Tens of thousands of Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa on Tuesday (June 1) continued demonstrations against Israel’s deadly interception of a flotilla of ships trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza.

Nine pro-Palestinian activists were killed on the passenger ferry Mavi Mamara when Israeli commandoes boarded the ship early Monday (May 31) morning. The Mavi Mamara was one of six Turkish ships trying to break Israel’s blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza.

Across the Arab world and in Israel””where Arabs comprise 20 percent of the population””angry protestors demanded an end to the blockade. Ishmael Haniyeh, the prime minister of Hamas, declared a day of mourning. Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa said the attack “indicates Israel is not ready for peace.”

In Rome, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi told Agence France-Presse that the Holy See feels “deep sadness and concern” over the flotilla incident, which also injured several activists and seven Israeli commandoes.

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…the greatest challenge to religious belief today is atheism based on neo-Darwinism. Hence the conclusion: if you are a consistent neo-Darwinian atheist you will wish there to be as few people as possible who share your beliefs.

This sounds like an intellectual joke, and so it is. If atheists can make fun of believers, why should not believers return the compliment? At its heart, though, is a serious proposition. Albert Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, said that the single most fundamental question we can ask is: “Why should I not commit suicide?” I think he was wrong. Spinoza was right: we have a natural instinct to survive. Instead, the most fundamental question we can ask is: “Why should I have a child?”

In terms of self-interest it makes no sense. Having children carries with it a high price in terms of money, energy, attention and time. Ethically too it is fraught with unanswerable questions. What right have we to confer life (and thus eventually death) on someone without their consent? What entitles us to expose a child to the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to? Did not Solomon in his wisdom say that “the dead who have already died are happier than the living who are still alive, but better than both is he who has not yet been, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun?” Rationally, having a child makes no sense at all.

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When I was a boy in Tibet, I felt that my own Buddhist religion must be the best ”” and that other faiths were somehow inferior. Now I see how naïve I was, and how dangerous the extremes of religious intolerance can be today.

Though intolerance may be as old as religion itself, we still see vigorous signs of its virulence. In Europe, there are intense debates about newcomers wearing veils or wanting to erect minarets and episodes of violence against Muslim immigrants. Radical atheists issue blanket condemnations of those who hold to religious beliefs. In the Middle East, the flames of war are fanned by hatred of those who adhere to a different faith.

Such tensions are likely to increase as the world becomes more interconnected and cultures, peoples and religions become ever more entwined. The pressure this creates tests more than our tolerance ”” it demands that we promote peaceful coexistence and understanding across boundaries.

Granted, every religion has a sense of exclusivity as part of its core identity. Even so, I believe there is genuine potential for mutual understanding. While preserving faith toward one’s own tradition, one can respect, admire and appreciate other traditions.

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Of more than 900 men in my battalion, I was one of only two Jewish soldiers. While serving in this predominately Muslim country, Lieutenant Schwartz had opted to translate his last name from the German and go instead by Lieutenant Black. My last name, Brewster, did not pose the same problem, but I had my own difficult choice to make.

My father is a fourth-generation Episcopal minister from a blue-blooded New England family who fell in love with a Jewish girl. Rather than prescribing a religion to any of their children, my parents raised my brother, sister and me in both religions and allowed us to decide for ourselves. While not rejecting my Christian heritage, I have considered myself Jewish since shortly after my bar mitzvah.

For safety’s sake, I ordered two sets of dog tags before my deployment, one that identified me as Jewish, the other as Episcopalian. In my first three months in Iraq, while I worked in intelligence ”” mostly relegated to a windowless office ”” I wore the dog tags that said Jewish. My switch to platoon leader meant leaving the base daily and facing increased danger. The night before my new duties, I sat for close to an hour staring at each set of dog tags. I thought of the Maccabees ”” choosing death at the hand of the Assyrians rather than renouncing their faith. I also recalled Daniel Pearl ”” the Wall Street Journal reporter who had been beheaded in Pakistan, in part for being Jewish. I knew the chance of my capture was relatively low and that my dog tags would probably remain hidden under my uniform. But the idea of hiding my religious identity weighed on me heavily.

