Judaism is Not a Religion

It has been awhile since I took to these pages. This past March the Ayatollah Kohmeni sent ballistic missiles to Israel which unfortunately kept us from attending our grandson’s bar-mitzvah in America. My beautiful wife and I took the last few weeks to make up for that missed visit and B’H we got to spend time with all of our children and grandchildren who still live in the states. And Kohmeni is dead.

A lot has happened during the weeks we were traveling. I debated for quite awhile what to write about. My brain is telling me to address the car wreck that is JD Vance who I warned you about previously here https://haroldkatz1.substack.com/p/two-sides-of-the-same-coin and here https://haroldkatz1.substack.com/p/i-am-not-a-jew-with-trembling-knees but I think I am going to pass on addressing his uneducated nonsense for the moment. Instead, I wanted to address something I am not sure many Jewish people understand. Don’t get me wrong. What I am about to say will seem simple and obvious. Some will blow it off as just that and ignore the rest of what I am about to write. I ask instead to stay with me. It is an important issue all Jews need to hear and comprehend and for some, it may change the way you look at our people and your role in it.

Despite the common narrative, much of what has been fed to the world on our behalf has been spread by Jews themselves. I am here to correct the record.

Judaism is not a religion.

As a matter of fact, I would argue because of how deep and complex the Torah is, it is about as far away from a religion as it could possibly be. The genesis of the Jewish people emanates from the Torah and the books of the prophets that follow it recount our history both what was and what will be. We can deny it all we want, but Torah is the soul of our people and we don’t exist as a nation without it. And yet, there is one underlying principle contained therein that is the burning flame inside the soul and is priority number one above all else. I do not believe there is anything inside Tanach that even comes close. The Torah is adamant and quite demanding about the collective that is the Jewish people. I will write it again. There is no issue the Torah considers greater than the collective Jewish nation. The greatness of Hashem and His Torah is that inside the collective, the individual is paramount.

“And this serves to tell of the greatness of the Holy One, Blessed be He, as when a person stamps several coins with one seal, they are all similar to each other. But the supreme King of kings, the Holy One, Blessed be He, stamped all people with the seal of Adam the first man, as all of them are his offspring, and not one of them is similar to another. Therefore, since all humanity descends from one person, each and every person is obligated to say: The world was created for me, as one person can be the source of all humanity, and recognize the significance of his actions.” (Mishna Sanhedrin 4:4)

Regardless of the vicious narratives being spread around the entire world about our people, the Mishnah records the Torah’s view about how important every Jew is to the collective and the world. Each and every person needs to know the entire world was created for me, the individual. As I have written here in the past, the Lubavitcher Rebbi said, “the moment you are born is the moment G-d said the world can no longer exist without you in it.”

Knowing all of that, there is nothing in this world of more importance to a Jew than the collective, the Am-the nation of Israel. “Hear oh Israel, the L-rd is G-d the L-rd is One.” The Torah does not say “you should hear” in the specific. Instead it speaks to the entire people of Israel. What follows are instructions for “you”, both personally and the collective. “You shall love the L-rd your G‑d with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words which I command you today shall be upon your heart. You shall teach them thoroughly to your children, and you shall speak of them when you sit in your house and when you walk on the road, when you lie down and when you rise… (Deuteronomy 6:4-9) In it’s brilliance the Torah commandments are both singular and plural. In declaring Hashem’s Oneness we declare our own. We live our lives as Jews to emulate our Creator and if He is One, His people must be one. There is nothing in the world like the Torah and no one else in the world like the Jewish people, the nation the Torah was given to at Mount Sinai.

Compare this to any other religion. Take christianity for example. They have done away with the collective. Believe in their diety and you are good to go for eternity. There is no collective responsibility. They have taken the most important lesson and message of the Torah and ripped it away whole without ever understanding what they have done. Now, I am sure the christian response will be the laws were all fulfilled so there is no need for the collective anymore. I won’t get into this, but suffice it to say the Torah very clearly rejects any such equation. There is no collective in islam. Anyone can be a part of islam if they accept Mohammad as the messenger of Allah. Yes, there are a few things they must do such as praying five times a day, but none of that is tied to the collective. Judaism on the other hand does not require actions to be counted as a part of the people. If your mother is a Jew, you are a Jew. Full Stop. No mater what actions one takes afterward, they will always be a Jew in the eyes of Hashem and His people. It should be noted, Jews who have chosen to join our people through the Jewish conversion process are every bit a Jew as those born of a Jewish mother.

To illustrate this even further, the prophets for the most part, only spoke about and to the collective. Salvation comes to the Jewish people through the collective, not the individual. That being said, each individual is expected and required to add to the collective. In fact, most adherents of any other religion will tell you they choose to follow the requirements of their belief systems in order to gain access to a future world to come. While Judaism believes in the existence of such a world, albeit a much different one, the Torah never mentions it and outside of a verse or two that alludes to something of the sort, the Torah only deals with this world we live in and how the Jew is to relate to it. More to the point, there is no need for The torah to engage in the “what will happen after you die”, because the Author is G-d, Himself and His numerous guarantees are real and have clearly been demonstrated in this world, the fate and history of the Jewish people being exhibit A. He knows what was and what will be. Both christianity and islam fail in that department. The church cannot point to anything in their books that refer to guarantees for you to test out in this world other than prophesies they have latched onto from the Torah. Like islam, they can only refer you to what will happen when you are gone from this world. From the outside looking in, it doesn’t seem very divine to me.

