Read on for more about the movement, its leadership, and its connections to Cincinnati, Detroit, Scarsdale, New York, and, yes, Mattoon, Illinois. Panken is a licensed commercial pilot and has a degree in electrical engineering from Johns Hopkins University. Jacobs, who stands 6-foot-4, is a former dancer and choreographer. Today, half of all married Reform Jews have non-Jewish spouses, and 80 percent of those who married between and wed non-Jewish spouses.
Concomitantly, the movement has moved away from discouraging intermarriage and has focused on welcoming intermarried families. In , a Reform rabbinic task force recommended reaching out to the intermarried and adapting rituals to include non-Jewish family members.
Today, most Reform rabbis perform interfaith weddings. However, Reform rabbis may marry non-Jews after graduation and face no sanction for doing so. Panken, the Hebrew Union College president, has indicated that a review of the longtime ban on ordaining intermarried rabbis may be in the works.
The Reconstructionist Rabbinical College recently dropped its own ban on intermarried rabbinical students, becoming the first US Jewish denomination to make that decision. For a long time, a great many Reform Jews dismissed kashrut, Jewish dietary laws, entirely.
In a group of fifteen rabbis gathered in Pittsburgh and wrote a statement of principles for Reform Judaism. They fail to impress the modern Jew with a spirit of priestly holiness; their observance in our days is apt rather to obstruct than to further modern spiritual elevation.
When I was growing up, barely anything was off-limits for Jewish reasons. The only thing that my family observed was not eating bread on Passover. I do remember, however, having ham and cheese on matzah at least once. My family was not exactly alone in its lack of interest in kashrut. The vice chairman of a Reform synagogue in Illinois once explained to me why he did not keep kosher. Animals must be specially slaughtered, which means that Jews are not allowed to eat animals that die naturally in their care:.
Leviticus additionally explains: And wherever you live, you must not eat the blood of any bird or animal. Anyone who eats blood must be cut off from their people Leviticus —7. Neutral foods, which can be eaten with either meat or dairy, are called parev. These include vegetables, pasta and rice. As long as these are washed thoroughly before eating, no kosher rules will be broken. Orthodox Jews keep all the rules of kashrut. Some even have separate utensils and perhaps fridges for the preparation and storage of meat and dairy products.
Reform Jews often choose which rules to follow. While many Jews today believe the biblical prohibitions against certain meat and fish to be for health reasons, Parashat Re'eh Deuteronomy makes no such claim.
In fact, if this were the case, the explicit permission to give the stranger and the foreigner the foods we are forbidden to eat would be frankly immoral. Rather, Parashat Re'eh , as the Torah does elsewhere, identifies the articulation of eating prohibitions strictly as part of the Israelites' particular path to holiness: "for you are a people consecrated to your God Adonai" What is it about these prohibitions that can make us holy?
Interestingly, the prohibited foods are identified as tamei lachem --ritually impure "for you" , 8, For this reason, it is perfectly acceptable for other people to eat them, just not for the people Israel.
Traditional and modern commentators have offered various explanations as to why particular fish, poultry, and animals are considered tahor "ritually pure" and therefore acceptable to eat. But perhaps more important than the meaning of each of the details of the prohibitions is the simple fact that we are given a list of dos and don'ts that govern what we are to consume daily. According to the Torah, God asks that we abstain from eating certain foods, not because they are unhealthy or intrinsically problematic, but simply as an expression of our devotion.
As with other chukim laws that the rabbinic sages define as being without rational explanation , these prohibitions are like the requests of a beloved: we may not understand them, but we are, in essence, asked to follow them purely as an expression of our love.
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