Baruch HaShem, I had some very interesting jobs over my half century in the workplace. There was really only one place I worked that I detested. Rather than tell you several examples of how bad it was, I'll just tell you about interactions with two of my managers. My then manager started the review with: Michael, I don't think we got our money's worth from you this year. (To be fair -- not that I have any obligation to be fair -- he was a fundamentalist Christian with whom I had just had a conversation about Judaism and Christianity. Obviously that conversation did not go well for him and he was likely still stinging. He therefore did the good Christian thing and decided to get back at me from his position of authority over me. I had another manager who told me it was arrogant of me to give reasons for my opinions. Fun times.
The root cause, though, of my revulsion to working there was that it was a company that provides advice to companies about how best to market their product. If you look up the definition of marketing, you will find something like this: the activity or business of promoting and selling products or services. Sounds pretty pareve, right? We did one study for a popular soda company who in their advertising sold "the real thing." They wanted to know what other products would be good to put on sale at the same time to boost their sales. It turned out -- no shock to anyone -- that putting tortilla chips on sale the same week as their soda sold more of both products. Great. Well... not so great, there were a few weeks where instead of selling more of "the real thing", the stores sold more of the "choice of a new generation." We still sold them the study, we just blanked out any data that gave them results they didn't want.
So let's be honest and just note that the closest synonym to "marketing" is "lying". I am not at all comfortable with lying of any sort, so I really, really had a lot of trouble working there. Being uncomfortable with lying, by the way, is how I got to Torah Judaism. My wife and I saw something about Open Orthodoxy and decided to check it out. The look on my wife's face was priceless and she gasped, "That's not orthodox!" So we started talking about all the names/labels used throughout the ages to market כפירה/apostasy. It is kind of enlightening.
First let me note that we just call our religion Judaism without any labels, nowadays I will sometimes use the term Torah Judaism if it needs clarification. The term "Orthodox Judaism" was actually coined in the late 18th century by our enemies as a derogatory term. The etymology of the word "orthodox" is from the Greek for "correct/straight thinking". Interesting that our enemies (more about them later) pejorated (great word, no?)/repurposed it to mean "narrow minded, unwilling to change and be more modern". Marketers adore co-opting words to give their idea a positive spin. (The best example I know of that is "gay"; you couldn't use that word in the Flintstones theme song any more... or, at any rate, it would mean something much different then when it was written in 1961.)
The first marketing of כפירה/apostasy was the Catholic religion. The word "catholic" actually means "universal", as their claim was that they wanted to paint us as elitist snobs, whereas they were the people's religion. The Crusades and, more recently. issues with their priests shows how well that went. The term "christian", by the way (not our topic) simply means "messiah centered", they were the original "we want the messiah now". Islam (also not our topic) means "submission to G-d". Again, we see how each of those has held true to their espoused principles.
The next big attempt was in the 1800s to re-form Judaism to make it more compatible with Western society. And "reform" has a positive ring to it, no? After all, the reformation of the Catholic church in the 1600s seemed positive, so let's try the same thing with Judaism. In 1883, the Trefa Banquet (go ahead and look it up) demonstrated how from Judaism the Reform religion had strayed. A group of apostates decided they would have more success if they conserved more of the traditional practices; and thus the Conservative Jewish religion was born.
Once you are breaking away, of course, you can do whatever you want. Another group of apostates decided that Judaism was really not a religion, but an evolving culture that needed some sprucing up. They decided to start from scratch and reconstruct the Jewish religion; enter the Reconstructionist Jewish Religion. Once you start conforming to the surrounding society's ideas, you may as well try being more egalitarian and, of course, more inclusive/open; which is where we started.
The common denominator of all those reforms, reconstructions, opening up is that they make rules that they find logical and reasonable. We Torah observant Jews, on the other hand, figure that if the Author and Creator of reality loved us so much that He wanted to give us direction in how to get closer to Him, then maybe we should stick with that. It is, after all, impossible to improve on perfection.
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