Judaism

It traces itself to the covenant with Abraham and the covenant at Sinai under Moses; as a historical tradition it took shape in ancient Israel during the first millennium BCE.

The exodus narrative and the giving of the Law; the kingdom and the First Temple; the Babylonian exile (586 BCE) and the return; the Second Temple period; and after the Temple's destruction (70 CE), the rebuilding of Jewish life around Torah study, the synagogue, and the rabbis.

Moses, the lawgiver of the Torah; the prophets; Ezra the scribe, who re-established Torah reading after the exile; then the rabbis — the Mishnah (c. 200 CE) and the Talmud (c. 500 CE) shaped rabbinic Judaism — and later teachers such as Maimonides.

Mainly by diaspora rather than mission: communities in Babylonia and around the Mediterranean, later the Ashkenazi and Sephardi centers of Europe and the Islamic world. Expulsions and migrations kept moving its centers; the founding of Israel (1948) regathered roughly half of world Jewry.

About 15 million people — nearly half in Israel, most of the rest in the United States, with smaller communities worldwide.

The Temple's destruction (70 CE) and the turn to rabbinic Judaism; the completion of the Talmud; medieval philosophy and Kabbalah; the 18th–19th-century Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment) and the Reform–Conservative–Orthodox division; the Holocaust; and the State of Israel (1948).

Judaism does not teach that humanity is fallen beyond repair; the problem is that people, given free choice, turn from God's will — Genesis calls it the inclination of the human heart toward evil — so the world remains unredeemed and waiting for repair.

From human choice: the Torah sets blessing and curse before people and commands 'choose life,' and the rabbis speak of an evil inclination every person must master. The book of Job adds, honestly, that some suffering remains a mystery known fully only to God.

Not a corrupted nature — Judaism rejects original sin — but broken relationships: between people and God, and between people themselves. The mystics later pictured a fractured world awaiting repair (tikkun olam), mended deed by deed.

The covenant: God gives the Torah and its commandments as a way of life, repentance (teshuvah) as the way back after failure, and the promise of a final messianic redemption in which the world is set right.

Daily faithfulness rather than a single moment of conversion: Torah study, keeping the commandments, repentance, prayer, and deeds of kindness. A famous Mishnah says the world stands on three things — Torah, worship, and acts of loving-kindness.

Partly now, fully at the end: each person can repent and each generation can better the world, but complete repair waits for the messianic redemption. The movements differ on its form — Orthodoxy expects a personal Messiah; Reform speaks of a messianic age humanity helps bring about.

The person is sanctified by the commandments; the community becomes a people ordered around justice, study, and Sabbath rest; and in the promised end 'the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD' and nations no longer learn war.

The Torah as God's revelation, read through the Oral Torah — the rabbinic tradition recorded in the Mishnah and Talmud. Pirkei Avot opens with the chain: Moses received Torah at Sinai and handed it on, generation to generation.

Revelation first, carried by tradition, with reason as a partner: Saadia Gaon and Maimonides held that true revelation and sound reason cannot finally conflict. Reform Judaism adds ongoing experience, treating revelation as progressive rather than complete at Sinai.

Because, Judaism argues, the Sinai revelation was national — an entire people saw and heard, not one private visionary — and the memory was handed from parents to children in an unbroken chain. Judah Halevi's Kuzari made this public testimony the tradition's chief argument for trust.

The Torah itself gives tests: a prophet whose prediction fails is false, and even a wonder-worker who calls to other gods must be rejected. Within the law, truth is settled by argument, evidence, and the majority ruling of the sages — the Talmud insists the Torah 'is not in heaven.'

Real and fixed, grounded in God's character and commands — Abraham can even appeal to that standard: 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?' Later thinkers debated whether the commandments have reasons we can discover (Maimonides) or rest on command alone, but not whether right and wrong are real.

Yes, within limits: God reveals what humans need to live rightly, but 'the secret things belong to the LORD our God.' Maimonides taught that we can know that God is, and what God is not, far better than what God is.

The Torah itself is held final — Maimonides' principles say no other Torah will replace it — yet its interpretation is deliberately open: the Talmud preserves its disputes and rules that 'these and those are the words of the living God.' Orthodoxy develops law within received rules; Reform treats even the law as revisable.

The Tanakh — Torah (the five books of Moses), Prophets, and Writings, twenty-four books in the traditional count — together with the Oral Torah: Mishnah, Talmud, and midrash. Later pillars include Rashi's commentaries, Maimonides' Mishneh Torah, Karo's Shulchan Arukh, and, for the mystics, the Zohar.

The biblical books were composed and edited over roughly a thousand years, and the canon was effectively settled by the early centuries CE. The oral teachings were written down in the Mishnah (c. 200 CE) and the two Talmuds (c. 400–500 CE); the Masoretes then fixed the Bible's letters, vowels, and notes (c. 700–1000 CE) in codices such as Aleppo and Leningrad.

