Ask a Jew....
 

So, since a couple of people in Dlish's awesome "Ask A Muslim" thread have expressed interest, the "Ask A Jew" thread is now open for business. I am not a bottomless well of Jewish knowledge, but I have good resources to find out what I don't know, and I know some stuff. As many of you know, I'm about to start my fifth and (hopefully) final year of rabbinical school, so it actually is my field, so to speak, and not only my religion.

I should note here that I know there are at least a couple of other forum members who are observant Jews, and I sincerely want to acknowledge them and their knowledge, and not make it seem like I'm shutting them out. You guys, if you want to add, or disagree, or present counterpoints, don't feel like I think this is my party. I'm just a mouthy bastard who's gung-ho for his work, I don't claim any provenance over things Jewish.

That said, note to all that I am nominally a Conservative Jew, although I tend to think of myself more generally as simply a liberal traditional Jew, rather than as a part of a movement. This means that I have a certain frame of understanding Judaism and Jewish law. I was raised Orthodox, and my fiancee is a Reform rabbi, so I do have some understanding of how other movements see things, and I promise I will try always to give a spectrum of answers reflecting that. But if I default to an unspecific answer, know that what you're hearing is a liberal traditional view, and take it as such.

OK, 'nuff said. The sign is flipped to open, and the Jew is in!

How strictly do you adhere to the rules on what you are to eat?


I only ask because my wife works for a Jewish doctor. He will not order a sausage and cheese pizza, or a shrimp eggroll. But if someone else does, he eats it and pretends to ignore the fact that it has things in it he's restricted from.



What specific preparations do you make for the Sabbath, and what do you avoid doing that most people take for granted?

Levite steps up to the plate...
How prevalent was Zionism before World War 2?
I'm assuming you still believe the Messiah is coming, what do you think Jewish people are looking for so far as indications or signs?
Maimonides made a list of 613 commandments, do you follow them or attempt to follow them?
I remember reading somewhere that the woven thread around the outside of a tallit had specific meaning. Am I remembering that correctly?
Is it just a coincidence that more comedians are Jewish, or is there something more going on?

This question isn't so much about the Jewish religion. Why are there so many self-deprecating jew jokes?

Wow, that was fast! OK, boys and girls, here we go...!!!


Even amongst the Orthodox communities, there are variations, and even a spectrum of how strictly one interprets the rules of kashrut (keeping kosher, both in terms of what you eat, and in terms of the various rules of your kitchen and your table, is collectively referred to as kashrut). So there is no one perfect way of observing the laws of kashrut.

That said, from a traditional standpoint, your wife's employer is doing a little bit of friendly cheating. His standards of kashrut seem to me to fall into a fairly common spectrum of center to left-wing non-Orthodox Judaism. Which, being ever-so-slightly to the right of center myself, I find understandable, but regrettable.

Then again, anyone to the right of me, which would include a small slice of the Conservative Movement, and the entirety of Orthodoxy, both Modern and otherwise, would say the same for my practice.

I am pretty firm on that I will not eat forbidden creatures (we'll get back to what falls into that list in a moment), nor will I eat any mixture of meat and dairy, nor will I eat non-kosher meat of any kind. That said, I will sometimes go to non-kosher restaurants, and there consume dairy meals, even though a more Orthodox interpretation of kashrut would say that there is simply no way for a hot (cooked) dairy meal in a non-kosher restaurant to be free from the taint of non-kosher meat. The key difference to me between what I do and what many more loose practitioners of non-Orthodox kashrut does is that I have the opinions of several Conservative rabbis whom I trust that say that to eat dairy in a non-kosher restaurant is halakhically permissible in some cases, and I have researched the issues of Jewish law myself also, to determine how and why I ought to be able to do so, and under what circumstances.

To non-Jews, I understand that this can sound so esoteric and obsessed with minutiae that it's nonsense. I sympathize with that, but this is what comes of Christianity not being a law-based religion. It creates a vastly different experience of what constitutes observance....

In short, I guess I would say my observance of kashrut is stricter than most liberal Jews, less strict that most Orthodox Jews.

BTW, forbidden creatures. The short version is this. If it's a land animal it needs to have split hooves and chew its cud. Basically, ruminants like cows and goats and sheep are kosher. Camels, for example, chew their cud but have no split hoof: not kosher. Pigs have split hooves, but don't chew their cud: not kosher. If it's a bird, the short list is chickens, ducks, geese, pigeons, partridges, quails. There might be a couple of exotics I missed, but that's the basic list. When it comes to fish or things that live in the water: it's got to have fins and scales. Catfish have fins but no scales: not kosher. There's a debate about swordfish: Orthodoxy says they have skin not scales, Conservative Judaism says they have skinlike scales. Crustaceans, cetaceans, anything with tentacles-- all that stuff is not kosher.

Well, I cook all the food I plan to eat over shabbat (the sabbath) on Friday, because cooking is forbidden by traditional Jewish law on shabbat. I keep the stove on warm, and a burner going under an iron plate, so that I can bring foods cooks before shabbat up to temperature on shabbat, because lighting fire is forbidden on shabbat. Before shabbat, I empty my pockets of car keys, money, wallet, coins, etc., because I do not drive on shabbat, nor will I carry money of any kind, or any instruments of doing business (like credit cards). During shabbat (that is, from sunset Friday to after sundown on Saturday) I will not go into stores or restaurants or cafes, and I will not travel. Right before shabbat begins on Friday, my fiancee lights the traditional candles, and says the traditional blessing to mark the beginning of shabbat. Then she sets the table, and I wash up from having been cooking all afternoon and shopping all morning. After that, we sing the traditional prayer service to begin shabbat, and then begin a meal (usually the nicest we can afford) by reciting the blessing sanctifying shabbat over a glass of wine, then making the traditional blessing over bread. We eat, we talk, we have a good meal, and then we finish by singing the grace after meals, and we sit and sing traditional shabbat songs.

So far, all of this is not really anything different than an Orthodox person would tell you. The differences are with things like electricity, which the Orthodox equate with fire, and therefore do not use on shabbat: I will use electricity on shabbat because like most Conservative Jews, I don't equate it with fire. I will write on shabbat if I have to, though traditionally it is forbidden, but I try very hard not to...and mostly, I don't. I don't play music on shabbat, or watch television or dvds, and I mostly don't use my computer, although I believe these things are not technically forbidden (the Orthodox do believe so) on shabbat, I think they distract one from keeping a peaceful, spiritual focus. I will answer the phone on shabbat (Orthodoxy will tell you that's forbidden), but only to chat with close friends and family. I will not talk to co-workers or discuss business of any kind. There are some other things that Orthodoxy would tell you are forbidden on shabbat that I don't hold the same opinion regarding, but nothing earth-shaking.

So what do I do on shabbat? In the morning, technically, I should be going to synagogue, but I don't care for the one near me, so I usually get up and pray at home, and study the weekly portion of Torah (it is customary that every year the Torah [Pentateuch] is read aloud in the synagogue, a portion every week, along with a selection from one of the books of the Prophets), then my fiancee and I have lunch, do some more singing of traditional shabbat songs, then spend the afternoon reading and talking in the pool or hot tub. Often, friends will drop by and hang out with us, talking; or we'll take a nap and make love, until it's time for a light dinner, often accompanied by some more singing, and some discussion of Torah, until shabbat is over, and we ceremonially mark its ending by a ritual involving a candle, spices, and wine.

A lot of non-Jews, I find, are weirded out by shabbat, and their reaction seems to be: "so many things you can't do! don't you get bored?!" But I never do. I look forward to it all week. It's the one day of the week I don't think about work, or school, or money problems, or the problems of the world. All that stuff goes away for that 25 hours, and it's just peacefulness, restfulness, good food and wine, nobody around but friends if we want them, song and leisurely talk of literature and philosophy and spirituality, admiring the world, being happy and grateful for our good lives. I don't know how that could get boring. It keeps me going. There's a saying, "The Jews don't keep Shabbat, Shabbat keeps the Jews."....

As someone who is becoming a Rabbi and engaged to a Rabbi, perhaps you could give me some advice?

I am in my mid-20s and Jewish by birth. I have always identified strongly with Judaism. However, my mother is a non-observant Jew and not the one that instilled me with this sense of identity. I never went to Hebrew school, was never Bat Mitzvah'd, and only brought to a temple (an Orthodox one...very strange to me at the time) as a young child.

I have been curious to get more involved in the spiritual side of Judaism for some years now, but it is scary to me, as someone so ignorant of the prayers, songs, traditions, and the Hebrew language. I once tried to attend a Conservative temple for a few months with a friend of mine but if anything, it actually made me feel more alienated.

How would you advise someone like me? What's a good place to start? I have several books on Judaism, know ABOUT many holidays, customs, history, belief...but going in, praying, being part of a congregation? Adding belief and traditional values to my own, thoroughly modern life? Gah. Do you know anyone who has done this?

Thanks :)

It depends on where you were. In the USA, not very. It was here, but it was very much lost in the jumble, just another enterprising Jewish idealist movement (at least until the onset of troubles associated with the rise of Nazism gave significance to Jews having somewhere to flee).... On the other hand, it was huge in Eastern Europe. Probably because life was good for Jews in America, and it sucked donkeys in Eastern Europe. When you're a penniless Russian peasant, and even if you're a penniless Soviet peasant, the adventurous, idealistic life of a kibbutznik (a worker on a socialist farming collective, which was what most early Zionist settlements were becoming by the end of the 1910s, and had become by around the 1920s or so) seemed pretty freaking sweet. So they made aliyah (emigrated to British Palestine, as it was then called) by the thousands. And not just Russians, either, but from all over the lands that were becoming the Soviet bloc after 1917.... And the support for it was enormous in those quarters. Slightly less in Western Europe, but still more than in America. I think Western European Jews saw this as their great chance to fulfill the Enlightenment dream at last, and be a regular nationalist entity among other nations.

Messianism is a tricky business. I'll be honest with you, there are so many different ideas about messianism floating around the Jewish people, I have no idea what other people are looking for. Except the Chabad hasidim: they're looking for their dead rabbi to come back, and they don't get why the rest of us find that appalling.... I think some people are looking literally for a savior from the House of David to appear. Some are just looking for a Great Leader. The wiser ones aren't looking for a person but for events: Rambam (Maimonides) says that you'll know a man is the messiah if he fulfills the prophecies by reconquering the Land of Israel, building a Third Temple, making peace with the nations, etc. If the events come to pass, the one who led in them is the messiah, if not, claims are worthless.

Myself, I don't necessarily believe in that laundry list of events. But even to the extent I do, it's pretty plain to see none of them will be happening any time soon. There isn't even peace among the Jewish People, let along peace among the nations. And there won't be a Third Temple anytime soon given that the spot it's supposed to be built on is currently occupied by the Dome of the Rock and the Masjid al-Aqsa, whose owners don't strike me as likely to volunteer to move their buildings to one side.

But I do believe in a messiah that will come, and I think Rambam was right to look for events, not people. Because I personally think that the messiah will come not to lead us into a new age, but to inaugurate such a new age with leadership once we have brought it about. I think finding peace among ourselves and the nations is our task as a whole people. And when all those problems are solved, it won't be a problem to build the Temple where it's supposed to be built, nor will the Muslims object to moving their buildings, because the Third Temple will be a joint venture of the Sons of Abraham, and it will be open to all, not just Jews. This, I think, is what Isaiah means when he says, "Even them will I bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer...for mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people." (Is. 56:7)

If you actually read the list-- which I recommend, it's a fascinating little book-- you'll note that it's actually impossible to follow all 613 in one lifetime, since some are specifically commandments for priests, and not regular-joe-israelite Jews, and there are even a couple that are mutually exclusive, although I can't bring them to mind at the moment.

There are some that are inoperable without a Temple, and no Jew can follow them at present, nor will be able to until the time of the messiah.

And there are some that I personally believe must be misunderstood in their classical interpretations, or even perhaps that their phrasing in the Torah constitutes a misinterpretation of what God was attempting to convey to the prophet who wrote them down first. These I do not follow, nor do I demand their observance from others: so, for example, the laws of menstrual purity I find utterly stigmatizing and without redemption. I don't demand of my fiancee that she follow them, and she doesn't, and I don't bother with the business of not coming into contact with a menstruating woman. Any Orthodox person who heard me say that would be horrified, and would consider it a gross betrayal of a fundamental principle of Jewish observance. But there you are. Likewise, the prohibition on homosexuality. I personally am not gay, but I don't demand that anyone follow that prohibition because I refuse to believe in a God who creates gay people and then tells them they must live in celibate shame because they are abominations. Whatever God was trying to convey, the prophet must have been confused, because that verse could not be a word of God. These two items, by the way, are notable not because they represent a vastly different observance from Orthodox observance, but because they are two things that there are currently no legal decisions in halakhah supporting my practice. I am, suffice it to say, researching the precedents in halakhah as part of writing teshuvot (legal decisions) to back up what I am saying here. But generally I don't refuse to do things unless there is a legal decision or precedent in halakhah that supports me.

I follow what I can of those that are possible to follow, there being no Temple, and me not being a priest. With just a couple of exceptions, like those I mentioned above, if I miss some, it's mostly unintentional.

I can only presume you mean tzitzit, the fringes on the corners and sometimes the edges of the tallit (prayer shawl)? The tzitzit are generally four long fringes of interlaced and tied thread on the corners of the tallit, but some people also tie smaller, puffier knots along the edge. Let's see if I can manage to get pictures in here.... You ought to be able to see what I mean-- the close-up shows the usual fringe, the wider shot shows the difference between the tzitzit on the corner and the puffier knots along the edge. So, the little puffy ones are not necessary: they are there, some say, as a reminder of the decorative bells and gold pomegranates that adorned the edges of the high priests outfit in the days of the Temple. But the long tied-thread fringes on the corners are required. They fulfill the commandment that you will find in Numbers 15:37-41. The intricate tying of the fringe varies from Ashkenazi (North/Eastern European) tradition to Sefardi (Spanish/Portuguese tradition) to Mizrahi (North African/Arabian/Persian), with differences in some Hasidic communities, but in all cases is reflective of Kabbalistic notions about patterns and numbers and magical protection.

If you don't mean tzitzit, I'm not sure what you mean.


No, we have a plot.

Just kidding, of course. I dunno. We play to our strengths. Why are most basketball players black? Why are there so many Asians involved in technology? Who knows? But we all seem to be enjoying the fruits of the coincidence....

Because maybe if we get there first and say them as jokes we can get other people to stop saying it and mean it.

I'm only guessing.

That's partially it. From what I understand, American-Jewish humor is strongly rooted in Yiddish/Eastern European humor that developed in Shtetls (the very religious Jewish communities that existed in 19th century Eastern Europe). The Russian empire has always been kind of oppressive and tolerance of the Jews has been an on-off thing throughout history. Pogroms were an unfortunate risk of life.

Jewish/Talmudic teachings encourage us to find the joys in life, to analyze and criticize ourselves, our communities, and that which we don't understand. The next step after finding these flaws, surely, is to then find the humor in them?

The Eastern European Jews developed a dry sense of humor about their uncertain life and humor had to be subtle to avoid the wrath of the people in power when mocking them. You may notice that a lot of Jewish humor is very sarcastic, or brings humor into the way things are said (which words are emphasized, etc). This is very Yiddish. A lot of American-Jewish comedians are really just stealing material from their grandparents or great-grandparents ;)

OK, I am so glad you asked this question! First of all, take heart. I have met bunches of people in your situation, and I know that it can seem unbelievably hard to find your way in, and that if you weren't given certain tools, some people just don't know how to open the door for you. Which sucks, and feels bad, and must be ridiculously offputting. And I'm sorry you've found it so. But I want you to know it can be done: you can get in touch with the traditon, and you can find spiritual satisfaction in it. It can be tough, but I have heard many say (and I agree) that it's worth it.

So here's the deal. I won't lie: getting maximum meaning out of Judaism is not always easy, and will always represent effort on the part of the individual. You're going to have to commit to some hard work: I say that up front.

First thing, most important: you've got to learn Hebrew. Now, don't worry, there are things you can be doing while you're learning Hebrew to begin practicing, to begin using the tools of the tradition for your own spirituality. But you've got to be learning Hebrew. I don't know where you live, but unless you're in a rural area, there probably ought to be some options. If you live in a city, then I recommend community college or the local university. If they don't offer Hebrew, which would be surprising, your local synagogues will be able to direct you to where you can find such a thing. But the Jewish tradition is written in Hebrew, and is designed around Hebrew, and Judaism is a system designed under the presumption that Jews will learn Hebrew; and it is next to impossible to get more than a fraction of the totality of Jewish traditional experience without the Jewish language.

In the meantime, second of all, read up. You've got some books, that's good. I can recommend more-- pm me. But also, get the tools of the trade. So, for example, you need a siddur (prayerbook), but you need one geared to learning. Look for a set called the Schottenstein Edition Interlinear Siddur-- there's one for weekdays, one for shabbat and festivals-- and you'll find an accurate translation interwoven with the Hebrew text. If you don't have a Tanakh (Hebrew bible), get a bilingual edition. JPS (Jewish Publication Society) has a nice one for cheap.

