Demythologizing Judaism March 13, 2022 Dr. Roger Ray, co-pastor
John 4: 19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you[c]say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” 21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him.
I began this series of sermons that David and I are doing last week when I suggested that all modern religions are in need of being demythologized. We can find insights and wisdom and, perhaps more importantly, community, in all of the traditional religions of the world, but in this modern era, we have reason to demand critical thinking, historical honesty, and moral clarity. Which means that the myths and superstitions of the ancient world need to be set aside in order to allow the real value of each of these religions to emerge.
And I feel that I need to apologize a bit about using a passage from the Christian Gospel of John to introduce this lecture on demythologizing Judaism. John is the least historically reliable of the four canonical gospels and that is saying a lot. It is an early second century creation and its version of the story of Jesus is almost entirely a work of fiction and it is the most clearly Anti-Semitic of the gospels. But for our purposes today, it is a piece of fiction written in a time when there was still a living memory of the competition between the Jews in Jerusalem and the Samaritans, who thought of themselves as being Jews, whose temple was on Mt. Gerizim.
This is relevant to us only because current canon of the Hebrew Bible would have had us to believe that there was only one Temple and that Judaism revolved around only the temple on Mt. Zion in Jerusalem. The fact is that there were at least four and possibly more. Two were in Egypt, in Alexandria and one on Elephantine Island, and one, as mentioned, on Mt. Gerizim in Palestine. What Christians call “the Old Testament” is just the version of Semitic writings as they were edited by the priests and scribes within the Jerusalem sect, but there were other, and sometimes intensely competitive, sects.
When I teach a college course on Western Religions, I tell my students that you really have to think about Judaism as having been at least two entirely different religions and more likely, it is best to think of it as having had four of five iterations. But for simplicity’s sake today, let’s think of it in two major divisions.
The most ancient Israelite religion was focused on the ritual sacrifice of animals managed by a priesthood. It was not a monotheism. Ancient Semites accepted that there were many gods but that Yahweh was their god. In the time of Moses and King David, Yahweh was a regional god of war who accompanied Judah in battle and Yahweh was more likely to be helpful on the battlefield if they didn’t sacrifice to rival gods. Yahweh was described as being “jealous” that way and sometimes maybe even petty and vengeful. At the very least, you would have to say that Yahweh was moody.
In the sixth century before the common era, Judah was conquered by the expanding empire of Babylon and most of the literate people and skilled craftsmen of Judah were taken into captivity.
Some of the Psalms reflect the anxiety of those Jews about whether or not it made any sense to pray to Yahweh when they were so far away from Zion. They believed that god was enthroned in the clouds above Jerusalem and without of the trumpets and rams’ horns being blown in the temple, they could hardly get his attention even there, but from some 1700 miles away, near what is modern day Baghdad in Iraq, they despaired that their god could possibly hear them. It was in the slave ghetto of Babylon that Judaism began to change from being a temple based religion managed by priests who ritually sacrificed animals into being religion based on religious texts that were read and interpreted by literate community leaders who were called “teachers,” which, in Hebrew, is rabbi.
It was in Babylon that Jews were influenced by the Persian religion, Zoroastrianism, which introduced them to concepts of monotheism as well as beliefs in such things as angels and demons as well as heaven and hell. The religion that emerged, nearly a century later, didn’t look much like the religion that they had carried with them into captivity.
After the return of the Jews to Judah, a temple was rebuilt but the temple cult was, from that time on, in competition with the Jews who worshipped in synagogues that were focused, not on sacrifices but rather on the study of the religious texts, most of which were compiled from oral traditions in Babylon. This competition between the temple based priesthood and the form of Judaism practiced in synagogues continued right into the time of Jesus.
In fact, for those of us who grew up going to Christian Sunday Schools, we were led to believe that Jesus, his disciples, and most early Christians were Jews and everyone who wasn’t a Jew was a gentile. That is our modern use of those words but in the time of Jesus, when the priests spoke of Jews, they meant people who lived in Jerusalem who continued in the traditions of the animal sacrifice, priestly cult. They would have thought of Jesus and his disciples from the Galilee as being gentiles as much as the pagans in Rome were gentiles.
When the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in the late first century of the common era, Judaism became a religion exclusively based on a book and centered in synagogue worship. As Rome embarked on a first century genocide of the Jews, Judeans were scattered around the world, forgetting their tribal identifications and giving up any hope of ever having a temple in Jerusalem again until the mid 20th century, in response to the Nazi Holocaust, the nation of Israel was re-established in 1948.
In the nineteenth and twenty centuries, Judaism evolved into four distinct groups: reformed, orthodox, conservative, and the lesser known reconstructionist movements.
The majority of Jews you will encounter are reformed but the ones we hear the most about in the news are the Orthodox sects who have a lot of influence in the government policies of Israel.
The kind of curious thing about modern Judaism is that we know much about them at all.
Looking that the global population, nearly a third of the people in the world identify as being Christian. About a fourth of the world identifies as being Muslim. 15 or 16% choose to either remain unaffiliated or identify as being Hindu . . . which can mean a lot of different things. Only 7% of the world describes themselves as being Buddhist and less than 1/4th of 1% identify as being Jewish . . . 0.2% of the world.
How do they still cast such a long shadow on the consciousness of the world?
How do 15 million people stand out so much in a world with more than 7.5 billion people in it?
