World Religions- Judaism

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The tradition of Judaism links the ancient and modern worlds in the West in much the same way that the Hindu tradition does in the East. It forms part of the triad of Abrahamic religions, along with Christianity and Islam, that have defined Western monotheism. For if any single concept characterizes religion in the West, it would have to be the belief in one God, omnipotent and omnipresent. "The Lord is one," says a part of the Hebrew Bible that reaches back over 3,000 years. And nearly 1700 years later, the Islamic Quran declared, "There is no god but God."

Monotheism had made other appearances before Moses codified it, most notably in Egypt, where Moses was born, but the Jewish tradition is the one responsible for establishing the concept firmly and irrevocably in Western culture. It's clear from the Hebrew Bible that monotheism developed slowly, from a belief that the tribal God of the Hebrews named Yahweh was simply the most important and powerful of many gods. The many early references to God in the plural make that obvious. Still, the God of Israel is a personal God, and an ethically demanding one, and this combination of characteristics was unique for its time. Unlike most other deities of comparable antiquity, the God of Judaism is never described or given any visual image, nor, in the strict sense, is God's name even to be spoken aloud. Yet this God interacts directly and decisively with humanity.

The Hebrew God is a sky god meant to supplant the many manifestations of the more ancient Goddess in the Mediterranean region. This male identity was passed on to Christianity and Islam, separating these three traditions from the rest of the world's conception of the Absolute in a significant way. The idolatry that the monotheistic traditions so violently opposed was in large part the much older, female-centered worship of the Goddess.

The Jewish people themselves have wandered the earth for nearly 2000 years, from the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in the year 70 until the founding of the State of Isreael in 1948. Their numbers are relatively small today -- only about 15 million -- but the Hebrew conception of God is at the core of Christianity and Islam, indelibly coloring these two religions that between them account for nearly half the earth's population.

Judaism may have evolved significantly from the early era of animal sacrifices, but there are ways in which it hasn't changed from its very earliest roots. Every week in synagogues around the world, observant Jews still proclaim one of the oldest passages in the Bible, "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one." (Deuteronomy 6:4)

The outstanding feature of the Hebrew Bible is the role of God as directly intervening in history to guide the Israelites out of bondage and into their role as a nation of priests and a "holy people." The Hebrews may have conceived God as absolute, omnipotent, and omnipresent, but He was also extremely personal, capable of forming a direct relationship with selected individuals to change the course of history.

The earliest passages of the creation scenario in Genesis, the first book of the Bible, make clear that God approved of the physical or material world. After each act of creation beginning with the separation of the waters and the dry land into Earth and Seas on the third of the six days of creation, the passage appears: "And God saw that it was good." Unlike Eastern concepts of Maya, which view the phenomenal world as a manifestation that veils Absolute Reality, the Hebrews accepted the essential goodness of material things, and saw a holy life as indivisible from a life of enjoyment of God's bounty, as long as certain inviolable moral laws were obeyed. But unlike the Goddess-and-nature-worshiping cultures of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian lands surrounding them, the Israelites believed that God exists apart from the material world, and has the power to affect and change it through His interactions with humanity. The Israelite sense of enjoying the world was predicated on following God's explicit law, rather than appeasing arbitrary gods connected with unpredictable forces of nature.

The Jewish religion is, then, closely tied to history. Abraham, the patriarch of the Jewish people, who migrated to the Holy Land from the Mesopotamian city of Ur, can be placed near the beginning of the second millennium before the Christian era. The Pharaoh from whom the Jews escaped under the leadership of Moses can almost certainly be identified as Rameses II (1304-1237 BCE).Comparisons of the king-lists in the early books of the Bible with non-Biblical Egyptian and Assyrian lists even make it possible to date within a few years the deaths of the earliest kings of the Israelites, including Saul, David, and Solomon, near the beginning of the first millennium BCE. The fall of Jerusalem can be placed exactly at March 16, 597 BCE, its destruction in 586.

