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The Jewish Civilisation
The Jewish civilisation is one of the oldest on earth. Its durability is not connected with the possession of some state or with the knowledge of any specific language. In some sense, a memory and now solidarity with the Israeli state plays some role, as well as the Hebrew language generally unknown to the majority of the Jewish people (even though they are all literate at least since the 1st century). Until quite recently, it was a dead language and only since the establishment of the modern Israel was it resuscitated as a living language in that state. However, neither the language nor the state is of any great importance in defining this civilisation. Jews often move from one country to another and at the same time, usually very readily, change the language used at home to adapt to the community at large.
In the Polish language, we speak of the "Jewish nation" - however this is a completely different phenomenon than a nation in the Latin civilisation. For us a nation means a common past of a flourishing or downtrodden statehood, a common language and literature in this language, as well as a specified place on earth considered as the fatherland. In other European languages, the phenomenon of Jewish togetherness is referred to by some other name than nation, usually as a people (the Jewish people, le peuple juif, Judentum), and this is well justified. They are indeed a people but the cementing element has nothing in common with the national solidarity of European nations.
The cementing factor lies in a sacral civilisation and in particular, a sacral consciousness of having a special mission given to them by God. They are conscious of being the elect, the "chosen people". This mission, of course, was to prepare the world for the coming of the Messiah, Who was to be born among them and to preserve the revealed truth until His coming. They have fulfilled this function. Many of them have recognised Him when He came and brought the Good News, the Gospel, to other peoples. What was a mission of one people, became the mission of the Church.
What we consider as the Jewish people today refers to a tragic community, a people that has not recognised the time of its visitation. It is those who did not recognise Jesus Christ as the awaited Messiah. Those Jews who followed Christ merged within the Christian universality. Those who rejected Him became wanderers throughout the world, among believers of other religions, jealously nurturing their chosenness, this messianic consciousness, which gives a defining mark to their civilisation.
It is a civilisation of programmed separateness, of programmed differentiation from the surrounding communities. In Judaism there is no specified theology that one could get to know and accept as a convert. One can only get married into Judaism, that is biologically become part of it. Jews do not seek converts. By their own will, they prefer to live a separate life, in apartheid from the surrounding communities. They form their own communes (kahals), they govern themselves by their own rules and they take care to maintain also a spatial separateness. They form the ghettos themselves, as districts in which they live together, comparable to the Chinatowns in the USA. It was only Hitlerls Germany that created the concept of forced separation, of a closed ghetto from which Jews were not allowed to leave.
Jews are not pioneers. They do not go conquering the wild world or overpowering the hazards of nature. They settle among other civilisations, preferably among the rich. They tend to migrate from poorer to richer lands. They do so always as a group, immediately forming their own separate community.
Jews do not represent any specific race. It is a great misunderstanding to consider anti-Semitism as racism. The Jews of Poland are racially indistinguishable from the Poles. The Jews of North Africa are racially close to the Arabs. Ethiopian Jews are close to the Ethiopians. And so it goes the world over. However, the fact that they stick to their own community, their own civilisation, their own separateness, results in biological differences developing. It is not the race that forms the Jewish civilisation but the civilisation can cause a biological separateness. This is never a total separateness because intermarriage occurs frequently but where Jewish communities live for several generations it is sufficient to develop some distinction from the surrounding society. All of this is a consequence of the communal consciousness of being the chosen people.
The memory of being chosen by God, of having a special relationship with God, of having a promise directly from God available only to the biological descendants of one people, results in monotheism degenerating into monolatry. The belief in a one and only God changes into a belief in one God, one's own God, a tribal God. The Prophets have successfully eradicated polytheistic tendencies among the Old Testament Jews. However, monolatry was only dealt with by Jesus Christ who addressed His message to all people and not only to the chosen. In reality, monolatry is a form of polytheism because it accepts the possibility that other people have other gods.
Messianism did occur as an idea among other peoples, suddenly reaching the conclusion that they have a special God given role to play. But this seldom lasted for many generations. Jews by nurturing their chosenness have created a whole civilisation based on fidelity to the Law revealed to them by God. By Law they mean the Torah, the Pentateuch of Moses, which of course is also for us a Holy book. However, we read it differently. The Jews see in it the Law, which is immutable and which has to be obeyed. Every letter of it is binding at all times. Jesus Christ has taught us that it is not the letter that is important but the will of the Lawgiver. He did not change the Law but gave it substance. He accused the Pharisees that they serve the Lord with their lips but not with their hearts. He called for the saving of a lamb or ox that fell into a well on a Sabbath (Mt 12:11; Lk 14:5), because the Sabbath is for man and not man for the Sabbath (Mk 2:27).
