Jews are Jews. There’s only one Jewish religion. Unfortunately, there is little agreement on how to practice it. To give an example, we had a family dinner last night that included my wife and her two sisters. We got into an argument as to whether or not a Rabbi from Chabbad behaved improperly in refusing to attend a cermony at my kids Jewish day school, which is a conservative jewish day school, because there was mixed seating. This argument lasted about 30 minutes. And this was between two sisters who are both conservative Jews (although one sister’s husband attends Chabad).
There aren’t “sects” of Judaism?
There are, of course. But at the same time, you will often hear an orthodox jew say there is no such thing as a “conservative” or “orthodox” jew. THere is just a Jew. Of course, if we all believed in approaching Judaism the same way, we wouldn’t have different sects of Judaism.
Isn’t it true that today many Jews are more secular?
There are many secular Jews, yes. By that I mean they do not observe the mitzvot in the Torah, do not attend services, etc. What their belief is regarding God, I don’t presume to guess.
Kind of like our “Christmas/Easter”, “I’ll stop by when I wanna baptize my baby” Catholics.
yep. And don’t believe this is a recent thing for Judaism. I have no doubt there were plenty of secular Jews 2,000 years ago.Kind of like our “Christmas/Easter”, “I’ll stop by when I wanna baptize my baby” Catholics.
Well, there were the Essenes, the Pharisees, the Saudecees, back then, right?
Yes. But there were also Jews who didn’t learn and weren’t overly concerned with their religion.
Rather depends on what one means by the words ‘belief’ and ‘God’, I expect, there seems no denying that there seem to be rather great differences between the Jewish and Christian appreciations of ‘God’ - together with us being much more centered on ‘correctness’ of activity and Christians much more centered on ‘correctness’ of belief.On of the most interesting things I ever read was a Jewish Philosopher/Theologian arguing that beleif in God is not a requirment for a Jew to be loyal to the Torah
us being much more centered on ‘correctness’ of activity
Hm, shall I bow to your immense sagacity and understanding of the subject or just smile at your episodic ramblings, I wonder?
Maybe you could just address what I said. What is the evidence that Jews place more emphasis on right actions not right beliefs? Nobody does anything unless they first believe something about it. This is just another fable promoted to further distance Judaism from Christianity to try to make them appear to be mutually exclusive.