RabbiO
הרב יונה בן זכריה
Rabbi Rachel Adler wrote a D'var Torah that largely echoes a position I hold. I have taken the below sections out of their specific context, which dealt with kashrut, and I confess to altering a tense or two, but I do not believe I have violated the integrity of what she wrote by making it a more general proposition. (I can already predict my friend Avi's response.)
"How [are] we to avoid being swamped by the majority culture? How [are] we to maintain our own integrity as a specific community called Israel? Most important of all, how [are] we to live as a holy community, in the kind of purity our God asked of us? The answer, in part, is in boundaries that we set for individual bodies and the communal body....
Jews still need boundaries to maintain our distinctness as a culture and religion, so that we can preserve continuity with the "Judaisms" of the past and pass on a Judaism with integrity to our inheritors."
"How [are] we to avoid being swamped by the majority culture? How [are] we to maintain our own integrity as a specific community called Israel? Most important of all, how [are] we to live as a holy community, in the kind of purity our God asked of us? The answer, in part, is in boundaries that we set for individual bodies and the communal body....
Jews still need boundaries to maintain our distinctness as a culture and religion, so that we can preserve continuity with the "Judaisms" of the past and pass on a Judaism with integrity to our inheritors."
Last edited: