Imagine Jewish parents who believe Judaism teaches that homosexuality is incompatible with a God-directed life.  Then their child, whom they love and admire, tells them they’re gay.

Their child confronts their theology.

The person before them is no longer an abstraction called “homosexuality.” This is their child. Living in opinions that see no action is easy.The question is whether the category will determine what they see, or whether their child will force them to reconsider it.

Can they distinguish Judaism from an understanding of Judaism connected to their identity that questioning it feels like questioning God? Could fidelity require reconsidering what they believed fidelity demanded?

When belief and identity become inseparable, evidence that challenges a belief can feel like an attack on the self, community, or God. Here, we risk losing the ability to ask whether our understanding is true and instead begin protecting it because it is ours.

That is the bridge to the Golden Calf. The Israelites made something and then treated what they had made as sacred. The danger comes when we cannot distinguish what is sacred from our understanding of what is sacred. Our idols are rarely statues. They are political, religious, national, and moral identities we protect from evidence that........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)