What is Torah Nation?

Torah Nation begins with an understanding of what Judaism is and is not.

Here’s the “what it is not” part.  (The “what it is” part will be the rest of the content of this site).

You will not find the word “Orthodox” anywhere in the bible.

Nor will you find the words “Reform” “Conservative” or “Reconstructionist.”  Denominationalism only started in the 1800s, and mostly in Germany and the US.  We existed without denominations for nearly all of our 3300 years, and today it’s absent among Sephardic Jewry and mostly so in much of Europe and South Africa.

So “Judaism” has nothing to do with denominations.

Interestingly, you won’t even find the word “Judaism” in Tanach.  Not in Hebrew, Greek or English.  

Surprisingly, the first cited use of the contemporary term “Judaism” was only in the year 1516.  And it was used as such by a non-Jew.

So what was “Judaism” before denominations and before 1516?  And what is it today?

You’ve heard a lot of possibilities.  Judaism is a religion, a way of life, a religio-legal system, a people, a race, a deeply personal matter, a moral system, tikun olam.

That which is called “Judaism” is some of that, but in the whole much more, and at the same time, much simpler.

So the next thing to conclude is:

There is no such thing as Judaism.

I know that sounds silly but there it is.  

The ideas you will read here will begin to reconstruct the original idea, what Jews have understood since the days of Moses and Mount Sinai.

We are a nation with a mission.

“According to the Oxford English Dictionary the earliest citation in English where the term was used to mean "the profession or practice of the Jewish religion; the religious system or polity of the Jews" is Robert Fabyan's The newe cronycles of Englande and of Fraunce (1516).”