Would foreign policy be driven by biblical precedents? His argument is that the Jewish people have a secular history alongside a religious one. The development of the Jewish people can be identified in purely material terms sociological, economic, geographical, linguistic, etc. The Jews were driven out of their land by force some 2, years ago, and they had every right to return to their historical homeland, which they have done over the past years.
In recent years, mainstream opinions about the meaning of a Jewish state—among both religious and secular Jews—have moved to the right. As the religious community has grown in influence, it has pushed for laws on the public keeping of the sabbath, for rules on kosher food, and for religious norms to apply in the military, especially regarding the role of women.
It has also argued for more extreme positions on foreign policy. All these stances have been supported by the right-wing government. Up to now a form of democracy has been in place in Israel, with free elections, a critical media, a plethora of political parties, and religious freedom.
Does the Jewish religion have something to say about what is the best form of government? I put these questions to two religious thinkers, one a rabbi and peace activist, the other a religiously observant professor of law.
Both are uneasy with the direction the country has taken as regards its Jewishness. For Rabbi Michael Melchior, an Orthodox rabbi and former member of the Knesset, talk of a Jewish state brings to mind a medieval book called the Kuzari, written by the Spanish rabbi Yehuda Halevi. It contains a purported dialogue between the king of the Khazars and a Christian, a Muslim, and a Jew, with the aim of discovering which of these religious paths the king and his people should follow.
Will power corrupt you? The prophets, who confronted those in power, spoke the truth. Their words have lasted, not only among Jews but also Christians and Muslims.
Is this a model for today, when political power is more prevalent than ethical, human values? Melchior is especially concerned about how Jewishness has been defined in the struggle to make peace with Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza, land occupied by Israel after the Six-Day War of Israel relinquished control of Gaza in They felt that any peace would mean giving up the land of Israel.
It would weaken the Jewishness of the Jewish state. This was not a project of which they wanted to be part. For related essays, see our special project Choosing My Religion. To share the most important religious decision of your life, or remark on one of the accounts below, please drop us a note at hello theatlantic. Two more Jewish readers continue to debate that question—raised by Abby , the young Catholic-turned-Jew, and then complicated by Lekha , the young Southerner with a Jewish father and Hindu mother.
To those who have shared their stories, please understand that God made some people Jews and some people non-Jews. Maybe this is hard for followers of other religions to understand because it is so different than other religions. For example, Christians believe that their religion is the right path and universal, but Judaism is unique in that we believe that everyone is equal in the eyes of God, and not everyone has to follow our religion—only the members of the Jewish family do.
I was raised in a Jewish household and went to a Conservative synagogue. If you asked me how I would label myself today, I would reluctantly say Orthodox. I say reluctantly because I firmly believe a Jew is a Jew if they have a Jewish mother or converted according to Jewish law. All of these other divisions are extremely harmful to the cohesiveness of the Jewish people. At first I heard it applied to sexual orientation, gender, or political stance.
But I have increasingly heard people apply this paradigm to religion and even race. Identity has nothing to do with it.
I think this stems from a larger trend of radical individualism that is such a prevalent attitude nowadays. It pains me to hear about those in the Jewish community who feel excluded. And this is certainly something that needs to be addressed. But the tension described by readers Abby and Lekha between their Jewish identity and their beliefs is an outgrowth of this philosophy, which, when taken to the extreme, falls closer to the antithetical side.
In Jewish practice, there is a balance between the rights and experience of the individual and the obligations that the individual has towards the community. When you swing too heavily to one side or the other, problems start to arise. But there is another aspect. Take for example the commandments surrounding the laws of kashrut keeping kosher. They are given no explanation in the Torah.
Later commentators have explained them in context, adding depth and breadth to their significance, but at their core, they are not meant to be understood by human logic. Another example is Shabbat observance. Jewish law prohibits driving on Shabbat due to the prohibition of lighting a fire. The collective observance of this law ensures that all members of the Jewish community live within walking distance of the synagogue, and thereby each other.
