Read more about the article Chapter 2: The Jewish People’s story, the early period

Chapter 2: The Jewish People’s story, the early period

In order to understand the Jewish community of today – we need to examine all sorts of phenomena that explain why the Jewish community today, in different places in the world, looks the way that it does. We need to understand too, why the idea of Jewish community has been so central to Jews for thousands of years. 

For this and the next two chapters, we will be following the strange path of the Jewish community as it wends its way through time, changing and developing as it encounters new situations and finds itself forced to adapt to strange and often difficult circumstances. We will see how the framework and the content of the lives of our ancestors changed and indeed revolutionized themselves in the three periods in question. Let us now open our story and plunge into the first period: how does the whole story begin?

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Read more about the article Chapter 3: The Jewish People’s story, the pre-modern period

Chapter 3: The Jewish People’s story, the pre-modern period

In this chapter we will examine the dynamics of Jewish community in the emerging Diaspora center. We will see the growth and the decline of great Jewish communities, each with their own Rabbinic leadership in different parts of the world. The basis had been laid in Palestine. The results were to be seen throughout the world. The story of the Jews was changing yet again.

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Read more about the article The Messiah – 16

The Messiah – 16

After all the promises and all the tests, and the centralization of our connection to God in the Temple, the destruction of the Temple and of our sovereignty constituted a major spiritual crisis.  It seems likely that many people saw this disaster as evidence that God was a failure, or non-existent.  The prophets’ challenge was now not just to get the people to obey the laws, but to get them not to give up on the whole project.  At first, the assumption was that this disaster was indeed a punishment, but that it would pass: we had paid the price of our sins, so now God could forgive us and get over His anger, and restore an anointed king of David’s line (anointed one = mashiach = messiah), and the Temple service.  As time went on, however, this neat picture never materialized, and we had to find a way to cope with painfully . and indefinitely postponed redemption.  And so, as the messiah receded into the future, he loomed larger and larger in terms of his expected role in the world.  At the same time, we learned to live (mostly) with a “permanent” tension between present reality and our imagined utopian restoration to the good old days (that were not as good as we imagined them).

This lesson traces the development of the messianic concept, and looks ahead at its impact on later Jewish history.  Our relationship to the land of Israel – and the state of Israel – is intimately tied up with this powerful and interesting concept.

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Read more about the article Palestine under Roman Rule – 20

Palestine under Roman Rule – 20

The period of Roman rule of Eretz Yisrael is important in our consideration of “teaching Israel” for several reasons:

  • Continuing the conversation that began with Shivat Tziyon, about the significance of land, autonomy, sovereignty, and exile: if we are living in our land but do not have sovereignty, are we in a kind of exile?  Or does exile only refer to physical separation from the land?  How important, in our relationship to the land, is political independence?
  • Another conversation that continues and blossoms during this period is about Judaism’s relationship to foreign cultures.  The Jewish-pagan polarity that is so evident in the Bible becomes much more complex and nuanced during the Hellenistic and Roman periods.  This brings us to down to the modern discussion of “what is Jewish culture?” and “What is Israeli culture?”  Is any culture that is rooted in Israel ipso facto Israeli?  Jewish?
  • It is during this period that the basic documents of the Oral Law are codified; thus, the “Jewish Tradition” as we know it, both Halachah and Aggadah, is founded upon the records of the discussions of the rabbis of Eretz Yisrael under the Romans – and this includes, of course, the place of the land itself in that tradition (see lesson 22, The Mishnah).

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