By Rabbi Fred Morgan
Recently, we at Temple Beth Israel celebrated the bat-mitzvah of a girl who attends Leibler-Yavneh College, a religious Zionist school. Her bat-mitzvah was a living example of what has come to be known as ‘pluralism’ within the Jewish world.
Pluralism is one of three approaches to the religious reality of diversity. It is a self-evident fact that the Jewish world today is a world of diversity. Pluralism is one such response: it claims that “there is more than one way to be Jewish.” The other two responses are the exclusivist and inclusivist approaches. Both claim there is only one way to be Jewish - the halakhic way - but differ in their attitude toward Jews who do not subscribe to that way of being Jewish.
