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Correspondence

March-April 1972

Exchange with R. Yitz Greenberg about Drafting Statement on Intermarriage for CCAR (1972)

Combating Assimilation

1. R. Schaalman to R. Yitz Greenberg

1. R. Schaalman to R. Yitz Greenberg (March 31, 1972)

1. R. Schaalman to R. Yitz Greenberg (March 31, 1972)

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Dear Rabbi Lamm: I read with great interest your letter to Noah Feldman (Jewish Daily Forward, August 2, 2007) admonishing him to fix the damage you suggest he inflicted on the Jewish community and on a certain Daniel of your acquaintance, in particular. I hope he will do as you did, write back, and make his remarks public. This is an issue of tremendous importance to Americans and to all people living in a modern pluralist democracy.Your differences line you up in the current culture war between those inclined toward one or another authoritarian tradition on the one hand, and those inspired by Enlightenment notions of universal human equality on the other. You may prefer to keep this Jewish, but as long as you are in America, the larger culture, I believe, will frame the questions and invite outside participation as well.Pope Benedict XVI’s recent call for Roman Catholics to renew their conviction that access to heaven is limited to his narrow gate will be rejected by most of us, Roman Catholics included, for the parochial view it is, and his prayers for your conversion, now that his Church has lost its teeth, will come across more as pitiful than insulting. How can your claim to have the keys to a narrow Jewish truth help but come across similarly?Just as you suggested Noah Feldman benefits from the orthodoxy he criticizes, you benefit, unless you close yourself off from it, from the fresh air of the Enlightenment. The freedom from Roman Catholic oppression which once created considerable misery for Jews and other non-Catholics is the same freedom Professor Feldman has sought and found from ways of being Jewish that shut out an embrace of the benefits of experience. He is not rejecting Judaism; he is exemplifying what makes it universal.Defining your tradition as Jewish Orthodox, but not as simultaneously Jeffersonian and Spinozan, is analogous to embracing your father’s wisdom and denying your mother’s. What a shame you should throw in your lot with authoritaria…
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Dear Rabbi Lamm, Hello. About two weeks ago I returned from a trip to Japan, and by [redacted] request I am now writing you an account of the current situation. She had wanted to write you in the last three months, but she has been afraid of your reaction, or perhaps I should rather say [illegible] to face your reaction, and so she didn't write. During the first year after her return to Japan she observed all the מצות she had observed previously, but after about a year her will-power was no longer strong enough, and her observnce of certain מצות began to [illegible].
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