Does God "Belong" to the Jews?

Frithjof Schuon

According to Frithjof Schuon, author of Christianity/Islam: Perspectives on Esoteric Ecumenism - A New Translation with Selected Letters', "In relation to monotheism, considered as such, Judaism stabilized, but confiscated, the message. Christianity universalized, but altered, it. Islam in turn restored it by stabilizing and universalizing it."

He also says that "Islam is equally logical in reproaching Judaism for having unduly nationalized monotheism and for having monopolized prophecy, for wanting God to belong to the Jews alone, and for passionately opposing any prophecy outside Israel, even in the Abrahamic line, as in the case of Islam."

This is very interesting, and I can understand why Islam would see Judaism in this way, but perhaps the question should be: did the Jews nationalize monotheism, or did God? After all, Muslims do believe that God initially selected the Jews, for some reason choosing Isaac's descendants over Ishmael's. So even if one argues that He broke His covenant with them for one reason or another (which Jews reject), Muslims nevertheless believe that at one point in time it did exist only with the Jews.

This is all a moot point though because even though Jews believe that God "nationalized monotheism," we still believe that it is accessible to the world through a) our extant holy text (the Tanakh) and b) interactions with Jews. It therefore makes sense that Islam would attack the veracity of our text because it is the primary source through which the world's population can "drink of the cup" of monotheism. If you break that cup then you need a new one. And if the cup isn't broken, then try to make it seem broken to justify getting a new one.

Further, there is plenty in the Tanakh that is universally applicable without requiring people to become Jews, so I would disagree that we believe that God only "belongs" to us. This also ignores the fact that the Jews didn't simply wish to keep God to ourselves, but that the surrounding pagan nations throughout Jewish history would metaphorically (and often literally) beat us whenever we tried to teach them about Him. Monotheism put us at odds with just about everybody when it "wasn't cool yet" to be a monotheist. The Jews have suffered greatly for remaining faithful to their religion, and it is only due to their being stiff-necked that we are still around today.


No comments: