| Over at least the last two thousand years, Judaism has not
been monolithic in practice, and has not had any centralized authority or
binding dogma.
Despite this, Judaism in all its variations has remained tightly bound to a
number of
religious principles, the most important of which is the belief in a
single,
omniscient,
omnipotent,
omnibenevolent,
transcendent
God, who
created the universe and continues to be involved in its governance.
According to Jewish thought, the God who created the world established a
covenant with the Jewish people, and revealed his laws and
commandments to them in the form of the
Torah. The
practice of Judaism is devoted to the
study
and observance of these laws and commandments, as they are interpreted
according to the
Tanakh,
Halakha,
responsa
and
rabbinic literature. Judaism does not fit easily into conventional
Western categories, such as
religion,
ethnicity,
or culture,
in part because of its 4,000-year history. During this time, Jews have
experienced
slavery,
anarchic
and
theocratic self-government, conquest, occupation, and exile; they have
been in contact with, and have been influenced by,
ancient Egyptian,
Babylonian,
Persian, and
Hellenic cultures, as well as modern movements such as the
Enlightenment (see
Haskalah)
and the rise of
nationalism. Thus,
Talmud
professor Daniel Boyarin has argued that "Jewishness disrupts the very
categories of identity, because it is not national, not
genealogical, not religious, but all of these, in
dialectical tension."
|