In Commentary, Daniel Gordis asks, Are Young Rabbis Turning on Israel?, then answers in the affirmative.
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Twice on Yom Ha-Zikaron, once in the evening and once again in the morning, the country’s air raid sirens sound. On sidewalks, pedestrians come to a halt and stand at attention, and even on highways, cars slow and stop; drivers and passengers alike step out of their vehicles and stand in silence until the wail of the siren abates. For two minutes each time, the state of Israel surrenders itself to the grip of utter silence and immobility. During that quiet, one feels a sense of belonging, a palpable sense of gratitude and unstated loyalty that simply defies description.
I mused on this fact as I read a recent message sent to students at the interdenominational rabbinical school at Boston’s Hebrew College, asking them to prepare themselves for Yom Ha-Zikaron by musing on the following paragraph: “For Yom Ha-Zikaron, our kavanah [intention] is to open up our communal remembrance to include losses on all sides of the conflict in Israel/Palestine. In this spirit, our framing question for Yom Ha-Zikaron is this: On this day, what do you remember and for whom do you grieve?”
Gordis was shocked. So he investigated. This article is the outcome. The problem is far more widespread in rabbinical schools that you can imagine.
He asks,
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What has happened to this generation of young rabbinical students? Why are their instincts so different from those of my generation? Four factors seem to me central.
And then speculates on the answer. DON’T MISS IT.
Actually there was no need for her to ‘answer.’
The clue to the gist of it is in the word, claim.
Her question was unmistakably rhetorical.
Wishful thinking.
I’ve never ended up with ‘egg on my face’ in any exchange I’ve ever had with you, Yahnkeleh.
The posting record all over this site is clear for anyone to see.
Furthermore, I ‘contorted’ nothing.
(Frankly I think it is yourself who is doing the contorting — to cast me into a form you can easily dispose of; but it’s never worked for you before, and it isn’t working now either.)
Since when does my citing the Pirkei Avot [“Ethics of the Fathers”] constitute a ‘SCRIPTURAL counter’?
A ‘counter’ to what?
And why would I WANT to ‘counter’ anything in her piece?
Rigler’s citing of Rav Kook fundamentally confirms what I said above [June 3, 1:05 am]:
Nu?
You would do well, Yamit, to take her (and his) counsel.
Come to think of it,
it seems to harken to something I recall from somewhere else too:
“Whoever says, ‘I love God’ — yet loves not his brother
is a liar.
“For how can he love not his brother
whom he has seen
and yet love God,
Whom he has not seen?”
[1 John 4:20]
Catarin and Narvey you should read this as well!!
The Hebrew Origin of Human Language
EDENICS
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:RCjyPU81bKUJ:edenics.homestead.com/sampler_1.doc+%E2%80%9Cthe+origin+of+speeches%E2%80%9D&hl=en
Gordis often complains that the ultra religious produce nothing, live off the dole, don’t serve and become violent if someone violates their space. Not the ideal citizen.
Bill Narvey
Just a suggestion: Teach Hebrew as a primary language to every Jewish kid you can convince. Subsidize such an effort even in place moneys earmarked for Israel. In a generation you will see the positive results. Everything else I think will be both a non starter and doomed to fail.
The Hebrew they don’t teach you in Hebrew school
Hebrew is not a natural language. In the Biblical Hebrew, almost all words are composed of three-letter roots. There are some two-letter roots from which the third letter drops out, a few very ancient two-letter roots, and a handful of four-letter roots consisting of duplicated two-letter roots (like klkl). These few exceptions need not distract us now, as we’re dealing with three-letter roots.
Such rigid root structure should already raise suspicion in people used to modern languages, where roots can be of any length. Add the fact that Hebrew roots are consonant-only; vowels create parts of speech: catav – he wrote, cotev – the one writing (I’m talking of the real Hebrew, not the Zionist language), mi-ctav – a letter, and so on. No other language group comes close to this mathematically structured rigidity.
Take a few English words starting with, for example, n+s: nasal, nascent, nash, nasty, nest, nostalgia, and others. Nothing in common among those words. But marvel at what happens in Hebrew: n-sh-v – to breeze, n-sh-hey – to forget, dislocation (the sense of fleeing away, gone with the wind), n-sh-m – woman (soft wind-like fluidity), n-sh-c – to bite (cf. to kiss, related to mouth breezing), n-sh-l – to throw out (to blow away), n-sh-m – to breathe, n-sh-ph – to breathe at someone, cool weather, n-sh-k – to kiss cf. breathe), n-sh-r – eagle (from, to peck; cf. hover, move fluently with breeze), n-sh-t – to dry (to blow the vapor away). The common meaning is unmistakable: fluidity.
