WHO, WHAT & WHY IS A JEW?
by hilda terry
Despite the Rabbinical assertion that God chose Abraham for his faith, one has to ask "What faith?" All we really know of Abraham's faith is that he rejected his father's faith; that he sought his own Maker-of-Life.
Clearly, a Creator has been steadily working, from the first amoeba, on a creature capable of appreciating Him/Her. It’s what every artist needs.
A God who seems to want to be found must have responded to the potential in the open-minded outreach of this obsessive seeker. In the interest of evolution, Nature would have pounced on this specimen for special cultivation. “Give me your future,” would have been the request.
“Bind your seed to your name and I promisewhen the time comes that man can truly know me, I will be revealed to you in the blood of your blood.”
God never promised to clone Abrahamonly to multiply his seed; to make of him a mighty nation. The survival of this nation over the millennia, despite repeated extermination attempts, validates the fulfillment of that promise.
Jews are not a race. The Jewish nation, created by a whim of Destiny, is about the most racially diversified of all nations. Yet tests made recently on male Coanim (reported in Science News. Vol. 154, October 3, 1998,) support the continuation of the seed from an original ancestor, by a predominant retention of unique event polymorphismsgenomic alterations thought to arise on a single occasion in human evolution, passed only from father to son. Even before the research on male lineage, the timely knowledge of mitochondrial DNA, the gene that only passes from mother to daughter, prompted researchers in early Israel to check the new immigrants flocking from everywhere.
No matter where they came from, the in-gathered Jews had more genetic patterns in common than they shared with the people among whom they had lived over the centuries. (Ironically, the most assimilated were the Jews from Germany; perhaps, from the Covenant's point of view, the most dispensable.)
Thanks to those who kept isolating us for persecution, as well as those who kept giving our forebears rules and rituals holding them together, every biological Jew to this day is a direct descendent, in an unbroken line, sharing in the heritage of Abraham. In the eyes of the God who made this contract, that can be the only definition of WHO is a Jew.
The religion is there if you want it, and many of us do, but even a Jewish atheist can not be excommunicated. Religion does not make the Jew. It's the Jew who makes religion. It was never God's intention that the Jews should have a monopoly, but the most successful creeds founded on the writings of Abraham's descendants have always come up with something to stop the children of Abraham from following. Jews who break the Covenant, following these new Gods, tend to fall through the cracks, losing their identity as they leak the seed of Abraham here and there. Converts to Judaism are free to come and go, but those who stay and reproduce within the tribe do join their blood with Abraham's future. Every child of a single biological Jew, regardless of gender, is a sworn carrier of the seed of the Covenant. The Jewish atheist is still a child of Abraham, bred, perhaps, to reject a father's beliefs in perpetuating the Patriarchal pursuit. The nicest thing about being a Jew is that, as a child of this man, we're reproduced with the ability and the inclination to do our own thinking.
God DID TEST Abraham. Knowing full well the millennium of persecution that would be needed to isolate and preserve the identity of the seed, ethics required the father's consent. Not everyone is happy with the sacrifice. Carl Marx wrote that whole elaborate Communist theory thinking if he could just get rid of religion altogether, he could get out of being a Jew. Again, after WW 11, a lot of Jews felt if they could persuade the world to think of them as Khazarian converts, maybe they'd stop killing us. Nothing has ever worked. You can't fight God. For some reason, Abraham's immortality continues in his seed. Jews are WHAT God promised Abraham.
When I was young and didn't look Jewish, I overheard enough to realize the real reason we're hated is, they think we're too damned smart. It may be racist to admit it, but they're not altogether wrong. Are we too damned smart because God saw, in Abraham, an evolutionary leap in brain power? Did God choose Abraham because he was able to think in the abstract–to communicate?
The language of Creation has to be abstract. Thought has to be interpreted within the context of the brain through which it seeps. To this day, from some 'zero point zero something' percentage of the world's population, Jewish names predominate in every area where the ability to think in the abstract is essential. Of course there were other great brains to choose from. Why not Ishmael, with all of Egypt's lore through his Egyptian mother? That's a mystery. Was Isaac, son of the half sister, chosen so the issue could be tagged with the mitochondrial DNA of Abraham's birth?
IS Someone listening? Science News, March 6, 1999, has an interesting article headlined "Ghostly magnetism comes from nowhere." There's no such thing as "nowhere." it doesn't take modern science to realize that, even on our small planet, a multitude of "worlds" coexist, each locked into a broad range of incompatible frequencies, having no sense of one another.
We do not invent, we discover. We FIND what exists in nature and we FIND how to make it serve us. Now that we've found the computer, we can understand how, in nature, we--limited memory processors with a short shelf life--might be governed by invisible operators. There must be alien souls on other planets far more advanced than we are. Do these God like souls hunt up and and gather their own worshipers? is the One God concept a bit off? Is there a God of the mosquitoes, for instance? Is each soul a potential God as I have postulated in "God's D NA" ? Do we, perhaps have ethnic or family Gods? Was that why the Bible encoding was done in the Hebrew language? Did Moses, in fact, inherit Abraham's ability to communicate?
The proliferation of Abraham's dissenting descendants strongly suggests that nit picking these questions, our most dominant heritage--perpetuating the God seeker, is WHY Jews.