Third of all, contact your local synagogues-- don't be afraid to use synagogues of different movements: nothing says you have to commit-- and ask about what kinds of classes and learning groups they have. If they're worth their salt, they should have some classes or learning groups on liturgy, ritual practice, theology, philosophy, and whatnot. If not talk to the rabbi, ask if they would study with you privately. Again, if s/he is worth his/her salt, s/he should be willing, or at least able to direct you to someone of equivalent knowledge who is. Don't be afraid to study. Finally, ask your local Conservative synagogue if they have a learner's minyan (a minyan is a quorum for prayer; a learner's minyan is just that: a service specifically geared to people just learning the liturgy). If they don't have one, ask them why not? Because they should. I say Conservative and not Reform or Orthodox because the Reform movement does not use the traditional liturgy, and the Orthodox movement will not teach you sufficient skills with prayer and prayer leadership because you're a woman, and according to Orthodoxy, you have no requirement to say many prayers, nor can you be a public prayer leader. So that's not really worth your while, but you should learn the traditional liturgy...so that puts you in the Conservative zone for learning prayer liturgy.

Judaism is not always an easy religion, in part because your best usage of it is going to be in vigorous exploration and confrontation of it. Israel, which is our ancient name, means "The one who struggles with God," and that is, in fact, what a practicing Jew does. Judaism is complex. Torah is elusive and full of multiple meanings. Halakhah (Jewish law) is voluminous and intertwined. The many theologies of Judaism range from frustratingly simplistic to frighteningly condemnatory to shockingly transcendent and full of love and compassion, but no theology is easy. Judaism requires effort to make it work, which I think is why so many people these days are giving up on it-- it must seem hard to put in so much work, when you already have so much to do. But as frustrating and paradoxical as it seems, at least know that, if it doesn't get less complex as it goes, it does get easier to understand and follow and reshape.

But to be comfortable with it, to find a comfortable niche in practicing Jewish society, you have to throw yourself into learning, and fearlessly claim the tradition for yourself. Don't let youself be put off by people acting like you should know X or Y, or (God forbid) telling you that you can't ask that question (a rare attitude to encounter among Jews in my experience), or what have you. You are a Jew. This entitles you to question, to dig, to confront, to reinterpret, to reshape-- so long as you do so from a place of learning and education. Which may be in process, I hasten to add-- you don't have to wait to confront until your Jewish education is complete!

Listen, if you don't like the shul (Yiddish for synagogue) near you, try another. Don't worry about movements for now, just play musical shuls and see what grabs you. If you don't like any of them right now, well, that's bad luck, but it happens. I myself don't care for any of the shuls near me right now, and I do most of my davening (Yiddish for praying) at home. It's unfortunate, but there's nothing wrong with it. But that's all the more why you need to learn: because you've got to be your own community when none is available to support you.

Do you have Jewish friends-- either practicing, or interesting in practicing more, like you are? If not, ask about events at your local shuls and Jewish Community Center, and see if you can get some practicing Jewish friends. I'm not saying you shouldn't be friends with non-Jews! I would never say that! But it's key to have some Jewish friends to share Jewish experiences with. Try having some people over for shabbat dinner, and talk about the week's Torah reading. Even if you don't go to shul, make it a habit to keep shabbat, learn the weekly Torah portion. As you begin to learn Hebrew, find some Jewish music, and start learning some songs to sing on shabbat. Don't worry if you're singing alone. I've spent some time living in places where I was the only observant Jew, and I sang to myself on shabbat, and was happy.

While you're learning the formal liturgy, start praying informally. Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, a famous Hasidic master, taught that everyone should just go out into the fields every day and speak to God, pouring out your heart and troubles to God as to a friend. Even if all you can say is: "Master of the World: oy oy oy!" Our liturgy is in Hebrew, and should be learned because it is beautiful and ancient and we are mandated to use it in part. But prayer doesn't always need liturgy, nor does it need to be in Hebrew. Talk to God. Try to feel God's presence. If you meditate, I heartily recommend using that as a tool. Read Jewish Meditation: A Practical Guide, by Aryeh Kaplan, for some good practical background on this. He has some other books that are useful, also. Also, for more philosophical background on this, read Man's Quest For God, by Abraham Joshua Heschel. A lovely little book about the philosophy of Jewish prayer and its experience.

Finally, if you're a twentysomething, you may be eligible for Birthright, which is a program in the Jewish community to bring young people to Israel for a brief encounter tour, as a way of finding out more about your roots, and strengthening your connection to your people and your ancestry. Go to Taglit-Birthright Israel: The Trip, look around, and see if anyone near you is organizing a trip. If not, or if you don't fit the age restrictions-- don't give up. Call them. There's sometimes room for flexibility. But it's a free trip to Israel, and builds relationships, friendships, and an incredible sense of belonging.

In the meantime, to get more practical, to determine some other steps, and to see if I can help you more, PM me, and tell me whereabouts you're located-- maybe I can hook you up with someone who can help. And don't be afraid to ask me more, either publicly or by PM.

And don't settle for feeling left out. There is room for every Jew in Judaism. If that room doesn't present itself, make it, because it is yours by right.

I'm curious about (orthodox?) fashion. Why is it that all the men wear the same suits and wide brimmed hats?

I can guess that there are edicts about dressing modestly with certain fabrics and so on but how does this translate into such uniformity? Why do some men have the curls on the sides?

What are the tenets in play here?

I'm finding the questions very interesting, mainly because they are mostly asked from the perspective of people for whom the baseline concept of religion is Christianity. That's natural, because most of the western world is Christian and thinks of religion that way. Judaism is much, much more prescriptive than Christianity. (I'm leaving Reform out of this because Reform is something of a hybrid of tradition and self-governance, and doesn't recognize the primacy of traditional jewish law other than as a source of tradition and history.) If you view religion as a set of beliefs, which is the basic Protestant view (I know I'm oversimplifying), much of Judaism looks unbelievably weird. But Judaism puts much more emphasis on law, deeds and conduct - both as to how a person relates to others and how a person relates to god. It's much more of a prescription as to how a person is supposed to conduct him/herself. And yes, some of it seems arbitrary and picayune, and is in fact arbitrary and picayune, but it all can be sourced back into specific commandments and sifted through traditional sources.

Will, that's part of the reason why, for the most part (not uniformly, obviously), worrying about the Messiah and the next world just isn't all that central to day-to-day Judaism. There is very, very little agreement on details about what the next world is, what will bring the Messiah, how reward and punishment works - and there is certainly nothing like the elaborate system of hell, purgatory, limbo, etc that classical Christianity has. Jews have their hands full trying to comply with the everyday laws that govern life in this world, and the general feeling is that if you do right on earth, the afterlife takes care of itself.

Overall, in my view at least, the details are less important than the fact that the community they fostered over the last few thousand years has managed to retain its coherent identity as a people, even though it was dispersed across much of the world. Whatever it did, has worked remarkably well - not necessarily in all its details, but in gross, Jews are probably the most successful and long-lived nationality in history. And it's at least fairly inferrable that it is the result of various traditional cultural practices that trace back to the religion, such as revering learning, primacy of family and community, emphasis on charity, and things like that.

What is the Jewish view of sex before marriage (dlish, I'm going to ask the same question to you if you're reading this)? My mother is what she calls a "non traditional" Christian - she fervently believes in God, Jesus, and the Bible but does not attend services of any kind, but she knows her Bible and is happy to give me passages when I ask her questions (I consider myself agnostic and am fairly ignorant as far as religion is concerned) I recently asked her about sex before marriage and she said that the Bible says if a man lays with a woman, she is his wife...meaning they technically don't have be married, but once they have sex they are. I don't know if this is a mainstream Christian belief...I know that some Christian churches believe sex before marriage is a sin. Anyway, I'm interested in hearing your answer :)

One more - how does the Jewish community in general view dating outside of your religion? If the couple decide to get married, is conversion mandatory?

Well, I am ethnically Jewish, and somewhat identify myself as Jewish, but I dont really follow Judaism in any sense.

I believe in the God of Judaism/Christianity/Islam in a broad sense, but I also believe that Jesus was probably (but not definitely) a true prophet. I have never been to church (any kind of church) in my life, I practise sex before marriage, in some occassions of my life I have committed crimes of violence and theft.

Do you think it is possible to reconcile a sense of Jewish identity when one is not religiously Jewish?

Here's the one I always have confusion on: Why do Jews, Christians, and Muslims kill each other over their faiths if they are all acknowledging they are worshiping the same dude?

how do jewish athletes reconcile their beliefs with the sabath since most sport is played on weekends?

Do jewish athletes that find it restrictive? how do they work around it?

dlish, that one is easy - most Jews are non-observant, and just about all Jewish athletes are. They don't work around it, they just don't do traditional Sabbath observance.

Toaster, that one is unanswerable. You might as well try to find out why different Christian faiths went to war with each other for hundreds of years until they all got tired of it.

Having once been a fan of a Jewish athlete, Shawn Green, I can tell you that he only sat out on the holiest of Jewish holidays.

yeah, Hal, that's right. So did Sandy Koufax, IIRC. But they played on Saturdays.

Let's leave aside for a moment the question of peyot (that's the name for those side-curls you mentioned), what you see at work in the black and white dress amongst traditional Orthodox men (Modern Orthodox men generally don't wear the black and whites, except sometimes on shabbat and festivals) is actually not Jewish law, it is custom of comparatively recent standing, based in an ascetic stream of thought called mussar, which means "knowledge passed along and received [i.e., from generation to generation]."

The custom in mussar, originally, was that a person should dress modestly, in simple colors and fabrics, in order not to divert their attention, or the attention of others, onto things of this world, but rather to allow their attention to more easily rest on things of the spiritual. In the 19th Century, this teaching became paradoxically conflated with a folk custom among Hasidim in Eastern Europe to dress as much as possible like a lord on Shabbat, and they decided that "a lord" indicated a lord in Eastern European lands during the time of the founding and first great flourishing of Hasidism, which is to say, the 18th Century. So even today, you find many Hasidim dressing not only in black and white, but in the long black coats, knee stockings, fur hats, and so forth of 18th Century Polish nobility.

Nonetheless, the black and white clothes all the time did not become dominant in the traditional Orthodox world until midway through the 20th Century, when, due in part to the mass emigration of Eastern European Jews to the US surrounding WWII, and due in part to the rise of assimilation as a problem for Jews in America, the Orthodox movement as a whole began moving sharply to the right, and more and more centrist and Modern Orthodox Jews began feeling pressured to become more stringent and strict. Sixty or seventy years ago, Modern Orthodoxy was the dominant form of Orthodoxy in America: now it is barely hanging on, with a handful of synagogues in New York, Los Angeles, and a couple other places on the East Coast. Most Orthodox Jews are traditional, and often if not usually wear some variation on the black and whites. The difference is that non-Hasidic Orthodox Jews don't retain the old Polish styles, but simply wear black and white suits of a modern cut, and instead of the very wide-brimmed hats of the 19th century that Hasidim favor, they wear the fedoras common to New York gentlemen of the early 20th century, when most men wore hats, and most immigrants were coming through New York.

What is extremely amusing to me is that in Israel, many Sefardim and Mizrahim (Jews of Spanish or Middle Eastern ancestry), who have nothing whatsoever in their backgrounds to connect them to Eastern European interpretations of mussar, much less the folk customs of Hasidim (who all came from Eastern Europe), have now begun adopting the black and white suits as a way of marking their ultra-Orthodoxy. That cracks me up.

In any case, the side-locks of hair, called peyot, represent a particularly zealos interpretation of Leviticus 19:27 ("Do not shave a tonsure on your head, and do not obliterate the corners of your beard"). The reasoning is that it could be unclear what obliterate means: perhaps it means one should never, ever cut those hairs. Therefore, lest they mistakenly violate this commandment, they grow the hair at the temple (which is as close as one can come to having a corner of the beard) long; some never trim them, others only trim them after they reach a certain length. Some wrap them around the ears in various ways, some curl them, and some twist them in ways attributed to teachings from the mystical text Zohar. In fact, it appears that much of the popularity of growing payot to extra-long length seems to have originally derived from the popularization of the Zohar, and historically, most Jews probably did not wear peyot as we see them today. But today, they are universally recognized as a symbol of being ultra-Orthodox.

Thanks Levite!

OK, so the real answer is that it depends on who you ask. If you ask most Orthodox authorities, they will say sex before marriage is absolutely prohibited to women, and men should refrain from it, but we all understand that sometimes men have uncontrollable urges, so they still shouldn't have sex before marriage, but it's not such a huge sin if they don't. But it's still shameful.

What I will tell you, not being Orthodox, is that modern Judaism is very pro-monogamy, and very pro-marriage. It is clear to all Jews, I think, that the beau ideal of Jewish sexuality is sex between husband and wife. That said, it is less than clear that other kinds of sex are prohibited. It needs to be understood that, in the Torah, and in the Rabbis' explanation of the laws of marriage in the Talmud, they were all working in societies wherein female virginity was highly prized, and not only aesthetically, but given that marriages involved the payment of bride-prices and the giving of dowries, considerable financial dealing was dependent upon women being virgins, as virgins commanded higher bride prices and came with larger dowries than non-virgins. Thus, marriage, which traditionally was based in the laws of acquisition (the man acquiring the woman and her dowry, having purchased her with the bride price and the agreement to pay her ketubah, or gift of divorce-- should he ever divorce her, he would agree to pay her X amount of money as recompense, since remarriage was difficult she being now 'damaged goods'), involved a contract, a payment, and sexual intercourse to seal the deal. That it involved contracts demanded that transactions be free of fraud, putting great pressure on women to keep their hymens intact. That it involved sexual intercourse meant that legally, one could make an argument that sexual intercourse was universally intended to effect marriage, which was a positive in their society, because it meant that players couldn't fuck 'em and leave 'em, they had to make good on the financial support of this poor girl whose best opportunities they had just ruined.

Of course, today, things work differently, and it is a problem in Judaism that the halakhah (Jewish law) has not adequately kept pace with the times in the matter of marriage. So there are various solutions being employed to try to resolve the issues surrounding acquisition, and some people are introducing the concept that not all male intercourse is intended to effect marriage. Meaning that men are permitted casual sex before marriage. Among the Orthodox community, female virginity is still valued, but the truth is that it need not be. By the rules of the tradition, she could just as well not be a virgin, and simply list a lower bride-price on her marriage deed. But Orthodoxy still clings very much to the aesthetic of virginity, which has resulted, embarrassingly enough for Orthodoxy, in a burgeoning trend among Orthodox youths in America of developing the skills of oral sex, and of anal sex.

Now, I will tell you that I think that there is adequate halakhic precedent to say that virginity need only be an issue if we make it one, and while it may be reasonable to assume that all sex is intended to effect marriage in a context where marriages are made very young, and all Jews live under Rabbinic law only, in a situation where people are marrying later and later, and Jews mostly are bound by the laws of the lands in which they live, vis-a-vis their daily legal framework, there should be nothing to prevent Jews from having sex before marriage. Although in the interests of supporting a healthy attitude about sex to bring into one's future marriage, I would advise young Jews not to be unduly promiscuous, as IMO, the more casual sex one has, the more one is apt to lost sight of the value of sex as a means of two people communing with one another, sharing deep feelings, and mutual care and affection. In other words, I'm not telling anyone to wait until marriage, just try not to fuck anything that comes by.

The universal traditional view is that if a Jew and a non-Jew wish to marry, the non-Jew must convert to Judaism. This is especially key when a Jewish man wishes to wed a non-Jewish woman, because Judaism is traditionally matrilineal (identity is passed through the mother's line), and therefore, one is Jewish if one's mother is Jewish. There are other reasons also, but that's the chief and primary reason. Reform Judaism has attempted, in the past thirty years, to get around this view by introducing a doctrine of patrilineal descent, meaning that so long as one parent is Jewish, the child is Jewish. This has backfired miserably, since both the Conservative and the Orthodox communities have violently disagreed, and a crisis is now ensuing of Reform youths who have been told they are Jewish wishing to wed Conservative or Modern Orthodox youths who are unable to marry them without them converting. But basically, if you're Orthodox, Conservative, or are among a minority of the Reform movement, the answer is that a Jew and a non-Jew cannot be married. A plurality of the Reform movement (and most of the tiny leftist fringe movements) hold that a Jew and a non-Jew can be married, but they have been ostracized over this by the traditional movements.

Regarding dating, again, it varies. Technically, nothing forbids a Jew from dating a non-Jew. Many do so. We often advise our youth to avoid doing so after a certain age, since it may be painful if marriage arises as a possibility, but their non-Jewish partner refuses to convert.

I myself, I will say, dated mostly non-Jewish girls during my life. And twice, I wanted to marry someone non-Jewish, and ended up having to end the relationship because she was not interested in conversion. It was extremely painful, but absolutely necessary.

My fiancee is, as I mentioned, Jewish...thank God.

---------- Post added at 05:56 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:21 PM ----------

I think it depends on what you want from your Jewish identity. If you're just looking for an understanding of your heritage and background, sure. Learn some Yiddish or Ladino or Hebrew, read up on Jewish history, enjoy the cultural trappings of Judaism. We have great jokes and we invented bagels. What's not to love?

If you want to connect to the deepest meanings of what it is to be a Jew, then, personally, I don't think so.

There are many who would disagree with me. If you read the writings of Mordecai Kaplan, founder of the Reconstructionist movement, or some other adherents of that movement, they would tell you very differently. But I very much believe otherwise.