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What does a Jewish child need most from a mother? Forget about the chicken soup””it’s all about the eggs, say a growing number of prominent rabbis. Several recent rabbinic rulings on fertility treatment dictate that a child conceived in vitro is Jewish only if the egg came from a Jewish woman.

The issue is most pressing in Israel, in part because tight restrictions on egg donation have long compelled infertile women to procure eggs abroad, where most donors are not Jewish. But decisions in Israel favoring the genetic mother over the gestational one are also likely to increase the already high demand for Jewish eggs in the U.S., and could call into question the religious status of thousands of children born to Jewish women around the world.

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In recent weeks, skirmishes in the cultural conflict over the clothes worn by some Muslim women erupted in Belgium’s parliament, in an Italian court and at a traffic stop in France. The burqa and the niqab cover a woman’s body almost completely, but there are also disputes over less comprehensive coverings, including the head scarf.

While the issue of the moment is about Muslim dress, Islam is hardly the only religion that connects modesty to faith. Mormons wear special garments. Amish women adopt plain clothes and cover their heads – men, too. Some Jews and Christians either encourage or require modest appearance, and many faiths have rules about hair – again both male and female.

Is this tradition or scripture? What kinds of problems do these practices present in a largely secular world?

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At his frequent best, Julius refreshes by a mordant tonality, as when he catalogs the types of English anti-Semites. The height of his argument comes where his book will be most controversial: his comprehensive account of the newest English anti-Semitism.

To protest the policies of the Israeli government actually can be regarded as true philo-Semitism, but to disallow the existence of the Jewish state is another matter. Of the nearly 200 recognized nation-states in the world today, something like at least half are more reprehensible than even the worst aspects of Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians. A curious blindness informs the shifting standards of current English anti-Zionism.

I admire Julius for the level tone with which he discusses this sanctimonious intelligentsia, who really will not rest until Israel is destroyed.

I end by wondering at the extraordinary moral strength of Anthony Julius. He concludes by observing: “Anti-Semitism is a sewer.” As he has shown, the genteel and self-righteous “new anti-Semitism” of so many English academic and literary contemporaries emanates from that immemorial stench.

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Enthusiastic applause greeted Sara Hurwitz when she stepped to the podium last month to address a gathering of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance in New York. Two months earlier, Ms. Hurwitz’s mentor, Rabbi Avi Weiss of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, had given her the title of “rabba,” or female rabbi, making her the most visible woman to join the Orthodox clergy. “The community is inspired, electrified and supportive of women functioning in rabbinic roles,” Rabba Hurwitz told the audience. That support, however, is far from universal.

In February the Agudath Israel of America, an ultra-Orthodox organization, blasted Rabba Hurwitz’s title as a “radical and dangerous departure from Jewish tradition” that “must be condemned in the strongest terms.” Rabbi Pinchos Lipschutz warned, “We cannot allow someone whose guide is 20th century feminism . . . to hijack and attempt to redefine Orthodoxy.”

Rabbi Moshe Kletenik, president of the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), a centrist group of Orthodox rabbis, told me, “A woman cannot be ordained as a rabbi or serve in the role of a rabbi based on our tradition.” Rabbi Steven Pruzansky, a vice president of the RCA, went further, likening the idea of female clergy to “pagan ideologies.”

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In “Two Lives,” his memoir of his great uncle and aunt, Vikram Seth reproduces extracts from the 1893 Jewish Prayer Book of a Berlin synagogue, at the end of which is a brief appendix on fundamentals of Jewish morality.

This says that “Judaism teaches: the Unity of Mankind. It commands us therefore to love our neighbor, to protect our neighbor and his rights, to be aware of his honor, to honor his beliefs, and to assuage his sorrow. Judaism calls upon us through work, through the love of truth, through modesty, through amicability, through moral rectitude, and through obedience to authority, to further the wellbeing of our neighbors, to seek the good of our fatherland, and to bring about the loving fellowship of all mankind.”

