[This is the first chapter of the book by Abba Hillel Silver titled One and the Same. Reformatting and highlights ours.]
When we speak of Judaism, we are dealing with a religion some 35 centuries old, covering nearly 2/3 of the recorded history of mankind. Judaism experienced many changes and modifications through its long history—changes induced both from within and from without. Judaism experienced many changes and modifications through its long history—changes induced both from within and from without. Organic evolution accounted for some of them; contact with alien cultures and civilizations accounted for others. Jews found themselves time and again in new environments in Palestine and elsewhere, exposed to an almost continuous bombardment of alien ideas and religious cultures, and faced with the necessity of making adjustments to new social, political, and economic conditions. Judaism is no more the product of any one country than it is the product of any one age. Nor is it the precisely formulated creed of a sect or denomination. It is the emergent spiritual way of life of a historic people.
Nevertheless, it possesses organic unity. While numerous inconsistencies may be found in it which should neither be ignored not exaggerated unduly, there is clearly visible in Judaism a steady and dominant coherence, a self-consistency, which links together all its stages of change and development and gives it structure and unity of tone and character. It possesses the unity not of a system but of a symphony. In their total and continuous integration, the key ideas — unity, freedom, and compassion — came to be sufficiently distinctive and impressive as to be unmistakable.
Judaism, in its long history, was not always spirally ascendant, nor did it always abide on high plateaus. It descended at times into dreary valleys of stagnation. There have been scholars, like Krochmal, who under Hegelian influence detected in the history of Judaism an ordered succession of life cycles—rise, maturation, and decay. Such arrangements of history are as uncertain as they are interesting. The fact of cultural fluctuations, however, even if not of a rhythmic periodicity, is beyond doubt. Judaism definitely experienced such fluctuations. At times its spirit wrote its message firm and clear on a parchment white and clean. At other times it wrote falteringly upon a blurred and worn palimpsest. There are many grades of vision and insight among the seers and teachers of Judaism.
There were many sects in ancient Israel which differed among themselves sharply and at times irreconcilably on what they regarded Judaism to be, both in doctrine and in practice. One of the Rabbis declared: “Israel was not dispersed before it broke up into 24 sects of heretics.” (One is reminded of the 32 heresies which Hippolytus [2 c.] found to exist in the early Christian Church.) Numerous sects flourished during the Second Commonwealth, a period of nearly 600 years, and in the following generations, both in Palestine and in the far-flung diaspora.
It was a turbulent, culturally agitated, and creative age — next to the prophetic, the most important age in Jewish history. During this period 2 powerful religious cultures, among others, exercised a strong influence upon Jewish life — the Iranian and the Greek. Many lines of religious cleavage developed among the people, whose resultant conflict contributed to the intense spiritual alertness of that decisive age. A major cleavage developed on the fundamental attitude toward the Written as opposed to the Oral Law. There were many other divisions. Some schools of thought stressed one phase of Judaism and some another.
- Some were strictly literal in their interpretation of the laws of the Bible;
- others were more liberal;
- still others were more mystical.
- Some unconsciously merged Greek, Buddhist, or Zoroastrian ideas with their own.
- Some entertained Gnostic views within a Judaic framework.
- Some emphasized otherworldliness in their religious thought, and austerity in their manner of life.
- Others were confirmed pacifists.
- Still others, though laymen, observed priestly prescriptions of ritual cleanliness and kept themselves free from all contacts which they regarded as contaminating.
- Some lived communally in desert retreats, or in closed covenanted associations in the towns and cities, practicing pious austerities and baptisms, even celibacy, eschewing all private possessions, despising wealth and extolling poverty, and in devout prayer awaited the coming of the messianic age.