What does that mean? Quite simply, that Hebrew didn’t develop through evolution. Someone consciously created Hebrew words by adding a third letter to the two-letter root cells (such as making n-sh-k from the n-sh root cell). What’s more, this means that our “caveman grammarian” had the alphabet at his disposal when creating words, whereas the normal process is the opposite: alphabets crystallize from spoken languages. The presence of the alphabet means that Hebrew was a written language from the beginning; it did not pass through the standard stage of being a spoken-only language.
Think of this carefully. If you need proof of God, this is it.
Language: The Chattering of Chimps or Babble from Babel?
The Origin of Speeches:
I’m surprised Yamit that you ask me for definitions, which I figured are pretty obvious since not only is Gordis’ view of Judaic/Jewish particularism evident in his piece, it has been evident in what you are others have written about.
Particularism – Judaic beliefs, dictates and doctrines in Judaic writings since and including the Torah as written, expositions on those beliefs, dictates and doctrines by our Rabbis, sages, philosophers and intellectuals that explain and demonstrate how Judaism can and has evolved within the context of ever advancing modernity, without compromising fundamental core beliefs, doctrines and values.
Rabbis and Jews who seek to incorporate modern secular universalist and mulitcultural thinking and values into the fabric and essence of Judaism are thus seeking to reform Judaism from a religion in the particular to a secular universalist creed or ideology in the general.
Exceptionalism – Judaism is exceptional in many obvious ways as is Israel.
Obama has denied American exceptionalism and is beginning to take heat for that as well he should. Rabbis and Jews who deny Judaism, Jews and Israel are exceptional should also take heat, but also efforts should be made to persuade them to abandon those views and to see Judaism, themselves and Israel as exceptional and take pride and strength from knowing that.
Gordis is an ass.
He supported evicting 10,000 Jews even though it was “painful” for him.
He now says it was a “mistake we had to make” (speaking of the Expulsion).
He hasn’t done shit for the 10,000 Jews who have to pay for the MISTAKE he supported.
And he wonders why American Jews can’t support Israel? Maybe it’s because Israel is running away from its Jewish heritage and roots.
Blogging one liners to express disgust with those new generation of Rabbis and Jews who incorporate universalism for the sake of all humanity into their views of Judaism and Israel, does not do justice to the phenomenon Gordis plaintively addresses. These one liners contribute nothing to the call by Gordis to analyze this phenomenon in order to be better able to combat it.
These universalist Rabbis and Jews seek engagement with their enemies to feel their pain, understand their dissatisfaction and aspirations and to bring them to share that same universalist ideal they espouse in the hopes that will bring all humanity to live in peace and love in spite of different minds.
Those of us Jews who share Gordis’ pain at this phenomenon, will not turn those universalist Jews to our way of thinking by simply denigrating and dismissing them as Jewish pariahs.
No one turns minds by turning their backs on those they disagree with. We must engage them to turn their minds.
I encourage all who share Gordis’ views to do more – a whole lot more than blogging one line expressions of disgust and rejection. A good place to start is to reach out to these universalist Jews to try to persuade them to turn away from universalism and to the particularism/exceptionalism of Judaism and Israel.
She did ans. But it is soooo anti Christian, soooo anti Jesus you are contorting to find a scriptural counter but as always come up with egg on your face.
CONCENTRIC CIRCLES OF LOVE
“Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935) developed a paradigm for love in terms of concentric circles. He wrote that first a Jew must love himself, the center of the circle. The next step is to focus on loving one’s family. The next concentric circle outward is love for the Jewish people. Beyond that, one should strive to love all human beings. The outermost circle is love for all living creatures.
Success with the inner circles impacts one’s success with the outer circles. A person who hates himself will have great difficulty loving others. A person who does not love his own siblings or cousins often bears only a specious love for all Israel. How can a Jew claim to love all humanity but hate his own people? A person who is devoted to saving the whales but couldn’t care less about saving starving Africans suffers from a glaring myopia.
Judaism considers the entire creation worthy of love (for, after all, who created it?), but prioritizes according to an inner logic. Thus, the Mishna lists “loving all humanity” as one of the prerequisites for acquiring Torah (Ethics of the Fathers 6:6) and Torah law forbids causing unnecessary pain to animals. No circle is skipped, but the more genuine the love, the more it will radiate from the center out.”
