Built on or Belonging to Jewish tradition #3 Of the earth or of God

America and its culture developed as an easy-to-enter “Melting Pot” for many cultures, creating a new commonality of culture and political values. This open culture allowed many minority groups, including Jews, to flourish in Christian and predominantly Protestant America.

In last writing we saw the reform ideas of Hirsch who stated that derekh eretz (literally, “the way of the earth”) refers to not only ways of earning a living but also to the social order that prevails on earth, the mores and considerations of courtesy and propriety arising form social living and things pertinent to good breeding and general education.

Hence Hirsch speaks of the ideal Jews as the “Israel-man”, that is, the Jew who is proudly Jewish, a believer in the eternal values and precepts of the Torah as divinely ordained, and is, at the same time, a cultured “man”, a human being belonging to the modern world.

Convenient to be a Jew

Hirsch wrote in the Nineteen Letters:

“Was Judaism ever ‘in accordance with the times?’ Did Judaism ever correspond with the views of dominant contemporaries? Was it ever convenient to be a Jew or a Jewess?…Was that Judaism in accordance with the times, for which, during the centuries following the Dispersion, our fathers suffered in all lands, through all the various periods, the most degrading oppression, the most biting contempt, and a thousand-fold death and persecution? And yet we would make it the aim and scope of Judaism to be always ‘in accordance with the times!'”

In the New World many Jews mixed with non-Jews as happened as well in Holland. So the question could arise if a family would be a Christian or a Jewish family or a atheist or non-believing family.

Up into the 21st century we could find traditions being mixed and different people in the same family going from one believe to an other.

{When I look at my wive’s family on her fathers site she had a grandmother coming from Jewish ancestry, with my wife’s aunts still having the Torah placed at the doorspost, and having them doing some prayers before they entered the house. But hey did not go regularly to the synagogue. My mother in law came from the Dutch Reformed church to become a Catholic. My father in law with Jewish ancestry becoming atheist, later evangelist.}

Jewish identity can include characteristics of an ethnicity, a religion, and today also citizenship.

On religious grounds, according to the Mishnah, the oldest codified normative definition used by Jews for self-identification, normally one is being considered to be a Jew when the person has a Jewish mother or when one is converted to Judaism in conformity with Halacha, Jewish religious law.

As such having on the female site Jewish ancestors someone could be considered a Jew.

Young Ashkenazi Jewish followers of the minority Haredi sect of Judaism, Jerusalem, 2005 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Jews do not look for converts as other religions try to do. In the Jewish history we do find girls who were not born as People of God in the tribe of Israel, like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah and Ruth . Moses himself, one of the greatest Jews selected by God to fulfil an important task in the history of Gods People, married a Midianite woman who became Jewish.

At its very end, the book of Ruth traces the ancestry of King David, the greatest king the Jews ever had, to Ruth, his great-grandmother.

To be part of the Jewish community when they believe, the Jews can find the great promise which, when they look carefully, is coming more and more into accomplishment since 1948, the foundation of the New Israel State (מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל) the parliamentary republic in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea.

Growing Jewish population

World War I poster in Yiddish. Translation: “Food will win the war – You came here seeking freedom, now you must help to preserve it – Wheat is needed for the allies – waste nothing”. Color lithograph, 1917.

From a population of 1000-2000 Jewish residents in 1790, mostly Dutch Sephardic Jews, Jews from England, and British subjects, the American Jewish community grew to about 15,000 by 1840, and to about 250,000 by 1880. Most of the mid-19th century Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants to the US came from German-speaking states, as part of the larger concurrent German migration. They all initially spoke German, and settled across the nation, assimilating with their new countrymen; the Jews among them commonly engaged in trade, manufacturing, and operated dry goods (clothing) stores in many cities. Between 1880 and the start of World War I in 1914, about two million Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews immigrated from Eastern Europe, where repeated pogroms made life unpredictable. They came from Jewish populations of Russia, the Pale of Settlement (modern Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova), and the Russian-controlled portions of Poland. (Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews, p.366) (Wikipedia)

Messianism

German-American pioneer, rabbi, author, translator, editor, and publisher Isaac Leeser

Bohemian-American reform rabbi, editor, and author Isaac Mayer Wise – bust by Moses Ezekiel in the possession of A. S. Ochs.

