A Pattern in History

[Where Judaism Differed by Abba Hillel Silver was first published in 1956; there was a 1972 edition; unfortunately, there is no ebook version that is downloadable for kindle or nook. There are used paperback copies listed at amazon.com for $3.24 (1972) and $2.65 (1956) and one new copy for $50! Since this book is not easily accessible, and we really wish to share its information, we will feature one significant chapter here because it provides historical information not usually known about Judaism. This is from the Chapter II titled A Pattern in History. Reformatting and highlights ours.]

A strong consciousness of history permeates Judaism.

• The God of Judaism was, of course, the Creator of the world, the God of nature. “In the beginning God crated the heavens and the earth.”
• To Abraham God was El ‘Elyon — “the Lord God Most High, Maker of heaven and earth” (Gen. 14:22).
• At the time of the making of the covenant, God revealed Himself to Abraham as El Shaddai — a term of uncertain etymology, but referring in all probability to some force or phenomenon of nature, the Storm God, perhaps, of the mountains.
• In the later Sinaitic covenant, which was based no longer on promise but on fulfillment, Yahweh, having redeemed Israel from Egypt, revealed Himself to the people predominantly as the God of their history. “I am the Lord your God Who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Ex. 20:2).
• He is no longer El Shaddai but Yahweh — “I will be what I will be” (Ex. 3:13-15), another difficult term whose meaning cannot be precisely determined, but one which suggests, among other ideas, that of the eternal God progressively revealing Himself in the processes of history.
• It was by that covenant, based on election and promise, that El Shaddai became the God of the Patriarchs.

Gods of nature, deities of creation, birth and fertility, were worshipped everywhere in the ancient world through rituals which were frequently grossly licentious. No ritual is to be found in Judaism which “symbolizes” anything about the nature of God or His “history.” All ritual came to be didactic in purpose, reminding men of their obligations toward God and their fellow men. Judaism, under prophetic guidance, came to subordinate the concept of the Creator God to that of the God of History, of Israel’s history and of mankind’s. In place of the seasonal drama of death and rebirth and its accompanying orgiastic rituals, Judaism projected a drama of history. Pagan religions were not interested in history, except in the mythological history of their gods, and pagan historians, though often acute in their appraisal of personalities and events, found little of permanent significance to mankind in history and saw no moral pattern in it. The prophets of Israel taught their people to think of God as the wise Ruler of their national identity. They wished to turn their people away from nature cults, from chthonic or astral ritualism to higher spiritual and ethical forms of worship.

This shift of emphasis from God’s theophanies in mighty and overwhelming nature phenomena to His revelation as the “voice of a gentle silence,” speaking of duty and mission to the inner spirit, is beautifully dramatized in the account of Elijah’s vision of God at Mount Horeb where the Mosaic revelation had formerly taken place amidst thunder and lightning (I K. 19:11-13).

The mighty drama of human experience, a drama not of sin and redemption, but of building the good society, as well as the millennial struggles and achievements of a unique people, is interpreted by Judaism. Israel was always admonished to recall history, to remember—“consider the days of old”—and on the basis of vital and instructive memories to build its future. Most of the religious festivals of Judaism and even the Sabbath day itself, regardless of their origin, came in time to be principally festivals of remembrance, memorials of the exodus from Egypt—the greatest moment in Jewish history. The seasonal, nature character of these festivals was deliberately subordinated to the historic motif.

Prophets, sages, and mystics alike related their thinking to a definite pattern of history. The Jews were the first to give mankind a philosophy of History — rather than a philosophy of Being.

Judaism sees in human history and in the history of Israel no mere succession of events, but the outline of an unfolding moral process, the articulation in time of an immanent divine plan, glimpsed by man in retrospect and then only dimly, but known to God in its completeness.

There is a pattern in all that transpires, and this pattern is a spiritual one. The good will triumph, for God has willed it so, but the triumph can be hastened by humanity’s efforts. Coming as a climax to Trito-Isaiah’s superb vision of the New Jerusalem and the great Restoration, is the verse, “I, the Lord, will hasten it in its appointed time” (Is. 60:22). There is here an apparent contradiction. If God has set a fixed time for the redemption, what is meant by His hastening it? A Rabbi comments: “If Israel merits it, God will hasten its coming; if not, it will come to pass in its appointed time.” God’s ultimate achievement does not dispense with man’s participation in it. This is a basic concept in Judaism. For Judaism is concerned not alone with the ways of God in history, but also with man’s creative function in it. Basic, too, is Judaism’s view of Israel’s unique role in history.

Judaism is indigenous to the Jewish people and is inconceivable without it.

