levite

So, guy44's answer to this was in essence right, I'd just like to flesh it out a little more. There is no irrevocable split in Judaism. If I were Protestant from birth, and wished to become Catholic, I would have to convert, and be re-baptized according to Catholic doctrines, and so forth. The same holds true for joining most Eastern Orthodox churches. As far as I know, a number of Protestant sects would also demand conversion of some kind, even if only a profession and baptism. The fact that one began as a Christian and ends up as a Christian wouldn't matter. However, although there are considerable differences of opinion amongst the movements in Judaism, one thing everyone agrees on is that if your mother was Jewish, you're a Jew. (As I mentioned above, the Reform movement now holds the same for your father, but nobody else does, and the Reform movement also holds matrilineal descent as well as patrilineal.) Everyone would also agree that one is Jewish if one converts, although the Reform movement, and the fringe movements to the left of it, are fairly lax on what constitutes a legal conversion. But if my mother were Jewish, or if I had an Orthodox conversion, everyone in the Jewish world would agree that I was a Jew: I could move from movement to movement, abandon movements altogether, even renounce my Judaism, and by Jewish law I would still be Jewish, and I would never be required to undergo a second conversion or any other rites of passage or transference. In that sense, there is still a unity to the Jewish People that Christianity has simply never had.

That said, the divisions among us are not insubstantial, and in many ways they are growing. The left wing of Reform Judaism is growing progressively leftward, and the right wing of Reform Judaism is small. Orthodoxy is growing ever more zealous and strict in its interpretations of the law, shutting more and more doors to the non-Orthodox. And the actions of the Reform movement over the past 30 years in declaring patrilineal descent, combined with their laissez-faire attitude about intermarriage, is slowly but surely creating a situation that those of us in the Conservative and Modern Orthodox movements never wanted to see, in that soon, if a Reform youth wishes to marry a Conservative or Modern Orthodox youth, a check will likely have to be made into their parentage, since we traditional movements can no longer trust the Reform movement that their members and children are all Jewish according to the traditional halakhah. And that is a very sad sign.

But even that is a separation based not on purposeful action, but on a huge mistake that the Reform movement seems unable to take back, and their simple negligence when it comes to confronting intermarriage. It's passive, it's nothing like Luther's decisive rejection of the church at Worms.

The roots of Reform Judaism, in the 19th century-- the Reform movement was the first non-Orthodox movement, and in numbers still dominates the smaller Conservative movement, which appeared at the turn of the 20th century-- were deeply Enlightenment, arising out of a desire to turn Europe's emancipation of its long-oppressed Jewish populace into impetus for creating a modern, culturally polished, secularly accepted Judaism. The movement began in Germany, and thus the roots of Reform liturgy, synagogue etiquette, prayer aesthetics, customs of daily practice and deportment, etc., are all consciously pattered after German Reformed Lutheranism of the 19th Century.

In no small measure, the tendency of Orthodoxy in Europe over the past 200 years, and in America over the past 60-odd years, to become increasingly strict, rigid, and closed-off, is the reaction to the rise, dramatic increase, and prospering of Reform Judaism. The fact that, in modern America, there is also the issue of secular assimilationism, only adds to the effect. Each side has been pushing the other, and we may yet see an actual breaking in the next 50-100 years. It is extremely disquieting.

---------- Post added at 08:00 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:40 PM ----------

Xazy's answer is, to my mind, a good Orthodox answer. Speaking as a non-Orthodox Jew, the synagogue has traditionally been a relatively male-dominated place. Women have traditionally been compelled to sit in a separate section, usually either in a balcony, or behind a screen or wall in the back.

Some Modern Orthodox synagogues run the separation down the middle, creating a vertical separation rather than a horizontal. And some use slightly smaller screens, or substitue curtains.

The seating in non-Orthodox synagogues is mixed.

According to Orthodox interpretations of halakhah, a woman is not obligated to say many of the key prayers, or to perform many key ritual acts, and therefore, she cannot be a public prayer leader. She cannot receive the honor of being called to the Torah, to have the reader read a portion of the text on her behalf, as men are called to the Torah to have portions of the text read by the reader on their behalf. Nor can she chant from the Torah or Books of the Prophets, or other sacred texts, publicly and aloud, since the traditional Orthodox belief is that women's voices are sexually arousing, and therefore improper to hear in song. They may not wear tallitot (prayer shawls) or tefillin (phylacteries: kind of ritual talismans. They're complicated to explain. Ask separately if you like, or look up). And the tradition in Orthodoxy has been that women do not receive rabbinic ordination, although there is a Modern Orthodox institution in Israel that has begun training women for ordination, and there is a yeshiva (rabbinical college) in New York that is debating whether or not to begin ordaining women.

In non-Orthodox congregations, women may do all of the above, and all non-Orthodox movements ordain women to be rabbis, and train them to be cantors.

Some Sefardi or Mizrahi communities, while technically Orthodox, have been traditionally much looser in their interpretations of the restrictions on women, and in those communities women have sometimes been granted some of these rights and duties. And there have occasionally been wise women in ancient Ashkenazi history who have done some of these things.


Xazy answered this one pretty well. I would add that even when there are prominent rabbis in the community to whom many turn for advice, dissension is traditionally very tolerated. There is a strong, strong tradition in halakhah that dissent and disagreement is respected, tolerated, and expected as normal. Thus, not only is there-- as Xazy pointed out-- no hierarchy at all, there is even less than a Christian might expect, since the halakhah has traditionally presumed that different rabbis will hold different positions from one another, and that is okay.

__________________
Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)