Title Author Date

Courage to expose Ezra and his Tradition Dobbs, Steven Jul 25, 2005

Dear Mr. Zeligman,

Congratulations for your courageous stand and for daring to let your conscience do the talking.

I wouldn’t like to be in the shoes of those teachers of the Law who read your letter. Even if inured by the ignorance and hypocrisy inherent to tradition, being confronted by doubts that one's life could be based on a lie must still be unsettling. (Yet one must bear in mind that, as people say, a guy needs to make a living -- just as Ezra and his team did.)

Ezra's forgery prevented assimilation, but at a terrible price for future generations. Does this mean that everyone must be hopelessly doomed for what someone else did? No. Life is an individual thing, not a collective endeavor. One's duty is to listen to one’s conscience and to seek the truth and to not sink without a fight.

Finding out the truth, even if it is painful, is far more important than a person's ethnic or religious identity. Loyalty to an error, on the grounds that it happens to come from one's own mother, does not make it less of an error and it does not change its consequences.

This may be a bitter struggle, but one can't afford to give up hope that, even now, Ezra's fateful deception can be undone. He was allowed to hide God's word, but not destroy it; its fragments are still there, and those who look with all their heart will find it.

Best regards,

Steven Dobbs

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