Few developments in American Judaism have excited more intense interest than the recent return of the Reform wing towards the more traditional, in ritual, ceremony, and belief. Does this mean that Reform Judaism is moving “backward” into Orthodoxy, or is it rather, as proponents of the new direction maintain, simply a necessary process of re-evaluation with a view to better fulfilling the intent of classic Reform Judaism and of historical Jewish religious tradition as well? Israel Knox, reporting here on the latest annual assembly of the Central Conference of American Rabbis held at Pike, New Hampshire, this past summer, offers a personal appraisal of Reform Judaism’s current re-appraisal. 

_____________

What was remarkable about the recent sixty-fifth annual convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (Reform) was the unmistakable manifestation throughout of the close tie between Reform and traditional Judaism—a much closer tie, indeed, than the critics of Reform, friendly or hostile, care to see or admit. Reform’s six hundred rabbis did not start with astonishment when one of the younger professors at Hebrew Union College proclaimed from the platform: “There is no Judaism without Halachah”—that is, without traditional Jewish Law.

Nor did it seem incongruous to them that the Conference should seize on the seven hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the death of Maimonides virtually to appropriate him for Reform—and not as the rationalizing philosopher of The Guide for the Perplexed, but as the great codifier, in the Mishneh Torah, of Talmudic law. And there was something of the loveliness of traditional Judaism—not as theology or ritual but as a style and way of life—in the greeting “Good Shabbos” that was exchanged after services on Friday evening and Saturday morning. This greeting, uttered by hundreds of persons throughout the improvised synagogue in the Lake Tarleton Club at Pike, New Hampshire, was a bridge across the generations, linking them to their parents and their parents before them.

But the really odd thing was that nothing in all this was especially novel. If it represents a return, it is not so much a return to Orthodoxy, as many have been saying, as to Reform Judaism’s own tradition. For Reform’s roots in historic and rabbinic Judaism—in what may be fittingly called classical Judaism—are much deeper than is commonly thought. It was perhaps natural in the early period of Reform for both friends and foes to stress its program of Reform rather than its affirmations of Judaism. How frequently has Reform been held up to scorn because one of its early spokesmen in Germany David Friedlander—proposed to his followers to go over to Lutheran Protestantism as a sort of Unitarian sect. Few remember that his proposal was overwhelmingly rejected. And fewer still remember that Isaac Mayer Wise, founder of Reform in America, waged his first battle (in Albany) for the observance of the Sabbath; he did not hesitate to assert repeatedly that Judaism was mankind’s supreme religious achievement and would become—in its Reform variant—mankind’s universal faith by 1900.

The movement toward traditional Judaism in Reform has been attributed to the influx of East European Jews and their children into the Reform rabbinate and its congregations. But it is just as likely that East European Jews, like so many other Jews, have turned to Reform because that moderation and practicality which helped establish it as a going American institution appeal to them, and because they find in it continuity with historic Judaism as well as with the “spirit of their own age.”

This emphasis on continuity with historic Judaism was evident in a plain-spoken courageous book published by the Hebrew Union College in 1949. Entitled, quite simply, Reform Judaism, it attempted an honest reappraisal of Reform. That this attempt was no transient caprice is made clear by Reform’s subsequent gatherings—both of rabbis and laymen—including this latest.

_____________

II

It is not generally understood that Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Judaism in no way parallel the great divisions in Christianity—Catholicism, Protestantism, the Eastern Church—but are only variants, each equally legitimate, of an essential and universal Judaism. Judaism is not a sacramental religion, and neither its rabbis nor its synagogues claim a special and divinely appointed function in the drama of salvation. The fundamental and irreducible theology of Judaism, to which all three subscribe, is contained in the Shema—“Hear, O Israel: the Eternal our God, the Eternal is One.” So Jewish Orthodoxy may dislike and denounce Conservatism and Reform, and where it can—as in the State of Israel—deprive them of legal standing, but it will not avow them to be heretical or schismatic, as Catholicism does Protestantism, and exclude them from the House of Israel, forbidding “intermarriage” with their adherents.

