The Supreme Court in England is set to rule by the end of this year on a case involving a question that has vexed Jewish communities throughout the world for centuries: Who is a Jew? The case began because a 12-year-old boy whose father was born Jewish and whose mother converted to Judaism was denied admission to an Orthodox Jewish high school on the grounds that, because his mother was converted not in an Orthodox synagogue, but in what the Times article refers to as a “progressive synagogue” (which I assume corresponds to something like Reform here in the States), she is not really Jewish; and so, therefore, neither is he. The boy’s family decided to sue the school for discrimination and lost. The Court of Appeal, however, reversed that decision on grounds that question one of the foundational tenets of Jewish identity: that, short of conversion, the only way one can be Jewish is to have been born to a Jewish mother.
In an explosive decision, the court concluded that basing school admissions on a classic test of Judaism — whether one’s mother is Jewish — was by definition discriminatory. Whether the rationale was “benign or malignant, theological or supremacist,” the court wrote, “makes it no less and no more unlawful.”
The case rested on whether the school’s test of Jewishness was based on religion, which would be legal, or on race or ethnicity, which would not. The court ruled that it was an ethnic test because it concerned the status of M’s [which is how the boy is referred to in court documents] mother rather than whether M considered himself Jewish and practiced Judaism.
“The requirement that if a pupil is to qualify for admission his mother must be Jewish, whether by descent or conversion, is a test of ethnicity which contravenes the Race Relations Act,” the court said. It added that while it was fair that Jewish schools should give preference to Jewish children, the admissions criteria must depend not on family ties, but “on faith, however defined.”
The same reasoning would apply to a Christian school that “refused to admit a child on the ground that, albeit practicing Christians, the child’s family were of Jewish origin,” the court said. (via Who Is a Jew? Court Ruling in Britain Raises Question – NYTimes.com.)
Is Jewish a religious or an ethnic identity? I was always taught it is both. Antisemites, on the other hand, have almost always argued otherwise. For the Nazis, Jewish was racial; go back further, and you find the Catholic Church treating Jewish as if it were a biological characteristic. Jewish men, for example, were understood to menstruate; Jews in general were believed incapable of perceiving the world accurately, of telling the truth in any language other than Hebrew, even of learning any language other than Hebrew–all because of the inherent deficiencies they suffered from as Jews. Even Jews who converted to Catholicism could not fully be trusted to have become sincere Christians, people at the time believed, because “once a Jew always a Jew,” and all it took to send a Jewish convert to be burned at the stake, or otherwise tortured and put to death, was for someone to imply that he or she was still, secretly, Jewish.
That Jews should trace their Jewishness back through their mothers, according to the rabbis, is commanded in the Torah. Here are the relevant verses from Deuteronomy 7:
1. When the Lord the God shall bring thee into the land wither thou goest to possess it, and shall cast out many nations before thee, the Hittite, and the Girgashite, and the Amorite, and the Canaanite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; 2. and when the Lord thy God shall deliver them up before thee, and thous shalt smite them; (then) thou shalt utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them; 3. neither shalt thou make marriages with them: thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take for thy son. 4. For he will turn away thy son from following Me, that they may serve other gods; so will the anger of the Lord be kindled against you, and He will destroy thee quickly. (Emphasis mine.)
The commentator Rashi explains the passage I have italicized as follows. (I am quoting here and above from The Pentateuch and Rashi’s Commentary: A Linear Translation into English, published in 1950 by S. S. & R. Publishing, Brooklyn, NY.)
For he will turn away thy son from following Me: [Rashi is here paraphrasing the passage from the Torah:] The son of a heathen, if he will marry your daughter, will turn away your son, which your daughter will bear him, from following Me. So [here begins Rashi’s commentary], we learn that your daughter’s son that is born of a heathen is considered your son; but the son of your son that is born of a heathen woman is not considered your son, but her son, for it is not stated regarding his [the heathen’s] daughter: “Thou shalt not take…for she will turn away thy son from following Me.” (Emphasis mine)
In other words, a son born to your (Jewish) son and a non-Jewish woman does not count as a member of your family, i.e., that child is not considered Jewish, and so it is not necessary to state the possibility that she will turn the child away from her or his Jewish heritage. One spiritual/mystical explanation that is given for this line of thinking is as follows:
Jewishness is not in our DNA. It is in our soul. The reason it is passed down through the maternal line is not just because it is easier to identify who your mother is. It is because the soul identity is more directly shaped by the mother than the father.
