[Avodah] YIDDISHKEIT WITHOUT IDEOLOGY: A LETTER TO My SON

Prof. Levine via Avodah avodah at lists.aishdas.org
Sun Apr 26 15:02:18 PDT 2015


 From 
http://traditionarchive.org/news/originals/Volume%2036/No.%202/Yiddishkeit%20Without.pdf

Let me be absolutely clear: where the demands of halacha are unambiguous,
you must submit to them. But how does one navigate between
much less well-defined traditional attitudes and strong personal inclinations?
When I was your age I didn't know the answer-I still don't-but
one proposition that seemed self-evident to me at the time was that it
was essential to be consistent. In other words, I felt that I had to some-
how make sure that the way I defined Yiddishkeit and the way I defined
my commitments given my own inclinations would be perfectly aligned.
I'm now convinced that that commitment to consistency was utter-
ly wrong-headed and is the key to all that is wrong with institutional
Yiddishkeit. I shouldn't have been defining either Yiddishkeit or my
commitments at al. To do so is to reduce Yiddishkeit to ideology which
is exactly what it is not.

See the above UL for more.  YL

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