Given what would happen in that German fatherland within a half-century, the reference to “obedience to authority” makes painful reading. Assimilated Berlin Jews of this period were patriotic to a fault. A happier phrasing would have been, “through questioning of authority.” Truth and questioning are inseparable, as the terrible price of German obedience showed.

But taken as a whole, these reflections on the contribution of Jewish ethics to the “loving fellowship of mankind” make uplifting reading at a time of renewal. Amicability, for one, is a neglected virtue.

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Thousands of years after Moses led his people out of Egypt, the Passover story is going digital.

At Monday’s Seder meal, dozens of families will be reading the traditional tableside ceremony from a Haggadah, a text guiding the Seder, that they have personalized by uploading family photos to replace stock illustrations of Pharaoh and the slaves.

Behrman House, a Jewish educational publisher in Springfield, N.J., has sold more than 100 sets of the cyber-assisted version of its Family Haggadah.

The personalized Haggadah — the Hebrew word means “telling” or “narrative” — recounts the biblical Exodus story and instructs families to relate it to their children as though they were along on the journey.

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This year, some liberal Jews will hear a new question during the ritual meals that define this weeklong season, which begins at sundown Monday:

“Why is there an orange on the Seder plate?”

The answer, in a new rite written by Rabbi Peter Schweitzer of New York, will please many unorthodox Jews.

“To remind us that all people have a legitimate place in Jewish life, no less than an orange on the Seder plate, regardless of gender or sexual identity,” states “The Liberated Haggadah,” a rite for “cultural, secular and humanistic” Jews. “And to teach us, too, how absurd it is to exclude anyone who wants to sit at our table, partake of our meal and celebrate with us the gift of life and the gift of freedom.”

The goal is to provide an enjoyable and educational Passover for Jews who are united by culture, art, music, literature, foods and folkways ”” but not faith. Nearly half of American Jews, Schweitzer says, consider themselves “secular” or “cultural” Jews, as opposed to religious Jews.

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Diane Medved, a clinical psychologist and the wife of radio host Michael Medved, says that the time before Passover “used to be a black month” for her. There was so much work to be done””cleaning the house from top to bottom, getting rid of any “leavened food,” switching to a new set of dishes, cooking for a large extended family””that she began to dread the whole experience. But then, like her ancestors in Egypt who labored under the pharaoh, Ms. Medved jokes, she was “released from bondage.” Twenty-one years ago, Ms. Medved and her family started going to resorts for the entire eight days of Passover, and she has never looked back.

Kosher-for-Passover vacations have been around for more than a quarter-century, but in recent years they have become more popular and more elaborate. Raphi Bloom, the sales and marketing director of Totally Jewish Travel, a Web site advertising getaways for observant Jews, says that he has 120 hotels on five continents promoting vacations for the holiday this year, which runs for eight days starting at sundown on Monday. From cruises to South America to resorts in Hawaii to luxury hotels in Europe, these vacations can run more than $10,000 for a family of four (not including airfare).

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A reverend, a rabbi and a scholar hike up a mountain ridge …

It sounds like the opening line of an unholy bar joke, not a spiritual warm-up for the beginning of Passover for Jews and Holy Week for Christians, leading toward Easter.

But these three believers say skiing off in winter cold, hiking in desert heat, even taking a senses-awake walk in the park can open you up, body and soul, to better appreciate these holy days of salvation and freedom.

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Charleston is a place of firsts.

It was the first permanent settlement in one of the New World’s first Colonies. It fostered the earliest cohesive Jewish community in the South. It was home to two of the four South Carolina men who signed the Declaration of Independence. It was the place where the first shots of the Civil War rang out. It was the American city where Reform Judaism first took root, in 1824.

And this July, Charleston’s Reform synagogue, Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, will welcome the city’s first female rabbi: Stephanie Alexander.

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Charleston is a place of firsts.

It was the first permanent settlement in one of the New World’s first Colonies. It fostered the earliest cohesive Jewish community in the South. It was home to two of the four South Carolina men who signed the Declaration of Independence. It was the place where the first shots of the Civil War rang out. It was the American city where Reform Judaism first took root, in 1824.

