Reform Jewish Quotes

The Qur’an calls Jesus Al-Masih, the Messiah—literally, “the anointed one” or “the one who wipes away injustice.” Rather than adopting the Jewish framing of the messiah as a political redeemer, the Qur’anic understanding of the messiah is a reformer anointed by God to revive the theory of Abraham and the structure of Moses. Or, in a related sense, as a great clarifier who wipes away the filmy haze obscuring clear understanding.

IRWIN: At the time of the Reformation there were fourteen foreskins of Christ preserved, but it was thought that the church of St John Lateran in Rome had the authentic prepuce. DAKIN: Don't think we're shocked by your mention of the word 'foreskin', sir. CROWTHER: No, sir. Some of us even have them. LOCKWOOD: Not Posner, though, sir. Posner's like, you know, Jewish. It's one of several things Posner doesn't have. (Posner mouths 'fuck off.')

Both mystic and comedian aspire to get the better of a world they are powerless to reform.

I felt most Jewish when my grandparents, also Reform but deeply obsessed with Jewish food, would drive me to New York and take me on a tour of all the old culinary haunts of our tribe.

Today, Medina is simultaneously the archetype of Islamic democracy and the impetus for Islamic militancy. Islamic Modernists like the Egyptian writer and political philosopher Ali Abd ar-Raziq (d. 1966) pointed to Muhammad’s community in Medina as proof that Islam advocated the separation of religious and temporal power, while Muslim extremists in Afghanistan and Iran have used the same community to fashion various models of Islamic theocracy. In their struggle for equal rights, Muslim feminists have consistently drawn inspiration from the legal reforms Muhammad instituted in Medina, while at the same time, Muslim traditionalists have construed those same legal reforms as grounds for maintaining the subjugation of women in Islamic society. For some, Muhammad’s actions in Medina serve as the model for Muslim-Jewish relations; for others, they demonstrate the insurmountable conflict that has always existed, and will always exist, between the two sons of Abraham. Yet regardless of whether one is labeled a Modernist or a Traditionalist, a reformist or a fundamentalist, a feminist or a chauvinist, all Muslims regard Medina as the model of Islamic perfection. Simply put, Medina is what Islam was meant to be.

The Catholic Church was derived from three sources. Its sacred history was Jewish, its theology was Greek, its government and canon law were, at least indirectly, Roman. The Reformation rejected the Roman elements, softened the Greek elements, and greatly strengthened the Judaic elements.

Then he placed his hands in his pockets and stood in the middle of the street alone, giving the silent roaring rage inside him time to ease down and out, and after several long minutes he once again became who he was, a solitary middle-aged man in the August of life looking for a few more Aprils, an aging bachelor in a floppy suit standing on a tired, worn Brooklyn street in the shadow of a giant housing project built by a Jewish reformer named Robert Moses who forgot he was a reformer, building projects like this all over, which destroyed neighborhoods, chasing out the working Italians, Irish, and Jews, gutting all the pretty things from them, displacing them with Negroes and Spanish and other desperate souls clambering to climb into the attic of New York life, hoping that the bedroom and kitchen below would open up so they could drop in, and at minimum join the club that to them included this man, an overweight bachelor in an ill-fitting suit, watching a shiny car roaring away, the car driven by a handsome young man who was pretty and drove away as if he were barreling into a bright future, while the dowdy heavyset man watched him jealously, believing the man so pretty and handsome had places to go and women to meet and things to do, and the older heavyset man standing behind eating his fumes on a sorry, dreary, crowded old Brooklyn street of storefronts and tired brownstones had nothing left but the fumes of the pretty sports car in his face.

Yet so much of the story so far has not been about unbelief at all, but sincere and troubled belief. When children of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and the children of the Jewish Diaspora turned on the religions which had bred them, they mostly sought not to abolish God but to see him in a clearer light. ( p698)

Christian reformism arose originally from the ability of its advocates to contrast the Old Testament with the New. The cobbled-together ancient Jewish books had an ill-tempered and implacable and bloody and provincial god, who was probably more frightening when he was in a good mood (the classic attribute of the dictator). Whereas the cobbled-together books of the last two thousand years contained handholds for the hopeful, and references to meekness, forgiveness, lambs and sheep, and so forth. This distinction is more apparent than real, since it is only in the reported observations of Jesus that we find any mention of hell and eternal punishment. The god of Moses would brusquely call for other tribes, including his favorite one, to suffer massacre and plague and even extirpation, but when the grave closed over his victims he was essentially finished with them unless he remembered to curse their succeeding progeny. Not until the advent of the Prince of Peace do we hear of the ghastly idea of further punishing and torturing the dead. First presaged by the rantings of John the Baptist, the son of god is revealed as one who, if his milder words are not accepted straightaway, will condemn the inattentive to everlasting fire. This has provided texts for clerical sadists ever since, and features very lip-smackingly in the tirades of Islam.

Two years later he married Eleanore Schwindt, who, like his first wife, was a nurse. Unlike Tilly, who was Jewish, Elly was Catholic. Although this may have been mere coincidence, it was characteristic of Viktor Frankl to accept individuals regardless of their religious beliefs or secular convictions. His deep commitment to the uniqueness and dignity of each individual was illustrated by his admiration for Freud and Adler even though he disagreed with their philosophical and psychological theories. He also valued his personal relationships with philosophers as radically different as Martin Heidegger, a reformed Nazi sympathizer, Karl Jaspers, an advocate of collective guilt, and Gabriel Marcel, a Catholic philosopher and writer.

