“There’s a tremendous amount of anxiety among religious traditionalists that when you take one step toward egalitarianism, the floodgates are open and everything that seemed self-evident will no longer be. Men go to work, and women raise children. If you undermine that, you have lost your whole universe.”The Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements of Judaism have been ordaining women as rabbis for decades, but the religion's most traditional sect, the Orthodox, remains a lone, minority holdout against egalitarianism. Last year, Orthodox Rabbi Avraham "Avi" Weiss (political
activist and founder of the
controversial, liberal, "Open Orthodox"
Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Yeshiva in New York)
tried to shake things up by ordaining the first female American Orthodox rabbi.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Jul 31, 2010 -
35 comments
For Orthodox Jewish mothers with small children, the
Shabbat can
be challenging. The answer, for many communities, is the establishment of an
eruv (discussed previously
here, in passing).
This San Francisco Chronicle article details the history behind Berkeley, California's
unique instance. This isn't the first time an
eruv has been attempted in the Bay Area: the failed effort to create one in Palo Alto
was covered by the Chronicle, as well as
the Jewish News Weekly. Berkeley isn't the only United States city with an
eruv—the
Boston eruv maintains a
large list of domestic and international eruvim—nor is it the city with the
most unusual eruv, or even the
largest. Inevitably, perhaps, there's a
blog entirely dedicated to the subject of
eruvim, and
vigorous commentary on the subject from
several others.
posted by scrump
on Jul 7, 2006 -
60 comments