Setting aside the philosophical reasons for this law for the moment there is a lot of rich material here , the moment people began to privilege their personal feelings to whether or not they relate to a law over the needs of the public, the communal structure of living next to the people you pray with and go to school with and socialize with collapses.
There is so much more nuance to Jewish identity than the strawmen and facile explanations of Jewish law that some of your readers are offering. The latter is only the case if you accept one interpretation of Judaism as the only one and assume that the people who have interpreted them have made no mistakes.
Under this interpretation, people who have fulfilled the requirements for conversion even under the auspices of the Haredi-controlled Chief Rabbinate in Israel can have their conversions annulled decades later, even if most of their ancestry is Jewish—something which simply is not in the rabbinic sources regarding conversion rites and amounts to as much of an innovation as anything else.
Under the former version, the Post-It one, people are expecting to have everyone accept them as Jewish no matter how little of the various traditions he accepts. In a different way, this too is asking your liberal interpretation of Judaism to be accepted by all.
And while I agree that this seems to mesh with people feeling at liberty to pick their identities regardless of actual facts and expect everyone to agree, the difference here is that conscience or beliefs are at least part of being Jewish—and those can change, even if who your parents are cannot. We ought to make that distinction. Indeed, the majority of the population of the State of Israel is secular. One could argue service in the IDF and an Israeli passport is just as much a symbol of Jewish peoplehood as anything any rabbi could issue.
Do these secular Jews who eat non-kosher food and turn lights on and off on Saturday not count? The answer is: each different group will have its own standards for acceptance. All in all, however, this is a luxury that Jews can only afford in relatively safe times.
Our enemies have never made such distinctions, so we should probably all give each other a break. Indeed, I kid her that she should have taken the name Golda when she converted, as my Jewish name is Tovye and we have five daughters between us …. First of all, the Notes section is absolutely amazing. As an Orthodox Jew, I want to add the following point to give context to the discussion about conversion: Judaism discourages potential converts because it does not view being Jewish [as] the only path to a relationship with God and a life well lived.
Being Jewish is to be part of the covenantal relationship that God established with Abraham and his descendants, a relationship that comes with added responsibilities that are not demanded of the rest of humanity.
Because this level of observance is not for everyone, we typically dissuade potential converts and recommend the universal means of serving God, unless they are truly committed to Judaism on principle and not for ulterior motives.
That being said, the Bible does repeatedly remind us to love converts and not hurt them in any way, including emotionally. Observant Jews struggle with the tension of leading religious lives in modern society on a daily basis and often wonder how a convert would choose to accept that tension when it would seem much easier to avoid it entirely. I myself often feel like an outsider to Judaism in many ways.
My mother is not Jewish; she is a South Asian Hindu. Also, unlike many Jews in this country, I was raised in a small Southern town with a very tiny Jewish community and no synagogue. I attended a Jewish Sunday school run by the local Jewish group, but I did not have the experience of being raised in a vibrant, large, Jewish community with an established synagogue and lots of opportunities to participate in religious life.
This has also left me feeling a bit insecure about my Judaism with respect to others who grew up in large usually Northeastern cities and thus had access to those resources, feel part of an established community, and make other Jewish friends. Throughout my childhood I only had one Jewish friend, and most of my other friends were Protestants of various stripes who were kind but convinced that my religion was sinfully wrong.
This, combined with the lack of community support and being a Jewish person of color, left me feeling very much an outsider to Judaism and Jewish identity—especially when I went to college outside Philadelphia and encountered people who had spent their whole lives surrounded by other Jews, engaging in BBYO, Jewish summer camps, and other activities that reinforced that identity.
As I got older I realized that my actual beliefs about god s were not in line with traditional Judaism. So in my case, choosing Judaism is not so much a religious choice, but a cultural identity that I was born into, and that I have chosen to reclaim in my own way. I must admit that I often feel confused when I meet Jewish converts. I think this is because many Jews, especially most of the relatively secular American Jews I know, look on being Jewish as a cultural identity more than a religious identity.
