Word: judaisms
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CONVERTED. Lewis Lehrman, 46, conservative New York business millionaire and 1982 Republican gubernatorial candidate who narrowly lost to Democrat Mario Cuomo; from Reform Judaism, the faith in which he was raised, to Roman Catholicism, whose teachings had increasingly attracted him, especially since a 1983 audience with Pope John Paul II; in a private baptism in New York City. "I can only hope for understanding," said Lehrman, whose wife and five children are Episcopalians and whose older sister is a convert to Mormonism. Some Jewish leaders nonetheless professed disappointment at the loss of a highly visible political role model, especially...
...Shammai, clashed shortly before Jesus' birth. Jewish tradition records that the rigid Shammaites held religious control throughout Jesus' life and during the founding decades of the Christian Church. But by A.D. 70 the more flexible Hillel school had become pre-eminent and the predecessor of today's traditional Judaism. In Falk's theory, Jesus was a Pharisee of the Hillel school, so that his denunciations ("Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!") were aimed at the Shammai school, not Jews in general, and not even at all Pharisees...
...schools. When Jesus attacked the money changers in the Temple, he declared that it was a "house of prayer for all the nations," but had become a "den of robbers." The author suggests that the money changers were corrupt Shammaites who were pocketing donations from Gentile converts to Judaism. Falk even proposes that the Golden Rule of Jesus is just a positive rephrasing of statement by Rabbi Hillel, who once told a pagan inquirer, "What is hateful unto thee, do not do unto thy neighbor. This is the entire Torah. The rest is commentary...
Although Orthodox Judaism shuns doctrinal discussions with Christianity, Falk points out that the great medieval sage Maimonides declared that Christians "will not find in their Torah [the New Testament] anything that conflicts with our Torah." Falk also refers to the commentary of the renowned Polish sage Rabbi Jacob Emden. In a 1757 letter to Polish rabbis, Emden discussed Jesus and Paul as Torah-true missionaries to the Gentiles. Falk, 53, who had studied at the Academy for Higher Learning and Research in Monsey, N.Y., was intrigued when he came across this document in 1974, and it led to his decade...
John Paul's approaches to Islam were not quite so historic as those to Judaism, but his first-ever papal visit to a mosque, in 2001, and his apology for the excesses of the Crusades indicated his understanding that Islam is both one of Catholicism's great competitors and, in many places, its next-door neighbor. Sept. 11 was perhaps the first great issue that the Pope, by then physically weakened, addressed in a less than aggressive manner, and the Vatican sense of urgency regarding Islam's various faces, although as keen as the rest of the world's, remains...