Judaism at a glance

Judaism is the original of the three Abrahamic faiths, which also includes Christianity and Islam. According to information published by The Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, there were around 13.1 million Jewish people in the world in 2007, most residing in the USA and Israel. According to the 2001 census 267,000 people in the UK said that their religious identity was Jewish, about 0.5% of the population.

• Judaism originated in the Middle East over 3500 years ago
• Judaism was founded by Moses, although Jews trace their history back to Abraham.
• Jews believe that there is only one God with whom they have a covenant.
• In exchange for all the good that God has done for the Jewish people, Jewish people keep God's laws and try to bring holiness into every aspect of their lives.
• Judaism has a rich history of religious text, but the central and most important religious document is the Torah.
• Jewish traditional or oral law, the interpretation of the laws of the Torah, is called halakhah.
• Spiritual leaders are called Rabbis.
• Jews worship in Synagogues.
• 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust in an attempt to wipe out Judaism.

There are many people who identify themselves as Jewish without necessarily believing in, or observing, any Jewish law.

The relationship with God

Jews believe that there is a single God who not only created the universe, but with whom every Jew can have an individual and personal relationship.

They believe that God continues to work in the world, affecting everything that people do.

The Jewish relationship with God is a covenant relationship. In exchange for the many good deeds that God has done and continues to do for the Jewish People...

• The Jews keep God's laws
• The Jews seek to bring holiness into every aspect of their lives.

Judaism is the faith of a Community

Jews believe that God appointed the Jews to be his chosen people in order to set an example of holiness and ethical behaviour to the world.

Jewish life is very much the life of a community and there are many activities that Jews must do as a community.

• For example, the Jewish prayer book uses WE and OUR in prayers where some other faiths would use I and MINE.

Jews also feel part of a global community with a close bond Jewish people all over the world. A lot of Jewish religious life is based around the home and family activities.

Judaism is a family faith

Judaism is very much a family faith and the ceremonies start early, when a Jewish boy baby is circumcised at eight days old, following the instructions that God gave to Abrahamaround 4,000 years ago.

Many Jewish religious customs revolve around the home. One example is the Sabbath meal, when families join together to welcome in the special day.

Who is a Jew?

Jews believe that a Jew is someone who is the child of a Jewish mother; although some groups also accept children of Jewish fathers as Jewish. A Jew traditionally can't lose the technical 'status' of being a Jew by adopting another faith, but they do lose the religious element of their Jewish identity.

Someone who isn't born a Jew can convert to Judaism, but it is not easy to do so.

Judaism means living the faith

Almost everything a Jewish person does can become an act of worship.

Because Jews have made a bargain with God to keep his laws, keeping that bargain and doing things in the way that pleases God is an act of worship.

And Jews don't only seek to obey the letter of the law - the particular details of each of the Jewish laws - but the spirit of it, too.

A religious Jew tries to bring holiness into everything they do, by doing it as an act that praises God, and honours everything God has done. For such a person the whole of their life becomes an act of worship.

Being part of a community that follows particular customs and rules helps keep a group of people together, and it's noticeable that the Jewish groups that have been most successful at avoiding assimilation are those that obey the rules most strictly - sometimes called ultra-orthodox Jews.

Note: Jews don't like and rarely use the word ultra-orthodox. A preferable adjective is haredi, and the plural noun is haredim.

It's what you do that counts...

Judaism is a faith of action and Jews believe people should be judged not so much by the intellectual content of their beliefs, but by the way they live their faith - by how much they contribute to the overall holiness of the world.

A summary of what Jews believe about God

• God exists
• There is only one God
• There are no other gods
• God can't be subdivided into different persons (unlike the Christian view of God)
• Jews should worship only the one God
• God is Transcendent:
  • God is above and beyond all earthly things.
• God doesn't have a body
  • Which means that God is neither female nor male.
• God created the universe without help
• God is omnipresent:
  • God is everywhere, all the time.
• God is omnipotent:
  • God can do anything at all.
• God is beyond time:
  • God has always existed
  • God will always exist.
• God is just, but God is also merciful
  • God punishes the bad
  • God rewards the good
  • God is forgiving towards those who mess things up.
• God is personal and accessible.
  • God is interested in each individual
  • God listens to each individual
  • God sometimes speaks to individuals, but in unexpected ways.

