It really bothers me a lot when people say "Judaism says: ...." or "Judaism believes..." As soon as one has let those two words slip s/he has already said a lie. Judaism is not a monolithic philosophical system. Saying "Judaism believes" is roughly equivalent to saying "philosophers say" or "Americans believe"
When it comes to what "Judaism" thinks about life the universe and everything - pretty much anything which could be thought has been thought. So at least philosophically speaking you cannot say the following things:
Judaism believes in free will and denies determinism
Judaism believes in Heaven and Hell
Judaism believes God is incorporeal
Judaism believes in a Messiah
Judaism believes in creation ex nihilo
All these statements which I've heard way too many times are false. Although one can say that historically Jewish thinkers tend to believe in free will, creation ex nihilo and the Messiah, one cannot state categorically that Judaism believes in these things - unless of course you don't want to include Chasdai Crescas, the Ralbag and some forms of Chassidut in the category of "Judaism".
People don't like uncertainty. They don't want a choice between thinkers. They don't want someone to tell them "Some people think this, and some people think that." No! People want their religion served on a plate. They want sturdy foundations and unquestionable tenets. They cannot accept heterogeneity.
Posts
No New Post Today
1 day ago
15 comments:
What we need is a page / small site with some of these statements and the quotes of those who think differently. This overview will be useful for many.
> one cannot state categorically that Judaism believes in these things - unless of course you don't want to include…
Those who make such statements often explicitly do exactly that. So-and-so was a great rav, but he’s not from our mesorah, or we paskened against him. (The belief thay psak can affect reality is its own conversation.)
This is semantics, but “Judaism” is incapable of belief, It’s a religion, not a person. Judaism requires belief X, or includes belief X, or belief X is part of Judaism, or adherants to Judaism normally believe X, but Judaism can’t believe X.
I agree with G*3 that the issue is needlessly clouded by the use of the construction "Judaism believes X." That phrase is semantically ill-formed and must be replaced by another construction, such as "Judaism includes the belief that X," before one can describe any such attribution as true or false.
Even with that correction, though, I don't think that it can fairly be said that, within Judaism, "pretty much anything which could be thought has been thought" (assuming that "thought" means "believed"). There is much that is thought and believed in other religious traditions that is simply beyond the pale for Judaism on any plausible interpretation. I do not think that Judaism can accommodate the belief that Jesus was the son of God, or the belief that there are numerous gods, or the belief that some statue or some emperor is or was a god, and so on. Such beliefs are surely excluded from Judaism.
What I think one can say positively about beliefs in Judaism is that Judaism consists of certain practices and traditions based on certain texts, and that certain beliefs play an essential role in these practices and traditions. For instance, a Jew may or may not accept the belief that a messiah will come to lead us all back to Jerusalem, but that belief always plays a role in the sense that it has a firm basis in our texts and any viable version of Judaism must either accept that belief or produce an argument for rejecting it.
I stand corrected - "Judaism believes" is not the best way of phrasing it...
Your other suggestions are much better
>I don't think that it can fairly be said that, within Judaism, pretty much anything which could be thought has been thought
Forgive the hyperbole. Obviously Judaism is defined by certain basic ideas. The question is where to draw the line and I find that Orthodox people tend to draw the lines much broader than history would dictate...
A topic of a future post may be what DEFINES Judaism...
Marc Shapiro's book Limits of Orthodox Theology is pretty thorough...
> I do not think that Judaism can accommodate … that there are numerous gods,
But once upon a time, it did. Judaism was monalatrous before it was monotheistic, and even after Judaism “officially” became monotheistic the average Jew still believed in and worshiped multiple gods.
Certainly there is no room in today’s Judaism for many gods, but as SH says, “pretty much anything which could be thought has been thought.” It may be hyperbole, but not by much. Christianity, too was once a Jewish sect.
G*3, my first response to your comment was to think: "Of course, the early Israelites were polytheistic; but their religion is not recognizable as Judaism." But then I reflected that, if one is going to take the line of identifying Judaism with a tradition, as I did, then one doesn't stand on a very firm ground for saying that the religion of the early Israelites was something else. I think I was presuming to identify Judaism with Rabbinic Judaism, but I was not thinking at all of the difficulty of drawing lines of separation in its history.
About the business of Christianity being a Jewish sect: It is my impression that, at the time when Christians were Jewish followers of Jesus, they believed only that he was Messiah, not yet that he was God. It is my understanding that the doctrine that Jesus is God incarnate or the son of God grew up only when Christianity became a religion in its own right to be spread among the gentiles. I am not certain of this, however, and hope to learn more about it in future studies.
I don’t know exactly when the early Christians began to see Jesus as Divine, but there is right now a subgroup of Lubavitch who believe that their late Rebbe was Divine. Most people still consider them an Orthodox group, and certainly a Jewish group.
The problem is that there are groups out there that call themselves {adjective} Judaism but then decide on their own what their values should be.
For example, all the beliefs in your post are, according to classical Judaism, uncontested. Judaism, real Judaism not a secular liberal version of it that has been altered so as to be non-offensive to its followers, believes in a final redemption, creation from nothing, etc.
Now when you get into specifics, then your point is valid. Lubavitchers will tell you that Judaism believes that a dead man can return to life and be Messiah. No, that's not true. Chareidim might tell you that Judaism believes you have to believe that creation ex nihilo took 144 hours precisely. No, that's not true. But the overarching principles are agreed upon.
>For example, all the beliefs in your post are, according to classical Judaism, uncontested.
Chasdai Crescas, possibly Yehuda Halevi, and the Admor from Izbiczca did not believe in free will
Maimonides and his rationalist followers did not believe in heaven and hell
The writer of the Shiur Koma, Moshe Taku and many of his contemporaries believed God was corporeal
Many rationalists implicitly denied a Messiah
Ralbag, Ibn Ezra, and possibly Maimonides himself denied creation ex nihilo
Are any of these not "classical Judaism?" This is really basic stuff...
Ralbag, Ibn Ezra, and possibly Maimonides himself denied creation ex nihilo
Does any rabbi affirm creation from nothing? I always assumed it was a Christian notion. It seems to be in direct contradiction to Bereshit 1, where formless earth and water are there from the outset and God merely forms and separates them.
> It seems to be in direct contradiction to Bereshit 1, where formless earth and water are there from the outset and God merely forms and separates them.
In Orthodoxy, anyway, suggesting that God Merely formed and separated pre-existing materials to create the world is heresy. At most, there are those who believe there were previous worlds, and Bereshies is describing the creation of the current world.
> all the beliefs in your post are, according to classical Judaism, uncontested.
Classical Judasim is what, exactly? What time period and geographic area practiced classical Judaism? As long as we’re talking about what actually happened, as opposed to an idealized version, I don’t think “classical Judaism” is actually a thing.
> Maimonides and his rationalist followers did not believe in heaven and hell
Nor, apparently, did the people who the Chumash was meant for.
> Many rationalists implicitly denied a Messiah
And the people who saw the Beis HaMikdash destroyed expected moshiach to come in their lifetimes. Close to two thousand years later, their expectation has become a dogmatic belief.
Most Medieval Jewish philosophers adamantly supported the notion of creation ex nihilo
Post a Comment