Why Be Jewish?

Judaism speaks about Yirat Hashem, the awe one should feel before God.

Jews are one quarter of 1 percent of the world population. Yet they make up almost 30 percent of the world’s Nobel Prize winners. Such achievement is not bred in the genes. It is a product of centuries of insistence on the gift of the human mind. The great heroes of Jewish spirituality always include scholars and sages.

Halakhah is the Hebrew word for Jewish law, and it literally means walking, a path to take and not a destination to reach.

Judaism urges us to sin against God before we would sin against another who is in God’s image. God can bear our sin. We cannot injure God, but we can destroy each other. Our first task therefore is kindness toward those who are created in the Divine image: the poor, the stranger, the neighbor, and the friend.

The first mention of Jews in history, outside the Bible, is in a small stone tablet called the stele of Mernpetah. It is a fragment of an Egyptian record dating from about the twelfth century B.C.E.—over three thousand years ago. It reads “Israel is laid waste —his seed is no more.” The very first allusion to Jews in history boasts that they are de

Israel is home in the classic definition of the poet Robert Frost: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

For all its power, science cannot be the meaning of our lives or tell us why to get up in the morning. Supreme at how questions, science does not answer why. That is the function of faith.

Spirituality is a constant striving to keep in mind the truth that the intangible is ultimate, that the moral world spins on the axis of what we cannot see.

Judaism took a different route (although individual Jews have tried all these strategies). One should try neither to wipe out desire nor to redirect it entirely. Pleasure is permitted, even promoted. But Judaism also asks that it be disciplined and sanctified.