A few months ago, Rabbi Avi Weiss was in a moral, political and ideological bind.A champion of women’s religious rights within Orthodoxy, he had overseen the rabbinic training of Sara Hurwitz, a six-year staff member of his congregation, the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, and taken pride in her completing the same course of Talmudic study as the male students of his Manhattan rabbinical school, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah. He felt she was deserving of the title “rabbi” and would have been honored to ordain her as such.
 
 

 The contrast between the American spectacle of celebrity death worship and the Jewish tradition of mourning has rarely been as sharply defined as it is this week.
 
 
I write these words 12 days after Michael Jackson died, his funeral arrangements and burial site still undecided. The star’s death has become as big a phenomenon as his troubled life. His family members hold press conferences, appear at music awards ceremonies and allow tickets to be distributed through a lottery for a huge, public memorial ceremony.