The Movement for Reform Judaism

Rabbi Shoshana Boyd Gelfand's closing speech from Conference 2008 in Leicester.

Why are we here? No, not here in Leicester. No, not even here in England. I mean the big question - Why are we here? Why do we exist? Why did God bother to create us at all?

The rabbis in the Talmud actually debate whether it would have been better for human beings not to have been created at all. I’m sorry to tell you that they concluded that the world would have been better off without us. But God doesn’t listen to a bunch of rabbis, I’m afraid, and God went ahead and created us. So we are left with the fundamental question of meaning: Why are we here?
 

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