In a moment, we will explore each of these important distinctions. But first, we should pause and reflect on the significance of this unfathomable gap between Jewish vocabulary and Christian concepts. Most modern Jews outside Israel (and certainly the audience of this work) are native English speakers. Their worldviews and expectations are formed by the contours of the English language. Sunday morning cartoons depict Bible stories, not Torah tales. Our conversations are filled with faith: Keep the faith, act in good faith, have faith in yourself. Intermediate schools teach comparative religion, subsuming Judaism into a category it doesn’t neatly fit. So when most modern Jews approach Judaism, they come with questions and preconceptions that are Christian. They believe Judaism is a religion; they imagine faith in God is a prerequisite. They want to know about liturgy and worship, and learn all about the Bible (which, in the most obvious acquiescence to Christian English, they usually call the Old Testament). Even the most honest attempts to understand Judaism authentically are unconsciously undermined simply because these attempts are in English, are limited by English.

Most English speakers operate under the false linguistic assumption that Judaism and Christianity run on the same operating system. Nothing could be further from the case. Anyone who remembers back to the days of floppy discs recalls that what worked on a Mac would need to be entirely reformatted for a PC. The analogy holds here: Judaism just has a different source code from Christianity. Its program language is Am and Avodah, Torah and Talmud. And it hardly suffices to translate these terms as people, worship, Bible, and (fascinatingly) Talmud. That’s not really what these essential Jewish concepts are about. To delimit these millennia-old, remarkably robust ideas with one-word terms born of alien Christianity is simply unfair. To truly appreciate Judaism, its core concepts need to be liberated from their simplistic English “definitions.” Judaism’s concepts, and Judaism itself, need to be appreciated for what they are, and—especially for English speakers—need to be distinguished from common Christian concepts.

Let’s start with “religion.” It is only the fifth definition of the phrase in the Oxford English Dictionary that doesn’t use the word religion as part of the definition:

Belief in or acknowledgement of some superhuman power or powers (esp. a god or gods) which is typically manifested in obedience, reverence, and worship; such a belief as part of a system defining a code of living, esp. as a means of achieving spiritual or material improvement.

Now, some might say this definition of religion describes Judaism perfectly: There is a belief, or at least covenant with, Yahweh, which is manifest in a series of commandments that both define a code of life and set a prescribed course for worship. Even though I will argue later that little of that is true, this OED understanding of religion fails to capture an essential element of Judaism: the self-conception as an Am, a people. From Torah’s time through our own, there are plenty of individuals who are born “Jewish” yet neither believe in nor acknowledge any sort of superhuman power who defines their code of living. Regardless, many of these individuals fully consider themselves “Jewish.” Judaism might overlap with certain aspects of “religion,” but it far exceeds the boundaries of such a limiting term.

Proof positive of the failure of “religion” to define Judaism is a phrase I have heard countless times in my career: I’m Jewish, but not religious. Early in my rabbinate, I took this assertion as a challenge. I would ask people what they found meaningful about their Jewish life, and answers would include everything from cooking for holidays to doing the work of social justice all the way through—shockingly—coming to Shabbat services. I sometimes sensed that what people meant when they said, “I’m Jewish, but not religious,” was that they loved Judaism—they were willingly engaging with a rabbi, after all—but that they didn’t believe in God. Sometimes, I even tried to convince people that they were fully Jewish, and shouldn’t let anything stand in the way of their own self-perception. Over time, however, I realized that these people didn’t have a problem. The problem was the word “religion” itself. It’s a Christian concept that simply doesn’t fit Judaism.

Opening any Hebrew-English dictionary will tell you that the Hebrew word for “religion” is dat. In this, there is a double irony. First of all, dat is a hardly Hebrew; it’s an Old Iranian loan-word that first appears in the biblical book of Esther, one of the later entrants in the Jewish canon. Secondly, dat means “law,” “edict,” or “practice.” In the book of Esther, dat indicates in one instance the edict of the king, and in another the custom of drinking to excess. By the time of the Talmud, dat maintained this same semantic range from custom through law. It wasn’t until the revival of Modern Hebrew started by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in the 19th century that dat came to mean “religion.” And why did this happen? Modern Hebrew needed to compete in the international marketplace of ideas: Modern Hebrew required its own words for phrases that were widespread in other languages, most prominent among which was English. And so this loan-word of antiquity was equated with “religion,” translated as such in a dictionary. Hebrew needed a place holder, and dat seemed to fit the bill. But dat doesn’t fit the definition of “religion” in any meaningful way. Hebrew really has no concept of religion whatsoever.

The chasm between English and Hebrew is equally deep when it comes to the Bible. For Christians, the Bible has always been a written document. There’s a reason it’s called ta Biblia: the book. By the time Christianity arrived on the scene, there were already texts of what they call the Old Testament. The Christian movement was propelled forward by the written word: Gospels authored by individuals sharing the stories of Jesus, and Epistles—literally “letters”—early authorities supposedly scripted and sent to Galicia, Thessalonia, Rome, and more. Christianity began with the written word as it foundation. The first chapter of the first Gospel cites the text of the Jewish prophet Isaiah; the last of the Gospels opens with the line, “In the beginning was the word.” From the beginning, Christianity had a book, the book, ta Biblia: the Bible.

Judaism has no Bible—at least not in the Christian sense of the word. The earliest name for a collection of Jewish traditions and teachings that come down to us is Torah. Over the millennia, Torah has become a most elastic word, meaning either something very specific or something incredibly broad. For our purposes here, Torah simply means teaching. This is why Torah can be something as narrow as a set of regulations regarding lepers, can indicate a five-volume literary collection falsely attributed to Moses, and also is able to signify the remarkably broad category of “all legitimate Jewish learning.” Torah is teaching. In the time that the collection we call “Torah” was created, the primary vehicle for this teaching was oral transmission. Yes, the words capturing these teachings were collected and put to parchment. But that inscription and collection happened long after the tales and laws were common cultural currency. To the Jewish mind, it matters not that these matters are written. What is important is that the words of Torah are taught, transmitted, from one generation to the next.

“Religion. Bible. Scripture. Worship. The phrases fit Judaism like a hand-me-down outfit from a sibling who’s a different size.”