October, 2015
To our members and friends, Shanah tovah, I hope you have been enjoying a meaningful holiday season. As the end of this beautiful season approaches, our Institute educational programming is about to kick off full-throttle.
September, 2015
To our members and friends, I hope you are all well.
As the New Year approaches, we have a robust new season of Institute programs in store. This report will give an overview, and upcoming reports will announce more specifics as the dates get closer.
No issue in Israeli public life arouses the range and intensity of emotions as does anything relating to Hareidim and Hareidism—the terms used for the “ultra-Orthodox” and their lifestyle. [1] A typical discussion on any Hareidi-related issue is laden with ideology, dogma, and opinion, but short on facts, let alone hard data.
On Changes in Jewish Liturgy
Options and Limitations
By Daniel Sperber
Urim Publications, 2010, 221 pages
This is the second recent volume where Daniel Sperber, professor, rabbi, author of thirty books and more than four hundred articles, a leading expert on Jewish laws and customs, addresses what many consider deplorable treatments of women in Judaism.
As the head of the Center for Women's Justice, I encounter on a daily basis the intractable entanglement—the “Gordian knot”—of State and (Orthodox) religion in Israel. This union of religion and state supports a gendered society, infringes on the basic rights of women, challenges the democratic values of the State, and threatens to undermine Israel's integrity as the political expression of the Jewish nation.
Preface
“Jewish, not Israeli” is a phrase I found myself repeating to many a Palestinian this summer (the summer of May 2010, following my senior year of high school) at Seeds of Peace international conflict resolution camp. Although I was part of the American delegation, and by definition not an Israeli, I was often identified by Palestinian campers as the “other side.” But Israel is neither my birthplace nor my current home, so one need not have expected my beliefs to oppose Palestinian existence.
When we moved to Israel 30 years ago we sacrificed a number of things: living space (we exchanged a two-story home on a large plot of land for an apartment in a 10-story building) and the excellent, affordable, and personal medical care to which middle-class Americans had then grown accustomed. We also lost Sundays as days off.
What we gained made this all worthwhile: a sense of purpose, a sense of being part of something important that was bigger than ourselves, and, we thought, the opportunity finally to be part of the mainstream.
When Rabbi Marc Angel asked me to write an article for this issue of Conversations, an issue dedicated to a consideration of Orthodoxy and the State of Israel, I saw both challenge and opportunity.1
An Orthodox colleague recently created a controversy after writing a blog post explaining why he no longer recites the blessing shelo asani isha - thanking God for not creating him as a woman. Several Orthodox rabbis criticized this position for various reasons with one even questioning the author's right to call himself "Orthodox," ostensibly for deviating from the traditional liturgy through his omission. In the grand scheme of Orthodox Jewish history this rabbi's personal choice is relatively trivial.
A Ladder upon the Earth, Whose Top Reaches the Heavens[1]