The creation account in the opening chapter of Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible, is familiar throughout the entire Western world. It has even been said that this scenario, in which God brings forth the earth and everything on it in a burst of creation, fits in with modern scientific theories about the origin of the universe, specifically the Big Bang. Scholars have shown conclusively that Genesis reflects earlier accounts from Sumerian and Babylonian literature, and that it is the product of several authors and editors, none of whom is likely to have been Moses, to whom the first five books, also known as the Torah, arev traditionally attributed. The uneven narrative even incorporates two distinctly different stories of creation, and has God speaking in the plural, as if to confirm the impression that for the earliest Hebrews, Yahweh was understood as the most powerful god among many. On the sixth day of creation, God says, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" (1:26). And in the famous account of the temptation by the serpent, who "beguiled" Eve into eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (no mention of an "apple," by the way), which she passed on to Adam. God then observes, "Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil."

Confusing matters further is the fact that Judaism has sternly forbidden the creation of physical images of God, while Genesis again states that God created man in His image and likeness. But the notion of humanity mirroring God helps to underline a crucial contribution of Judaic theology -- the belief that human life itself is sacred because it is modeled after the Supreme Being.

The early chapters of Genesis also narrate the familiar stories of Cain slaying his brother Abel, the general decline in humanity following the fall of Adam, and the Flood sent by God to punish the wicked ways into which men and women had descended. This story, in which God selects the one righteous man left on earth, Noah, and commands him to build an ark to preserve human and animal life, has unmistakable parallels in pre-existing literature of the region. Archaeologists agree that a real flood or floods of astonishing proportions did take place in the region of Babylonia and Sumeria sometime during the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE. An ancient Babylonian account written in the 17th century BCE describes a flood sent by a god who regrets having created humanity. In this story, another god intervenes to warn a priest-king named Ziusudra, who survives by building a large boat. An early Sumerian king-list identifies Ziusudra as king of the city of Shuruppak in Babylonia c.2900 BCE. Whether the Biblical authors were relating a story that had been handed down to them, or reinterpreting an old narrative in a moralistic, monotheistic context, is hard to say.

Abram, a descendant of Noah whose name God later changes to Abraham, is said to have come from Ur, an historical Sumerian city of the 4th and 3rd millennia, not far from Shuruppak. God directs him to leave his father's house and go "to the land that I will show you." Further, God promises to make of Abram's descendants "a great nation," and makes a covenant with him, saying: "To your descendants I will give this land." Historically, the Hebrews probably began as one of a group of wandering tribes known as Habiru, a hard-to-classify group of herders, often warlike and predatory, who roamed the regions of Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in search of water and pastures. They tended to settle near established kingdoms until their numbers grew too great and the local powers urged them to move on. The image of the Jewish people as "strangers and sojourners" appears repeatedly in the Bible, and in retrospect appears to have had prophetic overtones.

The fact that Abram came from a highly civilized city such as Ur explains his sophistication in dealing with the various local kings he encounters, and finally in executing the covenant with God, accepting obedience to a higher moral law in exchange for land for him and his descendants. That covenant, originally offered to Noah after the Flood, is a continuing theme throughout the first five books of the Bible as it passes on from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob (whose name is changed by the Lord to Israel). The covenant is not merely inherited, however; it is renewed personally by God in each instance, as when God appears to Jacob and says, "I am God Almighty: be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a company of nations shall be of thee, and kings shall come out of thy loins. And the land which I gave to Abraham and Isaac, to thee I will give it, and to thy seed after thee will I give the land." (Gen. 35:11-12)

The same covenant is later renewed with Moses, who in some ways played a more decisive role in the evolution of Judaism than Abraham did. Abraham was the founding father of the Hebrew people, but Moses was the one whose leadership and shaping of the laws formulated the essential Jewish contribution to world religious thought. The Promised Land of the covenant took on greater significance as the Israelites sojourned in Egypt as a slave people, and dreamed of returning. The land was generally referred to as the land of Canaan, roughly corresponding to later Palestine and modern day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel. Although the Hebrews inhabited Canaan in small numbers before the Egyptian captivity, and many never left to go to Egypt, it was not made into an Israelite nation until the return of Moses and Joshua from Egypt.

