{"id":147,"date":"2009-07-03T19:03:13","date_gmt":"2009-07-03T19:03:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/kingdomofpriests\/2009\/07\/what-jewish-mission.html"},"modified":"2009-07-03T19:03:13","modified_gmt":"2009-07-03T19:03:13","slug":"what-jewish-mission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/kingdomofpriests\/2009\/07\/what-jewish-mission.html","title":{"rendered":"What Jewish Mission?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A remarkable <a href=\"http:\/\/jta.org\/news\/article\/2009\/06\/15\/1005892\/op-ed-dont-fear-god-torah-and-judaism\">opinion piece by Joel Alperson<\/a> and carried by JTA includes this observation:<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<blockquote class=\"webkit-indent-blockquote\"><p>I&#8217;ve collected the mission statements of the largest 17 Jewish federations in North America, and not one mentions &#8220;God,&#8221; &#8220;Torah&#8221; or &#8220;Judaism.&#8221; Nor do the mission statements of the B&#8217;nai B&#8217;rith Youth Organization, Hillel, the National Council of Jewish Women, The Wexner Heritage Foundation, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, Hadassah and the Jewish National Fund. Of all the organizations I looked into, only United Jewish Communities mentions but one of the three words, Torah, in its mission statement.<\/p>\n<p>Some surely will be quick to say that the above organizations were not created to convey religious concepts. That is precisely my point: How can we say these organizations are Jewish and at the same time don&#8217;t need to mention God, Torah or Judaism?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>This fits with everything I know about Jewish communal leadership but the results of Alperson&#8217;s having sifted through all those mission statements &#8212; and found just one lonely reference to God, Torah, or Judaism! &#8212; still represents a startling piece of information, reflecting a massive desertion from the very purpose of Jewish existence.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Thanks to <a href=\"http:\/\/weblogs.baltimoresun.com\/news\/faith\/2009\/07\/guest_post_fear_of_gds_name.html\">Rabbi Yaakov Menken<\/a> for noting this on a <span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"font-style: italic\">Baltimore Sun<\/span> blog.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A remarkable opinion piece by Joel Alperson and carried by JTA includes this observation: I&#8217;ve collected the mission statements of the largest 17 Jewish federations in North America, and not one mentions &#8220;God,&#8221; &#8220;Torah&#8221; or &#8220;Judaism.&#8221; Nor do the mission statements of the B&#8217;nai B&#8217;rith Youth Organization, Hillel, the National Council of Jewish Women, The&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":72,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jewish-mission"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>What Jewish Mission? - Kingdom of Priests<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/kingdomofpriests\/2009\/07\/what-jewish-mission.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What Jewish Mission? - Kingdom of Priests\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A remarkable opinion piece by Joel Alperson and carried by JTA includes this observation: I&#8217;ve collected the mission statements of the largest 17 Jewish federations in North America, and not one mentions &#8220;God,&#8221; &#8220;Torah&#8221; or &#8220;Judaism.&#8221; Nor do the mission statements of the B&#8217;nai B&#8217;rith Youth Organization, Hillel, the National Council of Jewish Women, The&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/kingdomofpriests\/2009\/07\/what-jewish-mission.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Kingdom of Priests\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2009-07-03T19:03:13+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"David Klinghoffer\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"What Jewish Mission? - Kingdom of Priests","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/kingdomofpriests\/2009\/07\/what-jewish-mission.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"What Jewish Mission? - Kingdom of Priests","og_description":"A remarkable opinion piece by Joel Alperson and carried by JTA includes this observation: I&#8217;ve collected the mission statements of the largest 17 Jewish federations in North America, and not one mentions &#8220;God,&#8221; &#8220;Torah&#8221; or &#8220;Judaism.&#8221; Nor do the mission statements of the B&#8217;nai B&#8217;rith Youth Organization, Hillel, the National Council of Jewish Women, The&hellip;","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/kingdomofpriests\/2009\/07\/what-jewish-mission.html","og_site_name":"Kingdom of Priests","article_published_time":"2009-07-03T19:03:13+00:00","author":"David Klinghoffer","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/kingdomofpriests\/2009\/07\/what-jewish-mission.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/kingdomofpriests\/2009\/07\/what-jewish-mission.html","name":"What Jewish Mission? 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His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the Jewish Forward. A California native, he currently lives on Mercer Island, Washington, with his wife and five children.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/kingdomofpriests\/author\/dklinghoffer"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/kingdomofpriests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/kingdomofpriests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/kingdomofpriests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/kingdomofpriests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/72"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/kingdomofpriests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/kingdomofpriests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/kingdomofpriests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/kingdomofpriests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/kingdomofpriests\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}