We often tend to laugh at Jewish habits and denigrate them. However, when a pious Jew travels on Saturday on a train sitting on a rubber water bottle he is doing so to remain faithful to his religion, because he is not allowed to travel on a Sabbath except when on water. For him, this is showing obedience to the letter of the Law, a moral imperative. For us, this would amount to hypocrisy, a breach of the intent of the Lawgiver. With the growing complexity of life and a development of the understanding of the intent of the Lawgiver, we adapt rules to what we consider as ethical. For us, the law is derived from ethics. For Jews, the opposite is true. Ethics is derived from the Law.
For them, of course, life also requires changes in their habits. For the sake of convenience, they introduce interpretations of the Law, explanations for various circumstances, so as to maintain the letter of the Law but in fact, to find a way of living reasonably. All the learnedness of Judaism (Talmud, Kabala, rabbinic writings) consists of these interpretations of the Law, comments to the interpretations, comments to the comments etc. -a constant casuistry multiplying exceptions to immutable rules. This development is driven by convenience. Outside of Judaism, all this learnedness is valueless. However, the mode in which it develops is often copied and constitutes a spiritual threat. We must change rules when we decide that this is demanded by our understanding of what is and what is not ethical and not because we find them difficult to follow. In the Latin civilisation each generation transfers something from ethics into written laws. The multiplication of laws constantly restricts our freedom. The Jews are restricted only by the Torah and all of the later developed interpretations reduce the obligatory scope of these restrictions. Regrettably also among us, in conflict with our own civilisation, laws appear which make permissible that what is not considered ethical and what was already forbidden by written laws (abortions, divorces, homosexual acts, satanic cults, etc.). In this way, the link between ethics and law gets lost. Convenience rather than ethics becomes the source of laws.
In our civilisation, a righteous person living honestly will not get in conflict with the law, even not knowing it. On the other hand, living in agreement with the letter of the law but dishonestly, derives from the pharisaic attachment to rules but not to ethics. The exploitation of rules, of imprecisely written laws, of gaps in them, of their multitude and inconsistencies, activities on the verge of legality, tax evasion techniques, all formally within the law but unethical, derive from the rabbinical casuistry, from the mentality of deriving ethics from the written law. Yet, such a swindler, acting within the law, has in fact no moral respect for any law. He cannot be compared to the Sabbath traveller sitting on a water bottle, who is also using a convenient interpretation of the Law, but he is doing this in order to fulfil the Law and therefore in full respect for it.
Since many rules of the Mosaic Law were untenable in the Diaspora (such as the ban on learning the Greek language), interpretations were introduced on the strength of which the fullness of Mosaic Law is obligatory only in the Promised Land, but not outside of it. The Diaspora became a form of escape from the Law. Since ethics is derived from the rules, two ethics developed, one for Palestine and one outside of it. Further multiplication of ethics followed, for various occasions, on various days, towards Jews and non-Jews (gentiles). In this way, situation ethics developed, which for us is something completely alien. We recognise only a total ethic, the same ethic for all occasions. But are we always faithful to this understanding? For example, do we not sometimes treat differently the stealing from a neighbour as compared to the stealing of state property or the lies told to friends as opposed to those told to enemies? Such situational ethics derives from the Jewish civilisation and we should avoid it.
Within the Jewish civilisation, built on the Torah, five different religions developed, depending on the recognised books for the interpretation of the Law. Koneczny summarises these religions in the following manner (Table 2):
Table 2.| Examples | |||
| with Torah | without Talmud | without Kabala (1) | Sadducees, Karaites |
| with Kabala (2) | Sabbatites, Frankites | ||
| with Talmud | without Kabala (3) | Lithuanian Jews | |
| with old Kabala (4) | Sephardim | ||
| with Kabala + pylpul (5) | Hassidim, Ashkenazim | ||
Five religions, but they lack any theological differences that would lead to divisions. Regardless of the tradition pertaining to books that interpret the Torah, all Jews form a single family united by the Messianic consciousness of being the chosen people. A Jew may become an atheist, he may convert to another religion, even become a cardinal, but he will always be regarded by other Jews as a member of the Jewish community.
We are often impressed by Jewish solidarity, by the way in which they always support each other, by their faithfulness to the Jewish community. We observe that they participate in various battles, being present on both sides. However, after the defeat of one side, the Jews on the winning side make sure that the Jews among the losers do not suffer. After the next conflict, the result may be opposite and the same solidarity will follow. This is a mode of survival they have developed living among the gentiles. We do not have such solidarity. In fact, we accuse ourselves of quarrelsomeness and jealousies. We envy the Jews for their fidelity to each other over and above any conflicts. However, this difference has also a second side to it. We believe that we must support truth, goodness, justice and not a fellow countryman, just because he is a fellow countryman. We must combat evil, lies, whatever we consider, even mistakenly, as improper. That is our understanding of righteousness. We should remain ourselves rather than support what does not deserve supporting.
Both our position and the Jewish position make sense, but only within the context of our respective civilisations. This clearly demonstrates that no middle ground is possible on issues differentiating civilisations.