Monday, September 03, 2007

The living words

I'm participating in this month's edition of the URJ's Eilu V'Eilu, and the first week's statements are up! The question (perhaps inspired by recent events) is "Reform Jews are reclaiming Jewish traditions rejected by prior generations. How do you understand and relate to this perception?", and I'm responding along with fellow Chicagoan Larry Kaufman. In week 2, we'll respond to each other's opening statements, and in week 3, we'll respond to questions from readers. So feel free to send in your questions, and to suggest angles for future installments.

If you're getting to Mah Rabu for the first time from the Eilu V'Eilu page, welcome! Here is my longer post on the Pittsburgh Platform.

UPDATE: Corrections appended.

3 comments:

  1. The vast difference between your remarks and Kaufman's is great. I'm not going to take sides (yet?), but I keep looking the page up and down and finding new differences in framing, discourse, implied judgements, denominationalism, etc etc.

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  2. Oh, and just to clarify, by "great" I mean "awesome", and by "awesome" I mean "totally cool".

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  3. One difference that makes it difficult for me to write a direct "rebuttal" is that we're looking at different aspects of the question -- my statement is more philosophical, looking more at the reasons behind practices than the practices themselves, while his statement is more empirical, looking at what people actually are and aren't doing.

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