Jerusaelm Post
It is a precipitous moment for Jewish religious leadership in the US.While the problems are primarily financial, their impact appears to threaten the future of American Judaism.
Reform and Conservative seminaries - the institutions charged with providing the overwhelming majority of affiliated American Jews with their religious and educational leadership - face budget cuts so severe that their missions may be imperiled. The congregational arms of their movements also are in grave financial straits, and American rabbis generally face a shortage of jobs.
No doubt there are very smart people thinking about what this portends.
Those people, however, do not seem to be riding the Jewish information superhighway. Many of the stories about the rabbinate that interest American Jewish newspapers are not about the future of American Judaism. Instead, they concern whether "transgender" and intermarried Jews can be admitted to rabbinical schools, and see it as a sign of acceptance, or perhaps maturity, among the streams that a lesbian this month becomes president of the Southern California Board of Rabbis.
The idea seems to be that there are various groups pounding on the seminaries' gates: First the question was ordaining women, then gays and lesbians. Now that those groups can enter the non-Orthodox ordination programs, other groups have formed at the gate: the intermarried and transgender (women living as men, men as women, with or without surgical gender changes).
However interesting or irksome these issues are to most American Jews, these "who can be a rabbi" stories are irrelevant to the future of Jewish life.[...]
> No doubt there are very smart people thinking about what this portends
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately it's those very smart people who made the investment screw ups that led to this mess in the first place!
At any rate, this is all an over-reaction. Within a couple of years the Dow will be back over 12000, housing starts will be accelerating, and people will be acting as if the good times will never end. Just like before, and before that, and before that too.
It is wise to realize that the world spins and so do events. We have been in the throes of worldwide financial depression before and it will happen again. We have been in the vortex of worldwide financial prosperity and it will happen again. Happened by Yosef HaTzaddik too. We have the ability to glean the answers to these crisises from our forefathers.
ReplyDeleteYeah, store up corn and wait for the fat cow to sing!
ReplyDelete