Jewish in a Gentile World

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, starts at sunset tonight! Wishing all of my readers a happy and "sweet" new year in 5766!

Please note: I am not a rabbi and am not certified in any way to make decisions about Jewish law. This article is intended solely as food for thought. It is based on what I was taught, supported by my review of the relevant passages in the Talmud. Thou shalt not murder... Thou shalt not steal... Thou shalt not covet... In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, as the social order in New Orleans crumbled, many intellectuals contemplated their navels in their cozy living rooms and debated the morality of the behavior we see on our TV screens. Most agreed that ethical constraints need to be adapted to the situation, though some took a hard-line approach and maintained that rules are rules. It is worth noting that Jewish law addressed these issues long ago, not from the safety and security of ivory towers, but from a desperate real-world situation where oppressors routinely ordered Jews to violate Jewish law or suffer death. The Talmud takes a practical approach to the situation that is quite clos...

Israeli archaeologist Eilat Mazar has uncovered the foundation walls of an ancient and significant public building just outside the walls of the Old City in Jerusalem. She believes that she has found King David's palace, the palace that the Bible describes as being built by King Hiram of Tyre about 1,000 years Before the Christian Era (BCE). This remarkable find was announced earlier this month. If you haven't heard about this story, don't feel guilty: Lots of people haven't heard about it. It has hardly made a blip on the mainstream press in the United States. A search of a LexisNexis news database covering hundreds of newspapers gets only 6 results for the search "King David w/10 palace" since the beginning of August. Searches for the archaeologist by various spellings of her name return the same results. I would not have known about it myself if I had not read an editorial about the discovery in the Jewish Exponent last week. And no wonder the media doesn...

A colleague of mine recently told me the story of a couple identified on a restaurant check as "Jew couple." Apparently, some restaurants routinely use descriptions of patrons, rather than table numbers, to identify which table goes with a check. My colleague reported that she has received restaurant checks identifying her as "blond girl" or even "pretty girl." What is so wrong, she wondered, about calling two people "Jew couple" that the New Jersey attorney general would be investigating the story? First, let me emphasize that the word "Jew" is not an offensive term. I am a Jew. I am Jewish. I use these two phrases interchangeably and see no difference between them, and many other Jews feel the same way. In fact, when the subject came up in the newsgroup soc.culture.jewish, several people were offended by the idea that the word "Jew" is an offensive term, as if being a Jew were such a terrible thing that people should...

My friend has just informed me that the Kapoor family, discussed in my last post , has been released from detention! The next hurdle, of course, is the possibility of deportation, but at least they have been reunited with their family. See an article from an English language Indian newspaper: http://in.rediff.com/news/2005/jul/29nri.htm

A colleague of mine told me a harrowing tale of her experience on public transit. She boarded a train and saw a man standing in the back, moving in strange ways. She thought he might be a suicide bomber: he had little boxes apparently taped to his body. Being the responsible citizen that she is, she promptly reported it to the conductor. The conductor laughed. He said, "I thought the same thing the first time I saw him, but he's not a bomber. It's a Jewish prayer thing." The little boxes she saw "taped" (actually strapped with leather) to his body were tefillin, boxes containing verses of scripture that are worn during morning prayer to fulfill the commandment "bind them [words of Torah] as a sign upon your hand and they shall be frontlets between your eyes" (Deut. 11:18). The boxes certainly contain something of great power, but not in the way my colleague had in mind! I found her story quite amusing until a few days later, I received an email fro...

Yesterday, the Supreme Court rendered its decisions in the two cases related to Ten Commandments displays. In McCreary County, Kentucky v. ACLU of Kentucky , the Court held that the display of large, readily visible framed copies of the Ten Commandments in county courthouses violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, and this violation was not remedied when the counties, after initiation of the lawsuit, added displays of secular documents containing religious references. In Van Orden v. Perry , the Court held that a donated 6-foot-high monolith inscribed with the Ten Commandments, added to a preexisting display outside the courthouse that already contained a few dozen monuments and markers, did not violate the establishment clause. I have provided links to the full text of the opinions at the end of this post, but I have not yet had a chance to thoroughly review both of these lengthy opinions (75 pages each). I skimmed the summaries at the beginning of the opinions, and ...