Reform Judaism Today

As A Mighty Stream.
by Julian Morgenstern.
The Jewish Publication Society of America, 442 pp. $4.00.

Reform Judaism: Essays
by Hebrew Union College Alumni.
Hebrew Union College Press. 288 pp. $3.00.

It is the special merit of Dr. Morgenstern’s book that he attempts to redefine the meaning of peoplehood in Judaism and in Jewish history. It is the governing theme in this volume of essays and it also binds them together. Dr. Morgenstern’s scholarship is unimpeachable and his interpretations have the quality of originality about them; he is also a writer of parts.

Dr. Morgenstern does not confuse peoplehood with nationhood; on the contrary, he affirms the distinction between them. Nationhood is inseparable from a state and is rooted in geography; a nation is wedded to space. Peoplehood is a matter of memory and mission, and involves a sense of history and a sense of destiny; a people is wedded to time. It is Dr. Morgenstern’s conviction that the greatest of the prophets in the greatest crisis of ancient Israel relinquished nationhood, with its temporary and precarious triumphs, for peoplehood, with its promise of eternity. Israel has been and always will be a people, while the nation-empires of Assyria and Babylonia and Persia and Rome and the others, are dust and ashes. Israel is a people, and not a congregation of individuals, and it is as a people that it is a “light unto the nations” and the herald of the Messianic era.

With skill and lucidity Dr. Morgenstern delineates the portrait of Israel as a people and Judaism as its religion. In the Babylonian exile, no longer on its awn soil, the Jewish community was compelled to think of itself as a people rather than a nation. Earlier, Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah had prophesied doom, but Jeremiah spoke with hope of the community outside Judea and referred to the Palestinian community as “a basket of rotting figs.” It was, however, deutero-Isaiah who proclaimed Israel to be a universal people and Israel’s God a universal God, a God of all the earth and a God of history. Thereafter, within Judea and without, it was peoplehood—rather than nationhood—and Torah, the law of God, rather than a state and the rule of kings, that lighted up Israel’s path in history. Twice the Jews had been a nation with a state of their own and now they are a nation for a third time, but always they have been a people, and the concept of peoplehood is the more inclusive one. This is primary: both nationalism and universalism (as apart from peoplehood) have been secondary in Israel’s long history, and particularism has been tertiary.

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Dr. Morgenstern rediscovers and redefines the meaning of peoplehood for Reform Judaism, and yet one wonders if Reform Judaism’s quest is at an end. Dr. Morgenstern is at home in Judea and in Babylonia and in all the ancient and medieval lands where Israel lived and suffered and hoped, but his journey does not take him beyond the Renaissance. After that, we are informed, several centuries of darkness descended upon the Jews as they were huddled into Europe’s ghettos, and they produced naught of universal worth—not even a single outstanding poem.

Here then, the standard is no longer a Jewish one, and Jewish life is no longer seen from within, but from without, from the viewpoint of the world. The life within the ghetto, the centuries of extraordinary inner creativity in Eastern Europe, the spiritual miracles of Vilna (the Jerusalem of Lithuania) and Warsaw, the emergence of communities that approximated the ideals of the prophets—all that is seen as a sad and sterile interlude in Jewish history. It is thus not strange that some Reform rabbis (like many of their Conservative and Orthodox brethren) are subordinating Judaism, as a religion, to nationalism, as the cult of statehood. They are doing so because peoplehood, as envisaged by Reform Judaism, does not always have sufficient substance and relevance.

The pity is all the greater, because Reform Judaism is making a contribution, and may yet make a decisive one, to the shaping of America’s Jewish community. As depicted by Dr. Morgenstern, it possesses both breadth and depth, as when he writes of Israel’s election as a witness to the nations and as the partner that Christianity must not eschew if the world is to be saved. There is no doubt that Reform Judaism is in the tradition of the prophets, and that it can be a way of life. But a way of life, derech, must be implemented, must be filled out with, a style of life, nusach. And a style of life cannot be voted by resolution at a conference. It is at once far more elusive and far more concrete, and it must contain, as it were, lacrimae rerum, the tears and laughter of generations, the yiches, the sanctity of pertinent tradition.

Now when and where in its history, outside the boundaries and without the coercions of a state, has Jewry carved out for itself a mode of life, a nusach, as concrete and as universal as that embodied in the communities of Eastern Europe’s “ghettos”? The word “ghetto,” as sometimes used by American Jews sounds hollow, and only its deplorable aspects are stressed. It may even be conceded that the ghetto had a style of life, but its social and spiritual ethos is overlooked for the beards and skullcaps that our fathers wore. We forget that out of the “ghetto” arose also a Jewish revolutionary movement in Czarist Russia and a literature in Yiddish) that has kinship with Reform Judaism at least in one respect—in its profound concern (in Peretz, Leivick, Einhorn, Boraisha, Leyeless, and others) with the Messianic dream, with the redemption of Israel and all mankind.

Reform Judaism should not—must not—diminish or impoverish its universalism, but it stands in need of history, of an experience, and a style. It must absorb and transform the history and experience of the last three centuries and use them as the material out of which to fashion a style of life in America with our own history and experiences as its content. That may be difficult, but, as Spinoza knew, “all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”

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Reform Judaism is a noteworthy volume. It consists of thirteen essays, written by rabbis, alumni of Hebrew Union College, on the occasion of its seventy-fifth anniversary. What is surely commendable is the candor with which these rabbis look at the present condition of Reform Judaism.