From the Rigler piece [on Aish] linked by Yamit:
Such a person has forgotten that Hillel’s much-cited aphorism has not one part but two (well, three — but I’m addressing the first two here):
“If I am not for myself, WHO will be for me?
— and if I am ONLY for myself, what am I?” [Pirkei Avot 1:14]
Both parts are essential.
But vital ALSO is the order in which they are expressed.
If the order is ignored, then Hillel’s second clause is no longer an extension of the first
— and instead the two are put at ENMITY to each other,
though this is clearly & most assuredly NOT his intent.
Why not just use Gordis’ title?
So convert. What are you talking about?
This is a very interesting discussion.
How should Jewish believers relate to non-Jews who want to become believers? Part of Jewish belief is the acceptance that being Jewish is a matter of family. If your biological family is not Jewish, then you are not Jewish. Jewish authority and the rabbis are strictly concerned with Jews, their purpose is to promote the beliefs and practices of Judaism among Jews and nobody else. And this is a tough job already. Anyone who honestly wishes to convert to Jewish belief must accept the fundamental belief of who a Jew is, if your family is not Jewish, then as a matter of the Jewish beliefs you accept, you must conclude that you are not Jewish. And what rabbi can a convert go to except one who is soft on the notion of who a Jew is, what else are they likely to be soft on?
No other religion has this problem. It is an advantage over Christianity and Islam which have become monsters in history in their lust to submit non-believers to their beliefs. Even professed believers risk their lives against the policing of beliefs by these religions. And it all starts with the quest for converting non-believers. The presence of non-believers is always a threat. But Hinduism and Buddhism are much softer on conversion and beliefs like Confucianism and Taoism hardly require conversion at all.
The world must confront the lies spread about Jews and Jewish belief and overturn them. Global authorities have placed too much stake in these lies, there is too much power invested in too much that reduces to nothing more than a sadistic frenzy. Should Jews then advance what is true about being Jewish and Jewish belief, especially where it contradicts the beliefs of Christianity and Islam? Is this necessary? Isn’t it inevitable that there be those when confronted with their truth, then wish to embrace that truth as their own?
Where do they go?
Maybe the title should be “Good heavens! I’ve created a monster!”
That’s because author Daniel Gordis is the founding dean of this very parallel school of junk-Judaism on the West Coast.
“Rabbis for Human Wrongs”
The opposite of Universalism is community, not sectarianism.
My mother-in-law, an 85-year-old widow, fainted in the plane while flying from Florida home to Los Angeles. Suddenly she had felt dizzy and had risen to tell the stewardess. The next thing she knew, she was lying on the floor of the first-class compartment being worked on by two doctors. The plane made an emergency landing in Austin, Texas. She was taken by ambulance to South Austin Hospital.
Three hours later she was still lying in a cubicle in the emergency department when we, calling frantically from Jerusalem, caught up with her. Mom kept insisting she was okay and wanted to go home. The doctor, however, explained that they were doing blood tests at 8-hour intervals to determine whether she had had a heart attack.
Our greatest worry was that she was totally alone. Neither we nor Mom knew a soul in Austin, Texas….Read Full Article
Ted,
Rav Meir Kahane would have called it:
“The College of Leaving Judaism”.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I just inserted a heading. Does anyone have a better one?
Ted, you’re missing a heading/title entry line for this article.
This is the result when Judaism becomes a shallow ethical religion influenced by the majority non Jewish culture. The ethics become a corruption of Jewish ethics and a negation of the Judaism based on a national/religious structure which is the basis and core principle of Torah Judaism.
Rambam
The state, from the position of the Rambam, is the tool that molds the character of the Jewish people. That without the commonwealth there can be no Jewish existence.
I thought The Belmont Club closed down years ago.
Let me offer everyone a very relevant quote that I found on that (other) wonderful blog, The Belmont Club:
hahahhaha – I missed that very important keyword. Interdenominational = not interested in the truth. No thanks, you might as well interview jehovah’s witnesses.
interdenominational rabbinical school
New Age American Tripe. Judaism it’s not.
Keep em away from Israel.
Nobody here but JINOs!
There’s your problem right there.
Rabbis? You’re lucky if they’re Jews:
Hebrew College
Don’t miss the movie!
Looking forward to reading this one.