TedM

Assuming all you have written is true, what is it that Jews think about themselves as important in their current identification then? Why would they even care about their nationality if their history of being the chosen people of God is completely irrelevant to them? How does an entire group disregard their historical origins like that? I'm having a hard time making any logical sense of it. It almost sounds like secular Jews want to downplay their historical past, as if it means nothing now.. while still 'keeping' the Torah. Makes little sense to me.

Grog

Well, it must have been Abraham, or maybe Adam. It had to be a single person, right? There is an identifiable founder for every religion.

mbczion

What I have written is true. I think I have enough of an insider view to attest to that.

Not necessarily believing the Bible to be divinely inspired is NOT synonymous with denying one's historical past or culture. How many people the world over reject the "virgin birth" of Jesus, Jesus as the "son of G-d" or the resurrection of Jesus, yet still "celebrate" Christmas and Easter?

Do Greeks, Irish, Celts, etc. have to believe in a deity/ies to keep certain customs?

Just like there are many who don't accept the New Testament as being divinely inspired, yet manage to draw lessons from it to apply to their lives, so there are no small number of Jews who don't necessarily accept the Torah as divinely inspired, yet manage to draw lessons from it to apply to their lives.

Whether the Exodus from Egypt is true or not, it is part of our heritage that is passed down from generation to generation. So, yes, even most secular Jews will sit down on Passover night and make a Seder.

TedM

Ok, yes, I do understand what you are saying. I would think any sense of 'nationalism' would lesson/weaken over time as secularism strengthens, but perhaps not as other new values can replace old ones. Do you think 1948 would have happened if the entire nation was secular at that point? That seems doubtful to me, but I don't know anything for certain and you should know better than I. Thanks for your input.

Toto

On the contrary, nationalism and secularism often go together. People seem to need a group identity. Sometimes religious fills that role, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes religious and nationalism combine (often to form a toxic force, but that's another discussion.)

Which nation? Zionism was a mostly secular movement. The religious Jews rejected the idea of building a nation state before the return of the Messiah.

mountainman

It's pretty simple. The very same reason as the Christians and the Moslems.

A warlord (Moses?) of their empire in antiquity gave them a holy writ and an ultimatum.

Believe or die.





εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

Davka

Most secular Jews are just as skeptical of that claim as you or I. It's more a source of embarrassment than anything else. In America, the Jewish community is overwhelmingly Progressive. Progressives of any stripe tend to look at any ethnic stories of superiority with chagrin rather than pride (said the middle-class white male).

It is, in the mind of the religious. But that's the same for any religious group, really - "we worship the true god and that's why those heathens persecute us" runs pretty deep in monotheism, at least.


I'm not sure how many Jews really believed this for the bulk of that time. The secular streak among Jews is strong and deep, and even the writings of some of the ancient Rabbis can make one wonder if they weren't secretly proto-Unitarians or something.

Thing is, if you're an educated, intelligent freethinker, but your cousin is a fundy, do you turn your back on your cousin when the Cossacks come to beat him up? Especially if the reason they're beating him up is because he belongs to the same ethnic group you belong to?

A significant minority of Evangelical Christians consider themselves to be the "New Israel," the spiritual descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They claim that all the passages in the Bible which refer to Israel have been magically transferred to the True Christians^TM.

Other than that, I'm not aware of any group that claims some sort of special status as God's chosen.

Davka

My wife and kids are Jewish. I lived 7 years in Israel, and have dual US/Israeli citizenship. I agree completely with mbczion, for what it's worth.

Why do Jews care about their ethnicity? Well, for one thing, there was a fairly recent attempt to completely wipe out everyone who belongs to their ethnic group. The Holocaust destroyed around half of the world's Jewish population, along with countless physical evidences of European Jewry.

For another, when you talk to a Jew about Jews, you're essentially talking about family. The world Jewish community has always been very small, and because of the cultural insistence that Jews should always marry Jews (originally a religious thing, but increasingly more of a cultural thing), chances are good that if you're Jewish, you're related to a large number of other Jews who live nearby.

It's not the history of being the chosen people of God which is so powerful a thread, but rather the history of being persecuted for that belief. Jewish self-identity is inextricably bound to a long history of being collectively chased from place to place. Even today, as residents of the most powerful nation in the Middle-east, Israelis tend to see themselves as a persecuted minority.

J-D

Nearly three millennia ago, there were Moabites who considered themselves the people of their god Chemosh. Now there aren't. Nearly three millennia ago there were Aramaeans who considered themselves the people of their god Hadad. Now there aren't. Nearly three millennia ago there were Assyrians who considered themselves the people of their god Ashur. There are still Assyrians, but they no longer consider themselves the people of Ashur. But there are still Jews who consider themselves the people of their god.

Davka

just to stir things up, I will ask if there are truly Jews alive today who consider themselves the people of their god in the same way that Abraham or Moses did? has their god really remained the same over the past 3 millenia? Has the concept of being the 'chosen people' of that god remained the same?