The Jews brought new ideas about God

The Jewish idea of God is particularly important to the world because it was the Jews who developed two new ideas about God:

• There is only one God
• God chooses to behave in a way that is both just and fair.

Before Judaism, people believed in lots of gods, and those gods behaved no better than human beings with supernatural powers.

The Jews found themselves with a God who was ethical and good.

But how do Jews know this about God?

They don't know it, they believe it, which is different.

However, many religious people often talk about God in a way that sounds as if they know about God in the same way that they know what they had for breakfast.

• For instance, religious people often say they are quite certain about God - by which they mean that they have an inner certainty.
• And many people have experiences that they believe were times when they were in touch with God.

The best evidence for what God is like comes from what the Bible says, and from particular individuals' experiences of God.

God in the Bible

Quite early in his relationship with the Jews, God makes it clear that he will not let them encounter his real likeness in the way that they encounter each other.

The result is that the Jews have work out what God is like from what he says and what he does.

The story is in Exodus 33 and follows the story of the 10 commandments, and the Golden Calf.

Moses has spent much time talking with God, and the two of them are clearly quite close...

The LORD would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend.

Exodus 33

But after getting the 10 commandments Moses wants to see God, so that he can know what he is really like. God says no...

you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.

Then the LORD said,

There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.

Exodus 33

Two sides of God

Jews combine two different sounding ideas of God in their beliefs:

• God is an all-powerful being who is quite beyond human ability to understand or imagine.
• God is right here with us, caring about each individual as a parent does their child.

A great deal of Jewish study deals with the creative power of two apparently incompatible ideas of God.

Jesus through Jewish eyes

My first encounter with Jesus was in primary school Nativity plays. Teachers desperately - kindly - tried to find me theologically uncontroversial roles - a sheep or a donkey perhaps - but, in the end, they all had to face up to the limits of Jewish-Christian togetherness, I helped with make-up or costume, and the line was drawn.

A few years later, my second encounter was furtive, clandestine. Officially withdrawn from my school assemblies, which were all of a mainly Christian character, I was fascinated by the only thing that seemed to enliven my peers as they poured out of the school hall. "We had a parallel today." Years later, I found out that the word was 'parable', but they might have been right in the first place, even so.

So I snuk in in the hope of 'having a parallel' too. And sure enough, I struck lucky. I don't remember which it was, but I do remember huge disappointment. It was just another of the commonplace midrashim or hasidic tales I'd been brought up on - "There was once a king..." or "A rich man had two sons..." The only difference was the tedious, pedestrian insistence with which the headmistress explained us all to death after telling it.

Then a slightly more organised encounter - the back page of the Eagle comic. For a long time, the back page serialised great lives - Gordon of Khartoum, Nelson, Henry the Fifth, Jesus. Jesus in this comic strip story glowed amongst the glowering Semitic throng. Though I didn't recognise myself or any of my family in the crowd, I knew enough to recognise that anyone who didn't follow this blond, hunky but gentle, apotheosis was obtuse, stupid or, like the Mekon from Mars on the front page of the Eagle, simply committed to evil. However, having been nurtured in the business of living in two worlds, none of this impacted on the warm, coherent, joyous, Pharisaic inheritance than I was living in mid-20th century Britain.

Years later, I was at secondary school. My dearest friends were a Baptist and a Christadelphian. Somehow I felt I owed them the respect of reading the New Testament so that I'd know what moved them. So one weekend, going at the same pace as an orthodox Jew says his prayers or anyone might read a light novel on holiday, I whizzed through the Book. It was so Jewish! The arguments, the examples, the proofs, the preoccupations - I recognised them all as belonging more to my world than anything I had yet identified as Christian.

While reporting back to my friends about my impressions, I speculated on what might have happened to Jesus's children. "He didn't have any. He was unmarried," they chorused. "Of course he was," I said. "I've just read it." But they were convinced - and so I had to reread and, sure enough, nothing.

It took me some years to realise that I was so convinced Jesus was married because it didn't explicitly say he wasn't. From my point of view, from the Jewish point of view, to get to 30 and not be married requires comment and explanation!