Racial and cultural stereotypes are always inherently dangerous and probably racist. Trust me, as the adoptive father of a very bright young Korean daughter, all Asians are not good at math and science. My daughter majored in business because she thought it would be easy and their study abroad program featured a semester in Italy. You can imagine how proud I was of that choice!
But for 0.2% of the population, in modern times, nearly a fourth of all Nobel prizes have gone to Jews. Half of the Oscars for music have gone to Jews and you don’t even want to think about modern philosophy or psychiatry without Jewish thinkers and scholars. And when it comes to comedy, fuhgeddaboudit.
From Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud to Jon Stewart and Groucho Marx, the Jewish people have put their stamp on what it means to live in the modern era.
And right now, you can’t mention Jews who have made significant contributions to the modern would without mentioning the former comedian and actor, turned president of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelenskyy. I don’t want to say too much about this amazing national leader because I’m slightly jealous that my girlfriend and every other woman on earth has such a crush on him, and if he keeps up this courageous showdown with Vladimir Putin, I may have a man crush on him myself! May his tribe increase!
But so far as demythologizing and reformation in the 21st century goes: it should go without saying that the fact that the Hebrew scriptures contain a claim that the god of the Hebrews somehow uniquely chose them is just a bit of religious propaganda. The Jews are no more chosen by God than are the Boston Red Socks. We have no special reason to believe that Moses existed in history and we have lots of reason to assume that most of the Exodus narrative is fictional, if not all of it. God didn’t write the Ten Commandments and the Torah is not really sacred writ, any more than any other ancient or modern religious writing. It is an older equivalent of the Book of Mormon with just about as many preposterous claims and fictional stories.
Judaism is not, as I have tried to explain, a single, static religion but rather an ever evolving spiritual community with many ancient and current expressions. But it is a community that has valued identity, ethics, and intellect. Although their numbers are small globally, we can be grateful for their contributions to the arts and the sciences as well as to global politics.
For the past 80 years, this small population has suffered more than its share of discrimination and violence. Ironically, we also find the modern state of Israel, the geographic center of Jewish identity, to now be dishing out some of the same abusive injustice that they have been famous for suffering. I insist upon the obvious right to be critical of the state of Israel without being dismissed out of hand as being anti-Semitic.
Among the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reformed movements, you would find rituals and language that sounds very much the same but it is fair to say that only the Orthodox would take supernatural theistic claims and the historical narratives of the Torah as being literally true. Sadly, the Orthodox swing a big bat in Israeli politics and their belief in being God’s chosen people and in a piece of real estate given to them by God creates a lot of the tension that exists between Islamic governments in the Middle East and Israel. There are offenses on both sides of this divide and the dynamic created when land was taken from Palestine in the 1940’s to create the state of Israel caused deep entrenchments on both sides.
I am deeply and profoundly sorry that in a fit of Biblical romanticism, the USA and the nations of Europe went along with the creation of modern Israel in the ancient land of the Hebrew Bible. The Holocaust was a European sin and though the Jews deserved a safe homeland, it should have been established in Europe. Making Palestine pay for the sins of Germany and Nazi sympathizers has set up a situation with almost no solution.
Seventy years into this geographical mistake, I honestly don’t have any idea how to unwind it.
A two-state solution seems workable ideologically but, if past is prelude, any Muslim state adjoining Israel is likely to return to wanting to push the Jews into the sea. Dramatic reform in the religious thinking of both Jews and Muslims is needed but there is so much grievance on both sides of the conflict, it is difficult to see it happening.
I am one of those people who fell in love with Israel the first time I visited it. I have wished that both Jews and Muslims could share political power and preserve the rich history and meaning of the place to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. I don’t know what kind of magic it would take but I do know this, there is not a military solution to this problem. That has been tried for four generations in modern times and all of those solutions have only made matters worse.
Again, there are offenses on both sides of the equation, but I can say this about Israel, keeping Palestinians from being able to have decent employment, education, health care, and freedom to travel is only making it worse. I have loved Israel, but I won’t be going back under current circumstances.
I realize that Orthodox Jews and conservative Muslims think that there are too many differences between them to ever be peacefully reconciled. I believe that the real problem is that they are too much alike. They both have projected onto the skies and image of a God who makes them entitled to land and power and they are both wrong.
The Quran says that when a land has been under Muslim rule, it must be under Muslim rule forever. The Torah says that God gave Palestine to the Jews. Both are wrong. God is not a real estate broker.
This is not going to make me popular among traditional Christians, Orthodox Jews, or conservative Muslims, but this is the ultimate failure of all monotheisms. If you are convinced that there is one god and that your religion is the one that represents that god, then all of the others have to be wrong. Polytheism may not be attractive to many people in the modern world, but it allows for cooperation and peace and that can’t be all bad.
Of course, I advocate for a post-theism. If you can give up your imaginary friend in the clouds and accept that whatever is of the divine cannot be known, is beyond knowing and description, then we can all get along by acknowledging the mystery of the universe without anyone having to be wrong.
Trust me, I see the paradox. I’m saying that monotheism is wrong because it rejects others, but I am rejecting monotheism. It is like when Scott Peck says that community is inclusive of everything except for exclusivity. The world can no longer afford to abide any religion that insists upon being right by making everyone else wrong. I continue to believe that all of the world’s great religions have insights to share about morality and ethics but only after you strip away the magical thinking and the ancient superstitions with all of the entitlement that seems to come with it.
