Heidi of Princeton: In Defense of Religion

It was in the kosher dining hall at Princeton where, in the 1980s, I lost my innocence. It was my first foray into life outside the strictly Orthodox Jewish confines of a yeshiva. Heidi was a graduate student in the humanities who had taken it upon herself to educate me about the special duties of the Jewish people to humanity. "How can you justify your narrow tribal loyalty and commitments? Isn't the lesson of the Holocaust that we Jews must never put our parochial concerns ahead of those of others?" That was the moment I realized that I had never encountered true Orthodoxy before.