The Strongest Case for Judaism

Jewish thinkers have made the case for their faith in more than one way. Saadia Gaon and Maimonides built formal arguments for God's existence and oneness.¹² Judah Halevi argued instead from public events in Israel's history and the tradition that carried them.³ The Talmud praises the order of the people's answer at Sinai, doing before hearing, and the modern theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel links doing to understanding.⁴⁵

The five are this site's selection. They draw on classical and rabbinic texts and on statements from the Orthodox Union, Conservative Judaism, and Reform Judaism, with scripture quoted from the Jewish Publication Society's 1917 translation of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible).⁶ Where an item rests on one movement, the page says so: the fifth gives the Reform view. The answers to the objection include Orthodox, Haredi, Conservative, and Reform voices; the Haredi account comes through a description by Tamir Granot of Yeshivat Har Etzion; no Haredi-published source could be opened. For how the movements differ, see the Branches page.

Five of the reasons Jewish thinkers give

1. One God, known through reason

Some Jewish philosophers argue that reason itself leads to one Creator. Saadia Gaon (882 to 942 CE), a rabbi and philosopher, wrote The Book of Doctrines and Beliefs, also translated as The Book of Beliefs and Opinions. In it, the philosopher Sarah Pessin explains, he gives four proofs that the world was created: from finitude, composition, accidents, and time. He then gives three reasons why a created world needs a Creator outside itself, and argues that it was made from nothing.¹

In the Book of Knowledge, the first book of his code of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides (1135 or 1138 to 1204 CE) sets out the foundations of the Torah.⁷⁸

The foundation of all foundations, he writes, is to know that a Primary Being brought all existence into being. He points to the heavenly sphere, which he describes as revolving without interruption. It cannot revolve without someone causing it to revolve, and that one is God. A power that never stops, he reasons, is unlimited, so it cannot be the power of a body. What has no body cannot be divided, so God must be one.² He ties this knowledge to the Shema:

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

Conservative Judaism's 1988 statement of principles, Emet Ve-Emunah, says that for many Conservative Jews belief in God rests on grounds such as the fact that there is something rather than nothing, the order of the universe, the sense of command people feel before moral duties, and human consciousness. These, it says, reinforce one another and point beyond us. Others in the movement see God as a presence found in the search for meaning, justice, and redemption.⁹

2. A revelation witnessed by a whole people

Judah Halevi (died 1141 CE), a poet and thinker of Spanish Jewry's golden age, wrote The Kuzari as a dialogue between a Jewish teacher and the king of the Khazars.³ When the king asks what he believes, the teacher does not begin with proofs. He answers: I believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, who led the children of Israel out of Egypt with signs and miracles¹⁰.¹⁰

He notes that God introduced himself at Sinai the same way, not as the Creator of the world but as the God who led the people out of Egypt.¹⁰ The Torah gives those words:

I am the LORD thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

The scholar Ehud Krinis explains Halevi's reasoning. In the view of the teacher in the Kuzari, the plagues of Egypt and the parting of the sea were public events, so plain that they need no proof by reason. The teacher's argument holds that later generations know them through a concurrent tradition³: a report passed down through many separate chains of transmitters, which in this argument no conspiracy could have distorted.³ In the Kuzari, the people at Sinai still wondered whether God truly spoke to mortals, and God removed the doubt by letting the whole people hear his words.¹⁰

Historians' views of the Exodus and the giving of the Torah: see the History page, which sets the tradition's account beside the evidence for Israel's origins.

3. A chain of tradition from Sinai

Rabbinic teaching holds that the Torah was handed down from Sinai through a chain of teachers. The Mishnah's tractate Pirkei Avot opens: Moses received the Torah at Sinai and handed it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly.¹¹

Saadia treats such tradition as a way of knowing in its own right, alongside the senses, inference, and reason. Unlike those, Pessin explains, knowledge from reliable tradition arrives all at once and is certain to the one who receives it. Saadia writes that God, knowing his laws and wonders would have to be handed down, prepared in our minds a place for the acceptance of reliable tradition¹.¹

Maimonides made this part of his thirteen principles. The eighth holds that the whole Torah came to Moses from God; the ninth, that it has been faithfully handed down and may not be added to or taken from.¹² The ninth cites the Torah's own command:

All this word which I command you, that shall ye observe to do; thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it.

The modern movements describe revelation in more than one way. The Orthodox Union teaches that the Torah was given by God at Sinai and is of divine origin.¹³ Emet Ve-Emunah calls Sinai the single greatest event of revelation and says revelation continued through the prophets, the rabbis, and later legal writings. It describes several Conservative views, from a personal encounter with God, in which some believe God spoke in actual words, to an ongoing discovery of truths about God through nature and history.⁹ Reform's 1999 statement calls Torah God's ongoing revelation to the Jewish people.¹⁴

Historians' views: see the Sacred Texts page.

4. Doing before understanding

Some Jewish teachers value doing before understanding. When Moses read the book of the covenant at Sinai, the people answered:

All that the LORD hath spoken will we do, and obey.