The Biblical narratives are distinguished by portrayals of historical figures that lend the accounts an undeniable air of realism. Nowhere are the storiesand characters more compelling than the account in the Book of Exodus of the Israelites' escape from the powerful Egyptian empire to which they had become slaves, and their eventual deliverance into the Promised Land of Canaan. The narrative begins in Genesis when Joseph, one of the twelve sons of Jacob, is sold into slavery by his step-brothers, and works his way up the ladder, from servant in the house of an officer of Pharaoh to virtual co-ruler of Egypt under Pharaoh. His success derives largely from his ability to interpret Pharaoh's dreams and thereby predict, and prepare for, a serious famine, which ensures a high place for Joseph in the Pharaoh's government.

The Book of Exodus then begins sometime after the death of both Joseph and Pharaoh, however, when a new Egyptian ruler has become concerned about the growing presence of the Hebrews in his land and downgrades them to the status of slaves. The new Pharaoh, who has been identified historically as Rameses II, puts the Hebrews to work in his massive building program, and makes "their lives bitter with hard service, in mortar and brick, and in all kinds of work in the field."

The man who will lead them out of bondage, Moses is born to Hebrew parents during the stage of Egyptian captivity when all male children of the Hebrews were to be put to death at birth. Moses' mother leaves him in a basket made of bulrushes at the riverbank, and the Pharaoh's daughter discovers him there. But when the adult Moses sees an Egyptian beating a fellow Hebrew, he kills the man and hides his body in the sand. Found out, he flees from Egypt to the land of Midian, where God appears to him "in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush." Identifying Himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, He promises to deliver Moses's people "out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey."

Exodus then recounts the stunning escape of the Israelites from Pharaoh around 1260 BCE, and Moses' role in leading his people out through the desert and up to the Promised Land of Canaan. In the process, Moses receives for transmission to the Israelites the Ten Commandments, plus a long list of other laws, known as mitzvot, most of which have to do with making restitution for various accidental or intentional injuries to the person or livestock of one's neighbors. (Later tradition attributed the number of these laws as 613, which does not correspond to the number of laws actually stated in the relevant books of the Bible.)

When Moses first encounters God in the burning bush in Exodus 3, and God tells Moses that He has "come down to deliver" the Israelites from the Egyptians, Moses asks by what name he should refer to God when he reports his vision to the people. God answers, "Eheish Asher Eheieh," ("I Am Who I Am" or "I Am What I Am"), and goes on, "Say this to the people of Israel, `I AM has sent me to you.'"

Early in the Bible God is referred to as El, a common Semitic name for God, and the plural Elohim. Elsewhere El Elion, "Most High God," seems to confirm the existence of a pantheon of lesser gods. But by far the most common name used is Yahveh, a simplified pronunciation of the Hebrew consonants Yod Hay Vav Hay (YHVH), which are not to be spoken by pious Jews except in the sanctuary. They may substitute Adonai, "My Lord," or Elohim. The four consonants are also known by the Greek term Tetragrammaton and the Hebrew Shem ha-Meforash (shortened to Hashem, "The Name," and said in lieu of YHVH). A modern scholar, Merlin Stone, has pointed out the close relation of the name to the Sanskrit word yahveh, "everflowing," which seems like a fair description of the fire and smoke that continually emit from Mt. Sinai when the Lord is present there. During the 16th century, the name Yahveh was distorted by Christian readers of the Bible into Jehovah. But even Yahveh is just an approximation of how the four sacred syllables are to be pronounced, which is the subject of much esoteric study and speculation.

By the beginning of the first millennium BCE, the Kingdom of Israel was largely unified, although still composed of many small tribal groups under separate leaders. These tribes often fought against each other, until the threatening presence on the coastal plain of the Philistines (Palestine is named for them) compelled them to unite against a common enemy. Having accomplished their objective of conquering Canaan and now obliged to hold it against tribal aggressors from outside, the Israelites settled into a period of Kingship during which their original theocracy was often at odds with the evolving military and legal rulers. Incursions by the Philistines with their iron weapons increasingly created the need for a centralized military government to defend the newly conquered country from other would-be conquerors. The first king was Saul (d.c.1005 BCE), who was anointed by the early judge and prophet Samuel after the Jews insisted on having a king (but not before Samuel warned them repeatedly of the dangers of kingship, and laid out its various rights and duties at some length). When Saul failed to follow God's orders, Samuel denounced him, and after Saul's death he replaced him with David (d.c.966 BCE).

