GEN11 Israel’s acceptance of the Torah was the reason it had a special covenant with God: “If it were not for My Torah that you accepted, I should not recognize you, and I should not regard you more than any of the idolatrous nations of the world.” Exodus Rabbah, Ki Tissa 47:3 Moreover, as asserted in sources cited earlier [See (this verse) “void” DORFFLGP 174-77] the Torah is Israel’s gift to God and the world, and through it Israel gains not only worth but beauty. … In sum, then, the Rabbis of the Talmud and Midrash, who were the framers of Judaism and gave it its distinctive case, held unequivocally that a Jew must observe the Torah’s laws. They also held, though, that the Torah was not given once and for all at Mount Sinai but rather must be interpreted and applied anew in each generation. Only if this happens can the Torah continue to be an important concerns of Jews, a program of living. The alternative is to let it petrify into a relic of history. Thus it is not so much “tradition and change,” a phrase suggested by Rabbi Mordecai Waxman to typify both the rabbinic tradition and the modern Conservative (Masorti) movement, as it is “tradition, which includes change.” DORFFLGP 205-6