A treasure trove
Your award-winning weekly is overlooking and neglecting our Jewish community in that little space used to educate your readers about our collective heritage. Our Jewish religion is a treasure trove of delight based on our 4,000-year history. At least one full page of each issue should be dedicated to explain and demonstrate our achievements in architecture, art, culture, ethics, history, humor, languages, law, literature, and music.
The religious community believes they are maintaining their number and growing, but there are too many Jews who have lost touch with “Hashem.” They no longer “think” about Judaism. This is nota new phenomenon. The Greek philosopher Epicurus, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo, and others stoked the fires of disbelief.
Due to the recent exponential flowering of science, many Jews are no longer believers in a “God” who is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and full of compassion.
Furthermore, the enormous loss of life due to the machinations of Adolf Hitler, which educated estimates put at 50 million souls, of which six million were Jews, including one million Jewish children whose only “crime” was that a parent or grandparent was Jewish, has depleted our numbers. In years past we were able to sustain our numbers during numerous auto-de-fes, blood libels, expulsions, lynchings, pogroms, and quotas. Is it not accidental that surveys now show that anywhere from 10 to 50 percent of American and Israeli Jews no longer believe in “Hashem.”
When I ask my relatives, friends, and Jewish neighbors, I learn their children have often married non-Jews. As a result, their grandchildren are being raised with very little or no knowledge of their heritage. A Jewish newspaper should do more than just report the news. Your mission should also be to demonstrate and to teach the uninformed about the beauty of Judaism which is our/their “Yerusha.”
Ed Brody
Author, What is Ignostic Judaism?
Livingston
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