Readers React: If religious tales are just ‘stories,’ why do they harm so many people?

To the editor: Yossi Klein Halevi sheds light on the overly strict religious thinking that has sparked deadly confrontations for centuries. (“The Jewish story is under assault,” Opinion, April 22)

He begins by trying to clarify whether Judaism is a faith or a people, and his baffling logic fails to do that. But his ending, “We are a story we tell ourselves about who we think we are,“ is easy to understand and is at the heart of the matter.

Stories we tell ourselves — especially when “ourselves” is a small group of men who create and interpret the stories while isolated from “secular” society — should remain just stories. Millions around the world suffer when believers apply their stories to things like what you must wear, what wall you can pray at or which bathroom you can use.

Let them continue to tell stories, but we don’t have to listen.

Edward Dignan, Long Beach

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To the editor: I was glad to learn that Halevi regards me, an atheist Jew, as a Jew. But his statement, “Jews who reject Judaic beliefs but still identify with the Jewish people, its values and its fate are universally regarded among Jews as one of us,” is not correct.

On July 7, 2015, the New York Times reported that David Azoulay, Israel’s minister of religious services, said, “The moment a Reform Jew stops following the religion of Israel, let’s say there’s a problem,” adding, “I cannot allow myself to call such a person a Jew.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected Azoulay’s remarks but did not remove him from the cabinet.

At the time I wondered if Azoulay was going to revise the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust significantly downward from 6 million.

Julian Weissglass, Santa Barbara

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