Oppressed people must either reform or reject a religion that preaches spiritual salvation but has little to say about their physical and material conditions. The hypocrisy of white Christians who said their religion condemned darker-skinned people to perpetual slavery even as they worshipped a brown-skinned Jewish man who was put to death by an imperial power could hardly be starker, both then and now.

Days after setting off the bomb, the duo murdered a young MIT police officer during their attempted escape, and two years earlier Tamerlan and another Muslim immigrant slit the throats of three Jewish men on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attack—which I believe was also the work of immigrants. CNN headline after the attack: “Boston Bombing Shouldn’t Derail Immigration Reform.”32 Leaving aside the wanton slaughter, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan were tremendous assets to America. They were on welfare and getting mostly Fs in school. Good work, U.S. immigration service!

The Weimar Republic seethed with other resentments and hatreds: the German people were bitterly divided along every conceivable line. Rural people disliked the big cities for breaking with traditions of religion and sexual identity and morality. A postwar tide of refugees, particularly from eastern Europe, alarmed millions of Germans. German Catholics and Protestants had distrusted one another since the Reformation. The stresses of war and revolution had exacerbated antisemitism in both Christian groupings. Eventually, these different grievances coalesced, especially among the numerically dominant Protestants: Weimar was too Jewish, too Catholic, too modern, too urban—all in all, too morally degenerate.

The Soviets replaced him with a non-Jewish figure, Imre Nagy. Nagy was a Communist, but a reformer rather than a Stalinist. He had stood out from the beginning of his political career, when in the 1920s he had been sent to prison for his Communist beliefs and had arrived there wearing a bowler hat. “A Communist with bowler hat!” exclaimed the Hungarian journalist Tibor Méray. “He must be a different kind of Communist.”6 Later, he got into trouble with his party for refusing to stand at attention when “The Internationale” was played. It had been suggested in the press and in American State Department documents that he could be a Hungarian version of Josip Broz Tito, the charismatic president of Yugoslavia: unique among Eastern Bloc leaders for publicly splitting from Stalin’s Soviet Union.

THREE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER JESUS DIED ON A ROMAN cross, the emperor Theodosius made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. Christians, who had once been persecuted by the empire, became the empire, and those who had once denied the sword took up the sword against their neighbors. Pagan temples were destroyed, their patrons forced to convert to Christianity or die. Christians whose ancestors had been martyred in gladiatorial combat now attended the games, cheering on the bloodshed. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. On July 15, 1099, Christian crusaders lay siege to Jerusalem, then occupied by Fatimite Arabs. They found a breach in the wall and took the city. Declaring “God wills it!” they killed every defender in their path and dashed the bodies of helpless babies against rocks. When they came upon a synagogue where many of the city’s Jews had taken refuge, they set fire to the building and burned the people inside alive. An eyewitness reported that at the Porch of Solomon, horses waded through blood. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Through a series of centuries-long inquisitions that swept across Europe, hundreds of thousands of people, many of them women accused of witchcraft, were tortured by religious leaders charged with protecting the church from heresy. Their instruments of torture, designed to slowly inflict pain by dismembering and dislocating the body, earned nicknames like the Breast Ripper, the Head Crusher, and the Judas Chair. Many were inscribed with the phrase Soli Deo Gloria, “Glory be only to God.” Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. In a book entitled On Jews and Their Lies, reformer Martin Luther encouraged civic leaders to burn down Jewish synagogues, expel the Jewish people from their lands, and murder those who continued to practice their faith within Christian territory. “The rulers must act like a good physician who when gangrene has set in proceeds without mercy to cut, saw, and burn flesh, veins, bone, and marrow,” he wrote. Luther’s writings were later used by German officials as religious justification of the Holocaust. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy.

The seven people murdered by Chechen immigrants Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who planted a bomb at the finish line of the Boston Marathon in 2013. In addition to the three people killed in the blast, including an eight-year-old boy, dozens of Americans suffered severe injuries in the marathon bombing and are still learning to live with prosthetics and other artificial devices to replace lost legs, feet, eyes, and hearing—all thanks to an immigration policy that allows other countries to dump their losers on us. Days after setting off the bomb, the duo murdered a young MIT police officer during their attempted escape, and two years earlier Tamerlan and another Muslim immigrant slit the throats of three Jewish men on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attack—which I believe was also the work of immigrants. CNN headline after the attack: “Boston Bombing Shouldn’t Derail Immigration Reform.”32 Leaving aside the wanton slaughter, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan were tremendous assets to America. They were on welfare and getting mostly Fs in school. Good work, U.S. immigration service!

He talks about the way in which the American academy "assigns an official group identity" to students, eliminating the distinction "between voluntary association and imposed group identity." For example, "a Jewish student who is totally assimilated—whose Jewish identity is totally unimportant to him—goes to college and is assigned a special Jewish advisor." The academy also distinguishes between people who "own" their sexual, racial, or gender identity and those who, in its view, have "internalized their oppression.' For example, Kors says, Walter Olson, a tort reform expert at the Cato Institute who happens to be gay, "is not really gay because he doesn't understand the sources of his oppression." Thomas Sowell, an African American author based at the Hoover Institution, "isn't really black." And "Daphne Patai, a founder of Women's Studies at Amherst, isn't really a woman because she identifies with the oppressive culture around her. So in the humanities, when they speak of diversity, the one kind of diversity they don't mean is individuated intellectual diversity." On the contrary, there's a process of "vetting against individuation. The people who are most discriminated against, then, are not straight white males who just roll over and play along, but rather libertarian and conservative blacks, women who are critics of feminism, and gays and lesbians who are critics of the 'official' gay and lesbian positions on every issue in the world.

