The Biblical Tradition that gives unique dignity to the human person must not be understood in terms of domination but in terms of respect and solidarity. This requires of us a sense of a “human ecology” in which our responsibility for the eco-system is bound up with and reflective of our obligations to one another and in particular “a special generosity towards the poor, towards women and children, strangers, the sick, the weak and the needy” (Papal Address at the Synagogue of Rome, 17 January 2010, sect. 7).

The ethical aspect of human intervention in the natural order lies in the limitation on the power of science and its claim to absoluteness, and in the expression of human solidarity and moral responsibility towards all. To that end the bilateral commission strongly urges that all scientific innovation and development work in close consultation with religious ethical guidance. Similarly States and international bodies should engage in close consultation with religious ethical leadership in order to ensure that progress be a blessing rather than a curse. A genuine environmental ethic is a key condition for world peace and harmony.

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Jews are a famously accomplished group. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates.

Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of the Ivy League student bodies, 26 percent of the Kennedy Center honorees, 37 percent of the Academy Award-winning directors, 38 percent of those on a recent Business Week list of leading philanthropists, 51 percent of the Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction.

In his book, “The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement,” Steven L. Pease lists some of the explanations people have given for this record of achievement. The Jewish faith encourages a belief in progress and personal accountability. It is learning-based, not rite-based.

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If John Paul’s visit “brought down a wall, then Benedict’s visit builds a bridge across two sides of the Tiber that sometimes seem very far,” said Andrea Riccardi, a church historian and founder of the lay Community of Sant’Egidio, which helped orchestrate Sunday’s event. (The Vatican is on the other side of the Tiber from the synagogue in the former Jewish ghetto.)

Both the Vatican and Jews in Rome see Benedict’s visit, his third trip to a synagogue since becoming pope, as the continuation of an interfaith friendship and an effort to calm recent controversies.

“It’s true that there have been moments of tension and misunderstanding,” said the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi. “But a specific meaning of this visit is to affirm from the Catholic side the essentiality and richness and importance of the common elements in the relationship.”

The visit evolved from a longstanding invitation by Riccardo Di Segni, the chief rabbi of Rome, for Benedict to call at the synagogue. “We have a very, very complicated history and a lot of problems to resolve,” Rabbi Di Segni said. “But it’s one thing to resolve them at a distance marked by chill and total hostility, and it’s another thing to have a willingness to listen respectfully.”

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Blogging on the site FailedMessiah.com, Mr. [Shmaraya] Rosenberg, 51, has transmuted a combination of muckraking reporting and personal grudge into a must-read digest of the actual and alleged misdeeds of the ultra-Orthodox world. He has broken news about sexual misconduct, smear campaigns and dubious business practices conducted by or on behalf of stringently religious Jews.

Operating thousands of miles from the centers of ultra-Orthodox Judaism in Brooklyn and Jerusalem, waking at 3:30 a.m. and working a dozen hours at a stretch in an apartment cluttered with books, Mr. Rosenberg has had his scoops cited by The Wall Street Journal, Columbia Journalism Review, PR Week and Gawker. The national Jewish newspaper The Forward listed him among the 50 most influential American Jews, and the hip, cheeky magazine Heeb put him in its top 100.

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A bishop is among the 150 clergy and ministers who have sought protection with the trade union Unite from what it describes as a culture of bullying in the established Church.

Most of those who have sought help are in the Church of England but Roman Catholic priests, rabbis and imams have also joined Unite, according to Rachael Maskell, national officer for the union’s faith workers’ branch.

The union, which has set up a special helpline for priests intimidated by their bishops or congregations, is reviewing its clergy caseload as part of its campaign for full employment rights for clergy.

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Judaism is not a doctrine but a life””the continuation of the lives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Or so Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907”“1972) often said. To learn Jewish theology, then, is to relive the history of God’s encounter with the Jewish people, for theology and history are inseparable. What God revealed to Israel through the prophets, the sages, and the mystics is the “bold and dangerously paradoxical idea” that God needs man.

Much of academic Jewish scholarship finds conflicts between biblical Judaism and the rabbinic Judaism of late antiquity as well as between rabbinic Judaism and later kabbalistic-hasidic teaching. The academic consensus sets up dichotomies between the legal and the spiritual and between the rational and the mystical. Heschel instead integrates biblical, rabbinic, and kabbalistic sources into a unified vision of God’s continuing dialogue with the people of Israel. Indeed, Heschel’s scholarship, rightly understood, is inseparable from his theology, for his scholarship seeks to re-create the dialogue of the Jewish people with God.

