Word: judaisms
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other texts on Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism and Islam...
Numerous writers (and ordinary Jews) have bemoaned observant Judaism's diminishing American ranks, noting that 52% of Jews marry Gentiles, and 50% do not belong to any synagogue. The Columbia University journalism professor offers only a terse aside. "It is hard to work up any optimism" that such people will continue as real Jews, he writes. Rather, he asks, once they have drifted off into a Seinfeld-and-bagels ethnicity, how will American Judaism be defined...
This realization undermines the centuries-old myth of Judaism as severe and unforgiving, a slave of Pharisaic ritual, as opposed to the grace and charity of its progeny religion. Lieberman will not dethrone Shylock, still the single most influential Jewish figure in Western culture, for whom the law is pitiless law. But Lieberman's prominence and practice will illuminate the little-appreciated fact that Rabbinic Judaism is an attempt to take a very stark document--the Bible--and, by interpretation and adaptation, make it habitable for fallible human beings...
...other great myth awaiting demystification is that traditional Judaism eschews spirituality in favor of petty, highly detailed ritual. Hence the sport that commentators have had trying to figure out what Vice President Lieberman would do on the Sabbath. Well, he rests on the Sabbath. The rabbis define rest in very specific ways: no traveling, no carrying, no writing, no telephones, no use of electricity...
Which is why Lieberman's entry onto the national stage is so significant. It not only confirms and ratifies the full entry of Jews into the higher councils of American life. It marks the entry of Judaism into the deeper recesses of the American consciousness...