Day 52
Is Judaism Still Relevant Today?
Dedicated in memory of Daniel Rowe’s grandparents: Henry Pfeffer and Max and Hannah Rowe.
This question has been asked in almost every generation starting from the original exile from our land. In every generation since, Jews have been a small nation, more often than not with a weak voice and without a platform to promote their ideas further afield.
Yet, at the same time, their ideas have always been powerful, iconoclastic, and disproportionately influential, which caused many to write or agitate against them. And so they have been rejected, repeatedly, as belonging to some other era, with a presumption that the golden age of Jewish ideas lay in the past. The Roman historian Tacitus (Histories V (4–5)) objected to the Sab- bath as promoting idleness and was reviled by the notion that Jews kept alive all children. Indeed, in most pre-monotheistic societies, children were killed if they were disabled, unwanted, or simply for population control. No less a thinker than Aristotle (Politics, Book 7) wrote: “There must be a law that no maimed or imperfect children be raised, and to prevent excess of population some children must be exposed.”
