Reform Judaism Quotes

New Rule: Just because a country elects a smart president doesn't make it a smart country. A couple of weeks ago, I was asked on CNN if I thought Sarah Palin could get elected president, and I said I hope not, but I wouldn't put anything past this stupid country. Well, the station was flooded with emails, and the twits hit the fan. And you could tell that these people were really mad, because they wrote entirely in CAPITAL LETTERS!!! Worst of all, Bill O'Reilly refuted my contention that this is a stupid country by calling me a pinhead, which (a) proves my point, and (b) is really funny coming from a doody-face like him. Now, before I go about demonstration how, sadly, easy it is to prove the dumbness that's dragging us down, let me just say that ignorance has life-and-death consequences. On the eve of the Iraq War, seventy percent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11. Six years later, thirty-four percent still do. Or look at the health-care debate: At a recent town hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his congressman to "keep your government hands off my Medicare," which is kind of like driving cross-country to protest highways. This country is like a college chick after two Long Island iced teas: We can be talked into anything, like wars, and we can be talked out of anything, like health care. We should forget the town halls, and replace them with study halls. Listen to some of these stats: A majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is. Twenty-four percent could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War. More than two-thirds of Americans don't know what's in Roe v. Wade. Two-thirds don't know what the Food and Drug Administration does. Some of this stuff you should be able to pick up simply by being alive. You know, like the way the Slumdog kid knew about cricket. Not here. Nearly half of Americans don't know that states have two senators, and more than half can't name their congressman. And among Republican governors, only three got their wife's name right on the first try. People bitch and moan about taxes and spending, but they have no idea what their government spends money on. The average voter thinks foreign aid consumes more twenty-four percent of our budget. It's actually less than one percent. A third of Republicans believe Obama is not a citizen ad a third of Democrats believe that George Bush had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, which is an absurd sentence, because it contains the words "Bush" and "knowledge." Sarah Palin says she would never apologize for America. Even though a Gallup poll say eighteen percent of us think the sun revolves around the earth. No, they're not stupid. They're interplanetary mavericks. And I haven't even brought up religion. But here's one fun fact I'll leave you with: Did you know only about half of Americans are aware that Judaism is an older religion than Christianity? That's right, half of America looks at books called the Old Testament and the New Testament and cannot figure out which came first. I rest my case.

Founded in 1876, the Ethical Culture Society inculcated in its members a commitment to social action and humanitarianism: “Man must assume responsibility for the direction of his life and destiny.” Although an outgrowth of American Reform Judaism, Ethical Culture was itself a “non-religion,” perfectly suited to upper-middle-class German Jews, most of whom, like the Oppenheimers, were intent on assimilating into American society. Felix Adler and his coterie of talented teachers promoted this process and would have a powerful influence in the molding of Robert Oppenheimer’s psyche, both emotionally and intellectually.

The call for justice was a protest as fierce as those of the biblical prophets and of Jesus, and the similarity of the call was no coincidence. As with early Judaism and early Christianity, early Islam would be rooted in opposition to a corrupt status quo. Its protest of inequity would be an integral part of the demand for inclusiveness, for unity and equality under the umbrella of the one god regardless of lineage, wealth, age, or gender. This is what would make it so appealing to the disenfranchised, those who didn't matter in the grand Meccan scheme of things, like slaves and freedmen, widows and orphans, all those cut out of the elite by birth or circumstance. And it spoke equally to the young and idealistic, those who had not yet learned to knuckle under to the way things were and who responded to the deeply egalitarian strain of the verses. All were equal before God, the thirteen-year-old Ali as important as the most respected graybeard, the daughter as much as the son, the African slave as much as the highborn noble. It was a potent and potentially radical re-envisioning of society. This was a matter of politics as much as of faith. The scriptures of all three of the great monotheisms show that they began similarly as popular movements in protest against the privilege and arrogance of power, whether that of kings as in the Hebrew bible, or the Roman Empire as in the Gospels, or a tribal elite as in the Quran. All three, that is, were originally driven by ideals of justice and egalitarianism, rejecting the inequities of human power in favor of a higher and more just one. No matter how far they might have strayed from their origins as they became institutionalized over time, the historical record clearly indicates that what we now call the drive for social justice was the idealistic underpinning of monotheistic faith.

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

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

Mit der Dialogfähigkeit ist es nicht nötig, vom Bewährten abzurücken, gleichwohl es zur Stunde an allen Glaubensvertretern ist, der herben Enttäuschung ihrer Anhänger Halt zu gebieten und die verlorenen Schafe wieder in den Schoß ihrer Gemeinden zurückzuholen, in anderen Worten Religion als Marktmodell des Nutzens zu begreifen.