Possibly the deepest and widest split, however, was between Zionists in Europe and Palestine, on the one hand, and American Zionists, on the other. American Jews—even those positively inclined toward Zionism—were living in a setting radically different from that in Europe and could not embrace the statehood-centric version of European Zionism. Even the First Zionist Congress foreshadowed how difficult it was going to be to get American Jews on board; despite the fact that there were some 937,000 Jews in America, of the approximately 200 delegates to the Congress, only four came from the United States.* American Judaism was becoming anti-Zionist even before there was Zionism. In 1885, American Reform rabbis adopted what is now known as the Pittsburgh Platform, the movement’s statement of core beliefs and commitments. In it, these rabbis declared, in part, that the Jews were no longer a people but now constituted a religion. “We recognize, in the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellect, the approaching of the realization of Israel’s great Messianic hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice, and peace among all men,” they said as they jettisoned Judaism’s long-standing particularism and embraced the universalism then much in vogue in philosophic and cultural circles. “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community,” they said, and since Jews were no longer a national community, they expected “neither a return to Palestine,* nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.

Quoting page 56-57: Most important for the content of immigration reform, the driving force at the core of this movement, reaching back to the 1920s, were Jewish organizations long active in opposing racial and ethnic quotas. These included the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and the American Federation of Jews from Eastern Europe. Jewish members of Congress, particularly representatives from New York and Chicago, had maintained steady but largely ineffective pressure against the national origins quotas since the 1920s. But the war against Hitler and the postwar movement against colonialism sharply changed the ideological and moral environment, putting defenders of racial, caste, and ethnic hierarchies on the defensive. Jewish political leaders in New York, most prominently Governor Herbert Lehman, had pioneered in the 1940s in passing state antidiscrimination legislation. Importantly, these statutes and executive orders added “national origin” to race, color, and religion as impermissible grounds for discrimination. Following the shock of the Holocaust, Jewish leaders had been especially active in Washington in furthering immigration reform. To the public, the most visible evidence of the immigration reform drive was played by Jewish legislative leaders, such as Representative Celler and Senator Jacob Javits of New York. Less visible, but equally important, were the efforts of key advisers on presidential and agency staffs. These included senior policy advisers such as Julius Edelson and Harry Rosenfield in the Truman administration, Maxwell Rabb in the Eisenhower White House, and presidential aide Myer Feldman, assistant secretary of state Abba Schwartz, and deputy attorney general Norbert Schlei in the Kennedy-Johnson administration.

Defining Christian Zionism is fraught with difficulty. I begin by defining what I mean by Zionism. The term was first used only in 1890; the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition is: “an international movement originally for the establishment of a Jewish national or religious community in Palestine and later for the support of modern Israel.

The term Christian Zionist can be found as early as 1896, when the Jewish Zionist leader Theodor Herzl referred to William Hechler, the Anglican chaplain to the British Embassy in Vienna, as a “Christian Zionist” and the following year Herzl again used that term to describe Jean-Henri Dunant, a Swiss banker and founder of the Red Cross, and an observer at the First Zionist Conference.

The rabbinical form of Judaism that emerged from this movement emphasized literacy and the skills to read and interpret the Torah. Even before the destruction of the temple, the Pharisee high priest Joshua ben Gamla issued a requirement in 63 or 65 AD that every Jewish father should send his sons to school at age six or seven. The goal of the Pharisees was universal male literacy so that everyone could understand and obey Jewish laws. Between 200 and 600 AD, this goal was largely attained, as Judaism became transformed into a religion based on study of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) and the Talmud (a compendium of rabbinic commentaries). This remarkable educational reform was not accomplished without difficulty. Most Jews at the time earned their living by farming, as did everyone else. It was expensive for farmers to educate their sons and the education had no practical value. Many seem to have been unwilling to do so because the Talmud is full of imprecations against the ammei ha-aretz, which in Talmudic usage means boorish country folk who refuse to educate their children. Fathers are advised on no account to let their daughters marry the untutored sons of the ammei ha-aretz. The scorned country folk could escape this hectoring without totally abandoning Judaism. They could switch to a form of Judaism Lite developed by a diaspora Jew, one that did not require literacy or study of the Torah and was growing in popularity throughout this period. The diaspora Jew was Paul of Tarsus, and Christianity, the religion he developed, seamlessly wraps Judaism around the mystery cult creed of an agricultural vegetation god who dies in the fall and is resurrected in the spring.