Torah demands something else entirely from the Jewish people. To be a holy nation. To create a society in their own land with rules for everything from war and setting up courts to how to treat a convert and a widow. To care for the poor and feed the hungry. To not be expansionist, but to defend the land and protect its people. Most importantly, the Torah requires the Jewish people to live and act as one. In case you are wondering, unity of purpose is not unity of thought. Torah throughout the ages has embraced different opinions which is why the Mishnah and Talmud, the greatest peer reviewed documents in history, exist. We are to be one nation undivided and with one heart. “K’ish Echad, B’lev Echad-like one man with one heart.” To paraphrase Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, all three times we have been removed from our land it was because of disunity. Joseph’s brothers could not tolerate him, “vayisnu otto – they hated him – lo yachlo dabro leshalom – they could not live and speak peaceably with him.” Centuries later, we were kicked out of our land during the first temple period because we had already chosen we would rather be apart than together and split to become two different entities, a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom on the same holy precious land. After we returned a few hundred years later during the second temple period, we fought amongst ourselves again-including an actual civil war-until it led to our eventual expulsion. As Rabbi Sacks concludes, “this means there is only one people on earth capable of threatening the future of the Jewish People. And it is: the Jewish People.”

The Torah does not instruct us how to pray. It does not tell us what our sukkah is to look like. It does not instruct us how to make teffilfin. What the Torah does say however, is we are all responsible for each other. Without the collective, there is no redemption, no messiah. Torah is crystal clear. When the entire nation is unified and faithful the Jewish people succeed, when they are not, the people will pay the price. Tragically, history has proven that to be painfully true. In 1912 in Ha’ivri 1, Rabbi Abraham Issac Hakohen Cook, heretofore known as Rav Cook, wrote about the society the Torah envisions for the Jewish people and the rest of the world. “Not only exceptional individuals-the wise, pious, monks, and holy people-can live by the divine ideal, but entire nations as well down to the lowest levels of society.” The Torah dares to demand something extraordinary. A full functioning society created and sculpted by the Torah in service to Hashem and it was the nation of Israel who are to build it.

If the Torah is the constitution of the Jewish people, the land of Israel is the parchment the Torah is written on. While we have always retained a presence in the land, for thousands of years we were denied sovereignty in our homeland and a quick review of our existence previously exposes why we were removed. As I documented above, our behavior sealed our fate and while our prophets implored us to turn back from our bickering and strife, we refused to listen instead choosing to “be right” in place of “doing right”. We were lost in our own righteousness and forgot the importance of our collective. And we paid dearly for it.

“Because you fast in strife and contention, and you strike with a wicked first;…Will you call this a fast, and an acceptable day to the L-RD? …This is the fast I desire…It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the poor into your home. When you see the naked clothe them, and not to ignore your own people. (Isaiah 58:4-7)

But even with all of our sins written down and put on display for the world to see, our prophets also told us that our salvation will come despite our past sins, but we must understand who we are and what is required of us. “Therefore says the L-rd G-D: Now will I bring back the captivity of Jacob, and have compassion upon the whole house of Israel…And they shall bear their shame, and all their breach of faith which they have committed against Me…And they shall know that I am the L-RD their G-d, in that I caused them to go into captivity among the nations, and have gathered them unto their own land…” Ezekiel 39:25-26, 28).

As we rebuild our home, we know not everyone is able to partake at this moment in the incredible mitzvah we have before us. Do not despair for just as there are individual mitzvot we all do, there are community mitzvot we all share. Leaving sheaves for the poor, divorcing one’s spouse if needed, lighting shabbat candles and while I don’t have a source for this, it is quite possible rebuilding the land is a collective mitzvah as well.

In his work, G-d in Search of Man, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “Why is my belonging to the Jewish people the most sacred relation to me, second only to my relation to G-d? Israel is a spiritual order in which the human and the ultimate, the natural and the holy enter a lasting covenant, in which kinship with G-d is not an aspiration but a reality of destiny. For us Jews there can be no fellowship with G-d without the fellowship with Israel. Abandoning Israel, we desert G-d.

The Israel Rabbi Heschel is speaking of is Israel the people, and our intrinsic destiny with the collective. No, Judaism is not a religion and anyone who says so knows not what they are talking about. Judaism is the vehicle which connects the nation of Israel to their Creator and to each other. Without the people there is no Judaism, without Judaism there is no people. They cannot be separated. While the unity of the Torah and the people are intertwined as one, without the land, the people and Judaism can never be whole.

I will end with Rav Cook: “The soul of the sinners of Israel in the footsteps of the Messiah, those who connect to matters of the collective of Israel, to the land of Israel and to the life of the nation, is more perfected than that of the wholesome believers of Israel who do not have the advantage of self-feeling for the benefit of the collective and the building of the nation and the land.” (Orot 14)

To be continued…