The Talmud, in a passage about this verse, reads their answer as We will do⁴ and We will hear⁴, and praises the order of the two promises. When Israel put doing before hearing, the sage Simai taught, 600,000 angels came and tied two crowns on each person, one for each promise.⁴

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907 to 1972), who taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, wrote in his book God in Search of Man (1955), as quoted by NJOP, which cites page 283:⁵¹⁵ A Jew is asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of thought. He is asked to do more than he understands in order to understand more than he does.⁵

The movements weigh this differently. The Orthodox Union teaches that the Torah's 613 commandments are binding on the Jewish people.¹⁶ Emet Ve-Emunah calls halakhah, Jewish law, indispensable. Keeping it, the statement says, is an act of love for God, and the primary way God and the Jewish people show their love for each other.⁹ Reform's 1999 Statement of Principles commits Reform Jews to study the whole array of mitzvot, which it calls the means by which people make their lives holy.¹⁴

5. One God and Israel's mission: the Reform view

This item gives the view of Reform Judaism. It gives one movement's account because Reform rabbis have set out Israel's mission in successive platforms; Orthodox and Conservative teaching on Israel's election is on the Beliefs page. The 1999 Statement of Principles describes Israel as a people singled out through its ancient covenant to be witnesses to God's presence. It calls Reform Jews partners with God in tikkun olam, repairing the world, who help bring nearer the messianic age.¹⁴

The theme is older. The Columbus Platform of 1937 called the doctrine of the One, living God, who rules the world through law and love, the heart of Judaism, and held that Israel's mission through the ages has been to witness to the Divine.¹⁷ In 1885, Reform rabbis meeting in Pittsburgh held that Judaism presents the highest conception of the God-idea¹⁸, taught in scripture and developed by Jewish teachers. They read the Tanakh as the record of the Jewish people's consecration to its mission as the priest of the one God¹⁸.¹⁸ These principles, the American Jewish Archives notes, defined American Reform until 1937.¹⁹

The hardest objection: where was God in the Holocaust?

As Tamir Granot frames it in a lesson on the thought of Eliezer Berkovits: if God is good, all powerful, and watches over the world, why did God not prevent the Holocaust, an evil that no sin or purpose could justify?²⁰

This page takes it as the hardest objection because Jewish thinkers treat it at length. Emet Ve-Emunah says that evil has always been the most serious obstacle to faith, and that, given Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the problem has taken on a new and terrifying reality in the authors' generation.⁹ Yeshivat Har Etzion's online series Faith and the Holocaust runs to at least 43 lessons.²⁰²¹ The rabbi Daniel Korobkin reports Emil Fackenheim's (1916 to 2003) view that it caused a rupture²² in Jewish theology.²²

Eliezer Berkovits (1908 to 1992), whose work the lesson presents as an Orthodox view, answers with hester panim, the hiding of God's face.²⁰²³ To give people real freedom and responsibility, God must limit his own activity in history. Berkovits holds that God hides in human responsibility and human freedom.²⁰ Granot warns that this is not the whole answer. Berkovits ties God's hiddenness to God as Savior and to the covenant: God's presence shows in the survival of the people Israel, which has outlasted its persecutors.²⁰²¹ He draws on Isaiah:²⁰

Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself, O God of Israel, the Saviour.

Another answer comes from the Haredi world, as Granot reports it. In an earlier lesson, he describes the position prevailing in the main sectors of the Haredi public as a classical model. Suffering is a punishment for sin, and the sin must be identified, generally the Enlightenment, abandonment of religion, and assimilation. For the Satmar Rebbe, the sin was Zionism: in his interpretation, Zionist hastening of the end denies faith in divine providence and rebels against divine kingship.²⁴

Granot quotes Binyamin Mendelson, a Ger Hasidic rabbi, who likened Zionism, with its belief that the nation must redeem itself, to the sin of the golden calf. Mendelson called the murder of six million the birth-pangs of the Messiah and held that the sin of Zionism kept the righteous from averting them.²⁴ Granot and the Talmud scholar David Weiss-Halivni, who grew up in the Haredi world, reject this model.²⁴

Fackenheim responds with a duty, his 614th Commandment²²: Jews must not give Hitler a posthumous victory. They must remain Jews, remember the victims, and not despair of humanity or of God. Korobkin adds that Fackenheim gave no clear answer to where God was, because he felt people are too close to the events to see God's hand writ large, though he found moments of resistance he called tikkunim.²²

Emet Ve-Emunah holds that no theology can justify the slaughter of the blameless, and that by giving people free will, God limited his own future range of action. It also rejects the assertion that the Holocaust was the result of its victims' transgressions or of the sins of Jewry as a whole.⁹ Reform's 1999 statement keeps faith that, despite the unspeakable evils done to the Jewish people, the partnership of God and humanity will prevail.¹⁴

Where to go next

The comparison page sets this case beside Christianity's own account: Christianity vs Judaism. See also the book Christianity vs Judaism.