From a purely physical perspective, a child is more directly connected to their mother. The father’s contribution to the production of a child is instantaneous and remote. The mother, on the other hand, gives her very self to the child . The child is conceived inside the mother, develops inside the mother, is sustained and nourished by the mother, and is born from the mother.
This is not to say that a father and child are not intimately attached. Of course they are. But as deep and essential as the bond between father and child may be, the child’s actual body was never a part of her father’s body. But she was a part of her mother. Every child begins as an extension of their mother’s body.
This is a simple fact. It doesn’t mean she will be closer to her mother, or more similar to her mother, or follow her mother’s ways. We are not discussing the emotional bond between parent and child, but rather the natural physical bond. There is a more direct physical link between mother and child, because a child starts off as a part of her mother.
The body and its workings are a mirror image of the workings of the soul. The physical world is a parallel of the spiritual world. And so, the direct physical link between mother and child is a reflection of a soul link between them. While the father’s soul contributes to the identity of the child’s soul, it is the mother’s soul that actually defines it. If the mother has a Jewish soul, the child does too.
If the mother is not Jewish but the father is, his Jewish soul will not be extended to the child. There may be a spark of Jewishness there, but if it was not gestated in a Jewish mother, the child will have to go through conversion for their Jewishness to be activated.
Jewishness is passed down by the mother because being Jewish is a spiritual identity, it defines our very being. And our very being we get from our mother, both in body and in soul. (Via Chabad.)
This explanation essentializes Jewish in a way that would have been very familiar to the medieval Church, I think, and I imagine the Nazis as well, to the degree that any of them accepted the notion of a soul, would have endorsed it as well. I think anyone who believes in the necessity of keeping church and state separate, however, would be rightly troubled if a secular court were to accept such an explanation for why the actions of the Orthodox High School in England refused admission to M. (I should be clear that I have not read the court documents and so I don’t know if this explanation even entered into the school’s argument.) More to the point, if you read the passage from Deuteronomy without the mystical explanation, it’s hard to see matrilineal descent as anything other than a question of ethnicity.
The more I think about the questions raised by this case, the dizzier I get. I don’t know British law; I don’t know the Race Relations Act; I don’t what the legal standing of M’s family’s suit would be here in the States. Indeed, I think the idea of a court ruling on what I have always thought of as a religious question is kind of scary. If the courts can rule on this, then what other questions that have traditionally been handled within religious communities by the followers of the faith in question might the courts and then the government suddenly have jurisdiction over? What happens then to our separation of Church and State. Then there is the part of me that says the legal question is almost beside the point. The larger question is who gets to define the criteria by which someone is considered Jewish by other Jews? If we follow the reasoning of the Orthodox, aren’t we (and I mean here the Jews) saying that it’s okay for us to discriminate within our own community in a way that we would never accept were the discrimination racial, say, or ethnic and taking place outside the community?
Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.
It’s not a question of who the Jewish community may consider to be Jewish, it’s a question of who a school may consider to be Jewish.
Race-specific schools are not legal. So to the extent that Jewishness is an ethnicity, it isn’t legal to restrict your pupils to Jews. But religion specific schools are legal, and to the extent that Judaism is a religion it is legal to restrict your pupils to Jews.
I agree it’s a knotty problem. The law is such that the Law Lords cannot say “you must accept this person as part of your religious community”, but can say “you must accept this person as part of your religious community for the purpose of education”.
I understood from the article that some religious schools in Britain get government funding. And despite government funding these schools may refuse admittance to students who are not of their religion (as defined by some set of accepted laws of the religion). As I read it, the supreme court is getting involved because of anti-discrimination laws regarding publicly-funded schools . . . not because the court wishes to create secular law governing religions.
What a muddle. Makes one happy for clear(er) separation of Church and State (at least in theory) in the US. If religious institutions want to discriminate they should not accept funding from taxpayers. Period.
I was always taught that Jewish religion and Jewish ethnicity were two distinct things (though often shared by the same people). So you can convert to a Jewish religion, but you can’t convert to a Jewish ethnicity. And you can be born ethnically Jewish, but you can’t be born religiously Jewish.
Anyway. That’s what I was told. I don’t actually know. But personally, I never much liked the idea of being “born” a certain religion.
-there’s no separation between Church and State in the UK. I don’t know that that’s relevant to the topic per se though.
