Why Be Jewish?

Judaism does not look on human beings as essentially sinful.

Jews are one quarter of 1 percent of the world population. Yet they make up almost 30 percent of the world’s Nobel Prize winners. Such achievement is not bred in the genes. It is a product of centuries of insistence on the gift of the human mind. The great heroes of Jewish spirituality always include scholars and sages.

To live as a Jew is a double statement of faith. It presumes a belief not only in God but in the resilience and importance of the Jewish people.

The Bible portrays the origin of Judaism in God’s call to Abraham. Abraham is told to leave his childhood home, told to go “to the land that I will show you” (Gen. 12:1). The life he has known is overthrown in that instant. Abraham has been fated to follow something grander and deeper.

For all its power, science cannot be the meaning of our lives or tell us why to get up in the morning. Supreme at how questions, science does not answer why. That is the function of faith.

tikkun olam, the repair of the world.

The first demand made of a Jew is goodness. Nothing else is more important, no command more central. Tied to the consciousness of God is the need to be good. A verse from the biblical Book of Leviticus reads: “You shall not pick your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger: I am

There are those who, knowing little of Judaism, believe it is a tradition of suffering, guilt, and unrelieved remorse. But constant mourning is the sign of an ailing soul, one that needs healing. Joy is the natural condition of a human being relating to the Creator of the universe. Judaism is not a tradition of tragedy, and all the dire events of J

Why do Jews place such value on study? Because in the Jewish tradition, God was revealed through words. We can glimpse God in other human beings, in the marvels of the world, and in the depths of one’s own soul, but what shaped the history of Judaism was a book. Judaism is an astonishing testimony to the magical power of words, transmitted through