ABSTRACT
The Jewish people has been in existence for nearly 4,000 years. During the centuries, Jews have viewed themselves as inheritors of a sacred tradition. Arguably, today Jewry needs to reevaluate the Jewish heritage in the light of modern knowledge. No longer should the religious beliefs and the practices of the past bind Jews as they have done in previous centuries. Instead, individual Jews should feel at liberty to draw from their religious tradition those elements which they regard as spiritually meaningful in a new age. This is proposed by the Supermarket Analogy of Cohn-Sherbok.
The analogy receives heavy philosophical criticism for it seems to accept that a group of religious Jews should be permitted to return to, for example, animal sacrifice. There is also criticism of the implication that people can just ‘pick and choose’ their moral beliefs and practices – and, further, that whatever is chosen may still leave them as committed religious Jews. It looks as if the proposal is that people can, effectively, ‘self-certify’ as Jews. That is akin to how some transgendered individuals seek the right to ‘self-certify’ their gender. Those discussions return to the question of what constitutes the identity of those who follow Judaism in view of the wide differences.