-as has previously been said, this ruling is not about a religious question but one of human rights; it’s not legal to use ethnicity as a admission criteria for a state school in the UK, but it is legal to use religion as an admission criteria (this is actually pretty common as there are lots of state-funded Catholic and Anglican state schools, and quite a few schools for smaller faiths like Judaism and Islam). A boy who’s been raised in a family that practices the school’s religion but who gets barred from the school on grounds of his ancestry…that’s a pretty straightforward violation of his human rights, surely?
-how significant are the admissions criteria of state-funded schools in expressing the definition of a religion/culture? I’d point out that Christian faith schools in the UK are notoriously gamed by parents who are otherwise irreligious – eg. people will attend a church every so often for a few years simply in order to get a child into the local Anglican school – but there isn’t much talk about how schools admission criteria is altering the definition of Anglicans. Judaism, not being the UK’s dominant religion, isn’t in the same position though.
Thene:
First, I should be clear that I am not trying to defend the position which would exclude the boy from the high school. I don’t agree that matrilineal descent should be the sole determining factor, aside from conversion, of whether one is counted a member of the Jewish community. But here’s the thing: by conflating ethnicity and religion, which I think matrilineal descent does, Orthodox Judaism makes this a religious question. If the boy is not Jewish because his mother’s conversion is not a kosher one–meaning that she is not really Jewish by Orthodox standards–then from the point of view of Orthodox Judaism it is irrelevant whether or not the boy practices Judaism. It would be–I think; I am not sure–like someone who has not been baptized, or who had not been properly baptized according to whatever criteria there are that exist for that, practicing a kind of Christianity that requires baptism in order to be counted as a Christian. The boy’s, and his mother’s, practice of Judaism would be, basically, an act of appropriation. To force the high school to accept him is to force them to accept someone who, by their own standards, cannot participate in the religious life of the school.
So while I agree that this does come down to a question of human rights, I don’t think it is as easy to separate that question from the religious question as you might think.
This seems even more bizarre to me, because if read expansively this decision would prohibit not only the refusal-to-admit of the kid in question but the existence of the school. Matrilineal descent is how everyone else got in. I wonder whether this decision is in part the result of the british court’s either misunderstanding of or impatience with the schisms in present-day judaism. Because ultimately what we have here is a sort of trademark dispute, with the orthodox rabbinate saying “You may be a jew, but you’re not a Jew, so we won’t take you.”
It’s possible that if the school changed its charter so that it was open only to orthodox jews this wouldn’t be a problem, but they probably don’t want to do that.
Although I am not formally trained in the law of the U.K., I can say with certainty that the laws affecting the intersection religion and government are completely different than the U.S. laws.
This being a court case, it is exceedingly difficult to analyze without a real understanding of the pertinent laws. But because the laws are so incredibly different, there is no chance of this providing any precedent (legally speaking) for the U.S.
I’ve been reading about this case here and there for the last few months. It’s a very difficult case to view through American eyes. On the one hand, our Supreme Court would never get into a case like this. On the other hand, we would never have a religious school receiving state funding like this.
A few things I wanted to point out.
1) My impression – and maybe someone who is British and Jewish can correct me on this if I’m wrong – is that the Jewish community in Britain overwhelmingly identifies as “Orthodox,” which I put in quotes because their actual practice may not be that different than many American Jews, but the synagogues they attend are Orthodox shuls and they self-identify as Orthodox. Meanwhile, liberal Judaism (which is what I think they call their equivalent of Reform Judaism) accounts for a relatively small percentage of Jews there. Contrast that to the United States, where Reform, Conservative and unaffiliated account for the large majority of American Jews, and Orthodox is very small (I think around 16 percent) – but the majority of people self-identifying that way have a practice that we all would recognize as Orthodox practice.
This is relevant, I think, because the school, under this ruling, could set the standards for practice in such a way that only Orthodox students would qualify – and thereby still exclude all these children of “non-kosher” converts – but they also would end up excluding most of the “Orthodox” students they want to admit – the treif-eating, Sabbath-violating children of halachically Jewish mothers.
And so this case, in addition to getting outsiders involved in “who is a Jew?”, also gets at the hypocrisy of the Orthodox position toward non-Orthodox converts. An Orthodox convert must maintain every aspect of Orthodox practice, in the strictest, rather than the more lenient, interpretation, or risk having their conversion revoked. And perhaps rendering their children un-Jewish after the children are grown. Now, halachically, those children are born Jews. They were born to Jewish mothers because halachically there is not supposed to be a difference between a convert and a born Jew. But your rights as a convert will always be in question, and it will be over precisely these behavioral questions that are not supposed to be what defines a Jew.
