Word: rabbi
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Residue of Loyalty. To Orthodox Rabbi Irving Greenberg of Yeshiva University, history has already provided Judaism with the unity of shared experience: all Jews have been affected by the Westernization of their faith and culture, the Hitler holocaust, and the re-establishment of Israel as a nation. Nonetheless, Greenberg argues, Jewish unity seekers must face up to difficult issues. A problem facing all three branches of Judaism is that the majority of Jews are secularists living off a residue of "sentiment, loyalty and nostalgia which is vulnerable to the increasing inroads of contemporary culture...
...Reform Rabbi Jakob Petuchowski of Hebrew Union College agrees that " 'denominational' affiliation is no longer any guarantee of theological commitment." Some technically Orthodox synagogues have a predominantly Conservative membership, while many Reform families are nearly as strict in their observance of the law as Orthodox Jews. Petuchowski proposes that Judaism needs a new understanding and appreciation of Halacha (religious law) as a basis for unity: a Jew's piety should not be judged by how many of the 613 daily rules he keeps but by the spirit with which he conforms his life...
...necessary first step toward unity, suggests Conservative Rabbi Seymour Siegel of Manhattan's Jewish Theological Seminary, is a recovery of Judaism's ancient tolerance. In the 1st century B.C., for example, the Sadducees and Pharisees and the rabbinical schools of Hillel and Shammai differed bitterly in their interpretations of the law; yet they did not seek to exile opponents from the ranks of accepted Judaism. Siegel concludes that in today's Judaism there can be no single interpretation-which means that Orthodoxy in particular must surrender its exclusive claim to represent true Jewry...
...FATHER'S COURT, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Boyhood years in a Polish rabbi's household are evoked in energetic and engaging detail by Yiddish Writer Singer, now recognized as one of the great contemporary novelists...
Extra Cot. For the poor and pious Singer family, home stood at the head of a stinking, garbage-strewn Warsaw slum stairway. There Isaac Bashevis' red-bearded rabbi father (who chastely refused to look a woman in the face and could not, insists Author Singer, recognize his own wife) learnedly ruled his roost. He also ruled his rabbinical court, the Beth Din, an institution that dated from the days of Moses and was a blend of synagogue, law court and psychoanalyst's consulting room for the superstitious, the bereaved and the troubled. For Isaac Bashevis, it exemplified...