What Jews Believe

In the narrow sense, the Torah is the Five Books of Moses, the first of the three parts of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible).¹ The Orthodox Union teaches that God gave the Torah at Sinai, both the Written Torah and the Oral Torah.² The Mishnah, the body of classical rabbinic teaching, traces the tradition as a chain from Moses at Sinai through Joshua, the elders, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly.³

This page follows four modern movements, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist, and answers by movement where they differ. Orthodox teaching is drawn here from the Orthodox Union, its magazine Jewish Action, and classical sources such as Maimonides; Hasidic and other Haredi (strictly observant Orthodox)⁴ sources are not represented. How the movements see revelation is on the Sacred Texts page.

Does Judaism have a creed?

Teachers have long debated whether Judaism should have a creed, and its movements do not all use one.⁵⁶⁷ The best-known list comes from Maimonides (1135 or 1138 to 1204 CE), whose law code made him a leading rabbinic authority.⁵⁶ His thirteen principles hold that God exists, is one, has no body, is eternal, and alone is to be worshiped; that prophecy is real, Moses was the greatest prophet, and the Torah is from Heaven and faithfully handed down; and that God knows human deeds, rewards and punishes, will send the Messiah, and will raise the dead.⁸ The scholar Menachem Kellner calls it the first comprehensive account of Judaism's dogmas.⁶

Not every teacher accepted it. Hasdai Crescas (about 1340 to 1410 or 1411 CE) built his work Or Hashem on a different ordering of beliefs.⁹ Isaac Abravanel (1437 to 1508 CE) wrote a book ostensibly defending the thirteen against criticisms by Crescas and Joseph Albo, yet Kellner notes he is best known for his view that Judaism has no principles of faith at all.¹⁰

The modern movements part here too. The Orthodox Union presents the thirteen as the principles of faith.¹¹ A version whose lines begin I believe with perfect faith⁷ (Ani Maamin) appears in most Orthodox prayer books but not in Conservative or Reform ones, the scholar Joshua Berman writes.⁷ Emet Ve-Emunah, the Conservative movement's 1988 statement of principles, says it is not a catechism or a test of faith.¹²

What is ultimate reality?

Jewish tradition teaches that ultimate reality is one God, the creator of all that exists. The verse known as the Shema declares it:

HEAR, O ISRAEL: THE LORD OUR GOD, THE LORD IS ONE.

Maimonides calls knowing that a Primary Being brought all existence into being the foundation of all foundations. God, he writes, is one in a way unlike any other unity and has no body, and knowing this fulfills a commandment tied to this verse.¹⁴

Emet Ve-Emunah affirms that belief in God is critical but does not specify every detail, though it rules out a trinitarian God or a capricious, amoral one. It describes two views held by Conservative Jews. For many, God is a supreme, supernatural being with the power to command and control the world. For others, God is a presence and power found when people seek meaning and work for justice and redemption.¹²

Reform Judaism's 1999 Statement of Principles affirms the reality and oneness of God, while noting that Reform Jews may differ in how they understand God's presence.¹⁵ Mordecai Kaplan (1881 to 1983), the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, was a religious naturalist, writes the Conservative rabbi Neil Gillman.¹⁶¹⁷¹⁸ Reconstructing Judaism, the movement's organization, teaches that God is not an external being that acts on people but a power that works through them, found in everyday blessings and made manifest in loving and righteous acts.¹⁹

What is a human being?

Jewish tradition teaches that every person is created in God's image, with a soul and free will:

And God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.

The Orthodox Union teaches that one meaning of this is free will, the ability to choose between good and evil.²⁰ Reform Jews draw from the image of God that every human life is sacred.¹⁵ A morning blessing recorded in the Talmud, the rabbinic discussions organized around the Mishnah,²¹ begins: My God, the soul You have placed within me is pure.²²

The rabbis describe two drives within every person: the yetzer tov, the good inclination, and the yetzer hara, the evil inclination. The Mishnah reads the command to love God with all one's heart (Deuteronomy 6:5) as a command to love him with both.²³ The evil inclination is not simply bad. A midrash, a rabbinic commentary on books of the Tanakh,²⁴ says that without it no one would build a house, marry, have children, or engage in trade.²⁵

What is wrong with the world?

The teachers cited here place the problem in human choices. Reuven Hammer, a rabbi who holds a doctorate in theology from the Jewish Theological Seminary, writes: Judaism teaches that human beings are not basically sinful.²⁶ No one is born carrying the sin of ancestors, he explains. Sin comes from the yetzer, which must be properly channeled, and the Hebrew word for sin, chet, is an archery term for missing the target.²⁶ He traces the yetzer to the Torah's words after the Flood: for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth (Genesis 8:21)¹³.²⁶

The Torah also tells of Adam and Eve's disobedience in Eden.¹³ This page does not trace how rabbinic teachers have read the account. One modern reading, in a Reconstructionist rabbi's column, is Ari Elon's: the account balances the Torah's first creation account by introducing what is bad, and warns that the pursuit of abstract perfection often leads to disaster.²⁷

Maimonides teaches that every person has free will. Each can become as righteous as Moses or as wicked as Jeroboam, a king of Israel, and no one compels either path. He calls this a pillar of the Torah and cites its call to choose:²⁸²⁹ See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil (Deuteronomy 30:15)¹³. Emet Ve-Emunah adds that much of the world's suffering comes from the misuse of free will, and that poverty and war are often products of human sloth and immorality.¹²

What is the way forward?

