…I never ceased to be amazed how widespread this lie is in the non-Orthodox world. “There is more than one way to be Jewish,” they say, and “the Orthodox have no right to tell others they are not Jews.”

This is intolerable because no Orthodox Jew has ever said that. What Orthodox Jews say is that one’s behavior, in theory and practice, is not Jewish.

One is a Jew either by proper conversion or most commonly by birth, which clearly was the decision of the Almighty Who saw to it that you were born to a Jewish mother, and no man can countermand the Almighty. Your Jewish identity, your status, is from G-d, and no rabbi can change that.

What can be criticized, however, is one’s behavior that most certainly can be judged not Jewish. If the words of the Bible with its 613 commandments are to be taken seriously, one of them is not to eat pigs. Now, a Jew can eat pigs all he wants and in the modern age not die from trichinosis, but he cannot claim that this is Jewish behavior.

It is this distinction that is confused in the minds of Reform Jews, and I begin to suspect it is deliberate, albeit unconscious, on purpose so as not to hear the accurate judgment of the Orthodox when they say that those who do not keep the 4th commandment, to observe the Sabbath, and do not practice the spiritual appetite discipline known as kashrut, and do not observe the regulations in regarded in conjugal relations are correct in saying, “This is not Jewish behavior.”