European Judaism

Being intimately connected to a College, European Judaism is an organic entity that grows and develops its subject matter as part of a living community. Thus many of the materials we receive emerge from the interests or contacts of those associated directly or indirectly with the College. A good example is this issue that evolved into an exploration of contemporary ‘theological’ issues facing Jews, Christians and Muslims.

According to recent polls by US News and World Report, there are today 119 million U.S. citizens who class themselves as 'actively believing' Christians. Of these, more than eighty million profess to attend church more than once every week. Extrapolating from this same survey, more than sixty million Americans believe their Christian faith to be the only true religion. And more than eighty-five million claim to have had a personal experience of being brought into direct contact with God. This is a figure that some pollsters and statisticians, including Gallup, the largest polling organization in the world, consider potentially flawed. This is particularly interesting because Gallup is himself an evangelical believer. So for him to suggest that the stats have been skewed says a lot. As someone who has studied econometrics and statistics at both the undergraduate level in the U.S., and then in graduate business school in the U.K., I can state unequivocably that all of these statistics contain an element of truth. But they also are colored by who is asking, where they are asked, and how the questions are phrased. Even then, they do not tell the entire story.

On 25 May 2002, Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt, Professor Emeritus for Systematic Theology at the Free University (FU) of Berlin, was called out of life, as the death announcement of his family put it, 'in the midst of a happy spring walk'. The readers would have known him above all as a tireless worker for the renewal of the relationship between Christians and Jews. The reflections concerning the encounter between Christians and Jews, the recognition of the shared responsibility of Christians for the National-Socialist murder of the Jews, but also the meaning of the return of Israel to her Land and the founding of the State of Israel were pulled by Marquardt into the center of his Dogmatics perhaps more than by any other Christian theologian. It was a long journey to that point.

Over the last fifty years, Muslims and Christians have never talked so much with each other, according to Jean Claude Basset. However, he writes that it is mainly a small elite group of scholars who are doing the talking Ismail Faruqi described Muslim-Christian dialogue as a 'failure, a struggling desperately to survive', and in vain, with no visible results. He argued that Muslim-Christian dialogue has mostly been led by Christians; Muslims as 'invited guests' have thus not been free to speak being obligated to their 'hosts'. Furthermore, participant Muslims are often selected by Church authorities, rather than elected or appointed by their communities. Although a good number of dialogues have been organized at the international level with the support of religious organizations, they claim little impact beyond more local initiatives, have not prevented mistrust and conflicts from occurring, and have offered little help in healing wounds and restoring peace.

We are a group of Jews, Christians and Muslims who have been meeting for twelve years though some of us have joined more recently. We feel it is time to make a public statement to express our shared concerns. We wish to emphasise our shared belief in God, the shared moral and spiritual values of our three faiths, and to draw attention to the urgent need for inter-religious understanding and co-operation to promote a more just and peaceful and ecologically sustainable world.

My specific self-questioning title for this evening – 'Does Monotheism Breed Monomania?' – which I hope is both playful and provocative, has emerged from the conversation inside me between two of these identities, as it were. The dialogue within me between the analyst immersed in particular traditions of thinking about the human mind and its unconscious processes – and the rabbi who is one link in a chain of a millennia-old Judaic cultural heritage which can be thought of as a 'concentric tradition of reading' (the phrase is George Steiner's) centred on the Torah, but spreading ever outwards, and involving a 'fidelity to the written word' from the sacred scriptures of tradition to the definitive so-called 'secular' texts of our own times, like Kafka or Freud, texts which have their own luminosity, perhaps even, at times, numinosity.

There is no question in my mind that Rabbi Lilienthal has made a lasting impact on our world Progressive Jewish family in the area of conversion, both in addressing the unique challenge facing you here in Holland, in the leadership he has demonstrated in the European Beit Din in helping forge common practices and policies regarding conversion in Europe, and in the support he has been providing for our Eastern European and Russian communities. It is therefore highly appropriate for us to deliberate on the question of 'Who is a Jew?' at this time, as it has occupied a significant part of David's contribution to the Jewish People and the Reform Movement over the years. Moreover, I cannot think of any other issue that has had such an impact on Israel-Diaspora relations and provided ground for contention and divisiveness than the 'Who is a Jew' question. Clearly, it is not because of the relatively small number of converts who have actually made aliyah, but rather, because of its symbolic significance. Through the 'Who is a Jew?' definition, Israel is declaring its own perception of what is legitimate and what is not throughout the world.

Isaiah Berlin's famous essay about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, called 'The Hedgehog and the Fox' takes its title from a tag by an ancient Greek poet, who said something like 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing'. Berlin used it to talk more about temperament and preoccupation than about knowledge. That's how I'd like to use it now, and 'come out' to you as an unabashed hedgehog who, in various (and sometimes wildly divergent modes), has had one thing on my mind all my life.

This article describes the traditional Jewish laws and customs of mourning, translates and evaluates their psychological benefit and contribution to recovery from bereavement. It further investigates the influence of Progressive Judaism where its approach differs to that of traditional practice: does this enhance or diminish the psychological value of Jewish mourning rituals?

Marc Ellis is one of the few Jewish American intellectuals who supports the Palestinian struggle against Israeli domination and oppression. His writings have been highly praised by progressive intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and by the late Edward Said, although his work is ignored or decried by organized Jewish community leaders and most academics in the U.S. Ellis's oeuvre is clearly in the Jewish theologian tradition; however he is a singular and innovative thinker who is known for crossing interdisciplinary (among other) boundaries.

The three weeks known as Bein HaMeitzarim, twenty-one days between 17th of Tamuz and 9th of Av, are marked by abstaining from wedding ceremonies, dance-music, and for the more observant: no eating of meat or drinking wine, except on Shabbat. We read in Mishna, Ta'anit 4.6: 'Five things befell our ancestors on the 17th of Tamuz, and five on the 9th of Av'. The two lists of five things are somewhat symmetric: the first event in each list connects these two dates with mishaps during the first years of wandering in the Sinai desert, following the Exodus. The second and third items in each of these two lists connect the two dates with commemorating the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Which of the two Temples: the first or the second? As for Tish'ah beAv this mishnah is clear: 'The Temple was destroyed the first time and the second time on this date', i.e. both Temples were destroyed on the same date in different centuries. There is a contradiction between the two Biblical reports, in Jeremiah 52:12 and in II Kings 25:8, concerning the First Temple.

Scholars have largely examined and identified the historical and philosophical forces prevalent in Germany during the nineteenth century1 which, after having brought about a Wissenschaft des Judentums (a scholarly investigation into Judaism at large in all its various disciplines), eventually led to the establishment of the first rabbinical seminaries in Europe. Although, according to Richard Schaeffler, 'Wissenschaft des Judentums is as old as Judaism itself', it was in its specific German understanding of Wissenschaft a specific product of nineteenth-century German Geistesgeschichte.

Birthday Celebration

Seven Brachot for Chava

Ghost Ship over Poland

Fulfillment

Prometheus II

Birkenau

She had Troubles of her Own our Rabbi

My Father was a Writer Dream Tales

Lionel Blue Hitchhiking to Heaven: An Autobiography, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 2004, 300 pp., ISBN 0-340-78660-4

After Emancipation: Jewish Religious Responses to Modernity, David Ellenson, Cincinnati, Hebrew Union College Press, 2004, $35.00 552 pp., ISBN 0-87820-223-4