And this July, Charleston’s Reform synagogue, Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, will welcome the city’s first female rabbi: Stephanie Alexander.

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Rabbi Harold Kushner…. tells NPR’s Renee Montagne. “There’s always a fresh supply of grieving people asking, ‘Where was God when I needed him most?’ ”

That’s a question Kushner himself confronted as a young father when his first-born child died, leading him to rethink his view of an omnipotent God.

“It just seemed so terribly unfair and it forced me to reconsider everything I’d been taught in seminary about God’s role in the world,” Kushner says. “It was shattering.”

He says people from a more traditional perspective have asked him whether he thought his son’s death was part of God’s plan. He says they said that going through the tragedy of a child’s loss prompted him to write his first book. But Kushner rejects that idea.

“If that were God’s plan, it’s a bad bargain,” Kushner says. “I don’t want to have to deal with a God like that.”

Read or listen to it all (audio strongly recommended, just a little over 7 3/4 minutes)–KSH.

Rabbi Harold Kushner…. tells NPR’s Renee Montagne. “There’s always a fresh supply of grieving people asking, ‘Where was God when I needed him most?’ ”

That’s a question Kushner himself confronted as a young father when his first-born child died, leading him to rethink his view of an omnipotent God.

“It just seemed so terribly unfair and it forced me to reconsider everything I’d been taught in seminary about God’s role in the world,” Kushner says. “It was shattering.”

He says people from a more traditional perspective have asked him whether he thought his son’s death was part of God’s plan. He says they said that going through the tragedy of a child’s loss prompted him to write his first book. But Kushner rejects that idea.

“If that were God’s plan, it’s a bad bargain,” Kushner says. “I don’t want to have to deal with a God like that.”

Read or listen to it all (audio strongly recommended, just a little over 7 3/4 minutes)–KSH.

In this city so crowded with religious symbols, where houses of worship vie with one another to render the religious past visible, no synagogue bears more symbolic weight than the one called the Hurva, in the heart of the Jewish Quarter.

Just days ahead of its March 15 rededication ceremony, finishing touches still were being applied to the synagogue, once Jerusalem’s grandest, which had remained in ruins for six decades. The rebuilt Hurva, made of the white stone that is Jerusalem’s vernacular material, had already assumed its former prominence in the city’s crowded skyline. Only interior details remained to be done.

Early this month, as the Israeli architect Nahum Meltzer looked on, a whorled woodwork crown covered in gold leaf was hoisted to its perch atop a two-story holy ark. The ark, which stands beneath the building’s gleaming 82-feet-high dome, is a nearly exact replica of the original that stood on the spot more than 150 years earlier, encapsulating the basic principle that guided Mr. Meltzer’s reconstruction: not innovation, but historical accuracy.

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In this city so crowded with religious symbols, where houses of worship vie with one another to render the religious past visible, no synagogue bears more symbolic weight than the one called the Hurva, in the heart of the Jewish Quarter.

Just days ahead of its March 15 rededication ceremony, finishing touches still were being applied to the synagogue, once Jerusalem’s grandest, which had remained in ruins for six decades. The rebuilt Hurva, made of the white stone that is Jerusalem’s vernacular material, had already assumed its former prominence in the city’s crowded skyline. Only interior details remained to be done.

Early this month, as the Israeli architect Nahum Meltzer looked on, a whorled woodwork crown covered in gold leaf was hoisted to its perch atop a two-story holy ark. The ark, which stands beneath the building’s gleaming 82-feet-high dome, is a nearly exact replica of the original that stood on the spot more than 150 years earlier, encapsulating the basic principle that guided Mr. Meltzer’s reconstruction: not innovation, but historical accuracy.

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Last Saturday morning, as a blizzard sputtered out its last squalls over Passaic, N.J., Chaya Leah Smolen sent her husband and several children off to synagogue. She issued the children a message that might seem to contradict the essence of winter motherhood: do not carry any tissues.

To that admonition, she added others. The children shouldn’t take their toys or candies, the diversions that usually make Sabbath service easier. Later, after the worshipers had returned, there was a serious theological discussion about whether it was permissible to make snowballs.

