You don’t want to be in these wars. This is not your grandfather’s battlefield. When the enemy is nested in homes and apartments and no one wears a uniform but everyone has a cellphone camera,[…]
Month: February 2014
“JCCs must now make Jewish education, culture, and identity a central part of their mission”
Jewish Community Centers (JCCs) can also be an important part of the renaissance, as they are positioned to connect with Jews who are not otherwise involved in Jewish life. When the JCC movement began in[…]
“In most periods of the history of the Jews in the United States, fewer than half of American Jews have been members of synagogues” yet, “it has been the most significant Jewish institution in the life of Jews”
The Zionist thinker and Hebrew-language essayist Asher Ginsberg (better known by his pen-name, Ahad Ha’am) once said that “more than the Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews.” If we were[…]
“Not much changed from earlier decades in the Reform synagogue during the 1950s and well into the 1960s”
To a great extent, not much changed from earlier decades in the Reform synagogue during the 1950s and well into the 1960s, though, by the late 1960s, as we will see, the synagogue had become[…]
“The content of American-educated Orthodox rabbis’ English-language sermons was dramatically different from that of the (mostly) Yiddish-language sermons of an earlier generation”
…the content of American-educated Orthodox rabbis’ English-language sermons was dramatically different from that of the (mostly) Yiddish-language sermons of an earlier generation. This was particularly true between the World Wars in New York City, where[…]
“The intermarriage of one Jewish individual is rarely a sudden occurrence…”
The intermarriage of one Jewish individual is rarely a sudden occurrence. Rather, an individual’s choice to intermarry is a function of the depth of their Jewish education and experiences, the density of the Jewish population[…]
“Rabbis need to see themselves as teaching Judaism, not as upholding the tenets of a particular movement”
The denominations, and the seminaries where they train their rabbis, will have to recognize this and take a more holistic view of their role in Jewish life. Rabbis need to see themselves as teaching Judaism,[…]
“The relativizing of the absolute is absolute in the Reform movement…”
The “sacred core” of the Reform Movement is personal sovereignty. In defining Judaism as a set of options from which Reform Jews are free to draw selectively, its adherents are ruled by what Rabbi Heschel[…]
“Modernizing Orthodoxies”: “a group of religious movements bearing a familial resemblance”
Rather than seeing Orthodoxy as a more or less fixed entity, with “modern” and “ultra” flavors, I suggest we look at it as a cluster of processes, enacted across a range of what I call[…]
Difficulty in precisely translating the word צדקה
The word tzedakah is untranslatable because it joins together two concepts that in other languages are opposites, namely charity and justice. Suppose, for example, that I give someone £100. Either he is entitled to it,[…]