Judaism who is worshiped

Orthodox Jews often sway, which helps them to concentrate on the words being said. Orthodox Jewish men wear a tallit and often a tefillin. The tefillin makes them concentrate on God when they are praying.

In the UK, this is English. Reform synagogues hold services on Shabbat. Men and women sit together and often musical instruments are played.

Services are usually led by a rabbi but anyone with religious knowledge can lead worship. For Orthodox Jews the rabbi must be a man, but Reform Jewish rabbis can be women. Often a cantor , called the hazzan, stands at the front facing the aron hakodesh to lead prayers, which are often sung or chanted.

The siddur is used during each service. It contains the daily prayers. Opening prayers are usually said, and these are followed by a recitation of the Shema.

The Shema is the Jewish declaration of faith , and Jews have a duty to recite it three times a day. The origins of Jewish faith are explained throughout the Torah.

According to the text, God first revealed himself to a Hebrew man named Abraham, who became known as the founder of Judaism. Jews believe that God made a special covenant with Abraham and that he and his descendants were chosen people who would create a great nation. Jacob took the name Israel, and his children and future generations became known as Israelites. More than 1, years after Abraham, the prophet Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt after being enslaved for hundreds of years.

Around B. His son Solomon built the first holy Temple in Jerusalem , which became the central place of worship for Jews. The kingdom fell apart around B. Sometime around B. A second Temple was built in about B. The destruction of the second Temple was significant because Jewish people no longer had a primary place to gather, so they shifted their focus to worshipping in local synagogues.

While the Tanakh which includes the Torah is considered the sacred text of Judaism, many other important manuscripts were composed in later years. These offered insights into how the Tanakh should be interpreted and documented oral laws that were previously not written down.

Around A. Later, the Talmud, a collection of teachings and commentaries on Jewish law, was created. The Talmud contains the Mishnah and another text known as the Gemara which examines the Mishnah. It includes the interpretations of thousands of rabbis and outlines the importance of commandments of Jewish law. The first version of the Talmud was finalized around the 3rd century A. The second form was completed during the 5th century A. Judaism embraces several other written texts and commentaries.

One example is the 13 Articles of Faith, which was written by a Jewish philosopher named Maimonides. Shabbat is recognized as a day of rest and prayer for Jews. It typically begins at sunset on Friday and lasts until nightfall on Saturday. Observing Shabbat can take many forms, depending on the type of Judaism that a Jewish family may follow.

Orthodox and Conservative Jews, for example, may refrain from performing any physical labor, using any electrical device or other prohibited activities.

Most observant Jews celebrate Shabbat by reading or discussing the Torah, attending a synagogue or socializing with other Jews at Shabbat meals.

Throughout history, Jewish people have been persecuted for their religious beliefs. Some well-known events include:. The group also kidnapped and crucified Joseph ibn Naghrela, the Jewish vizier to the Berber king. The First Crusade: In the first of the Crusades —a series of medieval holy wars involving Christians and Muslims—thousands of Jews were killed, and many were forced to convert to Christianity. Experts estimate about , people were ousted and tens of thousands died while trying to reach safety.

The Holocaust: In the Holocaust , the most infamous of modern-day atrocities, the Nazis murdered more than 6 million Jews. During and after the Holocaust, many Jews returned to their homeland in the Middle East region known as Palestine and embraced Zionism , a movement for the creation of a Jewish state that emerged in 19th-century Europe. In , Israel officially became an independent nation. The god of the southern deserts. The first mention of the Israelite tribe itself is a victory stele erected around BCE by the pharaoh Mernetpah sometimes called "the Israel stele".

These Israelites are described as a people inhabiting Canaan. So how did this group of Canaanite El-worshippers come in contact with the cult of Yhwh? The Bible is quite explicit about the geographical roots of the Yhwh deity, repeatedly linking his presence to the mountainous wilderness and the deserts of the southern Levant. All these regions and locations can be identified with the territory that ranges from the Sinai and Negev to northern Arabia.

Support for the theory that Yhwh originated in the deserts of Israel and Arabia can be found in Egyptian texts from the late second millennium, which list different tribes of nomads collectively called "Shasu" that populated this vast desert region. The many faces of god. How exactly the Shasu merged with the Israelites or introduced them to the cult of Yhwh is not known, but by the early centuries of the first millennium, he was clearly being worshipped in both the northern kingdom of Israel and its smaller, southern neighbor, the kingdom of Judah.

As the Yhwh cult evolved and spread, he was worshipped in temples across the land. Nor, in ancient Israel, was Yhwh the invisible deity that Jews have refrained from depicting for the last two millennia or so. In the kingdom of Israel, as Hosea 8 and 1 Kings relate, he was often worshipped in the form of a calf, as the god Baal was.

Ergo, in northern Israel at least, the calves were meant to represent Yhwh. Such depictions may have even continued after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian Exile: a coin minted in Jerusalem during the Persian period shows a deity sitting on a wheeled throne and has been interpreted by some as a late anthropomorphic representation of Yhwh.

Not all scholars agree that the iconography of Yhwh was so pronounced in Judah. The God of the Jews. In any case, many scholars agree that Yhwh became the main god of the Jews only after the destruction of the kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians, around BCE. How or why the Jews came to exalt Yhwh and reject the pagan gods they also adored is unclear. We do know that after the fall of Samaria, the population of Jerusalem increased as much as fifteenfold, likely due to the influx of refugees from the north.

That made it necessary for the kings of Judah to push a program that would unify the two populations and create a common narrative.

And that in turn may be why the biblical writers frequently stigmatize the pagan cultic practices of the north, and stress that Jerusalem alone had withstood the Assyrian onslaught — thereby explaining Israel's embarrassing fall to Assyria, while distinguishing the prominence and purity of Judahite religion.