Word: mitzvah
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...pluralism of the U.S. Newly arrived German immigrants, eager to prove their Americanism, continued to reshape traditional Jewish customs and worship toward the image of Protestantism. The vernacular replaced Hebrew as the principal language of worship; organ music and Sunday services became widely popular. Confirmation replaced the bar mitzvah; dietary restrictions were relaxed. While Orthodox Jews continued to pray, in the traditional phrase, for their return "next year" to Jerusalem, Reform Jews became anti-Zionist, awaiting instead a "universal" kingdom...
...used to show on Candid Camera. "It's almost a classic thing," said Funt. "You trust your accountant for years..." He did notice that the object of his confidence lived well: "He had an enormous wardrobe, paid his chauffeur over $200 a week, had a $60,000 bar mitzvah for his son." Then he heard a story about a man who was swindled by his accountant, and "that triggered something in my mind." After some Funt calls to banks, brokers and the police, Accountant Seymour Goldes was indicted on charges of stealing from his star client the grand...
...Lehman simplifies so much throughout that we'd hardly have known without checking that Roth was hitting middle-class as well as Jewish. Once or twice Lehman films something so outrageous that it manages original humor (the congregation tossing their yarmulkes into the air, applauding Alex in a bar mitzvah fantasy sequence). But most of the outrage is collected and muffled in the dialogue...
...himself, calling nonreligious Manhattan Jews to God-and to Orthodoxy-in surprising numbers. Even on ordinary Sabbaths his new synagogue in the round is filled, and more than half the worshipers are young adults under 30. But Riskin has prepared middle-aged men as well as teenagers for Bar Mitzvah, and last Yom Kippur gave an 80-year-old man his first prayer shawl...
...Halakhah to individual inclination, arguing that its prescriptions were useful only to a Jew who found them personally fulfilling. But Rosenzweig saw the law as something stronger, not so much a set of rules as a universally binding commandment to seize every opportunity to perform a good work, or mitzvah. Laws that did not serve such good ends in a particular historical setting simply no longer applied. But as Rosenzweig later admitted, he discovered that more and more of them worked happily even into his own modern milieu...