Judaism and Only Judaism: Why Torah Claims Absolute Truth

One of the foundations of Jewish faith rests on a clear conviction that Judaism alone is the religion of truth. This idea appears even in the blessing we recite over Torah study: “Who gave us a Torah of truth.” Our Torah is the Torah of truth, and there is no other true Torah besides it.

It is easy to understand why this belief provokes opposition. Many people reject it and label it narrow minded or chauvinistic. They are offended by the Jewish claim that we are the people who received the Torah, and that our Torah is the only authentic divine teaching.

The culturally accepted position today sounds more polite and enlightened: I believe in my path, you believe in yours, and we respect each other. In such a world, anyone who claims that another religion is false is expected to justify it convincingly, or else they are branded as intolerant and disruptive to social harmony.

In this article, we will clarify the criterion by which we can understand why Judaism insists that it is uniquely true.

Why We Need Religion

Before comparing Judaism to other religions, we should ask a more basic question: why does a person need religion at all?

Today, many people define themselves as having no religion. They argue that religion is unnecessary and they claim they can live well without it.

Karl Marx coined the famous phrase that religion is the opium of the masses. Those influenced by that view often see religion as an emotional sedative used by weak people to escape reality. Religious people are portrayed as primitive, unable or unwilling to cope with life, and therefore retreat into the imagined comforts of belief.

This attitude is not new. Pharaoh expressed it long ago when he mocked Moshe and the people, saying, “You are lazy, lazy, therefore you say, ‘Let us go and sacrifice to God.’” The assumption is the same: only people who avoid real work and real life seek God. Practical people, the claim goes, rely on their own strength and intelligence, not on religious “fantasies.”

What Is the Human Being?

We cannot address the need for religion without first answering a deeper question: what is a human being?

A person is born as a biological creature. Like all animals, humans have physical needs such as eating, drinking, sleeping, and survival. In the end, the body dies as all living organisms do.

From that angle, one could argue that a human being is nothing more than biology. Biology, in turn, can be viewed as complex chemistry, and chemistry as a branch of physics. If so, why should a purely physical being care about anything beyond the physical world?

The answer lies in one phenomenon that refuses to fit inside physics: human consciousness.

The Mystery of Consciousness

A person is aware of the fact that they exist. Each of us experiences the “I.” We do not merely process information. We feel ourselves.

To understand how unusual this is, imagine a highly advanced computer that can walk, see, hear, and operate with mechanical arms. Would it be aware of itself? No. Even if you program it with information about its own existence, it would treat that fact like any other data point. If it were told it would be dismantled tonight, it might record that update like inventory management, and nothing more.

Human consciousness is different. Awareness of our own existence is central to everything we think and do. Feelings like love, anger, compassion, jealousy, hope, fear, and meaning are not physical objects. We can measure their bodily symptoms, like increased heart rate or muscle tension, but the emotion itself is not a physical quantity. It belongs to the inner world of subjective experience.

We can build a device that moves toward warmth, but it does not love warmth. It has no inner experience as human consciousness does.

And yet, despite living inside our consciousness every moment, we still do not understand what it is.

The One Thing We Do Not Truly Know

Human beings explore the entire universe, from distant galaxies to the digestive system. We analyze, classify, measure, and explain.

But there is one reality we do not truly grasp: ourselves. Consciousness knows that it exists, and it even knows that it knows, but it cannot fully explain its own nature.

Without consciousness, the world would have no meaning at all. If nobody were aware of the world, who would care whether it existed? Meaning arises through awareness. But even “caring” cannot be reduced to physics. Darwinian explanations that describe life as developing upward from matter struggle to explain why subjective consciousness exists at all.

Alienation as the Root Problem

Because consciousness does not understand itself, a strange and painful situation emerges. Consciousness naturally identifies with the thing it knows most intimately and uses as its instrument for experiencing reality: the body.

This identification is the root of human suffering.

The body belongs to the physical world and obeys physical laws. When certain chemicals are lacking, a person feels hunger. When fluids are lacking, thirst. When systems malfunction, illness. When the body breaks down, death.

In purely physical terms, these processes are not tragic. A machine is not emotionally distressed when its parts wear out. A car does not mourn the decline of its engine. Physical objects do not experience anxiety.

Tragedy enters only because consciousness has mistakenly fused its identity with the body.

No one falls into depression when their shoes wear out. They simply replace them. We do not identify with our clothes, tools, or possessions. But we do identify with our body, and that identification turns natural biological processes into existential terror.

This is alienation: two fundamentally different realities, consciousness and body, forced into a false union.

Why Death Feels Unnatural

Physical objects follow physical laws, including the law of decay. The body ages and weakens, and the physical system inevitably deteriorates.

However, consciousness does not experience itself as a decaying object. Consciousness does not feel like matter. It feels like living awareness.

When the body collapses, consciousness experiences something that feels profoundly unnatural. It feels like the destruction of the self. The inner “I” senses that the entire world, known through the body’s senses, is disappearing.

