Proud to be secular - and Jewish

Upon reading Rabbi Eric Yoffie’s needlessly polarizing “The Self-Delusions of Secular Jews,” I found myself incredulously checking the byline. This must be, I thought, some sort of mistake. Why would the esteemed and estimable past president of the Union for Reform Judaism upbraid his secular brethren (and in the liberal Huffington Post, no less)?

“An ultra-Orthodox rabbi must have written that,” I concluded, in an effort to ease cognitive dissonance. We would, after all, expect someone opposed to the liberal value of personal autonomy to declare: “’Secular’ and ‘cultural’ Jews may think they can wring the holiness out of their Jewish identity and practice, but they cannot.”

Maybe this was a scene out of Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock. A devious double, a pseudo-Eric Yoffie is astir on the Internet. The position he espouses in his article would be as good for Reform Judaism’s longevity as Moishe Pipik’s “Diasporism” (i.e., a doctrine demanding the immediate return of all Ashkenazi Jews to their ancestral European homelands) would be for Israel’s. But this was no mistake. This was, in fact, Rabbi Yoffie. Our Rabbi Yoffie.

Now, secular Jews - whether you define them as atheists, agnostics, skeptics, or believing moderates who buck Tradition - are accustomed to being anathematized. They are blamed for everything from Intermarriage Culminating In The End Of The Jewish People, to the Messiah’s tarrying. Rabbi Yoffie’s strictures against them are not novel. It his prominence within the Reform movement, however, that makes his critique baffling.

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/proud-to-be-secular-and-jewish.premium-1.500792