By the mid-19th century a new wave of central European immigrants revived the declining American Jewish community and remade it to serve its own needs. Primarily petty shopkeepers and traders, the new immigrants migrated westward, founding new Jewish centres which were almost entirely controlled by laymen. The exigencies of life on the fron­tier within an open society created a predisposition for religious reform, and it is significant that the greatest American Reform Jewish leader of the 19th century, Isaac Mayer Wise, was based in Cincinnati, Ohio. During his lifetime Isaac M. Wise was regarded as the most prominent Jew of his time in the United States. Wise sought to unite all of American Jewry in the new nontraditional institutions that he founded, Hebrew Union College (1875), the Union of American Hebrew Con­gregations (1873), and the Central Conference of Ameri­can Rabbis (1889); but his ever more radical reforming spirit ultimately drove the traditionalist elements within the American Jewish community into opposition. The head of the traditionalist circles had been Isaac Leeser, a native of Germany, who had attempted to create an in­digenous American community on the lines of a modernized traditionalism. Conservative forces, after his death, became disorganized, but in reaction to Reform they de­fined themselves by their attachment to the sabbath, the dietary laws, and especially to Hebrew as the-language of prayer. Under the leadership of Sabato Morais, an Ortho­dox Jew of Italian birth, Conservative circles in 1886 founded a rabbinic seminary of their own, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

World War II

A synagogue on West Twenty-Third Street in New York City remained open 24 hours on D-Day for special services and prayer.

During the World War II period the American Jewish community was bitterly and deeply divided, and was unable to form a common front. Most Eastern Europeans favored Zionism, which saw a homeland as the only solution; this had the effect of diverting attention from the horrors in Nazi Germany.
The Zionist Movement looks towards the segregation of the Jewish people upon a national basis and in a particular home of its own; specifically, the modern form of the movement that seeks for the Jews “a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine,” as initiated by Theodor Herzl in 1896, and since then dominating Jewish history.

German Jews were alarmed at the Nazis but were disdainful of Zionism. Proponents of a Jewish state and Jewish army agitated, but many leaders were so fearful of an antisemitic backlash inside the U.S. that they demanded that all Jews keep a low public profile. One important development was the sudden conversion of most (but not all) Jewish leaders to Zionism late in the war. (Wikipedia)

Being part of the world

Over the past three centuries American Jews have committed themselves to numerous political and social causes. During the nineteenth century, American Jews were deeply divided over the question of slavery and succession, on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Jews also took part in domestic politics and, at the same time, they established a variety of organizations that worked on behalf of oppressed Jews in other parts of the world. By participating in twentieth century causes such as the Civil Rights Movement and the efforts to help Jews living in the former Soviet Union, many American Jews became convinced that by defending the rights of others who were oppressed and downtrodden, they were in fact safeguarding their own civil liberties.

Haredi Judaism in New York City (Photo credit: Alex E. Proimos)

Yet with each passing decade, our personal freedoms are vanishing with increasing velocity. Our governments shoulder much of the blame, but since we the people are the government (which is actually becoming more theoritical than factual) every American or other citizen of a country, who stands silently on the sidelines, not questioning the constiutionality of laws and regulations, shares in the blame for our eroding liberties.

It is virtually impossible to dream beyond borders and not dream lofty dreams.

Oshek/oppression

In accordance with Jewish legal tradition there may not be a mistreatment of workers as Biblically prohibited oshek/oppression. According to the Law of God workers have to be treated with justice, and those who do not so are not to be acceptable children of God in Gods community.

Jews believe that a more democratic and equitable industry in which workers and employers collectively determine wages and working conditions is a blessing that employers should embrace.

The Torah commands us “You shall not abuse a needy and destitute laborer” (Deuteronomium 24:14), and the Rabbis later teach that employees have a right to organize and demand just conditions and compensation or their labor (Tosefta Bava Metzia 11:24)

Percentage of Jewish population in the United States, 2000

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Previous: Built on or Belonging to Jewish tradition #2 Roots of Jewishness

To be continued: Built on or Belonging to Jewish tradition #4 Mozaic and Noachide laws

Also of interest:

1. Judeo-Christian values and liberty
2. Fear of God reason to return to Holy Scriptures
3. A world in denial
4. Fear and protection

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