Table of contents
VEJA O TRABALHO COMPLETO AQUI
Avery
religion holds greatest role in society, in so doing, all human being should
choose the religion freely, no one is forced to worship someone’s God.
Thus,
this work talks about Judaism, basically, looking in its culture.
Simply
put, Judaism is the way of life of the Jewish people. In the English-speaking
Western world, “Judaism” is often considered a “religion," but there are
no equivalent words for “Judaism” or for “religion” in Hebrew; there are words
for “faith,” “law,” or “custom” but not for “religion” if one thinks of the
term as meaning solely the beliefs and practices associated with a relationship
with God or a vision of transcendence. The Jewish tradition is much broader
than this. As a way of life, it includes the social, cultural, and religious
history of a widespread and diverse community, including people who do and do
not think of themselves as “religious.”
Judaism embraces the intricate religious
and cultural development of the Jewish people through more than thirty
centuries of history, stretching from Biblical times to medieval Spain to the
Enlightenment, and then to the Holocaust and the founding of the modern state
of Israel. The result is an experience that reflects the elliptical
relationship between religious practice and people hood. From a religious
perspective Judaism is a theistic system, but from a people hood perspective,
it is also the group memory of the manifold communities and cultures formed by
Jews through the ages. It consists not only of Torah (divine revelation)
and mitzvoth (divine commandments), but also the diverse cultures of the
Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino languages.
Judaism
is perhaps best conceptualized as a triad with three points of reference: God,
Torah, and the people of Israel (that is, the Jewish people). None is central;
all are interdependent, with varying degrees of emphasis at various times. God
is the God of Israel, the God of all creation, the one God. Torah embodies
Judaism’s intellectual culture, focusing on the study, understanding, and
interpretation of sacred texts. Israel focuses on Judaism as a historical
culture and the civilization of a particular people; the “people hood” of the
Jews includes customs and foods, arts and music, dance and folkways that are
part of a way of life. Judaism is critically concerned with the evolving
relationship between God, Torah, and the Jewish people, a relationship
described as a covenant. In the covenantal triad, God emphasizes the vertical
relationship of the Jewish people to the Divine; Israel emphasizes the
horizontal relationship Jews bear to one another, and Torah is both vertical
and horizontal, for it defines the way of life of a whole people lived in
relationship to God.
These
three connotations of Judaism as a monotheistic system, as a literary
tradition, and as a historical culture are sometimes viewed separately. For
example, there are Jews who see themselves as culturally Jewish, but who are
also non-religious or atheist, often identifying more strongly with Jewish “people
hood” than with traditional understandings of God and Torah. Even so, all Jews
would recognize that these three points of reference have shaped and guided
Jewish experience through the ages.
The great symbols of God, Torah, and
Israel have assumed varying positions of prominence throughout Jewish history,
and our discussion of them necessarily unfolds within an ongoing historical
framework. Such a historical approach is critical for an understanding of
contemporary Judaism, for Judaism is a historical tradition—in which history is
valued in and of itself. In many ways, Judaism has always been the sum total of
all the history of its God, texts, and people.
The vision of a universal, singular God
is arguably one of the greatest religious innovations of the Jewish tradition
among the world’s historic religious systems. Between 1500 and 500 BCE, the
Israelite people of the ancient Near East began to articulate a radical new
understanding of divinity. The ancient Hebrews were most likely “polytheistic,”
believing in numerous deities representing different forces of nature and
serving various tribes and nations. Eventually, however, early Hebrew
visionaries and prophets began to speak boldly of one God as the creator of all
existence, a view we have come to call “monotheism.” Expressing the multivalent
nature of divinity as well as an insistence upon the oneness of God, early
Hebrew authors gave God names such as Elohim (“gods”), Adonai (“my
lord”), and the unpronounceable YHWH, from the same root as the verb "to
be," the etymological source of the name “Jehovah."
From
the perspective of Jewish tradition, all Jews share a common ancestry descended
from Abraham and his wife Sarah, and are therefore part of the same extended
family. The Torah attributes this commonality to the patriarch Abraham: in his
covenant with God, Abraham was promised that he would become the father of a
great nation. Fulfilling the promise, they had a son, Isaac, whose own son
Jacob was renamed Israel, literally “the one who struggles with God” (Genesis
32:29). Israel is the name of a person, a people, and a land.
The patriarch Jacob, renamed Israel,
fathered twelve sons, the progenitors of the historic twelve tribes. First,
they were known as bnei yisrael (“the children of Israel”). To this day,
members of the Jewish community describe themselves metaphorically as a “tribe”
and “family.” Second, the children of Israel (bnei yisrael) became the
nation of Israel (am israel), following their liberation from slavery in
Egypt and the uniting of the Israelite clans by the decree of God. Third and
finally, the pivotal stage in the biblical account of nation-building was the
inheritance of the promised land of Canaan, which thereafter became known as eretz
yisrael, the land of Israel.
From a historical perspective, however,
it may be more appropriate to highlight the transformation of the Jewish people
from a loose confederation of tribes into a unified nation in the period of the
Israelite monarchy, beginning in the late eleventh century BCE. After a period
of political and social flux, King David (c. 1000-960 BCE) united the kingdom
of Israel around his capital city of Jerusalem. David’s son Solomon (c. 961-922
BCE) built a Holy Temple in Jerusalem, thereby unifying the rituals and worship
of the Israelite tribes as well. Following Solomon’s death, however, his
warring sons divided the kingdom between the northern Kingdom of Israel and the
southern Kingdom of Judah.
Traditionally,
Judaism today is conceived as a timeless and ongoing conversation between the
Jews and God, based on centuries of religious development and voluminous
writings. These legal and interpretative texts, arguably the sum total of the
discussion, argumentation, and writings of rabbis through the ages, is commonly
called “rabbinic” literature. Rabbinic literature is a religious textual
compendium developed over the history of the Jewish people, particularly in the
Second Temple period and afterward.
The rabbis designated their literature
the Oral Torah, as opposed to the finalized canon of the Written Torah. While
the Torah refers mainly to the five books of Moses, it also refers more widely
to all of Jewish sacred literature. To ensure the durability and relevance of
the Biblical tradition, rabbis drew a distinction between the written Torah
dictated by God to Moses on Mount Sinai and the unwritten Torah dictated by God
to Moses verbally. According to rabbinic tradition, this second tradition was
passed down orally, eventually developed in writing by the rabbis of the third
century CE in Palestine and becoming known as the Mishnah.
The philosophical endeavor to reconcile
traditional religion with modern culture has long had a place in Jewish
history. Philo of first-century Alexandria, Rav Saadia Gaon of tenth-century
Babylonia, Maimonides of twelfth-century Spain and Egypt: many great Jewish
thinkers have taken pains to integrate the Judaism of the Torah and the Talmud
with the best of contemporary thought. Maimonides not only codified Jewish Law
in his monumental work the Mishneh Torah, he also wrote Guide for the
Perplexed, which addresses an educated audience perplexed by the
contradictions of the Torah and Aristotelian philosophy. The book had a great
influence on the development of Jewish intellectual traditions.
The various teachings of Judaism have
often been regarded as specifications of central idea monotheism, one God, the
creator of the world has freely elected Jewish people for a unique covenantal
relationship with him.