Despite his call for tenement reform, Riis did not have kind things to say about the people who lived there. A devout evangelical Christian, he was especially contemptuous of the Jewish residents of the Lower East Side. Rather than admiring their work ethic, Riis repeated standard anti-Semitic tropes about Jews and money. “Money is their God,” he said. “Life itself is of little value compared with even the leanest bank account. In no other spot does life wear so intensely bald and materialistic an aspect as in Ludlow Street. Over and over again I have met with instances of these Polish or Russian Jews deliberately starving themselves to

As early as 1845, thirty-three young German-Jewish immigrants who had arrived in Manhattan just a few years before banded together to establish a Reform congregation, which they named Emanu-El. The very term “Reform,” of course, indicated that these Germans felt that there was something about traditional Judaism that needed updating and correcting. Reform

Hungary was drawn along in the same vortex of intellectual excitement and scientific progress that enveloped the rest of the empire. An extraordinary constellation of the twentieth century’s leading physicists and mathematicians were the product of its equally exceptional educational system at the turn of the century—John von Neumann, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, Theodor von Kármán, Paul Erdös, and George Pólya, among many others. All came from Hungary’s Jewish middle class, all would flee Hitler’s Europe, and many would end up working during the Second World War for the Manhattan Project, helping to ensure that America, and not Germany, would be the first to build the atomic bomb. The educational reforms instituted in the era of ascendant liberal values in the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire emphasized creative thinking and experimental curiosity over rote learning.

A charter reform reduced the number of city councilors from twenty-four ward representatives to nine at-large members, thus weakening the position of old guard power brokers.

Kevin White had his father’s knack for hooking up with the right crowd. White’s first foray into politics came as a member of the Ward Five Democratic Committee, a liberal group consisting mainly of Jews and Yankees who in 1960 presented a reform slate to the voters on Beacon Hill. Kevin White then went on to win election as Massachusetts’ Secretary of State, a job that, in Boston’s political parlance, required “no heavy lifting.

We are not the first to go this way. In the Jewish tradition, there's a long history of faithful wondering. It's summarized in the midrash, ancient commentaries of the rabbis that contain their speculations about what lies off the page of Scripture, about all the details that didn't make the main scroll. "Midrash" means "study" or "searching out." In the Jewish rabbinical tradition, this type of learning has always been a group effort. "Through communal reading of Scripture with homiletical commentary and translation, community was formed, reformed and advanced," writes Rabbi Burton Visotzky, midrashic expert and Hebrew Bible scholar. "Midrash was to the Rabbis of old the primary means of hearing God's voice speak through the Word of Scripture." Midrash was never meant to concretize one particular understanding of a particular verse or a particular part of Scripture. While it sought to uncover ancient truths, it was also relentlessly open to contextualizing the sacred text for a new generation. "Earlier comments were passed on, modified, retold, so that the Bible became a patchwork quilt of text, with a verse of Scripture at the center and the various interpretations of the verse radiating outward to form the fabric," Visotzky says. "This quilt of scriptural interpretation offered warmth to all who sheltered under it.

Abortion is one of the most commonly performed medical procedures in the United States, and it is tragic that many women who have abortions are all too often mischaracterized and stigmatized, their exercise of moral agency sullied. Their judgment is publicly and forcefully second-guessed by those in politics and religion who have no business entering the deliberation. The reality is that women demonstrate forethought and care; talk to them the way clergy do and witness their sense of responsibility. Women take abortion as seriously as any of us takes any health-care procedure. They understand the life-altering obligations of parenthood and family life. They worry over their ability to provide for a child, the impact on work, school, the children they already have, or caring for other dependents. Perhaps the woman is unable to be a single parent or is having problems with a husband or partner or other kids.2 Maybe her contraception failed her. Maybe when it came to having sex she didn’t have much choice. Maybe this pregnancy will threaten her health, making adoption an untenable option. Or perhaps a wanted pregnancy takes a bad turn and she decides on abortion. It’s pretty complicated. It’s her business to decide on the outcome of her pregnancy—not ours to intervene, to blame, or to punish. Clergy know about moral agency through pastoral work. Women and families invite us into their lives to listen, reflect, offer sympathy, prayer, or comfort. But when it comes to giving advice, we recognize that we are not the ones to live with the outcome; the patient faces the consequences. The woman bears the medical risk of a pregnancy and has to live with the results. Her determination of the medical, spiritual, and ethical dimensions holds sway. The status of her fetus, when she thinks life begins, and all the other complications are hers alone to consider. Many women know right away when a pregnancy must end or continue. Some need to think about it. Whatever a woman decides, she needs to be able to get good quality medical care and emotional and spiritual support as she works toward the outcome she seeks; she figures it out. That’s all part of “moral agency.” No one is denying that her fetus has a moral standing. We are affirming that her moral standing is higher; she comes first. Her deliberations, her considerations have priority. The patient must be the one to arrive at a conclusion and act upon it. As a rabbi, I tell people what the Jewish tradition says and describe the variety of options within the faith. They study, deliberate, conclude, and act. I cannot force them to think or do differently. People come to their decisions in their own way. People who believe the decision is up to the woman are typically called “pro-choice.” “Choice” echoes what is called “moral agency,” “conscience,” “informed will,” or “personal autonomy”—spiritually or religiously. I favor the term “informed will” because it captures the idea that we learn and decide: First, inform the will. Then exercise conscience. In Reform Judaism, for instance, an individual demonstrates “informed will” in approaching and deciding about traditional dietary rules—in a fluid process of study of traditional teaching, consideration of the personal significance of that teaching, arriving at a conclusion, and taking action. Unitarian Universalists tell me that the search for truth and meaning leads to the exercise of conscience. We witness moral agency when a member of a faith community interprets faith teachings in light of historical religious understandings and personal conscience. I know that some religious people don’t do