What Mrs. Smolen experienced has been shared by a religious niche in the Northeast during this epically snowy season. From Washington to New York State, a series of “snowmageddons” have wreaked a particular form of havoc for Orthodox Jews.

The storms have knocked down portions of the ritual boundary known as an eruv in Jewish communities in Silver Spring, Md., Center City Philadelphia, the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Monsey in suburban New York, and Teaneck and Passaic in New Jersey.

Almost literally invisible even to observant Jews, the wire or string of an eruv, connected from pole to pole, allows the outdoors to be considered an extension of the home. Which means, under Judaic law, that one can carry things on the Sabbath, an act that is otherwise forbidden outside the house.

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Nowadays the very concept of personal ethics has become problematic in one domain after another. Why shouldn’t a businessman or banker pay himself the highest salary he can get away with? Why shouldn’t teenagers treat sex as a game so long as they take proper precautions? Why shouldn’t the media be sensationalist if that sells papers, programmes and films? Why should we treat life as sacred if abortion and euthanasia are what people want? Even Bernard Williams came to call morality a “peculiar institution”. Things that once made sense ”” duty, obligation, self-restraint, the distinction between what we desire to do and what we ought to do ”” to many people now make no sense at all.

This does not mean that people are less ethical than they were, but it does mean that we have adopted an entirely different ethical system from the one people used to have. What we have today is not the religious ethic of Judaism and Christianity but the civic ethic of the Ancient Greeks. For the Greeks, the political was all. What you did in your private life was up to you. Sexual life was the pursuit of desire. Abortion and euthanasia were freely practised. The Greeks produced much of the greatest art and architecture, philosophy and drama, the world has ever known. What they did not produce was a society capable of surviving.

The Athens of Socrates and Plato was glorious, but extraordinarily short-lived. By now, by contrast, Christianity has survived for two millennia, Judaism for four. The Judaeo-Christian ethic is not the only way of being moral; but it is the only system that has endured. If we lose the Judaeo-Christian ethic, we will lose the greatest system ever devised for building a society on personal virtue and covenantal responsibility, on righteousness and humility, forgiveness and love.

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(ACNS) The fourth regular meeting of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chief Rabbis of Israel took place at the Jerusalem offices of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel on 22nd February 2010 / 8th Adar 5770 in keeping with their joint protocol signed in 2006/5766

The Most Revd. Dr. Rowan Williams accompanied by the Rt. Revd. Michael Jackson, Bishop of Clogher and co-chair of the Anglican Jewish Commission; the Rt. Revd. Suheil Dawani, Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem; and the Revd. Canon Guy Wilkinson, the Archbishop’s Secretary for Inter religious Affairs, were welcomed by Rabbi Shlomo Amar, Rishon LeZion and Chief Rabbi of Israel, supported by Rabbi Shear Yashuv Cohen, Chief Rabbi of Haifa and co-chair of the Anglican-Jewish Commission; Rabbi David Rosen, Advisor to the Chief Rabbinate on Interreligious Affairs, Rabbi David Brodman, Rabbi Professor Daniel Sperber and Mr Oded Wiener, Director-General of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel.

After initial warm greetings and expression of thanks to the Creator of the Universe for His Providence – in particular for the ongoing friendship between the principals and their respective colleagues ”“ warm mutual appreciation was expressed for the work of the Anglican Jewish Commission whose most recent meeting had focused on the meaning and significance of Jerusalem in the Jewish and Christian traditions.
The Archbishop reflected on the presentations and on the concluding statement of that meeting and expressed his own hopes and prayers and those of his Church that the spirit of deep understanding and mutual respect that pervaded the substance and form of that meeting will soon be reflected on the ground between the different faith communities through a just and peaceful resolution of the conflict in Jerusalem and the Holy Land as a whole.

