Judaism as a Religious Legal System
![handle is hein.journals/hastlj29 and id is 1353 raw text is: Judaism as a Religious Legal System
By ELLIOT DoPFF*
Introduction
I MERICANS are accustomed to thinking about Judaism as
a religion, comprised primarily of beliefs and moral max-
ims. Judaism is a religion; it does espouse beliefs and
norms of behavior, but it includes much more. As Mordecai Kaplan
has suggested, Judaism is best described as a civilization because
Jewish identity involves attachment to a specific land, language, lit-
erature, music, art, and people, in addition to beliefs and morals.'
The religion is the core of the civilization because it gives all the
other elements their distinctly Jewish character, but it is not the to-
tality of what it means to be Jewish.
The fact that Judaism is a religious civilization is important for
two reasons. First, along with the specific attachments identified
by Kaplan, Judaism includes a body of law. In fact, this body of
law is central to the meaning of Judaism. The centrality of law
becomes clear when one notes that the rules which govern Jewish
life all require that Jews do specific things and refrain from doing
others, not that they believe one thing .or another. There are be-
liefs that characterize mainstream Judaism, but Jews have expressed
and interpreted them in a wide variety of ways, and no set of dog-
mas ever has become authoritative. Jewish law, on the other hand,
is detailed in its demands, and its observance traditionally has been
considered essential to having an identity as a Jew. Thus, if a com-
mitted Jew were asked to identify the essence of the Jewish faith,
his answer probably would begin with a discussion of the specific
* Director of Graduate Studies, The University of Judaism, West Coast School
of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
1. See generally M. KAPLAN, JUDAISM AS A CIVILIZATION (1957); M. KAPLAN,
QUESTIONS JEws ASK: RECONSTRUCTIONIST ANSWERS (1956).
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Judaism as a Religious Legal System
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