Which gets me to my second point.
2) The British Orthodox establishment could have avoided this whole thing by simply recognizing non-Orthodox converts as Jewish. That might seem like six of one, half a dozen of the other. They still are being asked to violate their own religious beliefs. But let’s look at the religious belief in question. They want to insist that someone who professes a belief in Judaism, rejects whatever their previous religion is, undergoes immersion in a mikveh, and then lives a Jewish life that involves the practice of Judaism … is not Jewish … because of their level of practice. That’s the only difference between an Orthodox and a non-Orthodox convert – the level of practice expected of the convert after the conversion. Can you see why the court had a hard time taking the Orthodox view here?
There are all manner of things that the liberal denominations do that the Orthodox disagree with, but the Orthodox don’t say “You’re not Jewish because you do X.” If they would put conversions into that same category – and there really is no religious reason that they couldn’t, if they wanted to – they could essentially keep those age-old standards we’re all used to and keep the government out of this decision.
Yes, this would be compromising their absolute religious freedom. But that’s what you get for taking state money and mixing religion and government in this way. That’s the bargain you make. And again, they could have kept this an intra-Jewish thing and kept the government out of it. They chose not to, and now they’re wailing and moaning and gnashing their teeth over it. Forgive me if this daughter of a non-Orthodox convert, who happens to agree that behavior should not be what defines a Jew, can’t summon up too much sympathy for their position.
chingona:
I am wondering if this is a community standard or if it is codified somewhere. Not that it makes any difference in its effect on converts; I am just wondering.
I am wondering if this is a community standard or if it is codified somewhere.
I believe (though I’m not certain) that it is not codified. My understanding is that the only thing that ought to invalidate a conversion is some evidence the person was insincere at the time of conversion. However, some Orthodox rabbis have revoked conversions, using the lack of observance as evidence of retroactive insincerity. There have been women whose conversions were revoked because they wore pants or didn’t sufficiently cover their hair. Their children were declared not Jewish, and their husbands were told they were no longer married to their wives. I think it’s a minority of rabbis who do stuff like this, but it has happened and it happens enough that it’s a cause of concern to converts. (I’m getting this from reading convert blogs and blogs like Failed Messiah, which documents abuses within the Orthodox community.)
The community standards probably raise more problems than actual revocations. If someone thinks a particular rabbi is too liberal or modern, that person will not treat the people who converted under that rabbi as “really” Jewish. A lot of converts worry about whether their children will be able to marry because of concerns they might not be really Jewish.
We had a courtcase like that in the 80’s, with maimonides (a Jewish highschool in Amsterdam). Our SC decided that the school could decide to refuse the boy.
I think that most of the cases of an Orthodox conversion being retroactively invalidated have been in Israel and have had a lot to do with political maneuvering within the rabbinate. When I went to an Orthodox Hebrew school, I was taught that once somebody converts, that person is considered as Jewish as someone who was born Jewish. There was some Talmudic passage about how a convert should be accepted by the community, and once the conversion is complete, that person should be treated just like any other Jew.
Something I think is missing here is that the courts are in no way ruling on “who counts as Jewish” – they are ruling on whether it is legal to discriminate against a child because of who that child’s mother is.
And, very much on there being no separation of church and state in the UK. Our Queen is also the head of the Church of England. I think the law requiring Christian prayer in state schools is still on the books.
SeanH:
While I have no doubt that this is how the court sees it–and I want to say again that I am not suggesting the court should see it differently; I do not agree with the stance taken by the school or the Orthodox community in general when it comes to conversion and/or matrilineal descent–the position you have stated, it seems to me (unless there is something I am not getting) denies the reality that, for the Orthodox, the question of who counts as Jewish is answered, except in the case of converts, always and only by the question of who one’s mother is. I defend the Orthodox position neither in this case nor in the world Jewish community, but it is wrong to suggest that this case, for them, does not go to the very heart of Judaism as they understand it. If, as I understand it, the school is legally allowed to accept only Jewish students, then forcing the school to accept this boy, whom they do not consider Jewish, legally invalidates their belief system.
My understanding is that the school is open to all students, but when they get more applications than they have spaces (which is just about always, which is apparently the case with many religious schools in Britain), they are allowed to give preference to Jewish students. That’s a fairly fine distinction that doesn’t really change your overall point, but that’s my understanding of the matter. Now, they are being told that if they are to give preference to Jewish students, they must look at practice, not identity (however defined) to determine who qualifies.