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As the new year approaches, with the recession still in force, I find myself giving thanks to God for all the things that cost nothing and are worth everything.

I thank Him for the love that has filled our home for so many years. Life is never easy. We’ve had our share of pain. But through it all we discovered the love that brings new life into the world, allowing us to share in the miracle of birth and the joy of seeing our children grow.

I thank Him for the blessing of grandchildren. I don’t know why it is I was so surprised by joy, but in their company my constant thought is that I didn’t know that life could be that good. I thank Him for the friends who stood by us in tough times, for the mentors who believed in me more than I believed in myself, and for the teachers who encouraged me to think and question, teaching me the difference between truth and mere intellectual fashion.

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Generations of Sunday school teachers have turned Hanukkah into the story of unified Jewish bravery against an anti-Semitic Hellenic empire. Settlers in the West Bank tell it as a story of how the Jewish hard-core defeated the corrupt, assimilated Jewish masses. Rabbis later added the lamp miracle to give God at least a bit part in the proceedings.

But there is no erasing the complex ironies of the events, the way progress, heroism and brutality weave through all sides. The Maccabees heroically preserved the Jewish faith. But there is no honest way to tell their story as a self-congratulatory morality tale. The lesson of Hanukkah is that even the struggles that saved a people are dappled with tragic irony, complexity and unattractive choices.

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Though there are few Jews in Montana today, there once were many. In the late 19th century, there were thriving Jewish populations in the mining towns, where Jews emigrated to work as butchers, clothiers, jewelers, tailors and the like.

The city of Butte had kosher markets, a Jewish mayor, a B’nai B’rith lodge and three synagogues. Helena, the capital city, had Temple Emanu-El, built in 1891 with a seating capacity of 500. The elegant original facade still stands, but the building was sold and converted to offices in the 1930s, when the congregation had dwindled to almost nothing, the Jewish population having mostly assimilated or moved on to bigger cities.

There is a Jewish cemetery in Helena, too, with tombstones dating to 1866. But more Jews are buried in Helena than currently live here.

And yet, in a minor revival, Montana now has three rabbis, two in Bozeman and one (appropriately) in Whitefish. They were all at the Capitol on the first night of Hannukah last year to light a menorah in the ornate Capitol rotunda, amid 100-year-old murals depicting Sacajawea meeting Lewis and Clark, the Indians beating Custer, and the railway being built. The security officer and the dog followed the rabbi into the rotunda, to size him up.

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So how does this religious nonbeliever practice his Judaism? By highlighting an overlooked aspect of Jewish culture. Together with his wife, Robyn, Mr. [Charles] Krauthammer runs Pro Musica Hebraica, a concert series they launched last year to change the common view that “Jewish music” is hava nagila, liturgical music, klezmer and not much else. Earlier this month, Pro Musica Hebraica presented its fourth concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington.

There is a rich tradition of Jewish classical music, though it is largely unknown even within the Jewish community. For Pro Musica Hebraica, such music is not defined strictly by the composer’s ethnicity. It must simply be “self-consciously Jewish”””by drawing on Jewish folk music, Hebrew texts or Jewish themes. Pro Musica Hebraica is an attempt to recover a tradition, Mr. Krauthammer says, and to encourage audiences to judge whether it might be worthy of “a place in the Western canon.”

Last year, the series focused on 20th-century Russian music, specifically on the St. Petersburg School, the Jewish students of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908). As nationalism rose across Europe, Rimsky-Korsakov challenged his Jewish students to create a Jewish national music of their own. They responded, Mr. Krauthammer notes, by sending “ethnographic expeditions to shtetls, where they wrote down and recorded””their wax recordings still exist in the St. Petersburg library””synagogue and folk music of the time.”

It sounds like the start of a joke: a rabbi, a minister and a Muslim sheik walk into a restaurant.

But there they were, Rabbi Ted Falcon, the Rev. Don Mackenzie and Sheik Jamal Rahman, walking into an Indian restaurant, and afterward a Presbyterian church. The sanctuary was full of 250 people who came to hear them talk about how they had wrestled with their religious differences and emerged as friends.