Jewish tradition teaches that the way forward is teshuvah, a return to God, with a life of Torah and the work of repairing the world. Maimonides describes teshuvah as abandoning the sin, regretting it, resolving never to repeat it, and confessing it in words.³⁰ The Orthodox Union lists the same steps and teaches that teshuvah done out of love of God can turn deliberate sins into good deeds.³¹ The Mishnah adds that Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, atones for wrongs against another person only after that person has been appeased.³²

The phrase tikkun olam, repairing the world, appears in the Mishnah as a reason for laws made for the good of society, such as rules on freeing slaves.³³³⁴ The sixteenth-century kabbalist (Jewish mystic) Isaac Luria taught that holy sparks of divine light were scattered at creation, and that people free them through the commandments.³⁴²⁷ Today the phrase has come to connote social action and the pursuit of social justice.³⁴

What do Jews believe about the Messiah?

Jewish teaching looks toward a messianic age, but the movements describe it differently. Maimonides writes that a king from the line of David will rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, gather the scattered people of Israel, and lead all nations to serve God together.³⁵³⁶ The Orthodox Union describes the Messiah as the redeemer of Israel at the end of days, and notes that Maimonides held nature will not change in that age, while the Ramban held that it will.³⁶

Emet Ve-Emunah says Conservative Jews do not know when the Messiah will come, or whether he will be a human figure or a symbol of humanity's redemption. Each person, it teaches, must live as if responsible for bringing the messianic age, and God and humanity are partners in redemption.¹² Reform's 1999 statement calls Reform Jews partners with God in tikkun olam, called to help bring the messianic age nearer.¹⁵ A Reconstructionist rabbi's column speaks of a messianic attitude, the hope that the world's social situation can be perfected, and of its dangerous side in false messiahs.²⁷

What happens after death?

The movements answer differently, so this answer goes movement by movement. First, the classical sources. The Mishnah teaches that all Israel have a share in the World to Come, but excludes anyone who says that the resurrection of the dead is not taught in the Torah.²⁹ The book of Daniel says:

And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to reproaches and everlasting abhorrence.

Orthodox. The Orthodox Union calls the resurrection of the dead, techiyat ha-metim, a fundamental belief, and the World to Come the reward of the righteous.³⁷³⁸ Maimonides lists resurrection among his thirteen principles and taught that the World to Come itself has no bodies, only the souls of the righteous.³⁹

Conservative. Emet Ve-Emunah affirms that death is not extinction. It names two traditional teachings, the bodily resurrection of the dead and the lasting existence of the soul, which some Conservative Jews hold literally and others more figuratively.¹²

Reform. The 1999 statement trusts the tradition's promise that the human spirit is eternal.¹⁵ The 1885 Pittsburgh Platform, since replaced, had rejected bodily resurrection.¹⁵⁴⁰ Earlier Reform prayer books praised God who gives life to all, in place of God who revives the dead. The newer Mishkan T'filah offers the ancient wording as an alternative, which many of its makers read as metaphor, a 2007 news report found.¹⁷

Reconstructionist. Kaplan, the movement's founder, affirmed the soul's immortality and did not accept bodily resurrection, Gillman writes. In his 1945 prayer book he replaced the traditional resurrection phrase with one from the High Holiday liturgy, which praises God for remembering his creatures in love unto life.¹⁶ The later prayer book Kol Haneshamah praises God Who gives and restores life.¹⁶

How should a person live?

The Orthodox Union teaches that Jews should live by the Torah's commandments, the mitzvot.⁴¹ The Torah presents them within a covenant between God and Israel. At Sinai, it says, God told the people:

if ye will hearken unto My voice indeed, and keep My covenant, then ye shall be Mine own treasure from among all peoples; for all the earth is Mine; and ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation.

A Talmud teacher counts 613 commandments in the Torah: 365 prohibitions and 248 positive commands.⁴² The Orthodox Union teaches that the 613 bind the Jewish people, while seven commandments given to Noah's descendants, among them bans on murder and theft, apply to all humanity.⁴¹ The Torah commands: thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD. (Leviticus 19:18)¹³

The movements differ on how binding Jewish law, halakhah, is. The Orthodox Union teaches that the commandments are binding, as above. Emet Ve-Emunah calls halakhah indispensable but always developing, changed by rabbinic decision, with the burden of proof on whoever would change it.¹² Reform's 1999 statement commits Reform Jews to study the whole array of mitzvot and to fulfill those that address them.¹⁵ Its 1885 platform, since replaced, had held only the Torah's moral laws binding.⁴⁰ Reconstructing Judaism teaches that, in learning from tradition, the past has a vote, not a veto.¹⁸

The covenant is read differently too. A 2013 column in the Orthodox Union's magazine Jewish Action describes chosenness as a mission: the Jewish people took on the Torah's 613 mitzvot as partners with God in perfecting humanity.⁴³ Emet Ve-Emunah likewise holds that Israel's election brings added duties, not superiority.¹² Reform's 1999 statement describes Israel as singled out through the covenant to witness to God's presence.¹⁵

Reconstructionists speak of peoplehood, and Reconstructing Judaism teaches that being Jewish is a means to a deeply interconnected life and to increasing wisdom and equity in the world.⁴⁴ Kaplan's 1945 prayer book left out the idea of chosenness; the later Kol Haneshamah, reported in 1989, restored the Aleinu prayer, which declares it, as an alternative reading.⁴⁵

Key terms

Term	Meaning
Mitzvah (plural mitzvot)	A commandment of God.41
Yetzer tov, yetzer hara	The good and evil inclinations.2326
Teshuvah	Repentance, or return to God.31
Tikkun olam	Repairing the world.34
Olam ha-ba	The World to Come.38
Techiyat ha-metim	The resurrection of the dead.37