Conservative Jews on gay issues; Jewish resistance to intermarriage; and religious groups’ sta

In Monday’s RNS report Holly Lebowitz Rossi reports on the Conservative Jewish stance on gay issues: When it comes to the questions of whether to ordain gay and lesbian rabbis and perform same-sex commitment ceremonies, Reform and Orthodox Jews know where their movements stand. Simply put, Reform Jews do both, Orthodox Jews do neither. The […]

In Monday’s RNS report Holly Lebowitz Rossi reports on the Conservative Jewish stance on gay issues: When it comes to the questions of whether to ordain gay and lesbian rabbis and perform same-sex commitment ceremonies, Reform and Orthodox Jews know where their movements stand. Simply put, Reform Jews do both, Orthodox Jews do neither. The Conservative movement is not as easy to categorize. On paper, the movement forbids both the ordination of homosexual rabbis and the blessing of homosexual unions. But a years-long debate among Conservative legal scholars is coming to a head, making stark the movement’s ideological struggle between preserving traditional Jewish legal precedent and embracing modern morality-and raising questions about what the future of this movement might look like. It is a controversial moment, but not one that threatens the movement’s ultimate survival. After all, the very foundation of Conservative Judaism is this middle ground, murky as it may be, between traditional Jewish legal authority and contemporary moral values.

Jeff Diamant reports that Jewish resistance to intermarriage may be fading: For decades, Jews marrying outside the faith have been sermon fodder for Conservative rabbis, who have lambasted intermarriage as the bane of the American Jewish existence. The rabbis have feared that with intermarriage rates nearing 50 percent-and, more critically, with only a third of intermarried couples raising their children to be Jewish-the American Jewish population, estimated at 5.2 million, will dwindle to insignificance in a few generations. But that attitude toward intermarriage has come with a price that increasing numbers of Conservative rabbis are acknowledging: the alienation of intermarried couples from Judaism, at least from its Conservative movement. Now, a document circulating through Conservative temples, the religious middle ground for American Jewry, is calling for a warmer embrace of interfaith couples, both to encourage conversions and to improve the odds the couples will raise Jewish children.

Piet Levy attended the Darfur rally on the National Mall yesterday and reports on how religious groups are continuing to pressure Sudan: More than 10,000 people, including a massive outpouring of Jews, flooded the National Mall on Sunday (April 30) crying out for an end to the genocide plaguing Darfur in western Sudan. But within a few hours, the masses dissipated. And so now the question is, what happens next? Rabbi David Saperstein has an answer. The director of Washington’s Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism announced from the rally’s platform that a new coalition, with support from the Southern Baptist Convention and the National Council of Churches, will visit every embassy and consulate of NATO and the African Union, as well as Russia and China, over the next month, urging for political pressure to bring the crisis to an end. “It staggers the moral imagination to try and understand how people can let the people of Darfur starve to death,” Saperstein said.


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