They call themselves the “interfaith amigos.” And while they do sometimes seem more like a stand-up comedy team than a trio of clergymen, they know they have a serious burden in making a case for interfaith understanding in a country reeling from the spectacle of a Muslim Army officer at Fort Hood opening fire on his fellow soldiers.

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One thing is clear: identity has become problematic in the modern world. The sociologist Peter Berger defined modernity as a state of permanent identity crisis. Many of the secular alternatives to religious identity proved terrifying in their consequences. National identity led to nationalism and two world wars. Ethnicity led to racism and the Holocaust. The “cause” led, among other things, to communism and Stalinist Russia. Even football, more harmless than most, can lead to violence. As for those who deny identity, it’s quite hard to be everyone in general without being anyone in particular. Even cosmopolitans tend to be comfortable in the company of other cosmopolitans, and feel threatened in the presence of other, stronger identities.

This is one reason why religion has returned, centre stage, in the 21st century, because of the waning of secular alternatives. Most of us need identity as our way of being at home in the world. It helps to be able to say: this is my story, this is who I am. It’s within our particular identities that we learn to live, love, create communities and cultivate responsibilities. The best identities speak to the better angels of our nature, especially when they include saintly role models, high ideals, and the imperative to love the stranger.

But there is a great danger, and those of us who are religious must be honest about it. Far too often in the past religious identities have been a source of strife.

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This much is known: In the mid-eighth century, the ruling elite of the Khazars, a Turkic tribe in Eurasia, converted to Judaism. Their impetus was political, not spiritual. By embracing Judaism, the Khazars were able to maintain their independence from rival monotheistic states, the Muslim caliphate and the Christian Byzantine empire. Governed by a version of rabbinical law, the Khazar Jewish kingdom flourished along the Volga basin until the beginning of the second millennium, at which point it dissolved, leaving behind a mystery: Did the Khazar converts to Judaism remain Jews, and, if so, what became of them?

Enter Shlomo Sand. In a new book, “The Invention of the Jewish People,” the Tel Aviv University professor of history argues that large numbers of Khazar Jews migrated westward into Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania, where they played a decisive role in the establishment of Eastern European Jewry. The implications are far-reaching: If the bulk of Eastern European Jews are the descendents of Khazars””not the ancient Israelites””then most Jews have no ancestral links to Palestine. Put differently: If most Jews are not Semites, then what justification is there for a Jewish state in the Middle East? By attempting to demonstrate the Khazar origins of Eastern European Jewry, Mr. Sand””a self-described post-Zionist who believes that Israel needs to shed its Jewish identity to become a democracy””aims to undermine the idea of a Jewish state.

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Why does a rabbi care about whether or not the Catholic Church becomes more welcoming of disaffected Anglicans? In this case, it’s because I welcome all moves which increase diversity within religious community. But whether or not this new move will accomplish that remains to be seen.

What appears to be a move toward greater inclusiveness may actually facilitate the homogenization of both churches directly affected by this process. People may opt to leave a community rather than work within it to maintain the vitality of their way of being members of a particulate church. They may, because of moves like this one by the Vatican, opt, in a version of the words of the old Pall Mall cigarette commercial, switch rather than fight.

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Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), and four other bishops issued on October 5, a “Statement of Principles for Catholic-Jewish Dialogue.”

The cardinal and bishops also said in a letter that the June 18 document titled, “A Note on Ambiguities Contained in ”˜Reflections on Covenant and Mission’” would be amended by removing two sentences that might lead to misunderstanding about the purpose of interreligious dialogue.

The Note addressed issues related to evangelization and the Jewish covenant that were discussed in an article written in 2002 by a group of Catholic scholars who were consultants to the USCCB and the National Council of Synagogues. Intended “as a clarification of Church teaching primarily for Catholics,” the Note “led to misunderstanding and feelings of hurt among members of the Jewish community,” the bishops said in their statement.

Read it all and read the original statement linked in a pdf at the bottom of the linked page.

In theory it sounded so simple ”” life, that is. Obey the rules. Do the right and the good. Be a blessing. But in practice we find ourselves cutting corners, compromising principles, searching for quick fixes, too pressured and hassled to look up and see if we are still on the right road.

It helps, once a year, to stop and look at the map again. Soon it becomes clear that we have taken a number of wrong turns. So we admit our mistakes, apologise, seek atonement and set out again, hopefully this time to reach our destination. The key word of these days is teshuvah. Normally translated as “penitence”, it really means “return”, getting back on track, a little more determined to get it right this time without getting diverted or delayed.

