Are there Jewish antecedents or precedents for the rather extravagant notions/edicts we have designated Ascending Lineality, or for Paternal Descent, and the status of the Settled Sojourner?

      There is ample evidence for the Settled Sojourner in the biblical narrative; so many husbands and wives of prominent figures like Ruth, and Moses’ wife Zipporah, are good examples. Indeed, the Exodus experience was shared by Hebrews as well as non-Hebrews called the erev rav – the mixed multitude - who joined the people Israel as Settled Sojourners (or, given that their journey entailed four decades of wilderness wandering, “Unsettled Sojourners”). Jews say, “they are our ancestors no less than the ‘original’ Hebrews. We are their descendents just as we derive from the Hebrew core community returning to their homeland in Canaan.”

       There is also ample evidence for patriarchal descent in Scripture’s historical narratives related in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Torah.  Joseph, beloved son of Jacob, Rachel’s first-born, (the most unflawed of biblical heroes according to Allan Bloom) had two sons, Ephraim and Manassah, by his Egyptian wife, Asenath. Her grandmother was Potphera, a priest of On who worshipped the Egyptian sun–god Ra. Ephraim, founder of one of the most influential Jewish tribes in the northern Kingdom of Israel often referred to as the “House of Ephraim,” was the offspring of an unconverted non-Hebrew mother...

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            The point here bears repeating: while lineage, or identity as a Jew, was once transmitted only from father to child, then only from mother to child, in our time the Reform and Reconstructionist movements have ruled that, given other required conditions such as a Jewish upbringing, Jewish identity can be conferred by either parent. This ruling is without question a radical but logical innovation of great magnitude and consequence.

At first this change – recognizing (again, as in biblical times) paternal descent as establishing Jewish identity - was put in effect and practiced in Reform synagogues unofficially. Theological justifications were not thought necessary. For decades, Reform Rabbis and their congregations would simply ignore maternity or paternity issues altogether once a child was enrolled in a synagogue’s religious school and the family made clear its decision to raise exclusively Jewish children...

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  One of the most fundamental principles uniting virtually all Reform, Reconstructionist, and most Conservative congregations (that is, most American Jews) is that of egalitarianism.  Hence at a Reform synagogue it is taken for granted that its members would not join a Jewish congregation which was not gender neutral, one which falls short of being fully egalitarian.

 Reform, Reconstructionist and many Conservative congregations mean by this that no privileges, duties, ritual honors and positions of importance in the synagogue will be determined, affected, or influenced in any way, by gender. Men and women are equal in all respects.  As it has been stressed previously, by now the commitment and devotion to gender equality has become a 21st century axiom.

Prayer books for Jewish worship are gender neutral. Contemporary women have written new prayers for important milestones, events, and rites of passage that they alone experience: for the onset of menses and menopause, for giving birth as well as for infertility, miscarriages, abortions and still births, for surviving the trauma of rape, for becoming a mother in law and grandmother, and even for separation and divorce. Today Jews refer to God in feminine (for example, “Shechina,” translated as Presence, Providence) as well as in masculine terms. Women can become - and have become...

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A Jew maintains that no one can atone for a sin except for the sinner. The relevant Jewish viewpoint has been that you don't send another party to jail for someone else’s crime. Nor may another person stand in for or take upon him or herself the misdeeds and transgressions committed by someone else. That would not reflect the concept of justice, at the heart of a covenant. It is a purely Christian idea that we cannot realize our own atonement because we were conceived in original sin and, in a fallen world, are incapable of overcoming our sinful nature without a surrogate who is a Savior. 

The Jewish tradition teaches that a sin is a wrongful act not an inherited or intrinsic condition and that everyone is conceived morally neutral - born with a good urge and an evil urge – a yetzer tov and a yetzer ra. Consequently, a parent's job is to cultivate and train the good drive in a child to predominate. It is up to the children themselves, however, (as it is up to all of us) to conduct their lives according to their understanding of God’s will and to do so increasingly on their own as they grow. Most important, in Judaism sin is not original and you don’t come by it automatically ‑ you have to earn it! You start out with a blank slate, and what you write on it is your own composition for good or otherwise...

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Jews don't have a salvational message; they have a survival message to deliver. Christians talk truth and salvation. Jews talk culture and continuity. My own teacher Rabbi Henry Slonimsky taught that if you look carefully at the tradition you understand that God promised not that it would be easy but that the Jewish people would endure and persevere. The people would go on preserving and enhancing the Jewish way of life from generation to generation...

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