|
Judaism 101 answers your question,
***Who is a Jew?
A Jew is any person whose mother was a Jew or any person who has gone through the formal process of conversion to Judaism.
It is important to note that being a Jew has nothing to do with what you believe or what you do....a person born to a Jewish mother who is an atheist and never practices the Jewish religion is still a Jew, even in the eyes of the ultra-Orthodox.***
http://www.jewfaq.org/whoisjew.htm
Some answering your question either don't know the Jewish scriptures or don't believe in them. (confirming there are atheist Jews)
The real question is which sect you want to join:
http://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/a/reformconservativeorthodox/
1. *** Orthodox sages recorded the claim that the oral tradition was received from G-d at Sinai in 1312 B.C.E. and passed down intact to the sages of the Mishna***
Of course, there is about a 1000 years where the passage of what was an oral tradition is not a part of Jewish scriptures. That is a staggering amount of events, circumstances, and prophets who could made reference to this but did not.
Rabbi Allonyoav says, ***Orthodox does not recognize Reform conversions...So what does Orthodox think of converts to Reform Judaism? In the case of religion: generally as righteous gentiles- ***
2. ***In mid-November, 1885, Dr. Kaufman Kohler
...attempted to set the conference?s tone and direction with statements like, ?We consider their [the Holy scripture?s] composition, their arrangements and their entire contents as the work of men, betraying in their conceptions of the world shortcomings of their age;?[14] and ?We must discard the idea as altogether foreign to us, that marriage with a Gentile is not legal.?[15] ....In 1972, By 1972, a survey commissioned that year by the Central Conference of American [Reform] Rabbis, reported that ?Only one in ten [Reform] rabbis states that he believes in G-d ?in the more or less traditional Jewish sense.??[20] The remaining ninety-percent classified their faith with terms like: ?Agnostic;? ?Atheist;? ?Bahai in spirit, Judaic in practice;? ?Polydoxist;?
3. ***As a branch off of Reform, the new Conservative group possessed no more affinity for the Mesorah than their parent movement. Solomon Schechter (1849-1915), who took over JTS in 1902, violated the Sabbath publicly[29] and wrote that ?the three r?s? stood for ?rotten ranting rabbis.?[30]Conservative historians say that Schechter?s successor, Cyrus Adler (1863-1940) ?shared the anticlerical bias.?[31]***
4 and more. ***The Conservative movement splintered twice, spinning off the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Seminary in 1968 and the Institute for Traditional Judaism in 1985. Reconstructionists, led by JTS professor Mordechai Kaplan, broke off to the left, jettisoning belief in the supernatural altogether.[58] The Institute for Traditional Judaism, led by JTS professor David Weiss Halivni, broke off to the right, arguing that G-d had given something to Moses at Sinai, but that that original revelation had been corrupted and lost during the Babylonian exile.[59]According to Weiss Halivni, the Torah represents only a sixth-century B.C.E. manmade guess as to the original material?s form and content. According to both groups, we do not possess a G-d given Torah, let alone a Divine oral tradition explaining the Pentateuch.***
5. Messianic Judaism
Hope this helps
|
Can you join Judaism without being an ethic Jew?