In my opinion, Judaism is an ethnicity, a culture, and a religion, all inextricably intertwined. Separating the elements from one another would be like trying to disentangle DNA: if you get it completely unravelled, it no longer is what it was. The greatest achievements of our people have had their covenant with God at the heart. I don't know how to preserve that greatness while excising the covenant.

As for your theology, Judaism has room for many kinds of theology. As I mentioned above, sex before marriage is by no means a dealbreaker. I do think that a Jew should refrain from crimes of theft or violence, although we all make mistakes. I myself, when in college, did some shoplifting, which I regret now, and would not do again, but I did do it, and it is done. Was Jesus a prophet? Who knows. Maybe. I won't say for certain that he was or he wasn't. All I know for sure is that the Rabbis who founded the tradition of Judaism of which we are currently the inheritors did not accept Jesus' prophecy as authentic. Does that mean it was false? Maybe, maybe not. But it does mean that, according to our tradition, it is not relevant or applicable to the Jewish people.

I want to make clear, although this is my honest answer, I say it without judgment or condemnation. I believe, personally, that Jews should embrace their tradition. I would not seek to force anyone. I believe that Jews who do not embrace the fullness of their tradition are, in some ways, disconnected from it. But that in no way means I think such people are bad, or immoral. You can be a good person without being an observant Jew. I just think that it's unfortunate that there are beautiful and deeply spiritual parts of one's heritage that such Jews choose not to experience in their lives. But the door is always open....

I'm sorry I can't give you a more pleasant answer. But it is honest, and offered with respect.

---------- Post added at 06:00 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:56 PM ----------

If I had the answer to that....

The real answer though, is that generally, wars fought over religion are not actually being fought over religion. Usually they're fought over land, sometimes over money, and occasionally as a means of diverting attention away from problems at home that the government doesn't want to solve (often because the government is the problem at home).

I'm not saying this is always true, just mostly.

---------- Post added at 06:03 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:00 PM ----------

D, loquitur is quite right. Nearly all Jewish professional athletes are relatively non-observant. We're lucky if they decide not to play on the High Holidays. Shabbat? Good luck, buddy. Never gonna happen.

Incidentally, it was a version of that problem that caused me to give up being a working actor/director-- everybody wants a Friday night show or Saturday matinee....

That's a really good point, and undoubtedly true. Religion was being invoked as cover for other power-plays.

I see this alot in Toronto (where Fresnelly is from as well) and if that is the intent, it fails incredibly. Nothing draws attention more than the groups of men & boys striding along the streets on a Saturday dressed in such a manner.

I never heard of this ans idea of Orthodox Judaism- sex before marriage being considered a a sin for women but an acceptable sin for men.

Further to what levite was saying regarding this. If you pay ver close attention you will see that there are many differences in the dress of the Orthodox - of those who do have specific dress.
From those who wear suits and fedoras, you will see that some groups wear larger brimed fedoras. Some other groups wear the fedoras a specific way.
You will then see those that wear suits with very long jackets (capoteh).
Others with high socks.
Other were the capotehs are not black but beige or gry with stripes.
Usually all these groups are decendants or followers of the teachings/opinions (halachic opinions on discussions and arguments raised in the talmud) or certain rabbis from certain geogrphic areas, towns, shtetls, yeshivas (jewish religions schools where torah [jewish law] is studied.

Here is an interesting story of a junior hockey player faced with this issue. How does on in this situation make such a hard decision especially at such a young age? Making the NHL or any professional league is considered very special and anybody who is on the cusp believes they can make it. What a hard decision.
But is this really any different than anybody working in any job? What does an observant Jew do on a Friday afternoon when the sabbath is approaching and you just need to finish the closing of the big deal? What if your boss wants you to come infor a meeting with a prospective client on a Saturday morning. Observant Jews face these dilemas all the time it is just that athletes are much more high profile so we all hear about these cases.

Sports on the sabbath are not strictly forbidden.
Some won't play sports becuase they consider it not in the spirit of the sabbath. Others, becuase sports are not forbidden find that it is something that they can do that relaxes them, helps them unwind, or is just plain fun and permissable.

There are some sports that would be considered inherrently forbidden according to halacha depending the situation and others that have very few issues.
With football becuase of carrying of the bal while you run, if there is no eruv (a demarkation of a geographical area usually with a combination of fence, wire, and string that surrounds a neighborhood or city within which carrying on shabbat would be considered permissable) then it would be considered forbidden. If there is an eruv then those who feel that playing sports is OK to do will be allowed.
Soccer, since there is no carrying involved would not require an eruv and if you are of the type that would play sports it would not be a problem at all.

An eruv has much more practical benefits than sports and is a huge discussion in itsefl.

Something else interesting is the way that commandments are approached.
As levite said, there are 613 commandments and some are just not possible to keep due to circumstance. Some are positive commandments - do this. And some are negative commandments - refrain from doing this.
While an observant Jew (of any denomination) will try to follow as many of the laws as he/she can (in the ways their specific denomination follows those laws), each of those laws is seperate and the non-observance of one law does not keep one from observing others. Each commandment followed is a mitzvah and is good.
There is an understanding that it is impossible to be perfect and that intent is often the most important thing. As you can see from levite's explanation above the list of 613 is not even possible.

I have a question:
- levite, are you a Levite?

---------- Post added at 11:01 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:57 PM ----------

They are less concerned about drawing attention from those outside their group as they are from drawing attention within their group.
Is this effective, I don't know.

how do eruvs work?

from what i understand, it allows you to do things on the sabbath that you usually cannot do. can anyone decide what an eruv is, or do you need a rabbi to declare the equivelant of a fatwa?

This is the modern Zionism as we know it today. An active Zionism started in the late 1800s by Herzl. But Zionism as part of Judaism goes way back to Abraham, Issac, Jacob, and most notably Moses. Issac lived his whole life in the land of Israel (or the future land of Israel - the land that God promised him and his father, and his children). Jacob insisted that when he died his body should be burried in the land of Israel. Moses yearned to enter Israel but was not allowed.
throughout Jewish history there is this undercurrent of desire to emigrate to the land the Jews feel was promised to them and their children.

---------- Post added at 11:38 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:15 PM ----------

There is alot of good information here:
Eruv - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

But the basics are that an eruv makes it permissable to carry. it does not really allow for much else.

What happens in most cities where there is a large Jewish populations is that there is a group fo rabbis who oversee certain services that the community feels is important
- kashrut certification for local restaurants
- kashrut certification for local food businesses
- Overseeing of kashrut at events that want to have kosher food served to guests
- one or more eruvs
- Jewish courts to settle halachic matters should the two parties agree to go to these courts
- conversions
- Death and Burial rituals

This group of rabbis is appointed by the community and changes now and then. Most often they come from the denominations (gorups) more to the right on the observant spectrum. This often ends up in those on the left having their own similar groups to cover the same services.

Back to the eruv.
So an eruv is essentially is a contiguous series of acceptable objects that surruound an area. Fence and phone or electrical wires are often make up part of the eruv and where there is nothing to continue the connection a thin string is setup. The eruv ends up completely surrounding an area. Rabinical interpretation of what is halachicaly acceptable to be part of an eruv is what ends up making up the eruv. Once setup it is checked every week sometime on Friday by volunteers. Some communities have a website or some other way of notifying people if there is a problem with the eruv and that it can't be relied on that shabbat. The general rule is that unless you hear otherwise you assume that it is in good order. The idea is not to overburden yourself with worries and stringencies.

The need or desire to have an eruv (and some groups don't want or don't follow this leniency) is really based on praticality.
There are alot of simple things that you would not be able to do without one.
- You would not be able to bring young childdren to synagogue as pushing a stroller would not be permitted. Many groups fel that synagogue is a family experience.
- You could not carry the key to your house in your pocket.
- You could not carry some tissues in your pocket
- You could not cary your talit (prayer shal) or siddur (prayer book)

Many feel that it really makes the observance of the sabbath better and becuae the law allows for it why not use it. Others feel that it is a leniencey and would prefer to be more stringent.

I'm not saying that they would actually put it in those words. But the fact is, I have known plenty of Orthodox girls whose mothers would absolutely massacre them if they were to lose their virginity, but who know that their sons are almost certainly not virgins, and their reactions are, "just don't disgrace the family." There is a famous sugiya (a section of text) in the Talmud, in the second chapter of tractate Hagigah, that says, "if a man is overcome by his needs, and cannot focus on learning Torah, he should go to a town where nobody knows him, dress in black, and go do whatever he needs to do [i.e., get laid] in secret, and then go home and go back to studying Torah." From the point of view of traditional halakhah, men should control their sexual needs, but if they don't...that's a shame. If women don't control theirs, it's shameful, disgraceful, and potentially fraudulent, if they don't disclose their status on marriage.

As for the rest, that's just the attitude, I'm not saying anyone has formalized it as doctrine.

Yes, indeed I am!

---------- Post added at 09:56 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:24 PM ----------

Yeah. I never said it was a good idea....

So Sticky gave a pretty good rundown of this. I might just want to sum up: eruvim (pl) are artificial enclosures that make it permissible to carry or otherwise transfer belongings, or to move things. On shabbat, one is prohibited from moving items from one's personal domain (inside the house, for example) to the public domain (for example, it would be forbidden for me to be standing by my window, and pass you a slice of cake if you were standing in the street outside my window). And once outside, one is prohibited from carrying items anyplace, or even picking them up. For legal purposes, a walled city, or part of a city that is a completely walled enclosure, is deemed to be a private domain, and thus one may carry and so forth inside it.

An eruv is a gorgeously designed legal fiction. By the norms of halakhah, a door is considered to be part of the wall it is in, not a hole in the wall. Therefore, halakhically, one could in theory construct an entire wall of nothing but doors. Which is what an eruv is. By running a wire or string along the tops of tall posts (like telephone poles), a de jure wall of open doors is created. This wall of nothing but open doors qualifies as a legal enclosure, making the area within halakhically a private domain, meaning one can carry within it.

To be effective, many Jews within the area must give their approval that they wish the eruv be there; and some must commit to helping oversee it (both physical oversight, to be sure wind or rain hasn't damaged or torn down the wire, but also maintaining it, as to be effective at least two or three families must pool some resources, indicating that this domain is private, but jointly shared. Some food usually suffices for the shared resourced).

Sticky is correct in that most towns with eruvim get them as the result of a local committee of rabbis who oversee things like that. But they need not come from there. Many communities have independently built and maintained eruvim, either in areas the local rabbinical committee has been unable to secure permission to make an eruv, or in neighborhoods where the ultra-Orthodox don't trust the local committees of rabbis to make or oversee the eruv properly. In theory, any group of people can put up an eruv, initiate its effectiveness, and oversee it, so long as they are familiar with the halakhot (pl) pertaining to eruvim.

You're 100% right, of course. But I prefer to separate Zionism, which is usually used specifically to describe the modern political movement, begun in the mid-1800s, to establish, somewhere in the world, a national homeland for the Jewish people, from the eternal connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, and their millenia-long yearning to return there. Zionism as a 19th- and early-20th-century political movement was always dominated by a socialist, deeply secular rhetoric. It embraced the notion of a Jewish people independent of Jewish religion-- which personally I question-- and advocated the advent of a Zionist national entity for reasons having nothing to do with the traditional teachings of the Jewish religion. Religious Zionism existed, sure, but it was always a minority movement, until late into the 20th century, well after the establishment of the State of Israel.

I am a religious Zionist, so clearly I support the State of Israel, and I believe that at heart, it doesn't matter what all those socialists thought, the establishment of the State of Israel is of some religious significance. But I am not, in theory, invested in the form of the State, or the makeup of its populace, or how religious its society is. I think that it is a first step on a long, long road to the messiah coming. But it's only that first step. It is only important in that it brought Jews back to live in the Land of Israel, speaking Hebrew, a country of free Jews on our ancestral homeland, acting as a shield for the rest of us by keeping a free space for any Jew to flee home, if need be, acting as our sword by keeping a strong Jewish army to remind people that Jews will no longer be anybody's prey, and keeping the torch of Judaism burning in the center of the Jewish world.

But socialism means nothing to me, and it was everything to political Zionists before the State was established. They couldn't care less about God, and I couldn't care more. It was a fortunate coincidence that their goals and the goals of many religious Jews met and ran parallel for a time. The great poets of Judaism who wrote about the eternal longing of Jews for the Land of Israel, and the City of David were not thinking about nationalism or post-Enlightenment geopolitics, but about God, covenant, and spirit.

I understand the desire to conflate the two, but I think it's important to keep them separate.

Good points.

My quick replies from my vantage as an orthodox Jew.

I will avoid zionism, since it is a topic I am passionate about, and well I like to keep this very simple, on religeous point of view.
Since you are over 12 Mazel tov, happy bat Mitzvah, there is no special ceremony or anything that makes you an adult. It is a big misnomer that you need to be called up or something to turn Bar or Bat Mitzvah, if you hit 12 as a girl or 13 as a boy you made it, just forgot the party and did not get the gifts. As far as getting involved that is up to you, there are a ton of organizations and ways to get involved, and if you want send me a private message where you are located and I can help you find some local organizations.


Jewish Law prohibits you from cutting your sideburns, there is slight difference depending from where in Europe they were from in how they have their sideburns. Chassidish world tend to have the curls on top of a beard, lot of other orthodox jews just do not cut their sideburn below the bone beside the ear. Which is always a thing to pay attention to when getting a haircut.



Sex before marraige, is a no no. Lot I can expound on the topic, but basically men have a sin not to waste their seed. No ding with no ring.

Jewish wedding is done in 3 ways. A Kassubah a contract. The ring, which is money. And the Yichud rooom.

Part of the Jewish wedding ceremony is a yichud room. After the Chupah where they have the ceremony the bride and groom are led (with singing and dancing) to a private room. Two witnesses are kept at the door so no one can go in and out. The room is a room where there is no entrances or exits. And they stand and watch the door for probably 7-10 minutes. Basically it is long enough for them to be able to have sex.

Those are the three ways to get married, contract, sex, and money. To put it simply having per-marital sex outside without marriage, can technically lead to that issue, but it does not cause marriage since there is no witnesses, etc... This is a very simplistic overview, of something I spend about 2 years learning in depth in the Talmud.

Sex also leads to technical problems for women, since they have issues marrying a person who is a Kohen (from the priest group), and again that marraige issue I mentioned. Since technically by Jewish law polygamy is allowed by the Torah (only rabbinical decree do we not allow it), it is not the same problem with the guy, he instead has the sin of not wasting the seed. But who are people to say one sin that G-d decreed is worse then an other, it is just a simpler sin, but not necessarily less important.

As far as marrying a non-Jew it is a no no. Can not get married to a non-Jew.

Not my place to judge you, I think if you are interested in finding out more about Judaism, just send me a message and I will be glad to point in the right direction. Otherwise as far as Jewish belief is if your mom is Jewish you are part of the tribe.

Ain't gonna work on Saturday, I Ain't gonna work on Saturday, double double triple pay won't make me work on Saturday. No get out of Shabbos clause for athletes.


Basic rule on Shabbos, I can not carry anything when I go out, that includes keys. Now if I am in an enclosed area, like a fenced in backyard, it is private and then I can carry. Simple fenced in backyards is an 'eruv'. But for instance in a town if they wanted to enclose an area using different methods, it gets very technical. The rules on Shabbos and eruv, are very intense and difficult, so I would always recommend consult your local Rabbi (and if you need more information please just message me)

Xazy, can I just thank you for coming in and giving us the frum [traditional, Orthodox] answer. I really appreciate that. I am trying to do my best to separate, in my answers, what is and is not traditional and/or Orthodox, but I am sure by Orthodox standards I am missing things, or not making a clear enough distinction. I was raised frum, but am now liberal, and the transition involved some negative feelings on my part with how I perceive things being done in the Orthodox world, and I am sure that sometimes colors my vision.

I may not always agree with the Orthodox viewpoints, but I respect where they come from, and I would hate to think this thread wasn't reflective of the totality of Jewish experience we have here.

As a Jew, I find this thread fascinating. Partially, this is because there are a couple of things I didn't know that have been spelled out. But mostly, it is because it highlights just how much of a role context and perspective have in your world view. I grew up in a relatively Jewish social circle, attended a relatively Jewish college, and now live in a very Jewish part of Pittsburgh (next door to a yeshiva!). I tend to forget that most people aren't as familiar with Judaism as me or my friends. This is a great thread - keep it up Levite!

If I as a Catholic were to attend a Jewish synagogue service in the interest of curiousity, what would I expect as far as the service is concerned. Special seating, readings, sermons, etc. Basically walk me through a Jewish service.

So why Hollywood?

Well, it depends on several things. First of all, it depends on when you're going. A weekday service, a shabbat service, a festival service, or a service for the High Holidays. The liturgies for the different services, although the cores are in common, have a fair amount of distinction from one another, and different theological imperatives are given show at different times.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, it depends on where you are going: what kind of synagogue or independent group is running this service? First off, is it Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform; or is it Reconstructionist or Renewal or one of the small fringe movements; is the congregation Ashkenazi (that is, following the customs of Northern/Eastern Europe) or Sefardi (Spanish customs) Mizrahi (Middle Eastern customs, or is it a small, independent rite, like Yemenite, Damascine, or Italian? All of these represent potentially substantial differences in what you might see.

