In response to Robert Lichtman, a few thoughts:
First, it is true that many Jewish values—or terms that are reflective of Jewish values—have seeped into Western culture via Christianity and Islam, or even just by a process of cultural osmosis. As you rightly point out, that is largely a good thing. Still, a closer examination of these supposedly common values may reveal that there are actually fundamental differences between what our mekorot say about these concepts and the ways in which they have been assimilated into the larger world. A case in point might be words like ‘kedusha’ and ‘tahara’, which mean very different things from ‘sanctity’ and ‘purity’. In fact, if we view tahara as a value, it might be absolutely uniquely Jewish with no substantive parallel in the non-Jewish world.
Kol tuv,
Simi Peters