I converted to Judaism through the Conservative Movement at the end of my freshman year of college. I was first drawn to Judaism as a year-old girl at Sports Broadcasting Camp. About 60 percent of the campers were Jewish. There had only been one Jewish student in my elementary and middle school in Virginia. I was fascinated by my new friends and their talk of bar mitzvahs and BBYO. As I learned more about Judaism through the Internet, I began to feel like my angsty teenage existential crisis of anxiety and questions had been answered.
I was raised Catholic and did not feel comfortable questioning how one man could encompass both a god and the Holy Spirit. The first time I stepped foot in a synagogue was a few weeks before the High Holidays in , when I was a sophomore in high school. The rabbi at the small reform congregation an hour from my house would not let me begin the conversion process until I was In the meantime, I read as much as I could and looked at colleges that had a Hillel.
While I watched my peers battle homesickness and the difficulty of learning to cook and clean and take care of themselves, I was trying to navigate Jewish social norms. I was shocked when I would go out with my Jewish friends and they would mix meat and milk, or skip services on Yom Kippur. Why did you do that? How do your parents feel about that?
The biggest religious choice was not standing before a beit din, a court of three rabbis, and declaring my belief in the mitzvot of Judaism, or denouncing my belief in Jesus. The biggest religious choice I ever made was joining a people who, at every turn, did not seem to want me.
Your reader raises interesting points, but it makes it look like Jews and Judaism as a whole are exclusionary and rejects convert, which is only a half-truth. The reality is much more complex because there are substantial differences between traditional and liberal Judaism.
It is true that Judaism traditionally does not seek converts. While during antiquity Judaism was open to converts, Roman and later Christian prosecutions of Jews and severe state sanctions for conversions led Rabbinic authorities to discourage conversions as well. In fact, if someone wants to convert, the rabbis traditionally need to discourage the person at least three times, to make sure that only those most committed to Judaism and most diligent in seeking to convert join the Jewish people.
Another issue is that Judaism like some other religions is based on descent—in the Jewish case, on matrilineal descent—and that, traditionally, we, the Jewish people, regarded ourselves as being descended from our ancestors who stood at Sinai 3, years ago when we were granted the Torah upon the Exodus from Egypt. So, in a way, our religion is tribal-based.
Unlike some other descent-based religions which do not accept conversions—like the Zoroastrians and the Druze—Judaism does allow conversions, but the process is difficult.
Although there are many intermarried couples including my own , conversion to Judaism is still relatively rare, particularly for the Orthodox stream of Judaism.
The more liberal streams, the Conservatives and the Reform, are much more open. Such questions typically reflect inquisitiveness rather than standoffishness or hostility. Most people usually stay within the confines of the faith there were born in, so a person who does something atypical obviously elicits curiosity.
Once she provides a reasoned reply, most Jews I know would accept the answer and her as a fellow Jew and move on. My parents homeschooled me all the way through high school, mostly so that they could control what I learned about the world and about religion. This means that I spent all of my life until the age of 18 or so being not only intensively indoctrinated, but also incredibly isolated from the outside world.
Undoing the brainwashing took a long time. The loss of so many long-held beliefs and ways of looking at the world was so devastating that for a time, I needed therapy three times a week. I know that many people practice a more liberal form of religion.
The extremist religion I was raised in did so much harm that I now feel allergic to any and all religious practice. Sometimes I still look back wistfully to the days when I could cling to the knowledge that God had a plan and knew better than I did, no matter what happened.
The world felt like a more secure place when I saw it in black-and-white terms and believed myself to be a child of the Creator. I am much happier now, in my secular life as a humanist.
For the first time, I can breathe freely and think honestly. I no longer see myself as a worm with no worth apart from what Christ has given me. I no longer have to repent of each tiny mistake I make. I no longer live in fear of hell. I no longer need to twist my mind to accept things that are in fact illogical and unproven. Unfortunately, I do still struggle with anger and bitterness and confusion and grief at the way I was raised.
The Benedict Option, formed mostly in response to the mainstream acceptance and full legalization of same-sex marriage, harkens back to the 5th century Saint Benedict of Nursia, who retreated from the decadence of Rome and formed an isolated group of monastic communities that sought to preserve Christianity through the Dark Ages.