In these circumstances it would have been surprising had the Jewish authorities not made life difficult for the disciples of Jesus. And this is just what they did, as the book of the Acts records.1 The apostles, when arrested and reprimanded, defied all prohibitions, and neither stripes nor imprisonment intimidated them. The priests, however, had not a free hand. The governor apparently was not inclined to lend himself to new condemnations. But there was worse to come. Stephen, one of the first converts, a zealous helper of the apostles, was accused of blasphemy against the Holy Place and against the Law of Moses. To judge by the speech he is described as making in the Acts of the Apostles, it does seem that his words were rather peculiarly vehement. At any rate, the Sanhedrim, perhaps encouraged by the weakness of the governor, or taking advantage of the post being temporarily vacant, pronounced sentence of death against Stephen, and caused him to be stoned in the traditional manner. They followed this up with severe measures against the faithful, and the terrified community dispersed for a time. But the alarm did not last long, and the "Church," as it now began to be called, soon came together again. The internal organization of the Church seems to have been very simple. Converts were admitted by baptism, the symbol of their union with Jesus, in whose name it was administered, and also of the conversion, the moral reform promised by the believer. A common daily meal was the sign and bond of their corporate life. There they celebrated the Eucharist, a perceptible and mysterious memorial of the invisible Master. In those first days the desire for a common life was so intense that they even practised community of goods. This led to administrative developments; the apostles chose out seven helpers who were the fore-runners of the Deacons. A little later there appeared an intermediate dignity, a council of elders (presbyteri, priests), who assisted the apostles in general management and took counsel with them.

This title is a Hebrew word meaning “collector” or “assembler,” and while the Protestant Reformers used the term “preacher” to translate this title, it more likely refers to this individual as a “collector” of proverbs (Crenshaw, 1992, 271).  At the outset of the book (1:12-2:26) this individual engages in a royal experiment, the background of which is clearly intended to be that of Solomon.  So here the author has gone one step further from tacking Solomon’s name onto a work to intentionally writing from the perspective of Solomon. Another

New perspectivists (who aren’t all the same, of course) often comment on how Philippians 3 fits with their paradigm. And they are certainly right, at least to some extent. We see the ethnic and nationalist flavor of the Jewish opponents here. Still, this passage is interesting in another way, for nationalism is aligned with works-righteousness as well. We don’t have an either-or between nationalism and activism, between ritual and works-righteousness. Instead, these are included together. Such a state of affairs is hardly surprising. If one ethnic group thinks it is superior to another, it typically believes that it is morally superior as well. Indeed, alleged moral superiority is often one of the chief reasons for believing that they are better than another people group.

The bifurcation of Christianity and Judaism was a gradual process. To some extent it was determined by the actions of the Jews themselves. The consolidation of Judaism round the rigorous enforcement of Mosaic law, as a result of the crushing of the reform programme by the Maccabees, was the essential background to the origin and rise of Jewish Christianity. Equally, the drift of Jewish rigorism towards violence, and the head-on collision with the Graeco-Roman world which inevitably followed in 66–70 AD, finally severed the Christian branch of Judaism from its Jewish trunk.

The existence of a temple of YHWH in Upper Egypt means one of two things for our understanding of what Jews were like at this embryonic moment in their collective existence. Either they were pre-biblical, aware only of some of the legal codes of the Torah and some of the elements of the founding epic, but had not yet taken in Deuteronomy, the book written two centuries earlier, ostensibly the 120-year-old dying Moses’ spoken legacy to the Israelites, which codified more rigorously the much looser and often contradictory injunctions of Leviticus. Or the Elephantine Jews did have the Mosaic strictures of Deuteronomy, and perhaps even knew all about the reforms of kings Hezekiah and his great-grandson Josiah making the Jerusalem Temple the sole place of sacrificial ritual and pilgrimage, but had no intention of surrendering to its monopoly. The Elephantine Yahudim were Yahwists who were not going to be held to the letter of observance laid down by Jerusalemites any more than, say, the vast majority of Jews now who believe themselves to be, in their way, observant, will accept instruction on what it means to be Jewish (or worse, who is and who isn’t a Jew) from the ultra-Orthodox.

As we see Protestantism to be a mere modification or reform of Popery, so Popery was nothing more than a similar modification or reform of Paganism. 64 It is absolutely certain that the Pagans were in possession of the whole Gospel story many ages before its Jewish origin was pretended; and it was not till the first error had been committed, of suffering the people to become acquainted too intimately with the contents of the sacred books, that it became necessary to invent a chronology, and to “give to airy nothing a local habitation, and a name.”**

Noting the parallels between Clement and Martin Luther, Jordan Cooper concludes, “For both Clement and Luther, the Pauline polemic against works does not refer only to Jewish boundary markers, but to good works in general. If Clement were asked what works a man must perform to achieve justification, he would likely respond as did Luther: ‘Nothing at all.

You’re at a Jewish wedding. How can you tell if it’s Orthodox, Reform, or Liberal? A: In an Orthodox wedding, the bride’s mother is pregnant. In a Reform wedding, the bride is pregnant. In a Liberal wedding the rabbi is pregnant.

So controversial was the preaching of the gospel that the religious establishment of the Jewish community forbade the Apostles from preaching the gospel at all because it was controversial and because it divided people.

