later authorized to return to Jerusalem. Their disposition towards Israelites from the Northern Kingdom was colored by its earlier succession and the subsequent years in which they remained military adversaries. In fact, when construction of the Second Temple was started, the surviving Northern Kingdom Israelites offered their assistance in its construction, but were summarily rejected.  Talmudic Judaism preferred to view the Israelites from the north (The Samaritans) as an unacceptable admixture of remnant Israelites that were comprised mostly of Gentile tribes brought into the area by the victorious Assyrians.

Samaritan History of its Own Origin

Samaritan history reports that the Samaritans are the remnants of the Northern Tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh (tribes of the sons of Joseph). It maintains that they remained in the Northern Kingdom, true to the God of Israel and to the site of Mount Gerizim, designated by God as, his holy place. The Samaritans also maintain that they never left the land to wander to other places and have been there continuously since Joshua brought them to worship at the holy site of Mount Gerizim. They contend that they have been true to the Torah and to the God of Israel.

Insight Into the Samaritan Origin Through Genetic Sciences

Samaritan origin has fascinated geneticists for some time. There have been many genetic studies of the Samaritans, both to uncover their origins and understand how they survived so many generations of isolation. Peidong Shen and colleagues, in the Journal of Human Mutation, used both mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome DNA of Samaritans to discover their origin and genetic relationship to Near Eastern Jews. The results are fascinating. The mitochondrial DNA (the DNA that traces through the female line) reveal no difference between the Samaritan Jews and the Palestinians in the Levante.  However, the Y chromosome (male lineal history) of the Samaritans had striking similarities to a very specific Y chromosome most often associated with Jewish men. It was clear that they, too, share a common ancestry. The geneticists concluded that the Samaritan lineage is the remnant of those few Jews who did not go into exile when the Assyrians conquered the Northern Kingdom, but may have married women who were not Israelites.

Professor Marcus Feldman, PhD of Biological Sciences at Stanford University, similarly concluded that Samaritans descended from Israelite men who married non-Israelite women. It is not unusual that Jewish men, perforce of circumstance, find themselves espoused to Gentile women, and yet pursuant to the patrilineal-ism of the Torah, continue to breed Jewish children into a preserved Jewish society.

Interestingly enough, the same situation later occurred with Ashkenazi Jews. They were thrust out of Israel as slaves, servants, and itinerants into Italy and environs following the Bar Kochba revolt against the Romans, in 132 CE.  There, they espoused to Gentile women, but patrilineally bred Jewish children with strong Jewish family identity. Thus, based upon chronology and irony, the Ashkenazim are a European latter-day clone of the Samaritans. However, the Jewish authenticity of both groups was dealt a blow when Rabbinical Judaism, for some reason yet to be identified, rejected the Torah’s patrilineal-ism and substituted matrilineal-ism.

According to the Torah, Hebrew identity is passed through patrilineal succession. “Zera” (semen) is the medium for the continuum of God’s designed people. See Genesis 12 (7), Genesis 17 (6-8) and (10-12), Genesis 26 (2-4), Genesis 28 (14) and Deuteronomy 34 (4-5).  The Y chromosome DNA of the Samaritan, which traces their male line, clearly demonstrates common ancestry with the Israelite communities, including the Kohanim (Hebrew Priests) who served in that community.

Rabbinical Attempt to Rewrite the Origin of the Israelite People Through Matrilineal-ism

The pattern of Hebrew men creating children in union with Gentile women, while still retaining strong tribal and religious identity, is not at all unusual. Four of Jacob’s children (Dan, Naphtali, Gad and Asher) were issue of Egyptian handmaidens and went on to constitute four of the Tribes of Israel. The children of Joseph and his Egyptian wife were Menasha and Ephraim, two Israeli half tribes who ultimately populated the Samaritan people. Moses was married to the daughter of a Midianite priest and to a Nubian woman. His children were issue of those marriages. King David and especially King Solomon had hundreds of wives, many from political alliances with neighboring tribes. The issue of all of those relationships had one thing in common that made them Hebrew children:  their father was an Israelite (patrilineal-ism).

In a more modern vein, of the 14.2 million Jews in the world today, the majority, by far, are Ashkenazi Jews. As noted, Ashkenazis descend from those Jews who were shipped to Europe as slaves and servants by the Romans. Many married Gentile, European women, but retained for themselves and their children Jewish culture and identity. Genetic discoveries demonstrate that more than 40% of the Ashkenazi community originate from four Gentile women.

