Word: rabbis
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Instead, Lelyveld writes a great deal about the strange relationship between his mother, a woman with a doctorate in dramatic writing who felt trapped by her family’s needs, and father, a nationally renowned reform rabbi. Still more of his narrative attempts to reconstruct the life of a man named Ben Goldstein, a significant figure in his childhood. Goldstein is a complex character, so much so that he might merit a work all his own, but he really has no place taking up so much room in what is ostensibly Lelyveld’s story. He may loom...
...Orthodox Rabbi Harvey Falk of Brooklyn believes that much interreligious tension need never have existed at all. His current book, Jesus the Pharisee: A New Look at the Jewishness of Jesus, just issued by a Roman Catholic publisher (Paulist Press; 175 pages; $8.95), contends that Jews and Christians alike fail to grasp Jesus' ties to the competing Jewish factions of his time. Christians, says Falk, have misunderstood some of the teachings of Jesus, while Jews have been needlessly hostile toward "Yeshua ha Notzri" (Jesus of Nazareth). Falk's book offers a provocative and controversial theory on Christian origins...
...prayer for all the nations," but had become a "den of robbers." The author suggests that the money changers were corrupt Shammaites who were pocketing donations from Gentile converts to Judaism. Falk even proposes that the Golden Rule of Jesus is just a positive rephrasing of statement by Rabbi Hillel, who once told a pagan inquirer, "What is hateful unto thee, do not do unto thy neighbor. This is the entire Torah. The rest is commentary...
Although Orthodox Judaism shuns doctrinal discussions with Christianity, Falk points out that the great medieval sage Maimonides declared that Christians "will not find in their Torah [the New Testament] anything that conflicts with our Torah." Falk also refers to the commentary of the renowned Polish sage Rabbi Jacob Emden. In a 1757 letter to Polish rabbis, Emden discussed Jesus and Paul as Torah-true missionaries to the Gentiles. Falk, 53, who had studied at the Academy for Higher Learning and Research in Monsey, N.Y., was intrigued when he came across this document in 1974, and it led to his decade...
...tide of immigrants changing the face of New York does not threaten me. If America is as good to these newcomers and benefits as much from their efforts as it did from those of my parents, who arrived in 1913, then all will be well. Rabbi Ronald Millstein Great Neck...