What Is A Jew?

Rabbi Morris N. Kertzer

• Verlag: Normanby Press
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781787200586
• Thema: History
• Thema: Jewish History

A guide to the beliefs, traditions and practices of Judaism that answers questions for both Jew and Gentile.Rabbi Kertzer answers over 100 of the most commonly asked questions about Jewish life and customs, including: What is the Jewish attitude toward intermarriage? Toward birth control? Do Jews believe in equality between the sexes? Are Jews forbidden to read the New Testament? What is the basis for the Dietary Laws?For non-Jews who want to learn about the Jewish way of life.For Jews who wish to rediscover forgotten traditions and beliefs."This portrayal of the Jewish way of looking at things attempts to convey some of the warmth, the glow and the serenity of Judaism: the enchantment of fine books; the captivating color of Hasidism;...the mirthful spirit of scholars more than sixteen centuries ago; and the abiding sense of compassion that permeates our tradition. It is in this way—and only in this way that anyone can give a meaningful answer to the question, 'What is a Jew?'"—Rabbi Morris N. Kertzer

V—CUSTOMS AND TRADITIONS

“Do you know where the Lord is to be found? He is in the place where He is invited to enter.”

—HASIDIC SAYING

Customs and Traditions

IT IS not easy to draw any rigid lines separating Jewish law and Jewish custom. There is an ancient saying that in Judaism custom becomes law. And the history of Judaism will reveal many religious laws later widely recognized and observed, which had their origin in long-accepted folk practices.

Dr. Solomon Schechter, founder of Conservative Judaism, described this phenomenon with the curious phrase “catholic Israel” (catholic in the sense of universal). When the vast majority of observant Jews adopted a certain way of practicing a ritual—or chose to disregard it—the custom ultimately became law.

This is not a new or a modem innovation. In any standard manual of Jewish law, we often find such introductory comments as: “This is the practice among Italian Jews; the French follow another custom,” or “Among the Spanish Jews, there is a tendency to be lenient in this matter; German Jews are more stringent...” No authority suggests that there is a single unalterable form of practice, or, for that matter, a single prayer book to be followed by all Jews.

Another factor which complicates our understanding of Jewish traditions and customs is the manner in which superstitions and local non-Jewish practices were adopted by the Jews and interwoven with the various religious rites which they observed.

Judaism was born out of mankind’s revolt against primitive superstition and witchcraft. It was Abraham, father of the Jewish religion, who smashed the pagan idols in his father’s sculpture shop and first proclaimed the existence of One God, Father to all living things.

The image of the child Abraham with axe in hand symbolizes Judaism’s rejection of magical thinking—a rejection which is stressed in all the laws and commentary of the Jewish religion.

The Bible tells us, however, that it was not easy for the followers of Abraham to root out all the superstitions of the past or to remain completely aloof from the beliefs and practices of their neighbors. Thus, Moses came down from Sinai to find Jews worshiping the golden calf, and Jewish leaders have often, through the years, had to do similar battle against the inroads of ignorance and false belief.

Today, though idolatry and other gross superstitions of that nature are long of the past, there still remain in Jewish custom and tradition certain practices whose origins can be traced to primitive, superstitious beliefs.

Some of these are really folk customs and have nothing whatsoever to do with religious observance. These include the automatic Gesundheit or Zu Gesundt (to your health) told to someone who sneezes—a custom widely practiced by almost every faith and nationality; and the many phrases like kein ayin horoh, unbeschrien, unberufen, all meaning “may no evil spirit befall,” which are so often used when speaking of good health or personal success.

There are also superstitious origins in certain commonly accepted religious practices which have no actual basis in Jewish law. Among these is the taboo against naming children after living relatives (see p. 61); the ban against double marriages of two brothers or two sisters (because too much happiness would tempt envious spirits); the Old World custom of guarding a newborn child against evil by hanging a charm necklace with the 127th Psalm, or other significant phrases from the Scriptures, around its neck. Such customs have remained deeply ingrained in Orthodox Jewish life despite the opposition of the rabbis through the ages. They are only now being discarded in modem Jewish homes.