I am wondering about the extent to which this is the problem of “dina ha-malkhuta dina” conflicting directly with Halacha in a nation-state where Jews are a (somewhat) protected minority outside the established national Church. In Israel, non-Orthodox conversions are not recognized, the boy is not Jewish, and would not go to a dati or haredi school. In the UK, the boy is still not halachically Jewish, but the school is required to take him, the non-Jewish government thus deciding who is a Jew-for-educational-purposes but not halachically. Basically, Exile being its own reward, dina-ha-malkhuta dina requiring educational recognition of a non-Jew and invalidating Halacha. The UK Jewish community thus reaping the reward of being a powerless, exilic minority, forced to open its institutions to people who are not actually Jewish, call them Jews, and dilute the identity of the community. They should reject government funding, or emigrate, or should long since have emigrated, 1290 and all that. I mean, really, it’s a simple question once you take the Jew out of the Galut.
It’s a bit backwards, you have an established Church, a fully-developed millet system, and 21st century human-rights balderdash that won’t let the minority religious millet determine its actual membership. All the disadvantages of the Ottoman Empire and none of the advantages of France in 1905, wrapped up in the Union Jack.
I understand how this does appear to the Orthodox community to be the government stepping onto faith matters – I should have addressed that in my comment, you’re right, but since I’m not Jewish I’m very hesitant to speculate as to how things appear on that side of the debate (very interested to read about it in the comments here, though).
I’ll be very interested to see how the Supreme Court rules on this. To a certain extent I think Lord Sacks is right when he says that the Court of Appeals has “declared [Orthodox] Judaism racist”, at least in the sense that any test of “who are your parents” is legally a test of ethnicity and those are banned. I’m just not sure that the ruling is incorrect.
Another problem complicating the issue is that the government embraced faith schools so strongly because they believed that faith schools were better, and thus they should be supported with taxpayer funds to improve the country’s education. Given that, they have to be especially vigilant about problems of inclusiveness in those schools.
Are you implying that only Orthodox feel this way?
As a Reform Jew, I have always thought that this was fairly universal. You’re either born to a Jewish mother or you convert. Obviously Reform Jews allow “reformed conversion” which the Orthodox would not accept as especially valid, but I have never experienced them as ignoring the matrilineal descent of Judaism.
Sailorman, Maybe I’m wrong or maybe things have changed–it’s beena long time since I have paid attention–but I know there was a time when some in the Reform community were challenging the principle of matrilineal descent. And I know that there are others who do as well. Adrienne Rich has a really fine essay about this, and I seem to remember something coming out of the gay Jewish community. In general, though, you’re right: mainstream tradition adheres really strongly to the principle of matrilineal descent.
Sailorman, the official position of the Reform and Reconstructionist movements is that a child with one Jewish parent who is raised Jewish is Jewish, regardless of which parent is Jewish.
Here’s the Reform movement’s resolution on the status of the children of mixed marriages from 1983.
SeanH,
If this wasn’t clear from Richard’s post, the Orthodox believe that Jews have Jewish souls. That soul is transmitted from the mother and cannot be transmitted by the father. (Converts receive a Jewish soul during their conversion. Except, apparently, non Orthodox converts. Or something.) That’s why “who your parents are” IS a matter of faith. As much as I disagree with the Orthodox position, I don’t think it is racist. It doesn’t revolve around purity. Someone who is half-Jewish ethnically can be 100 percent Jewish halachically – if their Jewish parent is their mother or if their mother is a convert. Absolutely, the court is taking a Christian standard for defining faith and saying that because the Jewish school doesn’t meet it, it’s not actually a standard of faith.
My lack of sympathy for the school here mostly comes from the fact that
1) If they wanted to control their admissions, they could do what Jewish day schools in the U.S. do and not take government funds.
2) Given that they do take government funds, if they wanted to keep secular (which is, in reality, Christian) courts out of Jewish business, they could have resolved this within the community. Accepting non-Orthodox converts as Jewish doesn’t strike me as a greater departure than accepting non-Orthodox weddings as valid or non-Orthodox circumcisions as valid. It would be a much less significant change than being asked to take someone whose mother didn’t convert, and it would be a miniscule change compared to measuring practice, which is what they’ll have to do now.
I had no idea. Having been raised in a Conservative congregation, I never heard mention of a soul and had assumed that the concept of a soul (and life after death) wasn’t really part of Judaism. I’ve never heard my Orthodox relatives mention the soul, either. There’s always something new to learn.
