Genesis, the first Book of the Old Testament, is imperiously dismissed by some as an imaginative allegory about the creation of the universe and the origin of the Jewish People.
Hidden in the treasure trove of its narrative are many answers to the mysteries of an ancient people, its obligation to repair the world and the origin of anti-Semitism
A vengeful God’s remorse
Genesis begins with God’s creation of the earth and its wondrous inhabitants. It identifies a Garden of Eden in which Adam and Eve lived a beautiful, exotic, and carefree existence. It was a perfect world. Yet, when God’s human creatures failed to obey a single order, He threw them out of the garden, consigned them to a finite life in which they were obliged to support themselves through their own efforts.
At a subsequent time when God’s human creatures did not comply with His moral code, His anger was once again kindled and, with the exception of Noah and the contents of his ark, He flooded the earth and all living things were destroyed.
When wickedness became rampant in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah God once again became wroth. With the exception of Lot, his wife and two daughters, He destroyed both communities. However, when Lot’s wife, out of natural curiosity, but against instruction, turned to see the destruction, she ended up as a pillar of salt.
God was quick to anger, and aware of His vengeful nature (Deuteronomy 32(35)). In one of the most sensitive moments of biblical literature, God, the creator of the world, turned to His own creations, Noah and his sons, and pledged to them that He would never again destroy the earth (Genesis 9(11-17). So contrite was God that He pledged that every rainbow in the sky would iterate His covenant in perpetuity to humanity.
In the very same chapter (Sedra) of Genesis, called “Noah,” we meet “Abram” and begin to learn how God intends to put guardrails on His anger. If He can control the wickedness of His creations, He will not need to respond with vengeance. What is needed is an on-site presence that can instruct the peoples of the world, God’s creations to whom He has granted free will, how to live in accordance with God’s law and mandate.
God chose Abram as the rootstock of a people whom He designed. There was no chosen people
The notion of a chosen people is an erroneous and contentious concept. It generates from Genesis 12(2-3), and elsewhere, where Abram is made a unique offer by God, who pledged that he would make Abram and his descendents a great nation. At that point of time, Abram had no children and only a barren wife. He was certainly not a people or nation. However, in the selection of Abram, God uses some interesting language: “In thee shall all families of the earth be blessed”. It is an expression that foreshadows God’s intended use of Abram’s descendents to spread God’s declared rules of civility (Torah), so as to repair a wicked world and thus to save it from His vengeance.
Specifications of a designed people
God’s design starts with the selection of one man, Abram, whose name is later changed to Abraham. It then grows into a family, a tribe, a series of tribes and ultimately into the Hebrew nation. In Genesis 12(7), 17(6-8), 17(10-12), 26(2-4), and 28(14), God covenants with Abraham and subsequently with his son Isaac and grandson Jacob that from their semen (Zerah) there will be forthcoming a great nation. God covenants to them that He will protect them, but they must abide by his requirements. As to qualified males, however, God (in (Genesis 12 (7)), additionally requires circumcision of the instrument through which the Zerah is delivered, as an everlasting memorial to His covenant with the Hebrew people. In anticipation of the work to be done by the people whom God created, God commits to grant them the land of Canaan (Israel) as an everlasting possession.
Thus, a female, or a circumcised male, as a descendent of the semen (Zerah) of the patriarchs, is a Jew whether or not that person is secular, adherent of another faith, agnostic or atheist. By the same token, one who is not born of the Zerah (semen of the patriarchs), who so loves Judaism that he or she strives to comply with all of the 613 Torah mitzvot is not a Jew perforce of that commitment or dedication alone.
In the waning days of the Second Temple, by virtue of rabbinical fiat and contrary to the express Torah prescription, a Jew was identified as one born of a Jewish mother, without regard to male zerah origination. It is a thesis that is still maintained within traditional Judaism today. Query, can a designed people change the design of their own origination?
