Abstract: Is it possible to maintain a special affection for one piece of land, but to remember in the process to love all lands? That simple question may well be the key to our capacity for unity as am eḥad, a united people, and for our capacity to gain strength from our diverse perspectives. There are those in the Jewish community who treat the world as if bifurcated into two mutually exclusive territories: one can either love Israel or love everywhere else instead. For these brothers and sisters, if one loves Israel, then Israel has to be the exclusive focus of our allegiance and the only real place toward which Jews should cultivate a deep commitment and loyalty. Everywhere else is happenstance, where we merely sojourn ... Read More PubDate: 2016-04-14T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The question of the place of religion in the public square is one fraught with tensions. It is one of the more urgent and contentious issues of the day. The question seems to be a point of intersection between two perspectives, each side feeling threatened by the other. Each is afraid of being attacked. Each is afraid of being inhibited and constrained. Each is afraid of being crushed or erased.I first began to contemplate this issue during the period of the counting of the omer, poised between two fundamental days in the formation of the Jewish people and of Jewish consciousness. The period of s’firah begins with Pesaḥ, the festival of our freedom (z’man ḥeiruteinu), and culminates in the celebration of Shavuot ... Read More PubDate: 2016-04-14T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: It is at this writing 75 years since S. Y. Agnon’s classic anthology of High Holy Day material and lore, Yamim Nora⋅im, was first published.1 This moment provides a good opportunity to raise some questions about it—actually, two questions or sets of questions. The first is a question we may fairly ask of any work that has attained the status of a classic: Is it as widely read today as its reputation warrants? Is Yamim Nora⋅im as valuable and as potent a resource for twenty-first century Jews as it was for those of earlier generations? Is it still a standard work for Jews, rabbis or laypersons, who want to prepare for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and who seek to enhance their experience and observance of those days? ... Read More PubDate: 2016-04-14T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Women carrying children were always sent with them to the crematorium. The children were then torn from their parents outside the crematorium and sent to the gas chambers separately. When the extermination of the Jews in the gas chambers was at its height, orders were issued that the children were to be thrown into the crematorium furnaces or into the pit near the crematorium without being gassed first.How am I to understand this? Did they throw them into the fire alive, or did they kill them first?They threw them in alive.1Fackenheim wants us to start here and continue to look, continue to see the image on our retina even as we close our eyes to look away, even as we wish to read on—past this horror. Fackenheim ... Read More PubDate: 2016-04-14T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Lately it seems as though natural disasters are on the rise. Hurricane Sandy on the East Coast and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, earthquakes in Haiti, China, and Turkey, tsunamis hitting India and Japan, tornados and flooding across the Midwest and the South, the list goes on and on. Each of these natural disasters has caused significant destruction and devastating loss of life. Despite the faulty levees in New Orleans and the poor infrastructure in Haiti, these tragedies raise difficult questions of theodicy. What role does God play in natural disasters? We often associate beauty in nature with God, as it gives us an awe-inspiring sight to connect with the Divine. However, if we attribute nature’s beauty to ... Read More PubDate: 2016-04-14T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: God forbid, the Talmud tells us, that we should mouth platitudes about God that are contrary to our understanding. Since God’s seal is truth, and we are created in the divine image, we must remain true to our own experience.1 And that experience, for a significant percentage of American Jews, is that God is absent.2 According to the 2013 Pew survey, of those who identified as Jewish, only a third (34%) claim “absolute certainty” in their belief in God or a universal spirit.3 Nearly a quarter (23%) do not believe in God or a universal spirit.4Statistics are slippery things.5 The discussion in this paper assumes that more than one quarter of the Americans who identify in some way as Jewish are either agnostics or ... Read More PubDate: 2016-04-14T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Many books have been written about gender constructs implicit within biblical and rabbinic literature—often with an eye on how patriarchal societal norms affect the bodies and cultural participation of women in early Jewish or Israelite society.1 Such scholarship often examines language, narrative, and law (or lack thereof) that differentiate Jewish females from Jewish males in Jewish literature. Jewish gender studies have rarely examined, beyond effects on women, social or political implications of the rabbinate as an utterly masculine collective.2 Despite the vast literature on gender and Judaism, and despite the fact that the word “patriarchal” often describes men’s domination in a society, few scholars have ... Read More PubDate: 2016-04-14T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Ah, you strange familiar city. As I walk your slick rock roads, my memories gently return to me, like a younger brother softly tugging on my shirttails. Memories of a year long gone, a time of incomparable freedoms. A year before children amused and exhausted us, a year before the incessant demands of work would descend upon us, a year of simplicity: my love and I, living in a sun-drenched apartment in Jerusalem. And so, every year I return to you: I walk your streets and I am overcome by vivid recollections, as I traverse every single inch of your pleasantries and your torment.In the early morning hours I descend your slippery stairs, leading from the Jaffa Gate to the cold, dark labyrinth of the Old City. As the ... Read More PubDate: 2016-04-14T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: They are so different, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and the Psalmist. Isaiah wanted to join the heavenly choir (Isaiah 6:1–6); Ezekiel wanted to locate God (Ezekiel 3:12); the Psalmist wanted to crown God who attends to the disadvantaged (Psalm 146:10). They want different things, and yet they are joined together in k’dushah b’tzibbur, the communal cantata of holiness, chanted whenever we repeat the Amidah in a minyan. The question is: why bring these three different voices together?Isaiah aspires to be one of the angels who gather around God’s throne, singing “Holy, holy, holy, Adonai of Hosts, the whole world is filled with God’s Presence” (Isaiah 6:3). The only obstacle is his unclean lips. An angel rushes over with a hot ... Read More PubDate: 2016-04-14T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: NOTE: Conservative Judaism 65:4 (Summer 2014) contained a review essay by Steven Kepnes entitled “God Is One, All Else Is Many: A Critique of Green and Artson.” Rabbi Arthur Green responds to the essay as follows.Steven Kepnes, a philosophy professor at Colgate University, has some advice for what he sees as a flailing Conservative Movement. Define yourselves around a theological agenda, he says. Instead of just staking out the territory between Orthodoxy and Reform on such halakhic issues as women’s empowerment and personal status, take up the cudgels against the “New Age” Jewish theologies of Arthur Green and Brad Artson, where the connection of faith to Jewish practice is “extremely attenuated and weak.” A ... Read More PubDate: 2016-04-14T00:00:00-05:00
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