Jesus in the Gospels

And the reason I made such unexamined assumptions was because I recognised Jesus's life described in the Gospels. I even felt immediately comfortable with the oh-so-Jewish, unselfconscious telling of the same story in four different gospels, from four different contradictory angles - as a tiny fraction, a glimpse into the world of the Talmud, snatched out and wondered over, a brief second in the span of time.

I easily recognised the Last Supper as most probably a Passover Seder (especially since Easter coincides with Pesakh), but had to wonder how come Jesus was welcomed into Jerusalem, according to the Gospels, about six days earlier, but with all the crowd behaviour of six months earlier, the festival of Sukkot - Tabernacles - when we wave palm branches and sing Hoshana - Save us?

I was even more puzzled by why everyone seemed to get so heated about whether or not Jesus thought he was the Son of God - aren't we all? - or even the Messiah - might not anyone be? And each gospel had its own angle, its own story. I could see, even at 17, what Matthew was doing. He was proving that all the prophecies relating to the Messiah were manifest in Jesus. Virgin birth? Tick. White donkey? Tick. Hanged on a tree? Tick. But I'd never been taught as a Jew to pay much attention to these details of messianic credential. How will we know the Messiah? Easy. The world will be at peace. Cross.

I could see Luke floundering in Jewish preoccupations he couldn't fathom. What were they all squabbling about? But with Mark and John, I felt more at home.

The world Mark describes sounds not dissimilar from the world I know from the Talmud and the Midrash, those compendia of rabbinic debate, quoting about 1000 rabbis, spanning nearly a 1000 years.

I recognised the pleasure in argument and verbal honing, the clever use of prooftexts, the camaraderie and generosity underlying disagreements, as the rabbis call them, for the sake of Heaven. I couldn't detect anything much Jesus says in the Gospel of Mark which couldn't also be found in the mouth of some rabbi - I want to say, some other Rabbi - in these great treasure stores of the Jewish relationship with revelation.

John's worldview is different. But I recognised it too. It carries all the cheerful anachronism of Midrash to prove its point. Just like John's contemporaries, the Rabbis of the Midrash, could have the twins, Jacob and Esau, struggle in Rebecca's womb as they respectively passed Houses of Study and gambling houses, despite the fact that they didn't - couldn't - have existed back then, mere historical precision is not the point. It's not so much the story of Jesus but a commentary, a didactic, a polemic on the story of Jesus.

By the time John writes, decades later, nuances are resolved into simple clarities. Them and us. 'The Jews' are now clearly the villains of the piece. Pilate - vicious, nasty, oppressive Pilate - nearly qualifies as a proto-Saint. In Mark, 'the Jews' includes Jesus and the disciples and just about everybody else. In John, they become the enemy.

The Scribes and the Pharisees

But that's clearly not how Jesus saw them. The Scribes and the Pharisees are his natural peers and he is clearly at home amongst them. The Pharisees were worker-teachers, proletarian democratisers of the tradition, cultivating the synagogue, prayer and good deeds as the means by which any Jew could secure salvation and by which the messianic age would be hastened. And not just any Jew.

"The righteous of all nations will inherit the World to Come," they taught. They claimed that God silenced his angels in heaven when they tried to praise him at the downfall of the Egyptians at the Red Sea. "There will be no rejoicing in my heavens at even the necessary destruction of my creatures", I learnt as a Jewish child, as those Pharisaic teachings rolled through the millennia to me.

These Pharisees taught the people in the marketplaces. The best of them had huge followings. They were ambivalent about eschatological talk. Would it distract ordinary folk from living the good life in the here and now? Would it stir up unnecessary conflict with the Roman rulers and occupiers? If all Jews could be helped to make the best of the world they lived in, wouldn't the coming of the Messiah look after itself?

Inheriting the prophetic tradition, they condemned hypocrisy and the excesses of the Temple industry. They loved the Temple and felt it to be the pinnacle of what was possible in God kissing the lips of the Jewish people and, through them, the world. But they certainly did not always condone the behaviour of the priests and their priestly party, the Sadducees. Indeed, the Talmud records an occasion one Sukkot, the festival of Tabernacles, when the obviously Pharisaically-educated and inspired crowd pelted the high priest as he mis-performed part of the ritual which had popular significance.