What I can tell you in all likelihood is that, if you are in the US, chances are your random Jewish friend will take you to an Ashkenazi synagogue, because those predominate in the US, probably on a shabbat, because most Jews who attend synagogue on anything like a regular basis go on shabbat, but not daily (and probably not every shabbat, and statistically you're more likely to see a shabbat service than a festival or High Holiday service). Statistically, your random Jewish friend is probably Reform, or maybe Conservative, if they identify with a movement.

Whichever movement's services you end up at, know that customs and rites vary somewhat from congregation to congregation, but fundamentally, the liturgy you'd see in the siddur (prayerbook) would be par for the course for whatever movement it is.

First of all, let me explain that there is a great difference between Jewish services and Christian services, at least as far as I have observed Christian services. Christian liturgy is much sparser and less dense than Jewish liturgy: in Protestant services I have witnessed, prayers are much more improvisational, and little seems formalized except for psalms, hymns, and The Lord's Prayer. Even then, the rites seem quite flexible in which psalms and hymns may be sung, and when or even if The Lord's Prayer is recited. Catholic or Eastern Orthodox services seem a little closer to the Jewish model, with specific set prayers at different times, a more formalized framework of which psalms are recited and when, what hymns are sung and when, when there is to be a recital of Pater Noster or Ave Maria, etc.

Jewish liturgy is fixed, and consists of psalms and (more or less) hymns set into a complex and lengthy framework of prayer, all serving as brackets for several key prayer-units, defined by the arrangement of formalized blessings or benedictions (micro-prayers invoking God's name, rulership of the universe, and usually, creatorship, plus some other relevant aspect of God's benificence, justice, authorship of some kind of phenomenon, etc.); the like of which is entirely lacking in Protestant, or even Catholic, analogue. I will try to attach an example, in translation.

This liturgy is quite fixed, and makes for a long service. By many Christian standards, an excruciatingly long service, although those who have defined it so to me have generally admitted it would be easier if they knew Hebrew-- as all traditional services are entirely in Hebrew, save for the sermon (though ours are mercifully brief by comparison to some I have heard at Christian services-- 10-20 minutes is average in Conservative synagogues, 7-15 minutes in Orthodox synagogues-- one case I heartily side with Orthodoxy). Some Christian services I have witnessed took barely an hour. The longest I recall was two. Shabbat morning services in a traditional synagogue (Orthodox or Conservative, or an independent unaffiliated body using traditional prayer customs) average 2 1/2 hours, and it is by no means unheard-of for them to run 3 hours, though generally not longer unless there is some additional special occasion, like someone's bar or bat mitzvah.

To be fair, if one knows Hebrew, the prayers are exquisite poetry. Since you likely won't want to learn Hebrew before going-- quite understandable, really-- your consolation will be that, though the translations are generally much drier than the Hebrew, much if not most of Jewish services are sung aloud, and I am told that the melodies are just as pleasant to non-Jews as we find them. At best, I have been told by non-Jewish, non-Hebrew-speaking friends who came with me that it was not unlike being at a community a capella concert.

The congregation all sings, but generally there is one prayer leader, sometimes per service, sometimes for the morning. This may be the rabbi, the cantor, the two of them in tradeoff, or one or more congregants.

On any given shabbat morning, there would actually be four separate services, although they would appear fairly seamless. The first, called Pesukei d'Zimra (more or less, "Phrases of Song") is mostly a collection of psalms and Biblical texts, making an introduction to the main service.

This is called Shakharit (meaning roughly, "Morning Service"), and consists of a couple of mystical hymns and a fair amount of poetic prose punctuated with blessings, which bracket two things, the first being the recitation of what might be called the Jewish credo, known as the Shma, based on the first word. This is a recitation of Deuteronomy 6:4-9 (it begins with the phrase "Hear, O Israel: YHVH our God, YHVH is One," although this translation could be debated), Deuteronomy 11:13-21, and Numbers 15:37-41, which together constitute a single liturgical unit. The second bracketed liturgical unit is a prayer called the Amidah (meaning, "Standing Prayer," because it's said while standing. Sometimes we arbitrarily shun complexity, what can I tell you), comprised of a series of blessings invoking our covenant with God, praising God for his holiness, thanking him for the shabbat, and then for other good things, and then asking for peace. Versions of this prayer constitute the heart of every Jewish prayer service.

The next service is actually comprised of little prayer, but is rather focused on the ritual taking out of one or more Torah scrolls [public readings of the Torah must be done from a hand-calligraphed text written upon sheepskin parchement scrolls in the ancient style] from the Sacred Ark at the front of the sanctuary, and a portion of the Torah [Pentateuch] is then chanted aloud, while the congregation follows along in bound, bilingual copies of the
text. This is usually referred to as The Torah Service. Following that, a designated selection from one of the Books of the Prophets is chanted aloud. The Torah scroll/s are then ritually put back into the Ark, concluding this service.

It is customary in many, if not most, American congregations to have the sermon at this time. This is invariably in English, save in the most Orthodox of ultra-Orthodox synagogues, where it is still sometimes in Yiddish-- a sight you are, statistically, unlikely to see. In many congregations, the rabbi always gives the sermon. In a growing number, different congregants give the sermon each week.

Finally, we have what is known as the Musaf service. Musaf means "additional," and this is because during the times of the Temple, an additional sacrifice was made on shabbat, over and above the daily sacrifice. Since we no longer practice sacrifice, this has been replaced with an additional service. The bulk of this service is constituted by another variation on the Amidah prayer. Some congregations have the sermon at the end of this service, rather than before it.

Generally, at the end of the Musaf service come community announcements, news of births, deaths, marriages, etc. The service is generally followed, in an adjoining room, by the ritual blessing over wine-- wine is served, along with grape juice, and sometimes liquors-- the blessing over bread-- bread is then served-- and generally either a large snack or a light lunch is served.

Reform services are shorter, mostly in English, and generally feature longer sermons, and more often are led decisively by rabbi and cantor, rather than congregants. This is because most Reform Jews do not have the Hebrew skills for the full traditional liturgy, and in any case, the traditional liturgy was much edited by the early Reform movement due to its perceived incompatibility with Enlightenment sentiments (Reform Judaism is very much a product of the Enlightenment). Thus much of the traditional liturgy is severely abridged or absent from the Reform siddur, and there is much use of English translations of the traditional text, modern meditation texts, poetry, etc. Thus, the rabbi and the cantor often use the service as an opportunity for Jewish remedial education. Also, their services are geared toward a Reform theology, which is different from traditional in various ways we can get into at a different time, if there is a desire to do so.

That said, if you visited, you would be greeted, you would be free to take a seat where you liked (in Orthodox synagogues, men and women are separated, but in non-Orthodox synagogues, anyone can sit where they like). There would be a copy of the siddur available, and also a bound copy of the Torah. It is customary for men, and some in the non-Orthodox world say women also, to cover their heads during services, and kippot (yarmulkes, skull caps, beanies) are provided. Jewish men (and in the non-Orthodox world, also many women) wear tallitot (prayer shawls), but generally non-Jewish visitors do not do so. My guess is that you would find it an interesting experience, although occasionally frustrating in not knowing Hebrew, or the nuances of the service (although this latter point can be remedied by reading an introductory book or two on Jewish prayer prior to attending-- I can recommend a couple, if you like). Most likely, after the services had concluded, people would introduce themselves to you, ask after you, and inquire whether you had someplace to eat lunch (despite a light lunch often being served in the synagogue after services, many if not most people just snack a little and then go home for a 'real' lunch).

Although there is nothing wrong with just showing up at a synagogue on some random shabbat morning and just checking it out-- and please, do feel free to do just that-- my personal recommendation would be that you go with a Jewish friend, if you have one. It's good to have a guide, someone to help clue you in on what's happening, and so forth.

But if you go, I recommend going several times, to several different congregations, if possible. Go on shabbat. Go on some holidays. High Holidays are their own thing. Save them for your advanced education tour. But for example, Sukkot falls October 3-9 this year (I phrase it this way because Judaism works on a modified lunar calendar, so Hebrew dates don't always match up with the same Gregorian dates), and that's a fun holiday to watch. We build these little huts called sukkot, as a remembrance of our dwellings in the wilderness after the Exodus, and in remembrance of the harvest in the Land of Israel, when we built such huts during the wheat threshing that took place at that time of year. We eat and drink and study in these sukkot every day for eight days. And in synagogue, we sing Psalms 113-118, a service called Hallel (meaning "Praise"), during which we wave palm fronds which have been bound together with willow and myrtle branches, and we hold them with a citron (a fruit rather like a giant lemon), and we process around the synagogue, singing and waving the palm fronds (called lulavim, or lulav in the singular). It's very musical, and quite a spectacle. The palm ritual, BTW, is what people were doing in the story in Mark 11:8-10, Jesus' entry into Jerusalem-- it was Sukkot. In any case, if you have any interest, it's probably worth your while to see a couple of Jewish services. If you don't know any Jews, just show up to synagogue on shabbat morning. We're really usually pretty friendly. Let me know if you want me to expand on anything....

Sorry, there was probably more to this question than you expected....

PS- The attached translation of a section of shabbat morning services is mine, and is copyrighted to me. Please don't pass it around. Thanks.

Who doesn't love picture shows??!

Levite, that was a great answer. I knew going in that it was going to be very different from Christian services. You answered all my questions. Thanks!

so if you cant take your keys with you on the way to the synagogue on the sabbath, does that mean that you leave your house unlocked?

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edit - ok, maybe thats not a good thing to ask publically...

My wife is home, some use a combo lock. Others may hide a key.

Is Frum and Liberal analogous to Catholicism & Protestantism? If not, is there a similar movement in Judaism to the Christian Reformation?

is the synagogue a male dominated place of worship? or are women welcomed and on equal standing?

can women becomes rabbis?

how does the heirachy work? is there a clergy set up like christiandom?

In synagogue both men and women are equally welcome, men have more of an obligation to pray at synagogue then women (women are on a higher spiritual level then men, and have different obligation then men). Since there is no 'erev' in my community and I have a baby, my wife stays home, and if she had wanted to go to synagogue I would go to early morning services then my wife would go to the one right after.

First off to define a Rabbi is someone who passes a test, has 'x' amount of knowledge, and there is different types of tests, meaning different degree of knowledge. Orthodox Jews only the men become Rabbi's, and study some of these things.

We have no real official hierarchy. Chasidim have their Grand Rabbi who they follow for every question they have. But there is no official pope or anything like that. But there are Rabbi's whose brilliance shine that they become the person who everyone comes to for questions. An example was Rabbi Moshe Feinstein zt'l.

Now 'Priest' in Judaism, is the group from the tribe of Levi (one of the 12 sons of Jacob), who did the work int he temple. They still have a special part in services, and a special role, but that is very different from a Rabbi.

intersting to see the similarities between islam and judaism with the obligation for men to pray at the place of worship.

i think levite mentioned that within an erev you can push a stroller and other such things. is carrying a baby on a sabbath considered work and thus not allowed?

now that you mention it, so what is the difference between a priest and a rabbi? apart from what you mentioned. are they considered in the same way that the shiites hold the 'ahl al bayt' or 'family of the house' which is the lineage of muhammad in higher esteem than other people?

A rabbi is a scholar and legal expert. A priest has (actually had, because we have no temple anymore, so no venue for priests to do stuff) assigned tasks in the temple, mainly related to sacrifices, i.e. it's been 2000 years since they actually could perform their role. The only special thing they do now is bless the congregation on holidays. Priesthood is hereditary, rabbinate is not.

With an eruv I can push a stroller or carry my daughter. But carrying outside is not allowed on Shabbos without an eruv, and while a lot of places have one, there is more often then not an erev. Also please note an Erev is very technical to make and very often requires using a lot of less stringent rules for use, so a lot of people may be more strict upon themselves and not use an erev at all unless they MUST.

When you have a religeous question, you ask a Rabbi. Basically they must have 'x' amount of knowledge as I mentioned before. And there are some Rabbi who may lead a synagogue, and some who may be the big Rabbi of an entire town. Some may study a single topic and be an expert on it, that other Rabbi's when they have a question will go to him. In my community we have 2 Rabbi's who people from all over the world call with the most intricate questions, concerning everything including pulling the plug, medical questions abortion etc...

A priest (KOHEN) role is to help be an inter-mediator in the time of the temple between us and G-d for bringing sacrifices, etc... They still give blessings to the congregation on the holiday services (everyday in Israel), but they are not a Rabbi as far as knowladge goes, and being able to answer questions. Of course a Kohen can study be a Rabbi, and answer questions and there have been numerous Great Rabbi's through history who were Kohen as well.

thanks..this is a great thread

i have another one i've always wondered about...

loquitor touched on this earlier on the subject of hell. ive read that judaism doesnt have the concept of hell in the old testament, and as such there is no afterlife. could you please elaborate a little more on this?

its quite the opposite of christianity and islam where we have a heaven and a hell

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the muslim day actually starts from sunset the day before. is this also the case in judaism?

if this is the case, then the sabbath starts at sunset on the friday evening?

We do believe in an afterlife, as well as Messiah coming and people coming back then. we do not believe exactly in hell, for the most part consider hell going through a washing machine, where it cleans and removes the sins you have done. And trust me hell does not sound like a fun place from the little of it I have learned about. Where or what you get in afterlife is based on your life now, and so just because you are cleaned of sin does not mean you go to the VIP room of heaven.

Just saw your second part of the question, Muslim is added on top of the Torah, (so is Christianity so someone one day will explain why they do not do this), and we hold the day starts with sunset. So Friday night - Saturday night is Shabbos.

If you look in the beginning of the bible, in Breishis (genesis), it says וַיְהִי עֶרֶב וַיְהִי בֹקֶר יוֹם אֶחָד "it was evening it was morning one day"

Not really, and sort of but not really. Frum generally refers to the orthodox or ultra-orthodox, and as you have seen there are many other denominations (reform, conservative, modern orthodox, etc.).

From my understanding, the Christian Reformation was about "reforming" the Church. In Judaism there is no longer a centralized established authority like the Catholic Church was in the 16th century, so it isn't possible to seek to reform one. However, many of the more modern movements (reform and conservative come to mind) were very much efforts to "modernize" or "reform" Judaism. They were about marrying the ideals and beliefs of the times (the 19th and 20th centuries) to Judaism and this can look kind of like how Protestantism branched off of the Church. Obviously, the reform movement is named after this process.

Levite and others correct me if I'm off base, but this is my understanding.

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.

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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.

This same tendency also brought about the advent of modern Orthodxy whic did not exist 50 years ago.
Modern Orthodoxy follows all the same halachot (torah and rabinical laws) as orthodoxy but has a way of looking at things as though you are a Jew that is living as part of the world at large. The idea is not to insulate yourselves in your community and that insulation is inherently your protection against the influences of the outside world. The idea is that you make yourself strong by sticking to the halachot and at the same time living and interacting with the rest of the world. These people, while often live in a more Jewish area becuase of the need to be in walking distance of a shul (synagogue) and mikvah (ritual bath), do not exclude themselves from the community at large. They work at the same jobs that non-Jews work at (doctors, lawyers, business owners, employees). They go to movies. Listen to secular and religious music. Play sports. Read all books. Essentially, they are just like any regular person yet they also strictly keep to halachot.
My point was that that levite is right that a widening rift came about as the right moved farther over to the right and the left in reaction moved to the left but Modern Orthodoxy and Conservatism moved in to fill that gap.
The gap is still there in that the Jew way on the right can't (or doesn't or chooses not to) indentify with the Jew on the left but the middle is not an empty hole.
Modern Orthodox jews are the ones that you see wearing the smaller knit, leather or felt kippas (yarmulkas) all the time.

It is not so simple. Since Orthodox is more stringent then reform or conservative I would not be so ready to eat in someone house who does not adhere to Kosher (even if it is outside their house). While there is always a few who make others look bad, most Orthodox Jews do not believe you are less Jewish if you are reform or conservative (we may not believe you follow the rules), however it is not my place to judge another, and how would I know where I would be if our shoes were reverse.

Orthodox is growing stricter in many ways due to technology and invasion of society in to the culture. From billboards to television, internet, or just how people dress. Torah teaches women to dress modesty, how sex is for a man and his wife, a wife is to look sexy for him and not others. In a world where models and how women are viewed, how they dress (I live in NYC) just going to the store, the mall, sexuality totally invades our daily life. I do feel strongly that alot of this does affect marriages, and to a degree is responsible for divorces. But this is what the Jewish community is up against. Hasiddic communities like New Square, Satmer, they close their people off, to keep that all out, since to do otherwise you expose your community to things that religiously disagree with. I do not disagree with what they do.

I consider myself Orthodox, some may call me Modern Orthodox, I do my best to follow the Torah do I see tv, movies, yes. I cannot disagree with people more strict then me, but as when I do run in to one of the few (and I know the few stand out more since they are more vocal) who judge others for not following as they do "I may learn grow, become more strict, and if you want to show me something I will listen, but it is not our palce to judge anyone."

Also alot of Orthodox, who are more to the right, still interact and work in regular jobs, and commute. I know a Hasiddic doctor who is the head of peds, one who is a cop, etc... I do not think that only 'modern' orthodox play sports, work in regular jobs, or live in a regular community. Modern orthodox, you will find have a tv, go to movies, and the music. And while I have those, now that I have a child, I question the full need of a tv (trust me I am a tv addict like everyone else, but I have yet to find one show I would want my daughter to see), I just do not feel it is right to even mention to my wife.

