WITHOUT MILAH AND TEVILAH
humanity; conversion an affirmation of the human. There should be no barriers between Jews and Christian (in his address at the Pittsburgh Conference, Kaufman Kohler said"Christian " when he is referring to non-Jews ). No one addressed the question why anyone would want to be Jewish when it adds nothing and was only a confirmation of the human.
It may be better to read all this with the sense of irony that Reinhold Niebuhr has taught us as we look at all expressions of American messianic hopes. The Jewish hope is the universal hope, the Jew is every man . But Jews keep on being Jews and the world remains the world. As H. Richard Niebuhr has written of Protestant liberalism:"...the idea of the coming kingdom was robbed of its dialectical element. It was all fulfillment of promise without judgment. It was thought to be growing out of the present so that no great crisis needed to intervene between the order of grace and order of glory. In its one-sided view of progress...this liberalism was indeed naively optimistic."
Notes 1. Mary Douglas , Natural Symbols, introduction to the New Edition , pp. xix ff. 2. Mary Douglas , Ibid., p. 7. 3. Mary Douglas , Ibid., p. 65.
5. Protokolle...,p. 10. The translation is from Central Conference of American Rabbis Yearbook 1891, p. 120.
6. Einhorn’s Prayer Book Olat Tamid contains a ritual statement of belief for proselytes; the
only prayer book to do so. 7. His question is printed in B. Felsenthal , Zur Proselytenfrage im Judenthum, Chicago 1878, pp. 7ff.
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