The Evolving Jew

My answers to a couple of comments on this post - Anon: I wasn't trying to give you a hard time for posting anonymously - sorry if it came across that way. You're right - perhaps the word "retreat" is a poor choice. But I do not believe in rejecting empirical evidence because my religion claims it must be wrong. If I had always lived in caves and my religion had taught me that the sky was green, and I had always believed that, what would happen if I came to the surface and saw that the sky was blue? There would be 3 choices. 1) The sky isn't blue, despite the evidence of my own eyes. 2) The sky is green; therefore, my entire religion is wrong. 3) The sky is green, therefore my religion was wrong about this particular point. That doesn't invalidate the rest of the religion. My beliefs would fall into the 3rd category. I love Hashem, I love Judaism. I am forced to concede that Judaism had it wrong on some counts, but that doesn't mean I reject

I usually don’t comment on politics on this blog, but in this political season, and with politics being my version of sports, I guess it’s inevitable. In this Jerusalem Post op-ed piece , Jonathan Tobin decries that the Democratic Party, by veering sharply towards the left, has forced people like Joe Lieberman to turn to the republicans and endorse John McCain. Tobin repeats the usual claim of the right that the Democratic party has become soft on terror and is now controlled by the radical anti-Israel pacifist left and that people like Lieberman have no choice but to lean towards the “responsible” foreign policy of the Republicans. "At places like Huffingtonpost.com and other sites where the MoveOn.org crowd congregate, the comments range from the scatological to the purely anti-Semitic. At such places, hard core anti-Bush and anti-war sentiments are the coin of the realm, and hostility to Israel and its perceived influence on American foreign policy is rampant. The notion of

Anonymous left a comment to my post "Faith vs. Evidence" on Dec. 24. I started typing a comment in response, but decided my point merited a new post. Anonymous wrote: "Great blog. I came across it accidentally, but well thought out and thorough posts. "Anyway, I don't think your generalization in the 2nd paragraph holds. I came from a pretty religious family, from an early age as I can remember I always valued logic and reasoning more than blind faith. "But anyway, on to your statement that "There is nothing in the documentary hypothesis to force me to reject God's existence". If you are accepting scientific reasoning, as your post seems to suggest (e.g. you are refer to documentary hypothesis, which is a scientific construct), then you are going about it from the wrong angle. Extraordinary claims required extraordinary proofs. Thus, you have to prove God's existence rather than wait for someone else to disprove it. Otherwise, I could just

There’s been a lot of talk lately about how much of the formerly Modern Orthodox community has been leaning to the right, religiously. The problem is much more pronounced in the big communities where the Orthodox population is dominated by the Ultra Orthodox. The MO in those areas seem to take their cues for everything from the Charedim. Kashrut, education, etc, are all run or organized by Charedim and the Modern Orthodox just use the services provided by them. I live in a small community that is most decidedly "out of town". Because there are only a handful of Charedim here, the MO rabbis and lay leaders and members of the community all step up to the plate and manage the Vaad Hakashrut, run & teach in the day school, manage the eruv, invite modern speakers, etc. In the big communities the MO look to the UO for all their community building, by default, and end up thinking about themselves the way the UO think of them - that Modern Orthodoxy is just "Orthodoxy

Is there any evidence for believing in Hashem & Judaism other than faith? It depends on one's starting point. Someone who was raised in a secular humanist household and whose identity is invested in secular humanism will undoubtedly see no reason at all to accept any sort of higher being or revelation. On the other side of the coin are many of us who are starting from a point of faith in God and faith in Torah MiSinai. We don't have this faith because we have deduced it from logical processes. Rather, we feel it deeply, in a way that is not subject to logic or rationalism. It's a different kind of belief, not based on empirical evidence. We simply KNOW. Being intelligent individuals raised on modern western rationalism, we confront evidence that the Torah is not what traditional Judaism claims it to be. What do we do? Rather than throw out all of our deeply held beliefs, we must modify them to fit the empirical evidence. That is, emunah still has a place in

