So it's been just over a month since I've posted: three weeks intensive study at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem with 25 Orthodox, Reform and Conservative colleagues, traveling to Hevron, the Galil and South Tel Aviv and spending as much time as possible talking with Israeli family and friends have certainly given me much to reflect upon. Yet, in this first pre-Shabbat post, I wanted to catch up on the conversations that have been taking place on this side of the Jewish planet.
I returned home to relax with a copy of the Sunday New York Times--alas, it was the edition with Noah Feldman's lament (tirade maybe) against his Modern Orthodox high school alma mater's refusal to acknowledge or celebrate his marriage to a non-Jew. Whether you choose the path of intermarriage or not, we can agree that a rooted personality will not feel the need to defame a community in its entirety. Feldman makes the preposterous accusation that observant Jewish doctors, for example, only begrudgingly aid non-Jewish patients because of halakha. He also implies that the Jewish murderers Yigal Amir and Baruch Goldstein are a natural outgrowth of the observant ideology. It is precisely because Jewish radicalism fueled by a near term messianic theology is such a risk to the Jewish universe that crude slander, like Feldman's, only makes tackling these issues all the more difficult. Read it for yourself if you have not yet done so (here). What else to say? Well, let's see:
Allan Nadler, formerly of Montreal’s Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, cogently reflects on Feldman's unwillingness to acknoweldge a community's right to self definition, in his article "The Death of Genuine Dissent." Rabbi Norman Lamm, the chancellor and former president of Yeshiva University, berates Feldman for his ungenerous presentation of Jewish law in his letter published in The Forward. Even Phoebe Maltz who in her blog subtitled "The Best Francophilic Zionism in the Blogosphere" advocates an end to what she calls "the war on intermarriage" critiques Feldman (here). The conversation is ongoing because the issues it raises are both real and urgent.
Have fun with your summer reading and Shabbat shalom and it is good to be home.
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