Wall Street Journal: The Genesis of a People
A guide to understanding the world's first monotheistic religion.
Today, as Jews celebrate Passover and tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt during the traditional Passover ritual meal, the Seder, they will figuratively re-enact the story of their own creation as a nation. The transition from slavery to freedom—the wandering through the Wilderness, during which the Jews receive the Ten Commandments, and the eventual arrival in the land of Israel—is the dominant historical theme in Judaism. But as David Gelernter explains in "Judaism: A Way of Being," the Exodus can be understood as a metaphor for the creation of the world. Just as God parted the waters of the Red Sea to enable the Jews to flee Egypt and escape bondage, he first divided "the waters from the waters" to create the firmament and make an earthly place for life itself.
The Jewish experience, as Mr. Gelernter shows, echoes profoundly across the wider experience of humanity. "Judaism" itself is a wide-ranging book about the beliefs, practices and philosophy of the world's first monotheistic religion—a book that Jews and non-Jews alike will find well worth reading. Mr. Gelernter is not shy about explaining why everyone should care about Judaism. It is, he writes, "the most important intellectual development in western history. . . . . It has given morals and spiritual direction to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim society . . . and created the idea of congregational worship that made the church and the mosque possible." Mr. Gelernter organizes his book along four major themes or images, each intended to provoke answers to basic questions about Judaism.
With "separation" (between Jew and non-Jew, the Sabbath and the weekday, the holy and the impure), Mr. Gelernter explains why Judaism is not just a matter of finding a personal relationship with God but also of leading a life governed by Jewish law, which "covers everything from weddings to legal procedure in criminal cases." "Veil" is the image Mr. Gelernter uses to explain how Jews can relate to a God who is "abstract and indescribable." Like the curtains protecting the Torah in a synagogue, or the Western Wall, which shields the public from the Temple Mount (the site of the two, long-destroyed Jewish temples in Jerusalem), a sacred, translucent veil separates God from his people. The Jewish God is thus both ineffable and close at hand. "Perfect asymmetry" is Mr. Gelernter's phrase for explaining the structure of marriage and family in Jewish life and for defending, against charges of discrimination, a religion that usually forbids women to conduct public ceremonies. Finally, "inward pilgrimage" is his emblem for the effort to meet the challenge of theodicy—how a belief in God can be reconciled with the existence of evil.
Mr. Gelernter's most moving discourse concerns separation. He argues that "God uses separation as an act of sanctification." Indeed, the Hebrew word for "holy" (kadosh) is derived from the concept of separation or withdrawal: What is holy is set apart. The work of the creator—creation itself—is the ultimate act of separation, he notes, not merely the act of making order from chaos but even the separation of the individual from the womb. One of the most famous of all biblical commentators (Rashi) interpreted the exhortation in Leviticus to "be holy" as meaning "to separate oneself from immoral sexual conduct." The broader idea of separation implies a resistance to other ways of being—to the "inevitable rising tide of chaos in the universe." …
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