Nor are there such doctrinal differences among them as separate the Protestant denominations from Catholicism—as, for example, the question of the primacy of Scripture over such historical institutions as the Church; the priesthood of all the people as against sacerdotalism; justification by faith rather than “good works.” All three variants of Judaism agree on the classic metaphysical issues of religion, they agree on the enduring and unique traditions of historic Judaism.

Nor do the names of the three Jewish “denominations”—Orthodoxy, Conservatism, Reform—contrary to the common opinion, represent any safe guide to their different theological emphases. True, Reform Judaism rejects, as we might expect from a denomination calling itself Reform or Liberal, the tenets of bodily resurrection (though not of immortality) and of a personal Messiah (in behalf of a Messianic Era). Reform’s outstanding leader in America, Isaac Mayer Wise, scorned “dogma, mystery, and miracles,” and spoke with eloquence of a religion of reason. Yet he also affirmed the divine source of the Ten Commandments, the dependence of morality upon a belief in God, and the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. He decried Biblical criticism and the Darwinian theory of evolution, and all his life regarded the Sinaitic revelation as historical and binding.

The “quarrel,” then, among the three versions of Judaism does not bear on such issues as the nature of God or the reality of man’s freedom of moral choice; it bears primarily upon Halachah, upon the scope and role and mandatory force of Talmudic law in contemporary Jewish life. (This is not to say that the differences concern “mere legal niceties,” as many Jews as well as non-Jews believe. Jewish Law, religious and civil, is coextensive with life; it includes ritual and ceremony, but especially conduct. In Jewish experience Halachah has been at once exacting and enriching, a “categorical imperative” immanent in the life of the Jew as one who must “walk in the ways of God.”)

The widespread notion that Reform discards Halachah in principle is simply not true. Neither Reform nor any variant of Judaism has ever adopted a Pauline position on Halachah and opposed it as such. Antinomianism, that recurrent tendency looking to the abrogation of the “yoke” of the Law, has played no important role in Reform, past or present. Reform, along with Orthodoxy and Conservatism, upholds the validity and relevance of Halachah as a discipline of life, a day-to-day guide to the achievement of holiness. But Reform asks whether the sanction for Halachah is natural or transcendental in origin¹; whether its essential development ended fifteen centuries ago or still goes on; and how much and what in the Law is still binding.

Orthodoxy will not go beyond the interpretation of Halachah under any conditions; Conservatism prefers selection to interpretation, or at least makes it equally important. But Reform insists on its right, even its duty, to rescind, amend, and modify, to cut away some elements and enlarge others. Isaac Mayer Wise boasted that all the innovations he proposed were in keeping with Halachah: “To be sure, I am a reformer as much as our age requires, because I am convinced that none can stop the stream of time; none can check the swift wheels of our age; but I always have the Halachah for my basis; I never sanction a reform against the din.” Even David Einhorn, that advocate of a radical break with rabbinic Judaism, could say the following of the Talmud: “Israel believes thee; thou art a medium through which the divine may be reached, but thou art not divine.”

_____________

It was nevertheless startling to note at this sixty-fifth convention of Reform rabbis that the words most frequently heard in the plenary sessions were Halachah and K’lal Yisroel (the Community of Israel). It was startling because Reform has so often been stigmatized—ignorantly if not maliciously—as antinomian, almost Pauline, in its alleged renunciation of Torah (both Mosaic and Talmudic), and as assimilationist in its alleged repudiation of Jewish peoplehood.

Granted, the words Halachah and K’lal Yisroel upon the lips of these men do not mean what they mean upon the lips of Orthodox rabbis—if they did, there would be no differences at all between them. But what they do imply is that these differences do not form an insurmountable stone wall, but a line that can be crossed. However, there should not be any misunderstanding about this: Reform has no intention of dissolving itself, of adopting a program of “appeasement”; it does not propose to return to the Orthodox fold. Reform is self-critical, but it is also critical of Orthodoxy and Conservatism. When Professor Atlas of Hebrew Union College paraphrased Kant’s famous dictum to say that Reform’s danger is emptiness, Orthodoxy’s blindness, and Conservatism’s something of both, he reflected, not a capitulatory mood, but the determination of Reform’s six hundred rabbis to put aside all complacency and reexamine, ponder, and reflect.