The change from patrilineal descendants of the patriarchs to those born of female Jews has obviously modified the composition of the Jewish people. They are different from those with whom God covenanted, through the patriarchs, to deliver the land of Canaan in perpetuity. We must ask ourselves the difficult question as to whether the change in the composition of the Jewish people has adversely affected our entitlement to the Land of Israel.
Reform Jews, in 1983, reintroduced Jewish patrilineality by proposing that a child born of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother is a Jewish child if the child is reared in the Jewish home. While that is a desirable step, the notion of rearage is irrelevant to identity.
A child born of a Jewish father originates from the Zerah of the patriarchs and therefore is a Jew, not a Gentile and not a half-Jew. Jewish identity, by definition, is a function of birth, not of rearage.
Intermarriage
With the exception of seven named Canaanite tribes (Deuteronomy 7(1-4), the Torah does not preclude Jewish men from relationships with Gentile women. In biblical times, relationships with non-Jewish women were most common. Of the 12 tribes of Israel, the tribes of Dan, Naphtali, Gad, and Asher were the result of Jacob’s relationships with two Egyptian women, Zilpah and Billah. Joseph was married to Asenath, an Egyptian woman whom the Pharaoh gave to him as a wife. The kings of Israel: Saul, David, Solomon and their successors married hundreds of foreign women in pursuance of political relationships with neighboring people. Moses was married to a Midianite woman. Who would suggest that the children born of these marriages were not part of the Jewish nation? What all of the children of these mixed marriages had in common was that they were conceived by Jewish men endowed with the blessed seed (Zerah) of the patriarchs. Assuredly, these Gentile women did not all convert to Judaism, especially since rabbis did not appear on the scene until hundreds of years later.
When man plays God
The requirements of Jewish conversion are different from that of the other major faiths. In both Christian and Muslim faiths, conversion takes place by ceremonies of acceptance and dedication to their special deities and religious practices. However, a Muslim convert is not automatically turned into an Arab and a Christian convert does not automatically become a Semite.
In Judaism, however, because it originated as a tribal faith of a single people, it requires the practitioner to to be a member of the tribe as well as to commit to the faith and its practices. Thus, Jewish conversion would be obliged to render the convertee a Jew as well as a co-religionist.
However, the rite of the conversion does not and cannot change the convertee into a Jew. A Chinese convertee still retains his Asian appearance, skills and attributes of birth. His or her children will remain Chinese in appearance and will inherit the genetic traits of that people.
Science has not as yet acquired the ability to change the total genetic makeup of a live person so as to re-create him or her as someone else. Assuredly, it is a skill not yet taught in rabbinical school and awarded with diplomas from yeshivas, or institutions like Hebrew Union College or Jewish Institute of Religion. Religious school credentials do not provide the ability to invest Gentiles with the seed (Zerah) of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. No study, blessing, or immersion can alter a person’s genetic heritage.
The DNA of a Gentile convert to Judaism will remain unchanged after the conversion process has been completed.
Attempts at conversion by rabbis are an embarrassment
The fragmented denominations of the Jewish faith, i.e., Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstruction, etc., all adopt their own standards and procedures for conversion. Recently, the chief Rabbi of Israel, where almost one half of all Jews reside, announced that only conversions performed by Orthodox rabbis will be recognized. The effect of this action is to attempt to legitimize an impossible and biblically unauthorized procedure, but only with regard to conversions conducted by Orthodox rabbis. At the same time, they would reject inclusion of children born of Jewish fathers (conceived with the Zerah of the patriarchs) if the mother is not Jewish. Conservative Jews are obliged to follow the same standard, but their conversions, according to the Orthodox, are unworthy.
Reform rabbis, who deal more frequently with intermarriage, are much more liberal with the conversion process. It is no wonder that in recent centuries, there is so much confusion as to who is a Jew. The issues have become one of the politics of religion.
