NO OF PAGES: 201 SUB CAT I: Jewish Practice SUB CAT II: SUB CAT III: DESCRIPTION: This book aims to prove that, in its normative writings, Judaism is a universalistic religion, speaking a language common to all humanity and offering a place in God?s kingdom to everyone. That proof is required because Judaism is commonly portrayed by both the faithful and the competing religions as ethnic and particularistic, exclusive and unwelcoming. Two forces today aim at the ethnicization of Judaism into a mere culture, Christianity and Jews themselves.

From New Testament times, Christianity has represented Judaism as insufficient because it excludes the gentiles from that ?Israel? of which Scripture speaks, the Israel that knows and worships the one and only God of all humanity. But on its own, Christianity cannot stifle the vitality of Judaism within the community of the faithful.

The Jewish community defines itself in ethnic and political terms, and even rabbis function more often than not as ethnic cheerleaders. Jews, so people maintain, have attitudes and feelings and opinions acquired through birth and upbringing and not accessible to other people, as do all other ethnic or racial groups. By Judaism then people mean, the Jews? ethnic culture. Then in an age of ethnic celebration, a time in which people emphasize difference and not commonality, Judaism finds itself represented as an ethnic religion, which is not a religion at all. It is the sum of Jews? experience: the culture, the history, the sentiment, and consciousness of the Jewish people. So difference and particularity rule, and Judaism, a religion that I shall show from its origins means to address all humanity from beginning to end, from creation to redemption at the end of days, loses all hearing.

To state matters simply: the Jews used to be a people with one religion, Judaism. Now, Judaism is becoming merely the religion of one people, an ethnic religion, thus, in the monotheist framework of a universal God of all humanity, deprived of its religiosity altogether.

The argument of this book, with its stress on the universalistic character of the thought and argument of Judaism in its normative canon, means to reestablish the claim of Judaism to constitute a universal religious tradition, addressing the entirety of humanity exactly as do Christianity and Islam, competing with the other two monotheisms on an even playing field for the attention and affirmation of all who maintain that the one and only God who made heaven and earth has made himself known to humanity. All three monotheisms concur that there is only one God, and the naked logic of that concurrence requires that all three are speaking of one and the same God. Then the claim that one of the three monotheisms affords access to the one and only God to only one sector of humanity, a sector sustained principally through ethnic or racial ties, and that that one and only God is inaccessible to everybody else?that absurd claim laid against Judaism caricatures Judaism and violates the generative logic of monotheism, whether in its Islamic or Christian or Judaic formulation.

Each of the three monotheist religions?Judaism, Islam, and Christianity?chooses its own medium to convey one universal message to all humanity concerning the one and only and unique God. All encompass in the story that they tell humanity the one God?s self-manifestation to Abraham, then in the Torah given by God to Moses at Sinai, and, more generally, in the Hebrew Scriptures of ancient Israel. All concur on a further stage in revelation: God in Christ; God to the prophet, Muhammad; God in the Oral Torah, for Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, respectively. Judaism represents one of the three possibilities that inhere within the dialectics of monotheism. But while Christianity and Islam set forth a message of universal significance and appeal, Judaism finds itself represented as a backwater, not part of the mainstream of monotheism.

What I mean to demonstrate in these pages is that in its normative writings, ScrNOTES: Purchased from Amazon.com. SUBTITLE: The Universal Dimension of Judaism