The Jewish part of a symposium on personal belief

Imagine the sea, not white caps on blue water, not wine-dark but black, with roiling waves crashing and falling. The tiny ship, its sails shredded, tosses like a child's broken toy. All cargo, all deck furniture, has been jettisoned. In despair, the captain casts lots to identify the human cause of the catastrophe – and the lot falls upon the passenger, now sleeping, who had scrambled aboard as the ship was about to sail from the port of Jaffa, buying a ticket to Tarshish. The captain rouses him.

“Then they said unto him, ’Tell us, we pray thee, for whose cause this evil is upon us? What is thine occupation? And whence camest thou? What is thy country? And of what people art thou?’?

The traveller's reply, in verse 9 of the first chapter of the Book which bears his name, is simple and direct.

“And he said unto them: ’I am an Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of Heaven, which hath made the sea and the dry land.’?

I adopt Jonah’s answer. I’m a Jew, and I stand in awe of the one God, the maker of heaven and earth. I stand as an inheritor of an invaluable heritage. I also believe that I’m part of the Jewish people – a community of fate. I share the joys and the sorrows of the Jewish people.

If one asks Jews today what that fate has encompassed this century – whether they lived through all or most of it or not – their answer will be that the principal episodes in it are the Holocaust of 1939-1945 and the creation of the State of Israel, three years after the end of the Second World War.

During the Holocaust, there was a song that, it was reported by survivors, was sung, or its words said, by many of those who waited to be gassed, or shot, or even buried or burned alive. These were its lyrics:

Ani ma’amin bemunah sh’leimah b’viat hamashiach, v’af al pi sheyitmahmeyah, im kol zeh, achakkeh lo b’chol yom sheyavo.
I believe, with perfect faith, in the coming of the Messiah, and though he may tarry, I wait, through each and every day, for his coming.

This is the twelfth of the Thirteen Principles of Faith. They were penned, more than eight hundred years ago, by Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, usually referred to by Jews by the acronym made up of the initials of his name – the Rambam. In English and indeed in Latin and Greek writings, he is called by his Greek patronymic Maimonides. So influential was his enunciation that about two hundred years after its publication an Italian Jewish sage, Daniel ben Yehudah of Rome, composed a beautiful poem incorporating the thirteen Principles. Called Yigdal, from its first word, it is sung in many synagogues to end the Eve of Sabbath Service. Here are the thirteen Ikkarim, or Principles of Faith, as Maimonicles expressed them:

2. There is a Creator.
3. He is One.
4. He is incorporeal.
5. He is eternal.
6. He alone must be worshipped.
7. The prophets are true.
8. Moses was the greatest of prophets.
9. The entire Torah was given to Moses by God.
10. The Torah is immutable.
11. God knows all the acts and thoughts of mankind.
12. God rewards and punishes.
13. The Messiah will come.
14. There will be a resurrection of the dead.

The thirteen Principles of Faith came late in the life of the Jewish people – some twelve centuries after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and the dispersion, resulting in what is called the Diaspora. The central event in our history is the Exodus from Egyptian bondage and the giving of the Torah – God's law – on Mount Sinai to the Children of Israel, His chosen people.

His Torah – the subject of Maimonides's eighth Principle – consists of the Written Law and the Oral Law.

The Written Law has as its core the Ten Commandments, the Decalogue, which fall into two segments, each occupying one of the two tablets on which they were engraved. It is convenient, though not entirely accurate, to describe the first segment as affecting the relationship ben adam laMakom, between human beings and God, and the second as ben adam la Adam, between one person and another. The Torah, including the Oral Law, which was ultimately published under the editorship of Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, the Prince, around the year 200 CE, constitutes the framework of rule within which a Jew is to live her or his life. The rule framework is commonly referred to as Halakha, which literally means ’process’ or ’progression’.

The history of the Jews during the last two millennia is intimately intertwined with the history of the two faith communities which are Judaism’s daughters – Christianity and Islam. In some ways, it is a history of daughters not only rejecting but reviling the mother from whom they sprang. Inevitably, however, each has affected, and continues to affect, the other.

Judaism’s emphasis has been almost entirely on living and doing in this world, though there have been, at times, and not surprisingly in periods of physical and religious repression, much concern with ha’olam haba – the world to come. That is why some sang Ani ma’amin at the gates of hell on earth.

The heritage of which I spoke must be won. It is won by practice and by learning – the two are inextricably intertwined. Jewish practice is day-long, week-long, year-long, and life-long. The day begins with prayer, and ends with the recitation of Shema Yisrael – Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. That fundamental declaration is often the last sentence to leave the lips of a Jew about to die. The week begins with the Havdalah service, farewelling the Sabbath and inaugurating a week which will culminate in the Shabbat, the day of rest. The year begins with Rosh Hashanah, the day of judgement, and begins ten days of penitence for past misdeeds, culminating in the most awesome day in the Jewish calendar, the fast of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The year is divided by the three Pilgrim Festivals: Pesach, or Passover, the Festival of our Freedom, marking the Exodus from Egypt; Shavuot, or Pentecost, marking the giving of the Torah on Sinai; and Sukkot, or Tabernacles, called the season of joyfulness, which sees the end of the annual cycle of weekly Torah readings and its immediate recommencement. Each of those Festivals, falling in Spring, Summer and Autumn, also remind the Jewish people of the agricultural episodes in the year in the land of Israel, where first the Sanctuary, and then the Temple, was the central place for public service to the Almighty.