• The Jewish people did not adopt Judaism as the Romans, for example, adopted Christianity.
  • They created it.
• Jews and Judaism entered history simultaneously.
  • Its life and that of the Jewish people are inseparably intertwined.
• No other people, as such, consciously shared in it or helped to mold it, as was the case, for example, with Islam, which originated with the Arabs but whose golden age was the achievement largely of Moslems of non-Arab descent.
• Judaism exerted its tremendous influence upon the world from its own base in the Jewish people.
  • That base, however, was quite extensive. Israel was perhaps the least parochial of all peoples of antiquity.
  • “A wandering Aramean was my father . . . .”
• From the desert to the sown land the tribes of Israel moved in the dawn of their history.
  • From their fixed habitation in Palestine many of them were carried away into exile and to distant lands again and again.
  • From the dispersion of the Ten Tribes onward there was not a period when the Jewish people as a whole was concentrated there.
  • Jews were in close contact with many nations and many civilizations,
    • and they were influenced by many cultures.
  • Israel thus acquired a first-hand knowledge of the religions,
    • the modes of worship,
    • and the ways of life of many of the peoples of antiquity.
• It gained a world outlook.
  • The writings of the prophets reflect the wide horizons of this “cosmopolitan” people.
  • Their prophecies are directed by name to nearly all the nations of the ancient world,
    • and reveal an acquaintance with their traits and their histories.

The faith and ethical insights of Judaism were, however, not monopolized by the Jewish people. They were offered to humanity.

• Israel’s covenant with God was also a covenant with mankind.
• “I have given you as a covenant to the peoples, as a light to the nations” (Is. 42:6).
• It was not a solitary and unshared light but a beacon light.
• The Sages declared that “the Torah was given in public, openly, in a free place. F
• or had the Torah been given in the land of Israel, the Israelites could have said to the nations of the world: You have no share in it.
  • But now that it was given–
    • in the wilderness
    • publicly and openly
    • in a place that is free for all,
    • everyone willing to accept it
      • could come and accept it.”

The God of Israel was the God of all men, and all men were called to His service.

• The Jews carried on an active missionary propaganda for their universal spiritual ideas and moral values throughout the world whenever conditions did not prevent them, although they never conceived it as their historic mission to conquer the world, to engage in a Holy War on infidels in order to convert the world and bring it into subjection to the God of Israel.
• The Rabbis never accepted the principle of forcible conversion.
  • The only instances of such conversion took place under John Hyrcanus and his son Airstobulus who forcibly Judaized the Edomites and Ituraeans in the 2nd century B.C.E. It was never approved by the teachers of Judaism. John Hyrcanus’ intolerant religious imperialism extended also to the Samaritans, whose Temple on Mount Gerizim he destroyed.
  • These unprecedented and politically motivated acts contributed to the bitter friction which developed between Hyrcanus and Pharisees.
  • In Pharisaic law even slaves could not be forcibly converted.

All men, regardless of race or status, were welcomed into the faith. The Jewish people was never a self-enclosed society with an exclusive separatist religion. “Let not the foreigner who joins himself to the Lord say, ‘The Lord will surely separate me from His people’ . . . . I will bring them to My holy mountain and make them joyful in My house of prayer . . . for My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples” (Is. 56:3,7).
Some of Israel’s greatest leaders were descendants of proselytes, including King David, to whom the lineage of the Messiah was traced in later times. A Special prayer for “righteous proselytes” is included in the 18 Benedictions of the Prayer Book. Hillel (1 c.), the foremost spiritual leader of his day, was especially eager to receive proselytes.

Non-Jews who were not prepared to accept the full obligations of the Jewish discipline, national fellowship, and ceremonial laws were welcomed as Yir’e Shamayim (God-fearers). Some of them were ultimately converted and became Jews, accepting full citizenship in the religious household of Israel. Others accepted monotheism and practiced some, though not all, of the customs of Israel, but remained unconverted. Their spiritual status, however, was in no way regarded as inferior to that of a full-fledged Jew.

• Judaism never claimed to be the one and only channel through which “salvation” is conveyed to men.
• It never adopted Cyprian’s position: “Extra ecclesiam nulla salus” (No salvation outside the Church).
• Rather it held to the conviction: “The righteous among the Gentiles will have a portion in the world to come.“

The predominant hope of the people of Israel was not to convert the whole world to Judaism but to convert the whole world to God. It did not set as its goal the establishment of one universal Church to which all the true believers must belong and wherein alone “salvation” could be found. It looked forward to the day “when God would be One and His name would be One.”

