Many Jewish and Gentile people have been trying to put together the identification characteristics of the Jews with the purpose of using these characteristics for predicting the future of the Jewish people.
Among those who are attempting to assess the Jews are antagonists and enemies of the Jewish people. An example of the antagonists is Gentile anti-Semites who believe in the need to eliminate the Jews from all places of public influence since the Jews are “taking advantage of everybody and everything”. Examples of the enemies are Muslim militants who believe in Allah’s order to eliminate the Jews from the Earth since the Jews are “morally corrupting” the World, and the Nazis who see in the Jewish faith a fundamental immune defense against Nazi bloody ideology.
Other antagonists include Jewish atheists and agnostics who don’t care about the Jewish faith and history since they believe in the “natural” moral laws for all humanity – the laws that had been created by Darwin’s evolution – not by God; in essence, the Jewish atheists and agnostics see the future of the Jewish people in assimilation to become “like everybody else”.
Among them are some Orthodox Jewish communities (ultra-Orthodox, Haredim, strictly observant) who believe the Jews were made the Chosen People by God to live in spiritual isolation (in spiritual ghetto) to strictly follow the 613 mitzvoth – by doing so they believe they preserve the Jewish people until the coming of Messiah.
Among them are contemporary Jews in Israel and in many Judeo-Christian countries whose interpretation (more often intuitive feelings) of Jewish Choseness is to be helpers to God in bringing the non-Jews to the moral prescripts of Torah; in order to achieve this goal they believe the Jews have to live among the Gentiles and participate in all spheres of human endeavor to guide the human activities along the Torah’s lines.
Many identification concepts and many predictions of the future of the Jewish people!
Some of them are coming from human authorities – some of them are coming from the Higher Authority. To what extend our future depends on the Will of this Higher Authority, and how the Free Will that was given to us by this Higher Authority shapes the future of the Jewish people? How to comprehend and navigate through all that?
I intend to present my thoughts on this topic in the future publications such as
- Identification of the Jews with the goal of their physical extermination as it was in the Nazi Germany and is in the orthodox Muslim communities
- Identification of the Jews with the goal of denigrating them as it was and is in numerous anti-Semitic communities
- Identification of the Jews with the goal of their spiritual extermination as it was in the Soviet Union
- Identification of the Jews with the goal of their assimilation as it was in the Czech Lands
- Identification of the Jews with the goal of their spiritual isolation as it was and still is in strictly orthodox Jewish communities
- Identification of the Jews in Israel with the goal of creating a coherent Promised-Land people
- Identification of the Jews as the Chosen People as may be interpreted from the Torah.
The future of the Jewish people depends on how they are perceived and identified by themselves and by others, and therefore advancing the discussion in this area should be of real interest for Judeo-Christian communities – and the strongest antidote against assimilation!