The year also includes the fast-days which commemorate the tragedies which have marked the history of the Jewish people, the principal disaster being the destruction of the First and the Second Temples, on the ninth day of the month of Av, which falls sometime between mid-July and mid-August. It is also, however, enlivened by days of joy and gladness – Channukah, the Feast of Lights, which celebrates the victory of the Maccabean-led battle against the Syrian Seleucid oppression and the rededication of the Temple; and Purim, the Feast of Lots, which celebrates the defeat of the Persian vizier Haman, who plotted the destruction of the Jewish people in every part of that Empire. To that list there has been added, in our own day, Yom Ha’atzmaut, the anniversary of Israel’s independence, which was proclaimed on 14 May 1948, and Yom Yerushalayim, the anniversary of Jerusalem’s unification in 1967, after nineteen years of division. Yom HaShoah, the 27th day of Nissan, which falls between mid and late April, on which we remember and mourn the six million Jewish women, men and children who were murdered by the Nazis; and Yom Hazikaron, the day before Yom Haatzmaut, the day of remembrance for those who died in the establishment or in the defence of the State of Israel.

Life begins, for a boy, with Brit Milah – circumcision, the entry into the brit or covenant with God which Abraham, the first of the Patriarchs, inaugurated. For a girl, her entry is marked by a naming ceremony in the synagogue in the first public reading of the Torah when her father is present. A boy’s name is pronounced as part of the brit. Maturity is said to be achieved when a girl is twelve and when a boy reaches the age of thirteen. The Bat-Mitzvah and Bar-Mitzvah ceremonies mark the assumption of Ol Mitzvot, the personal onus of fulfilling God's commandments.

Marriage is a sanctification, where bride and groom stand beneath a canopy and seal their life-partnership. Divorce, if sadly it must be effected, has its solemn ceremony too, where the compact of marriage is sundered and the couple freed to marry others, if they choose to do so.

Life ends in death and Kever Yisrael, Jewish burial. A dead person deserves special respect and reverent attention, since she or he cannot return thanks for what is done for them.

Jewish learning is life-long. There is a famous episode in the Talmud, relating the different responses of two of the most eminent teachers of their and all time – Shammai and Hillel. A non-Jew came to Shammai and said that he would convert to Judaism if Shammai would teach him all of Jewishness, its law and practice, while he stood on one foot. Shammai picked up his builder’s measuring-stick and chased the questioner away. When he posed the same question to Hillel: “Teach me the Torah while I stand on one foot,? this was what happened. Hillel converted him and said:

“What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour: this is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary; now go and study.?

The significance of this episode is not only in its so-called negative enunciation of the central tenet of Judaism, first stated in Leviticus 19:19 in positive form: “But thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the Lord.? It is also in its last words – the Law must be studied so that the whole significance of that first part of Hillel’s response becomes manifest. Today that study has been made easier through the publication of vast numbers of books, periodicals, papers and pamphlets, on all facets of Judaism. Our classical sources and the whole corpus of scholarship which derives therefrom have been made accessible. Of course, today, CD-Roms and Internet sites convey Jewish knowledge to people at home, at school, anywhere, wherever a PC or a laptop computer may be used.

I begin and end with Jonah. The Book of Jonah is read in the Afternoon Service on Yom Kippur. It is called affectionately Maftir Yonah, the Prophetic Lesson of that part of the Day of Atonement. The reasons why this selection was made, from all of the rich and remarkable array of offerings in the canon of prophetic writing, are several. There is the patent theme of repentance and of divine mercy and grace to those who do repent, no matter how egregious, how awful their sins are.

However, there is more. At the end of his book, Jonah, angry because God has forgiven Nineveh after its King and people fasted and repented, relates how he stomps out of the city and squats outside its walls, in a booth – a Sukkah – that he built. God makes a large gourd spring up to shade the booth, and “Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd?. Then God sends a worm to gnaw at the gourd, which withers away. The sun and the east wind, beat down on the unsheltered prophet, who wishes himself dead.

God then interrogates his reluctant messenger and elicits from him the response that, yes, he pities the gourd and wishes it was still there, luxuriant in its provision of shade. Then there are these two sentences, with which this remarkable book finishes:

“You had pity on the gourd, for which you did nothing, nothing to make it grow. It sprang up in one night, and perished in another. Should I not spare Nineveh, that great city, with its more than 120,000 persons that cannot distinguish between their right hand and their left hand, and also much cattle??

What is God telling Jonah – and through him, us all? A modern Jewish commentator has provided this answer. Jonah is a Hebrew, who fears the true God, and the people of Nineveh are gentiles. We must not grudge our neighbours God’s love and forgiveness. Like us, they are God’s creation and like us, they are made in the image of the Divine. That is also a vital part of what I believe.

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Professor Louis Waller, AQ, FASSA. held the Sir Leo Cussen Chair of Law in Monash University, Australia, since 1965. He is Chairman of the Infertility Treatment Authority and is Chairman of the Ethics Committee of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research and is the Chairman of the Appeals Committee of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons. He is Chairman of the Makor Jewish Community Library and Chairman of the Committee for the Melton Adult Education Program.