Talk:Judaism

Judaism on Education

Could we include the role of Jewish organizations in Judaism? Orthodox Union, Aish HaTorah, Chabad and Rohr JLI?

Overall Article: Editorial Help

This article feels extremely muddled, verbose, arcane, and just a plain hodgepodge for a first time reader. Seriously I am getting a headache by reading it- it seems like a collection of random pet contributions that grew until enormously unwieldy over time. I understand that any edit becomes extremely painful and divisive on a Wikipedia article of this importance, but something needs to be done.

Perhaps some of the main editors of this article, who babysit it, so to speak, and contribute often, can get together and start a discussion to find a way to clean this thing up and make it a product of excellence.

Semi-protected edit request on 14 December 2015

Add more about modern versus ancient Judaism in terms of religion and nationality. For pre-modern Judaism, there was no distinction between the two, it was just a collective people. Moses Mendelssohn is credited with the idea the Judaism is just a religion, and nothing more; as opposed to a political and national entity. Mendelssohn lived during the 1700's in Germany, and was interested in emancipation and assimilation. He liked the idea of Jews being treated as Germans in public, and only acted specifically like Jews in the privacy of their own homes. He believed that reducing Jewish culture to just a religion removed all the major differences and allowed the Jews to assimilate to European culture as best as they could. Amos Oz and his daughter, Fania Oz-Salzberger are 20th and 21st century secular Jews. They believe that Judaism is a nationality and not a religion. Religious elements can exist as part of the greater nation, but not independently. Moses Mendelssohn gave modern Jews in the Diaspora the opportunity to decide how assimilated they want to be and how distinctly Jewish they would like to be. Mordecai Kaplan's unique perspective of being born into an observant Lithuanian family in in 1893, but being raised in New York, allowed him to respect both Jewish and American traditions greatly. He wanted to take the best traits from both cultures and combine them both in private and in public. Kaplan described Judaism as a "religious civilization." Judaism has all the components that any society would have: politics, language, history, but religion is at its center and is the best part part of the civilization. Jdgoodman4 (talk) 05:08, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

There is a whole Jewish identity section, including a subsection Judaism#Distinction between Jews as a people and Judaism. Isn't that enough? Debresser (talk) 08:22, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

References

First paragraph omits Mishnah

First paragraph has an error. The Talmud is a commentary on the Mishnah, yet it's absent in the first sentence. Overful (talk) 13:57, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Why is that an error? At most it can be an omission. In any case, that sentence mentions the Midrash and the Talmud as examples. Therefore, the list is not exhaustive, and there is no imperative to mention the Mishnah. Also, the word "Talmud" is better knows than the word "Mishnah", in English, which is a good reason to mention the Talmud. Debresser (talk) 17:28, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

References

Article lacks information on historical scholars' views.

I looked up this article out of curiosity as to what see the most widely accepted views among historians (not theologians or religious practitioners) as to the origins of Judaism. All I see is the faith based, theological, tradition informed views of the origins of Judaism (Abraham's covenant, etc).

There is precious little of any information regarding the views of objective academic scholars and historians as to the origins of Judaism.

As such it's really not a particularly informative or encyclopedic article so much as a survey of Jewish theology and traditional beliefs.

CannotFindAName (talk) 12:44, 4 May 2016 (UTC)