liv: In English: My fandom is text obsessed / In Hebrew: These are the words (words)
Liv ([personal profile] liv) wrote in [personal profile] 403 2009-07-19 03:44 pm (UTC)

You're not wrong that this can be a flaw with Reform's individualist approach. I think part of it is that it's reaction to a feeling that Orthodox Judaism constitutes a huge great heap of "someone made me do it". And actually if you observe Reform Jews, you see that it's not a matter of everybody doing exactly what they feel like, there are such things as community norms even if they're not stated as explicitly as in other denominations.

It's very possible indeed to say, what I find personally meaningful is to commit myself to doing repeated ritual actions every single day, even at times when I really don't feel like it. So you don't get a lot of people who say, oh, I'll keep kosher today cos I feel like it, but the next day they have a craving for bacon for breakfast so they don't keep kosher any more! It's more like, people make a personal decision that they are going to keep kosher (to whatever level) as a long-term thing, and then put up with missing out on what they want to or find convenient to eat on a day to day basis.

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