Undoubtedly, the most tragic damage to the identity of the Israelite people occurred in the second century CE, when the Tannaim (the early rabbis of the Mishna) summarily rejected biblical descent from Hebrew males and substituted descent from Hebrew females. Noted Hebrew scholars of today are still trying to identify the reason or the authority for such a proposed change. Howsoever accommodating to Jewish women that change might appear, it poured Hebrew identity into a genetic Mixmaster (blender) and set it on high speed.

Religious Beliefs of the Samaritans

Samaritans identify themselves as B’nai Yisroel (“Children of Israel”), which is the term used by all Jewish denominations as a name for the Jewish people. Understandably, the Samaritans do not refer to themselves as Jews, which is the derivative from Judah, their historical adversary. Their religious beliefs include the following:

• Mount Gerizim, not Jerusalem, is the one true sanctuary chosen by Israel’s God.
• They believe that the dead will be resurrected.
• There is one God, YHWH, which is the same God recognized by the Hebrew prophets.
• The Torah was given by God to Moses.
• They reject all Rabbinical works (such as the Talmud, which includes the Mishna, the Gomorrah and the Midrash). On Shabbat, Samaritans abstain from cooking and kindling of fires (even fires initiated before the Sabbath) and pray barefoot in white garments.
• Their priests are the interpreters of their law and keepers of their tradition. They scrupulously follow the text of the Torah, even to the extent that they require women to move to their own private residences during menstruation for seven days of isolation.
• Their Torah, written in ancient Hebrew script, is essentially the same document as the Masoretic Torah (current Rabbinical version of the Torah), with approximately 6000 differences. Most of the distinctions involve grammar, spelling and interpretation. It does have, however, additional narratives and one major religious confrontation regarding the importance of Mount Gerizim.
• The Samaritans celebrate all holidays mentioned in the Torah, including Passover, Shavuot, Yom Kippur, Sukkot and Shemini Atseret. However, unlike Rabbinical Jews, they do not celebrate the nonbiblical holidays of Hanukkah or Purim. Passover requires the presence of all Samaritans on Mount Gerizim, where, at the appropriate hour, a lamb is slaughtered and its blood smeared on the heads of the firstborn.

The Samaritan Torah and The Masoretic Torah 

Reference has been made to the existence of two Torahs, which appear to have a common origin and subject matter, but are, nevertheless, distinct from each other. While many of the distinctions appear to be technical in nature, there are narratives in one that are not contained in the other, and an essential principle of faith articulated in one that is silent in the other.

If the Torah is the accurately transcribed word of God given at Mount Sinai and sacredly adopted by all Israelite nations as the essence of their faith and their relationship to God, how could there be two Torahs? That question is particularly pertinent when one of the differences is in a fundamental area of faith. If the distinctions, as in this case, go beyond mere transcription errors, then we are left with a series of troublesome questions:

What is known or rationally suspected about the origin of these two Torahs?

1. Manuscripts of the Samaritan Torah are written in a different Hebrew script than the other Hebrew Torah. Samaritans employed the Samaritan alphabet, which is derived from the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet used by the Israelite community prior to the Babylonian captivity. Afterwards, Jews adopted the Ashuri script, which is based on the Aramaic alphabet and developed into the modern Hebrew alphabet.
2. Until the 1950s, Bible scholars turned to the Jewish Masoretic text as the definitive version of the Torah, virtually ignoring the Samaritan text. However, in the winter of 1947, a group of archaeological specialists searching through 11 caves in Qumran happened upon the Dead Sea Scrolls. After rigorous study, the scrolls found in Qumran match the Samaritan text more closely than the Masoretic text.
3. In July 2008, the Princeton Theological Seminary researcher, Professor James Charlesworth, posted on the Internet an unknown fragment containing Deuteronomy 27 (4-6), said to be taken from cave 4 in Qumran, giving the commandment to build an altar to the Almighty “in Mount Gerizim.”

The most interesting insight into the controversy regarding God’s selection of the holy site for his Temple can be found in Deuteronomy 11 (29) of both Samaritan and Masoretic Torahs. Mount Gerizim is mentioned as a place for a blessing. In neither of the Torahs is Jerusalem ever mentioned.

