The History Of Judaism
It is history that provides the key to an understanding of Judaism, for its primal affirmations appear in early historical narratives. Thus, the Bible reports contemporary events and activities for essentially religious reasons. The biblical authors believed that the divine presence is encountered primarily within history. Gods presence is also experienced within the natural realm, but the more immediate or intimate disclosure occurs in human actions. Although other ancient communities also perceived a divine presence in history, the understanding of the ancient Israelites proved to be the most lasting and influential. It is this particular claimto have experienced Gods presence in human eventsand its subsequent development that is the differentiating factor in Jewish thought.
History, moreover, disclosed not only Gods purpose but also humankinds inability to live in accord with it. Even the chosen community failed in its obligation and had to be summoned back, time and again, to its responsibility by the prophetsthe divinely called spokespersons who warned of retribution within history and argued and reargued the case for affirmative human response. Israels role in the divine economy and thus Israels particular culpability were dominant themes sounded against the motif of fulfillment, the ultimate triumph of the divine purpose, and the establishment of divine sovereignty over all humankind.
Denial Of Residency And Nationality
Israeli authorities have denied millions of Palestinians the right to residency and nationality through its control over population registries, the granting of legal status and residency rights, and entry and exit to Israel and the OPT.
West Bank and Gaza
Israeli policies on Palestinian residency have arbitrarily denied hundreds of thousands of Palestinians the ability to live in, and travel to and from, the West Bank and Gaza. Israeli restrictions on residency separate families, bar thousands from returning to their homes in the OPT, trap others inside their homes or parts of the OPT, and block others from pursuing educational or economic opportunities.
Israeli authorities have primarily done so through their ongoing control of the population registrythe list of Palestinians whom authorities consider lawful residents of the OPT. Israel requires Palestinians to be included in the population registry to obtain Israeli-sanctioned identification cards and passports, which allow Palestinians to reside, work, and inherit property, but do not convey citizenship or nationality. Israeli security forces manning checkpoints require Palestinians to present an identification card before allowing passage for travel within the OPT, including to schools, jobs, hospitals or to visit family. Egyptian authorities also require Palestinians to present an identification card or passport to enter or exit via the Rafah crossing.
East Jerusalem
Residential Schools And The Church
Residential schools were a key institution responsible for the undermining of Aboriginal culture in Canada. Residential schools were run by the Canadian government alongside the Anglican, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, and United Churches . These schools were created with the purpose of assimilating Aboriginal children into North American culture .
In 1920 the government legally mandated that all Aboriginal children between the ages of seven and fifteen attend these schools . They took the children away from their families and communities to remove them from all influence of their Aboriginal identities that could inhibit their assimilation. Many families did not want their children to be taken away and would hide them, until it became illegal . Under the Indian Act, they were also not allowed lawyers to fight government action, which added greatly to the systemic marginalization of these people. The churches were responsible for daily religious teachings and daily activities, and the government was in charge of the curriculum, funding, and monitoring the schools .
The Roman Catholic Church created the most residential schools, with the Anglican Church second . There has been much debate surrounding the Churchs involvement in these atrocious organizations. Former Primate and Archbishop Michael Peers apologized in 1993 for the Anglican Churchs part in the residential schools. Canadas first Aboriginal Anglican Bishop Gordon Beardy forgave the Anglican Church in 2001.
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The Four Dimensions Of Religion
The incredible amount of variation between different religions makes it challenging to decide upon a concrete definition of religion that applies to all of them. In order to facilitate the sociological study of religion it is helpful to turn our attention to four dimensions that seem to be present, in varying forms and intensities, in all types of religion: belief, ritual, spiritual experience, and unique social forms of community .
The first dimension is one that comes to mind for most Canadians when they think of religion, some systematic form of beliefs. Religious beliefs are a generalized system of ideas and values that shape how members of a religious group come to understand the world around them . They define the cognitive aspect of religion. These beliefs are taught to followers by religious authorities, such as priests, imams, or shamen, through formal creeds and doctrines as well as more informal lessons learned through stories, songs, and myths. A creed outlines the basic principles and beliefs of a religion, such The Nicene creed in Christianity , which is used in ceremonies as a formal statement of belief .
| Religious Classification | |
|---|---|
| Nonhuman beings | Indigenous nature worship, Shinto |
mysterium tremendumTable 15.2. The Religions of the World.
Iii Intent To Maintain Domination
Israeli government policy has long sought to engineer and maintain a Jewish majority in Israel and maximize Jewish Israeli control over land in Israel and the OPT. Laws, planning documents, and statements by officials demonstrate that the pursuit of domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians, in particular over demographics and land, guides government policy, and actions to this day.
This chapter will show that this objective amounts to an intent to maintain domination by one group over another. When inhumane acts are carried out in the context of systematic oppression pursuant to that intent to maintain domination, the crime against humanity of apartheid is committed.