Passions ran high in those days. Religious details mattered. And they still do. When I read the account of Jesus being expelled from the synagogue for preaching something the crowd didn't like, I didn't even realise this was supposed to be controversial. I bet the Jewish Jesus - the one I recognise - would have been back the following week arguing the toss all over again.

Who was Jesus?

So, who then, do I, a practising Jew, think Jesus was? Even that question, of course, is Jewish. A Christian would be as interested, even more interested perhaps, in who Jesus is, not who he was.

But before I answer, I have to say that this is not the kind of question that Jews would ever bother to ask ourselves. After all, how often do Christians challenge themselves with questions as to where they would place Muhammad in their pantheon? Most Christians, quite reasonably, would say, "He doesn't come into our frame of reference." For the sake of peace and goodwill between communities, they might concede or agree that Muhammad was a good man or a great prophet or whatever, but it wouldn't be a Christian statement. So it is with Jews and Jesus.

So, from my very Jewish take on the world, who - what - was he?

Over the years, my view of Jesus has become a little more subtle than it was thirty and more years ago, when hardly anyone would listen to my insistence that Jesus was really very Jewish. Nowadays, the comment hardly raises an eyebrow - well, in Britain anyway. Since then, I've read a Hebrew translation of the Lord's Prayer and it sounds exactly like all those prayers that my prayer book is full of - selected quotations from the Psalms, knitted together to build to a crescendo of equilibrium between God's responsibilities to us and ours to Him, as best expressed through our dual duty to God and humanity.

I've looked more closely at Jesus's reported challenges to the religious teachers and authorities of his day and I can find nothing much shocking. Argument and polemical exaggeration are the stuff of Jewish debate. If a teacher condemns something and says it doesn't matter in comparison to something else, you shouldn't take their comments out of the context of how they actually behaved or what they said elsewhere. They may have just been making a point.

Those who enshrined the prophecies of Isaiah in the canon of the Bible - the Rabbis - didn't think he was urging the end of sacrifices just because he attacked those who offered sacrifice without also amending their moral behaviour. His statements are polemical and are making the strong - and who could disagree? - point that the ritual is a bit pointless if it doesn't lead to a concomitant improvement in behaviour.

I read Jesus and get his point exactly. Ritual is pointless without it having an impact on behaviour. When Mark, for example, says that Jesus's comments that eating the right foods doesn't make you righteous inside indicates that he thus declared all foods 'clean', he doesn't explain that those listening to him - even his own closest disciples - didn't understand it that way. Later, in the Acts of the Apostles, they still debated whether or not converts to Christianity should observe the dietary and other laws.

Similarly, Jesus's comments on Shabbat observance are the very stuff of Pharisaic dispute. We know so much about Pharisaic dispute because the rabbinic tradition did not suppress opinions which didn't chime with the consensus. All the variant opinions are recorded in the Talmud. Disagreeing wasn't a crime. Nor was claiming to be the Messiah - as several failed claimants have done before and since.

So it's fairly easy to see Jesus as a Pharisee from the Liberal wing, probably heavily influenced by the Messianic fervour that was current and, apparently deeply impressed by John the Baptist who may have been associated with the Essenes or some other such separatist sect. He was deeply bothered by the Temple excesses of the time, didn't want to get involved in the politics, and wanted the people to be take themselves seriously as being able to bring about God's kingdom on Earth by right living.

But I can't see Jesus as the Messiah we Jews are waiting for. And nor, as the Gospel accounts themselves make clear, could the disciples who knew him once he was executed. After the crucifixion, the disciples did not sit around calmly and reassure each other that all was going according to plan. They were instead understandably devastated. This was not the messianic plan. Nothing in Jewish teaching had suggested the execution of the Messiah. Not one of them was able to come up with the idea that this was all as it should be. It wasn't. They had invested their faith in this man and he was now dead.

And this is the fresh mystery at the heart of the Christian story - and one which raises no echoes or meaning for Jews. Something happened back then that first Easter that persuaded those disheartened followers that what they'd been expecting and waiting for, what they believed Jesus was about despite - or because of? - their years of living in his company and hearing his teachings - wasn't the point after all. It was all entirely different to the way Jews had understood the idea of the messiah for centuries... and still do.

