When you step off a 15-hour plane ride and face the stark realization that you will be without running water, a flushing toilet, electricity, a refrigerator, a microwave, or air conditioning for the next five months, that is when you know you have stepped out of your comfort zone. When you realize that you are unexpectedly the only white person in the village in which you will be living, let alone the only Jew (my coworker thought we were extinct), that is when you know your comfort zone is worlds away.

This is how I spent much of the last half-year, and I loved it. You might think I am crazy, and I will not disagree with you. However, when you throw yourself into a culture half-a-world away from your own, forcing you to challenge your own beliefs, you live in constant fascination at how the world operates so smoothly — after you learn to shower properly with a bucket, milk a cow, slaughter a chicken, and cook over a wood-burning fire, that is.

Few Jewish couples define their marriage as “mixed” just because bride and groom were born and raised 30 miles apart in the same country.

Linda and Bernard Levy, however, live in Belgium, a country whose long experiment in fusing two distinct cultures recently has been showing signs of breakdown. With the Dutch-speaking Flemish half of the country increasingly at odds with the French-speaking part, Belgium’s corresponding Jewish communities are finding themselves at loggerheads, as well.

Linda was born in Antwerp, the capital of Flanders in the self-governing Flemish region. She rarely uses Flemish (similar to Dutch), the language of her youth, since she married Bernard, a Francophone from Brussels. They live just outside Brussels with their three children.

As a long-time resident who is completing his first two-year term as mayor of Teaneck and was decisively re-elected to his third council term on Tuesday, Mohammed Hameeduddin has come to understand and revel in the commonalities between his Muslim community and the Jewish community which he serves, and which helped elect him.

Being on the campaign trail — such as it was, in the run-up to this past Tuesday’s municipal’s elections — highlighted one aspect of that commonality.

“The Jewish people of Teaneck are very similar to the Muslim community, because when you walk in, the first thing everybody makes sure to ask is ‘Did you eat?’ That’s the first question every grandmother asks. It’s very similar if you walk into a Muslim household from south Asia,” says Hameeduddin, whose parents came to America from India in the late 1960s.

Last week, a U.S. district court judge sitting in Roanoke, Va., made an extraordinary suggestion about the document commonly referred to as “The Ten Commandments.” He suggested it be cut to six. He appointed another judge to oversee negotiations to accomplish that goal.

The case involves Narrows High School in Narrows, Va., a part of the Giles County school district, which is the actual defendant in the case. After Narrows High put up a display of “The Ten Commandments,” the American Civil Liberties Union objected and brought the case to the U.S. District Court in Roanoke. It cited the separation clause of the First Amendment, as well as a number of federal court decisions, as its reasons.

One case relevant to U.S. District Court Judge Michael Urbanski’s argument in The ACLU of Virginia and the Freedom From Religion Foundation v. the Giles County, Va., School Board is King v. Richmond County (Georgia), which was decided for Richmond County almost exactly nine years ago, on May 30, 2003. In that case, a panel of judges on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stunning ruling. The “Ten Commandments,” the majority ruled, has its secular side.

At specific issue was a seal used by the Richmond County Superior Court.

LOS ANGELES – Are the Ten Commandments (okay, the “Ten Declarations”) only to be heard, but never seen? And when they are seen, how should they look?

Some groups, notably the Anti-Defamation League, believe that public images of the Ten Commandments should be scarce.

“That the increasing call by private citizens and public officials for the government to post the Ten Commandments in schools, government buildings, courts and other public places — while often well-intentioned — is bad policy and often unconstitutional,” the ADL says on its website.

Other organizations advocate displaying them, even in schools. The conservative American Center of Law and Justice argues that the Supreme Court “should not prohibit their display in the absence of a clear showing that the display has the effect of endorsing a particular religion.”