The Basic Beliefs of JudaismOne of the oldest monotheistic religions known to humankind, Judaism has withstood the tests of time. So what exactly are the tenets of this ancient faith that have been passed down over the...Lawrence J Epstein...
Judaism is a set of beliefs and practices originating in the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Tanakh, and explored in later texts such as the Talmud. Jews consider Judaism to be the expression of the covenantal relationship God developed with the Children of Israel - originally a group of tw...
Judaism has developed a rich collection of hair practices across its three millennia, starting with biblical characters like Esau and Samson. In Numbers 6, the Naziritic vow ended with a sacrifice of one’s hair before the priest. Hair also figured in some Torah mitzvoth like prohibitions agai...
Minority status has also allowed Judaism and many Jews to see beyond the things that commonly divide people and produce enmity. The Hebrew Bibledemands worship of a God who cannot be represented in a visual medium and who has no resemblance to any created entity — in either corporeality, gen...
, shows that certain abuses had crept into the Temple worship and the religious life of the theocracy, and there was a real danger that a lax priesthood would once again bring the people to the brink of spiritual ruin. c. Ezra. These tendencies were brought to an abrupt halt by the ...
In in the Spring Term,Traditions of Judaism, we explore those things that the Jewish People worldwide share (Shabbat, the prayer book, the worship service) and we learn about Jewish history through the lens of the varieties of Jewish communities: Sephardic, Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, and others. We...
That does not mean that Jesus was God incarnate in the manner that the pagan Gentiles who worshiped everything under the sun proclaimed. Neither does it mean that Jesus was the only Messiah -- because each of us who seeks to make their body-vessel a Living Temple, receives the Anointing ...
We Reform Jews are heirs to a vast body of beliefs and practices embodied in TORAH and the other Jewish sacred writings. We differ from more ritually observant Jews because we recognize that our sacred heritage has evolved and adapted over the centuries and that it must continue to do so. ...
“founders” of his worship. Attached to the founder and his family, as befits the patron of wanderers, this unnameddeityacquired various Canaanite epithets (El, Elyon, Olam, Bethel, Qone Eretz [“Possessor of the Land”]) only after their immigration into Canaan. Whether the name of YHWH...
There has evidently been a foretime, though it is prehistorical, when, so far as we know, mankind was universally polytheistic; when innumerable rites and worships prevailed without restraint, springing up and contending with each other like the trees in a primeval forest, reflecting a primitive...