Keeping the faith: This year, let’s learn to engage in a society of many different opinions – By Rabbi Hillel Skolnik (Special to The Columbus Dispatch) / January 10, 2022
It is an old joke within the Jewish community that if you put three people in a room, you’ll hear four opinions.
The comment works with any group size so long as the number of opinions is at least one greater than those gathered. While this attempt at humor has become cliché, it is based on the fact that Jewish texts have been recording disagreements for hundreds of years.
The Talmud, a collection of rabbinic discourse that is dated to approximately the year 500, is literally a collection of disputes between the rabbis of third through fifth centuries. Sometimes these disagreements come to a conclusion and other times not.
It is now 2022, and I think it is safe to say that the reality on the ground has not changed. People, in whatever faith and values community they identify, will continue to have differences of opinion, just as the rabbis did long ago.
