Video Transcript: Judaism Lecture 5

In our last session, I was recounting a bit of Jewish history. And I started to say  that after the the temple was destroyed for the second time that there was a  succession of empires that ruled in Palestine. And that Israel wasn't free again  an independent nation until 1948. And I started to say with the exception of the  Maccabean revolt, and I mentioned the Maccabees then got distracted, never  finished that sentence. So I apologize for that. I will straighten that out right now.  There was a succession of empires, Babylonia, and then Medo-Persian, and  then the Greeks under Alexander the Great, and then the Romans. But there  also was a time when the Jewish nation was able to throw off that rule briefly  anyway, under the Maccabees, and that revolt, and it took place, because the,  one of the rulers of the empire that was bequeathed by Alexander, Antiochus.  Antiochus, Antiochus, Antiochus Epiphanes decided that he would turn the  temple and Jewish culture in more in the line of Greek culture. And so what he  wanted to do was have a statue of Zeus set up in the, in the temple as the most  outrageous thing you can imagine. And so the, under the priests Mattathias,  there was a resistance, and his five sons were called the Maccabees, they work  together an army, and they defeated the Syrian commander, and retook most of  the country even down to retaking most of Jerusalem except for the strong  Garrison, where the they were in the protected by a kind of Castle. The Syrian  troops were and they became independent, Maccabees means the hammer  boys, a good nickname for them. So there was an independence then, for quite  a while. And what happened then, later was that around the year 63, there was  a real disenchantment of the Pharisee party with the rulers, and it broke and a  civil war broke out. And then the Roman General Pompey was called on to  come in and mediate the dispute try to resolve it. Well, inviting a Roman general  into your country, is probably not the wisest way to resolve a dispute. So  Pompey shows up and turns the whole province, the whole country into a  province of Rome. And that tripped off another rebellion. But it was, it was  brutally crushed. The army that Rome sent to put it down, was commanded by  Vespasian. But he never took part in the, in the military operation, because he  was recalled to Rome and made emperor and he turned the, the operation over  to his son, Titus. And in the year 70, he not only invaded Jerusalem, but he  flattened the temple, he destroyed it, the the Second Temple, and it was a great  tragedy for all Jews, it was the center of the national consciousness, the center  of worship, the the heartbeat of, of the Jewish people, and it meant that the  center of worship and the sacrifices, and the priesthood and so on, was  destroyed and meant that worship then only was left to the local synagogues,  rather than having a central place where God Himself dwelt. This is a great  tragedy, to Israel and of course, in time that led to another revolt and that was  put down as well. And an end of the result in the end result was a great  dispersion of Jews from the country, it throughout Asia Minor and into North  Africa and into southern Europe. There was no center to keep them to hold them

