Reform Judaism for the Rest of Us by Alexander Maller

Author:Alexander Maller [Alexander Maller]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781475935820
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2012-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

Notes

1. Union for Reform Judaism, “What Is Reform Judaism?” as posted at http://urj.org/about/reform/whatisreform/.

2. See Popper, The Open Society, 2:233.

3. “We know that crucial progress on immigration policy, climate change and gay and lesbian rights will be resisted, and that without a powerful chorus of progressive voices calling for change, we will remain mired in the status quo. One example: The battle—and it will be a battle—to roll back health care laws is about to begin, and there was no stronger religious or Jewish voice fighting to support these key reforms than the RAC, and we will need to strengthen those efforts in 2011.” (From a letter sent by the RAC to congregants in December 2010.) As this letter indicates, the RAC has expanded its positions: no more “repairing the world” but instead radical political and environmental change. The RAC is already preparing for “battle” and expects us members to follow it.

4. See Aron, Opium of the Intellectuals, 109.

5. Modern history teaches us that ambitious political initiatives intended to “repair the world,” such as the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War, “the war to end all wars,” ultimately brought enormous damage instead of repairs. In contrast, the Marshall Plan was a collaborative visionary process between governments and between private and public enterprises. The plan was conceived and built to provide a broad and complex range of improvements. The historic success of the plan was in providing sustainable results on a scale and at a depth never achieved before. We must note that many of the major economic failures of the twentieth century were caused by wrong governmental decisions (see the history of the Great Depression or the mismanagement of the midcentury urban-renewal projects). Zealous ideological application of well-intended policies, deprived of an understanding of life realities and human nature, brought more damage than benefits. Top-down government and central planning seldom possess the knowledge and the intellectual breadth to address the complex issues of human development. Modern capitalism, with its broad distribution of actions, individual initiative, and entrepreneurship as well as its self-correcting mechanisms has brought more basic prosperity worldwide than any other economic system. Sustaining prosperity, however, requires the expansion of freedoms with all their political and spiritual implications.

6. See Meyer, Response to Modernity, 309–14.

7. As quoted in J. P. Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), 133.

8. See ibid., 233.

9. See ibid., 234.

10. See ibid., 449.

11. On February 16, 2009, France’s top judicial body, the Council of State, formally acknowledged the French government’s responsibility for the deportation of thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps during World War II. See http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/francedeps.html.

12. See Union For Reform Judaism, “What Is Reform Judaism?”

13. Michael Meyer in Response to Modernity, 366–68, describes the dilemmas encountered by the Reform movement, in particular the CCAR, in the 1960s and 1970s regarding topics such as the civil rights movement, resistance to the Vietnam War, the Six Day War, and the merit of the alliances with interfaith groups. These dilemmas and disappointments indicate the danger in mixing religion with political activism.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.