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How to be a Jew … and a pragmatist

JL;DR SUMMARY Rabbi Marc Katz discusses the pragmatic decisions underlying rabbinic Judaism, focusing on Yohanan ben Zakkai's choice to prioritize establishing a school over saving the Temple after its destruction. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski.

  • At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself.
  • This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude.
  • Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from.
  • But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
  • And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.
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Tags

Jewish LawJewish IdentityZionismInterfaith MarriageRabbinic JudaismModern JudaismPragmatismTemple DestructionRabbi Marc KatzYohanan Ben Zakkai

Places mentioned

Jerusalem, Israel
"And while Rome was in the process of getting ready to invade Jerusalem, a rabbi whose name is Yohanan ben Zakkai snuck out of Jerusalem and ended up having an audience with the governor..."
Rome, Italy
"Someone walks in and says to him, guess what? Caesar's dead. You're the new leader of Rome."
Israel
"I'm demanding something of them. But what I am not doing is giving them, for example, a single-minded way of thinking about God. Because if I say, see this guy in the Bible, this character in the Bible called God, you must believe that thing, that's leading too far in front. And by the way, even if I believed that and felt like that the optimal way of seeing God was the God of the Bible, right, I still think I would meet the people where they were at and tell them to go on a journey and say to them, you know, if you're really going to take this seriously, you've got to read Jewish books and you've got to always have books on your nightstand and you've got to have conversations and you've got to join my classes and really push them hard on those things while at the same time understanding that I have to also be okay with them falling short sometimes and picking them back up and helping them to keep looking toward a destination rather than an end. Right."

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This podcast episode was indexed and curated by Cairo, JL;DR's web crawler.
Cairo Item ID 42976
Cairo Source ID 28
Retrieved 2025-01-30 05:30:33 UTC
Curated 2025-01-30 06:10:07 UTC