Word: judaisms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...have religious significance to them. At the other end, a smaller but steadfast group regards Judaism principally as a strict and compelling faith, in which nothing less than exact adherence to Torah and Talmud* will do. In between are those who acknowledge the universal community of Judaism, but who trace that community to traditional roots in a common faith...
ETHNIC OR EXISTENTIAL JUDAISM...
Jews in this group may be completely secular?even atheist?or sometimes members of a denomination like Reform Judaism. They simply do not feel that formal ritual or denominational affiliation is crucial. Though a rabbi himself, Philadelphia's Jacob Chinitz insists that "it is membership in the Jewish people that ties a Jew to Judaism, not his membership in a synagogue...
Existential Judaism operates on a less cosmic scale too. Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz tells in Making It how a high school teacher once insisted on taking him to a nonkosher restaurant?and he was so revolted that
...interested in Halakhic observance?generally agree that the Jews' special relationship with God demands some kind of loyalty to traditional Jewish law. "Without law the Covenant is empty and even meaningless," says Seymour Siegel. "There can be no Covenant without observance." That, of course, is an old question in Judaism, and it divides even those devoutly observant Jews whom the outside world paints with the broad brush of "Orthodoxy...