Dummy's Guide to Judaism: Things all Jews agree on

[jack]

One of the controvertial questions I asked while learning about Judaism is "Is there anything all jews agree on". There is very, very little: almost ANYTHING is guaranteed to start a big debate[1]. However, over four years, I have picked up one or two things that seem to qualify.

Note, I don't literally mean all. For any question about any religion there's always going to be SOMEONE who disagrees. But I mean that, in general, if you ask a couple of people who know, the response will generally be "yes, of course", not "well, you'd think that, and obviously I agree, but actually so-and-so thought that was totally wrong because..." and start arguing about it.

What I've come up with so far:

• There is at most one God
  
• Do not disrepect the torah scrolls
  
• Do not do human sacrifice, ever
  
• Cloths other than linen and wool can be mixed with impunity and linen and wool are ok to be worn at the same time with no way to touch

Lots of people (especially in New York and Israel) identify as jewish without being observant at all, and many more people are observant to a greater or lesser extent, but don't believe in God. But if I understand correctly, there's still rather a taboo against believing in other Gods, so few people still identify as Jewish if they believe something polytheistic[2]

And people outside Judaism may not even be familiar with Torah scrolls, but every synagogue has a big completely hand-written scroll of the Torah, which is held up and paraded round and read from during services. And I can't imagine anyone ever harming one: even if you don't believe it, you'd put it in a museum or something.

Human sacrifice doesn't really need an explanation, it's just hard to find anything that no-one has been in favour of, I cried "aha!" when I found another entry for the list.

Some orthodox people do still follow the no-mixed-wool-and-linen rule. But it seems to be one of the few rules that hasn't accreted a lot of extra suggestions around it over the years (like, "do not boil a kid in its mother's milk" became "do not eat meat and milk within four hours of each other"). So no-one (as far as Liv knew) kept any stricter version of it, which means everyone's A-OK with mixing other things in clothes :)

Are there any other suggestions? :)

[1] Liv cited an example where Bluejo's livejournal asked "What do Jews do on passover" and someone said "We argue a lot" and someone else said "No we don't!"

[2] I'm sure there must be pagan jews, but I think it must still be controvertial?

Comments

[liv]

I meant to say, although this post is very funny, on a serious note there aren't really things that all Jews agree on, because Judaism is an ethnic and cultural grouping as well as a religion. So there are always going to be some people who completely identify as Jewish due to their ancestry, but who profess any possible religious beliefs you could name, whether that's Pagan, Christian, Buddhist or whatever. I think you could probably say that most (perhaps even all) Jews would agree that believing in more than one God is not part of normative Jewish teaching, but there are certainly Jews who personally believe in more than one God, and are still Jewish.