Who are the Jews?
Clive A Lawton leads us through the many traditions of Jewish life
Jews love arguing. It’s how we arrive at the truth. Besides the Bible, our greatest Jewish book – actually it’s a twenty-volume set – is the Talmud, which records the debates of about a thousand rabbis spanning about a thousand years. Not one final decision is recorded. And as soon as that was finalised, other rabbis started out on their discussions about what it all meant. Whenever Jews look at a text, we never say: ‘If that’s what it says, then that’s what it means’. Our default position is ‘if that’s what it says, then what does it mean?’ Every text is an invitation to debate, not a final word on anything. Christians will probably be most familiar with one brief minute of Jewish time and debate – the discussions that raged during Jesus’s time on how to understand the Torah, the core text of the first five books of the Bible. That’s the ‘written Torah’. Side by side with that goes the Oral Torah, which is what the Talmud was trying to pin down, the traditional understandings of what is and is not included in work and rest on Shabbat, not murdering, honouring parents, being responsible for the Earth, loving one’s neighbour and so on. If it matters, then it matters to get it right.
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