What are you going to do to preserve a tradition that is the peculiar and unique culture that Judaism inculcates? The American Jewish community is not going to survive by lining up against its common enemy.
I studied Judaism a lot. I studied religion in general, and I have never imposed my Judaism on my kids. They are what they want to be. I think… you must care for others. That’s the correct religion, I think.
I wear my Judaism on my sleeve – and my face for that matter.
Jews have long experience with Christians who have tried to help us in putting our Judaism behind us.
I want to do everything in my power to ensure the equality between all movements of Judaism in the state of Israel: Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform. In conversions, in budgets, in the eyes of the law. No one can claim ownership over the Jewish God.
The observant Jew has his own sense of values. Torah Judaism is his blueprint for this life, his target for existence.
Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.
What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism – which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people – is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era.
I still believe there is a lot of truth in Orthodox Judaism, but not the whole truth. Each person has his truth that he has to discover. You don’t necessarily have to mold yourself to another idea of who you are.
As a journalist, I’ve always treaded carefully about being Jewish and caring a lot about Israel and having that not become too big of an issue that could affect my journalism. But I also don’t think it’s essential to my Judaism, as I think it might be for some other people.
Since Hiroshima and the Holocaust, science no longer holds its pristine place as the highest moral authority. Instead, that role is taken by human rights. It follows that any assault on Jewish life – on Jews or Judaism or the Jewish state – must be cast in the language of human rights.
My faith was undermined by the same sort of things that make people skeptics of religion in general. Part of it was, there was no real place for me in Judaism. Maybe if there was I would’ve hung in there, but I was attracted to the social-justice aspects of Judaism, and I was attracted to the prophets.
Judaism is a brilliant religion, and the main function of Judaism is to learn and read.
In Judaism, almost every ritual entails either food or the absence of food. Yom Kippur, for instance, is the absence of food. Part of it is Talmudic, part of it is custom. So much of Judaism was bound up in dietary laws. So everything you ate – the very act itself – was part of religion.
Jews do not have to be Christians. Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism, but too utopian, too hopeful, too unrealistic a turn.
Abraham is the shared ancestor of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He stands at the heart of these three faiths. And yet you know almost nothing about him.
I realize that many elements of the Buddhist teaching can be found in Christianity, Judaism, Islam. I think if Buddhism can help, it is the concrete methods of practice.
Judaism lives not in an abstract creed, but in its institutions.
In Judaism, there are 613 biblical commandments, and the Talmud says that the chief commandment of all is study.
From a constitutional point of view there is an advantage to democracy and it must be balanced and the Supreme Court should be given another constitutional tool that will also give power to Judaism.
Traditional Judaism has always embraced the doctrine of the immortality of the soul and the ultimate resurrection of the dead.
I’ve never been from a certain group. I’ve always reserved a space for myself where I’m unattached to any group, but the part of Judaism that I really take away, that means something to me, is the part about community.
These are the themes in life which are consistent in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism – of being grounded in who you are and being engaged in an unjust world.
In other words, Judaism is not Calvinism.
Patriarchy is a bully notion, which if you will notice never attacks a nation that can defend itself. Zionism is patriarchal and sets Judaism on its head.
Judaism is one of the last of the world’s matrilineal philosophies. Matriarchies are always the cultures that patriarchy attacks and decimates, because they don’t spend all their money on the military like patriarchy does. They are easy prey.
Judaism is not just a religion but a people, and the food and customs of one part of the people is connected to the other part of the people. They are part of a larger story.
Evangelicals too often fall short in their actual teachings about Judaism.
Every fundamentalist movement I’ve studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced at some gut, visceral level that secular liberal society wants to wipe out religion.
I believe that our democratic values are also born out of our Jewish faith, a ‘love for the stranger,’ and equality before the law – these are not foreign values: this is Judaism.
Judaism is a whole line of values that have existed for thousands of years, but the democratic idea is a new idea, and significant parts of it stand in contradiction to Judaism.
To have knowledge of Judaism and to be a religious Jew or an interested Jew, is to have a doorway into a worldview that is entirely alien to the rest of the world’s worldview.
Judaism shouldn’t be the jailhouse of ideas but a liberator of ideas; not a disintegrator of people but what brings people together.
I believe an authentic Judaism would legislate total equality for queer people.
I really find that with Judaism, it creates an amazing blueprint for family connectivity.
There are many ways people think of God, and thousands of flavors of Christianity, Judaism, Islam… but they’re always looking at something that’s not measurable or you can’t really see or control.
I feel like one of the things that is central to American life is the religious experience, and I think that the experience of being Muslim in America is as valid and as important a perspective on the religious experience of America as evangelical Christianity or Judaism – whatever it may be.
Religion triggers a lot of emotions in me, most of which stem from being raised Jewish in a very Baptist community in the South. I didn’t believe any of it from an early age – the clubby quality of whatever religion or church you belonged to, Judaism included. It just struck me as foolish.
The more we can do to support and promulgate the intellectual traditions of the Abrahamic faiths – of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – the better armed we will be to fight fundamentalism.
So much of Islam is Judeo-Christianity. It’s impossible to divorce them. Islam is 600 years after Christ. Thousands of years after Judaism. Christ, Moses, Abraham – they are all in the Koran.
I find its attention to living this life rather than the next one exhilarating because I think even independently of Judaism that that’s the right way to go about life.
I have a great identification with Judaism as a religion and as a culture, and all the values that created such a great history, and the Jewish contribution to the betterment of all humanity.
For years, Judaism has been a sort of product put on the religious shelf, and on holidays, we would take it off the shelf and let seculars play with it for a bit. Now, Judaism is going back to being something that more closely touches everyone.
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