Discriminatory intent, when it gives rise to severe abuses of fundamental rights, also makes up the crime against humanity of persecution.
To analyze the motivations behind Israeli policies towards Palestinians today, which developed over many years with much of the architecture established in the early years of the state and the occupation, this chapter considers materials that in some cases date back decades. This does not implicate every official cited in seeking to dominate Palestinians. In fact, some Israeli officials and parties advocated positions that, if implemented, could have avoided such policies.
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Institutional Discrimination In Israel
Authorities inside Israel institutionally discriminate between the countrys Jewish and Palestinian inhabitants, though in ways less severe than the oppression and persecution of the OPT. There are roughly 6.2 million Jews and about 1.6 million Palestinians within Green Line Israel, according to data from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics. Israels Proclamation of Independence affirms the complete equality of all residents. Palestinians in Israel are citizens who have the right to vote in national elections, unlike Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem . For the first 17 years of Israels existence as a nation, however, Israeli authorities placed most Palestinians under military rule, confining them to dozens of enclaves, requiring them to obtain permits to leave their enclaves, and severely restricting their rights. When military rule ended in 1966, authorities granted Palestinians in Israel freedom of movement, but they continue to treat Jewish Israelis and Palestinians in starkly unequal ways, including with regards to legal status, land policies, and access to resources and services. This discriminatory treatment is undertaken to further Jewish Israeli control over demographics and land as officials have directly acknowledged.
Read A Brief Summary Of This Topic
Judaism, monotheisticreligion developed among the ancient Hebrews. Judaism is characterized by a belief in one transcendent God who revealed himself to Abraham, Moses, and the Hebrew prophets and by a religious life in accordance with Scriptures and rabbinic traditions. Judaism is the complex phenomenon of a total way of life for the Jewish people, comprisingtheology, law, and innumerable cultural traditions.
The first section of this article treats the history of Judaism in the broadest and most complete sense, from the early ancestral beginnings of the Jewish people to contemporary times. In the second section the beliefs, practices, and culture of Judaism are discussed.
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Mile Durkheim On Religion
Durkheims father was the eighth in a line of father-son rabbis. Although Émile was the second son, he was chosen to pursue his fathers vocation and was given a good religious and secular education. He abandoned the idea of a religious or rabbinical career, however, and became very secular in his outlook. His sociological analysis of religion in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life was an example of this. In this work he was not interested in the theological questions of Gods existence or purpose, but in developing a very secular, sociological question: Whether God exists or not, how does religion functionsocially in a society?
He argued that beneath the irrationalism and the barbarous and fantastic rites of both the most primitive and the most modern religions is their ability to satisfy real social and human needs . There are no religions which are false, he said. Religion performs the key function of providing social solidarity in a society. The rituals, the worship of icons, and the belief in supernatural beings excite, maintain or recreate certain mental states that bring people together, provide a ritual and symbolic focus, and unify them. This type of analysis became the basis of the functionalist perspective in sociology. He explained the existence and persistence of religion on the basis of the necessary function it performed in unifying society.
To Businesses Active In Israel And The Opt
- Cease business activities that directly contribute to the crimes of apartheid and persecution.
- Assess whether their goods and services contribute to the crimes of apartheid and persecution, such as equipment used in the unlawful demolition of Palestinian homes, and cease providing goods and services that will likely be used for such purposes, in accordance with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
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Ii The Crimes Against Humanity Of Apartheid And Persecution
The prohibition of crimes against humanity is among the most fundamental in international criminal law. The concept, which dates back more than one hundred years and became clearly part of international criminal law in the 1945 Charter of the International Military Tribunal that created the court that prosecuted members of the leadership of Nazi Germany in Nuremberg, refers to a small number of the most serious crimes under international law.
The 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which came into force in 2002, sets out 11 crimes that can amount to a crime against humanity when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack. The statute defines attack as a course of action involving the multiple commission of acts pursuant to or in furtherance of a State or organizational policy. Widespread refers to the scale of the acts or number of victims, whereas systematic indicates a pattern or methodological plan. Crimes against humanity can be committed during peace or armed conflict.
Among the 11 distinct crimes against humanity are the crimes of apartheid and persecution. There is no hierarchy among crimes against humanity they are of the same gravity and lead to the same consequences under the Rome Statute.
Max Weber On The Protestant Work Ethic
Weber is known best for his 1904 book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. He noted that in modern industrial societies, business leaders and owners of capital, the higher grades of skilled labour, and the most technically and commercially trained personnel were overwhelmingly Protestant. He also noted the uneven development of capitalism in Europe, and in particular how capitalism developed first in those areas dominated by Protestant sects. He asked, Why were the districts of highest economic development at the same time particularly favourable to a revolution in the Church? ) ). His answer focused on the development of the Protestant Ethicthe duty to work hard in ones callingin particular Protestant sects such as Calvinism, Pietism, and Baptism.
