Tag Archives: Secular Humanistic Judaism

Intermarriage And The Ghetto Mentality

Posted on by
2

Ever the hot topic in the “Shry Gevalt” quarters of the Jewish community, intermarriage still remains a bogeyman for many otherwise liberal rabbis. Even open-minded Reform rabbis who have no problem welcoming gay couples often draw the line at those who dare to venture beyond a Jewish ghetto mentality.

I’m all for Jews marrying Jews. I’m also all for Jews marrying whoever the hell they want. I love performing ceremonies for them and my single condition is that they are committed to each other and that they love and respect one another. Continue reading →

A Supplement For Your Seder

Posted on by
1

Humanistic Jews are faced with challenges at every holiday. How do we make our celebrations relevant when we know that in many cases they’re commemorating events that never happened? Or at least not the way the legends developed.

Passover celebrates an event – the Exodus from Egypt – that most certainly never occurred. That doesn’t stop me from having a seder, albeit one that was created for a Humanistic Jewish community. But even those Humanistic seders that I’ve used don’t really struggle with what modern scholarship teaches. Continue reading →

The Atheist Rabbi And The Orthodox Women’s Seminary

Posted on by
3

As I mentioned in a previous post, I returned last Sunday from a two-week stay in Jerusalem.

The sole purpose of my trip was to visit my youngest daughter who is in an Orthodox gap-year program. (For some odd reason, these are generally called seminaries, even though no one there is entering the rabbinate or priesthood.)

I have not written about my children before, but my daughter has given me permission to write this post. Continue reading →

Leonard Fein & Steven Cohen: Let Secular Jews Be Secular Jews

Posted on by
1

Leonard Fein and Steven M. Cohen have written a masterful reply to Rabbi Eric Yoffie’s screed about the delusions of secular Jews. It is a must-read for anyone who has been involved in this conversation.

Favorite bit:

Yoffie complains that these allegedly faithless secular Jews continue to assemble in synagogues and to undertake acts of family life and communal celebration that are either explicitly religious or that radiate with the power of deep faith. Indeed, he may be drawing upon his familiarity with his own Reform movement. In the same survey we find that of those identifying as Reform, just 6 percent (6 percent!) see themselves as religious Jews “to a great extent.” Among the same Reform Jews three times as many (18 percent) see themselves as secular, and nearly seven times as many (41 percent) call themselves
cultural Jews.

Fein and Cohen (a leading Jewish demographer on the faculty of HUC-JIR) are much more polite than I was.  For reasons that I won’t go into here, I hear Orthodox rabbis make similar claims all the time.  So I was just shocked (really…not in an ironic Claude Rains-y way) to see it coming from Yoffie. Continue reading →

The New York Times Asks: Is Atheism A Religion?

Posted on by
Reply

In the New York Times’ latest installment of “Room for Debate,” writers discuss the question, “Is Atheism a Religion?” The exchange was inspired by Susan Jacoby’s recent piece, “The Blessings of Atheism” and by the new efforts of a couple of British non-believers to establish an actual atheist church, “The Sunday Assembly” that plans to meet monthly. All of the contributors come to the obvious conclusion that no, atheism is not a religion.

I proudly display Richard Dawkins’ scarlet “A” in this blog’s logo.  I am, after all, a big believer in “coming out.”  But then I attach it to the word “rabbi,” a religious concept if ever there was one.

Nevertheless, I do not pretend that atheism is more than it is. Atheism is simply a statement regarding one’s lack of belief in supernatural gods. Continue reading →