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Back to Question of the Week Q: I have never heard of a Jewish missionary and I have never found a commandment for the Jews as a whole to go into the world and preach about God. My question is this: If there is no commandment to mission abroad, and Jonah teaches that non-Jews path for redemption is sincere [repenting] prayer, how are non-Jews to come to know God? If there is no commandment to mission abroad and non-Jews are supposed to atone for their sins, could other religions be valid faiths with God speaking through their culturally specific prophets ? . . . I have always thought that the Bible taught the relationship between God and Israel was special and exclusive but not unique in the sense that He would make Himself known to all mankind. - Shane |
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A: Dear Shane: As I understand your question, the theological problem is this: If Jews have special knowledge of God's will, and a special mission in the world, what, in traditional Jewish terms, is the religious mission of everybody else? How are other nations to come to know and love God unless Jews go out and preach about it, which generally we don't do? Or, to put it more bluntly, if the Jews are the "chosen people," what does that make everybody else? Good question, one that the ancient rabbis considered a long time ago. As with many questions, there's more than one possible answer in the traditional rabbinic sources. However, what is widely accepted is the idea that Jews do not, and never have, possessed the exclusive means of "salvation," traditionally understood as "the life of the world to come." The medieval philosopher Maimonides says quite explicitly that the "righteous of all nations have a share in the world to come," and in fact some rabbis believe that it's even easier for the members of other nations to achieve the status of "righteous" than for Jews. Huh? Well, the rabbis who hold that view do a bit of mitzvah-math on the following equation: according to the Talmud (Sanhedrin 56b), there are seven laws which God wants all nations to observe, while for Jews, there are 613 commandments. So if you observe the seven laws of the "children of Noah" (i.e., everybody on earth), you're considered to be absolutely righteous, while a Jew has 606 more details to worry about, making the task that much harder. Just for the record, the traditional "laws of the children of Noah" are: don't murder, don't steal, don't commit adultery, don't eat the limb off a live animal, don't curse God, don't worship idols, and establish courts of justice to administer fair laws. These and other pre-modern rabbinic sources seem to indicate a belief that a kind of generalized monotheism was something that any rational person, of any nation, would or could come to believe in; similarly, basic moral laws were available to any person or nation, and adherence to these laws, rather than the specifics of belief or practice, was the important test of a nation's character. So there was no need to go out and preach to non-Jews, because if they just applied their reason, they would come to the conclusion that there is One Creator and this Creator demands a standard of morality. All the rest of Jewish belief and practice was only a specific agreement between God and the Jewish people, and not really necessary for anybody else. Now, one could argue strenuously with these ideas, claiming that a Jewish belief that sets a "lower standard" for non-Jews is just part of the general belief in Jewish chosenness, which many people find problematic for ethical and theological reasons. Personally, I like Maimonides' insistence that all nations have a path to God- while he might not have imagined other paths like Buddhism or Native American spirituality, he was certainly familiar with Islam and Christianity, which other Jewish scholars at the time considered to be monotheistic religions. I understand "idol worship" to be a matter of morality, not of theology. To me, even religions that use icons and representations of the Divine are not "idolatrous" if the worshippers are trying to connect with a greater Unity beyond the specific forms (as they would be in the aforementioned examples of Buddhism and Native American religions.) Therefore, I have no problem with your proposition that people of any nation can connect with the One God in their own culturally specific way. I even believe that God has made covenants with every people, challenging them to be their moral and spiritual best, in a religious form that has evolved in their own history, just as Judaism has evolved for us. For another perspective on Jewish chosenness, see my colleague R. Jeremy Schwartz' Reb column on "Who Chose Whom?" Many of the Jewish denominations have active interfaith programmes; comparing the statements such programmes make would give one an idea of how different Jews today view their non-Jewish neighbours. NJL |
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