We Should Be Welcoming All Jews and Bringing Them Closer — Despite Religious Differences

Reading from a Torah scroll in accordance with Sephardi tradition. Photo: Sagie Maoz via Wikimedia Commons.

We Jews have always liked to argue about religion, and everything from kashrut to conversion. Often these differences are far from polite. In every branch and variation of Judaism (as elsewhere), there are sects and extremes, iconoclasts and revisionists, insiders and outsiders. It pains me that we seem so incapable of overcoming such differences and conflicts amicably.

There is an axiom in religious life (all religions...