RDJ Judaism - InterFaith Leadership Council of Metropolitan Detroit

Judaism

About Judaism

Judaism is a religion comprising the religious, cultural, and legal traditions of the Jewish people. The central religious belief of Judaism is that there is only one God. This is known as monotheism. Monotheism was uncommon at the time Judaism was born nearly 5,000 years ago. According to Jewish tradition, God revealed God’s self to Abraham, the ancestor of the Jewish people.

God revealed the Torah, which includes the Ten Commandments, to Moses. Some laws in the Torah pertain to the Jewish people’s relationship with God. Other commandments (in Hebrew Mitzvot) focus on the Jewish people’s relationships with each other and the rest of the world.

The vast array of Jewish community-building organizations in America is too large to count! Here are some national groups you might like to find out more about:

Alpha Epsilon Pi

American Jewish Historical Society

American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

Anti-Defamation League

Jewish Braille Institute International

Landsmannschaften

National Foundation for Jewish Culture

National Jewish Democratic Council

Republican Jewish Coalition

United Jewish Communities

A Jewish View of God

God exists.
There is only one God.
God doesn’t have a body.
God is everywhere, all the time.
God is just, but God is also merciful: God is forgiving towards those who mess things up.
God is personal and accessible. God sometimes speaks to individuals, but in unexpected ways. (Full text: BBC)

Albert Einstein (1879 -1955) was born to a middle-class German Jewish family. His parents were concerned that he scarcely talked, and not in complete sentences, until the age of five. Einstein developed the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics. In 1921 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.”

The Metropolitan Detroit Jewish Community has been a pillar of the region for generations. In comparison to other US cities Detroit’s Jewish population is small, though, with only 71,750 individuals representing 1.7% of the area’s total population in 2018 (source: Jewish Virtual Library)