Tradition holds God dictated the Torah to Moses, and the copying record is genuinely strong: the Dead Sea Scrolls (3rd century BCE–1st century CE) largely match the Masoretic text copied a thousand years later. Academic scholarship, however, mostly concludes the Torah reached its final form centuries after Moses, woven from earlier sources (the documentary hypothesis); traditional scholars reject or qualify that conclusion.

One God, covenant, law, and the call to justice — carried in narrative, law codes, prophecy, poetry, and wisdom. The style ranges from the spare storytelling of Genesis to the legal detail of Leviticus, the moral thunder of the prophets, and the hard questions of Job and Ecclesiastes.

That God is one (the Shema); that every human is made in God's image; that Israel must keep the commandments — Sabbath, honest dealing, care for the stranger, the widow, and the poor — and 'love your neighbor as yourself.'

Through the interpretive tradition rather than raw literalism: the rabbis read on several levels — plain sense, hint, homily, and secret — and the Oral Torah often reshapes the letter ('an eye for an eye' becomes monetary compensation). Orthodox readers stay within halakhic interpretation; liberal movements add historical context.

The midrash collections and the two Talmuds; the great medieval commentators — Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Nachmanides; the law codes of Maimonides and Joseph Karo; the Kabbalah of the Zohar; and, since the nineteenth century, academic biblical scholarship, accepted in different degrees by the movements.

Yes, and they are openly studied: the Masoretic text differs at points from the Greek Septuagint, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and some Dead Sea Scrolls — Jeremiah, for example, is notably shorter in the Greek. Most variants are minor, and the Masoretic consonantal text has been remarkably stable since antiquity.

The Torah presents itself as God's commands given through Moses, written down and read publicly to all Israel — men, women, children, and the resident stranger — and the prophets speak in God's name: 'thus says the LORD.' Its covenant is with Israel, while Genesis presents God as Creator and judge of all humanity.

One God — creator, incorporeal, eternal, without partner or image: 'Hear, O Israel: the LORD is our God, the LORD is one.' God is personal, acts in history, and commands; Maimonides' Thirteen Principles state the classical view, Kabbalah speaks of the unknowable Infinite (Ein Sof), and a modern minority (Kaplan's Reconstructionism) redefines God naturalistically.

Both: God creates a physical world and repeatedly calls it good, and there is also an unseen order — the soul, angels, God's presence. Judaism resists treating matter as evil; Heschel called the Sabbath a 'palace in time,' the spiritual entering ordinary life.

Yes: God breathes the breath of life into the human being, and the daily liturgy has each person say, 'My God, the soul You placed within me is pure.' Classical Judaism holds that the soul survives death and will be rejoined to the body at the resurrection.

There is no single dogma about the mechanics of consciousness; the sources speak of a God-given soul that knows, chooses, and is answerable. Medieval thinkers like Maimonides tied the soul's highest part to the intellect, and beyond that Judaism leaves the question to philosophy and science.

The continuing, answerable soul: you remain the person God made and holds responsible across a lifetime — repentance itself assumes the sinner and the penitent are one self. The resurrection teaching presumes that personal identity persists even through death.

Born pure, with capacity for both: Judaism teaches no original sin, but two inclinations — a good impulse and a selfish one present from youth, which the midrash says can itself be harnessed to build homes and livelihoods. The morning prayer states, 'the soul You placed within me is pure.'

Free will is a cornerstone: 'I have set before you life and death… choose life.' The rabbis held the paradox together — 'all is foreseen, yet freedom is given' — and Maimonides ruled that without free choice, commandment, reward, and punishment would all be meaningless.

As one unit, not enemies: the body is God's handiwork, blessed and cared for — the liturgy even thanks God daily for the body's ordinary working — and the soul animates it. The classical hope is bodily resurrection, not escape from the body.

Because God freely chose to create: 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.' Classical Jewish thought holds creation from nothing — the world exists because a good God wanted creatures who could know Him and choose the good.

By God's creative word, as Genesis tells it in ordered days. Maimonides defended creation against Aristotle's eternal universe yet wrote that he could reinterpret the verses if reason ever demonstrated otherwise; many modern Jews accordingly read Genesis as theology rather than chronology, alongside big-bang cosmology.

God's commandments — traditionally counted at 613 — as interpreted and applied through halakha, Jewish law. Yet the Bible also assumes a justice humans can recognize, by which Abraham can even question God: 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?'

Justice, kindness (chesed), and humility — 'do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your God' — with truthfulness, gratitude, holiness, and love of learning. The Mussar movement built an entire discipline of character-training around such traits.