Erleben, Überleben und Ableben hängen vom Bewusstsein der Pluralisierung, Aktualisierung, Individualisierung, Aufopferung, Erziehung und Ausübung ab, mithin von der Dialogfähigkeit als dem Ergebnis einer kritischen Hinterfragung des Gebarens und damit der Wünsche der Gläubigen.

Je mehr sich der kleine Moritz durch Korruption und Misswirtschaft, Autorität und Gewalt sozial ungerecht behandelt fühlt, desto größer ist sein Verlangen danach, sich wenigstens mit seinem Glauben noch ein Stück Identität und also Würde zu bewahren.

Where did that remark come from? Mormonism, as anyone can easily find out, is one of a number of Christian sects which came into being in the USA in the nineteenth century. It differs from mainstream Christianity on certain technical points which Dawkins would at least pretend not to understand. So why write "four if you count Mormonism"? Why not "five if you count Mormonism and Christian Science"? Or "ten if you include Mormonism, Christian Science, Christedelphians, Jehovah's Witnesses, Reformed Judaism, Shi'ite Islam, Strict Baptists, Celtic Orthodox, Unitarians and Quakers?" Does Dawkins think that the Mormons' adoptionist Christology is so far removed from the mainstream as to constitute a separate faith (while the Jehovah's Witnesses' arianism is not?) Or is he playing a numbers game, saying that the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-day Saints is so numerous as to count as a religion in its own right, distinct from "Christianity". (But then, why not "Four if you include Catholicism"?) We never find out. Like Melchizidec, it comes from nowhere and it goes nowhere. It popped into Dawkins head and he wrote it down. It makes me doubt whether our author is fully in command of his brief."Four if you include Mormons". Honestly, you might just as well say "Britain consists of three countries: England, Scotland and Wales – or four if you include Tooting Bec.

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.

Until Islam can do what Judaism and Christianity have done—question, critique, interpret, and ultimately modernize its holy scripture—it cannot free Muslims from a host of anachronistic and at times deadly beliefs and practices.

If American Jews are to effect change in Israel to make room for their brand of pluralism, they need numbers. No political change is ever possible without numbers. And there are no numbers in Israel for the kind of Judaism that Americans have in America. To get the big numbers, liberal American Jews have to decide who their actual potential allies are. If they seek Israeli Jews who will have a positive attitude towards religion, then they are likely to be non-liberal Orthodox Jews who reject their form of practice completely. If they seek Israeli Jews who will share their values of pluralism, equality, tolerance, feminism and liberalism, they are, by and large, likely to be the shrimp-eating-Shabbat-driving Jews, whose attitudes to religion range from revulsion to apathy. If Conservative, Reform and generally liberal American Jews seek partners in Israel who share both their liberal values and positive attitude towards religion, they will limit themselves to a pool of citizens that is barely likely to get one seat in the Knesset.

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.

So the deuteronomists codified the religion. Made it into an organized, self-propagating entity,” Hiro says. “I don’t want to say virus. But according to what you just quoted me, the Torah is like a virus. It uses the human brain as a host. The host—the human—makes copies of it. And more humans come to synagogue and read it.” “I cannot process an analogy. But what you say is correct insofar as this: After the deuteronomists had reformed Judaism, instead of making sacrifices, the Jews went to synagogue and read the Book. If not for the deuteronomists, the world’s monotheists would still be sacrificing animals and propagating their beliefs through the oral tradition.

Maybe you go to mass every day. But if you live for your own selfish benefit, and have no concern for the difficulties of your neighbour, as if they did not touch you at all, then all you have done is take part in the sacrament in a merely outward way. The sacrifice of the mass, in a spiritual sense, means that we become one body with the Body of Christ, living members of His Church. If your love for things is guided by Christ, if you think all your possessions to be things you hold in trust for the good of all, if you take upon yourself the difficulties and sufferings of your neighbour as if they were your own, then you may take part in mass very fruitfully, because now you take part in a spiritual way… But to worship Christ with nothing more than outward ceremonies, as if such worship were the height of spirituality, while all the time you are puffed up with self-importance, and condemn other people, and think yourself secure because you live and die in your outward worship: well, the very ordinances of worship that were meant to draw you to Christ will withdraw you from Him. Your religion is a rebellion against the spirit of the Gospel, a falling back into the superstitions and rituals of Judaism ... The apostle Paul, the foremost defender of spiritual religion, never ceased trying to get the Jews to give up their confidence in outward works and rituals, and to lead them to spiritual realities. Yet I feel that the great majority of Christians have fallen back again into that sickness.