And fair enough. But you'll have to understand when we Jews look at the claims made about Jesus with incomprehension and remain true to our own tradition. After all, Jesus did.

Converting to Judaism

Converting to Judaism is not easy. It involves many lifestyle changes and about a year of studying.

Becoming a Jew is not just a religious change: the convert not only accepts the Jewish faith, but becomes a member of the Jewish People and embraces Jewish culture and history.

Conversion and Jewish law

Conversion to Judaism is a process governed by Jewish religious law. Conversions are overseen by a religious court, which must be convinced that the convert:

• is sincere
• is converting for the right reasons
• is converting of their own free will
• has a thorough knowledge of Jewish faith and practices
• will live an observant Jewish life

There are also two ritual requirements:

• a male convert must undergo circumcision - if they are already circumcised, a single drop of blood is drawn as a symbolic circumcision
• the convert must undergo immersion in a Jewish ritual bath, a mikveh, with appropriate prayers

Judaism and conversion

Judaism is not a missionary faith and so doesn't actively try to convert people (in many countries anti-Jewish laws prohibited this for centuries).

Despite this, the modern Jewish community increasingly welcomes would-be converts.

A person who converts to Judaism becomes a Jew in every sense of the word, and is just as Jewish as someone born into Judaism. There is a good precedent for this; Ruth, the great-great grandmother of King David, was a convert.

Note: Not all Jewish conversions are accepted by all Jews. The more Orthodox a community is the less likely it is to accept a conversion done in a more liberal movement.

Orthodox Jews usually don't accept the validity of conversions done by non-Orthodox institutions - because many Orthodox Jewish communities do not accept that non-Orthodox rabbis have valid rabbinical status.

Heart and Soul spoke to people who chose to take the difficult path to convert to Judaism. Among those interviewed were Theo Heser, a former member of the Hitler Youth, who sees his conversion as an act of atonement.

Why convert?

The most common reasons put forward are:

• because the person believes the faith and culture of the Jewish people is right for them
• in order to marry someone Jewish
• in order to bring up children with a Jewish identity

But only the first of these should be accepted as the true reason for conversion - the convert must have an overpowering wish to join the Jewish people and share in their destiny, and be committed to loving God and following his wishes as expressed in the Torah.

There is no other reason that can enable a person to truly enter the covenant between God and the Jewish people, and do it freely, without reservation, forever, and to the exclusion of all other faiths.

How to convert

Different forms of Judaism have different conversion mechanisms, but this outline of what is involved covers the basics for all:

• discuss possible conversion with a rabbi
• study Jewish beliefs, history, rituals and practices
• learn some Hebrew
• get involved with Jewish community life
• believe in G-d and the divinity of the Torah
• agree to observe all 613 mitzvot (commandments) of the Torah
• agree to live a fully Jewish life
• circumcision (men only)
• immersion in a mikveh or ritual bath
• appear before a Bet Din (a religious court) and obtain their approval

Talking to the rabbi

Conversion to Judaism is not something to be done lightly. The rabbi will want to make sure that the person really wants to convert, and that they know what they're doing.

Some rabbis used to test would-be converts by turning them away three times, in order to see how sincere and determined they are. This is unusual nowadays.

If a person doesn't know any rabbis to discuss conversion with, they probably haven't got close enough to Judaism and Jewish life to be thinking of converting. They should start by talking to Jewish people, and attending some synagogue services.

The rabbi asks the would-be convert a lot of questions - not just as a test of their sincerity, but in order to help the convert form a clear understanding of what they want to do:

• Why do you want to convert?
• What do you know about Judaism?
• Are you converting of your own free will?
• Have you discussed conversion with your family?
• Will you accept Judaism as your only religious faith and practice?
• Will you enter into the covenant between God and the Jewish people?
• Will you bring up your children as Jews?
• Are you willing to study in order to convert?
• Will you live as a member of the Jewish people?

Studying

Would-be converts study Jewish beliefs, rituals, history, culture (including some Hebrew) and customs.

They do this through courses, or by individual study with a rabbi. At the same time they will start going to services, joining in home practices (with members of their local community) and taking part in synagogue life.

Information Taken from: https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/judaism/