David's 40-year reign was the most successful in Jewish history, combining military security with theocratic openness. A poet and musician as well as a great leader, David is remembered for composing a number of the Psalms and slaying the great Philistine "champion," Goliath, with a stone from a sling. He went on to defeat the Philistines and to conquer the city of Jerusalem, which was then still held by the Jebusites. Solomon (c. 961-925 BCE), a son of David, proved to be a pragmatic and sometimes ruthless king, with several foreign wives, including the daughter of the Egyptian pharaoh. He built a famed Temple which contained a completely dark inner sanctum known as the Holy of Holies, in which the Ark of the Covenant resided. Sometime after the death of Solomon, the Israelites, made up of two small kingdoms in the area of Palestine -- Israel in the north and Judah in the south -- split apart and were destroyed separately by outside forces. The Assyrians invaded the Kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE, removing the elite and skilled laborers back to Assyria, and resettling the region with their own people, eradicating 10 of Israel's 12 tribes in the process. The Kingdom of Judah lasted some time longer, but finally fell to the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar, who conquered the city of Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple of Solomon in 587 BC.

Before the destruction of Israel, a series of prophets had arisen in the land, taking the rich and powerful to task and foretelling God's vengeance if His laws were not followed. Elijah of Tishbi, who denounced the infamous Ahab and Jezebel in the 9th century BCE, was the first prophet to support the individual conscience. The Lord spoke to him in a "still, small voice," a phrase that has come to define the inner urgings of a spiritual conscience. His preaching that even kings had to answer to inner principles was not popular, and he spent most of his life as a fugitive.

Hosea, a prophet at the time of the breakup of the Northern Kingdom of the Israelites, predicted its downfall, and traced the causes to the moral failings of the chosen people, their violence and political purges, institutionalized priesthood, and backsliding into pagan activities, saying, "They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind." Isaiah was a prophet of the 8th century BCE, although the second half of the book attributed to him in the Hebrew Bible was composed a century or two later by an unknown prophet referred to as Deutero-Isaiah. He predicted the coming of a Messiah (Ma-shi-akh), a savior who would lead the people out of darkness, a "Prince of Peace." These prophesies were later quoted in the Christian New Testament as proof that Christ's coming had been predicted by the prophets. However, the Jewish Messiah was supposed to gather the Jews to Israel from all over the world and usher in an era of universal peace, events which clearly have not yet happened.vFinally, Jeremiah railed against the impending collapse of the Southern Kingdom, Judah, in fatalistic fashion -- a long, virulent tirade that has given us the word "jeremiad."

Toward the end, the prophets looked on the impending doom as part of God's will, saying that whatever happens is meant to be and should be accepted, including the destruction of the Israelite kingdom. In 597 BCE, the city of Jerusalem was conquered by the Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar, and the Diaspora, or dispersal of the Israelites, began. By 586 BCE, Jerusalem itself had fallen, and the Temple of Solomon was destroyed. The Temple was rebuilt 70 years later--called the Second Temple--only to be destroyed again, for good, by the Romans in 70 CE.

The later prophets, especially Hosea and Isaiah, not only opposed the institutionalized priestly religion of ritual and sacrifice, but also insisted on the need for social justice. The forcible admonitions of the prophets laid the groundwork for a tradition of social justice and change which is deeply ingrained in Western thought.

The Jewish people have lived many more years in exile than in their homeland. During the 50-year period of Exile, also known as the Babylonian Captivity, that began in 586 BCE, the Jews began the strict observance of religious laws and rituals they now needed to hold them together. The identification of Judaism with an ethnic and cultural bond as much as a set of religious principles probably had its beginnings in this period of dispersion. Circumcision, the Sabbath, the feasts of Passover (commemorating the escape from Egypt and the founding of Israel), Shabuot (the giving of the Law to Moses), Tabernacles (wandering in the desert), Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), and Rosh Hashannah (the New Year) became part of every Jew's life, and were passed along with the laws and scriptures from generation to generation.

Between 450 and 200 BCE, the Hebrew Bible was assembled in close to its current arrangement, and the Jews who had returned to Jerusalem all gathered to sign a new covenant to agree to follow its teachings, marking the official inauguration of the religion of Judaism as based on the Biblical texts. The first five books of the Bible, known as the Torah and later by the Greek term Pentateuch ("five books"), were probably canonized late in the 7th century BCE. In Judaism, the canon originally referred to the Torah, and by the 3rd century BCE was expanded to include the books of the prophets and others.

