ICJudaism: A Teacher’s Guide to Judaism

      Hosted by ICTeachers                                                                Formerly: Mike’s Rough Guide to Judaism

Disclaimer:

The contents of these pages represent the author’s personal views, experience and understanding.
There are bound to be some things here that some Jews would disagree with.

 

What is Judaism?

Judaism is one of the oldest of the World’s major religions. Jews consider themselves to have been the first monotheists.

Judaism began in the Middle East but there are now Jews living in most parts of the world. The greatest numbers of Jews in one area are probably in New York, where a little less than 20% of the population are Jewish. There are few accurate figures for Jewish populations but recent estimates suggest that about 7.2 million Jews live in Israel, between 5.3 -7.0 million estimates vary widely) in the USA (with 1.1 million in New York City). The UK Jewish population is a little over ¼ million - about 0.5%)

Jews see themselves as the descendants of the Patriarch, Abraham and the Matriarch, Sarah, of their son, Isaac and his wife, Rebecca and their grandson Jacob and his wives Rachel and Leah. After his fight with the "angel" Jacob was given the name Israel and Jews are often known, to themselves and others, as “The Children of Israel”.

What do Jews Believe?

The core Jewish belief holds that there is one deity, independent of space and time, who is the creator of all things. In our daily prayers we say:

"Hear, Oh Israel, The Lord is God, The Lord is One".

God is understood to be omnipotent, good, just and merciful. He demands obedience but allows free will. God gave the Children of Israel a set of rules to live by which are embodied in the Torah given to Moses on Mount Sinai.

Many Jews believe that God’s name must never be spoken. When written in the Torah or in prayer books it is set down as 4 Hebrew letters (yod, hay, vav, hay - equivalent to YHVH - which is often referred to as The Tetragrammaton). These 4 letters, with vowels added could, amongst other possibilities, become Jehovah or Yaweh but Jews never use these, nor attempt to pronounce the tetragrammaton in any other way, either. Instead, a range of epithets are used which have meanings such as "Lord". The most commonly used is ADONAI (meaning My Lord) and even that is not pronounced by many orthodox Jews except in prayer. At other times the word is altered to ADOSHEM (roughly meaning "The Lord’s Name"). Similarly, many Jews will write the word God, when referring to the Deity, as G-d. In conversation they will refer to Him as Hashem ("the Name").

For a clear, fuller explanation of the Jewish take on God’s names see Judaism101.

God’s names in Hebrew are masculine in form and in English translation the usual reference is to He, Him or His but this should not be taken to mean that Jews consider God to be male - both languages lack appropriate forms for referring to sentient beings without gender (it would seem very wrong to refer to God as “It”). Many progressive English-speaking Jews have taken to replacing both the word “Lord” and the masculine pronouns with more gender neutral terms such as “The Eternal”.

As well as the tetragrammaton, the Torah often refers to God as Elohim, a plural form ,meaning The Gods. This seems to be the equivalent of the English “Royal We” (as in Queen Victoria’s famous “We are not amused”).

Orthodox or Progressive?

For an explanation of the differences see the page on Diversity.

 

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