In its strictest form, “atheism” is defined as a rejection in the belief that there is “a” God. According to a report released in 2009 by the American Religious Identification Survey, Atheists make up approximately 2.3% of the world’s population. In 2009 the world’s population was about 6.8 billion people which would mean that in 2009 6.6 billion people in the world believed in some form of God or Gods.
Since I was a small child, old enough to speak and put ideas together in my brain, I had an interest in religion, particularly ones that were not my own. For most of my life I identified with Christians because really, there was no other identity for me because I was adopted into a Christian (Catholic) family and my birth mother never told the adoption agency about her Jewish background. However, even though I identified my self as a Christian, I never believed the very basic tenants of Christianity, one being that Jesus was God sent to earth to save humanity. It always seemed like a fairy tale, a myth laden with symbols and a story not to be taken literally but a story told to teach people about kindness to your fellow man, the love our creator had for us and importance of having faith that all will turn out OK in the end. I’m reminded of a line from a movie called “The Most Exotic Marigold Hotel” in which the main character says “It will all be alright in the end, and if it is not yet alright, it is not yet the end”. This has become my mantra.
In Christianity I found that a man, a human being, no different than me, was given special powers. Priests could absolve me of my sins; the Pope could make rules about how I was supposed to live my life, as a woman, as a person, all powers given to them by God supposedly. The prayers in Catholicism had lines like “I believe in one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church” and “He was born of the Virgin Mary, was crucified, died and was buried and on the third day he rose from the dead and is seated at the right hand of God” and the ever famous, “He will come again to judge the living and dead”. When you go to confession in the Catholic church, the culmination of being forgiven, and the measure of how great your sins are, is by how many “Our Father”s and “Hail Mary”s the priest that you can’t see or have eye contact with, gives you to say when he excuses you from the dark little booth with the sliding door where on the other side lies the priest’s face. I always wondered whenever I left confessional, was that meant to be a counseling session and if so, why can’t I see his face, why is the little sliding door closed?
My spiritual path has led me down many roads. I studied and in some cases practiced many different religions along the way but the one path I never went down previously was Judaism. I now believe that in the creator’s master plan, he was saving the best for last for me. I had to see and know about all the other religions to be able measure, understand and appreciate Judaism for what it is. It is first of all, the very first mono-theistic religion, born over five thousand years ago. Meaning, it was the first religion to ever believe that there was one God. It was the religion of Jesus which most Christians don’t even realize but all of their teachings, the teachings of Jesus Christ, were based in Judaism. Every good idea in Christianity came originally from a Jewish idea. And it would have had to be wouldn’t it, since Jesus was himself a Jew. Judaism is about the individual and about the world at large. Yes, there are sects of Judaism who believe in the good only for other Jews (Orthodox) and Jews who believe in the good for all of mankind (Reform). My sect, Conservative, believes in both. I prefer this idea because of everything I have learned in the last couple of years, Judaism in its original form, stripped down of all the “man-made” ideas, is in fact about both. It is about striving to be the best person you can be and helping to make the world a better place for all who live on this planet.
I’ve had many discussions with a person very close to me regarding the “marks” of a “good Jew”. He and I have known many people who identify themselves as “Jews” but question whether they are in fact “real Jews”. He is a Christian (Church of England actually) and has not had good experiences with the people he has known who identified themselves as “Jews”. Though I’ve explained it to him many times, and will probably need to explain it many more times, there are many facets to “being Jewish”. It is probably the hardest concept to get across to Christians because they think of being Jewish as only a religious identification. I understand this difficulty because for much of my life I thought the same way so I understand how hard it is to shift the paradigm of belief of only a religious identification to being Jewish is a religion but it is also an ethnicity, a culture, a people with specific DNA markers all originating from a specific place on this earth, the middle east, and specifically, Israel.
Israel is all of Jewish humanity’s home. The original Jews were in fact called “Israelites”. This is why the state of Israel has a right to exist, and should exist, just like Greek people have Greece as their homeland, Russian people have Russia, Spanish people…well, OK, so Spanish people have many homelands depending on where their ancestors were from but every Jew’s ancestor going back to the beginning was from Israel is my point.
Though the actual length of time the Jews spent in Egypt as slaves is still being deliberated by scholars, the fact is that we as a people were captured and taken into slavery for at least 350 years and the Bible says 400 years. This was our first departure from our homeland and the reason that people give as to why Israel should not exist as the “Jewish” country. In that time, our homeland was overrun by other peoples. They made homes, had families, generations were born and died in our homeland. This doesn’t make it any less ours. It is where we came from, it is our country. When you look at other country’s histories, we don’t say that England doesn’t belong to the English because they were occupied for a certain amount of time in history by the Romans.
And speaking of the English, at one point they had one of the largest empires in the world, but we don’t today call any of the countries they occupied “England”. By 1922, the British Empire controlled more than one fifth of the world’s population and was spread across one quarter of the earth’s total land mass, and yet, India is still known as India, the homeland for East Indian peoples, Africa is still known as Africa, the home of the African peoples. It is ironic to me then, to a certain degree, that since 1948, due in large part to British intervention, Israel has become in modern times the “official” homeland of the Jews.
The literal translation of “Israel” from Hebrew to English is “God Prevails”. It makes sense to me then that the homeland of the people who were the first to believe in one God, and one God only, would be called “God Prevails” and so far, for now, he…or she…does. Shabbat Shalom everyone!