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Discriminatory Restrictions On Residency And Nationality
Palestinians face discriminatory restrictions on their rights to residency and nationality to varying degrees in the OPT and Israel. Israeli authorities have used their control over the population registry in the West Bank and Gazathe list of Palestinians they consider lawful residents for purposes of issuing legal status and identity cardsto deny residency to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Israeli authorities refused to register at least 270,000 Palestinians who were outside the West Bank and Gaza when the occupation began in 1967 and revoked the residency of nearly 250,000, mostly for being abroad for too long between 1967 and 1994. Since 2000, Israeli authorities have largely refused to process family reunification applications or requests for address changes by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The freeze effectively bars Palestinians from acquiring legal status for spouses or relatives not already registered and makes illegal, according to the Israeli army, the presence in the West Bank of thousands of Gaza residents who arrived on temporary permits and now live there, since they effectively cannot change their address to one in the West Bank. These restrictions have the effect of limiting the Palestinian population in the West Bank.
To The United States Department Of State Department Of Defense And Department Of Treasury
- Condition military and security assistance to Israel on Israeli authorities taking concrete and verifiable steps towards ending their commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution.
- Conduct an assessment of and release a public report on the use of US-origin weapons and/or equipment, or Israeli weapons and/or equipment purchased with US funds, to contribute to the commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution, or to facilitate violations of international human rights or humanitarian law. If and when further assistance is provided, ensure that no funding goes to units where there is credible information implicating them in the commission of gross violations of human rights, in compliance with 620M of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, 22 U.S.C. 2378d and Section 362 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code, otherwise known as the Leahy Laws.
- Impose visa bans and asset freezes pursuant to the Global Magnitsky Accountability Act of 2016, Executive Order 13818, and Section 7031 of the Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act of 2019, on all Israeli officials found to be responsible for or complicit in gross human rights violations, including the crimes of apartheid and persecution.
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Land Expropriation And Restrictions
Beginning in 1948 and in subsequent decades, Israeli authorities seized several million dunams of land from Palestinians inside Israel. Many of the most serious abuses described in this subsection, involving the massive confiscation of land from Palestinian citizens of Israel, occurred between 1948 and 1966. While the plight of Palestinians in Israel has generally improved since the lifting in 1966 of the martial law that Israeli authorities imposed on them for the first 17 years of the countrys history, these violations are continuing insofar as many of the victims remain unable to recover what authorities seized from them, return to live in the villages they came from, or obtain compensation for the losses they experienced.
In a 2005 report, the Global IDP Project of the Norwegian Refugee Council estimated based on a review of a range of sources that there were at the time between 150,000 and 300,000 Palestinians in Israel internally displaced from the events surrounding the establishment of Israel. The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights found in 1998 that most of what they estimated to be around 200,000 internally displaced Palestinians, who they refer to as present absentees, continue to be displaced and dispossessed within the State because their lands were confiscated and not returned to them.
Land Expropriation And Creation Of Separate Enclaves
Using a range of official justifications, Israel has since 1967 taken over much of the land in the West Bank from Palestinians in large part to serve the needs of Jewish Israeli settlers. BTselem and Kerem Navot have found that Israeli authorities have confiscated more than 2 million dunams of land, making up more than one-third of the West Bank. Israeli settlement authorities effectively control these lands, including about 540,000 that fall within their formal jurisdiction.
Most commonly, Israeli authorities take land, including land privately owned by Palestinians, by declaring it to be state land. The Israeli group Peace Now estimates that the Israeli government holds about 1.4 million dunams of land, or about a quarter of the West Bank, as state land.
Through this process, Israeli authorities have designated as state land about 788,000 dunams, excluding East Jerusalem but including about 100,000 dunams currently in Areas A and B. The remaining roughly 600,000 dunams of state land it holds, including about 70,00 dunams currently in Areas A and B, consists of land that Jordanian or British authorities registered as state land during their respective reigns over the West Bank and which Israel took control of in 1967.
Of the more than 675,000 dunams of state land that Israeli authorities have officially allocated for third parties in the West Bank, they have earmarked more than 99 percent to serve the needs of Israeli civilians.
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Sociological Explanations Of Religion
While some people think of religion as something individual , for sociologists religion is also a social institution. Social scientists recognize that religion exists as an organized and integrated set of beliefs, behaviours, and norms centred on basic social needs and values. Moreover, religion is a cultural universal found in all social groups. For instance, in every culture, funeral rites are practiced in some way, although these customs vary between cultures and within religious affiliations. Despite differences, there are common elements in a ceremony marking a persons death, such as announcement of the death, care of the deceased, disposition, and ceremony or ritual. These universals, and the differences in how societies and individuals experience religion, provide rich material for sociological study. But why does religion exist in the first place?