This mood of reexamination found expression in comments by Rabbi Freehof and Professor Eugene Mihaly, one of the younger teachers at Hebrew Union College. Rabbi Freehof, a distinguished scholar and teacher of Reform, the author of several books on Reform practices and duties, put it this way: “To us the word of God is in the ethical commandments. . . . Reform must select from Halachah. Halachah must be guidance and not governance.” In extolling the crispness and lucidity of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, Rabbi Freehof, too, paid homage to Halachah: “Jewish Halachic literature is magnificent thinking and very poor writing. But Maimonides put rabbinic literature in superb Hebrew. He translated eternal law into imperishable art.”

Rabbi Freehof’s remarks were in response to a learned and thoughtful paper on Maimonides by Professor Mihaly entitled, significantly, “Reform and Halachah—the Contemporary Relevance of the Mishneh Torah.” The colloquy between Freehof and Mihaly, representatives, respectively, of the older and the younger generations, showed perhaps more than anything else how Reform is working out a policy—if not a philosophy, much less a code—of its own on Halachah. Professor Mihaly characterized Halachah in a manner that would have warned the heart of the most Orthodox Jew: “Halachah represents the totality of the demands of God as defined by Judaism and realized in Jewish experience.” He further asserted: “There is no Judaism without Halachah.”

But Orthodoxy could not have rejoiced in what followed; for Professor Mihaly hastened to add that the b’nai Halachah, the sons of the Halachah, must be the bonai Halachah, its builders, too. For Freehof and Mihaly, and Reform in general, Judaism’s mission is to select, modify, and apply Halachah in some harmony with the predicaments and conditions of today’s living. It is no contradiction to equate Halachah with God’s demands and at the same time require the b’nai Halachah to be the bonai Halachah, its builders and creators—because, as they saw it, Judaism knows God’s demands only as they are “realized in Jewish experience” (to use Professor Mihaly’s own words).

Judaism as an evolving religion, as a religion whose God is the living Lord of history—in Paul Tillich’s terminology, as a religion that stresses the infra-historical in contrast with Christianity’s emphasis on the trans-historical—could not remain stationary, timeless, metaphysical. God’s demands required constant deepening and redefinition, from Abraham to Moses, from Hosea to Ezra, from the Pharisaic sages to the later rabbis of the Talmud, and from the Talmud to our own times. The seven centuries’ evolution of the Talmud is itself proof of this. In Halachah (“the totality of the demands of God”), the eternal is wedded to the temporal, everlasting principle seeks expression in the changing circumstances and details of conduct. And so inevitably the b’nai Halachah must also be today, as yesterday, the bonai Halachah.

_____________

The climax of the conference was a symposium on Maimonides. Reform’s eagerness to forge a firmer link with traditional Judaism was clearly evident in the portrayal of the great medieval sage as one who foreshadowed in his own day what Reform was to undertake centuries later. It would be easy to diagnose this as still another sign of the retreat from religious liberalism, of nostalgia for the spiritual securities of yesteryear. However, Reform has no intention of aligning itself with the currently fashionable prophets of anti-rationalism. Reform has taken up Maimonides exactly because his method was always that of rational analysis and argument, because he was no “misologist,” no hater of reason, but an uncompromising foe of superstition, bold enough to cast even those demons out of his Code that the Mishnah itself referred to.

We must remember that Orthodoxy, while it lays claim to Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, approaches his theology with mixed feelings. It places his thirteen articles of faith at the end of the morning prayer, but is dubious about the philosophical foundation and setting of his theology in the introduction to the Mishneh Torah and in the Guide for the Perplexed. Reform, however, finds nothing to gibe at in Maimonides’ philosophical theology. Its own thinking welcomes his insistence on the absolute unity and incorporeality of God; his condemnation of all anthropomorphism, including the semiidolatrous tendencies that managed to cross the threshold of the synagogue; his reliance on negative attributes for a “knowledge” of God; his teachings on immortality, on the Messianic Age, and kindred themes. Not that Reform can accept Maimonides as the sacred source of all theology. But it believes that his wisdom and truth, if taken seriously but not literally, can be of service to a Judaism that wishes to be liberal and forward-looking and yet remain attached to its heritage at the same time.

