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Peoplehood and Justice

Nessa Rapoport: Instead of inviting the entire Jewish people to the feast, we have cultivated a legacy of disparagement, vilifying this or that faction of our minuscule people until no one is deemed authentic enough to be at the table.
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Neil Gillman: While Abraham Joshua Heschel went far beyond his Jewish concerns to engage in a broadly humanitarian, universal social and political agenda, Kaplan devoted the last decades of his career to developing our only indigenous American Jewish religious movement.
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Mara Benjamin, Steven M. Cohen, Jack Wertheimer: Three distinguished Jewish thinkers exchange a series of letters about how next-gen Jews are viewing peoplehood and the tension between individuality and collective responsibility, selfhood, hybridity, and Jewish identity.
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Alan Hoffmann Interview: Sh’ma Editor Susan Berrin interviews Alan Hoffmann, Director of education at the Jewish Agency for Israel, about how central, or not, peoplehood is to Jews and Judaism, and the values and limitations of Jewish peoplehood.
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Ezra Kopelowitz: While Alan Hoffmann conceptualizes Jewish peoplehood as a belief system, Jews cannot move between the peoplehood belief system and the mitzvot of everyday life in a clean way… As people go about their daily lives they mix and match their “identities” in a fluid and ever-changing way, pulling as needed from various ideologies and rarely over-committing to anyone of them.  Research shows that when a person lives a rich Jewish life, he or she will feel part of the Jewish people.  There is no need to define and market peoplehood and expect Jews to carry out a certain set of mitzvot.
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Are there core values that underlie the notion of peoplehood and what are those values?

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Quote of the Month

"The notion of a Jewish 'people' - something larger than individual existence - gives many Jews a sense of connectedness to a bigger something, which is especially important as collective bonds weaken in the general society and also amongst Jews. But a danger lurks if this becomes a diluted lowest-common-denominator concept, not nearly as powerful or robust as Jewish religious identity or national identity."

Alan Hoffmann

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Sh'ma serves as a gathering place for independent dialogue -- rich conversation of differing positions presented in an honest, respectful, and sacred conversation. Our readers, like our authors, are intellectually sharp, seeking, concerned and literate. Sh'ma is a publication of Jewish Family & Life! JFLMedia.com