Family feeling. I argued in Covenant of Conversation, Kadochim, that Judaism is more than an ethnicity.

It's a call to holiness. In one sense, however, there is an important ethnic dimension to Judaism.

It's best captured in the 1980s joke about an advertising campaign in New York. Throughout the city, there were

giant posters with the slogan, you have a friend in the Chase Manhattan Bank. Underneath

one, an Israeli had scribbled words, but in Bank La Ume, you have Mishpacha. Jews are, and a conscious

of being a single extended family. This is particularly evident in this

week's parisher. Repeatedly, we read of social legislation couched in the language of family.

When you buy or sell to your neighbour, let no one wrong his brother. If your brother becomes impoverished and sells some

of his property, his near redeemer is to come to you and redeem what his brother sold. If your

brother is impoverished and indebted to you, you must support him. He must live with you like a foreign

resident. Don't take interest or profit from him, but fear your God and let your brother live with you like a foreign resident. Don't take interest or profit from him, but fear your God

and let your brother live with you. If your brother has become impoverished and is sold to you,

don't work him like a slave. Now, the phrase, your brother, in these verses, isn't meant literally.

At times it means your relative, but mostly it means your fellow Jew.

This is a distinctive way of thinking about society and our obligations to others. Jews aren't just

citizens of the same nation or adherence of the same faith. We are members of the same extended family.

We are biologically or electively children

of Abraham and Sarah. For the most part, we share the same history on the festivals. We relive

the same memories. We were forged in the same crucible of suffering. We are more than friends.

We are Mishpacha, Family. The concept of family is

absolutely fundamental to Judaism. Consider the book of Baratius, the terrorist starting point.

It's not primarily about theology, doctrine, dogma. It's about, it isn't a polemic against idolatry, it's about families, husbands and wives,

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