R. Johanan (2-3 c), founder of the Academy of Tiberias and one of the chief creators of the Palestinian Talmud, declared: “Anyone who repudiates idolatry is called a Jew.” Elsewhere it is stated: “He who rejects idolatry acknowledges the whole Torah.” R. Johanan also shared the conviction of his colleague R. Eleazer, who succeeded him as head of the Academy, that “the Holy One, blessed be He, did not exile Israel among the nations save in order that proselytes might join them.” He interpreted the tragic exile as an opportunity for the people of Israel to turn mankind to God, even as Deutero-Isaiah in his day had similarly interpreted the Babylonian exile. In time many of the leaders of Judaism came to realize that there were other ways, perhaps more effective ways, of spreading spiritual truth in the world than proselytism and formal conversion;

• there was the way of example,
• and of total dedication to a pattern of life which might inspire others to emulation.

Judaism was, however, fearful of syncretistic tendencies which might do violence to its essential monotheistic faith, and was mindful always of the special covenant and mission which were assigned to Israel. It therefore looked to the people of Israel itself as its enduring sanctuary. The ritual prescriptions which guarded the discipline of its group life did not interfere with its spiritual and ethical universalism.

The spiritual leaders of Judaism of the Second Commonwealth and thereafter, as well as the prophets of the pre-exilic times, conceived of Israel not only as a nation, but also as a kehal Adonai (Dt. 23:4), “a Congregation of God,” coextensive with the nation — a covenanted religious community. The congregation or community, however, was never an entity distinct from the nation for the state, as was the case with the Christian Church, nor did it ever displace the concept of nationhood even in periods when the people did not possess an independent political life and its leaders were not kings but high priests. Like king, priest, or prophet, Israel as such had been, as it were, anointed for a divinely commissioned ministry, and by that token had become possessed of a special grace and power, had become a different kind of people. “Touch not Mine anointed and do my prophets no harm” (Ps. 105:15; also Ps. 84:10; 89:39, 52: 132:10; and Hab. 3:13, the latter also in the form of a Psalm. In each case it is the people that is referred to as having been anointed). Israel, as a people and as a community of believers, knew itself to be different. No term defining other nations, races, or religions could ever quite adequately be applied to it. By virtue of the immortal ideals of which it believed itself possessed, it experienced throughout its history a deathless hope, and believed its life to be indestructible. “When you pass through the waters I will be with you; and through the rivers they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through the fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you” (Is. 43:2).

Two world religions kindled their fires at the altars of Judaism. Both Jesus and Mohammed claimed no originality for their message. They did not come, they averred, to found a new religion but to restore the true faith of Abraham. Abraham stands at the headwaters of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Jesus worshipped in the Temple of Jerusalem. Mohammed and his followers at first turned their faces in prayer toward Jerusalem. It was only after he despaired of converting the Jews that he ordained that the faithful should pray toward the Ka’aba at Mecca — the Ka’aba of which Abraham was the reputed founder. Both Christianity and Islam turned to the Bible to authenticate their own scriptures. Much skilled typological dialectic was employed by the Apostles and the Church Fathers to prove that everything in their faith was prefigured in the Old Testament.

As part of this effort to establish that the Christians were the true Israelites and their predestined successors, quite a number of attractive philosophies of history were invented to account for the unique story and baffling persistence of the people of Israel. Judaism was by some assigned the role of a historic foil for Christianity. The argument was popularized that Christianity began where Judaism left off, and that Judaism’s creative life ended with — or even before —the advent of Christianity. There are to this day scholars who assign to Israel only a single flowering period, terminating with the last of the Biblical prophets. The many centuries of Jewish history which followed are regarded as a prolonged withering, waste, and fossilization.

The orthodox Christian interpretation of the role of Israel as the star witness for Christian truth, was crystallized for the Christian world by Augustine in his City of God. When prophecy ceased in Israel, after the return from the Babylonian captivity, the religious role of Israel came to an end. The Jewish people, thereafter, was afflicted with continual adversity to prove that Haggai’s prophecy, “The glory of this latter house shall be greater than that of the former” (Hag. 2:9), applied not to the second Temple which the Jews had built but to the coming of Christ. With his coming, the Jews were “rooted out from their kingdom and were dispersed through the lands . . . and are thus by their own Scriptures, a testimony to us that we have not forged the prophecies about Christ.” The Jews were needed by the Church as a living testimony. Hence they were not utterly destroyed. But they had to be dispersed “because if they had only been in their own land with that testimony of the Scriptures and not everywhere, certainly the Church which is everywhere could not have had them as witnesses among all nations.” Centuries later, at the time of the Second Crusade (1146-1147), Bernard of Clairvaux, whose eloquence helped set the Crusade in motion, in defending the Jews in the Rhineland against the violent mobs who attacked them, employed the same line of reasoning. The Jews should neither be killed nor expelled because they were needed as a living and a witness to the truths of the Christian faith. Seeing their dispersion and their disabilities, Christians will realize ever anew the truth of the crucifixion and the punishment which overtook those whom they held to be responsible for it.