Finally, there are those superstitious practices, adopted by some Jews from the surrounding culture, which are actually completely alien to our tradition, such as knocking on wood for good luck or crossing one’s fingers. Since both of these customs most likely refer back to the wooden crucifix of Christianity and the sign of the cross, they obviously have no precedent in Jewish life. Jewish tradition also frowns on the custom of wearing black as a sign of mourning—a practice which harks back to the Near Eastern peoples, who usually wore white clothing and put on dark clothes to hide their identity from the death messenger.

On the other hand, throwing rice and confetti at weddings, which can be traced back to an ancient fertility rite, is a custom frequently found at Jewish weddings, and is neither blessed nor banned by Jewish law.

Of course, not all informal customs have their origin in primitive belief. Many folkways, colorful and meaningful, have their origin in Jewish doctrine.

The pliability of Judaism has always permitted a great range within the traditional fold. The Jewish religion has never been a fertile breeding ground for separate sects and denominations. It did not suppress opposition—it simply absorbed it.

A person who chose to follow the mystics or the Hasidim merely exercised his right to use his personal preference on what was important among the elements of his faith. Often there was ill feeling between the followers of Hasidism and their opponents, but no one thought of ruling his fellow Jew to be outside the mainstream of tradition.

Thus no common word for sect or denomination exists in Hebrew, and even in the English language we are hard put to find a word expressive of the at-one-time differences and similarities in Orthodox, Conservative and Reform.

A serious student of the Jewish religion will try to distinguish between the generally accepted law, the widely accepted practice and the variety of popular superstitions and folkways not indigenous to Judaism. But to the extent that they affect and influence the pattern of Jewish life, all three are inseparable ingredients of Judaism’s customs and traditions.

Why Does the Jewish Day Begin at Sunset?

THE custom of reckoning the day from sunset to sunset is based on the story of Creation as depicted in Genesis: “It was evening, it was morning, the first day.” The evening came first! Thus, each new day begins with the sunset of the one before. The Sabbath is ushered in as the sun sets on Friday. And if the Feast of Purim falls on March 15th, the celebration actually begins on the evening of the 14th.

During the period of the First Commonwealth (prior to 586 B.C.E.) the day was not reckoned in terms of hours. In fact, the word “hour” is not found anywhere in the Bible, even as a figure of speech. The night was divided into three watches, the early watch, the middle watch and the morning watch. (Hence such biblical sayings as “Watchman, what of the night?”) The day was divided into forenoon and afternoon.

When the Jews returned to Palestine after their Babylonian exile (516 B.C.E.) they brought back with them the Babylonian astronomy and way of reckoning time. But they still clung to a rather curious way of dividing the daylight hours: an hour was a twelfth part of daylight—longer in summer than in winter. Apparently they had much less of a passion for uniformity than modern man.

This lack of exactitude is still followed with regard to Sabbaths, festivals and fasts, for Jewish tradition stretches the day a little: a few minutes is added at either end—and even an hour or two among the more observant. It is considered unseemly to begin the Sabbath or other holy day at the last moment, or to end it at the earliest opportunity. During the High Holy Day season, after the Feast of Tabernacles, an entire day has been added in keeping with this custom. The day is called Shemini Atzereth, the Eighth Day of Assembly, and has no historic significance whatever, though it is observed as zealously as other holidays. Folklore offers the following explanation: The Al-mighty, who has been close to the children of Israel during this season of the year, says: “It is too hard for Me to take leave of you—let Me linger yet another day!”

An ordinary day, therefore, is calculated in the Jewish tradition from the moment of sunset to the next moment of sunset. The day consists of exactly twenty-four hours only twice a year, during the equinoxes, and at other times is a few minutes longer or shorter, depending on the season.

