Haven’t lived in both worlds, I understand how you can get taken in with that lifestyle. But it shouldn’t mean that you be stuck in it for the rest of your life, If it no longers makes any sense to be so fanatical, drop it like a sack of old clothes.

They don’t own Judaism. They don’t own chessed.

Then you have this Puker Matisyahu, wit all his Ha-Shem talk, and look how he acts. What a shameful and arrogant travesty.

“The nice thing is that I currently attend a Conservative synagogue and a Reform Temple (ugh, who came up with “temple,” it sounds almost Protestant), and therefore do not get to experience these little incidents with crazed Ultra-Orthodox Jews.”

Wow. I guess I would have to try that, being that all my secular-Orthodox synagogues are rampant with fundamentalists who want to burn down shit.

Purim, thanks for your post, but sadly I have to say that Temple and especially the music in many of the services I’ve been to over the years, just seem so foreign after years of attending Orthodox and Conservative services. Hence my bias. It has nothing to do with history, it’s a purely personal thing.

“The Aaronic priesthood and the Mosaic sacrificial cult were preparatory steps to the real priesthood of the whole people, which began with the dispersion of the Jews, and to the sacrifices of sincere devotion and moral sanctification, which alone are pleasing and acceptable to the Most Holy. These institutions, preparatory to higher religiosity, were consigned to the past, once for all, with the destruction of the Second Temple, and only in this sense – as educational influences in the past – are they to be mentioned in our prayers.”

-Taken from “Judaism: A Very Short Introduction” part of the Oxford series.

Early Reform Jews believed that the Temple of old was no longer something relegated to just Jerusalem or any particular time. They purposely used this term to describe their congregations to emphasize this fact. “Berlin is the new Jerusalem” after all…