To serve as a corroborating witness for another faith and to be superseded has, however, never received the willing cooperation of the Jews and Judaism. They were not impressed by the premature obsequies which were pronounced over them from time to time by those who regarded themselves as the lawful heirs of a faith and a people which, however, refused to die. They had a strong will to live. The altar of Judaism retained its own fires undimmed, and amidst the turbulence of wars, invasions, exiles, and persecutions, the faith was preserved intact. It survived the fallen thrones of its own kingdoms and the ruins of its own Temples. It wandered with Israel into strange lands and fearful exiles and often, harried and outlawed, it lived on in the hearts of the faithful as in an inviolate sanctuary, and remained in vision and power undiminished.

This has by some been called “narrow,” but the “narrowness” was not of racial pride, or out of lack of love for mankind. It was a question of technique—how best to transmit the message unimpaired to the world. Judaism chose one way; Christianity chose another. As to which was the wiser course, in terms not of quantitative but of qualitative diffusion, opinions will always differ. The influence of Judaism is not to be measured by the number of its adherents. Judaism never had an Asoka, a Constantine, or an Omar to hasten its progress; nor was it permitted through most of the past 2000 years to engage in proselytizing activities. In the realm of ideas one must be alert to withstand both the fear of numbers and their prestige. Even in times of apparent neglect and eclipse, Judaism strangely troubled the established orthodoxies of Christendom in the form of a variety of Judaizing heresies which began almost with the rise of Christianity itself. At other times it upsurged with sharp revolutionary thrusts in movements such as Humanism, the Reformation and Puritanism. The very presence of the unassimilated and stubbornly resisting Jew in medieval Europe, daily symbol of a faith which denied Christianity but in which Christianity sought authentication, troubled and disturbed the spiritual uniformity of the Christian world and from time to time forced it to reexamination and revision. The great social and democratic movements of Europe in the last few centuries, which have been remaking our world, turned for their inspiration principally to the Old Testament, to the prophetic message of Judaism —social justice and human equality, brotherhood and universal peace. The dominant apocalyptic elements of Christianity —“My kingdom is not of this world,” “It is the last hour,” “Resist not evil” –could not well serve as a basis for a program of social reform. The strong emphasis which both Catholic and Protestant Christianity have in the 19th and 20th centuries placed on the social gospel of their religion marks a sharp departure from their traditional positions and a welcome return to the prophetic ethics of Judaism. For while Christian metaphysics was in the main Platonic, and its soteriology an adaptation of a widely diffused Oriental gnosis, its ethical principles, with some notable exceptions, and its cultural-historical background were Jewish. Time and again the social passion of the Hebrew Bible swept in like the reviving sun and rain of a new springtime. How often have socioreligious movements in Christendom, like those of the Puritans and the dissenters, quoted chapter and verse from the Jewish Bible as the all-sufficient justification of their demands for social and economic reform, for free political institutions, and their opposition to the usurpations of tyrants and kings. The violence of the obscurantist attacks in recent years, such as one finds among some Existentialist theologians, upon the humanistic element in Christianity — its Jewish core — is further evidence of the Judaic leaven still powerfully at work. One wonders whether their very violence and dialectic truculence does not betray the throes of a struck and mortally wounded theology. Clearly, there is something unqualified both in the alleged failure of Judaism and in the so-called triumph of Christianity.

The “narrowness” of Judaism had to do not with its God-concept or its world outlook, but with its unique conception of a universalistic faith in the stewardship of a covenanted people. The ideals of universalism and human brotherhood had been part of the essential pattern of Judaism since the days of the prophets. In proclaiming the one and only God, and in denying the very existence of any other god, Judaism created the universal God idea, the universal Fatherhood of God and its logic corollary the universal brotherhood of man. Its “narrowness” was due to its firm determination to retain undiminished its spiritual identity in a world dominated by powerful syncretistic tendencies.

The trend of nearly all the religions of the Greco-Roman world at the beginning of the common era was toward “internationalism.” The Greco-Roman world, generally, was “international” in character. The sense of nationhood, peoplehood, of “patriotism” had largely disappeared in the incessant mixing of populations and cultures and in the vast amalgam of races, peoples, and creeds of the far-flung Roman Empire, which was held together by military force and administrative skill. The process had begun centuries before under Alexander whose dream was of a single world state.

Judaism saw no inconsistency between religious universalism and nationalism. It believed that the independent existence of nations was within the plan of God, and that He assigned each nation, as to each individual, a distinct task and responsibility. National identities were not, however, irreconcilable, and did not preclude international cooperation and universal brotherhood.

The many cults of the Roman Empire could without much difficulty be contained within the framework of a cosmopolitan, fluid, and tolerant religio-philosophic culture. Neoplatonism provided such a framework from the third through the fifth century, as did Gnosticism in the earlier centuries. Judaism could not and did not fit into any such mosaic.