Basic doctrines
Traditionally in Judaism the doctrine of faith takes a back seat to the doctrine of behavior. Fundamental, however, is the confession of the one God (Yahweh) who is incomparable in his uniqueness and cannot be represented. As the creator of this world, according to Jewish belief, he is master of life and death and will raise people to life in a new world to come; he has made his will known to men; they will receive reward and punishment according to their behavior. This God brought the people of Israel out of Egypt, thereby making them a free people, with whom he made a covenant on Sinai and gave them his law (Torah). As a »written Torah« (Pentateuch) an external form that can be presented to anyone and read publicly, and is to be internalized as an “oral Torah” and passed on through the generations. In the Jewish religious understanding of God, Israel thus has a certain model character in the world; Theologically described both as a role model for the world and as a special commitment to holiness, d. i.e. to be a spiritual center for the world. Israel as a community is committed to God, also in the sense that its relatives stand up for one another. Moses, the messenger of the Torah, is considered the “father” of the prophets, who repeatedly call Israel – but also the “heathen peoples” – to obedience to God’s word ( Prophet). Those who have deviated from God’s instruction are called to repentance, and if they repent, they will be forgiven. A special focus of the prophets, for example here the prophet Amos, is on the (re) establishment and preservation of social justice. The willingness to do God’s will finds its expression in constant reflection on his instructions, which leads to action. This process, which spans generations, is reflected in the Talmud. The life practice derived from it finds – as the center of Jewish existence – more weighty theological attention than that with the promise of the coming Davidic king, the Messiah, connected beliefs (especially those of the messianic age as an age of all-embracing peace and the rule of God). In contrast to the Christian doctrine of the faith, the Messiah is “only” a specially chosen person.
According to acronymmonster.com, in the course of Jewish history there have been a number of attempts at systematization. Philon of Alexandria laid the Torah in the 1st century BC. By means of platonic and stoic thoughts. In the Middle Ages, M. Maimonides tried to solve the polarity between reason and revelation with the help of Aristotelian philosophy. In his introduction to the Mishnah tract “Sanhedrin” he summarized the Jewish doctrine in 13 articles of faith, which have found their way into the Jewish prayer books as the Jewish creed. In a critical examination of these articles of faith, Josef Albo (* around 1360, † 1444), like Maimonides Religious philosopher, the Jewish religious doctrine summarized in a teaching system structured according to three beliefs: 1) existence of God, 2) Torah from heaven, 3) reward and punishment. In the 19th century, S. R. Hirsch created the system that still lives on in conservative Judaism today: absolute obedience to the revealed law causes the peoples to rise up in Israel. H. Cohen taught an ethical monotheism oriented towards the prophets, for which his book “Religion of Reason from the Sources of Judaism” (published posthumously in 1919) stands. In doing so, he paved the way for a liberal Judaism, which interpreted the Jewish religion as ethical monotheism and is based on terms (known from Christian dogmatics) such as love of God, sin, grace, justice. M. Buber sees the story as a dialogue between God and creature. The American Jewish theologian Richard Lowell Rubenstein (* 1924) starts from the experience of the absence of God and interprets the Bible and tradition with existential and psychoanalytic categories. The establishment of the State of Israel made it necessary to reconsider the relationship of the Jews to the “Promised Land” and especially to the position of the Jews living in the Diaspora towards it. The reconstructionism advocated by M. M. Kaplan teaches that Judaism has two poles, both of which are indispensable to it, Israel and the diaspora. The latter enables him to keep tradition alive through cultural exchange with other peoples.