How invested in contemporary cultural and political arguments should synagogues get?

Well, no one would want to be part of a ritualistic community that has no wisdom to instruct the dilemmas of our public life.

And there are clearly some areas of foreign and

domestic policy that directly affect the Jewish community. So it's natural that on those areas in

particular, Jewish leadership should take their arguments into the public square. There's never been a time

in all of Jewish history that religion and politics were entirely separate. Jewish holidays like Hanukkah and

Pesach, Purim, these are kinds of religious responses to politics, after all. And I think more than

that, all political regimes, including the Democratic Republic of the United States, assumes some

vision of the common good and the good life of a citizen, and Judaism too has a vision of the common

good and the vision of a

full human life. So to think about political affairs and to think about Jewish law and Jewish life

is to think about these concerns that both traditions share, how to structure a just and decent

society that cares for the weak and allows members of that society to flourish. There are good and important reasons for Jewish communities to take an active interest in public life,

especially of the societies in which they live.

But there are real trade-offs to weigh here.

And in today's discussion, I sit down with a reform rabbi worried about the costs

that the American Jewish denominations outside of orthodoxy

are paying because of their investment in the politics of liberalism.

Welcome to the Tikva podcast on Great Jewish Essays and Ideas. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver.

My guest today is Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, author of many books, including most recently the JPS Binay Mitzvah Torah Commentary,

and the spiritual leader of Temple Sollel in Hollywood, Florida. Rabbi Salkin wrote an essay in

commentary magazine called Judaism Beyond Slogans, which asks, not so much about the political

...