Reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield Mark Oppenheimer, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture (New Haven: Yale University Press): 273 pp., $30.00. When the press exposed Richard Nixon for belonging to a New Jersey country club that lacked any black or Jewish members, a spokesman explained that the former president would
By Neil Gillman End of life decision-making is complicated. Clinical, economic, psychological, and social values are often in conflict; physicians and nurses, chaplains, social-workers and ethicists, the patient and the patient’s family don’t always agree; and time is short. The process is tension-filled. Appropriately so, for what is at stake is a human life. Does
These ten sensibilities help us understand how our Jewishness defines or contributes to the way we live.
Adherence to halakhah is not the issue; familiarity with the relevant categories and their sources in classical texts is.
The idea that people are made in the image of God—tzelem Elokim—is both anthropological and theological, asserting some correspondence between the human and the Divine.
The term “sensibility” highlights some of the compelling strengths of a liberal community; it also points to that community’s most unstable, intrinsic weaknesses.
1. How would you characterize and chart a list of ten sensibilities to guide Jewish life today?
2. In a society ever more connected to popular culture, how do we transmit core Jewish values to our children?
3. How have Jewish values influenced contemporary American ethics, and how much have contemporary American cultural values informed Jewish sensibilities?