THE PROPHET EZEKIEL : THE BIRTH OF JUDAISM Among the first group of the elite forced into Babylonian exile in 597 BC was a senior priest called Ezekiel. His beloved wife passed away during the siege of Jerusalem and he lived in lonely exile near Babylon. Sitting on the bank of the Chebar canal he experienced a divine vision: the only salvation was through religious purity. States and empires and thrones did not matter in the long run. They would perish through God's power. What mattered was the creature God had created in his image : man. Ezekiel describes how God took him to a valley which was full of bones and asked him:"Son of man, can thse bones live?" Then before his terrified gaze, the bones began to rattle and shake and come together. To Ezekiel it was a sign of the resurrection of Israel. It was thus Ezekiel and his visions which gave the dynamic impulse to the formulation of Judaism. Ezekiel insisted like Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah, that the calamities which befell the Jews were the direct and inescapable result of sinful breach of the LAW. But for Ezekiel the Jews had nobody to blame but their individual selves. God, wrote Ezekiel, no longer punishes people collectively for the sin of a leader, or the present generation for the fault of their ancestors. Each was individually responsible to God :"the soul that sinneth, it shall die". The idea of the individual became thus paramount with Ezekiel and thereafter individual accountability became of the very essence of the Jewish religion. From the times of the first deportation, the Jews began to be a scattered, stateless folk and they were forced to find alternative means to preserve their special identity : so they turned to writings, their laws and the records of their past. From this times, the scribes became very important people : a caste of its own, copying precious scrolls brought from the ruined Temple, ordering and editing the Jewish archives. In Babylon, the Jews were reasonably treated. As some of them became wealthy, mercantile wealth financed the scribal effort and if the individual was responsible for obeying the Law, he must know what the Law is. So the Law must be set down and copied but also taught. Hence it was during the exile to Babylon that ordinary Jews were first disciplined into the regular practice of their religion. Circumcision was insisted upon rigorously and the act became a ceremony. The concept of the Sabbath became the focus of the Jewish week. The Laws were now studied, read aloud, memorized. In exile, the Jews, deprived of a state, became a nomocracy, voluntarily submitting to rule by a Law which could only be enforced by consent. Nothing like this had occured before in history. The exile was short but his creative strength was overwhelming. It is notable that the Jews when they achieved settled and prosperous self-government found extremely difficult to keep their religion pure and incorrupt. This pattern occured several times after the conquest of Joshua, under Solomon, both during the northern and the southern kingdom and again under the Hasmoneans. Only in adversity they clung to their principles and develop their powers of religious imagination, their originality, their clarity and their zeal. Jeremiah comes close to the notion that the state itself is inherent evil. This idea is inherent in Yahwehism itself since God, not man, is the ruler. So we are not very far from the idea that the Jews are the yeast, producing decomposition of the existing order, the chemical agent of change in society, so how could they be order and society itself ? The first leg of this notion was used and re-used by Hitler and the Nazis who pretended since Mein Kampf that the Jews were"parasites, vermins and bacillae" upon the social body of the German nation. What the Nazis did not see was the fact that the Jews were in their own eyes also "chemical agents of change in every society". HOME RETURN TO PAGE Source : Michel Cahier and Paul Johnson, in "A History of the Jews" Harper & Row 1987 |