Is it possible for a whole society, even an entire civilisation, to suffer mission drift? Not only is it possible, it’s almost inevitable. Right now we are going through one of the great mission drifts in the history of the West.

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And at no other time of year in the Jewish calendar does the role of a Jewish prison chaplain seem more essential. The period from Rosh Hashana through Yom Kippur is known as the Ten Days of Repentance.

Tradition and theology call on all Jews, of course, to engage in the soul-searching called heshbon ha-nefesh in Hebrew, and to make amends with repentance (or teshuva), prayer and charity. Yet this particular season of reflection and penitence comes after a banner year of proven or alleged misdeeds by Jews, from Bernard Madoff’s pyramid scheme to the violations of labor laws at the Agriprocessors kosher slaughterhouse in Iowa to the arrest of several New Jersey rabbis in a scandal involving political bribery and trafficking in human organs.

If Rabbi Gerard’s experience at Graterford sheds any light on how the convicted and incarcerated encounter the High Holy Days, it is light that strikes in some unexpected ways. (Officials at Graterford would not permit interviews with individual prisoners or the release of their names.)

Most of the Jewish inmates have come to feel remorse about their crimes, Rabbi Gerard said. One or two continue to profess their innocence. All wrestle with a mixture of remorse and defensiveness.

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[Martin Luther] King…had this to say in 1968 about anti-Zionism at Harvard University: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews; you are talking anti-Semitism.”

Today, Gandhi’s influence is still keenly felt globally. Yet it is interesting to note that India today rejects its spiritual founder’s worldview. A nuclear power, it has adopted Israel’s approach to threats from suicide bombers and other terrorists.

So with all due respect to Tutu, Israel and the Jewish people are clear about the lesson of the Holocaust: that never again will the destiny of our people be placed in the hands of others. For 2,000 years, Jews depended on pity; they had no land and no army, and what they got in return were inquisitions, pogroms and the Nazi genocide. The Holocaust also taught us that freedom and justice come to those who are prepared to fight for them.

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Jews have no history in the city of Jerusalem: They have never lived there, the Temple never existed, and Israeli archaeologists have admitted as much. Those who deny this are simply liars. Or so says Sheik Tayseer Rajab Tamimi, chief Islamic judge of the Palestinian Authority.

His claims, made last month, would be laughable if they weren’t so common among Palestinians. Sheik Tamimi is only the latest to insist that, in his words, Jerusalem is solely “an Arab and Islamic city and it has always been so.” His comments come on the heels of those by Shamekh Alawneh, a lecturer in modern history at Al Quds University. On an Aug. 11 PA television program, “Jerusalem””History and Culture,” Mr. Alawneh argued that the Jews invented their connection to Jerusalem. “It has no historical roots,” he said, adding that the Jews are engaging in “an attack on history, theft of culture, falsification of facts, erasure of the truth, and Judaization of the place.”

As President Barack Obama and his foreign-policy team gear up to propose yet another plan for Israeli-Arab peace, they would do well to focus less on important but secondary issues like settlement growth, and instead notice that top Palestinian intellectual and political leaders deny basic truths about the region’s most important city.

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For many, hospice care is synonymous with death, and death is not an event to be confronted or embraced but, rather, feared and avoided.

In the Jewish and black communities, cultural attitudes often cause people to reject the idea of death until the bitter end, according to Sandy Slavin, program director for Lutheran Hospice, the Charleston area’s nonprofit hospice organization. This tendency, along with other factors, keeps many members of the Jewish and black communities away from end-of-life medical care and counseling that might benefit them, Slavin said.

Her views were confirmed by religious leaders who attested to the fear and avoidance, citing a variety of religious, cultural and historical reasons.

In an effort to reach these underserved populations, Lutheran Hospice recently launched a campaign to cater to the particular concerns of the two groups and to ensure that patients enjoy regular access to the people and practices of their religious traditions despite the sequestered nature of hospice care, Slavin said.

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Jewish leaders are calling on U.S. rabbis to emphasize the faith’s ethical requirements in their sermons during Rosh Hashana in response to recent financial scandals involving its members, including Bernard Madoff.

Jews have been embarrassed the past year by the arrest of former Wall Street tycoon Madoff, who is serving a 150-year prison sentence for defrauding investors out of billions of dollars, and several rabbis who were arrested in July on money laundering charges, said Richard Joel, president of Yeshiva University in New York.

