Jewish Law and Tradition
| Part of a series on |
| Progressive Judaism |
|---|
|
| Regions |
|
| Beliefs and practices |
|
Reconstructionist Judaism holds that contemporary Western secular morality has precedence over Jewish law and theology. It does not ask that its adherents hold to any particular beliefs, nor does it ask that Jewish law be accepted as normative. Unlike classical Reform Judaism, Reconstructionism holds that a person's default position should be to incorporate Jewish laws and tradition into their lives, unless they have a specific reason to do otherwise. The most important distinction between Reconstructionist Judaism and traditional Judaism is that Reconstructionism concludes that all of halakha should be categorized as "folkways", and not as religious law.
Reconstructionism promotes many traditional Jewish practices. Thus, mitzvot (commandments) have been replaced with "folkways", non-binding customs that can be democratically accepted or rejected by the congregations. Folkways that are promoted include keeping Hebrew in the prayer service, studying Torah, daily prayer, wearing kipot (yarmulkas), tallitot and tefillin during prayer, and observance of the Jewish holidays.
Read more about this topic: Reconstructionist Judaism
Famous quotes containing the words jewish, law and/or tradition:
“What was lost in the European cataclysm was not only the Jewish past—the whole life of a civilization—but also a major share of the Jewish future.... [ellipsis in source] It was not only the intellect of a people in its prime that was excised, but the treasure of a people in its potential.”
—Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928)
“What, then, is the true Gospel of consistency? Change. Who is the really consistent man? The man who changes. Since change is the law of his being, he cannot be consistent if he stick in a rut.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The words of the Constitution ... are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.”
—Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965)