Of course, historically there was nothing liberal, in the Reform sense, about the “fence” of the Law within which rabbinic Judaism sought to preserve Israel as a “holy people.” Maimonides’ method was indeed one of rational analysis and argument, but always for the sake of Halachah: to sustain it and bequeath it unimpaired to later generations, not to dilute it into something tailor-made to the “needs” (meaning too often the convenience) of Jews living in a particular time or society. The point here, however, is not whether Reform is right in leaning upon Maimonides; what is important is that Reform is aware of the danger of “emptiness,” of isolation from the derech hamelech, the royal road, of historic Judaism.

Is Reform now equipped to find that road? Can it find it without losing in the meantime what is distinctively its own? In short, can it be at once traditional Judaism and Reform?

_____________

III

Despite the soul-searching character of this sixty-fifth convention of Reform’s rabbis (as of all its recent gatherings, rabbinical and lay), it cannot be reported that Reform has as yet truly faced the problem of Halachah in its full scope. On this, it is itself clear and frank. Rabbi Freehof, in an eloquent paper on Jewish education in America, stated: “The Jewish love of learning was the logical product of the Jewish system of education. . . . The influence of the parent was an invitation to shared learning; now—it is to shared indifference. The school now is not the vestibule to Jewish education but the exit from it.”

But isn’t it rather the other way round—wasn’t Jewish education the product of the Jewish love of learning? Wasn’t the love of learning for its own sake—Torah lishmah—prized so highly because it was a learning precisely of Halachah? Traditional Jewish learning could be shared between father and son, rabbi and community, because it was a reading of the “totality of God’s demands” in a very concrete set of texts summing up and embodying an integral civilization, a style of living and a mode of conduct. The talmid hacham, the Jewish sage, the scholar and rabbi, whoever he might be—the rov of a townlet or the Gaon of Vilna—did not live on the periphery of his society but at its vital center; he was not respected because he was different from his fellows but because he was more of what they all were.

On another occasion Rabbi Freehof said: “The question is what can we accept of Halachah without surrendering our freedom as Orthodoxy did?” To which Orthodoxy might reply: “What you call a surrendering of freedom is to us the gaining of a world, of a divine order and purpose in living.” Freedom is not the issue. The issue is rather this: If Orthodoxy’s Halachah has lost its merit, it is not because it is Halachah, an experiment in holiness, but because it is no longer coextensive with life, because it is no longer a style of living, but a set of rituals, observances, and rules governing only a small part of life.

Formerly, Rabbi Freehof told his audience, there were great Jewish books that belonged to all Jews, learned and unlearned; they were a mighty bond joining all our people together. Some of these books were the Tanach (Bible) with Rashi’s commentary (especially the Chumash, or five books of Moses); the Shulhan Aruch, or the code compiled by Joseph Caro; the Ayin Yaakov with its Talmudic tales (the Agadah); and the Yiddish Tsena u’ Re’ena for women, a simple paraphrase of the Pentateuch with Talmudic tales as well as the Haftarot and the five Megillot. In Rabbi Freehof’s judgment, what we need is another such set of books, a small shelf of volumes on Judaism to be our constant companions and to do for us what the older books did for our ancestors.

But can any set of books do for us what they did for our grandparents? For them learning and living were truly one. The past was incorporated in the present, and the present was an integral way of life. “We have lost the art of being alone with a book,” Rabbi Freehof repines; “let us cultivate in our midst men who can be alone with a book.” But our fathers were not alone with a book; they were alone with a sefer. And though all the dictionaries tell us that a sefer is just a book, it is a very special kind of book. There is an aura of holiness about it; a sefer is a rung on Jacob’s ladder that brings man nearer to God, not through mystical contemplation but through dedicated effort to understand how we are to sanctify His world which is also ours. Above all, it is no book that separates you from the community and leads you away into a land of ideas and experiences which are unknown ground to your contemporary fellow Jews. Rashi and Ayin Yaakov and Tsena u’ Re’ena and the Shulhan Aruch surely diminished and perhaps even resolved for our fathers the tension between learning and living. Will this suggested list of volumes—Jewish philosophy and literature and history and law—lessen or augment for us the tension between learning and living, between understanding and commitment, between knowledge and conduct?