Widely distributed images showed them being led into the FBI building in Newark in rabbinical garb and handcuffs didn’t help.

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To Jewish friends and fellow workers on the occasion of Rosh Hashanah 2009

It gives me great pleasure once again to be able to offer my warmest greetings and good wishes on the occasion of Rosh Hashanah to all in the Jewish communities in this country and abroad. The turning of the year offers once again the opportunity both to reflect on events past and to look forward with hope at the possibilities which lie ahead for us to renew the already deep bonds of solidarity and friendship in faith that bind us together.

Looking back on the past year, I recall with vivid intensity the visit to Auschwitz with the Chief Rabbi and Rabbi Dr Tony Bayfield and other religious leaders of this country, arranged through the Holocaust Educational Trust. It was a remarkable day for all of us whether in the traveling to and from Auschwitz; in the experiences of solidarity in faith; or in the sheer intensity of the horror that remains present at Auschwitz and Birkenau. To have encountered this together, side by side, in a moment of the most profound recollection, was a salutary reminder to us that we must continue to struggle together against the selfsame tendencies that remain present today.

For this reason I was glad to be able to host the London Conference on Combating Antisemitism here at Lambeth in February, and to make clear once again the Church’s unshakeable commitment to opposing the forces in our society that nurture a new anti Semitism as well as other forms of racism and dehumanization.

The resurgence of violence in southern Israel and Gaza was the occasion of a deep testing of our relationship of trust and friendship. I dare to believe that in maintaining the bonds of relationship between Christian, Jewish and Muslim friends here in the United Kingdom, we set an example to the wider world and made a small but, I hope significant, contribution to the long term peace and reconciliation in the Middle East for which we all long. Our combined appeal from all three communities for humanitarian aid was a symbol of our determination not to follow the paths of separation and antagonism. We must pray that the current renewed efforts towards reconciliation and a lasting peace will bear fruit.

Looking to the year ahead, there is much to celebrate and to hope and to work for. We shall be glad to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which has made such continuous contributions to our society and will continue to do so under its new leadership. I welcome wholeheartedly the future presence of the Chief Rabbi in the House of Lords where he will continue to offer profoundly important reflections on the moral issues of our times. I look forward to visiting the Middle East again and to my next meeting with the Chief Rabbinate of Israel with the opportunity to renew the commitments on which our dialogue is founded. I have been encouraged by the continued strengthening of the work of the Council of Christians and Jews and especially the broadening of its Presidency and I hope for an extension and deepening of the ways in which church and synagogue encounter each other in faith.

May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us in the year ahead.

Earlier this month, James von Brunn, the 89-year-old bigot charged with killing an African American security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, appeared for a hearing in a Washington courtroom.

Von Brunn, who faces charges including first-degree murder, hate crimes and gun violations, “appeared frail and sat quietly in a wheelchair,” according to news reports. The hearing presented evidence that he was on a “suicide mission,” driven to “send a message to the Jewish community” that the Holocaust is a hoax.

Not surprisingly, the judge ordered a mental competency exam.

In the hours after the Holocaust museum shooting, there were multiple, brazen assertions that American Jews were in profound danger and that the shooting was only the latest evidence of the lurking threats that ought to rouse Jews from their mistaken slumber.

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Egyptians generally do not make any distinction between Jewish people and Israelis. Israelis are seen as the enemy, so Jews are, too.

Khalid Badr, 40, is pretty typical in that regard, living in a neighborhood of winding, rutted roads in Old Cairo, selling snacks from a kiosk while listening to the Koran on the radio. Asked his feelings about Jews, he replied matter-of-factly. “We hate them for everything they have done to us,” Mr. Badr said, as casually as if he had been asked the time.

But Mr. Badr’s ideas have recently been challenged. He has had to confront the reality that his neighborhood was once filled with Jews — Egyptian Jews — and that his nation’s history is interwoven with Jewish history. Not far from his shop, down another narrow, winding alley once called the Alley of the Jews, the government is busy renovating an abandoned, dilapidated synagogue.

In fact, the government is not just renovating the crumbling, flooded old building. It is publicly embracing its Jewish past — not the kind of thing you ordinarily hear from Egyptian officials.

