Word: rabbis
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Oasis of Quiet. Wouk wrote the book for his fellow laymen. Gentile as well as Jew, but many a rabbi will read it for pointers on how to present and explain the meaning of the Sabbath and the holy days, the sacred symbols and rites of the Torah, the Talmud, and the lines of division in modern Judaism. Again and again Wouk draws on his personal experience. After describing the negative injunctions of Sabbath observance, which cuts off the outer world from Friday's sundown to "the end of twilight on Saturday," he demonstrates its positive side in terms...
This challenge was issued by Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold, Associate Director of the Harvard B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundation. He was thinking specifically of the mass of "non-committed" undergraduates who call themselves Jews because of Jewish birth, but who identify with neither their Judaic heritage, nor active religion...
...Rabbi Gold was somewhat disturbed by this "flirtation with commitment." "I do not favor the lack of earnestness indicated by casually picking and choosing ideas rather than determined searching." This searching--academic wanderings among new and different philosophies--is not eschewed by traditional Judaism; in fact, the pursuit of knowledge is revered as in perhaps no other religion...
...should not stop at potentially dangerous ideas," stated Rabbi Maurice L. Zigmond, Director of Harvard Hillel. "We must study all the facts, for learning is basic, and learning gives the possibility of choice." Is it too optimistic to believe that such open inquiry will lead the Jew closer to Judaism? Zigmond says that he is not worried about Jews merely flirting with commitment "because there will be commitment at some time or another...
...University community, the curriculum, and the teaching attitudes offer a distinctly Christian tradition. Rabbi Gold maintains, though, that the prevailing faith, not only in American universities, but in Western civilization, is not even Judeo-Christian, but Greco-Christian. How does the Jewish student, with only a poor knowledge of his own faith, fare when he meets such foreign and challenging philosophies for the first time...