That is why death is terrifying. Not because the body is objectively unusual in dying, but because consciousness is not truly the body, even though it has been living as if it were.

The Need for Religion

This is where the need for religion begins.

Religion, in its deepest sense, is the search for a reality beyond the physical. Consciousness seeks a non physical source with which it can harmonize, because it recognizes, often without words, that its own nature is not merely physical.

If consciousness discovers the transcendent reality it truly belongs to, the alienation disappears. Life becomes more real and more peaceful than anything previously known.

This sheds light on the teaching in Pirkei Avot that one hour of repentance and good deeds in this world is greater than all the life of the World to Come, and one hour of spiritual serenity in the World to Come is greater than all the pleasures of this world.

Repentance, in this frame, is not only regret. It is a change of direction. It is the turning of consciousness away from identification with the body and back toward its true spiritual identity.

That turning point can feel like a curtain being lifted, a revelation of the self. Many people who return to Judaism describe exactly that.

Spiritual Identity Does Not Mean Hating the Body

Correct spiritual identification does not mean neglecting the body or despising it. Judaism does not teach hatred of the physical. It teaches proper use.

The goal is not to erase the body, but to stop confusing it with the self. A hand does not identify as a work glove, yet it uses the glove to accomplish meaningful work. In the same way, consciousness should guide the body rather than be ruled by it.

When the body is elevated through Torah, mitzvot, and discipline, it becomes a refined vessel rather than a prison.

The Criterion for a True Religion

If the core human crisis is alienation within the self, then religion must address that crisis at its root. And for that, Judaism argues, religion cannot be a human invention, even the invention of a brilliant philosopher.

A human being trapped in alienation cannot fully rescue himself by constructing ideas from within the trap. Philosophical systems are built on axioms, starting assumptions that cannot be proven. A philosopher chooses axioms that feel plausible or attractive. But if the thinker is distorted, the system will reflect that distortion, like a builder using an inaccurate level and producing crooked walls.

The sages acknowledged that there is wisdom among the nations, meaning analytical brilliance and reasoning. But they distinguished between wisdom and Torah. Torah, in this view, is not merely clever reasoning. It is divine instruction, truth revealed from beyond the human system.

The Lesson from the History of Science

There is a parallel in the history of science. Aristotle, a man of immense genius, reached many conclusions by logic alone without testing reality. For centuries, his authority constrained scientific progress.

Modern science advanced when people began asking the external world what is true through experimentation, even when results contradicted intuition.

Judaism makes a related claim in the spiritual realm. The human mind, trapped in internal confusion, cannot generate the ultimate cure from within. The cure must come from beyond.

Why Revelation Must Be Public and Compelling

If a transcendent reality exists and can guide human consciousness out of alienation, that guidance must be revealed in a way that minimizes human self deception. A private revelation to one person leaves too much room for imagination, manipulation, or error. A true divine revelation must be public, undeniable, and widely witnessed.

Judaism places Mount Sinai at the center for this reason. It describes not a secret message to a single individual, but a national revelation experienced publicly by an entire people.

This revelation also carried an element of obligation. It was not presented as a sales pitch meant to flatter human desires. A religion that markets itself by saying, “This will satisfy your pleasures most,” is still submitting to the distorted judgment of an alienated self. It does not heal the root problem.

Judaism insists that healing begins with accepting the authority of truth even when it challenges us. That is part of what is meant by accepting the yoke of Heaven.

The Meaning of “We Will Do and We Will Hear”

The declaration “We will do and we will hear” reflects a national willingness to leave the confusion of alienation and submit to divine guidance. It is the recognition that the human being cannot fully heal himself alone.

This is the logic behind the idea that the Torah was given with compelling force, described by the sages in the image of the mountain held over the people. The message is that a true cure cannot be negotiated with the illness. It must override it.

Bavel and the Chaos of Self Made Spirituality

When spirituality is pursued without divine command, it often becomes another tool of ego. People attach lofty ideas to selfish goals, and instead of unity, such spirituality intensifies division. This is the pattern symbolized by the Tower of Bavel, where the attempt to reach Heaven through human ambition produced confusion and fragmentation.

The same is true among nations. The fiercest wars have often emerged from conflicting ideologies. Until Torah goes forth from Zion and the word of God from Jerusalem, swords do not rest and humanity keeps learning war.

True spirituality that heals rather than destroys comes from obedience to the higher command, not from spiritual creativity that serves the self.

Life Through Attachment to God

The sages taught that one who is commanded and acts is greater than one who acts voluntarily. The reason is that commanded action breaks the tyranny of the ego and realigns the self with truth.

The Torah describes the solution in one sentence: “And you who cling to the Lord your God are all alive today.” Clinging to God means replacing identification with the decaying body with attachment to the eternal source. That is the end of alienation. That is real life.

A person is called to discard a false identity card that says, “I am only my body,” and accept the true identity of the soul. With that identity, Torah becomes a living set of instructions for harmony, meaning, and a refined life in the physical world.