The Kind of Thing Judaism Is
The more I interact in this endlessly fascinating interfaith environment, the more I sense a category-level misunderstanding of what kind of thing Judaism is.
The connotations of the word “religion” are the primary problem, along with the mechanics of its associated examples.
The basic issue: a “religion” is typically defined by certain things it holds as eternal truths: deity/ies, cosmology, their interplay/mechanics, morality, what that all says about the nature and role of people, &c.
That’s not how I recommend understanding the Jewish “religion.”
The West tends to look to sacred texts as a central site where a religion encodes its core truths. Indeed, the West arguably got its way of doing this from Judaism. Certainly, Judaism centers on its sacred texts. But the above list of eternal truths isn’t what is encoded there.
Certainly, there have been projects to retcon them in over time. As the children of Israel began to interact with a wider world, it became advantageous to do so, just as it did for that world to do so for us. The thing is, after so long, the layered version history is visible.
It’s no longer possible — in an honest way — to ignore the obvious historical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence in these layers. This canon has been assembled over time in an effectively evolutionary process. This people’s relationship with the Divine evolved accordingly.
If anything can be said to be eternal in the Jewish religion itself, it’s the porting of this story through time, accreting new layers and requiring new ways of reading in order to inhabit it for ourselves as ancestors did. Which of course, necessarily, we do in our own way.
There are always a few conflicting ways in the world at a time of reading the story and deriving ways of living from its lessons. No one of those ways is “Judaism,” because “Jewishness” is not a religious status. It is a peoplehood. This whole process is its religion.
I hope this overview is informative and leads to ever more fruitful dialogue. I am out here assembling my own ways of reading and inhabiting my people’s story.
