Subscribe
Subscribe to receive new posts:
Available Now!
When Judaism Meets Science
Posts Tagged ‘Baruch Spinoza’
What the Torah and Talmud Teach about Cancel Culture
In August, 2022, Rabbi David Wolpe, then senior rabbi of one at the largest congregations in the United States, wrote an essay in Sapir Journal titled “To Err Is Human; to Disagree Jewish.” His point of departure is a story related in the Talmud which tells of how Rabbi Gamliel, at one point the leader of the rabbinic community, publicly shamed another rabbi, Yehoshua, who dared to challenge him on the issue of whether evening prayer was obligatory or optional. The sages were so offended by Rabbi Gamliel’s behavior that they deposed him as Nasi (presiding leader) and elevated another, Rabbi Elazar, who instituted changes that allowed more and fresher perspectives to presented. (See BT Berakhot 27b.) This alone might have been a dayenu moment, but chastened, Rabbi Gamliel apologized for his behavior and was awarded an opportunity to lead the academy again.
read more
Evolving Reform Judaism
What is God? According to our ancestors, who recorded their beliefs in the Bible, God is an all-powerful and all-knowing entity, living somewhere outside of our world, who created the world and controls what happens in it. My definition of God is slightly different. I tend to think that God is not an entity outside nature, but nature itself, as postulated by a 17th century Jewish theologian, Baruch Spinoza, in Holland. This short article, rooted in my comment dated September 5, 2014, “Heretical or not Heretical,” on this blog is a set of quotes and reflections based on three recently found Internet references.
A brief history of Reform Judaism is presented at the Jewish Virtual Library. Here is a quote, from that reference:
“The ‘Oral Law‘ is not seen as divinely given at Sinai, but rather as a reflection of Judaism’s historic development and encounter with God in each succeeding generation. In this, Reform [views] . . . God working through human agents. Reform believes that each generation has produced capable and religiously inspired teachers (this means that Reform rejects the often expressed view that assigns greater holiness to those who lived in the past). Some individuals of our generation may equal or exceed those of the past.” read more
The Coyne Wars Reach Einstein
Q: What do Jonathan Sacks, Ross Douthat and Albert Einstein have in common?
A: Let’s see. The first is the former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth, the second is a New York Times based columnist who writes frequently about religion, and the third was the pre-eminent physicist of the twentieth century, responsible for teaching us how light can bend, time can slow, and mass and energy can convert into each other.
Oh, I know. In recent months, Jerry Coyne, biology professor at the University of Chicago, and author of the excellent book Why Evolution is True, has written critically of each.
In the cases of Sacks and Douthat, Coyne was responding to an essay. Rabbi Sacks’ piece appeared in The Spectator under the title “Chief Rabbi: atheism has failed. Only religion can defeat the new barbarians.” In it, Rabbi Sacks railed against two forces he saw as detrimental to an enduring, moral society: first, the idolatry of “the market, the liberal democratic state and consumer society,” aided and abetted by tone deaf, humorless secularists, the “new atheists,” and, second, a religious fundamentalism which combines into a toxic brew “the hatred of the other, the pursuit of power and contempt for human rights.” read more
JEWISH SOCIOLOGY: PEW’S IMPRECISE AND MISLEADING CONSTRUCT OF “JEWS OF NO RELIGION”
Credit: Pew Research Center
Of the many interesting aspects of the recently released survey of Jewish Americans by the Pew Research Center (the “Pew Portrait”), perhaps none is more troubling than the distorted bisection of American Jews into two primary sub-groups, one labeled “Jews by religion” and the other “Jews of no religion.” Once those designations were established, Pew, among other things, then sought to determine whether members of the two sub-groups had different attitudes or characteristics, whether, for instance, a person assigned to one sub-group was more likely or less likely to believe or behave differently than a person assigned to the other.
How large is the group of “Jews of no religion?” Pew found that about one fifth of adult American Jews (totaling approximately 1.2 million individuals) were Jews of “no religion” and that among Jews born after 1980 (“Jewish Millennials”) the fraction increases to one in every three. (See Portrait, at 7, 23, 32/214.) Pew’s survey director reportedly said that the rise in the number of Jews “of no religion” was the most significant finding of the study.
Just as one might expect, as soon as the Pew Portrait was published, the commentary class waxed wise on Pew’s findings about the Jews of no religion. Much of the concern expressed was about related findings that Jews of no religion were less connected to the Jewish community, less likely to be involved in Jewish organizations and less likely to raise their children as Jewish. (See Portrait, 60-62, 67-69/214.)
In all the hubbub, an important fact seems to have been overlooked: not only is the label “Jews of no religion” awkward, nowhere in the more than two hundred pages of the Pew Portrait does Pew precisely define what it means by “religion.” Pew’s failure to do so has created unnecessary ambiguity and confusion and muddled its survey results. At one point Pew says that Jews of no religion are “also commonly called secular or cultural Jews.” (See Portrait, at 8/214.) But those characterizations were not offered as primary choices in Pew’s survey questionnaire. (See Portrait, at 177, 186/214.) A look at the survey, beyond the executive summary, reveals some of the problems of Pew’s binary construct which is, perhaps, more provocative than probative. read more