Many Jewish religious customs revolve around the home. One example is the Sabbath meal, when families join together to welcome in the special day. Jews believe that a Jew is someone who is the child of a Jewish mother; although some groups also accept children of Jewish fathers as Jewish. A Jew traditionally can't lose the technical 'status' of being a Jew by adopting another faith, but they do lose the religious element of their Jewish identity.
Because Jews have made a bargain with God to keep his laws, keeping that bargain and doing things in the way that pleases God is an act of worship. And Jews don't only seek to obey the letter of the law - the particular details of each of the Jewish laws - but the spirit of it, too. A religious Jew tries to bring holiness into everything they do, by doing it as an act that praises God, and honours everything God has done. For such a person the whole of their life becomes an act of worship.
Being part of a community that follows particular customs and rules helps keep a group of people together, and it's noticeable that the Jewish groups that have been most successful at avoiding assimilation are those that obey the rules most strictly - sometimes called ultra-orthodox Jews. Note: Jews don't like and rarely use the word ultra-orthodox. A preferable adjective is haredi, and the plural noun is haredim.
Judaism is a faith of action and Jews believe people should be judged not so much by the intellectual content of their beliefs, but by the way they live their faith - by how much they contribute to the overall holiness of the world.
The Jewish idea of God is particularly important to the world because it was the Jews who developed two new ideas about God:. Before Judaism, people believed in lots of gods, and those gods behaved no better than human beings with supernatural powers. However, many religious people often talk about God in a way that sounds as if they know about God in the same way that they know what they had for breakfast.
The best evidence for what God is like comes from what the Bible says, and from particular individuals' experiences of God. Quite early in his relationship with the Jews, God makes it clear that he will not let them encounter his real likeness in the way that they encounter each other.
Moses has spent much time talking with God, and the two of them are clearly quite close In the kingdom of Israel, as Hosea 8 and 1 Kings relate, he was often worshipped in the form of a calf, as the god Baal was. Ergo, in northern Israel at least, the calves were meant to represent Yhwh.
Such depictions may have even continued after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian Exile: a coin minted in Jerusalem during the Persian period shows a deity sitting on a wheeled throne and has been interpreted by some as a late anthropomorphic representation of Yhwh. Not all scholars agree that the iconography of Yhwh was so pronounced in Judah.
The God of the Jews. In any case, many scholars agree that Yhwh became the main god of the Jews only after the destruction of the kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians, around BCE. How or why the Jews came to exalt Yhwh and reject the pagan gods they also adored is unclear. We do know that after the fall of Samaria, the population of Jerusalem increased as much as fifteenfold, likely due to the influx of refugees from the north.
That made it necessary for the kings of Judah to push a program that would unify the two populations and create a common narrative. And that in turn may be why the biblical writers frequently stigmatize the pagan cultic practices of the north, and stress that Jerusalem alone had withstood the Assyrian onslaught — thereby explaining Israel's embarrassing fall to Assyria, while distinguishing the prominence and purity of Judahite religion.
The Israelites don't keep the faith. This transformation from polytheism to worshipping a single god was carved in stone, literally. This is reflected in the many biblical texts exhorting the Israelites not to follow other gods, a tacit acknowledgement of the existence of those deities, Romer explains.
For example, in Judges , Jephtah tries to resolve a territorial dispute by telling the Ammonites that the land of Israel had been given to the Israelites by Yhwh, while their lands had been given to them by their god Chemosh "Will you not take what your god Chemosh gives you? Likewise, whatever Yhwh our god has given us, we will possess. Most young children have some concept of God. It is important to respond to their questions with sophistication and honesty.
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Quizzes God Quiz Jewish conceptions of God have varied through the ages. Traditional Judaism answers with an emphatic "yes! So too, with the God of Muhammad. At the end of the world, God would act as a God of justice. God would then reward or punish each person in the gardens of paradise or the fires of hell according to their deeds. Each would be presented with a record of his deeds — in the right hand for those to be saved, in the left for those to be damned to the fires of hell.
For those who were saved, the delights of paradise awaited. Those who died in the cause of Allah, however, did not need to wait for the Last Judgment. They would go straight to heaven. Further reading: Paris attacks — why Islam and Christianity are twin religions of war and peace. Like the God of Moses, Allah was a lawmaker. The Quran provided often varied guidance to the believing community in matters of marriage and family law, women, inheritance, food and drink, worship and purity, warfare, punishments for adultery and false accusations of adultery, alcohol and theft.
In short, it provided the foundation of what was later to be much elaborated in sharia law.
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