In each Torah, the Ten Commandments appear in two separate places: Deuteronomy 5 (6-21) and Exodus 20 (2-17). However, only in the Samaritan Torah, the Tenth Commandment appears as follows: 

And it shall come to pass when the Lord thy God will bring thee into the land of the Canaanites whither thou goest to take possession of it, thou shalt erect unto thee large stones, and thou shalt cover them with lime, and thou shalt write upon the stones all the words of this Law, and it shall come to pass when ye cross the Jordan, ye shall erect these stones which I command thee upon Mount Gerizim, and thou shalt build there an altar unto the Lord thy God, an altar of stones, and thou shalt not lift upon them iron, of perfect stones shalt thou build thine altar, and thou shalt bring upon it burnt offerings to the Lord thy God, and thou shalt sacrifice peace offerings, and thou shalt eat there and rejoice before the Lord thy God. That mountain is on the other side of the Jordan at the end of the road towards the going down of the sun in the land of the Canaanites who dwell in the Arabah facing Gilgal close by Elon Moreh facing Shechem.

The foregoing language, however, does not appear in either of the recitations of the Ten Commandments in the Masoretic Torah. Instead, we find that the First Commandment, of the Masoretic Torah, is not a commandment at all, but simply a declaration. It reads, “I am the Lord thy God which brought thee out of the land of Egypt from the house of bondage.” It is a declaratory statement, which may well have fit as part of the next commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

There are several interesting hypotheses for the absence of the Mount Gerizim language in the Tenth Commandment of the Masoretic Torah:

• Before bringing the Torah to the Second Temple, Ezra and his acolytes (descendants of the former Kingdom of Judah) eliminated the Mount Gerizim language from the Tenth Commandment because it placed into question Jerusalem’s authenticity as God’s selected site for His temple. The division of the First Commandment into two would numerically have accommodated the elimination of the Tenth Commandment about Mount Gerizim, resulting in Ten Commandments.
• The Samaritans were so committed to the holiness of Mount Gerizim that they added to the Tenth Commandment God’s requirement that it be selected as the site for His Holy Temple.

Conclusion

The survival of the Samaritan people is a microcosm of the 4000-year survival of the Children of Israel. It is a testament to their treasured identity; fidelity to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; unyielding resistance to those who would forcibly convert them; and indifference to those of their brethren who arrogantly rejected them.

The Samaritans have preserved the customs and traditions of their origin without paying tribute to the gods of societal alteration and change. They, like their spiritual brothers, the Karites, have survived and been sustained by the Torah alone, without reference to the Talmud or other Rabbinical commentaries.

The confluence of history and modern genetics confirm that the Samaritans existed as an unexported remnant of the Ten Northern Tribes of Israel by the Assyrians. While Samaritan history does not report episodes of intermarriage with the Gentile females from tribes brought in by the Assyrians to replace the Israelites, genetic study of Samaritan mitochondrial DNA suggests that intermarriage did, in fact, occur.

The Samaritans, through the continuity of their patrilineal lineage, were devoted Israelites, consecrated to the laws of the Torah. They never left the land promised to their patriarchs. They differed from their brethren in the Tribe of Judah in many ways.

The Tribe of Judah early rose to leadership among the Israelites in the newly occupied Canaan. The Tribe assumed that its prominence amongst the other tribes was its manifest destiny and did everything to assure the continuum of that notion. After the Northern Tribes revolted, it proffered its tribal name to describe the Southern Kingdom, although that Kingdom included the Tribes of Simeon, Benjamin and part of the Tribe of Levi. It assured its future by asserting that every successor Hebrew king must be a descendant of David (himself from the Tribe of Judah) and that any future Messiah must also be of that lineage.

On return from the Babylonian exile, the Judeans did everything they could to reject and deny Samaritans, the other Israelite group in the Holy Land, from assisting in the construction of the Second Temple. In an effort to suggest that the Samaritans were not Hebrews but a mongrel people who should be avoided and scorned, the Judeans called the Samaritans by the tribal name of the Gentile tribe brought in by the Assyrians.

Today, some utter the word Jew as an epithet, while we, descendants of the patriarchs, speak it with the pride of the people designated by the Creator to help civilize humanity. It is neither! The word Jew is simply an abbreviated form of Judah, the name of one of the sons of Jacob. When we call ourselves Jews, we separate ourselves from the rest of the Israelite nation, both lost and found. When we call ourselves Jews, do we reimpose the arrogance that divided the United Kingdom of Israel?

David Ben-Gurion and the other fathers of the new nation, formed in 1948, sagely renamed the state “Israel” and not Judah. Today, Israel is a land of inclusion, which has sought out and returned to its bosom Hebrew descendants of every color, type and description from the remote portions of the world community.

The Samaritan entitlement to Israeli citizenship in the new nation is not derived from The Law of Return, because the Samaritans are Israelites, who simply never left.

Douglas Kaplan