THANK YOU!!!! I dont think I will ever understand that.

You are right. It was not fair to keep it as simple as I described.
The two points I was really trying to get across were:
- Orthodoxy while was getting stricter and the left were moving farther to the left, the gap between did not remain empty.
- Most of the stricter (or right) of the orthodox groups insulate themselves with physical barriers (geography) to try to protect the influences from the outside world while modern orthodox takes a different approach.

This thread has clearly awakened my interest in learning about my Jewish heritage. There is a lot to read and I have not read through it all yet, but I will. My question is more on a personal level, I think. I was raised in a non-practicing Jewish home, I never went to Hebrew school and I know very little about the Jewish religion. I married a non-practicing Catholic, converted and had my children baptized. Looking back, I realize that was not the path I should have taken. I am feeling a pull back to my family and my Jewish heritage but I still know nothing. I'd like to learn and be able to teach my children. Where do I start? Is there a book you can recommend? Would I still be accepted into the Jewish faith now that I am legally separated from my husband, would I have to convert back?

Of course you are welcome. 3hwew are a lot of organizations, books places where you can go to learn for yourself and your children. Also if you are under 26 go to birth right it is a free trip to Israel where you can experience Israel for youurself. I am writing this on a cell, so keeping it short, but I will message you later, and if you let me know where you are located can help you find local organizations

But simpy you, your children, family are more then welcome to explore it takes just a desire to explore and learn and I can help you find out information. Again I will try to reply more later wheb I am not on a cell keyboard

How does one Jew view another Jew who interprets the faith differently?

Not sure how different you mean is it a question of halacha (jewish law), reform view orthodox or vice versa. Personally I view people as people and let 6-d do the judging, but I am not sure how you are defining 'faith', and many people react different.

Well I see it like this: Hassidim, Orthodox, Casual... they're all "Jewish" but they have different ways to worship. Traditions, behaviors, clothing, etc. If you consider yourself part of one sect, how do you feel about people in other sects? Are they doing it wrong? Are you holy and they not? Do the casual Jews think the orthodox jews are crazy masochists for adding all this extra crap to their lives in order to worship? Do the orthodox Jews look at everyone else and go, "Well, the thought was nice, but they're missing a lot and god favors us because we're the straight-A students?"

In order words: If there wasn't a "right" way or a "wrong" way, then what is the purpose of going about all this worship in the first place?

I can only talk about orthodox view, how I was raised.


There is a part in the talmud that talks about someone who died (a big Rabbi to keep it simple), and came back, his father asked him what did you see and he replied "what was up was down and what was down was up."

To expound on it is this those some who were 'righteous' were not and some who were thought to be sinners was righteous. And to expound a little basically people are not judged by G-d on their action, but their actions based on their situation. Who am I to say if I was in someone else shoes how well I would do, and if that person was given my opportunities.

If you were to ask me on practice of a group overall, I do think that you have to keep kosher, but if you do or do not that is your choice. Do I feel on shabbos you can not turn off lights, drive to synagogue, cook, etc... I do, but again if you do or do not that is your choice. I will give a law, for instance that some 'sect' how you define say it is acceptable, but Orthodox will point out and quote it from the Torah "Homosexuality is an abomination", I do not take that as a fluid thing, it is written in ink and parchment. Again you can do as you wish it is not our place to judge, but I can never say on the topic that I agree with people who say it is allowed.

Meditrina, here is a good book if you are interested in reading, it is .

I'm not sure there's any one single answer to this question, Hal.

Xazy's answer was excellent, and true, in that it represents the legitimate feelings of an Orthodox Jew who is also, as far as I can tell, a major-league mensch (Yiddish slang for a decent, good person). But this is something for which there is no universal doctrine, and each Jew will judge others as s/he will. I have heard similar sentiments from others, and heard much less tolerance in other cases, from any number of places on the spectrum of movements.

That said, while I do think that there are some (vocal) people on the left and on the right who just don't get where the other is coming from, and seem perfectly willing to write off (respectively) the Orthodox as all fanatical zealot ascetics, or the Reform and Reconstructionists as traitorous secularist maniacs, or the next best thing to apostates, I think most of us don't judge each other too hastily.

Part of why there is not as much mutual condemnation as there might be-- though still way more than there should be-- is that at least in theory, we are taught to be respectful of the opinions of others regarding halakhah and practice. It is deeply ingrained in our tradition.

For example, just this morning, I was telling my 9th grade class a famous story from the Mishnah (the older part of the Talmud, dating from the first two centuries CE), wherein there was a difference of opinion between the great first-century sages Hillel and Shammai, who were the chief of the Sanhedrin and the prince or president of the Jewish People in Israel at that time. The difference in what was the correct interpretation of a certain matter in halakhah grew so heated between them that the whole people were split. And at that point, a Heavenly Voice was heard, and it said, "These, and those also, are the words of the Living God. But the halakhah in this matter is according to Hillel's interpretation." And why was Hillel's opinion deemed worthy, the Mishnah asks? Because he taught his students to understand Shammai's opinion as well as his own, and even explained Shammai's opinion before he taught his own, comes the answer. From this story, we teach two things: first, that we must honor and respect differences of opinion as being both natural and potentially holy; second, that our respect for different opinions must not prevent us from picking an opinion to side with, and going with that choice.

We try-- although it seems these days we often fail-- to always remember teachings like that, and to respect the ways that other Jews make halakhic decisions and choices of practice that are not like ours, because they have the right, and none of us can be certain of having a monopoly on interpreting the words of Heaven. In my experience, most Jews I know are reluctant to do more than talk some shit about those they disagree with. Actual confrontation is comparatively rare, and public insults or hate speech, though sadly not unknown, are not predominate in our inter-denominational discourses, though I don't pretend the polite relations are always friendly.

Unlike Xazy, I have met many Orthodox folks who are quite vigorously condemnatory of anyone not Orthodox, and in no uncertain terms. And, I must confess, also some Reform, Reconstructionist, and fringe lefties who anathemize Orthodoxy pretty wholly. I wish it weren't so, and I don't count any such among my friends, but I have seen it, and seen it more often that I've wished....

And, BTW, to answer your final question, the reason to do it, even if there is no one right or one wrong way, is because God has asked us to do our best, and we (we are taught) wish to do our best to give to God that which, as God, he is due: praise, love, exaltation, and service in good faith. This is not about there being a single right answer: the search to find a right answer and accept it is the paradigm of a belief-oriented system. But Judaism is an act-oriented system: it matters less what you believe than what you do. Ideally, sure, it would be nice to interpret the halakhah and the Torah with just the perfect little nuance that God would wish. But it's just as important, if not more, that in trying to look for ideas and answers, you don't neglect to look out for the defenseless, support the impoverished, comfort the grieved, and raise up the oppressed, which God loves even more than prayers and festivals. Read the Book of Amos if you don't believe me...!

If your mother was Jewish, you are Jewish. Period, end of story. You can convert to whatever, and from the point of view of Jewish law, you remain a Jew, though a Jew in error. You absolutely don't have to convert back, presuming your mother was Jewish. All you have to do at most is publicly (i.e., in front of a group of three rabbis) renounce any other beliefs, and go to the mikveh (ritual bath).

As I mentioned above, I recommend classes. Most synagogues and many Jewish Community Centers have all sorts of fundamentals-of-Judaism classes. I also recommend classes in Hebrew from a local college. Nothing will serve you better than starting to learn Hebrew. And start reading. There are a lot of books. I have a reading list I use for instructing individuals in similar situations to yourself, and for use in teaching converts to Judaism, which I am attaching below. It's a serious list, not a crash course, and it's long. But they are good books, well worth the time. I include substantial chunks of source text also, which I recommend reading carefully to give yourself a leg up on a life of Jewish study. And to live as an observant Jew is, in large part, to be in constant dialogue with texts, to be in some measure constantly studying and learning.

There's a lot to learn. I can imagine it might look awfully dismaying and difficult. And it can be difficult, but don't be dismayed. It is learnable. It is comprehensible. It is doable. And you can do it. Please do PM me with any further questions; and if you like, PM me anyhow to let me know whereabouts you live, and I'll see if I know anyone around that I can hook you up with for some teaching.

I tend to have friends who are from all range of observance, and I honestly feel, that it normally is the nuts who scream the loudest. I have to admit in the past few years I have been involved with a lot more hasiddim then I had in my first 20 years. Basically I now live in NYC, visit Israel yearly and tend to bump in and meet a lot more of them now. And I am more and more impressed by some of them, by how kind, nice, how open, warm, and willing to give the shirt off their back for another Jew.

I met a Chassid (wow typing hebrew/yiddish in english is a skill I am not good at) in Jerusalem one Friday night, and he invited me as someone new and visiting to come to his home for Shabbos. I did not accept his offer but the next day I found out from my sister who lives there all about this person. He and his wife have 8 children, they live paycheck to paycheck, he a year prior had lost his job, and now does a lot of temp work. Anyone (and I do not mean only orthodox I mean anyone) who is new to their synagogue that weeks gets invited to their house for a meal, during the week they have 'guests' who need places to stay come over for food or a bed. And this is just a sample of one such person who just wowed me, I have met dozens of people from people to the right who are just like this.

I do not disagree that there are some who I consider more the 'nuts', and they are most often seen, since they scream the loudest.

is this love of fellow man exclusive only between jews?

---------- Post added at 11:07 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:03 PM ----------

levite, can a non-jew attend these classes? can a non-jew convert to judaism?

christianity and islam have groups within themselves that go out and preach in order to convert and bring 'into the fold'. i have never noticed this of judaism. is there such a thing? and if not, why not?

They will help others, but the idea of charitey is first yourself then family then friend then communnity then others.

Ask any rabbi (for sure orthodox ones ) first answer will be you do not want to, don't give up your pork, cheeseburgers. Can people convert yes, but we will explain to you every hard rule first and advice you not to a million times over before you willl be allowed to.

so the aim of judaism isnt to convert? i just sense reluctance on your part to bring converts into the fold, is this because people will find it too hard and give it up?

D, it absolutely is possible to convert to Judaism. It's done all the time. I myself have helped guide people through the process.

That said, we do not proselytize, or attempt to actively recruit people to Judaism. The Jewish tradition has always taught us that it is perfectly possible to be a good person, and to please God, and achieve "eternal reward" (to the extent that the tradition believes there is such a thing for certain, or can agree on what it might be) without being Jewish. Judaism, we have always been taught is God's covenant with the Jewish people: it is not something demanded of others.

The way I look at it is that Judaism is how Jews should relate to God, what God expects of Jews. Presumably, God has other ways he expects others to relate to him.

Non-Jewish people have it much easier, 7 commandments only versus the basic 613 Jewish ones (that when you break them down, is not so simple). Why make it harder on yourself, if you want to be a good person, and all much easier, and you get the cheese burgers, and when you go anywhere you can easily find food to eat, etc...

If you want in we will accept you, but we will make sure you understand every need, every item you will give up, and every new restriction that we embrace.

The understanding of what a Jew should aim for is to be a servant of G-d, his wine steward if you will.

Ive noticed this as well, I've also noticed an historical attitude of acceptance and tolerance for people of differing religions - something that isn't always reciprocated for some reason.

My question: Have you seen the Tarantino film "Inglorious Basterds" which deals with a 'jewish revenge fantasy' against the nazis and if so, what did you think of it? (I thought it stunk.)

Just saw the movie, I enjoyed the movie. I liked the idea of how they marked the ones the Nazi's they let go. I will say one thing about Jewish belief, an eye for an eye. If someone is trying to kill you, you are allowed to kill them first.

It is fiction, I also do like terrentino style films, and was just well a fun way to spend a Thursday morning.

I haven't seen it yet. I plan to, because with the exception of "Grindhouse," I love Tarantino movies, but I am not putting any stock into his story. IMO, you don't go to see Tarantino for plot, you go see Tarantino for snappy lines, stylish camera work, and ultra-violence. I never expect anything more.

As for a "Jewish revenge fantasy" rewriting history...I don't know that any such fantasy would or could help assuage the memory of the real events, but I also think that at worst it's...silly. My attitude, I guess, is...whatever.

I'd agree with levite and xazy that opinions vary. One branch of my family is orthodox and they have almost completely cut off contact with the rest of us. Only one orthodox family speaks to us, all because we are reform or non-practicing Jews. As with all people, there are some reasonable and some unreasonable folks.

No, except for some very small groups, evangelism isn't a Jewish activity. Someone else mentioned that Jews seem to be tolerant of other religions, and while there are obviously exceptions (if I had a nickel every time I argued with a Jew who was blindly angry at Arabs/Muslims...but that's a whole 'nother conversation) I think that there is some truth to the idea. Maybe it's because of the diaspora, or that Jews have for so long been the minority everywhere they lived, but I think we've developed an outlook on life that accepts living with people who are very different than you are.

...I wanted to touch on levite's discussion of intermarriage in the reform movement. It's an extremely contentious topic internally and has been for years. Many people feel that it is eroding the number of people who consider themselves to be Jewish or practice Judaism. Others have a much more modern belief that love triumphs all. As admirable as the idea is for only marrying Jews...well, realistically, Jews are a tiny percentage of the American population, and an even smaller percentage of the world at large. My personal belief is that it is unrealistic to expect people nowadays to only marry within the tribe, so to speak. And as with many aspects of a religion and culture thousands of years old (the idea that women are not full and equal members of the community, and may not become rabbis, or that gays are committing a sin), Judaism may have to adapt to modern realities somehow in this case.

Judaism hasn't survived this long, in so many locations, and through so many difficult times by being monolithic and unable to evolve. In fact, the one thing I like most about my heritage is that Judaism not only encourages, but demands, that its adherents constantly take honest appraisals of - and question - absolutely everything. The story goes that after Jacob awoke from the dream in which he wrestled with angels, he took the name Yisrael, which means "one who struggles." The Shema, one of our holiest prayers, begins "Shema Yisrael," which means "listen, you who struggles with god." Times change, and I think it is up to Jews to both maintain their faith and keep up with them.

With all due respect, guy, I have to disagree about this one thing. I think there are many, many areas of halakhic dispute between the movements in which I would agree with you: Judaism has to be free to evolve, yes, and with our tradition of makhloket l'shem shamayim [dispute for the sake of Heaven], we will inevitably evolve in different directions sometimes. And if it's a matter of what is or is not kosher, or what is or is not the minimum acceptable length of a weekly Torah reading, or what does or does not constitute a full Amidah, or what is or is not appropriate dress or other behavior for a Jew, I say that there is room for us to both do as we feel is best for the Jewish people, and we need not agree.

Where this differs is that, up until thirty-odd years ago, the entire Jewish people, fractured as it was, all understood that the fundamental basic of Jewish identity was matrilineal descent. We all knew that if your mother wasn't Jewish, then you needed to be converted in order to be a Jew. With all of our differences of opinion, our arguments, and our internal frustrations between movements, identity was one thing everybody trusted was universal in Judaism. And to me, that is sensible: as long as we know who the Jews are, we have some sense of what is going on, and where we stand, regardless of the ever-increasing differences in practice and halakhic standards.

We are in the midst of a dreadful crisis of assimilation. I work at a Jewish day school, at the high school level, and even with my students, who are in as Jewish an environment as one could wish, the level of ignorance is stunning, because no matter how much we at school try to cram into their heads, they get no supporting education at home, and their environment does not urge them to spend time studying Torah and learning Hebrew, their environment urges them to spend time playing Xbox and watching YouTube and, in short doing everything to absorb the secular American culture around them-- which, God help us, when it isn't secular is usually pretty Christian. The Jews we do have aren't strong enough to make up for those we lose to assimilation. Our numbers have never been big, but in the past there has always at least been a level of education, of being bound up with Jewish culture, of daily practice of the tradition, that has made up in strength what we lack in population. But not any more.

We don't need to weaken Jewish identity further right now. And if you want to say to me that the Reform movement doesn't see patrilineal descent as weaking, that may be the prerogative of the Reform movement, in theory, but unlike Reform views on prayer or kashrut, which can be ameliorated vis-a-vis their impact on the rest of the people, this has a terrible effect on the rest of the Jewish people. In all other things, a Jew can do as s/he likes, and have relatively small effect on the Jewish people: you don't keep kosher? OK, fine, so we'll go out to eat, or I won't eat hot food at your house, or I'll invite you to my place. You don't like the traditional prayer services? OK, so you go to your shul and I'll go to mine. But you marry a non-Jew and your kid wants to marry mine...? Suddenly we're screwed.

I've had a number of students now who I had to counsel, sometimes when they came to me in tears, because their Reform father and non-Jewish mother had told them their entire lives that they were Jewish, and their youth group never told them otherwise, and they get to a Conservative Hebrew School or a transdenominational high school, and they want to date a Conservative student, and that student's parents wig out when they find our their baby is dating a non-Jew. These are good kids who, all of a sudden, at 14, 15, 16, 17, suddenly are told that if they ever want to marry a non-Reform Jew, or make aliyah [emigrate to Israel], or have any honors in a non-Reform shul, etc., they need to convert. And naturally enough, they feel hurt and betrayed and angry as hell, and I have to try to help them sort out their feelings while maintaining their respect for their parents and their desire to continue associating with the Jewish people. And in some cases, I have seen students so fed up with the "deception" practiced on them that they simply walk away, disillusioned, and dismiss their practice of Judaism altogether.