It is not by inadvertence or indifference that the Torah makes no reference to conversion. It is high time for the rabbinate to abandon the perilous road of conversion and to resort to the effective clarity of the biblical law of Ger Toshav.
Ger Toshav, the biblical solution to the perils of conversion
During early biblical times, intermarriage between a Jewish man and a Gentile wife were handled more efficiently and with less formality. The Gentile wife simply entered the Jewish community and remained there with her husband and her children as a Ger Toshav. The term applied to a permanent sojourner with the Jewish people in the Jewish community. At the end of the day, their issue, having been sired by a Jewish father, were Jews and were automatically accepted as members of the Jewish community.
The Torah was especially mindful to instruct the community to treat such sojourners with kindness and equality.
In Deuteronomy 10(18-19), God teaches the obligation of loving the stranger (Ger) and in giving that person food and raiment. God reminds the Jewish people that they were strangers in the land of Egypt. Jews are informed that “cursed is the one who perverts the justice of the stranger” (Deuteronomy27 (19). The Torah, in Numbers 15(15), provides that “ there shall be one law for you and for the resident stranger; it shall be a law for all time throughout the ages. You and the stranger shall be alike before the Lord.” In multiple ways the Torah goes to great lengths to equate the rights and living conditions of the sojourner to that of the populace.
In order to justify the rite of conversion, the modern rabbinate often turns to the Book of Ruth in the Tanakh, suggesting a historical justification for conversion. The book tells a simple story during the time of the Judges (600-400 BCE) of a Jewish widow by the name of Naomi with her two sons who married Moabite women. Both of her sons died and she was left with her two Moabite daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth. As Naomi prepared to return to her own people in Judah, she bade farewell to Orpah, but Ruth cleaved to her saying “whether thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.” These beautiful words by Ruth evince more of a dedication to her mother-in-law, Naomi, than a desire to convert to the God of Israel.
There is no indication in the text that Ruth was ever formerly converted to Judaism, or even that there existed at that time rabbis, or others, who could have effectuated such a conversion. Ruth entered the Jewish community as a Ger Toshav, accompanied by her mother-in-law Naomi. Nevertheless, in accordance with Scripture, she was provided with the rights of a Jewish widow and afforded a Leverite-like procedure to allow Boaz, a kinsman of Naomi to marry her. Notwithstanding the fact that Ruth was a Moabite, since Boaz her spouse was a Jew, the lineal descendents of that relationship, including her great-grandson King David, were Jews.
The “Chosen People” misconception and anti-Semitism
To justify the animus against Jews, anti-Semites suggest such rationales and libels as: the Jews control the world economies; the Jews control the press; the Jews are always focused on money and wealth; the Jews killed the Christian God Jesus etc. Genesis, however, provides a more logical explanation.
In Genesis 17(6-8) God selects Abraham as the father of a designed future people who will act as God’s surrogate in instructing the world on living a moral and ethical life. In anticipation of, and reward for, the performance of their duties, God grants the people of Israel the land of Canaan in perpetuity. That is the origin of the often expressed, but little understood, notion of tikkun olam.
Israel was then a small nation, both geographically and in population. It had little chance to accomplish the work for which it was designed. Opportunity, however, did accrue as BCE changed to the CE.
Shortly after the death of Jesus in 32 CE, his disciple Paul, a Jew, was convinced that Jesus was the anticipated Messiah. Thus, Paul undertook to export the Jewish tribal faith, as modified by the notion of the divinity of Jesus, to neighboring Gentile nations. He preached that one need not be a genetic Jew in order to partake of their faith. In support of his efforts, he provided the Torah and all of the books of the Tanakh, together with a history of the life of Jesus, to a pagan or godless world. This modified form of Judaism was ultimately identified as the Christian religion.
