Word: rabbies
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...Just short of herem (excommunication) in the Judaic tradition is niddui (ostracism), the shunning of a wrongdoer by the whole community. Some extreme Orthodox sects still engage in the practice, but it has otherwise fallen into disuse. Last week, however, niddui was proclaimed against Rabbi Shlomo Lorincz, a member of parliament, by Israel's Chief Rabbinate...
Lorincz's offense was that during a parliamentary debate he had compared the chief Ashkenazy rabbi, Shlomo Goren, to Uganda's President Idi Amin, a notorious anti-Semite. "We are sitting in Jerusalem, the city of the Torah, and not in Kampala," remarked Lor-incz as he accused Goren of autocratic tactics in appointing religious judges. The rabbinate's decree cited the 12th century philosopher Maimonides' advocacy of a ban against "he who shames a scholar." Lorincz offered a Talmudic citation in reply: "Where God's name is put to shame, there is no obligation...
...many years ago, when Zero Population Growth was first publicized, the black community denounced it as a racist policy. Now Rabbi Berman and Rabbi Lamm are making these same assertions on behalf of the Jews [July...
Revering Z.P.G. "The statistics only really began to hit us in the past few years," says New York City Conservative Rabbi William Berman, who a year ago organized the Jewish Population Regeneration Union to promote a reversal. Zero population growth may be a good idea for humanity in general, he believes, but "it's not a service to humanity for Jews to disappear." Since Jews constitute only three-tenths of 1% of the world's population of 4 billion, Sol Roth, president of the New York Board of Rabbis, reasons that "the Jewish community will not solve...
...Orthodox Rabbi Norman Lamm, who raised the question in a recent speech in Milwaukee, admits that world population control is a "moral imperative," but maintains that it must be balanced by a concern for survival of all human groups. "Jews are a disappearing species," he says, "and should be treated no worse than the kangaroo and the bald eagle." Lamm's recommendation: each Jewish couple should have four or five children...