Idolatry, murder, theft, adultery, false witness, and oppression of the weak; halakha adds forbidden foods, work on the Sabbath, and — heavily stressed — malicious speech (lashon hara). The stranger, the widow, and the orphan stand under explicit protection.

Prayer three times daily; blessings before and after food; Shabbat every week; kosher eating; Torah study; charity (tzedakah); a mezuzah on the doorpost and, among the observant, tefillin each weekday morning. The range of actual practice across the movements is wide.

Honor parents; keep marriage faithful; deal honestly — the Talmud says the first question in the final judgment is 'did you deal faithfully in business?'; visit the sick, comfort mourners, and do not separate from the community. Hardship is met with prayer, communal support, and the structured week of mourning (shiva).

The mature scholar (talmid chakham) and the righteous person (tzaddik): steeped in Torah, honest in trade, generous, restrained in speech, learning visible in conduct. Soloveitchik's 'halakhic man' pictures the ideal as bringing God's law into every corner of ordinary life.

Repentance (teshuvah): stop the wrong, regret it, confess it, and resolve never to repeat it — Maimonides codified the steps. Yom Kippur atones for wrongs against God; wrongs against another person require making amends and winning that person's forgiveness first.

To love and serve God, keep the covenant, and sanctify ordinary life — and, in the rabbinic phrase, to act as God's partner in perfecting the world. Meaning is found inside obligation: study, family, honest work, community, and justice.

Classical Judaism affirms that the soul survives, faces a purifying judgment (traditionally capped at twelve months for most), and awaits the resurrection of the dead and the world to come — while the texts stay sparing on detail and the weight stays on this life. Reform Judaism generally teaches the soul's immortality without bodily resurrection.

Not rescue from a fallen nature, but covenantal life with God now, atonement when one fails, and redemption at the end: the messianic age, the resurrection, and a share in the world to come — promised to Israel and, the tradition holds, to the righteous of all nations.

For each person: judgment and the world to come. For humanity: a repaired world — the messianic age when war ends, exiles return, and 'the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD'; Orthodoxy awaits a personal Messiah, while Reform speaks of a messianic era built with human hands under God.

A final judgment, not cosmic cycles or the self's dissolution: the tradition teaches an annual judgment each Rosh Hashanah, judgment of the soul after death, and, at history's end, the resurrection of the dead — the closing articles of Maimonides' Thirteen Principles.

Through calendar and community: weekly Shabbat meals, the festival cycle from Passover to Yom Kippur, and life-cycle moments — circumcision, bar and bat mitzvah, the wedding canopy, structured mourning. The emotional register runs from Yom Kippur's solemnity to commanded festival joy, and memory — exodus, exile, Holocaust — anchors it all.

Orthodox (from Haredi and Hasidic communities to Modern Orthodox), Conservative/Masorti, Reform, and Reconstructionist — alongside many Jews who identify culturally or secularly. Across these run the Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi heritages, each with its own customs and liturgy.

Deeply: local custom (minhag) is itself a category of Jewish law, so melodies, foods, liturgy, and even rulings differ among Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi communities. Israeli and diaspora Judaism have likewise grown different rhythms — one embedded in a Jewish state, the other in minority life.

Who counts as a Jew (Orthodox and Conservative: matrilineal descent or conversion; Reform since 1983: either parent plus Jewish upbringing); women's place in ritual; how binding halakha is; conversion standards; and the religious meaning of the State of Israel. These disputes are open and recorded in each movement's own rulings.

From misunderstanding: 'chosenness' read as claimed superiority — the sources frame election as added obligation ('you only have I known… therefore I will punish you'), and the tradition grants the righteous of all nations a share in the world to come. Real disagreements: whether the Torah is divine revelation, specific halakhic positions, and the politics of the State of Israel — which both critics and defenders often wrongly equate with Judaism itself.

Powerfully: Judaism is a peoplehood as well as a faith, so identity is carried in covenant signs — Sabbath, circumcision, food — and in thick communal institutions: synagogue, study house, school, burial society. That structure is how a scattered minority kept one continuous identity through two thousand years of exile.

Mostly by embrace: Maimonides set the precedent that truth cannot contradict truth, Modern Orthodoxy pairs Torah with secular knowledge (Torah u-Madda), and Jews are heavily represented in the sciences. Haredi communities keep more distance from secular culture, and readings of Genesis against cosmology and evolution range from non-literal (most) to literalist (some).

Biblically, a covenant society under God's law with justice for the weak at its core; for two millennia halakha then governed self-ruling communities inside host states, under the Talmudic rule that 'the law of the land is law.' Today halakha binds the observant personally rather than any state, and Israel's balance between religious and civil law remains internally contested.

Even the king sits under the law: Deuteronomy limits royal wealth and requires the king to write and read a copy of the Torah, and the prophets' rebuke of kings — Nathan before David, Elijah before Ahab — is the tradition's model for confronting unjust power. No ruler stands above judgment.