The problem with intermarriage and patrilineal descent as a solution to it is that it's no solution. It just creates the illusion for the two spouses that they have solved their problem, when, in actuality they are simply visiting their troubles upon their offspring.

My problem with the Reform movement's actions is not that they don't crack down on intermarriage-- personally, I feel that's a bad choice, but it's not my movement. My problem is that the Reform movement doesn't simply tell its intermarried couples: listen, marry whoever you want, just get your children halakhically converted at birth. It's easily done, and it will save everybody a world of trouble later on. Because identity is the one thing that affects the entire people of Israel. There is no containing the ramifications. And as it stands, we are hemorrhaging Jews to assimilation, easily half the Reform movement is intermarried, and the only educated, motivated Jews who are vigorously keeping their children Jewish are the Orthodox. If we don't contain the problem now, non-Orthodox Judaism will be a thing of the past in 100 years.

I'm not saying this because it makes me happy, or because I want to take a poke at the Reform movement. My mom is Reform, my fiancee is Reform, some of my favorite colleagues in Jewish education are Reform. As a future Conservative rabbi, I am always eagerly hopeful that the two great liberal movements can find ways to work together, and I am absolutely heartbroken and hamstrung that there is this key difference that no amount of invoking "makhloket l'shem shamayim" can overcome.

Without consistency in identity, the Jewish people will fall apart. It's that simple. Nearly everything else is something that we can all agree to work on in dialogue with one another. But not this. And as a future Conservative rabbi, I am dreading the moment when I have to tell some nice young Reform kid that I cannot marry them to their fiancee without them converting first, because despite what their parents told them, halakhically they are not Jewish. That is not something I want to have to do-- God, I am dreading it! But it has to be done. Otherwise, Judaism is like a balloon not made of bonded latex or polyethylene or what have you, but of something much more permeable: slowly but surely, all the air inside will leak out, and after a time, all that will be left is an empty husk, the contents inside indistinguishable from the air outside.

I don't want to threadjack "Ask a jew" into "Theological and sectarian discussions between Jews," and I certainly don't relish the idea of doing so with a soon-to-be-rabbi. Although the Reform movement has made the move towards accepting patrilineal descent, the point I tried to convey in my post is that it wasn't an easy choice. I remember from even when I was a kid that this topic - assimilation, etc. - was debated and argued and treated with utmost importance. Internally, from within the Reform movement, is was (and remains) a contentious issue. If some of your dire predictions about future consequences come to pass, I would not be surprised to see the issue flare up again and be revisited in some way.

I'm sure you're right. And I also don't mean to threadjack. Obviously, it's a very important issue, and brings strong feelings with it.

Also, guy, I really hope that those feelings did not inadvertently cause me to offend you, or make you feel personally attacked-- neither of which were my intent. And if I did, then I apologize.

as an outsider looking in, and looking at this from a simplistic view, why is there so much disagreement when it has been mentioned earlier that there is no right and wrong?

if its ok to live your life as a non jew and be a good person, why does it matter what type of judaism you practice?

what is the ultimate goal of judaism when considering the afterlife? what happens to muslims, christians, athietsts etc when they die? can they enter heaven/nirvana if they have been 'good people'. and what constitutes what a 'good person' is?

is there a heaven without the existance of a hell, and who will enter it if there is?

sorry for all the questions

It's not always necessarily so much whether the kind of Judaism a Jew practices is problematic or not so much as whether we can all keep playing together. The question of Jewish identity-- what is the minimum parameter we can all agree on is the definition of "us,"-- is key, because that determines whom we can marry, and whom we may call upon to act publicly as agents of our community in prayer, as witnesses in rabbinical courts, etc., all things only Jews may do.

Vis-a-vis the differences of opinion-- which can get very heated-- about how to decide the halakhic issues of our times, and how best to practice the tradition, these are important because of our covenant with God. Yes, of course non-Jews can be good people, and they can be justly rewarded for it by God. But they have different responsibilities to answer to God for. By our standards, yes, there are the seven commandments for the Children of Noah, but presuming that God makes other covenants, and establishes other relationships with other peoples, they then have to worry about those covenants, and the demands of those relationships. So if I say-- as I personally do-- that Islam is God's covenant with Muslims, then it is incumbent upon Muslims to fulfill the terms of that covenant. Or if I say that the Way taught to the Lakota by the Great Spirit is God's covenant with them, then I presume it is incumbent upon Lakota to live according to their ancient ways, in fulfillment of that relationship. But the covenant of God and Israel is Torah (in the widest sense of the meaning of the word), and that is what Jews must be responsible for. We believe that Jews are meant to be Jewish, just as other peoples are meant to be whatever they have inherited regarding their ancestral covenant or relationship with God.

The responsibilities of the covenant on Jews is not, we traditionally believe, subject to further negotiation, or to individual whim. What was accepted at Sinai was accepted for all our ages, for all our descendants, for all time to come, and we are bound by it. The binding is, some might say, comparatively loose, in that the means of executing the obligations is found in the process of halakhah, which is flexible, evolving, and renewing. Yet, like any system of laws and rules, it is dependent upon a number of things. First, that it operates according to its own rules. Radical changes and dramatic shifts can be made, but only according to the complex and sometimes slow process of the internal parameters of the halakhic system. Second, that certain basic fundamentals be accepted by all Jews. Fortunately for us (given the amount of truth in the old saying "two Jews, three opinions") the basic fundamentals are very few, and mostly constitute identity, belief in God and covenant, and a willingness to play by the rules. And third, that the system requires an educated populace dedicated to the maintenance and furtherance of the system.

To parallel American law for a moment, in other words, for American law to work, everyone has to accept the premises set forth in the Declaration of Independence; they have to accept the Constitution as binding; they have to be aware of how the American legal system works (in rough strokes, not a nation of lawyers), they have to agree to the general principles, and they have to know what the laws are, and what their options are for change if they disagree with a law. Unfortunately, while the bare minimums for participation in the American system can be met by twenty minutes quiet reading of Appendix A of any good 12th grade government textbook, and a car ride long enough to listen to the A side of Schoolhouse Rock's "Government Rock" album, the minimums for Jewish society take a little more work. But they are incumbent upon all Jews, and only upon Jews. The standard for other peoples is simply different: not better, not worse, just different.

There are, and have been, many many different beliefs in Judaism about the afterlife. And in some sense, we are all free to believe whatever we like about the afterlife, because the concerns of Judaism have always been over how we act here, in this world, in this life.

That said, there has almost always (since the inception of Rabbinic Judaism after the fall of the Second Temple) been some kind of belief in "Olam ha-Ba" that is, "The World To Come," which is more or less analogous to Heaven. There has never been any agreement as to what Olam ha-Ba is like, or what existence there offers, save that all concur that it would be very pleasant and rewarding-- much more so than this world-- and the pleasure and rewards would come both ceaselessly and without the price attached to them in this world. Eternally learning the secrets of Torah and basking in the radiance of God is a frequent postulation, although hardly the only postulation.

At various times, Jews have believed different things about the ability of non-Jews to enter Olam ha-Ba. But overarchingly through history, and certainly predominately today, the majority seem to believe that non-Jews who are of good character can and do enter Olam ha-Ba, and receive reward there. What precisely is the minimum requirement for a non-Jews entrance to Olam ha-Ba is the subject of some debate. Many have said it is obedience to the seven commandments for the Children of Noah. But many have also said it is that they demonstrated adherence to "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," together with whatever the moral imperatives of their own faith. Unsurprisingly, many Jews over the past 1000 years opined that in addition to these things, it helped if the non-Jew in question was friendly to Jews; but I personally would suppose that such a requirement would simply fall under the more overarching imperative to be kind and tolerant to all other peoples, not just the Jews.

Many have speculated a hell-place called Gehinnom, named after a valley in Jerusalem where once the Phoenician god Molekh was worshipped by the sacrifice of children; an image that was so horrible to the Rabbis of the Talmud that they apparently deemed the place worthy of representing hell on earth, as it were. It actually seems to have functioned more like purgatory: the souls of sinners were said to go there, work off their sins in various unpleasant punishments, and then, cleansed, proceed on to Olam ha-Ba. Belief in Gehinnom has never been a formal doctrine of Judaism, and historically, it has never been a popular belief, although it was widespread. Today it remains vigorous in the Orthodox communities, although in the liberal Jewish communities it is given lip service, at best, and many, if not most, do not believe in it.

But the spectrum of opinions on what may come in the afterlife is vast, and many Jews have picked and chosen and created various theories and scenarios to suit their needs and preferences. Personally, I believe that there is no Gehinnom or other hell or purgatory. I believe in what we have called the Sha'ar Ha-Gilgulim, which is to say the cycle of rebirth, or metempsychosis. That one lives in this world, dies, and one's soul is sent back to be born again, elsewhere to live another life. This goes on, I believe, until one has fulfilled one's purpose in the Divine Plan, balanced the cosmic scales for the sins one has committed, and learned the lessons one needed to know. At that point, if one wishes, one may enter Olam ha-Ba. Needless to say, this particular belief is both unorthodox and un-Orthodox.

Why? Isn't that what this thread is for?

Not at all. You know the old line about two Jews and three opinions, right? I'd be ashamed of us if we simply agreed on everything!

do jews see the middle east conflict as a religious altercation or a political one?

i mean, its a myriad of things really isnt it..

arabs vs jews
muslims vs jews
israel vs arab neighbours

does israel see it as a religious war or is politics and religions intertwined within judaism that it cannot be seperated?

There are so many differeing opinions with regard to everythign that Israel is not different. In fact, I would guess that peoples opinions are much stronger on this subject and that you would be very surprised about certain people or groups opinions.

It is generally a Jewish belief that the land of Israel was promised to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob by God to be the place belonging to their children.
There are Jews who believe in this strongly and there are those who don't.

For simplicity I will make an assumption that is in general true - A practicing Jew, no matter what type of Judaism, will likely belive in the idea that God promised the land of Israel to the Jewish people.

However, this does not mean that those same people believe in the state of Israel in its current form.
Most probably do, but some view these two ideas as seperate

Regarding the current State of Israel, Once you understand the ideas above you can start to see how many differing opinions can arise.

- There are practacing Jews that believe in the State of Israel
- There are Unltra-Orthodox, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform Jews who belive in the state of Israel
- There are non-practicing Jews that believe in the state of Israel
- There are non-practicing Jews that don't believe in the state of Israel
- There are practacing Jews that don't belive in the state of Israel
- Believe it or not there are those from the most ultra-Orthodox groups who many would consider the most strict and even fanatic who don't belive in the state of Israel. In fact, there are even some of these groups that are anti-Israel and will rally against Israel and give money to Anti-Israel groups.

With this last group mentioned they belive that God promised the state of Israel to the Jews but they belive that it will happen when the Messiah comes and that the current state is a secular institution that Jews should have nothing to do with.

With all the other groups that believe in the state of Israel there are differing opinions as well. Just because one believes in the state of Israel does not mean that they have to belive in the policies of the state of Israel. So, you will ahve Jews that agree with Israeli policy and those who don't.
And then even the Israeli policy is much more fluid then we understand. Just like any other country there are different political parties that belive in different political ideals. So people who agree with Israeli policy sometimes may not agree all the time and vice versa.

It may or may not be well known but the Israeli policitcal system is very fragmented. If you are familiar with the parlimentary system and you come from (or know how it works in) Canada or the UK you will wonder how the Israeli government is able to accomplish anything at all. In Canada and in the UK there are very few major parties who are bale to win seats in parliament and there is, most of the time (although not recently in Canada) a party that wins the majority of seats in the parliament.
In Israel, becuase political ideas are so fragmented, there are so many parties that get a handfull of seats. Each time there is a goverment it is formmed by coalition with the largets party in the coalition usually leading the coalition goverment. In Israel there are political parties that:
- Are right wing
- Left wing
- Center
- Religious Right
- Religious center
- Secular right
- Secular center
- secular left
- Issue based
There are even Arab parties. Several seats in the Isralei parliament are held by Isralei Arabs some of whom are very anti Israel.

So dlish, as you can see, your questions are not that simple.

Israel is a Jewish state.
Israel is not a religious state even though it has laws based around some religious institutions.
Israel has a parliamentary system where the government is lead msot often by right and left wing parties that are closer to the center than we imagine.
Israel has an Army that is controlled by the state.
Israel has a very powerful Judiciary system that many would agree is more left leaning than right.
The rabinate, while very important and while very influential, has no political power at all.

So to get to the questions (and you can probably guess some of the answers alread) .

Do Jews see the middle east conflict as a religious altercation or a political one?
Some would say it is only religious, others would say it is only political. Most would proably say both.

Arabs vs. jews
Muslims vs. Jews
Israel vs. Arab neighboors

All of the above. In my opinion though I think that we are now stuck where we are becuase of the inability to trust and the inability to be trustworthy (or honest).

Does israel see it as a religious war or is politics and religions intertwined within judaism that it cannot be seperated?
In my opinion, I believe that most of Israle sees it as political but so intertwined with religion that it can't be seperated. The Jews can't just walk away and make a homeland in Uganda (as was proposed at one point). This is why relgions is so intertwined (from the Jewish side at least).

(I rambled a bit)

---------- Post added at 02:42 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:36 PM ----------

Agree with that. But another very important factor is kavanah (intent). You can act all you want but it is important that intent is there as well. even with negative comandments. Intent is often a factor in whether you have successfully carried out the mitzvah (commandment).

---------- Post added at 02:46 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:42 PM ----------

And if you are a woman and have children born to you, they are Jewish as well.

D, Sticky's answer to this was excellent, I just want to round out a couple of corners. Sticky's absolutely right in that this is quite likely either the most divisive or one of two or three most divisive issues amongst Jews. Everyone has opinions, and feelings run high.

I can tell you that, in my experience, most of the Jews I know do not see the Israel-Palestinian conflict as necessarily Arabs vs Jews (I think there was more of that sentiment in the 60s and 70s, but less and less since peace with Egypt in '79), and surely the majority of the folks I know don't see it as a case of Muslims vs Jews per se, although the use of extremist Islam as a rallying point by groups like Hamas are, unsurprisingly I am sure, very unpopular with Jews. There are a handful of (unfortunately rather vocal) Jews amongst the raving neocons here in the US, and amongst the ultra-Orthodox both here and in Israel, who use religion to justify some really sick views about what ought to be done to the Palestinians, and a point of pride for me as a liberal Jew has always been that such opinions are not only not mainstream in Jewish society, but are widely scorned, condemned, and vituperated by people in all the movements-- both vocally and in print. And I think it is safe to say that many Jews feel like it would be nice to hear the same kind of condemnation and distancing from Palestinians vis-a-vis Hamas and their ilk, and it is hard to feel confident about the chances for future relations with folks who apparently are willing to espouse the views of Hamas and company.

I think most Jews are torn. On the one hand, we have all been taught, and most of us hold some feeling, for the Land of Israel being the gift of God to the Jews. On the other hand, though many of us feel that Israel has a right to defend itself, and is often unfairly criticized for doing so, none of us like bloodshed, and none of us like to see Jewish hands shedding blood, whether it may be justified or no. We want to see Israel whole and safe, and yet we would like to do so as peacefully as possible, and yet we realize that may not always be possible. A great part of the problem, from the Jewish point of view, is that (and this is not just a propaganda line, but a truism) we don't know who to talk to. Everyone who seems to be in a leadership position amongst the Palestinians doesn't appear to be particularly interested in flexible negotiations or guaranteeing Israel's safety. But to most of the Jews I know, that signifies a failure of leadership, not a reason to hate all Palestinians.

All of this, BTW, is entirely separate from Israeli politics and social movements. Israel may be the Jewish State, but it is not a theocracy, and the majority of its citizens are what is known there as "hiloni," which tends to be translated "secular," although it is a term employed to describe the entire spectrum of non-Orthodox Jewish beliefs and practices. The motivations of Israeli governments, politicians, and society, have little, if anything, to do with Judaism-- and that often includes the politics of the ultra-Orthodox.

If you want to know my feelings on the subject, they are these. I am a religious Zionist, and I believe it is very important that there be a Jewish nation in the Land of Israel. That said, I also think that God wants us to find peace between the Children of Isaac and the Children of Ishmael; and if to do so means giving up part of our land, that's probably not too great a price. I won't deny that there are areas in which I am skeptical and unwilling as yet to trust the capabilities of the Palestinian government and the entirety of the people to live in peace, side by side with Israel: I believe in Jewish sovreignty over Jerusalem, and that the suburbs of Jerusalem in Gush Etzion need to stay Israeli; but I believe there has to be a land swap to make things equitable, and the Israeli government needs to offer a permanent assurance of the unshakable right of Muslims to have free access to the Dome of the Rock and the masjid Al-Aqsa (and the masjid al-Umar), and to assure the support of Israel within all reasonable parameters for the oversight of the Haram al-Sharif by the Waqf. I think that the Palestinian people need to do more to voice their rejection of violence and terrorism, and I think the Israelis need to be more frank and open in their confrontation of the effects on the average Palestinian in lack of movement, lack of money, lack of many things, as a result of Israel's security actions. I don't know whether or not all those actions were and are justified, but I do know that there is not enough taking of responsibility by Israel for the effects on the noncombatant populace.