The teaching of the Buddha is called the Dhamma. He did not teach Buddhism, any more than Jesus taught Christianity. The one wanted to reform Judaism, the other to reform Brahmanism. Neither succeeded, but each unwittingly started a new religion. The movements they started were reforms of ancient religions which, because the spirit had left them and only the letter still was observed, had deteriorated into rites and rituals, and social norms. Today we come across this very same problem everywhere.

The earliest Christians did not consider themselves followers of a new religion. All of their lives they had been Jews and they still were. This was true of Peter and the twelve, of the seven, and of Paul. Their faith was not a denial of Judaism but was rather the conviction that the messianic age had finally arrived.

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.

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

When Calls A Promise: I made a promise to someone that I would protect humankind with my life - that I would let no savagery, no prejudice, no sectarianism tear my people apart - that I would spend every breath of my life in uniting my people - the people of earth. And my very existence is the living manifestation of that promise. Don't make promises that you know not whether you will be able to keep, but once you do make a promise, keep it at all cost, even at the cost of your life, which is exactly the kind of promise I made - to give my life in the unification of humankind. Initially I thought I would achieve that by erasing the religious barriers amongst people. Hence, in the beginning I wrote ceaselessly on religion, but as I kept studying the tenets of the society, I came to realize that the barriers amongst people have invaded every aspect of life and society, much beyond the mere traditional bounds of religion - they have invaded the very lifeblood of society and have been tearing the society apart from inside out. I came to realize that the religion of the future is not going to be christianity, islam, judaism or any such traditional system, rather, the religion of the future is going to be social justice. And the best way to shape the future is to envision it early on and start manufacturing it today. Thus, though initially the primary premise of my work was religion, eventually it acquired much wider and diverse societal roots. My purpose remains the same, that is, to unite you all, to unite my seven billion sisters and brothers of earth, but I had to make a few changes to my approach based on the need of the time as I kept evolving with my work. I started off as a scientist, but the needs of the society turned me into a reformer. Society needed not yet another scientist, it needed a reformer scientist, so I became one. All my life my need has been to serve the need of the society - need mark you, not desire. There is a difference between what the society desires and what it really needs. Society may desire for more bigotry, more segregation, more rigidity, more separatism, but that's not what the society needs - a civilized society needs humility, not bigotry - it needs inclusion, not segregation - it needs reason, not rigidity - it needs assimilation, not separatism.

His upbringing in Reform Judaism had trained him to believe that as a Jew he had to right the wrongs of the world.

In the beginning I wrote ceaselessly on religion, but as I kept studying the tenets of the society, I came to realize that the barriers amongst people have invaded every aspect of life and society, much beyond the mere traditional bounds of religion - they have invaded the very lifeblood of society and have been tearing the society apart from inside out. I came to realize that the religion of the future is not going to be christianity, islam, judaism or any such traditional system, rather, the religion of the future is going to be social justice. And the best way to shape the future is to envision it early on and start manufacturing it today. Thus, though initially the primary premise of my work was religion, eventually it acquired much wider and diverse societal roots. My purpose remains the same, that is, to unite you all, to unite my seven billion sisters and brothers of earth, but I had to make a few changes to my approach based on the need of the time as I kept evolving with my work. I started off as a scientist, but the needs of the society turned me into a reformer.

This stratification of Judaism is confusing, so I'll explain it as it relates to bacon. In Judaism the major players are: Reformed eat bacon and love it; Conservative- eat bacon only in diners; Orthodox-never touch bacon but secretly wonder what it tastes like; Ultra Orthodox--no way, feh, it's treif, and Chassidic-what is this bacon of which you speak?

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 European intellectual renaissance preceded the translations from the Arabic. The latter were not the cause, but the effect of that renaissance. Like all historical events, it had economic aspects (lands newly under cultivation, new agricultural techniques) and social aspects (the rise of free cities). On the level of intellectual life, it can be understood as arising from a movement that began in the eleventh century, probably launched by the Gregorian reform of the Church.…That conflict bears witness to a reorientation of Christianity toward a transformation of the temporal world, up to that point more or less left to its own devices, with the Church taking refuge in an apocalyptical attitude that said since the world was about to end, there was little need to transform it. The Church’s effort to become an autonomous entity by drawing up a law that would be exclusive to it – Canon Law – prompted an intense need for intellectual tools. More refined concepts were called for than those available at the time. Hence the appeal to the logical works of Aristotle, who was translated from Greek to Latin, either through Arabic or directly from the Greek, and the Aristotelian heritage was recovered.

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

its seeds in Germany, but had come into full flower in the United States, where it was regarded—by the German-American Jews, at least—as an essential step toward assimilation into the American culture. Reform Judaism was touted as “the dominion of reason over blind and bigoted faith,” but it really represented the new dominion of America over the Old World. Among the revisions advocated by Reform was that houses of worship no longer be called synagogues, but instead be known as temples.