Classical halakha assigns distinct roles: women are exempt from many time-bound commandments, are not counted in the traditional prayer quorum, and divorce requires the husband's writ (get) — the root of the modern agunah problem, which Orthodox authorities work to relieve case by case. Reform and Conservative Judaism are egalitarian, ordaining women rabbis since 1972 and 1985 respectively; Orthodoxy keeps distinct roles while greatly expanding women's Torah study.

Judaism neither seeks converts nor teaches that non-Jews are damned: the righteous of all nations have a share in the world to come, and the seven Noahide laws set a basic moral standard for humanity. Classical texts hold both harsh statements about idolaters and the teaching that every human is beloved as God's image; the dominant modern reading — from the medieval Meiri to Sacks — extends full moral standing to all peoples.

The Torah commands specific ancient wars, but the rabbis confined 'commanded war' so tightly — requiring prophet, king, and Sanhedrin — that the category became inoperative; what remained is self-defense: 'if one rises to kill you, rise first.' How Jewish law should govern a modern army, and whether Zionism is a religious duty, a secular project, or a mistake, are live disputes across the Orthodox, Reform, and Haredi worlds.

Classically, 'a Jew, even if he sins, remains a Jew': the one who leaves keeps the status but historically lost communal standing, sometimes by formal ban (herem) — Spinoza's in Amsterdam, 1656, is the famous case. The Torah's death penalty for apostasy was rendered inoperative by rabbinic procedure and is not practiced; today there is no penalty, though those leaving strict Haredi communities often bear a heavy social cost.

Its chief argument is public revelation: the Torah claims God spoke to an entire nation at Sinai, and Judah Halevi's Kuzari argues that no people would accept such a story about its own ancestors had nothing happened — a claim of national memory, not private vision. Advocates add the argument from endurance: a small, stateless people preserving text, law, and identity through twenty-five centuries of dispersion, and a moral legacy — one God, the image of God, the Sabbath — that reshaped world civilization.

Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise argued the Torah is the later-compiled political law of one ancient state, not eternal divine teaching; modern criticism (Wellhausen) reads it as woven from several documents, and archaeology has not confirmed the exodus and conquest as narrated (Finkelstein and Silberman). The tradition's best replies: the national-revelation argument — a whole people's testimony is unlike one man's vision (Halevi); scholarly counter-cases such as Cassuto's against the documentary hypothesis; and thinkers like Heschel who ground the Torah's authority in Israel's covenant encounter with God rather than in criticism-proof manuscripts. The argument is real and remains open.

Its core — one God, covenant, law, freedom — is coherent, and the tradition flags its hardest tensions instead of hiding them: providence versus free will ('all is foreseen, yet freedom is given'), a universal God bound to a particular people (answered through the Noahide covenant), and above all innocent suffering — from Job to the post-Holocaust debate, where Fackenheim urged defiant faithfulness while Rubenstein rejected the God of history. Judaism keeps these as open wounds rather than contradictions resolved on paper.

Mixed, and debated in the open: later biblical history is well corroborated — the Tel Dan stele names the 'House of David,' and the Babylonian exile and return are documented — while the exodus and conquest lack direct archaeological confirmation. On science, most movements read Genesis non-literally, so direct conflict is limited; on everyday experience, advocates point to the Bible's unvarnished realism about human moral failure as a mark of truthfulness.

Observant Jews demonstrably live the whole system — Shabbat, kashrut, family law, daily prayer — and have for many centuries; halakha was built for full-life practice. The honest caveat runs the other way: most Jews today do not keep full halakha (Pew documents large secular and non-observant majorities), and the liberal movements openly weigh outside ethical thought — which they defend as Judaism's own ongoing revelation, not borrowing.

Achievements: monotheism handed to half the world, the Sabbath and the idea of rest, a legal tradition that protects the stranger and the poor, a culture of near-universal literacy and study, and outsized contributions to science and thought. Harms done in its name: the Torah's conquest commands, harsh classical passages about gentiles, and modern extremist violence — Baruch Goldstein's 1994 Hebron massacre, the assassination of Rabin — which mainstream authorities condemned as desecration. Adherents answer that the tradition itself disarmed its violent texts (the conquest categories were ruled inoperative) and note that Jews have far more often been history's victims than its persecutors.

The tradition names some tests of its own: a prophecy that fails disqualifies the prophet, and Maimonides granted that a demonstrated eternal universe would force him to reinterpret Scripture — evidence is allowed to matter. By its own logic, proof that the Sinai tradition was fabricated, or the disappearance of the Jewish people whose endurance the covenant promises, would count against it. Beyond that, many Jews treat the covenant as a relationship of trust that argument alone cannot overturn — an honest report must say the core is not treated as falsifiable.