The Catholic Church was derived from three sources. Its sacred history was Jewish, its theology was Greek, its government and canon law were, at least indirectly, Roman. The Reformation rejected the Roman elements, softened the Greek elements, and greatly strengthened the Judaic elements.

what I call Destination Jewish Culture. These programs are also low barrier and held in secular spaces. However, they usually require some level of planned participation (a set start time and destination event) and may charge a nominal fee (though no more than what would be charged at a secular equivalent). Good examples of programs that might fit in this circle are Jewish film festivals held in commercial theaters or a Jewish musical event held in a concert hall. The third level of Public Space Judaism is what might be described as Open Door Community programs. These may be held within Jewish communal institutions, but they are open to the entire community. A good example of this approach is the Reform Jewish movement’s Taste of Judaism program (although the program is not limited to the Reform movement). This brief three-week introduction to Judaism is free, welcomes all participants

allegorical interpretation. This was one of the most influential approaches to biblical interpretation until the Reformation of the sixteenth century. The roots of allegorical interpretation reach back to the Golden Age of Greece and, in early Jewish hermeneutics, to Philo Judeas. In the beginning centuries of the Christian church, allegorical interpretation was identified with the Alexandrian school and especially with its most famous scholar, *Origen. The key assumption in this hermeneutical approach is that the scriptural text contains several senses. The interpreter seeks to discover levels of meaning that lie beneath the literal sense of a text. The figure of Moses in the Exodus narrative, for example, can be interpreted allegorically as Jesus Christ, who comes to those enslaved in sin and leads them to salvation. Origen identified three primary senses: the literal, the moral and the spiritual. Later Latin fathers expanded the senses into four: the literal, the allegorical, the tropological (moral) and the anagogic (focusing on the end or the goal of the Christian life).

One of the reactions to Jesus was the confession, first voiced by the leader of the Twelve, Peter, that “You are the Messiah” (Mark 8:29), the eagerly awaited “anointed of the Lord” who would bring deliverance to the Jewish people. It was a confession welcomed by many, doubted by others, and feared by still others in positions of power. Jesus’ popularity provoked jealousy and opposition from some Pharisees and a range of sentiments from uneasiness to profound disturbance among the political leaders.

Josephus, a Jewish historian who lived at the time of Christ, records that Cyrus read the prophecy of Isaiah and was marveled saying:   "Thus saith Cyrus the King:  Since God Almighty hath appointed me to be king of the habitable earth, I believe that he is that God which the nation of the Israelites worship; for he foretold my name by the prophets; and that I should build him a house at Jerusalem, in the country of Judea"   Josephus continues:   “This was known to Cyrus by his reading the book which Isaiah left behind him of his prophecies; for this prophet said that God had spoken thus to him in a secret vision: "My will is, that Cyrus, whom I have appointed to be king over many and great nations, send back my people to their own land, and build my temple.  This was foretold before the temple was demolished" Accordingly, when Cyrus read this, and admired the divine power, an earnest desire and ambition seized upon him to fulfill what was so written; so he called for the most eminent Jews that were in Babylon, and said to them, that he gave them leave to go back to their own country, and to rebuild the city of Jerusalem" 18   The fulfillment of this prophecy is also recorded in the Bible in 2 Chronicles 36:22-23, Ezra 1:2-8 and 4:3.

Rashi was trained to wrestle with God like Jacob at Bethel, to bargain with him like Moses at Mt. Sinai. Rashi's people have an ancient tradition of questioning God "face-toface, as a man speaks with his friend." [Exodus 33:11] Conversely, I abandoned my faith because it seemed I had no right to question the difficulties, much less expect answers. I had been taught to accept ready-made dogma rather than to personally take my doubts to God. Make no mistake; I do not blame the church for my lost time. I might well have fallen away no matter what. But it is just possible that several years of painful isolation from the Lord might have been avoided had I learned at an early age this simple truth that most Reform Jews know: God loves an honest question.

went to this house of worship on Rosh Hashannah, the Jewish New Year. It was a most moving experience. Since few Czech Jews had survived, the crowd was made up of remnants from the survivors of different Jewish communities. The books, the torahs, the cemetery - everything, at that time, was in complete disarray. It was the most moving experience that I ever had in a synagogue. I also saw and admired the square where Huss was burnt on the stake. He was the Czech reformer, who wanted to translate the Bible into the national language and was burnt to death by the prevailing Catholics, who judged him as a heretic. The old, historic town fascinated me no end. The medieval houses, with fortresslike portals, the waterwell in the courtyards, the crossover walks from one side of the street to the other, at the third or fourth floor level for escape, in case of attack; the walls around the area. It all brought the history of the city alive; it brought the Middle Ages alive.

Fundamentalism itself—whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim—is modern. It is a reaction to modern culture.7 Christian fundamentalism as an identifiable religious movement originated early in the twentieth century in the United States, with its immediate roots in the second half of the nineteenth century.8 It stressed the infallibility and inerrancy of the Bible in every respect, especially against Darwinism and what it called “the higher criticism” (by which it meant the scholarly study of the Bible as it had developed primarily in Germany in the nineteenth century). The roots of the evangelical understanding of the Bible are older, going back to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. The Reformation replaced the authority of the church and church tradition with the sole authority of scripture. John Calvin and Martin Luther, the two most important leaders of the Reformation, both had a strong sense of biblical authority. But it was in the second and third generation of the Reformation that claims for the infallible truth of the Bible were made. “Plenary inspiration”—the notion that the words of the Bible were dictated by God and are therefore free from error—was emphasized by those later Reformers.9 The realization that these developments are relatively recent is important. The explicit description of the Bible as inerrant and infallible by fundamentalists and some conservative-evangelicals cannot claim to be the ancient and traditional voice of the church. Yet both fundamentalism and the notion of the Bible as “God’s truth” (and thus without error) have their roots in an older, conventional way of seeing the Bible widely shared by most Christians for a long time.