Another comment that I posted on XGH 's blog: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I also entertain skeptical thoughts but here's the two facts which ground me: 1) I believe in Hashem. How to define Hashem? The standard way - an omnicient and omnipotent entity who created the universe (ir, in some way, IS the universe.) I leave out whether this entity exactly matches whet is depicted in Tanach for the moment. Call him a nondenominational God. 2) I believe in Judaism. That is to say, I believe in the process. Rabbinic Judaism is mostly man made anyway. What we practice today would be virtually unrecognizable to Jews at the time of, say, Shlomo HaMelech. So for anyone, 90% of believing in Judaism is believing in the process of Judaism, the give & take of interpretation of the Torah. As for the other 10% - well, I have doubts, but I figure my belief in Hashem and in the process of Judaism is enough grounding so that I can

On his blog , XGH often stuggles with God's existence and with the truth of Judaism. Here is comment I wrote to one of his recent posts - I ended up rambling a little: Seems to me that you struggle with 2 questions and that you need to examine each in a different light: 1) does God exist 2) if god exists, is OJ true? Or break it down even further: If God exists, what kind of God is he? Does he consciously rule the world or is all of existence just a sort of "side effect" of God's being? Or does he take an active role? If he takes an active role, did he actually command us to do all the things that the Torah lists or is that a human document by people who were striving for God? Even if it's not a totally human document, what level of input was there by God? Written by God, every word? Written by people interpreting the word of God? Written with ruach hakodesh or divine inspiration? There's a lot behind the question: "Is Orthodox Judaism tru

The YU Commentator has an article about Young Israel setting a national screening process for all YI shul rabbis . Here's the comment I posted at the Commentator website: More top-down homogenization and yet another reason I don't daven at a Young Israel. I wonder why they're taking this action? I have never heard of a case of a YI hiring a graduate of Chovevei Torah, and I can't think of any YI that would. Another comment - as a fan of YCT, it disturbs me to see Rabbi Helfgot using the "Torah True" phrase. While I respect Rabbi Helfgot tremendously, this is slightly disturbing. While there's nothing's wrong with "Torah True" in principle, it's become a catchphrase of the yeshivish world to exclude places like YCT, and even YU sometimes. His using the term comes off like a desperate attempt to say to the yeshivish world: "Look - we're one of you! Please acknowledge our legitimacy!"

Recently I started attending a local Gemara shiur (Talmud class.) The class is studying Tractate Megillah, and one of the first things we discussed was whether women can read the megillah for men. It seems very clear from the gemara, (towards the top of page 4a), that women can do so, and that men will fulfill their obligation by hearing a woman read. The gemara says: Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said: Women are obligated in the reading of the megillah, for they too were part of the miracle. Note that it says “bemikrah”, in the reading of the megillah, not “beshmiyah”, in the hearing of the megillah. However, Tosafot, while acknowledging that the plain text would appear to support that view, then jumps through hoops to work out an interpretation that denies women this right. I wonder if this is a case of approaching the topic by the standards of the medieval period in which the Tosafists lived with a preconceived notion and then wringing out their desired conclusion through rather convolu

From Forward.com: Israel's Hiden Crisis ( http://www.forward.com/articles/11292/ ) The article discusses the demographic crisis in Israel - not of Arabs vs. Jews, but of Charedim vs. Non-charedim ------------- So what to do? Is there a way to get charedim to participate in the workforce & army while allowing them to stay charedim? And what will this do to governmental institutions once the Charedim have that much voting power? Perhaps what we need is something almost as unlikely as charedim working and serving in the IDF: massive North american aliyah of the non-charedi variety...

A friend just sent me this article about the experience of Jews of color in the United States. Aside from the fascination of the article as a whole, one quote by a Jewish African American woman caught my eye: "In my experience in the Orthodox community, I have found the culture of being Orthodox and Jewish to be deeply tied to a need for conformity." How true!

Why do we in the Modern Orthodox community have such a deep need for validation from the Charedi community? So they don’t accept us – big deal! Do you see Reform wringing their hands because of their lack of acceptance by the Yeshivish world? Do you see Conservative lamenting that Rav Shach never saw their movement as valid Judaism? The problem is that Modern Orthodox and Charedim share a label: “Frum” or “Orthodox”. I propose the following: Let Charedim call themselves whatever they want, and if we need a label so badly, we can be “Torah U’Mada” Jews, or something like that. My suggestion is something even simpler: “Hilchati” “Hilchati” Judaism, Yahadut Hilchatit, or Halakhic Judaism, is simple and to the point, as well as having the additional benefit of borrowing from the title of the Rav’s seminal work, “Ish HaHalacha” or “Halakhik Man”, thus having a built-in connotation to a philosophy that much of the Modern Orthodox world prizes and follows. Once the labe