The Jews and Their Role in Our World: The Personal Intellectual Journey to Discovering Jewish Identity (For Jews and Gentiles) - Tapa blanda

The role of the Jews in our world is analyzed through the prism of Jewish intellectual identification. The well known halachic identification guides Jews in their internal spiritual life in a family and in a multitude of Jewish religious and social organizations. The intellectual identification steers the actions of the Jewish people in Gentile non-Jewish environment where they are building together with everybody else a better world for the entire society. The book is tracing the Jewish intellectual identification to the Torah. For many centuries theologians, archaeologists, historians and scientists have been trying to prove or disprove the truthfulness of the events described in the Torah/Bible. But from the point of view of the identification of the Jewish people, the truthfulness of the events described in the Torah is irrelevant. Even if all the events described are a figment of the people's collective imagination, this imagination shaped the Jewish people, made them unique, and defined their spirituality, which also is the identification of these people. And the book describes this identification. The book is tracing the Jewish intellectual identification to the individual freedoms for everybody the fight for which began at the time of the Exodus from Egypt. In the course of Jewish history individuals have been identified as Jews by external forces –rabbis or anti-Semites. "A Jew" was a kind of invisible label affixed to an individualregardless of the desire and spirituality of the individual himself. This book explores the Jewish identification not as the verdict of these external forces, but as the conscious decision of the individual himself based on his intellectual understanding of the history of the Jewish people and their unique role in the advancement of the ideas of "a better world" for every human being.The book is tracing the Jewish intellectual identification to the responsibility of being creative in “the image of God”. According to the Torah/Bible, the "better world" is not the realization of social systems contrived by earthly enlightened leaders, such as the founders of capitalism, socialism, communism, halakhic Judaism or sharia Islam. The "better world" according to the Torah/Bible is the realization of the combined efforts of individuals of Judeo-Christian spirituality continuing the spiritual and material creation of our world in accordance with their understanding of their own role in the continuation of what was created at the very beginning by someone or something subsequently called God (regardless of how this someone or something is imagined in the minds of people). The responsibility of being creative means each Jew has the right, and perhaps is obligated, to find for himself the most effective means of such contacts with the Almighty with the purpose of visualizing the best individual way of creating a Better World in family, workplace, community and nation. And that is being described in the book. The book is tracing the Jewish intellectual identification in the Gentile non-Jewish Judeo-Christian world. In 1986, the highest Christian authority Pope John Paul II went to a Rome synagogue to pray with the city's Jewish community and Chief Rabbi of Rome. Noting Christianity's unique bond with Judaism, he said, "You are our beloved brothers ... you are our elder brothers" in the faith of Abraham. In 2000, the Pope after meditating at Jerusalem's Western Wall placed in the wall a written prayer to God expressing deep sadness for all wrongs done to Jews by Christians. It ended, "Asking your forgiveness, we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant." That was the beginning of modern revival of Judeo-Christian spiritual friendship that is at the foundation of Judeo-Christian civilization. And what is at the foundation of all that is analyzed in the book.

Born before the Second World War, Vladimir Minkov Ph.D. experienced all sufferings of the war and grief of having a part of his family perished in the Holocaust. After the war he graduated from the Naval Engineering Academy in the Leningrad suburb Pushkin in the former Soviet Union, and for a while, he served in the Soviet Navy before attending post-graduate school. By the end of 1970s, Minkov achieved a lot in his area of research, but not in the area of spiritual development: dictatorial soviet system, anti-Judeo-Christian laws and state-sponsored anti-Semitism were on guard against any deviation from Marxist ideology. Although he lived and worked the Soviet way sincerely along the lines of Soviet/Russian tradition, his mind - regardless of his desire, most likely genetic - worked the Jewish way, as he subsequently determined it. The mind operating the Jewish way was looking for something better all the time. It doesn't obediently carry out instructions coming "from above," but automatically subjects these instructions to analysis hoping to find better solutions to make everyone "happy" - from the nearest and dearest to those furthest removed and not related at all (and that's it!). Then he still would not have known that everything comes from some incomprehensible God and some unknown Torah, and he was acting, most likely, impulsively. At the end of 1970-s he had immigrated to America where democracy and the Judeo-Christian spirituality of this country made it possible for him to actively defend both his scientific and spiritual ideas. Finding the American-Russian nuclear-disarmament projects the most interesting part of his professional work in the USA, he went on to write Nuclear Shadow Boxing with three colleagues, which entailed the scientific history of the nuclear confrontation during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and USA. Here in the USA he has found the place not just for his science, for his family and friends, but for his public work in the spiritual realm of One God and Torah (Old Testament) as well, and his findings are in his book "The Jews and their role in our world: the personal intellectual journey to discovering Jewish identity (for Jews and Gentiles)."