As for the Sabbath, the Day of Atonement and other meaningful days in the Jewish calendar—they are generally closer to twenty-five hours. Mathematical precision yields to the needs of the spirit.

What Is the Torah?

THE word Torah has two usages in Jewish tradition. Broadly, Torah is our way of life, or, as Milton Steinberg expressed it, “All the vastness and variety of the Jewish tradition.” It is synonymous with learning, wisdom, love of God. Without it, life has neither meaning nor value.

More narrowly, the Torah is the most revered and sacred object of Jewish ritual—the beautiful, hand-written scroll of the Five Books of Moses (the Bible from Genesis to Deuteronomy) which is housed in the Ark of the Synagogue.

The Torah scroll is made of parchment, wrapped around two wooden poles or rollers. It is covered with an embroidered cloth. Silver ornaments rest on the poles and a silver breastplate adorns the covering. The text of the Torah, drafted in a Hebrew unchanged through countless generations, must be letter-perfect. A Torah containing two scribal errors may not be used in worship.

A portion of the Torah, starting with the book of Genesis, is read aloud every Sabbath during worship, beginning right after the High Holy Days and continuing each week until the entire Torah has been read by the end of the Jewish year. The worshiper stands when the Torah is taken out of the Ark. A pious Jew kisses the Torah by placing his prayer shawl on the parchment (so his fingers will not touch the scroll) and then lifting the fringes of the shawl to his lips.

In Jewish folklore, the Torah is supposed to antedate the time of Creation. It was at the Creator’s side when the world came into being. To the observant Jew, the Torah is the very breath of life. Men have bled and died to save this sacred scroll from desecration. Throughout history, Jews who were forced to flee their homes in the face of tyranny and persecution abandoned all their worldly goods but carried the Torah with them into the unknown.

What Is the Talmud?

THE Talmud consists of sixty-three books of legal, ethical and historical writings of the ancient rabbis. It was edited in the year 499 C.E. in the religious academies of Babylonia, where most Jews of that period lived.

The Talmud is a compendium of law and lore, and has been for centuries the major textbook of Jewish schools. Knowledge of its contents is, even today, the most important training of Orthodox and Conservative rabbis. Orthodox Jewish law is based largely on the decisions found in the Talmud.

A considerable portion of this encyclopedic work is of interest only to well-informed students of law. But the Talmud is much more than a series of legal treatises. Interlaced with the discussions of the scholars are thousands of parables, biographical sketches, humorous anecdotes and epigrams that provide an intimate glimpse into Jewish life in the days just before and after the destruction of the Jewish state. It is a storehouse of wisdom as real today as it was eighteen hundred years ago.

Many of the moral maxims of the Talmud have become household phrases: “Give every man the benefit of the doubt.” “An ignorant man cannot be a pious man.” “Don’t look at the flask but what it contains.” “One good deed invariably leads to another; an evil deed always brings another in its wake.”

The rabbis possessed remarkable insight into the minds of children. “Do not threaten a child. Either punish him or forgive him.” The Talmud also has much to say about education: “A classroom should never have more than twenty-five pupils.” “When you encounter a child whose head is as solid as iron, you may be sure that his teacher did not have a pleasant way of explaining things.” “Always begin the lesson with a humorous illustration.”

One of the rabbinic teachers classified his students into four categories: “The sponge: he absorbs and retains everything; the funnel: everything that goes in comes out; the sifter: he remembers the trivial and forgets the significant; the sieve: he retains the important and sifts out the incidental.”

Another scholar told his students: “He who does not study deserves to die!” Still another summed up his education: “Much have I learned from my teachers; even more from my class-mates; but most of all, from my students!”

The rabbis were fond of pithy sayings: “Bad neighbors count a man’s income but not his expenses.” Or cryptic ones: “Better a tail to lions than a head to foxes.”

Occasionally their words wer...