Young people need to feel needed. I remember how depressed I was when I could not find useful work, that was before I became a Rabbi. In this time of the Invisible Magic Friend’s holy virus, rabbis, archbishops and other usefully employed religious leaders, have called for jobs for young people.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11YwGMcIrmb0FcWxh5XSqPOEZZ_1FbZxD/view?usp=sharing
Platitude of the Day 
A rabbi on TftD when there isn’t a Big Jewish Holiday? A rare thing indeed. Rare also is the flavour of Judaism this rabbi represents. Never heard of it before and couldn’t quite ‘catch’ it from the pronunciation. Could anyone enlighten me?
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Me neither, but Masorti Judaism is interesting. They seem to be a halfway house, almost wilfully ambiguous, between Orthodox and Reform. As an example, this was from their 2006 declaration on homosexuality:
In other words, they are the Church of England of Judaism. Like BBC commentator Alan Gibson’s comment on the New Zealand cricketer Bob Cunis, they are neither one thing nor the other.
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From wikipedia: “Conservative Judaism (known as Masorti Judaism outside North America) is a Jewish religious movement that regards the authority of Jewish law and tradition as emanating primarily from the assent of the people and the community through the generations, more than from divine revelation. It therefore views Jewish law, or halakha, as both binding and subject to historical development.”
Erm… it can’t be BOTH binding AND subject to historical development. Yet people embracing such nonsense get to give us a ‘thought’ to start our day. Pathetic.
I suppose we should be grateful that at least the BBC forewarned us of his religious status. They didn’t chicken-out and pretend he was there because he is “a writer” [Rhid, I’m looking at you!]
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Although Jonathan mentions a couple of religious people, the thoughts he has about helping young people could hardly be said to come only from a religious perspective. Having my own daughter looking for her ‘dream’ job at the moment it was definitely a positive thought for the current times, but this fails our Greenberg challenge.
On his blog he recently talked about how “ sacred energy flows through the world” which gives you an idea of the waffly religious views he holds.
I don’t know anything about the different sects within Judaism but I would like to hear a TFTD given on why god couldn’t get his message over succinctly enough for there only to be one religion in his created world. Has any TFTDer ever done that?
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Couldn’t grasp the puppy bit at all – “our puppy’s a happy little creature with a sense of adventure and future – but unfortunately young people aren’t like puppies.” Was he paid for junk like that?
Apparently it needs pointing out to us atheists that young people need a lot of help and support at present; and we should follow the lead of all religious people who are falling over themselves in their desperation to get involved.
What I heard was that he was talking to people from “across the faiths.” So, faith has a plural; I suppose that was only to be expected. Anyone can have faith; just make sure it’s not the wrong sort of faith.
I was glad that Gordon’s Brown’s got a mench.
What caught my ear
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Gordon Brown is a mensch 🙂
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I never really understood why Gordon Brown was so unpopular as a PM. He had the misfortune to be in charge when the banking crisis hit (and handled it competently I thought), but the press seemed to have it in for him long before that. His gov was just an extension of Blair’s. The Blair gov policies had largely been Browns’. The only thing Brown lacked was the phoney smile.
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This is very off-topic, but the world seems to be going to hell in a handcart sometimes, and anything that can offer some optimism about the future has to be worth sharing. Two rival candidates for office in Utah have produced this advert. That it is necessary to do something like this, to suggest that politicians act like grown-ups, is a poor reflection of our times, but thank god (*) they had the balls to stand up and do it.
(*) Osiris, obviously.
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Thanks Steve. Much needed.
[What do you mean Osiris? The Great God Glycon surely? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvIUKBDHBp8
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‘Purposeful work’ has been part of the human condition since long before the first books of the ‘Hebrew scriptures’ were made up (which could have been as late as 270BCE). Does Welby think that what he says carries any more weight just because he can relate it to Genesis?
@Steve/Graham: since those candidates are from Utah, the odds are that at least one of them’s a Mormon, so maybe we should give a hat-tip to Moroni.
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At masorti.org.uk, our Jonathan says:- “I believe in the importance of doubt, but I’ve never doubted wanting to be a Masorti Jew.” and “There is no other way that I can struggle to make all this a reality than through Masorti Judaism.”
He’s either truly infatuated with his group or he enjoys re-wording cheesy adverts for motivational courses.
Relating this to his TFTD, he understands that young’uns from all sorts backgrounds will be helped in all sorts of Masorti-free ways yet he’d say they should seek his version of IMF-ism which has only ever appealed to a tiny percentage of humankind. That alone should give him doubt.
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