The shared center — held across the tradition
God is one, indivisible, and engaged with history.
The Shema is the center: Hear O Israel — the LORD is one. This God acts in time: exodus, exile, return.
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God has no body, and no image of God is possible.
Maimonides made incorporeality the third of thirteen principles, and the Torah's outstretched arm became language stooping to be understood. The commandment is enforced hard enough that a tradition three thousand years old produced almost no religious portraiture.
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A covenant binds a people to God across generations.
At Sinai the bond became mutual and collective — inherited, argued with, never dissolved.
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No one stands between a person and God.
No priest absolves, no saint is petitioned, nobody confesses to anybody. On Yom Kippur each person strikes their own chest through a list of sins written in the plural — everyone says everything, and no human being is listening.
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A person is built with two inclinations, and neither is a devil.
Yetzer hatov and yetzer hara. The rabbis said that without the evil inclination nobody would build a house, marry, or start a business — so they locked it up, and the hens stopped laying. There is no original sin here and no fallen nature, only an appetite that has to be steered.
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Repentance is always open, and it is work.
Teshuvah is a turn, not a mood. Maimonides sets the test: the same temptation, the same opportunity, and a different choice. Sins against another person God does not forgive at all until that person has been asked — three times, and then the debt passes to whoever is refusing.
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Every human bears the image of God.
B'tzelem Elohim — the opening chapter's claim with the longest reach: one ancestor, the rabbis taught, so that no one may say my father was greater than yours.
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Argument, for the sake of heaven, is sacred.
The Talmud preserves the losing opinions. Machloket l'shem shamayim — disagreement pursued honestly — is not a failure of the tradition; it is how the tradition breathes.
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Chosen means obligated.
Asher bachar banu — who chose us — is said before every Torah reading. The rabbinic gloss is consistently about load rather than rank: 613 commandments for Jews, seven for everyone else, and the righteous of all nations have a share in the world to come.
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Held by most — broad, but not universal
Repairing the world is human work.
Tikkun olam: creation is unfinished, and justice is a duty rather than an aspiration.
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The messianic age is still ahead.
Whether a person or an era, redemption has not yet come — expectation is part of the faith.
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The dead will rise.
Techiyat hametim sits in the second blessing of the Amidah, said standing, three times a day: who revives the dead. Orthodox Jews say it as written. Classical Reform changed the line to who gives life to all, and recent Reform prayer books print both and let the congregation choose.
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There is a world to come, and Judaism will not describe it.
Olam haba is promised constantly and pictured almost never. Gehinnom is capped at twelve months in rabbinic law, which is exactly why a child says kaddish for a parent for eleven — nobody implies their parent needed the full sentence.
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Contested within — affirmed by some schools, refused by others
Torah came from Sinai.
Torah min haShamayim. Orthodoxy holds the written text was dictated to Moses and the oral law given alongside it; Conservative Judaism reads revelation as real and humanly recorded; Reform reads it as Israel's response to encounter rather than its transcript. This one sentence is the fault line between the movements.
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The commandments are how the covenant is lived.
613 mitzvot pattern life — how binding halakha remains is the live argument between the movements.
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The Land is part of the covenant.
The liturgy has faced Jerusalem for two thousand years and asks daily for the ingathering of exiles. What follows politically is the most divisive question in Jewish life, and the tradition contains every answer at once.
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God contracted to make room for the world.
Tzimtzum. Isaac Luria taught in Safed in the 1570s that the Infinite withdrew from a point so that something not-God could exist, and that the vessels made to hold the light shattered. Every commandment kept lifts one fallen spark — which is where the word tikkun comes from.
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The Shoah broke something, and no answer has held.
Richard Rubenstein concluded that the God of history could not be maintained. Eliezer Berkovits answered with hester panim, the hiding of the face. Emil Fackenheim proposed a 614th commandment — not to hand Hitler a posthumous victory — and the Satmar Rebbe blamed Zionism in print while survivors were still counting their dead.
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