Officially sealed early in the Christian era, with no more additions or changes to be allowed, the Bible was taught in specially designed centers of learning called synagogues. As worship by blood sacrifice faded from Judaism, it was gradually supplanted by prayer and Torah study; the priest and scribe were replaced by the rabbi, a man specially trained to teach the Law and the Scriptures. Talmudic scholars deliberated on and taught the law in a yeshivah (pl.yeshivot), which in medieval and modern times became the center of training for rabbis and religious scholars.

The 39 books of the Hebrew Bible are divided into three categories. The first five books, collectively called the Torah or Chumash in Hebrew and the Pentateuch in Greek, are, in English, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy (their Hebrew names have different meanings). Genesis and exodus tell the story of creation, the Flood, God's selection of Abraham as the Patriarch of the Jewish people, Joseph's rise to power in Egypt, the Egyptian captivity, Moses' selection by God to lead the Israelites out of Egypt to the Promised Land, and the giving of the Law to Moses on Mt. Sinai. The last three books continue the saga of the 40 years of wandering in the desert, ending with the death of Moses and the entry into the Promised Land. More significantly, they contain the laws and ordinances covering the entire range of civil and criminal law, ritual and sacrificial rules, moral and ethical commandments.

Although tradition insists that Moses authored the Torah, modern scholarship has shown the books to be the work of at least four main sources and probably many other writers and editors over a long period of time. Different scriptural documents, the oldest of which date to the 9th and 8th centuries BCE, were cobbled together, traditionally by Ezra the Scribe in the mid-5th century BC, although the redacting process began before then and continued to some extent after the destruction of the Second Temple. A controversial recent book makes the case that, based on internal evidence, the author of a large portion of the original material was a woman. A number of other recent books by feminist scholars make the convincing argument that when the Hebrew Bible was given its final major redaction in the 5th century BCE, the scribes went out of their way to discredit the Goddess worship that had not been totally eradicated from the land they had occupied.

The two other groupings of books are the Prophets, or Neviim, and the Holy or Wisdom Writings, or Ketubim, which include the Psalms and Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs. All of these were canonized under Rabbi Johanen ben Zakkai between 70 and 132 CE. The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, or Septuagint, reputedly begun by 72 Jewish scholars brought from Jerusalem to Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy II (c. 270 BCE), was probably completed by the time of Christ, and varies only slightly from the Hebrew original, which is known as the Masoretic text.

As a spoken language, Hebrew had been supplanted by Aramaic sometime around the 5th or 6th century BCE -- Jesus spoke Aramaic, as did most Jews of his day in Judea. During the Diaspora, Aramaic was replaced by Greek and later by many locally derived languages, especially Yiddish, as the common spoken language of Jews. Hebrew was reserved for liturgical purposes and sacred writings, and so remained virtually unchanged for thousands of years. With the founding of Israel, however, Hebrew once more became a spoken language, the national tongue of Israel, and the process of evolution has recommenced.

Next to the Bible, the Talmud is the most important source of Jewish spiritual teaching. It is much larger and more complex than the Bible, and combines volumes containing many different layers and kinds of material. Its contents fall roughly into three groups: Mishnah, Gemara, and Midrash.

I. Mishnah is the code of Oral Law elaborated largely by the Pharisees in the two or three centuries before the Great Revolt. The Pharisees were the liberal Jews of their day, responsible for doing away with slavery well before other ancient societies did. They interpreted the written law and scriptures to fit changes in the social and political situation under Greek and Roman rule. The written Mishnah code, begun early in the 2nd century by Rabbi Akiba ben Josef and his disciple Meir, was edited into final form around 200 by Judah Ha-Nasi and his followers. Rather than a strict code of laws, it is a compilation of the opinions and rulings of previous rabbinical sages and scholars on a wide variety of situations -- giving the majority and dissenting opinions in many cases -- and is used as a guideline. These sages were known as Tannaim ("Teachers"); the two most prominent were Hillel the Elder and Shammai.