I am split on many things. I don't like the idea of the kind of controls that the Palestinian people live under. And yet I also remember the school years of '01-'02 and '03-'04, when I lost friends to bus and cafe bombings in Jerusalem, the bombing of Hebrew University, and there was fear in every street of the city. And I noted, when I lived in Jerusalem, the year before last, the city was safe. There were only two or three terror alerts, and only one successful terrorist action-- a shooting in a yeshiva, committed by a kid from East J'lem. The fence, as unpopular as it is, works: and I couldn't deny it.

I am no fool. I don't blame all Palestinians for the actions of some-- that's madness. But there is a culture at work amongst the Palestinians right now that is supportive of terrorism, and that causes me so much distrust that often I distrust even those who are trustworthy. And if that's true for me, how much more so for others who are less willing to be open on the subject.

I think the situation is being exacerbated on both sides. Among the Palestinians, I think that the people as a whole are being manipulated and used by corrupt officials and religious radical nutballs, and in their misery and despair they allow themselves to be wielded like a weapon. Among the Israelis, I think that right-wing nutjobs are in control of the Knesset at the moment, who are uninterested in considering fair solutions, and the legitimate fears and questions about security are being wielded like weapons of panic by corrupt neocons and ultra-Orthodox radical nutjobs. I don't know what the solutions are, but they need to come from both sides.

And whatever my beliefs as a religious Zionist concerning the Land of Israel and the Jews' right to it, it still breaks my heart that Jews and Muslims are at each other's throats worldwide over this, when to my mind, the Sons of Abraham should be natural allies and brothers. I hate that there is this major thing that I have to simply agree with my Muslim friends never to discuss. I hate that I can't share their enthusiasm for visiting the Haram al-Sharif, or their worry for Palestinian friends without it being clouded by other issues. And I hate it that they can't share my enthusiasm for Jerusalem and my interest in the fortunes of my friends' vineyards and fromagieries in Gush Etzion without it being clouded for them with other issues. I pray for peace, and I pray that both sides will be guided by God, and I figure that, in the absence of solutions, the best I can do is to remain as flexible as I feel possible, and do my best to not let it affect my relationships with Muslim individuals.

In the end, it is a conflict of nations, not a conflict of religions or peoples. And I hope it is over sooner rather than later.

Levite, is it also your impression (it's definitely mine) that Judaism and Islam are much more similar to each other than either one is like Christianity?

i see that too loq...its just amazes me that we just dont seem to see eye to eye. shame

muslims emulate Mohammad and carry out daily tasks that he used to do in terms of how he ate, spoke, dressed, acted etc.

do jews have a similar thing where they emulate the actions of a particular prophet like Moses?

One example is the beard. Muhammad kept one, so devout muslims the world over keep one. why do jews keep their beards?

This group is marching right down the street past my office building as I type this.
I find it sad.

---------- Post added at 05:28 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:15 PM ----------

I am sure that levite will expand but, in general, no.

Jews emulate (or would like to emulate) the actions of Moses not becuase he was Moses. A Jew ends up emulating Moses by following the commandments.
Moses was a great Jew. He followed the commandments well. If you follow the commandments well you will be a good Jew and as a result be like Moses.

So the goal is not to emulate Moses the goal is to be a good Jew.

Maybe that is what it is like with Muhammad and Muslims. I don't know. If I ask, I will have to put in in the other thread :).

I'd have to say yes to that. Judaism and Islam are religions of laws, first and foremost. They construct a framework of daily ritual and practice that is grounded in a legal system of sacred laws derived by stylized exegesis from holy texts, or by interpreting the comments and deeds of the originators of the system, and their teachings (in the case of Judaism, the Rabbis of the Talmud and their teachings; in the case of Islam, the comments and deeds of Muhammad, and those who were taught directly by him, and their teachings, as I understand it-- Dlish, is that too egregious a simplification of sunnah, hadith, and fiqh? I admit I barely know the surface, let alone the complexities of how they interact).

Also, theologically, the absolute monotheism of Judaism and Islam are much more similar to one another than to the more complex, constructed monotheism of Christianity (i.e., that Christianity has to do some mighty fancy philosophical footwork to get the Trinity to be one God, whereas monotheism is self-evident from the texts of Judaism and Islam), and certainly is more philosophically similar than the Catholic or Eastern Orthodox systems, which incorporate not only trinitarianism but the cults of the saints.

This is really Reason One I've never gotten how Muslims and Jews don't get along better. You would really think it would be easy for us. It is a damn shame, which I hope won't last forever-- or even much longer. I personally have always felt much more kinship with the Muslim scholars I've run into than with the Christian seminarians I know-- though of course they're lovely people, and I am delighted to know them.

---------- Post added at 03:48 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:30 PM ----------

We really don't have anything similar to this. The closest I can think of would be the way different Hasidic groups follow their masters, whoever their Rebbe or Grand Rabbi is, or their founding Rebbe was. They often emulate devices of speech, attitudes, even sometimes manners of dress. But that is still nowhere near the same level of importance or centrality, and it is only among some Hasidim, by no means a mainstream thing.

Even the Hasidic Rebbes don't encourage such a thing. Much closer to the main stream of Jewish thought would be this teaching: when Reb Zushya of Hanipoli (one of the early, great Hasidic masters) was dying, he trembled, and his students, seeking to reassure him, told him that surely he would be welcomed in the World To Come, because he was so learned, so great-- like Moses come again! And he shook his head, and replied, "When I come before my Creator, I do not fear he will ask me, 'Why did you not try to be more like Moses?' I fear he will ask me, 'Why did you not try to be more like Zushya?'"

As Sticky mentioned, we are traditionally taught not to compare ourselves with others, or to worry about what they did or did not do in minute terms. If we compare ourselves with others, generally we are encouraged to admire the learnedness, the devotion, the prayerfulness, or the humility of great figures in Jewish text and history. But not to emulate their dress, or their manner, or what have you.

As for the beard thing, traditionally, Jewish men have worn beards for two reasons: one is the commandment not to shave one's beard with a razor, which we extrapolate from the command in Leviticus 19:27 about not "rounding the corners of the head," which also explains the wearing of peyot or sidelocks. The other is that there are certain Kabbalistic teachings that emphasize beard growth as a mark of developing certain kinds of energies. Even today, if you run into any Orthodox man who doesn't have a beard, he will have trimmed it not via razor but via electric shaver, which, halakhically (according to Jewish law) acts like a scissors, not a razor, and is therefore permissible. Many Conservative men also follow that interpretation. On the rare occasions I have shaved, I have used an electric razor. But I don't keep a beard because I fear violating the commandment, or for Kabbalistic reasons, but rather because without it, I look 15 years younger and at least 120 degrees rounder in the apparent circumference of my face.....

I really wish you two could enjoy bacon. I respect your religious beliefs, but it's just sad to know you're missing out. Oh well, I'll enjoy enough bacon for the three of us.

Bleh, pig, no appeal at all, the smell of pork just makes my stomach turn.

There is no real Rabbi we aim to aspire to we might say for instance that Moshe was an "Unov" (no clue how to spell a Hebrew word in English the closest translation of it is modest but it is not close enough). But there is no real person we emulate.

You know what? In my younger, wilder days, when I was going through my time of questioning, and for a brief time did not keep kosher, I ate bacon several times. And I have to say, honestly, it was good. But I never thought it was all that. I had heard non-Jews tell me my whole life of the glories of bacon, and don't get me wrong, it's quite tasty; but it was so not all it was cracked up to be. Maybe it just got spoiled by the hype, I don't know. But when I went back to keeping kosher, bacon was not in any way shape or form hard to give up-- and it was, by light-years, the best of the pork products. I tried ham, pork chops, etc., and thought they were revolting. Pork sausage: not bad, but in no way better or tastier than beef or chicken or turkey sausage. The whole pork/bacon thing was, IMO, mostly hot air.

On the other hand, I still sometimes dream of shrimp. God, I miss them. I remember the first time I ate one, and I was like, "Holy fuck, how did nobody ever tell me about this?!!" Shrimp, and to a lesser degree, lobster and scallops, were so very much harder to give up than bacon...!!! I still remember the meal at which I realized that, if I were going to be true to myself, and really live with my increasing reconnection to Jewish practice, this would be my last shrimp. It was at a Chinese place in Santa Cruz that I loved, that did this dish called "Three Flavor Shrimps," where you got a little helping of garlic shrimp, a little helping of kung pao shrimp, and a little helping of sweet and sour shrimp, served with shrimp fried rice (for some reason that didn't qualify as a flavor, I guess); and they used the freshest shrimp, daily caught just down the road in Monterey, and they cooked them so gorgeously: crispy and taut on the outside, firm and moist and buttery on the inside. I remember saying goodbye with each unbelievably succulent little morsel of briny goodness, and in my head, saying to God, "You just better have a good explanation for this one when I get to ask You face to face. Because I'm gonna be really pissed if it turns out that You say, 'Shrimp? I never said that! Why do you think I made them so delicious?! I said when you eat them, don't scrimp! As in, have lots of them. Me damn it! That Moses and his poor hearing!'"

Seriously though, don't worry about us Jews. We're okay. 'Cause let me tell you, pork shmork, my grandma (God rest her soul) made matzoh ball soup with kreplach (like won tons) that would have made you weep. We get by, my friend.

I've had several Muslim friends try to convince me that they conveniently hate bacon. I'm not saying you're a liar, but I've never met a Jewish or Muslim person that actually admits to loving bacon, and that somehow seems wrong to me. Oh, have you tried kosher shrimp? It's made of Alaska Pollock fish (insert polish joke here). Supposedly, it's a reasonable approximation. I'm sure with the right sweet and sour sauce or garlic and butter concoction, you could be brought back to shrimp nirvana.

Delving back into Kashrut for just a minute, the question of why is what interests me. Is it really just "this is the common interpretation and I trust G-d", or is it something more like a test of obedience or self-control?

First of all, I have-- alas!-- met plenty of Jews who admit they love bacon. Most of them don't appear to be willing to give it up. But to respond slightly to your observation, I have noted that among those I know who have tried and disliked it, or at least not liked it enough to mind giving it up, all of them-- myself included-- were raised in kosher households, and not permitted to eat nonkosher food at the houses of friends. I wonder if part of the glory of bacon is that its fans have been socialized to know that it is delicious. I mean, if it is given to kids as a treat, or otherwise becomes a childhood favorite, the bond is likely to last into adulthood for emotional as well as flavor-based reasons. And by the same token, if one never is given the chance to taste it as a child, or is told that it is a yummy treat, one simply never forms the subconscious associations with it.

In any case, I have tried the faux shrimp made with pollock, and they're not bad. I sometimes use them to make mock seafood chowders. I would readily concur that they are more like shrimp than soy bacon is like bacon. But they don't taste like shrimp. Not really. I have done everything to them I can think of, and they are tasty, but they just don't have the smoothness of texture, the innate butteriness, the fresh brininess, of real fresh shrimp.

I think there are a lot of reasons for why people keep kosher. For a lot of Jews who do, it really is as simple as "God told us to." Others have various reasons of their own, most IMO rather hazy and vague. And there are some who take a literalist Kabbalist stance that nonkosher foods convey spiritual impurities. I'm never satisfied with simple answers, and I am also not a textual literalist, or a believer in direct Divine authorship of the Torah. I may be something of a Kabbalist, but I have no evidence that nonkosher foods convey such spiritual impurities. So for me, the Kabbalist answer is out, and it's less that I am satisfied to believe "God told us to, end of story," and more that I don't know what the Real Reasons are, since God has not revealed them; or if this is part of something that a prophet misunderstood, and God intended something else for us, there is nothing to suggest an alternate understanding to me. Therefore, to me it makes sense to take it on faith unless there is an overwhelming reason not to. And since there are a number of other issues in halakhah that I find in need of radical answers and sweeping changes, I feel that it behooves me to pick my battles. For example, I am intent on using a radical halakhic methodology to resolve the problem of gay acceptance in Jewish society; and that seems reasonable to me, because it makes a change to relieve the daily suffering of many others. But what would be gained by attempting to rewrite the halakhot of kashrut in order to permit the eating of foods explicitly banned in the Torah (a very radical change, well-nigh impossible to achieve)? I would get to eat shrimp again. Some other people would get to eat bacon again. Very pleasant, no doubt, but a disproportionately minor problem to go to such monumental and dramatic lengths to resolve. Much better, IMO, to save the effort for more serious issues.

Because in the end, who is hurt by my not eating shrimp or bacon? Nobody. What negative energy is generated by my not eating shrimp or bacon? None, as far as I can tell. Would anyone be hurt by my eating shrimp or bacon? Not directly, but it would be yet another wedge to drive into the divides between the Jewish people vis-a-vis halakhic disagreements. Would my eating shrimp or bacon generate negative energy? It seems unlikely, but then again, the Torah says God wishes us not to, and in my mode of understanding, the "reason" for commandments without apparent reason is that God wishes us not to do things that generate negative energy between ourselves, or between ourselves and the world, or between ourselves and God, and somehow God or the prophets who wrote the Torah believed that doing or not doing X thing would generate said negative energy. Perhaps the Torah is wrong in the matter of kashrut, but what reasons do I have for not going with the Torah as a matter of first recourse, rather than going against it as a matter of first recourse? Only a love of shrimp. And that, IMO, is a pretty poor reason.

Which, I suppose, still boils down to faith. But it's not, IMO, a blind or unreasoned faith, within its own parameters.

There are those liberal Jews, especially amongst the Reform, who keep kosher because they see it as a hallmark of identity: keeping kosher is something that Jews do. Therefore I will keep kosher to solidify my identity as a Jew. I respect that, but for me, that is insufficient. Likewise, Reconstructionists occasionally keep kosher because they see Judaism as a patchwork of folkways, and kashrut is the peculiar folkway of foods and eating dictated by our culture. Needless to say, I don't see that as sufficient, either. But that's because, as they will do, they have left God and Torah out of the equation, and as an observant Jew, I cannot see such things save in terms of God and Torah.

He did.

I don't see it as a matter of what it would hurt/not hurt, but rather as simply a question of modern interpretation. I've read the OT more than a few times and there are some rather dated requests which may have seemed pragmatic at the time, but are now entirely out of date. Circumcision used to prevent dangerous infection, but modern practices of hygiene would prevent that. Growing different crops next to each other could have caused pollination problems, but we're genetically engineering super-crops now. I'm pretty sure we can grow corn in the Sahara (and that it'd be subsidized). Women that are menstruating are no longer prone to infections, in fact we have pills that reduce the frequency of periods to 4 times a year or even less. I've postulated here on TFP in the past that the Sabbath was the first instance of worker's rights, but we have labor laws now.

It's not that the passages of the Torah are wrong, in fact there may have been a time when these directives saved lives. It's a question of whether these were divine mandates intended to be carried out for all time or simply some very clever men that took down what at the time were very important rules. If it's the former, it seems to be 100% an act of faith. If it's the latter, I'll buy you a plate of shrimp.

I appreciate the offer of you trying to get me to sin :rolleyes: . Wish i could try the shrimp, but if I was to try non-kosher I would start with a good cheeseburger or go to Peter Luger. Sadly it will be just be a temptation for me that I have to live with.

The thing is, Will, you're trying to rationalize what might not be rational. Circumcision because of hygienic reasons: modern medicine=no more need for snippy-snip. But what if that wasn't the reason for circumcision? We can call it by any number of fancy terms, and over the years, our rabbis have come up with some dandy ones. And if you ask Orthodox rabbis for reasons, either they won't give them to you, or they will simply put the full stop where Xazy did, and say "God told us to," or perhaps at best will give you some pleasant-sounding reinterpretive language that makes this all more palatable for the rationalist ear.

But in the end, it's a blood oath. A blood binding ritual, to use the classical magical terminology. It is a profoundly arational act, based not in an incomplete and ineffective scientific paradigm, but in an extensive and much more elusive paradigm of mysticism. You were a fellow Buffy watcher, if I recall right: remember the Season Five finale, when Xander asks, jokingly, "Why does it always have to be blood...?!" And Spike retorts, "Because it's always gotta be blood.... Blood is life, lackbrain.... It's what keeps you going, makes you warm, makes you hard, makes you other than dead." And the thing of it is, Spike is right. From a magical/mystical perspective, the unbreakable bond is wrought in blood. That's why we are forbidden to eat the blood of even kosher animals. That's why blood conveys spiritual impurity according to our ancient purity codes. That's why when Jewish women finish menstruating, they go dip themselves into a pool of living water (i.e., rainwater or melted and warmed glacier water; or if a natural body of water, a fresh-fed lake or the ocean): only living water, free of stagnation, is free of magic, and neutralizes the powerful energies associated with blood. Blood is Life. This covenant that God and Israel have is a covenant bound for life. It must be sealed in blood, nothing else will do. And it can't be a ritual drop from just anyplace. It is a covenant for all generations, a covenant to elevate all the mundane, everywhere, all the time, into the holy. It must be from the sexual organ, symbolizing its eventual passage to the next generation, and it must be there, permanently marked in us, to remind us, even at the moment we are most wrapped up in the worldly, that even this can be sacred. Even in that profoundly personal moment, we are still bound in our covenant to God.