the additional bills. On July 20, 1944, Harrison resigned in protest. In a story in the New York Times, Roosevelt praised Harrison for his reform of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, “notwithstanding the wartime additions to the work of the service, such as the civilian internment program.” The Washington Post said in an editorial on July 24, “Hats off today to Harrison, who resigned that position in protest of our immigration laws, which he compares to the racial laws of Nazi Germany.” The “Jewish question” was now impossible for Roosevelt to ignore. At the beginning of the war, Roosevelt concluded that America could save the Jews of Europe by quickly defeating Hitler and his troops. But he worried about anti-Semitism in America and finally took on the issue directly. In speeches during 1943, Roosevelt said that any American who condoned anti-Semitism was “playing Hitler’s game.” However, immigration restrictions stayed in place.

Nicholas issued over six hundred anti-Jewish decrees designed to disrupt Jewish life. These included censoring Yiddish and Hebrew books, stifling religious education, mass expulsions, and the conscription of young boys into the army for periods of up to twenty-five years. Jews remained barred from the professions, barred from holding land, barred from living outside the Pale of Settlement. His son, the reformer Alexander I, reduced compulsory military service to five years, allowed Jews into some universities, and allowed Jewish businessman to travel to parts of Russia that had been off-limits. They were still not allowed to own land, enter the professions, or live outside the Pale. Nonetheless, the winds of change were blowing, even into the deepest recesses of the backward empire.

In March 1919, almost a year and a half after the Balfour Declaration, almost three hundred Reform rabbis sought to convince President Wilson not to express support for Balfour’s sentiments. Going much further than Brandeis’s tepid endorsement of a “Jewish settlement in Palestine rather than an actual state,” they rejected even Brandeis’s formulation. In a letter to the New York Times, they wrote, “We raise our voice in warning and protest against the demand of the Zionists for the reorganization of the Jews as a national unit, to whom, now or in the future, territorial sovereignty in Palestine shall be committed. . . . We reject the Zionist project of a ‘national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.

Yet Silver’s Zionist passion was but one facet of a much more complicated picture. American Jews remained fundamentally uncomfortable with Jewish sovereignty. The very same year Abba Hillel Silver delivered his oration, Houston’s Reform congregation, Beth Israel synagogue, declared that Zionists could not be members of the congregation. Even in 1943, with the Holocaust raging and the argument for the need for a Jewish state more compelling than ever before, the congregation specifically referred to the Pittsburgh Platform’s statement that “we consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community,” and agreed that an oath of loyalty to America would be required for membership. It further ruled that those supporting Zionism could not be full members of the congregation or hold office. Beth Israel did not begin accepting Zionists as members again until 1967, almost two decades after Israel’s creation.

This do’ did not refer to the whole supper, and it did not even include the Jewish meal berakoth which recent liturgists have insisted underlies the eucharistic prayer.[157] The command referred not to Jewish traditions, but to the newness of his action, which was the act of eating and drinking the bread and wine which he had declared to be his body and blood.

Princeton Tries to Explain a Drop in Jewish Enrollment; or "What is Communism?" by Yggdrasil The sine-qua-non of inner party power is a multi-cultural elite alienated from its tribal and racial kinsmen. It is the native elites - the indigenous leaders who might resist the inner party's drive for power that are always the target. ... For the reform version of communism developed by the Frankfurt School that now dominates the ‘liberal democracies" and the NWO, the masses of the nations are important as consumers ... What remains relevant to the inner party are the inner party's potential competitors, the native national elites with community ties to their brethren. In the Soviet Union, the inner party elites (using Lenin and Stalin as their cover) resorted to murder and forced resettlement to remove the native national elites, a fast, direct and brutal form of decapitation. In the "liberal democracies" the inner party uses a slower and less visibly brutal method of decapitation. Thus, in the liberal democracies of today we have "affirmative action" - a set of laws that places tremendous pressure on private businesses to displace native elites at the top with minorities who will be less plausible targets of discrimination lawsuits. These laws exist everywhere in the European world, and with the exception of the U.S. were enacted long before any significant minority constituencies (other than the inner party itself) existed to lobby for their passage. The entire program of displacement and decapitation within the liberal democracies was carefully drawn up and explained in "The Authoritarian Personality" by Theodor Adorno, et. al.(1947). It is a prescription for identifying any person who displays any bond of obligation to his own kind and the will to resist those who threaten the interests of his kind. Such "authoritarian personalities" are to be denied university admission and consigned to low status occupations, which is precisely what the laws of affirmative action and social rules of political correctness accomplish. Indeed, as I read the tables from the 1939 Soviet census published in Sanning's work [The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry by Walter N. Sanning] I recalled my own research showing that the inner party, representing 2.4% of the U.S. population comprises 28% of the student body at Harvard, while the descendants of European Christendom comprising 70% of the population supply only 18% of the students. The American Majority has been effectively displaced at Harvard. Relative to their share of the Population, they have 2.4 times fewer students than do the inner party's Afro-American coalition partners. ... The United States Department of Labor has maintained a tracking study of 12,000 young people who were between the ages of 14 and 22 in 1979 known as the National Longitudinal study of Youth ("NLSY"). The CD Roms with all the data can be purchased from Ohio State University. These data show that at each given level of IQ (all participants were tested) the income and educational attainment of the descendants of European Christendom is much lower than for Blacks, Hispanics and Inner party members of the same IQ. In what will surely be a surprise to most middle and upper middle-income Euro-Americans, the effects are most pronounced at the highest IQ levels. In other words, it is the majority elite that suffers the widest disparity in income and education when compared with Blacks, Hispanics and Inner Party members within the same IQ range. When the effects are broken down by sex, we find that among males the disparity is most pronounced in the highest IQ ranges and disappears entirely by the time you descend to the 50% mark. The widest disparity exists among the top 2% of the population (those with IQs above 130).

The Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, the document by which the Reform rabbinate, the largest stream of American Jewry, expressed its foundational values, said the following: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine . . . nor the restoration of any laws concerning a Jewish state.

he simply wished to reform Judaism. He never denounced the Jewish God, Yahweh; rather, he claimed himself to be the Son of God. Why were not the Jews happy to see the Son of their beloved God? Why did the Jews kill a noble man whose only crime was that he claimed to be the Son of God? God of almost all religions is supposed to be a father or creator of every creature. The problem was in the fundamentalist nature of Jews, and their obstinacy was responsible for the barbaric act they committed. Jesus never questioned the existence of God and just added a human element to it.

From the period of development to the present, Reformed theologians have debated the finer points (particularly the relation of the Sinai covenant to the covenant of grace). Nevertheless, a consensus emerged (evident, for example, in the Westminster Confession) affirming the three covenants I have mentioned: the eternal covenant of redemption; the covenant of works; and the covenant of grace. With these last two covenants, Reformed theology affirmed (with Lutheranism) the crucial distinction between law and gospel, but within a more concrete biblical-historical framework...Ironically, just at the moment when so much Protestant biblical scholarship is rejecting a sharp distinction between law and gospel, Ancient Near Eastern scholars from Jewish and Roman Catholic traditions have demonstrated the accuracy of that seminal distinction between covenant of law and covenants of promise. P.13

Judaism, the most ritually liberal of the three main denominations (along with Orthodox and Conservative), accepted patrilineal descent as a criterion of Jewishness. This opened up new fissures with the state-sponsored Chief Rabbinate in Israel, which held fiercely to the standard of matrilineality. It also opened up broader divisions between American Jews and the State of Israel over whether those converted to Judaism by Reform—or, for that matter, Conservative—rabbis should be considered Jews under Israel’s “Law of Return,” which grants an expedited path to citizenship to Jews. Within Israel itself, debates have been vigorous about the status of hundreds of thousands of new immigrants over the past three decades or so—Ethiopians and Russians who moved to Israel but were not considered

Ottoman lands became the center of a new eastern Sephardi diaspora, Christian Europe became the home of a western dispersion. Spanish exiles, as well as conversos who wanted to end the duplicity of their existence as outward Christians, made their way in the fifteenth century to Italy, France, England, Germany, and the Low Countries. Insofar as some of these countries had previously expelled their Jews, the new arrivals set about gingerly, revealing very gradually their Jewish origins and customs in cities from Venice to London. Some of these settings proved more tolerant than others, especially those that had fallen under the arc of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, whose guiding motto of Sola Scriptura indicated a renewed appreciation for the Bible, the Hebrew language, and, in some cases, Jews themselves.

Because legitimacy comes from fighting for what’s right, politicians who compromise for the sake of interest or power have sold their souls and lost their legitimacy. For amateurs, justice means not a transactional outcome but fidelity to an abstract ideal, like the public interest. They are suspicious of compromise, loyalty, insiders, inducements, deals. Being amateurs, they typically have jobs outside of politics or enter the political fray only temporarily, a fact which they will trumpet as a source of disinterest and political chastity. (In New York, Wilson notes, anti-Tammany reformers in the 1950s were heavily drawn from Protestant and Jewish middle-class young professionals.) Not being repeat players, they can afford to play single hands for high stakes, and they cannot easily be held accountable for losing.

In both Europe and the United States, that debate is currently polarized between a right that seeks to cut off immigration altogether and would like to send current immigrants back to their countries of origin and a left that asserts a virtually unlimited obligation on the part of liberal democracies to accept migrants. The real focus should instead be on strategies for better assimilating immigrants to a country’s creedal identity. Well-assimilated immigrants bring a healthy diversity to any society, and the benefits of immigration can be fully realized. Poorly assimilated immigrants are a drag on the state and in some cases constitute dangerous security threats. Europeans pay lip service to the need for better assimilation, but fail to follow through with an effective set of policies. The reform agenda here is highly varied since individual European countries approach the problem very differently. Many countries have in place policies that actively impede integration, such as the Dutch system of pillarization. Britain and a number of other European countries provide public funding for Muslim schools, just as they support Christian and Jewish schools.

Jesus was a Jew, and so were his father and mother. He thought his fellow Jews had strayed too far from their faith, and all his preaching was an effort to get them to reform. So the Jewish leaders at the time wouldn’t have killed him. They’d simply have excommunicated him.” “Excommunicated?” “Expelled him from their church, only they called that church a synagogue,” explained Eleanor. “As for the crucifixion, Jews never crucified anyone. That was a Roman punishment, and they did quite a lot of it in fact. The road to Rome was lined with crucifixes.