II. Gemara is the commentary on the Mishnah compiled by the Amoraim, successors to the Tannaim whose opinions made up the Mishnah. Gemara is what is technically meant by the term Talmud, and is often referred to as the Talmud proper. Two sets of Gemara were created, one in Bablylonia completed by the 4th or 5th century, and one in Palestine, known as the Jerusalem Talmud, completed about a century earlier. Both are incomplete, commenting on a little more than half the treatises in the Mishnah, yet they comprise numerous volumes representing the work of hundreds of scholars over several centuries.

III. Midrash is an assessment of the Bible, but especially the Pentateuch, aimed at clarifying various points of law. Compiled over a thousand year period ending in 1040, it consists mainly of various forms of anecdotal and allegorical material that often began as sermons or homilies based around a passage of Scripture -- a method that later became popular with Christians.

The Talmud as a whole is formed of two kinds of material: halakha and aggada. The halakhah includes all the legal decisions in the Mishnah and the two Gemaras; the aggadah comprises a wide range of legends, myths, anecdotes, parables, and aphorisms aimed at explaining the laws, beliefs, and rituals of the Mishnah to the common folk. This material expands as it expounds, in the process creating a colorful body of folk material. The whole massive, often confusing corpus of laws, commentaries, and anecdotal accompaniments, is referred to popularly by Jews as "The Sea of the Talmud."

Because Judaism accepted and incorporated seemingly heterodox belief systems rather than strain a community under fire from outside forces, the mystical practice and study known as Kabbalah was allowed to grow alongside mainstream Judaism. (In the 17th century, however, the Rabbis ruled that, because it contained advanced an potentially danmgerous spiritual knowledge, Kabbalah should be studied only by married men over 40 who were also adept in Talmud and Torah.) Kabbalah offered Jews a mystical approach to religion within the context of the accepted beliefs and practices of Judaism. By modern times, Kabbalistic themes had entered the Jewish mainstream, influencing certain prayers and liturgies and contributing its own set of customs and folk beliefs, notably belief in reincarnation.

Originally, the word Kabbalah, from a root meaning "to receive," referred to the received tradition of the Bible, but it later came to signify esoteric wisdom known only to a select few. Seeing physical creation as a manifestation of the Divine Word, Kabbalah assigned detailed descriptions of God's body parts along with secret names and numerical interpretations of scriptural texts. Kabbalists believe that the letters of the Torah, along with the numbers they symbolize, provide a direct knowledge of God in the classic mystical sense; the mystical combination of these letters is one of the major techniques of Jewish mysticism. The magical or occult elements of Kabbalah developed separately from the mystical theology, and from about the 15th century, the two sets of teachings became known respectively as "Practical Kabbalah" and "Speculative Kabbalah." The aim of the latter was to give the Kabbalist inner spiritual guidance; the former delved into the more questionable realms of white (helpful) and black (harmful) magic.

During the long period spent under Babylon from the 6th to 11th century, Judaism was influenced by many of the mystical and magical concepts derived from Egyptian, Hellenistic, and Persian sources. These found their way into the underground stream of Kabbalism which surfaced during the early Middle Ages in Europe, incorporating the Hindu concept of reincarnation with Babylonian astrology and the numerology of Greek philosopher and mystic Pythagoras (of "music of the Spheres" fame). Numerology, the study of the occult significance of numbers, became an especially significant part of Kabbalah.

The blend of disparate sources matured among the Provencal Sephardic Jews in the late 12th century from the work of Judah Halevi (c. 1075-1142), the great Jewish poet of the Middle Ages, and later in Catalonia and Castile in Spain, and favored direct experience of God over the intellectual, rationalist approach. It drew on earlier Kabbalistic texts like the Sefir Yetzirah (c.100-500), attributed to Rabbi Akiba ben Josef. Among other things, Kabbalists believed that each of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet had a specific meaning and a numerical counterpart. When properly combined and added, these values would release great creative powers inherent in the "Word." They taught that particularly the first five chapters of Genesis were written in a kind of code that could be correctly interpreted only by knowing the specific values of each Hebrew letter.

Some Kabbalists argued that the original Hebrew of the Bible was purposely altered to hide certain secret knowledge when it was translated into Greek for the Septuagint and later into Latin by St. Jerome. Only by learning the Kabbalistic values of the Hebrew letters was it possible to unravel the deeper, esoteric meaning of the Torah.