The important fact to bear in mind, however, is that numerous and divergent as these sects were, they were at all times minority groups within Jewish life and did not represent the dominant and prevailing views. It is remarkable that in spite of all this great variety, there persisted a Judaism which retained an unmistakable character of its own. Notwithstanding the many byways which frequently led off from it, Judaism’s main highway continued clear, steady, and undeflected. Its reverence for the past and for the written Torah ensured for it an essential unity and a historic continuity. The written word proved on occasion to be constrictive, but it had the advantage of steadying the faith and checking extremes and relapses. What was gained was never lost, and the character of the faith was not altered in any of its essentials. Thus, the religious monotheism of the Rabbis of the Talmud and their code of ethics centering in the three constants—unity, freedom, and compassion—differed in no essential regard fro those of the prophets who lived nearly a thousand years before them, and they differ in no fundamental respect from those of their successors to the present day. Here and there one finds a difference of emphasis, a weightier or a lighter accent; here and there a nuance, significant but not critical. But there is no transvaluation of values.
One should be especially on guard against the temptations to exploit a stray quotation which may be found in some corner of Jewish literature and to make it carry more than its weight in order to establish some major deviation from normative Judaism. It should be borne in mind that not every judgment of a Rabbi was law for Israel, and not every personal opinion necessarily reflected the consensus of the Rabbis. One should rather look for the dominant pattern of the whole when considering the importance of any isolated expression, and inquire how far it falls within the authentic Judaic formula. The philosopher Maimonides found necessary to caution the men of his day against this practice of employing some fugitive phrase or chance expression in the Haggadah, in some Midrash, or in the writings of some Gaon as evidence against a dominant truth of Judaism. To understand Judaism one must avoid forced inferences and one must keep clearly in mind what was requisite in doctrine and what was mandatory in practice — in a word, Judaism’s major tenets, its great assumptions, and its accented features. One must see the whole of it before one can properly understand and appraise any part of it.
This is not to suggest that through the ages there were no modulations in the interpretation of the classic Jewish concepts. There were. From time to time, one hears new accents and new intonations, fresh orchestrations on ancient themes.
The prophets sank deep shafts to mine new gold. they redefined for mankind traditional concepts of—
- God
- people
- temple
- brotherhood
- and peace.
Rabbinic Judaism continued this process. What was progressive in the contribution of the Rabbis was not the “hedges” or “fences” which they found it necessary to build around the Torah, but the deepening of the essential concepts of Judaism —
- the disciplines of pious study,
- Torah for its own sake (Torah li’shemah),
- the hallowing of the Name of God (kiddush ha-Shem)
- suffering inflicted by divine love (yesurim shel ahabah),
- the noble ways of prayer,
- the higher ranges of charity,
- the spiritual utilization of the Sabbath,
- the wider scope and function of the synagogue
- and how to train oneself for the religious life,
- how to become “skilled in faith” (‘ayum b’yirah).
Medieval Jewish philosophy likewise contributed new insights —
- the interplay of revelation and reason,
- the meaning of freedom in man and in God,
- and how a confident life could be built for man in a world created and governed by the unknowable will of God.
A medieval Jewish philosopher, Halevi, gave a profound and new definition to the concept of Jewish nationality, to the autonomy of the Torah and to Israel’s unique association with it. Jewish mysticism, likewise, revealed new insights —
- how to satisfy the hungry soul through devout contemplation of the mysteries of God and His world,
- how to set pious feet on the road of the eternal quest for the nearness of God,
- and how to unlock the recondite meaning of the Sacred Text.
In a later manifestation, in Hasidism, Jewish mysticism refreshed old concepts and introduced new techniques —
- “Enthusiasm” (hitlahabut),
- “Outpouring of one’s soul” (hishtapchut ha-nefesh),
- the sacredness of joy in the practice of faith,
- and the importance of personality in spiritual leadership.
Modern Judaism contributed new and progressive elements,
- not so much in the abandonment of certain customs and ideas which no longer satisfied the intellectual or aesthetic needs of the new day,
- but in the substitution of scholarship for scholasticism,
- of liberty for inflexible authority,
- and the restatement in modern terms of the basic concept of the mission of Israel.
But in spite of these impressive variations in emphasis which greatly enriched it, the basic theme of Judaism continues throughout, all-dominant and clearly audible. Judaism’s spiritual message remained one and the same through the ages.
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