The Principle Of Separation At The Heart Of The Jewish Religion

This text is an excerpt from 'Zionism, Judaism and the Jewish State of Israel: Separateness, ontological uniqueness and Jewish morality are its characteristics' by Lynda Burstein Brayer, linked below.

Lynda Burstein Brayer is an Israeli lawyer who has represented Palestinians in the Israeli courts. She has lived in Israel/Palestine for over fifty years and considers herself political dissident and lives in an Arab township.

She is a former South African who has experienced 'apartheid': ”I not only know the meaning of the term in its original language of Afrikaans– separateness- but saw its effects upon the non-White population.”

The principle of separation is at the heart of the Jewish religion itself and Zionism is the political expression of the Jewish religion. Normative Judaism in Israel is Rabbinical Judaism or Talmudic Judaism, which, historically, has been normative for nearly two thousand years. This is the Judaism developed by the Rabbis following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, or who were then known as the Pharisees. This Judaism is not a biblical religion: rather it is a religion based upon the interpretation of the Torah – the relevant parts of the first five books of the Bible from Genesis to Deuteronomy – by a succession of Torah interpreters known as rabbis. I would like to stress that the bible is not normative. In Judaism, that is, it is not binding nor is it obligatory for Jews: only the Talmudic rulings are binding. It is for this reason that the politically-concocted "Judeo-Christian” heritage does not hold. Christianity sees the Bible, both Old and New Testaments its standard-setting texts. Not so for Judaism. Judaism and Christianity do not share a parent/child relationship nor an older sibling/younger sibling relationship, as per the politically correct Roman Catholic Church.

The first codification of these interpretations was made in 200 CE and consisted of the six-part Mishnah. …This Judaism held a monopoly which began to be challenged only in the mid-nineteenth century in Germany as a result of the influence of what is called the Enlightenment, the source of the secularism of the West and the secularism of a majority of Western Jews, most of whom, nonetheless, have not broken with Judaism's basic rituals of circumcision, the bar-mitzvah, Jewish divorce and burial.
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The late Professor of Biblical studies at the Hebrew University, Shemaryahu Talmon, in a lecture to Catholic Christian Zionists, while stating that the basic value of Judaism is the principle of separation, he left out the most significant binary opposition of Rabbinical Judaism: the Jew/Gentile or Jewish/goy opposition, the consequences of which have always been, and remain, central to Jewish life.
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The separation that both exists and is demanded for Jews is the separation from the "impure”. God is kadosh and His people must be kadosh too. This is the significance of "chosenness” – chosen by God to have the existential quality of purity. The Jew is pure because he possesses a soul – – nefesh in Hebrew. The purpose of all Jewish ritual is to sustain the state of purity of the Jew. Jews are commanded to do all in their power to avoid being contaminated by what is considered impure. In contrast to Jews, goys or goyim, the latter having the same dictionary meaning as gentium, people, fall into the category of the impure because they are not born with souls and are therefore, existentially separated from God without any possibility of "closing the gap”. □ comment: Islam is 180° different: there is the fitrah, i.e. the original creation of every human being as being the purest form, then when growing up and exposed to all kind of secular, etc. influences, they become one or the other.
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This existential distinction between the Jew and the goy is reflected in the absence of a Jewish universal moral code, an absence which is not found within either Christianity or Islam. Judaism's moral code is characterized by its particularity: it only binds Jews vis-à-vis Jews, not Jews vis-à-vis goys. The most outstanding exemplar of this system is that a Jew is not bound to save the life of a goy if saving the life requires the use of electricity or travelling in a motor vehicle, such as an ambulance, because such activities are forbidden on the Sabbath as they are considered forms or work, and a Jew may not work on the Sabbath. □ comment: Already prophet Jesus (the blessings and peace of Allah upon him) pointed this out and showed it's absurdity. That mercy has to prevail, for if it doesn't, nothing is won.
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It is this background that serves to explain why Aristotelian logic does not have an exclusive hold on the Israeli legal system and why a formal legal analysis cannot, by definition, grasp the entire experiential reality of the separateness/apartheid of the Jewish state. Once the lives of goys have no more value than chattel, the Jewish Israeli legal system cannot provide value to that which has no value to Jews.
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But how could "humanitarian” considerations apply to Palestinians? After all they are goys, and goys have no souls and are therefore like chattel. They don't deserve humanitarian considerations. This term therefore, in this context, is no more than flatus vocis – empty air, having no corresponding reality.
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