Status Updates From Who Are the Jews―And Who Ca...

“They also need to understand that for Israelis, fifty plus years of occupying another people has come at a profound moral cost. It is difficult to sustain a sense of moral obligation toward a people who you believe has rejected your right to exist and who has eliminated peace and coexistence as an option.”

“If Israel and North American Jewry were to disengage from each other, my principal concern would not be about Israel’s political well being but whether my Jewish story is in danger of coming to an end - a Genesis emergency. I have no Judaism without my people.”

“I am left with one major problem with regard to the entire question of our relationship to the State of Israel. I think the worst thing that Zionism and the State of Israel have done for us is to give us another topic in America which cannot be debated. We now have a subject on which no arguments are allowed, no criticism. A new sacred cow is introduced.”

“His (Maimonides) own life’s work centered around the same mission: to try to save his own commitment to Judaism by reinterpreting that which he found alienating within the tradition he’d inherited.”

“In practice, “intolerable deviants” may not be kicked out of the Jewish community. Instead, they may be stigmatized as a member in lesser standing unworthy of communal compassion or concern of hatred in humiliating and alienating ways from fully participating (in religious and communal life).” Is this the premise for alienating get refusers and sexual abusers?

“Pluralism assigns equal value to (certain) opposing positions. It means being cognizant of difference without asserting hierarchical claims. Pluralism does not necessitate the acceptance of all positions, but it does recognize the possibility of equally valuable goals that cannot be “graded on one scale”. It allows us to see others’ very different viewpoints as being just as authentic as our own.”

“While indispensable for social cohesion, boundaries can also be abused and used to undermine the possibility of shared communal life. The purpose of his boundary was not to define the core features of his beliefs, or to challenge others to join him therein, but to divide the community along denominational lines, with Orthodoxy standing alone behind its new nonnegotiable red line.”

“But do we solely want to be Genesis Jews, with unconditional loyalty to Jews and no one else? …The Genesis Covenant is a powerful source of identity, but on its own, I believe, it can breed moral mediocrity and even depravity… Being Jewish must entail more than the Genesis Covenant if the identify is to be worthy of our loyalty.”

“In the Genesis Covenant, God extends God’s grace upon the Jewish people, accepts them unconditionally, and demands of us the same: to emulate this unconditional acceptance in our treatment of each other.”