Rabbi Shear Yashuv Cohen responded, echoing the sentiments of the Archbishop and adding the hope that genuine peace and reconciliation will be one in which provision is made not only for the respect of separate holy sites of each faith, but also for open access to sites holy to more than one faith in a manner acceptable to all relevant parties. All present expressed gratification with the progress of the Dialogue to a degree that enabled honest and frank exchange in discussion of both convergent and divergent vital issues. This was considered of great significance in giving a renewed impetus for a continuation and deepening of the Dialogue.

Chief Rabbi Amar and Archbishop Williams offered their reflections on the theme of the forthcoming meeting in London of the Anglican Jewish Commission on creation and human responsibility for the environment. They spoke of their common understanding of the creation as a gift of the Creator entrusted to humanity. They emphasised that Scripture insists on the integrity of both the spiritual and material for any effective approach to environmental concerns.

Discussion also took place concerning the life and needs of the diverse Christian community in Jerusalem and the Holy Land and a clear commitment was made to find practical ways in which greater mutual understanding between communities could be brought about and to which the special relationship of the principals could contribute.

The deliberations concluded with a commendation of the work of the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land and a commitment to continue the Dialogue and the work of the Anglican Jewish Commission.

Following the meeting the delegations went together to Yad Vashem. The Archbishop, with Bishop Suhail Dawani and Bishop Michael Jackson laid a wreath in recognition of the abiding significance of the Holocaust and as a commitment to the struggle against the continuing evil of anti Semitism and all racial hatred and bigotry.

The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams has held talks with Israeli President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem during a visit to the Middle East.

They discussed the role of Christian schools and hospitals in Israel and the Palestinian territories, and the contentious issue of water-sharing.

The two men also talked about the importance of inter-faith dialogue.

Dr Williams also met Christian and Jewish leaders, and visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.

He is on a four-day tour of Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories.

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According to the Aleinu Marital Satisfaction Survey””an anonymous online study conducted by the Orthodox Union in conjunction with a program of Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles and the Rabbinical Council of California””72% of Orthodox men and 74% of Orthodox women rated their marriages as excellent or very good. By contrast, only 63% of men and 60% of women in the public at large told the General Social Survey, conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, that they were very happy in their marriages.

The Aleinu results are consistent with previous research indicating that couples who participate regularly in religious activities report greater marital contentment and are less likely to divorce. Still, I was surprised. While there are no official statistics, there exists an overwhelming perception in the Orthodox community that divorce rates have gone up, particularly among younger couples. The undertaking of the Aleinu survey attests to some level of worry on the part of Orthodox leaders that the sacred bonds of marriage have been weakened.

To its credit, the Orthodox Union, at a press conference last month, highlighted the top stressors to Orthodox marriages. Lack of communication, not enough time together, and conflicts with in-laws””common complaints of couples religious and not””are on the list. But also on it are special challenges, at least some of which will be familiar to people of other faiths and traditions that favor private schooling, early marriage and large families.

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Gender and sexuality have caused divisions in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. Same-sex unions are upheld in some churches and not in others; the same is true for gay clergy. While there are more than 3,300 churches that affirm lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender congregants, 57 percent of Protestant clergy hardly ever discuss issues specific to the gay and lesbian community.

But according to “Sexuality and Religion 2020,” a report released this week, they probably should.

The report was published by the Westport, Conn.-based Religious Institute, a national interfaith network of more than 5,000 clergy and religious leaders.

On Tuesday, the report’s authors described a “disconnect between religion and sexuality in America” and called for churches, synagogues and seminaries to work on narrowing the divide between faith and sex in the next decade.

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After practice one late-summer day in 1986, Alan Veingrad strode into the Green Bay Packers’ locker room, feeling both spent and satisfied.

An undrafted player from an obscure college, he had made the team and then some. On the next Sunday, opening day of the N.F.L. season, he would be starting at offensive tackle.

In his locker, Mr. Veingrad found the usual stuff, his street clothes and sweat suit and playbook. On a small bench, though, lay a note from the Packers’ receptionist. It carried a name that Mr. Veingrad did not recognize, Lou Weinstein, and a local phone number.