The Provencal Kabbalist Isaac the Blind (d.c.1235), who was the first to refer to God as En Sof ("Without End," or "Infinite"), and Rabbi Moses ben Nahman (better known by the acronym Ramban, 1194-1270), who supported Kabbalistic mysticism and brought it into the mainstream in Spain, were among those most responsible for the development and spread of Kabbalistic mysticism in Europe. The concept of En Sof as the undifferentiated Absolute beyond comprehension is key to the identity of the Kabbalah as an esoteric study, since it implies that even Biblical conceptions of God do not reveal the true nature of the infinite Source of the universe. But despite attempts to keep Kabbalistic teachings limited to an inner circle, the ideas and practices began to filter into Jewish society on both a folk-magic and a theological level.

Abraham Abulafia (c.1240-1292) developed a so-called "Prophetic Kabbalah" based on his own ecstatic approach. Around 1286 in Guadalajara, Moses ben Shem Tov de Leon (1230-1305) produced a work called the Sefer ha-Zohar, or Zohar, the best known Kabbalistic text to this day. De Leon presented the Zohar as being a more ancient work by the second century Rabbi Simeon ben Yochai, although some scholars believe he made this claim merely to bolster the book's believability, since it has been proven that the Aramaic of the book could not have come from the 2nd century. Nonetheless, the Zohar, written in the form of a mystical commentary on the Torah, the Song of Songs, and the Book of Ruth, is considered to be the most profound expression of Jewish mysticism in existence.

Building on the work of Isaac the Blind, de Leon propounded a Kabbalistic theory of creation that attempts to describe the creation of the Godhead from within itself. At the root of the theory is the concept of divine "emanations" that take the form of the 10 sefirot -- manifestations or attributes of En Sof that contain the archetypes of the rest of creation, implying that all material objects contain some divine aspect.

The process of emanation by which God manifests Himself also implies naming these emanations, and, by extension, the Divine power and significance of language, specifically the 22 Hebrew letters. In general, the Kabbalists saw Judaism as a system of mystical symbols, letters, and numbers relating to God and humanity, and sought to discover the keys that would help them understand these symbols. But as befits the Kabbalah's esoteric status, the particulars were not spelled out in books, and Kabbalists themselves disagreed sharply over many of the details. If the notion that all matter is good because it is of God is fully coherent with Jewish tradition, the concept that God exists within all matter clearly goes counter to Judaic monotheism, and is close to pantheism. The Zohar also contains material on astrology, demonology, numerology, and transmigration of souls that many conservative Jewish authorities found threatening and potentially heretical. But because the Kabbalah was also supported by renowned rabbinical scholars, it was absorbed into the mainstream, especially through the Hasidic traditions that developed later.

Throughout the 18th century, various pietistic movements developed that appealed to the needs of the Jewish masses for a more devotional and joyous approach to their religion. The most successful of these was Hasidism, which may have developed partly in reaction to the scientific rationalism of the day -- influenced not only by the Jewish rationalist philosopher Spinoza but also by Sir Isaac Newton and his mechanical model of the universe. The movement was pioneered in 1735 by Israel ben Eliezer, known familiarly as the Ba'al Shem Tov ("Master of the Good Name," c. 1700-60) or by the acronym Besht. Not strictly rabbinic, the Besht was more in the tradition of the ba'al shem, a kind of wandering holy man who worked outside the mainstream, like the Hindu sadhu or Taoist feng shui, and who sometimes employed white magic, made charms and amulets, and exorcised evil spirits from the possessed. The Ba'al Shem Tov was an ecstatic mystic whose devotional approach fed the people's need for an emotional, love-based religion. But his teaching that love and doing good works was more important than following the letter of the Law offended many orthodox Talmudists, known as Mitnagdim, or "Opponents." In particular, Rabbi Elijah of Vilna, better known as the Vilna Gaon ("Genius of Vilna," 1720-97), the unofficial spiritual leader of Lithuanian and Russian Jewry, opposed the movement and had Hasidism banned. Still it continued to spread rapidly all over Poland and Lithuania, across Eastern Europe and around the world, until almost half of all Jewry was Hasidic. But as the liberalization of Jewish law toward the end of the 18th century was perceived as a threat by both the Hasidim and Mitnagdim, the two groups closed ranks. Hasidism merged with the rabbinic mainstream and stands today as a bastion of Orthodox Judaism, a somewhat closed society with a slightly antiquated style of dress.

