CRISES OF FAITH

In the Sunday NY TImes, Laurie Goodstein has a particularly insipid article on a "planetary alignment" of three world religions simultaneously racked by crisis.

Here are the three crises she decides to link together: (1) the sexual abuse scandal and cover-up in the Catholic Church, (2) support for mass murder in certain schools of Islam; and (3) the recent rise of anti-Semetism in the Arab world and Europe. One of these crises is not like the other.

The sexual abuse scandal goes right to the heart of the Catholic doctrines of priestly celibacy and clerical hiarchy. The rise of Islamic terror raises serious questions for Muslims about how the Islamic holy sources should be understood in the modern era, and the ease at which radical Islamism has co-opted the tradition. Both faith communities need to undergo serious soul-searching (although this is far more critical for contemporary Islam). No such soul-searching is required for Jewish believers in the wake of the current spike in anti-Semetism. If anyone needs to be doing the soul-searching, it is those that hate us. At the most, the rise in global Jew-hating poses a crisis for Jews. It does not pose one at all for Judaism.