These essays are, in effect, a heshbon hanefesh, a searching of the heart; and the topics discussed range from Rabbi Olan’s “Rethinking the Liberal Faith” and Rabbi Leipziger’s “What Has Liberal Judaism to Offer America?” to Rabbi Freehof’s “Reform Judaism and Prayer” and Rabbi Beryl Cohon’s “Conservative and Reconstructionist Judaism as Seen by a Reform Rabbi.”

Reform Judaism has been described by some as rationalistic, cosmopolitan, and optimistic, as an “easy” religion. This description is not adequate and not wholly fair, and it is to the credit of these writers that they are neither resentful nor apologetic, while admitting that there is some truth in the “indictment.”

In a superb essay, Rabbi Levi A. Olan deals with this “indictment,” and he deals with it in a larger setting. He takes the measure of some current trends in religious thought—those associated with the names of Karl Barth, Berdyaev, the neo-Thomists, and Martin Buber. Although he regards them as unwholesome, he does not reject all their insights, and is quite critical, too, of that religious liberalism which has remained unaffected by the demonic forces let loose in our own age.

Rabbi Olan limits himself to stating and analyzing the issues. And now the question is: can Reform Judaism remain what it is—liberal and humanistic—and yet again the “dimension of depth”? This much is surely true: it cannot be done unless Reform Judaism—or any other variant of Judaism—is ready to abandon a scorn for “metaphysics,” an accommodation of religion to the conveniences of the day. What has happened in Europe should have shaken us to the roots of our being, and it is no disparagement of Israel and no blindness to the historical importance of the establishment of a Jewish state to say that it is a joy incommensurate with the infinite tragedy that has befallen us. And so there are celebrations—as perhaps there should be—of the anniversary of the establishment of Israel, but there is no day of mourning, no yortseit, for the six millions who have perished.

Here, too, Reform Judaism must turn to the “ghetto,” to the millions that died (and we might have been among them), must gather and cherish every document and diary out of the concentration camps, every chronicle and song. And then, with these to aid us, all of us must rethink and relive the epic of Israel in the world, must reread and re-examine Genesis and Job and the Prophets and the Book of Psalms for the “dimension of depth.” We have perhaps neglected this dimension in our legitimate preoccupation with “scholarship” in these fields. But what was legitimate before Treblinka is trivial now.

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It is not possible in a brief review to consider all the essays in this volume.

Rabbi Freehof’s “Reform Judaism and Prayer” is both scholarly and thoughtful. He succeeds in appraising the social and aesthetic “functions” of prayer without disregarding its “metaphysical” character and meaning, nor its “sense of mandate,” of mitzvah; and he does not omit to locate Jewish prayer in the total picture of Judaism’s continuity and evolution.

Rabbi Beryl Cohon’s “Conservative and Reconstructionist Judaism” is a solid analysis and critique from the standpoint of a Reform rabbi. He is not quite certain whether Conservative Judaism, in its linkage of Judaism with Palestine and Hebrew, can escape the degrading influence of nationalist tribalism. It will not do to scoff him out of court. His version of Conservative Judaism may be one-sided; but if it is, it is worthy of an earnest refutation. And recent tendencies in the Jewish community appear to confirm some of Rabbi Cohon’s fears and doubts. He also puts the scalpel to Reconstructionism and exposes the contradictions inherent in the notion of a Jewish civilization (Palestine-centered) within American civilization, and sums it up with the trenchant comment that “while our bodies are in the west, ova minds would have to be in the east.” Rabbi Cohon is wary of Reconstructionism’s plea for a kehillah, since it would entail, despite our best intentions, a compulsive discipline; on the other hand, he is more “traditionalist” than the Reconstructionists in retaining the doctrine of the Chosen People, and asserts that their rejection of it follows from a non-Jewish interpretation (whereas the Jewish interpretation is simply that Israel is the “eternal witness to the Eternal”). His final charge is that Reconstructionism is busy “with small change” rather than with the prophetic ideals.

Rabbi Cohon’s analysis of Reconstructionism is on a high level, and Reconstructionists will probably pay heed to it. However, one might be prompted to ask how small is the “small change”—how is the term to be defined? And again, can there be derech, a way of life, without nusach, a style of life? Reconstructionism’s “small change” may turn out to be the beginning of some “style of life,” an American nusach. And that would be a matter of signal importance. The heart of Rabbi Cohon’s criticism would lie then in the first part—that is, if Reconstructionism’s premises are wrong or invalid, then its nusach will fail us. But in its quest for nusach, it is unassailable, and Reform Judaism might take a leaf from its book.

Reform Judaism in America is almost a century old. It was in 1846 that Isaac M. Wise arrived in America, and it was under his leadership that the Union of American Hebrew Congregations was founded in 1873, and the Hebrew Union College opened its doors in 1875. Reform Judaism in America has been “experimental” and it has gone a long way in modifying its program and enriching its philosophy. These two volumes are evidence that its philosophy is not a “closed system,” that its “postulates” are not beyond criticism, that in listening to the voice of the present it has caught something of Judaism’s eternal values. Reform Judaism has apprehended the why o£ Jewish destiny. Its task now is to implement the why with the how of Jewish existence. It must pass on from derech to nusach.

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