Leningrad Codex carpet page, 1010 CE · public domain

Judaism

Tradition·Founded c. 1000 BCE·est. ~15 million worldwide

Judaism → 8 branches

Branch
Core tenet of Judaism⚖ contested within

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.

Understanding it — context, not catechism: how this passage is held

This is the sentence the movements split over, and each of them knows it. Orthodox Judaism holds that the entire Written Torah was given to Moses letter for letter and that the Oral Torah — eventually Mishnah and Talmud — was given with it, which is what makes rabbinic law binding rather than merely wise. Conservative Judaism, following Zacharias Frankel and later Louis Jacobs, holds that revelation is real but that human hands shaped the record and the law therefore develops; Jacobs lost a British pulpit over saying so publicly in the 1960s. Reform Judaism treats Torah as the record of Israel's encounter with God and takes the ethical commandments as binding while leaving the ritual ones to conscience. Reconstructionism goes furthest, describing Judaism as an evolving civilisation with no supernatural revelation at all. All four read the same portion on the same Shabbat from the same kind of scroll, and disagree entirely about where it came from.

The same ground, other faiths

claims that share this one's ideas
The Compilation of Divine Messages. Cao Đài · scripture Open the book →
The Ofudesaki. Tenrikyo · scripture Open the book →
The Urantia Book — 2,097 pages, no author. The Urantia Movement · scripture Open the book →
The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster · scripture Open the book →
The Rigveda. Vedic Religion · scripture Open the book →

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