For Libby Anne, her isolation from secular society had the opposite effect of what her parents intended; it led to her to abandon Christianity altogether, as well as a belief in any god. She explains:. The Christian homeschooling movement purports to raise strong, upstanding Christians who will, upon adulthood, be ready to communicate the truth of Christianity and the value of the Christian way of life to the world.
The Benedict Option purports the same thing. But how is this supposed to happen if these same Christians grow up so shielded from the world that they have no idea how to interact with it? The same was true with basically everything. This created a crisis of faith, because I no longer felt I could trust what my parents had taught me.
Because what I call the Christian bubble filter is so common across congregations and communities, raising children under a more separate Benedict Option could potentially mean that all of their information about the world outside the bubble would be filtered and thus distorted. And frankly, postponing this moment until adulthood spells trouble.
I was born in a Christian, Evangelical home. Before I even knew how to speak my heart believed in God. God met me in college, when recession had just hit, and my parents could no longer afford my education. Freshman year: I received a scholarship I never applied to. Sophomore year: I received a large donation from a stranger.
Junior year: I was due to be expelled from university because of lack of payment, but instead I was given an extension until my senior year. And senior year: I was the only student in the history of a long established institution to attend graduation with a due balance. God met me after college, when a series of life events lead me to depression, and when I consciously chose to give my life to Him.
And when I asked Him to remove the pain, the suffering, the unwillingness to continue this life, He did. Beyond all comprehension or logic or tactic I could pinpoint as a proven method, He simply did. It was only after all these events that I understood, at 25 years old, why I believe: not because I was taught to, but because life pushed me to a place where the only answer was God. He pushed me to a feeling beyond this physical world.
He pushed me to a hope beyond rational understanding. He pushed me to a state of indescribable peace. He pushed me to a faith that makes a fool of what makes sense. He met me where logic ends. People keep looking for facts that God exists, and these facts are everywhere; most importantly within you. I was very fortunate in the tradition that I grew up in.
While I am far from incurious, I found that my own tradition, with its demands and expectations of belief and behavior, held up pretty well under scrutiny. So I stayed. Doing so has reinforced to me the value of rootedness and the flimsiness of whim, volition, and passing fancy.
Doubts come and go, but I seem to inhabit a different zone from most modern Americans—not of certainty, but of inevitability. That started changing a few months ago, when I decided I would try to find faith again. Even though I had decided I wanted to stay, and wanted to believe in this huge and grand and intangible thing that made people I knew so happy, it wasn't as easy as one choice.
Faith is elusive, and I learned that even when one devotes their lives to it, belief can be hard to cultivate.
At first my big issue with the Church, and staying involved in it, was its culture—the sometimes judgmental and exclusive and downright mean behavior of some of its members. After a while I realized that the culture I hated so much was something created by its members, who are all fallible humans, rather than doctrine or a divine being.
I thought that epiphany would make my faith flourish, that it would no longer be so difficult to believe in the gospel in which I so desperately wanted to believe. I did not come to bring peace but a sword. Nevertheless, it remains true that, in the Old Testament, God commands the Jewish state in the land of Israel to come into being through warfare and violent dispossession of the original inhabitants.
We need hardly say that this comes against a background where every day the Israeli settler movement is grabbing more land in the West Bank and Jerusalem there are now , Israeli settlers in the West Bank alone — aided, abetted, funded and empowered by the current Israeli government — and throwing or forcing more and more Palestinians out, in so many different ways that it would take volumes to describe.
It entails, in the Old Testament itself, a Covenant between God and a Chosen People regarding a Promised Land that should be taken by force at the expense of the other inhabitants of the land and of non-Jews. This idea is not present as such in other religions that we know of. This is a reasonable demand, and it may allay the fears of Jewish Israelis about becoming a minority in Israel, and at the same time not arouse fears among Palestinians and Arabs about being ethnically cleansed in Palestine.
Sari Nusseibeh. Published On 30 Sep More from Author. Most Read. Belarusian airline stops flying Middle East citizens from Turkey. Poland-Belarus border: What you need to know about the crisis.
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