Thats not my point . It was in response to stealing no matter what the circumstances are is awful . There are definitely different degrees . My colleague stole my pen last week . It wasn ' t awful , just annoying . <| sep |> How is it that people get defined by the worst elements of their support nowadays ? <| sep |> Do agree ? Yes and no . Hey , I ' m a Jew . You were expecting a different answer maybe ? The article finishes thus The current movement toward adult secular Jewish programming seems to indicate that the secular Jew needs a community Just as much as the religious Jew needs a congregation . Jewish is something people have in common , and it means most when people find a way to give it group expression . In the Jewish religious tradition a prayer offered in congregation has more clout than one offered by the solitary individual . Some of the forms by which secular Jews can do this already exist . But there ' s still plenty of room for creativity . And I believe the path toward this effort will be made easier by accepting secular Jewishness as an approach , rather than a category . I ' d argue the first sentence above contradicts the last one . Secular Jews don ' t ' seem ' to need a community . Secular Jews are members of a highly social species home sapiens . They absolutely need a community . And , when a community emerges out of the commonality that is Jewish cultural tradition and social norms , that community is , I ' d argue , best understood as a category rather than a approach . If nothing else , the people in the particular community won ' t think of themselves as an approach they will think of themselves as ' us ', a group . A category of people , if you will . That aside , and allowing for the date the talk from which the article is excerpted was delivered nearly 42 years ago , there ' s a lot to like about the article . It correctly puts the secular tradition into the heart of Jewish culture . It gives a sense of the enormous shadow cast by the Holocaust on all Jewish thinking and practice , secular or otherwise but it doesn ' t make the mistake of thinking secular Jewishness is a postWorld War II thing . I think the weaknesses in the talkarticle are the weaknesses of lots of these sorts of essays insufficient anthropology . I admit I may be biased on this front . My partner who is also Jewish and a convert to boot did serious anthropological fieldwork before switching to teaching . But , as they ' ve been reminding me for decades now , anthropology is zoology with humans as the studied species . Which means , just as physics encompasses all the sciences , anthropology encompasses all the humanities ' liberal arts ' in the US . Hence the contradiction I argue exists in the quoted paragraph . Humans need communities by definition . Seriously , we do even assuming a lone human can feed and shelter themselves adequately , loneliness can and does kill . Any discussion of or investigation into a particular human community needs to proceed from that basic truth . More generally it doesn ' t matter what branch of the humanities you are digging around in , if you don ' t get the anthropology right , you ' ll end up in the weeds .