Then as now, however, Hasidic communities employed music and dance, often leading to ecstatic states similar to those sought by Sufi dervishes or Christian Pentecostals. The Ba'al Shem also developed a kind of spontaneous prayer based on divine possession, and promoted a direct communion between the faithful and God, sidestepping the priestly or rabbinic class. In its place he restored and transformed the ancient concept of the zaddik (pl. zaddikim, "righteous")--a superior man or saint, not necessarily a rabbi, who could intercede for the people with God. This charismatic figure, sometimes called a rebbe, dispensed wisdom and, like the ba'al shems of old, created amulets and talismans to ward off evil spirits and grant wishes. Under his successor, Dov Baer of Mezrich (1710-72), the zaddik became central to Hasidism.

Like great mystics before them, the Hasidim found God in the most mundane activities and practiced "physical worship," praising God not through prayer and asceticism but in profane activities such as eating, sleeping, and making love. The goal was the same as it was for the Kabbalists: devekut, or mystical union, and the Besht taught that any act performed with devekut in mind would lead to ecstasy.

For a religious tradition that has been active over more than three millennia, Judaism has surprisingly few sects, and only four major divisions, which can be easily distinguished.

The Reform movement arose in Germany in the early 19th century as a response to the gradual dropping of legal and political barriers against European Jews, by seeking to integrate Jews into a mainstream society that was increasingly available to them politically and socially. It abbreviated the liturgy, introduced prayers and sermons in the vernacular and singing with organ accompaniment, and rendered dietary and Sabbath restrictions optional. Faced with the opportunity to be accepted into German society without having to convert to Christianity, many German Jews felt compelled to eliminate all tribal and ethnic aspects of their Jewish identity, including beliefs that might be construed as superstitious. They even moved their Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday for a time. In America, the Reform movement became known for its relaxation of ritual overall, preferring to stress the Torah's teachings on ethics.

Orthodox Jews insist on retaining traditional Jewish laws and customs, not only as they relate to liturgy but also to diet and dress. They demand full submission to the authority of halakhah, the massive accretion of written and oral laws of Judaism, feeling that the revealed will of God, not the value system of a particular age, is the ultimate standard of conduct. Those laws include separation of the sexes during worship, and other roles for women that are at odds with social changes sought by the women's movement. The Hasidic sects comprise a significant segment of Orthodox Judaism -- all Hasidim are Orthodox, but not all Orthodox are by any means Hasidic.

Conservative Judaism, originally known as "Historical Judaism," began in the mid-19th century as a response to the perceived excesses of the Reform movement. Conservative Jews hailed the Westernization of Judaism in the areas of education and culture (embracing modern dress, for instance), but kept the use of Hebrew in the liturgy, the observance of dietary laws and the Sabbath, and almost all Torah rituals. In the 1980s the Conservatives decided to admit women as rabbis. The center of the movement is the Jewish Theological Seminary of New York; more American Jews are affiliated with Conservative synagogues than with Reform or Orthodox.

Reconstructionist Judaism was founded in 1922 in the U.S. by Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan (1881-1983), in an effort to adapt classical Judaism to current ideas on science, art, and reason. Reconstructionists see Judaism as an evolving civilization rather than a religion, and reject the notion of a personal deity, miracles like the parting of the Red Sea, and the whole concept of the chosen people. With only about 60,000 members, it is a minor branch, headquartered in Philadelphia, but it has strongly influenced Reform Judaism. Rabbi Kaplan performed the first Bat Mitzvah, conferring on young women a religious rite of passage previously reserved only for Jewish males, but now commonplace among Reform congregations; he also began the havurah movement, in which Jews meet in small groups to study and observe Jewish rituals. Recently, Reconstructionism has restored references in its prayerbooks to supernatural events that it had earlier excised as being unbelievable but now accept on the level of "myth."

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Judaism

The God of History

The Covenant

Moses

Tetragrammaton

Kings and Prophets

The Babylonian Captivity

The Torah

The Hebrew Bible

The Talmud

Jewish Mysticism: The Kabbalah

Hasidism

The Four Branches of Modern Judaism