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Rabbi Margaret Moers Wenig preaches increasingly to the converted: Hebrew congregations and rabbinical and cantorial students who no longer assume that a rabbi has to be a he or heterosexual. Rabbi Wenig, 52, has seen and propelled her share of changes in Judaism since being ordained in 1984, and now teaches classes of more women than men at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Greenwich Village, seminary of the Reform movement, Judaism’s liberal branch. A lesbian with two grown daughters from a previous marriage whom she raised in Brooklyn with her longtime partner, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, Rabbi Wenig won acclaim for her widely published 1990 sermon “God Is a Woman and She Is Growing Older,” portraying the deity as a loving if long-suffering mother who wonders why you haven’t called.

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The rabbis had every reason to fear science. It was done, in their day, by the Greeks, and there was a profound difference between the two cultures, so much so that Jews had fought a war ”” essentially a war of culture ”” against Hellenism. The name Epicurus, the Greek thinker who more than anyone presaged atomic science, was synonymous for Jews with heretic.

Yet the rabbis knew wisdom when they saw it, and they valued it even though they dissented from some of its conclusions. They did so for three reasons. First, it was evidence of the fact that God had indeed created humankind “in his image, after his likeness”, meaning according to Jewish tradition, “with the capacity to understand and discern”. Intellect, insight, the ability to frame and test hypotheses: these are God-given and a reason to give thanks.

Second, scientific method can apply to religion as well.

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U.S. Jewish leaders have expressed concern over a June statement issued by the U.S. bishops to clarify a 2002 document that raised questions about the church’s mission of evangelization and how the church relates to the Jewish community.

In a letter to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the leaders said that because of the statement dialogue between the two faiths is at risk.

Representatives of the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee and rabbis from various branches of Judaism sent the letter Aug. 20.

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This is not the first time these questions have been raised. Pocket books called Stalags circulated widely in Israel during the Eichmann trial in the 1960s. They depicted American or British pilots being abused by sadistic Nazi female officers, and then taking revenge by raping and/or killing their torturers. Deemed pornographic by Israeli courts, these books were banned.

There is a not uncommon belief that the Torah sanctions revenge. But the precept of “an eye for an eye” is usually cited incorrectly, according to Rabbi Joel Roth, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. It is actually meant to refer to monetary compensation rather than bloodletting. And Leviticus 19:18 says, “Thou shalt not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people.”

Rabbi Roth notes that Jews are prohibited from taking “the law into your own hands as a matter of legal punishment.” The scaffolding of legality””a fair trial and conviction””is paramount under Jewish law. Eichmann was the one person to ever receive a death sentence in an Israeli court, and not without much hand-wringing from Jews world-wide.

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WILLIAMS: (to Ms. Frank): Do you think that his Orthodox Jewish faith makes him a better doctor?

Ms. [MICHELLE] FRANK: I think it makes him a better doctor, because I think that it helps to instill a lot of confidence in him. He does things that no other obstetrician will do. Whether they can or can’t they just won’t, and he’ll tell you that he really feels like God just sort of guides his hands in his deliveries, and some of the things that he does, and some of the stories that have been told, there’s just no way to do that on your own. I mean, you have to have help, and he attributes that help to God.

Dr. [JOSEPH] TATE: When you understand that there is another power in the world, and it is not just about you, then God gives you the ability sometimes to do things beyond what you particularly can do.

WILLIAMS: Natural births mean less blood loss and risk of infection for the mother and fewer respiratory problems for the newborn. But on this Sabbath day, there’s a problem with Sarah. Her tailbone is blocking her baby’s birth.

Dr. TATE: What I don’t tell people always is when I’m in tough situation I’ll close my eyes and I’ll say a silent prayer, and I want Him to let me know if this is something that can be done, let me do it, let me do it well. But if it’s something that can’t be done, well, let me know, and if I need to do a cesarean to””that’s the right thing, then we’ll do that. I need help, and I’m not ashamed to ask for it.

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Someone was buried in Florence Marmor’s grave, and it was not Florence Marmor.

When Mrs. Marmor visited her deceased husband’s cemetery plot in Flushing, Queens, one afternoon, she found that someone had been freshly buried in the spot next to his, where she had planned to rest someday. No one could tell her why.

Strange and wrenching discoveries like that have sprung up repeatedly in Jewish communities over the past few decades as families have discovered that the cemetery properties where they expected to be buried among spouses, children and parents are caught in a legal knot that no one can untangle.

The reason: the Jewish burial societies that sold the gravesites no longer have administrators. Founded by the immigrant ancestors of the people caught in this bind, the societies, in effect, have died.

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