in their ancient homeland. And this dispersion within was called the diaspora.  And it resulted in a number of things, one of which cannot go by without being  mentioned. And that is that wherever Jews went, they were persecuted. And this is a serious business, they have persisted with their faithfulness to the covenant  and God in keeping the rites and rituals and so on. But it meant that they stood  out as strangers and in whatever country, they, to whatever country they  emigrated. This is especially nasty history. And I want to say something about  the origins of this awful record of persecution that they suffered. People are  naturally xenophobic, they are wary and suspicious of strangers, people that do  do things differently, wear different clothes, have different holidays, and rites and so on. That That alone is, is probably enough to undo some of the persecutions.  But when the natural xenophobia of people, the fear of strangers, is matched up  with an official doctrine from the top, it's far more vicious. And what I mean by  matched up with an official doctrine, from the rulers, has to do with the education that European rulers royalty all got. They got an education that was heavily  weighted in the ancient Greek philosophers, especially Plato, and Aristotle. And  it's in Aristotle's Politics, that he takes up the question of how much unity a state  has to have. That is the political institution and society has to have a certain  amount of unity, or it will fall apart. And he doesn't then tick off a list of things  about which the people have to be agreed and unified. But over the next few  chapters, he names them. And he names quite a number, he starts with, they  have to speak the same language, they have to wear the same clothes,  celebrate the same holidays, dance, the same dances, worship the same gods.  And that becomes the reason why kings of and other rulers, royalty of Europe,  regard religious dissent as treason. It's because of Aristotle, and his great  influence and authority. Religious dissent is one of the things the a government  can't tolerate, or the whole political fabric of society will disintegrate and fall  apart. The fact is that the church, for all its complicity in this never executed  anybody for heresy. The church didn't have the authority to do that only the king  did. But the king or queen could could make heresy, religious difference in  dissent, treason by law, and then if you are found guilty of being a heretic, the  state would execute you. And, and that's the kind of persecution that that the  Jews faced, being dispersed throughout Europe and so on. I know, in a world  where the intellectual tradition, the dominant intellectual tradition was that of the  Greek philosophers. And the, and the great authority of Aristotle stood behind it.  It's a terrible record. And it ended up in the worst persecution of all then which  we call the Holocaust, which took place during World War II, when Hitler and the Nazi ideology declared Jews, subhuman, and to be exterminated. They weren't  the only ones there. He took the same view of gypsies and others, but he had a  theory that there's a superior race that has emerged evolutionarily that, that  superior race. He called it Aryans. And he claimed that this Aryan race was  superior, not in intellect, intelligence had already evolved. But this was the next 

stage of evolution, they were superior in will, that was their will that was superior to the other sub humans. And he called this group, the above humans, the Uber  Mensch something he took from Nietzsche, the philosopher Nietzsche. And they were destined to rule and to rid Europe and wherever else they conquered of all  sub humans, such as Jews, and Gypsies, and of course, Negros made the list  

later on, and so did Orientals. Everybody, but us Aryans, about what he said. He also made an appeal to Churchill, to have Britain join Germany, and in  conquering Europe, and ruling and establishing the Aryan race, because he  regarded the British as also Aryans. of course, to Churchill had nothing to do  with this grotesque myth of a superior race. And Hitler himself was parodied by  putting his picture over the description of this, of what a typical Aryan looked  like, the typical Aryan according to the Nazi ideology, was tall, blond, very fair  skin, blue eyed, and, and very strong, and Hitler course was dark and short,  brown eyes and didn't look at all like any Aryan. That was a joke, but the  Holocaust was no joke. And over 12 million people were executed in the death  camps that were established by the Nazis, and over half of them were Jews was a terrible, terrible time and a great blemish in the history of humankind. There  were occasionally spots of relief from this. It looked as though the Protestant  Reformation might be getting off to a better start. When Martin Luther published  a pamphlet, called Jesus was born a Jew. In that pamphlet, he said this, The  Jews are blood relations of our Lord. And if it were proper, to boast of flesh and  blood, the Jews belong to Christ more than we do. We must exercise not the law of the Pope, but that of Christian love, and show them a friendly spirit.  Unfortunately, that good start was ended in a dead end, it was went nowhere,  because later on, the a new law promulgated by the government, offended the  Jews and they went to Luther and appealed to him for help. So he, he traveled  to the capitol and made a defense of their cause, and worked out a compromise  and brought it back and presented it to them. And Jewish community rejected  the compromise. And this kicked in the famous Luther temper, and he flew into a rage. And subsequently he wrote things about the Jews are always intractable,  you can't deal with them. They're full of lies, and all kinds of things. And his, his  later writings were quoted by the Nazis to support their program. It's one of great tragedies that the Reformation didn't solidly go down his first path, rather than  the second. The French Revolution granted freedom of from persecution to the  Jews and so did the American. But of course, officially granting it and actually  getting it sunk can often be two different things. But we have to make some  mention of of this possible, talk about Judaism and Jewish people, without the  mention of that awful tragic history of persecution. We we see, it's unfortunate  that what Aristotle picked out, are just the things that make someone stand out if they're different if they celebrate different holidays and speak a different  language, wear different clothes, right away, they're strangers. And we're people are naturally suspicious anyway, or even fearful. But then he makes it into a 