Alone in a new town, too naïve to be wary, Mr. Veingrad called. This Lou Weinstein, it turned out, ran a shoe store in Green Bay, Wis. He had just read an article in the paper about a Jewish player on the Packers, and he wanted to meet and welcome that rarity.

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Attacks on Jews in the UK reached record levels in 2009, according to figures compiled within the community.

The Community Security Trust (CST) said it had recorded 924 incidents over the year, 55% more than the previous high of 598 incidents in 2006.

The organisation, which monitors incidents against Jewish people and organisations, said the rise was linked to last year’s Gaza conflict.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown described the figures as “deeply troubling”.

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As its title implies, “Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life” reflects Kaplan’s effort to redefine how modern American Jewry thinks of itself. Judaism is not only a religion, Kaplan stated; it is a people with its own history, identity, culture and civilization. Moreover, like any civilization, to remain vital it must continue to evolve to meet and adapt to the challenges and needs of each new generation. It must be reconstructed, so to speak””or else risk losing its purpose.

Kaplan practiced what he preached at Sabbath and holiday services at his synagogue, SAJ (where I am an active member and am teaching a course on Kaplan’s thought this winter). Seeking to reinvest traditional ritual and liturgy with relevance to contemporary Jews, he emphasized modern interpretations while also revising or discarding prayers (like the traditional prayer for rain) he thought incompatible with the progressive, rational-minded, science-oriented world of 20th-century America.

A believer in gender equality long before the term political correctness became a cliché, Kapan in 1922 “invented” the modern-day bat mitzvah””in which 12-year-old girls (like their male counterparts, 13-year-old boys, at their bar mitzvahs) symbolically accept the religious responsibilities of adulthood””when, at Sabbath services one Saturday morning, he called his oldest daughter to the pulpit and had her read from the Torah scroll. Since then, of course, this then-unheard-of custom has become an accepted, even expected rite-of-passage among Jews in all but the Orthodox branch of the faith.

Indeed, Kaplan held the goals and ethics of democracy and equality so high that he declared anachronistic the idea of Jews being the Chosen people””and changed or deleted the wording of traditional prayers that implied that belief from his 1945 Sabbath Prayer Book.

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“Hope without memory is like memory without hope” is the striking phrase by Sir Elie Wiesel brought forward by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust for the 2010 commemoration under the theme: ‘the Legacy of Hope’. Elie Wiesel was awarded an honorary knighthood in 2006 as a public sign of the importance of the living memory that survivors of the Holocaust are for present day humanity. Our 2010 commemoration of the Holocaust has at its heart the survivors of the Shoah, the unique human beings who are the primary source for our continued attention, our understanding and our need to continue to work at the lessons in a world that seems not yet to have learned them.

As those who directly connect us and our children with that archetypal genocide pass from this life, we are confronted with the challenge of keeping alive the reality of what happened and of its defining significance. There may still be some 5000 Jewish and other survivors of the camps and of the years of Nazi occupied Europe. But tragically there are also many hundreds of thousands of people in this and other countries who are survivors of the many other genocidal events of the 20th and 21st centuries, including those atrocities that have taken place, like the Holocaust, on European soil.

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And just as God creates in love so He asks us to create in love. The Abrahamic monotheisms are the only systems to place love at the heart of the moral life. There are other codes of ethics: every civilisation has them, secular or religious. All civilisations have something like the golden rule: treat others as you would wish to be treated. Many of them have forms of justice: treat equals equally. But only a vision that sees the world as God’s work of love makes love the highest value. Love God with all your heart, soul and might. Love your neighbour as yourself. Love the stranger for you know what it feels like to be a stranger.

And yes, there is another way of seeing the world and our place within it. The Universe came into being for no reason, and one day for no reason it will cease to be. There is nothing special about humanity: we are mere primates with a gift for language. There is nothing special about any of us. We are born, we live, we die, and it is as if we had never been. Our ideals are illusions; our hopes mere dreams. We have no souls, only brains; no freedom, only the hardwiring of our genes. And the biggest illusion of them all is love, the smokescreen created by humans to hide the fact that we are here to reproduce.

I know which I prefer. Better is a world built on love than on the Darwinian struggle to survive.

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