Christianity grew in the Middle East and in the Roman Empire under the nurture of the Catholic Church, only to be fragmented in the Middle Ages by the Protestant Reformation and by unique national interests. Today there are multiple Christian denominations who publish their own form of the Christian Bible. Significantly, all of the Christian Bibles, of whatever denomination, contain a verbatim translation of the Torah, as well as most of the books of the Tanakh (Phrophets and Scribes). Essentially the Christian world has adopted the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and a modified version of the Jewish faith to which they remain devoted. Many male Christians have received the rite of circumcision.
Howsoever devoted Christians are to the Old Testament, they lack the genetic lineage from the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and therefore are not includable in the people that they erroneously believe were chosen by God as his people.
For some Gentiles, devoted to the God of Abraham, anti-Semitism takes the form of anger over an erroneous notion that their love, in the eyes of God, occupies a secondary place behind that of the Jewish People.
Analogously, in Genesis, we see the tale of Cain and Abel. Abel’s gift to God is acceptable and Cain’s is rejected. Cain’s bitterness and jealousy, in what he perceives as the denial of God’s love, results in the murder of his brother.
Similarly, in Genesis, the sons of Jacob were angered over what appeared to be Jacob’s greater love for their brother Joseph, upon whom Jacob conferred a coat of many colors. Only upon the plea of one brother to sell Joseph into slavery was Joseph’s life saved from death at the hands of his jealous brothers.
For some Christians, even inflicting pain upon the Jews is not enough to soothe the wounds of shame of being second-class citizens in the world of the God that they have adopted and love.
The ultimate question
Was the creation of the Hebrew nation, for the purposes of spreading the civilizing effect of God’s Torah and to defeat world wickedness, successful? History strongly suggests that it accomplished little if anything. We live in a world bereft of morality and beset with national and personal greed. Our societies are rank with dishonesty, perversion of justice, rape, sexual promiscuity and wars of such magnitude that we have the capacity of total self-destruction.
The failure of the Hebrew nation’s mission is confirmed by the fact that, for 2000 years, Jews have been obliged to wander the surface of the earth, despised, landless and without Temple, going from host nation to host nation until rudely cast out.
Assuredly, the vengeance which God sought to deny himself through the creation of the Hebrew people, was directed to that very same people as a result of its failure to accomplish its mission.
Ah! But like all other Judaic critical self-examinations, there is always “the other view”.
God’s vengeance against all of his creatures has not been rekindled and he has not, as yet, again destroyed the world.
On reflection, what better way could God’s designed people have to spread the essential civilizing aspect of his Torah than to travel from nation to nation throughout the world for 2000 years educating its peoples on the essential aspects of God’s moral imperative through Torah.
Could it be that the Galus (2,000 years of wandering) was part of the Hebrew mission?
Viewed from yet a different perspective
The Christian world believes that the Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, born to Mary at the start of his Era, had a special relationship with the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob.
If that were so, he would join a number of other of God’s human creatures, Noah, Jonah, Moses, and others who God selected to perform designated tasks on behalf of the Almighty. While they were all men of honor and respect, none were deities or lesser deities, nor could they be, given God’s declaration of his exclusiveness in both the first and second of the 10 Commandments.
On reflection, the service performed by Jesus, John the Baptist, the Hebrew preacher, the 13 Jewish apostles, and the Pharisee Saul of Tarsus (Paul) was totally consistent with the mission to bring Torah to the world, assigned by God to their Jewish nation. Paul, along with Christian doctrine, introduced the Torah and the other sacred Hebrew texts to the known world.
Christianity today is the largest religion in the world and comprises 2.1 billion members. A survey by the Bible Society concluded that around 2.5 billion copies of the Christian Bible were printed between 1815 and 1975, but more recent estimates put the number at more than 5 billion. In every Christian Bible there appears the Torah, the Prophets and the Scribes (the Tanakh) as an essential part of their sacred text. How they are absorbed and considered is a function of God’s grant of freedom of will.
Did the early Christians know that their efforts were instrumental in bringing the Torah, given by God to the Jews at Mount Sinai, to the Gentile world?
At this stage of history Only God knows!
By Douglas C. Kaplan