policy that a government has to repress all that, or risk, the, the, the whole  political fabric of society falling and falling apart. And that's the real source of the idea that other religions be persecuted. It certainly doesn't come out of the New  Testament, there's nothing in Christian doctrine that says, persecute those other  people or make them second class citizens or repress them, or whatever. That's  not Christian, but it is Aristotelian. Well, that's enough of the history I said, we're  our our main focus was not going to be on history, but on doctrine. And I want to  keep it there. And and talk about some of the developments during this same  period of time through the Maccabees at the time of the birth of Christ and  passed it in that time, the Torah, the scriptures are compiled, and they become  completely compiled by about the year 90, after Christ. And at the same time,  there are commentaries being written on it by the rabbi's. So commentaries,  called Misha, and Midrash. And these come to be collected the two main  collections, one in Palestine, one in Babylon, but the Babylonian one comes out  supreme. And all of these collected commentaries on the Scripture and pieces  of advice and rules and observations about how best to keep Jewish tradition  and so on, becomes the Talmud, the great commentary on Scripture that is  taken by most Jews to be virtually have equal authority with the Holy Scriptures,  or at least, at worst, one step below. There was a movement later that rebelled  against that wanted to go back just the the Scriptures, the Karaites claim that  but that was not a very long lasting or influential movement, in the long run. So  the the Talmud was finished, about the late four hundreds, the fifth century. And  from that time on, it has been the supreme commentating commentary on the  scriptures on the books of Moses, which are properly called Torah, the properly,  but then sometimes the whole scripture is referred to that way. But especially  Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. And then the other writings were collected and attached, the historical books and the major prophets, the  minor prophets, and finally, the Wisdom literature. And so the the scriptures  become complete, and the commentary is fixed by the end of the fifth century,  and nothing has ever challenged that the Talmud for an authority on Jewish life,  and the the understanding of the Scriptures we have to mention to to that there  were great scholars that arose that particularly Moses Maimonides needs  special recognition, great philosopher, comments on the Scripture, but he also  wrote a famous work called a guide to the perplexed and in which he defends  belief in God, and the. and the entire Jewish outlook on life. It's very influential,  and even among later Christian among Christian scholars, and here is what  here's a quote from him. That I think typifies what you would find in Maimonides. And so I've chosen to read it I believe with perfect faith that God is the Creator  of all things and that he alone, that he is one with a unique unity, that he is  without body or any form whatsoever, that He is eternal. That to him alone his  properties, it is proper to pray that all the words the prophets are true that Moses is Moses is the chief of the prophets. And the law given to Moses has been 

passed down without alteration, that this law will never be changed, no other will be given that God knows all the thoughts and actions of men, that He rewards  obedient, the obedient and punishes transgressors, and that the Messiah will  come, and there will be a resurrection of the dead. Now, the idea of a general  resurrection of the dead, arose in this later period, just prior to the birth of Jesus, that to place it in time. And the doctrine of a day of judgment became a strong  theme in the later prophets. So that both teachings occur in Judaism and  Judaism has contributed, then to religion, the idea of the dead being raised  something that Christianity and Islam both are going to pick up and affirm that  sometimes people try to make the claim that this is an old idea, it's really a  pagan one. But that's not the case. And there's a very fine work on this that I can recommend by the New Testament scholar, N. T. Wright, called the resurrection  of the Son of God. And in it he shows that what was existed in ancient pagan  religions was the idea that certain gods died every season and rose again,  another season. Usually, of course, it coincided with the onset of winter, they  die, and they are raised again in spring, and so on. But it was never the idea  that a human beings would, having really been dead, be raised back to bodily  life, never to die again, that's uniquely Jewish, and taken over into Christianity,  and affirmed, of course, and then exemplified by Jesus Christ. So, in our next  session, we'll finish up with Judaism with the developments into modern times,  and and then we'll be ready to take on Christianity