Believe in Judaism - Zionism = Racism
Respect ALL Civilizations & Religions.
Our Mission
We are a group of Orthodox Rabbinic Leaders Writing About how they see Judaism, Israel, the Jewish People and Our World.
Orthodoxy, in that it is a term coined and way of being formed in response to the European enlightenment’s openness to new ideas, is by definition something that has walls and limits, protecting those inside from potential, and perceived potential evils without. But what happens when those walls keep out important Jewish values such as Jewish unity, loving the Jewish people and one’s neighbors, and engaging all the Jewish people in Jewish life?
To ask the question the opposite way, many Jewish communities claim that being welcoming is of importance, but what happens when welcoming comes up against other values such as fears of the slippery slope of approval of things we may not want to approve of, or feel Judaism should not condone?
For instance, if an intermarried family wanted to be part of our shul would we let them? Where would we draw the line? Could they have a family membership? An aliyah? Could the non-Jewish spouse if it was a man have peticha (opening the ark) or gelilah (rolling up the torah), honors that do not technically require one to be Jewish but might, for many Jews, feel like giving tacit approval to someone, all of whose actions the torah may not approve of?
What about fears of legitimating what others are doing and unwittingly putting our approbation on things we do not think are in consonance with Torah, such as driving on Shabbat, gay Jews and their partners, Jews who do not keep kosher or pay their taxes? Should we welcome all of them?
Stay tuned over the next few weeks as I will examine what I think our (Morethodox) attitudes should be with regard to non-Jews, intermarried Jews, gay Jews, Jews who do not keep kosher, and Jews who cheat on their taxes.
What You Should Know
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Often we can not have both. I believe we must err, in an extreme way, on the side of welcoming. I learned this from one of my long time mentors and teachers, the saintly Rabbi Abraham Magence. Rabbi Magence was the rabbi of my shul for 35 years before he asked me to take his place. I was his congregant for 8 years while I worked at the Hillel at nearby Washington University and davened at Bais Abraham.
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No matter who walked into our shul, Bais Abraham, Rabbi Magence hugged them, and truly loved them. A non-Jewish homeless person, an intermarried person, or a Jew convicted of crimes. I will never forget that our first week in St. Louis 13 years ago Rabbi Magence invited myself and my wife over for dinner with one of the pillars of the shul and his wife. This pillar was a humble man who spent many hours fixing parts of our (at the time) crumbling shul building with his hands. I saw the man in shul after that every Shabbat, he always received aliyot, and was treated like any other member of the shul.
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It was only years latter when this man’s wife passed away and I asked if he needed me to do anything for the funeral when he answered that he did not since his wife’s priest and her church would be taking care of it. I was amazed and pleasantly surprised. I think Rabbi Magence, and probably Rabbi Levi Yitzchok of Bardichev, would have composed the following blessing. “Master of the Universe, how wonderful are your people Israel, even though this man’s wife was not a Jew, in fact a committed Christian, this does not stop him from coming to shul, loving G-d and serving the Jewish people.”
- Abraham our ancestor did this when G-d was talking to him and he saw three people, nomads in the distance, and he left God to welcome them. As Rabbi Magence used to say, “Those three people Avraham saw were not Jews, there were of course no Jews or monotheists other than Abraham, those three men Abraham left God’s presence for were idol worshipers.”
The Challenge of Biblical Criticism: Dogma vs. Faith
A religiosity which affirms the immediacy of the Divine in the human heart feeds a sense of urgency to make that presence manifest. This urgency can serve as the catalyst which ultimately invigorates our commitment to avodat HaShem as Jews and as human beings created in the image of God.
