Judaism’s Universalist Side

Chaim Amalek writes: "In my many years of orthodox cheder (Noah, Amalek feels for you), I don’t recall even once being instructed on what it meant to be a "light unto the nations of the world".  And I asked, too:  "We are an example by studying the Torah" (by which they meant the books of the Talmud that other rabbis had written well over a thousand years after Mount Sinai).  The Judaism of the rabbinate turned its back on the rest of the world thousands of years ago, thereby ceding the field to Christianity and then Islam, each of which went on to great victories that a less tribal Judaism might well have won for itself – to its profound and enduring loss."