I really don’t mean to present myself as some expert on Orthodox Jewish thought. I’m not at all. But I hang out a bit in the J-blogosphere, and in threads that are either about or drift into “who is a Jew?” territory, you see that Jewish soul talk a lot, especially from the Chabad types (see Richard’s long blockquote above). I’d suspect that the more mystically inclined among us tend to talk about that stuff more, rather than it being a strictly Orthodox, non-Orthodox division.
I think this is a fairly good summary of the history of belief in soul in Judaism. The first and last paragraphs seem particularly relevant to this discussion of the soul.
Thanks, Chingona.
And wow, do I feel out of the loop. Heh.
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Thanks to everyone here for very informative posts. There’s also great stuff at Dear Diaspora on this.
I think this is another reason that publicly funded faith schools don’t work. Our laws on racial and religious discrimination just can’t be squared with the inherently discriminatory nature of faith schools.
Eurosabra, does dina de-malkhuta dina (=”the law of the kingdom is the law” and used to explain why Jews might follow the laws of the places they lived when those laws didn’t contradict halakha too terribly) apply to family law or conversion? I study the middle ages, and while it was applied to questions of taxation and jurisdiction pretty regularly then, I don’t think it was ever held to apply to marriage or inheritance. So, for instance, the ruler where you lived had the right to tax you, even though there was no halakhic basis for the tax. And s/he had the right to say that your contracts would be adjudicated in his courts, if s/he so chose. How would one make the case that batei din would be required to accept converts the ruler defined, though?
It’s a result of a few never-before-seen phenomena, such as the fact that people now want to join a minority Jewish community in a European state with an established church, that Judaism has a “Liberal” conversion option and matrilineal descent, and it places Halachic authority in an impossible quandary, because the State has never determined “Who is a Jew?” outside Israel, except for purposes of oppression. The school needs to refuse state funds at any cost, a penalty Muslims do not need to pay, because a Muslim student in an analogous situation (non-Muslim father, disputed conversion, yet claiming to be a Muslim and seeking admission) would be refused and the state forced to recognize that refusal. The State’s claim of paramountcy is only acceptable to UK citizens because this is a conflict with Halacha and not Sharia, and the people whose religious law is being trashed are white-British-born-identified European Jews, not foreign-born Muslims.
The proper Halachic answer is that HM’s Govt. does not have standing to determine this question, as in every other European country with an established church. Again, a side effect of the Jews being simultaneously a hyper-Western legalized people and a minority religious millet. Should you think this a bit creepy, remember that “Statut personnel mosaïque” was French law until 1962 in the Sahara, and that Sahrawi Jews became French ex gratia, with no legal basis for their claims of French citizenship except their impending statelessness.
1) Richard’s article about the “Jewish soul” is quoted from Chabad – a hassidic sect that has always stressed Kabbalah, and has recently veered into extreme messianism.
Please do not take this as mainstream Orthodox opinion. It’s worth noting that Judaism does not have any problem with conversion – the convert retains no lingering “gentile” metaphysical status.
2) Orthodox Judaism’s problem with Reform conversion is very simple and practical: conversion means accepting the Torah as G0d-given, and taking its commandments upon oneself in that spirit.
Reform Judaism certainly does not require or enforce that view of the Torah, or that sense of obligation – indeed many Reform Jews view their Judaism as “ethnic” or “cultural” rather than religious, to use the terms of this post.
So they obviously don’t require Orthodox-type covenantal commitment of their converts.
Liberal Jews love to harp on Orthodox “intolerance” – but from the traditional Jewish perspective, the main features of Judaism are obscured or missing in Reform Judaism and Reform conversions. You may not agree with it, but it’s a valid difference of opinion.
Ben-David:
This is true and I should have said so in my post. However, I do want to say that I heard talk very similar to this about the Jewish soul when I was in a non-Chabad, orthodox yeshiva during my high school years. I am not trying to start an argument that the view in the quote from Chabad is mainstream, just that some of the ideas in that quote are out there.
Interesting article in the Forward about this case.
Apparently, two years before Boy M was denied admission, the children of two Orthodox converts were denied admission to the school. One of those families signed on as an “interested party” to the lawsuit that led to this ruling.
Chingona,
Thanks for post #31. It’s very sad, this kind of narrow fear based decision making. Where is the loving kindness, the proscription to never embarrass (much less shame) a fellow human being? If I can mix cultural references for a moment, it seems the hubris of the rabbi and beit din is leading to their downfall and that of the school that they thought they were protecting.