Shabbat may or may not be good labor law. It may or may not be good civil rights. But it is a spiritual necessity. Spiritual development demands focus, silence, cessation of the worldly, and an immersion in the holy, on a regular basis. If, as we think, God gave us Torah in order to facilitate (among other things) our spiritual development, Shabbat is an absolute necessity.

Kilayim (the sowing of mixed crops) may or may not be good agriculture. But it is a reminder to someone whose life is spent measuring and working the utter pragmatics of earth and seed and harvest that their crop is not just some junk they put in the ground in hopes they can scrounge enough to eat next winter: each kind of grain and grass is different from every other, and we should pay attention even in those utterly routine moments of sowing seed to think about the wondrousness of the Creator's work, who doesn't just give us Plant and Animal, but the incredible, bewildering, breathtaking explosion of different kinds of life on our world, each kind completely different, with its own qualities and admirable traits.

Maybe kashrut was just an early kind of hygiene and sanitation system, but maybe it isn't. Maybe in the end, it's designed to teach us something. Maybe about how we are permitted to eat only grazing animals and foraging birds, putting us only one remove from vegetarianism, rather than consuming predators or scavengers putting us at one or two further removes from vegetarianism, signifying that while we are designed to be omnivorous, we should be careful of how we treat the higher lifeforms we are going to eat, and select only those that cause the least distancing from a plant-based life. Or maybe it's to teach us something else entirely. Or perhaps, the consumption of other kinds of animals has an effect on our energy that is unsuitable to the rest of the Jewish lifestyle. They say that you are what you eat: perhaps we are forbidden to eat predators and scavengers lest we become them, in spirit or in mind....

But that's the thing. There are so many lessons that the commandments do teach, or can be revealed to teach with just a little investigation; and so many facets of mystical or magical life that can be found to be somehow affected or tied into them, that one cannot simply declare cavalierly that such and such a commandment has just outlived its day. If such a thing ever comes about, that we are forced to put a commandment into abeyance, it would require more than just a penchant for rationalism to justify it. I contemplate putting the commandment about shunning male-on-male intercourse into abeyance, not because I cannot fathom it teaching anything, but because I cannot fathom anything it teaching outweighing the daily suffering of the gay Jews I know, who are merely trying to exist as God created them, and trying to live good Jewish lives as best they can according to who they are. To relieve the suffering of my brothers in the Jewish community, I might act radically to change the halakhah. But just because someone offers me shrimp, or tells me circumcision is unnecessary now that we have showers and soapy washcloths? Not so much.

Judaism is a religion of laws-- which are rational, according to their own framework-- but not only laws. It is a religion of story, of symbolism, and at heart, like any good religion, a religion of spirit. And all of those realms are realms of the arational, and to attempt to rationalize them is to strip the most important parts away. Or, if you like, think of it this way: if I gave you the choice between three gorgeously cooked, succulent dishes for your breakfast, lunch, and dinner, on condition that they be savored accordingly, or, alternatively, the option to take the perfect balance of the day's nutrition and energy needs in the form of a single capsule to be taken in the morning with a glass of water-- thus giving you considerable extra time, saving you cost, and effort, and optimizing your experience for the scientifically-calculated mean efficiency of your body's blood and enzyme systems...which would you choose? From a purely rational point of view, the capsule has to win every time, but I'd be willing to bet the majority of people would take the food.

Torah is more than just social rules. Every passage in Torah has levels, shades and nuances of meaning that have nothing to do with the mundane details of life. And in the end, it doesn't matter whether the words came directly, intact, verbatim from God, and we've messed up the transmission or misunderstood the message, or whether the words represent a bunch of people's efforts to try and put words into nonverbal messages from God. In either case, the Torah has been given already. It is no longer in Heaven, for God to tell us how it should be interpreted, but here on Earth, where it is the job of rabbis and scholars of halakhah to interpret it as best they can to achieve the goal of binding God and Israel ever closer.

Wow. I started reading this thread with one question in mind, and ended up spending my whole lunch break reading and thinking, which spawned a bunch more questions. But since my break is nearly over, I'll start with my original question. How do Jews in general, and you specifically, feel about non-Jews and Kabbalah? (or however you spell it, I've found about 10 different ways, and I imagine the differences arise from translation from Hebrew to English) I'm particularly interested in your opinions in its use in Hermeticism, but also curious about what you think of those who seem to practice it as a stand-alone belief system, such as Madonna and the Kabbalah Centre.

First of all Kaballah does deal in HEBREW and the Torah, I have met some true Kabbalah Rabbi who can scare the pants off of you and tell you some stuff that make you cringe in fear to just meet them and ask for advice. And most ashkanzic Jews hold that until you 40 you should not even consider learning Kabbalah. Sephardic Jewry learn it more, Ashkanazic tend to learn it much less often since there is so much more to learn first.

Kaballah is the mystical portion of the Torah, it is about understanding more the world we have , us and G-d, using Torah and mystical connections.

We can also talk about translating the Kaballah to English etc..., how words when translated the meaning is not precise, how someone with 0 knowledge or groundwork in Torah try to learn the Torah mystical section which is very heavy based on the Torah, on Hebrew letters, on truths that take 40 years worth of Torah learning to consider before you even start to learn it, yes do not make me laugh...

I am under 40, and I have heard seen I think 3 times with a Rav who learns kabbalah showed me an answer to a unique question I had showed me an answer in there, and it is not something you can just read and understand you need so much groundwork before hand.

By the way my curiosity my desire to learn Kaballah is there, yet I know inside me despite how much I learn and know I will probably not get to the level where I can begin to grasp it, and it is something that is not for me to know.

<edit> Here is 1 of Kaballah stories in my life. Oh and I consider this the least creepy one.

I will add a story of a Rav who was the student of the famous M'Kubul Rabbi Yisrael Abuhatzeira or better known as באבא סאלי (Baba Sali). I met a man in my building who was looking to meet someone in the community, he was the shamash (right hand man) for this Rabbi, who was visiting from Israel and was outside in the car. And I asked the man if I can get a Bracha (blessing), from him, and he said of course. I went outside the Rav was 103 at the time, and I had only had heard of him before but never met him. The man I spoke with translated what I asked for to the Rav, he gave me a blessing, I then gave a list of hebrew name of my siblings and he went through giving each family a blessing, when he got to one of my sisters he stopped, and finally said he will give it but it will not help, and continued with my other family.

My sister he stopped at, is married to an abusive manipulative wife-beater piece of garbage husband.

I'm glad you asked this question (and I hope you won't be shy about any of the others that occurred to you)! Magic and mysticism is actually one of my professional areas of interest, so I am pleased to get the chance to say something about it. I hope you'll bear with me if I separate your question into three subquestions, and first one subquestion that was unasked, but lies in the background nonetheless.

1. Jewish feelings about Kabbalah. Not all Jews approve of Kabbalah, and historically, there have been considerable differences of opinion over the propriety of certain kinds of Kabbalah and certain aspects of Kabbalistic practices. First of all, there is a difference between what we might refer to as "High Kabbalah," which is a mysticism more oriented toward theology, philosophy, metaphysics, with elements of practice more or less limited to meditation, arcane readings of scripture, and certain esoteric contemplation techniques; versus what we might call "Low Kabbalah," which is much less interested in abstract philosophy and metaphysics, and much more interested in practical magic. There has, perhaps unsurprisingly, always been more tolerance amongst the scholars and rabbis for "High Kabbalah," and more tolerance amongst the average country folk for "Low Kabbalah." Sometimes the lines between the two have blurred, and it has proven disastrous, as in the case of the False Messiah Shabtai Tzvi (if you're interested, wikipedia him) who achieved fame as a wonder-worker and maker of amulets; and sometimes the lines between the two have blurred and it has proven beneficial, as in the case of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism (again, if you want to know more, wikipedia him), who was not only a charismatic and learned scholar, but also a famous magical healer and exorcist. But even in the case of "High Kabbalah," there has been a strong tradition of neo-Aristotelian rationalism in traditional Judaism, brought about chiefly under the auspices of the great philosopher and halakhist Moses Maimonides (if you don't know who he is, check out his wikipage), and that school of thought have consistently rejected mysticism of every kind-- although to me it seems to me that they just replace it with their own brand of mysticism. Today, many if not most Liberal Jews have a very post-Enlightenment skepticism regarding magic and mysticism, both in the "existence" thereof but also in the value thereof, regardless of "Low" or "High." The Orthodox world also has a chunk of people who don't hold with magic and mysticism, but more who do. That latter group is divided into those who believe in it, but think it is too dangerous and radical for anyone save the most learned, holy scholars; and those who not only believe in it, but believe in learning and teaching it.

2. Jews and non-Jews adopting Jewish language, text, and scholia for use in non-Jewish practice. Obviously, there is a line: after all, Christianity and Islam, as well as many minor religions, use Jewish texts or the reinterpretation thereof and Jewish language and practices for their own purposes, and we don't object. In my scholarly experience, most Orthodox Jews who are made aware of the existence of Hermetic or Western Qabalah (since there are many transliterations of the word, my usual practice is to spell the Jewish mysticism as Kabbalah, the Western/Hermetic systems as Qabalah, and the Christian mystical system as Cabala) are not comfortable with the usage, since much of the Western magical tradition embraces what we refer to as avodah zarah, which is sometimes translated as "idolatry," but is more accurately termed "foreign worship," meaning worship or spiritual practice forbidden to Jews or unintended for them. Such people view the adoption of Kabbalistic models and language by the Western magical traditions as an improper use by non-Jews of what is deeply esoteric and sacred to Jews. Personally, I believe that as long as practitioners of Qabalah do not claim that what they do is Jewish mysticism, or that Qabalah and Kabbalah are the same thing, there is little reason to protest. People borrow and swap cultural material: it happens. It's only when they imply continuity where none exists, or claim the mantle of Judaism without actually being Jewish, that I then have an issue. I would venture to guess that I am probably in the minority among Liberal Jews in even having an opinion about this subject. Many if not most are likely to be ignorant concerning either or both Kabbalah and Qabalah, and fewer still are likely to care.

3. Non-Jews (or, I suppose, in theory, uneducated or misguided Jews) practicing "Kabbalah" as a stand-alone system, or using elements thereof to assemble a makeshift system. This is more problematic. In part it has to do with what I mentioned above, with it being problematic when non-Jews attempt to claim some form of Jewish identity without actually converting to Judaism and practicing it in some recognized form. And in part it has to do with the fact that Kabbalah simply is not intended to be a stand-alone system. It is Jewish mysticism, and it is designed for use in living a Jewish life. Furthermore, Kabbalah is extremely, egregiously, unbelievably complex. To properly understand even the simplest level of meaning in the text, one must be fluent in Hebrew, relatively fluent in the Aramaic of the Talmud and other Rabbinic writings, and one must be deeply, deeply steeped in the scholarship of Tanakh (The Hebrew Bible), Talmud, Midrash (the body of literature comprising exegetical parables written by the Rabbis of the Talmud), the Apocrypha, and numerous works of commentators, halakhists, storytellers over the course of centuries, if not millennia. I have been studying Jewish text my entire life-- my father is an Orthodox rabbi, and my mother is a professor of Jewish Thought, and I was inculcated with Jewish scholarship from Day One-- and only within the last few years (I am thirty-six) am I beginning to be able to perceive the simpler meanings of the great Kabbalistic texts. Chances are, the random non-Jew who professes to follow "Kabbalah" as his system of belief in actuality has no idea what he is talking about. The bulk of the Kabbalistic literature has never been translated-- to the degree that it even is translatable. There are no shortcuts. I have met a couple of non-Jews who label themselves "students of Kabbalah," who are studying all these things, and admit that they may never acquire the requisite knowledge to properly comprehend what they study. So much I might accept. But I have never yet met a non-Jew who says he "does" Kabbalah who actually has taken the time to master the vast range of knowledge necessary to even start making sense of what is there. I doubt there are many, if any.

4. The Kabbalah Centre. If you read my posts, you'll know that in general, I try hard to respect the opinions of others, and to be polite even in disagreement. If you knew me, you'd know I nearly never judge the practices of others in religion in public without at least leavening such judgment with an admission that I could be wrong, or be misunderstanding. Therefore, it should be taken with some seriousness when I say that the Kabbalah Centre are the worst kind of frauds. They may teach many things, but actual Kabbalah is not among them, and their practices are willfully ignorant, disrespectful to the tradition, deceitful, and avaricious. They prey upon the ignorant, the unwary, and the helpless. They take the holy and sacred Name of God and debase it by selling it as simony. In their stores are the parchments made to be put inside mezuzot (the little cylinders or boxes you see affixed to the doorposts of Jewish homes and businesses): these must be handwritten, perfectly and without error. Those in the Centre shops, sold as "amulets" are often sold, as their clerks say, with special words of power and protection written on the side or back: anyone with good Hebrew knows that the "special words of power and protection" mean "unfit for use." They sell holy water. Judaism has no holy water. Water cannot be blessed or cursed, according to Kabbalah. They told one of their "congregants" who had cancer that bathing in their holy water would cure him. He had to purchase close to a thousand cases of their bottled holy water (at $5/bottle) to fill a small pool of the "requisite size" for him to immerse in: he gave them tens of thousands of dollars for their blessing cure. They gave him water, and he died. They tell people that they have no need to learn Aramaic or Hebrew to learn the book Zohar (the central text they claim to use)-- that one need not really understand the words, just pass one's finger over the text, and it will magically imbue one with good energy. They "suggest" that it is best to use their edition of the Zohar, which costs between $250-$425 dollars, when anyone could purchase a perfectly good edition of Zohar in any decent Jewish bookstore for less than $100. They sell all manner of amulets and talismans for exorbitant prices, with little proof of efficacy. And they teach that the Kabbalah itself strips the learner of any need to practice the full range of the traditions and commandments. I don't care who their practitioners or congregants or adherents are, non-Jews or Jews, I don't believe it is acceptable for anyone to support them. They are everything that Kabbalists should not be, and exemplify the worst sorts of perversion of religion. It's people like them that make me regret I don't believe in Gehinnom (Hell), because they should only go burn there...if there were one...which I don't think there is. I spit in front of their headquarters whenever I pass it. They have nothing to do with real Kabbalah or real Judaism. And if Madonna thinks otherwise, the more fool she.

Thanks for the very detailed reply. The reason behind my question, is that i'm a very eclectic Wiccan, and I've found the study of Hermetic Qabalah to be very interesting. I can understand what you mean by High and Low, as some Wiccans make the same distiction between High and Low magick, as in ritual to better connect with divine and ritual to effect change in the physical world. It's nice to know that there are some out there who understand that borrowing from other religions is an acceptable practice. I've always sort of viewed most religions as just different paths to the same goal, but many don't quite see it that way.

I'm a little bit of a student of religions in general. One of the things I've been wondering, and part of the reason I took the opportunity to ask, was whether it would be offensive to ask a Jew, or even go to a synagogue, to make the attempt to learn Hebrew. I know I could probably find books on the topic, and probably will. But it seems like they would be the best teachers, especially for context, since I intend to study some of the Jewish texts. I just don't know if they would be willing to teach me considering my desire to study their books of worship and use what I found there out of the context they are comfortable with. On one hand, I can understand that they would think that I was using the material in a way that was not in line with their faith. On the other, I've always thought it appropriate to take wisdom where you could find it, and use different views to help me understand things. From the bit of Qabalah that I've seen, it seems to be a path that many different religions could use to better understand diety.

As for one of the random questions I had (sorry it took this long to respond, I wanted to try to put it together in a coherant fashion, and I've been rather busy) I'm curious about the Jewish lineage. From what you've said, if your mother is a Jew, then you are part of the tribe without having to convert. But conversion is possible, if difficult. So my question is, if a woman converts to Judaism, and then has children, do they fall under the lineage, or is it different because she was a convert?

And thanks for the information on the Kabbalah Centre. I'll file them away in the same category I keep other sham cults like Scientology.

If she converts her children born after are Jewish, if she converts after she had children her children are not jewish.

My guess would be that most Jewish professional scholars would not have a problem teaching you more about Judaism, or teaching you Hebrew, or teaching you some Jewish texts: Bible, Talmud, philosophy, commentary, liturgy.... In general, Jewish scholars are delighted to teach anyone who wishes to learn. However, as I mentioned, I do think you would find it difficult to find truly qualified teachers of Kabbalah who would be willing to teach you. To be frank, as a Liberal Jew, I find it difficult to find such qualified teachers myself, since they are mostly to be found in the Orthodox community, and thus tend to be disinclined to share their wisdom with one they do not trust to comprehend, guard, and use the knowledge properly. In any case, while it is hardly uncommon for non-Jews to come to Jewish scholars to learn more about Judaism, I might not, were I you, advertise your intent to mine the knowledge given you for resources useful to adopt into Wiccan practice. Some, like me, might have no problem with that; many others likely would be uncomfortable.

Xazy is, of course, quite right. To expand very slightly, identity, in traditional Jewish law is a fairly absolute quality. A Jew by birth is a Jew no matter what they do; if the Jew is a woman, all her children will always be Jewish no matter what she does, no matter what they do. A woman who converts to Judaism is Jewish for the rest of her life, no matter what she does; all her children will always be Jewish no matter what she does, no matter what they do. There is, according to Jewish law, only conversion to Judaism. There is no converting from Judaism-- no leaving the tribe once one is accepted, so to speak.