Why Judaism Is Different: The One Faith Founded on National Revelation

Not long ago, I happened to walk into a bookstore. On one of the shelves I discovered a massive volume of nearly one thousand pages titled Lexicon of Religions. It turns out that since the dawn of humanity, people have been searching for God. Humanity’s attempts and gropings toward the Creator and Ruler of the world stretch across all of history.

And still, the confusion is immense. The book surveyed hundreds of religions one by one, briefly describing their core beliefs, central commandments, and major milestones in their development and spread. The differences among religions are many and varied, but one thing unites them all: every religion claims exclusive possession of the truth and insists that the only way to fulfill God’s will and connect to Him is through its own beliefs and practices.

The Dilemma of the Truth Seeker

Here stands the honest person, sincerely seeking truth, overwhelmed by confusion. Which religion should one choose? Which is correct? If a person were to begin a systematic investigation, religion by religion, studying their beliefs and commandments, seventy years would not suffice to even learn half of them. One could spend an entire lifetime searching, and die before ever reaching the truth.

How could God allow such a situation? Did He not give the sincere seeker any reliable way to reach Him? Something here does not add up.

In truth, there is such a way. It is simple, fast, and demanded by logic. The secret is this: examine the envelope, not the content.

Content Versus Envelope

Every religion consists of content and an envelope. The content is the religion’s beliefs, commandments, and way of life. One could spend years studying and evaluating this content, and doing so for every religion is simply impossible.

But every religion also has an envelope: the way it was delivered, the manner in which it entered the world. Here lies the profound difference between Judaism and all other religions.

Other religions begin with a claim of divine revelation to a single individual or a small group of founders, accompanied by stories of miracles witnessed by a limited number of people. From there, the religion gradually spread over time.

Private Revelation and Its Problem

Muhammad, for example, the founder of Islam, claimed that he went into the desert and there, in a cave, the angel Gabriel appeared to him and commanded him to do various things. If that convinces you, you may believe it. After all, in any respectable psychiatric institution you will find people who sincerely claim that God spoke to them last night. Would you accept their stories?

Not only is such a claim inherently unreliable, it is also illogical to assume that God would choose such a method to reveal Himself and His will to humanity. People could never know whether it truly happened or which of the many who claim such revelations is genuine, as opposed to a fraud or a delusional individual.

Judaism and National Revelation

Judaism, by contrast, makes a radically different claim. It begins with a mass revelation of God to millions of people. Six hundred thousand adult men between the ages of twenty and sixty were present, meaning that the entire nation, including women, children, and the elderly, numbered several million. All of them saw and heard God revealing Himself from atop Mount Sinai.

This revelation was surrounded by miracles, some one time events such as the splitting of the Red Sea or the earth swallowing Korach and his followers, and others that continued for decades, such as the manna, the quail, and the pillars of fire and cloud, all witnessed by millions of people.

Any rational person must admit that such a claim is far more robust and is the only one that can be historically verified.

Why No One Else Made This Claim

How can we explain the fact that no other religion makes such a claim? Many religions borrowed ideas and concepts from Judaism, sometimes directly and sometimes with slight modifications. Few ideas are more central to Western civilization than belief in one God and the Ten Commandments.

Yet for some reason, the one idea that is the foundation of the entire system and gives it its authority, national revelation, was never copied. It remained the exclusive possession of Judaism. Even the two major religions that arose after Judaism, Christianity and Islam, did not deny this event. They acknowledged it, claiming only that afterward God changed His mind due to Israel’s sins, a claim we will not address here.

If national revelation were an invention that could easily be fabricated, how can we explain the fact that no other religion ever dared to make such a claim?

Instead, all of them chose to rely on the least logical argument of all, one that is inherently unverifiable: the claim that God conveyed His will through a single individual. Could they not have done what we did? And how remarkable it is that the Torah anticipated all of this in advance.

Moshe’s Challenge to History

In one of his final messages to the Jewish people shortly before his death, 3,300 years ago, Moshe explicitly prophesied that the one aspect of the Torah that the nations would never attempt to appropriate is the claim of national revelation. In a direct challenge to future generations to examine all of world history and discover that no other nation ever claimed such an event, Moshe declares: “Ask now about the earliest days that came before you, from the day God created man on earth, and from one end of the heavens to the other: has anything as great as this ever happened, or has anything like it ever been heard? Has any people heard the voice of God speaking from the midst of fire as you have heard and survived? Or has any god attempted to take for himself a nation from the midst of another nation, with trials, signs, wonders, war, a mighty hand, an outstretched arm, and awesome deeds, as the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes?”

Notice that Moshe does not merely assert that such an event never occurred, but that no one would even dare to claim it. “Or has anything like it ever been heard?” If all of this were a fabrication, why would Moses make such a bold promise? If you could invent this, why could others not do the same?

This is the envelope through which the Torah was given.

The Source of Jewish Endurance

This is what distinguishes Judaism from all other religions. This is what grants it authority. And here lies the strength of the Jewish people and the foundation of Israel’s ability to walk in the path of Torah life for 3,300 years with devotion and self sacrifice, despite every hardship.

“You yourselves have seen that I spoke to you from heaven. Behold, I will come to you in a thick cloud, so that the people will hear when I speak with you, and they will believe in you forever.”