What Does It Mean To “Convert” To Indigenous Judaism?

What does it mean to “convert” to an Indigenous People’s ethno-religion? Meaning, to convert to Indigenous Judaism? You know, to the religion and way of life of the Jewish people of the Canaan land of Israel?

Jewish “conversion” is a lengthy legal process of education to determine by a beit din, a Jewish court of law, whether an Indigenous Jewish community allows a non-Jew full legal rights amongst our people. And not everyone is ruled a Jew. Outside of being born into a Jewish family or successfully “converting” by the decision of a legitimate Jewish community, there is no other kind of Jew in this world, full stop. The rest is whether you are Rabbinical Jew (semi-theology based) or Traditional mitzvot/halachot based (regardless of personal theology). If you are not born into a legitimate Jewish family and have been ruled legally a Jew in a Jewish community’s court of law, then you are a Jew for life by adoption.

It is not about “religion”, but about how we Jews are going to survive – relevantly – into the future as the Jewish people of Israel. Still speaking our Canaanite Hebrew language, still embracing our Indigenous Judean stories, and still fulfilling the mitzvot/halachot of our people in a present and modern obligatory way – both upon the land of Israel and throughout the worldwide diasporas for our Jewish people! Every legitimate Jewish community has their requirements on what fulfills this survival need for them. I keep saying “legitimate”, because there are many misguided Christians in the West who think that Jews are just a religion, thus wrongfully call themselves Jews, too, and even dress up like us, thinking it is a matter of “faith”. If we don’t survive with the heart of Indigenous Jews amongst us, can we truly remain “the people of Israel”?

That’s the beauty of Judaism! Jews can be polytheistic to monotheistic in “theology” beliefs, so long as you “worship” only YHWH, the god-King of the land of Israel that is located in the Canaan Levant, and fulfill the mitzvot/halachot of our people. You can read Torah on its own polytheistic -leaning- henotheistic terms or you can read Torah as Christian-Muslim diasporas interpretive approving, and still be an authentic Jew either way. Judaism is Judea-people-ism, the ethno-religion of … Jews who are indigenous to Judea and Samaria.

It doesn’t matter how we present in this Arab-European colonized world – as Jews “Indigenous” to Judea-Samaria or as “just a religion” – the lack of acceptance is the same in every generation everywhere around this Christian and Muslim colonized Earth. The first Colonial racism is antisemitism, which metastisized into skin-color based racism. Until we address this original Christian-Muslim supremacist racism…!

Voices matter! Voices used to matter! Voices through words alone used to matter! Not so much now in the age of Tik Tok, Instagram, and “clique” obsessed Facebook and Twitter. Used to be that words matter! But, then again, for those of us minorities within minorities, we’ve never really been heard beyond whatever lucky “choir” we manage for ourselves. Voices matter! A different view of this world really matters!

It doesn’t matter whether you are Indigenous Jews – also known as Judaism – Kurds, Balochs, tribal Ethiopians, Navajo, Lakota, Wampanoag, Hawaiian, Māori, etc, etc, etc – the social erasure and stereotyping in worldwide Colonial media is the same! Meanwhile, Colonial Muslim minorities in Colonial Christian majority nations are more heard than we Indigenous peoples, and vise versa.

By the phrase “all religions”, what most actually mean is Colonial Christianity, Islam, and Marxism, the historic universalist theology-based religions enforced upon all Indigenous Peoples’ lands worldwide for our indoctrination into said religions. The rest are ethno-religions (Judaism, Yazidism, Anitsalagism, Navajoism, Hinduism, … catching a pattern here). The ethno-religion latter has in some ways internalized some of the hatred and bigotry and racism of the three world colonizing religions, but they are correctable!

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UPDATE Comparative Thought:

Established Colonial Myth: “Post-exilic Judaism, after the late 6th century BCE, was the first religion to conceive the notion of a personal monotheistic God within a monist context….”

Indigenous Reality: The Jewish people did not embrace monotheism, until the teachings of Maimonides, 1138-1204 CE, took root as normative Jewish belief. Before this, Jews were a henotheistic people, devoted to our Judean land-God, YHWH.

Maimonides, a Sephardi scholar living in the Colonial Arab diaspora, reimagined YHWH as a pantheistic deity that is both supernatural and everywhere in the natural simultaneously. Maimonides deity directly conflicts with Torah’s teachings.

According to our Jewish Torah, our ancestral scrolls, it was Elohim that created the land, skies, and waters. In all Canaanite languages, Elohim means “children gods of high god El”, including in our Canaanite Hebrew. The Torah does not deny our polytheistic Jewish roots, it only obscures this history with redactions. Thus, the correct reading of the first of the two creation stories in the scroll of Bereishit is as follows:

At the beginning, high god El (“Elohim”) shaped the orderly world from out of the chaotic formless primordial matter. Then, in parallel – after the first planetary Shabbat – in the second creation story, YHWH, who was assigned the Levant land, created a Levantine person and a garden for this human to work and to protect. This is why Cain, when banished from YHWH’s land, finds a home amongst a people living on another god’s land.

You need a philosopher like Maimonides to eventually be born, in order to reinterpret Torah to where YHWH is Elohim and Elohim is YHWH, for Torah on its own terms does not support this reading. Prior to Maimonides and his 12th c CE “13 principles of faith”, the treatment of “Elohim” as an honorific title for YHWH by Jews was a strictly henotheistic (aka, monolatrous) act. An act that began during the Babylonian diaspora period and was further solidified with the Greco-Roman diaspora-influenced period.

“Faith”, a universalist religion concept pushed upon Indigenous Peoples worldwide by Christian and Muslim Colonizers and adopted into modern Judaism, is not an Indigenous Judaism ethno-religious “commandment”. Never once did any Jewish writing before the Middle Ages suggest that there is only one deity within the universe that “Lords” over all of humanity, and that we must have “faith” in “him”. Our very Judean people’s halachot (Indigenous system of laws) exists to ensure that we Jews don’t go “whoring”, as our Torah puts it, after other nation’s gods.

“…The concept of ethical monotheism, which holds that morality stems from God alone and that its laws are unchanging, first occurred in Judaism” in the 12th century CE, which is “now a core tenet of most modern monotheistic religions, including Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, and Baháʼí Faith.” History matters! Correct Indigenous narratives matter!

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