Wow. a life without finding someone to exclude from something must be a life not worth living. Is this what yiddishkeit in our time has come to? Let’s figure out who we can’t associate with, who we can’t listen to, who we can’t eat by, who’s children we can’t let into our schools, who we must shun or banish from our kehilos? Its all we have to think about and worry about.
I’m going to concentrate on making my own tfilos more meaningful, my kavonoh more perfect, and I’ll do my best to bring someone who doesn’t usually daven at all in to experience something Jewish.
You know what happens to a yiddishkeit with all the life, the meschlichkeit, the bringing in of brothers and sisters sucked out of it? It withers and dies like a dried husk of corn. It blows away in the wind. It shrivels and decomposes. My yiddishkeit has room for those who are less than perfect.
Do you know who the first one to claim that observing Torah was all or nothing was? It was the meshumad Paul of Tarsus, who more than anyone else made Christianity into what it has become, and because of whom millions of Jews died. Those who seek to exclude exclude exclude based on this or that imperfection of observance are following the same road.