Judaism
bringing ancient tribal religion of the Middle East
into contemporary culture
Antisemitism is on the rise.
It's nothing new.
The Jews have inspired hatred
in many times and places
almost wherever and whenever
they have been
an identifiable minority.
They began, as did every human grouping
as a tribal people.
Humans have been tribal far longer
than we have been races, ethnic groups, nations,
or any other mythical form of identification.
The Jews brought their tribe (or tribes)
into many other societies,
and sometimes they were welcome
at least at first.
Their uniqueness and their ability to stand out
among other peoples
is based on their history.
Their history reaches all the way back
to the founding myth of 3 Western religions.
Abraham is the father figure.
His faith in one God became the basis for
ethical monotheism.
Abraham's one God was YHWH,
Who became the tribal god
of the 12 ancient tribes
who claimed to be descendents
of Abraham.
His near sacrifice of his favored son
became the myth at the core
of the relationship of the one God
with the people of the one God.
You see, human sacrifice was the rule
in Abraham's time.
The first born male child
had to be offered to the gods.
Before slaughtering his favored son on the altar,
Abraham heard a voice,
his own conscience?
the voice of YHWH?
his love for his son?
Whatever the origin of the voice,
Abraham heard that he was not to kill the boy,
and a substitute sacrifice was offered instead.
From that one experience of hearing a voice,
Judaism, Christianity and Islam were born.
Whether any such single event ever happened,
whether there was ever such a person as Abraham,
the story is part of the foundation
of the faiths and societies most familiar to us.
In the myths of Genesis,
Abraham's favored son had two sons,
and from his son Jacob, aka Israel,
were born twelve patriarchs,
each of them the father of a tribe,
the Twelve Tribes of Israel.
All of those Tribes ended up in Egypt
during a time of terrible famine.
All twelve escaped slavery
during a highly mythological miracle,
the crossing of the Red (or Reed) Sea.
All twelve tribes settled in Canaan,
usurping, and not for the last time,
land that had previously belonged to others.
Over the ensuing centuries,
two nations were formed of the Twelve Tribes,
Israel and Judah, north and south.
The northern kingdom was overrun by Assyrians,
and the southern kingdom became a vassal state.
The northern tribes of Israel were lost to history,
but not to themselves:
they were simply assimilated
and became the Samaritans.
The southern tribe and nation of Judah
was taken away by the Babylonians
and returned by the Persians.
The legend of the Twelve Lost Tribes of Israel
(Judah and Levi, the priestly tribe were never lost.)
became an obsession
especially in the United States
in the early 19th Century.
One new myth,
that the Twelve Tribes were led to North America,
became the basis for the Mormon church (LDS).
(We'll talk more about all that later!)
While the Judahites of old were in captivity
in Babylon,
the term Judahite was shortened to Jew
and their tribal religion
became known as Judaism.
Much of the Hebrew Bible was compiled in Babylon
as well as the Babylonian Talmud,
both of which laid the foundation
of Rabbinic Judaism as we know it today.
After all, those Jewish priests and scribes,
now without their Temple,
needed something worthwhile to do!
The Law, the Prophets and the Writings were what
the Jews called the Scriptures,
what we call the Old Testament.
By the end of the first century of the Common Era,
the Hebrew Bible had taken on most of the form
that we know today.
The Jews did not all leave Babylon,
and beginning in the era following the Exile,
they began to scatter all over the known world.
Under Greek rule following Alexander the Great,
many Jews were Hellenized,
which means mostly that they spoke Greek.
Accordingly, a translation of the Hebrew Bible,
called the Septuagint, came into being.
The myth of its development
was that Seventy scholars (hence Septuagint)
were sequestered to translate
the Five Books of the Law, the Torah.
When they emerged with their translations,
they were exactly the same, word for word.
Their miraculously produced translation
was used all over the Greek and Roman world,
and it became the Bible of the early Christians,
at least during the century or two
in which the New Testament was being
written and compiled.
The schools of rabbis who were teaching and writing
during the first century of the Common Era
became the foundation of Rabbinic Judaism.
One of those rabbis who founded a school
seeking to reform Judaism
was Rabbi Jesus ben Joseph,
Jesus of Nazareth.
Under Roman rule in their province of Syria,
Jerusalem had a great deal of autonomy.
The Jewish Temple functioned
under a Jewish council,
and a religious - political party,
the Saducees, prevailed.
A different party, the Pharisees,
developed synagogues
which were found in virtually every town
in Judea, the Greco-Latin name for Judah.
There were also synagogues all over the Empire.
Most of the Jews outside of Galilee and Judea
spoke Greek and were at home in Rome.
Many of the Jews in the home country
were also thoroughly acculturated to Rome,
but by no means all.
A third party among them, the Zealots,
sought to rebel against Rome,
and that rebellion inevitably ended in tragedy,
more than once.
Religious extremism generally does not end well,
and it sometimes does not expect to end well,
at least in this world.
It is a lesson that the modern world needs to learn:
No matter what we may believe,
the idea that we alone are right,
and that we must impose our beliefs on others
will result in destruction and death,
most of all on those of us
who believe and behave in such a way.
In 70 C.E. Roman legions destroyed Jerusalem
and the Jewish Temple.
The Temple has never been rebuilt,
so Judaism today is built upon the synagogue,
the local gathering place anywhere
in which Jews can study their scriptures
and worship their God.
The rabbis of every time and place
since the fall of the Temple
have found ways to adapt their communities
to the world in which they live
while living out their traditions
and fulfilling the Mission of Israel.
As I understand that Mission,
it is simply to show and teach the world
about the loving concern of the one God of the Jews
for all people, including the Jews.
This Mission alone would not be enough to inspire
the kind of hatred Jewish people have experienced
in our own times and places
and for centuries past in many other lands.
Religious and political leaders can too easily invoke
ancient tribal hatred and prejudice,
twisting it to their own advantage.
With the holocaust,
the murder of at least 6 million Jews,
a new kind and degree of organized hatred
resulted in brutal antisemitism
with totally destructive violence.
Today the denial that the holocaust took place
or was as bad as history records
is itself an expression of antisemitism.
The establishment of a Jewish state in the late 1940s
has brought about a new hope for many Jews
while exacerbating hatred in their own homelands.
There were people already in the land in the 1940s
just as there were when the tribes first wandered in
from Egypt,
and some of those people did not and do not
want to assimilate
and become part of the Jewish tribe.
There are no easy answers,
either for the hatred seen in Israel
or for that seen in Coeur D'Alene
and other cities here
and around the world.
Yet as Unitarian Universalists,
whether or not we believe in the God of the Jews
at all,
we do believe in coexistence
with people of every tribe and nation.
If we live up to our own principles,
we can lead the way in our own UU mission
to a way of life that can bring peace on Earth
and hope to all kinds of people,
Jews and Gentiles
and those who consider themselves
to be neither.
Shalom!
Peace, Salaam, Shalom!
Omeyn.
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