JUDAISM EXPLAINED - WHAT IS JUDAISM? JUDAISM BASIC INFORMATION AND TUTORIALS

JUDAISM
14 million believers, mostly in Israel and the United States.

It's c. 1700 B.C.E. (Before the Common Era, a designation considerably less irritating to Jews than the Christian B.C., Before Christ). Heaven is crowded with divinities of the moon, sun, stars, trees, and irrigation, as well as with various celestial dog-and-pony acts.

Enter, below, a Sumerian named Abraham, who insists that there's only one God and all the rest are wannabes. Acting on direct orders from this God, whose name is Yahweh (but for pete's sake, don't say it out loud), Abraham has packed up his kin and his kitchen utensils and relocated to the Promised Land, on the other side of the Euphrates, thereby earning his entourage the name "Hebrews" (from an ancient word meaning "the other side") and establishing an exhausting pattern of Jewish migration that will repeat itself for the next four thousand years.

Pleased with Abraham's obedience and general salt-of-the-earth comportment, Yahweh promises him offspring galore (Abraham is ninety-nine at the time), along with rights to the Promised Land—a place called Canaan, later renamed Palestine, after the Philistines, who occupied part of it—in perpetuity. The agreement is oral but binding; it simultaneously marks the debut of monotheism in the world and sows the seeds of future unrest in the Middle East.

But all that's family history. Judaism as a more or less coherent religion didn't really get rolling until Moses led a group of transplanted Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt and trekked with them back to the Promised Land. Moses took his orders directly from Yahweh, who was quite clear about what He expected from His Chosen People, issuing directives on everything from ethical conduct ("Thou shalt not kill," "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife," etc.) to diet ("Hold the bacon"). The shalts and shalt nots were recorded, along with much divinely revealed history, in the Torah, later compiled and edited into the first five books of the Bible.

If this is beginning to seem like an awfully long story (and we're only up to about 1300 B.C.E.), so much the better. In the absence of a homeland, a strong national identity, or even passably tolerant neighbors, history is about all the Jews had to rely on to keep their traditions alive through the next several millennia of persecution, exile, and general tsuris. History, that is, and the law, as embodied in the Torah and buttressed by the scholarly commentaries on same, were later collected in the Mishnah and the Talmud, Judaism's next-most-important books.

Because Jewish law and tradition evolved as a kind of survivor's guide to life on a hostile planet, Judaism is somewhat more practical and here-and-now oriented than many other religions. (The childhood trauma that might explain Judaism's you-only-live-once mentality: the Diaspora, which originally referred to the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. and the subsequent exile of the Jews to Babylonia, known as the first Babylonian Captivity, later to the chronic dispersion of the Jews across the face of the earth.)

Jews don't believe in the doctrine of original sin, for instance, or in a devil powerful enough to instigate anything worse than a parking violation, and they spend considerably less time fantasizing about a blissful afterlife than planning for a comfortable retirement in Florida.

It's true that ethical conduct—especially helping anyone worse off than one is—is an almost obsessively big deal in Judaism (it's no accident that so many liberal Democrats, social workers, and shrinks are Jewish), but morality isn't hitched to a system of rewards and punishments, the way it is in Christianity.

A Jew is required to do the right thing, just because. "The right thing," by the way, can be loosely defined as any action that would put a smile on God's face if He should happen to be looking. (And if He had a face; Judaism posits a God who can't be adequately pictured or conceptualized. In this, Jews are a little like physicists.)

Such obligatory good deeds are called mitzvahs and can range from faithfully lighting the Sabbath candles every Friday night to saving a life or picking up after your dog.

Other key terms: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist, the four branches of modern American Judaism, which differ mainly in the degree to which they adhere to tradition—Orthodox, 100 percent, no excuses; the other three, anywhere from about 75 percent down to about 10 percent, depending on the congregation, the individual, and/or the Zeitgeist—although occasionally they'll agree to disagree about a core belief, such as whether God is a personal entity or, as many Reconstructionists insist, a natural force, like gravity.

Then there's Zionism, the political movement born in reaction to European anti-Semitism in the nineteenth century, that aimed at making good Yahweh's original offer of a Jewish homeland in Israel; and Kabbalah, Judaism's complex mystical tradition, based on esoteric reinterpretations of Scripture and currently enjoying a vogue among Hollywood celebrities. Holocaust you already know.