“There is no Judaism without Halachah” Mihaly, Freehof, and others confessed at a conference of Reform—not Orthodox—rabbis; and many—perhaps all—assented. But what, in specific consequences, does this mean? How is it to be embodied in life and conduct? These questions were left unanswered.

_____________

Reform faces this dilemma: it cannot realign itself with Orthodoxy, and it cannot devise a Halachah of its own.

Orthodoxy will not revise Halachah and bring it “up to date” because “the Law of the Lord is perfect”; it will permit interpretation, but only within the traditional premises of Halachah. Rabbi Herzog, Chief Rabbi of Israel, has phrased it clearly: “We cannot go beyond the Law. We learn from the impact of the life about us and we institute certain arrangements, within the framework of the Law, whereby adapting life to the Torah, we have found many solutions to so-called religious problems.” Yet the history of Halachah is clearly the history of something that has grown out of life, not of something imposed upon it. Understanding this, there can be no going back for Reform.

Yet Reform cannot create an alternative Halachah of its own overnight, even if it wanted to. Reform’s departures from Halachah are nothing extraordinary in Judaism and, even at that, they are a matter of the slow movement of years. To formulate a new, competing Halachah, a new system of religious law, would be to violate the spirit of Judaism and to erect, moreover, a high wall between Reform and classical Judaism in place of the present tenuous line of demarcation. It would be schismatic. And Reform is determined not to become a schismatic Jewish sect but to keep its place inside the ancient House of Israel.

There is, however, a way open to Reform. Its initial task has been accomplished—the evolutionary modification of religious practice, the loosening of ritualistic fetters, the rediscovery of Judaism’s universal dimensions. In this initial stage, Reform was more concerned with the retention of Judaism as a religious institution than with the Jew in his individual life. It cared more perhaps for decorum and order in the synagogue than for the kavanah, the inner intention, of prayer; it was more preoccupied with adapting Judaism to its surroundings than with affecting the quality of Jewish living. Much of this was necessary and constructive; but the other side of the coin is that this effort at adaptation also tended to convert Reform, in all too many ways, into an easy and comfortable religion with a minimum of commitment.

What Reform requires—what Judaism as a whole in America requires—is a style of life, a mode of conduct, that will identify and distinguish it and yet not cut it off from traditional Judaism and the larger community. It is this idea rather than the concept of an immutable Halachah that promises the most for the future of Judaism in America; it is towards the shaping of such a style of life and mode of conduct that Reform has been groping.

The goal is not easy if Reform is to be authoritative without becoming authoritarian, if it is to develop a set of commitments that will remain binding despite lack of supernatural sanction. Is it really true that the ethical imperatives of religion must lose their force as a discipline in living unless they are given a supra-historical and suprahumanist status and are invested with a divine origin? Was the 13th century, when the divine origin of the Ten Commandments was taken for granted, a more moral century than the 19th with its scientific and philosophical quests? Ultimately, all values must be justified as a deepening and enrichment of life in both its individual and social possibilities, and as a fulfillment of man’s “destiny” to make himself in the image of God. Therein lies the objectivity of values, their inherence in the nature of things.

Halachah as such is the Jewish Imitatio Dei, just as constitutional government as such is the basis of the democratic state; Halachah may change and constitutions may be amended, but Judaism needs Halachah just as the democratic state needs constitutional government if it is to endure. Reform’s task is to develop a style of life, a set of commitments, a structure of meritorious deeds, in continuity with classical Jewish tradition and yet in keeping with our own times, in the spirit of a minhag America.

_____________

There are words that sum up our social and religious experience as a millennial people. There are for example: mitzvah, averah, teshuvah, geulah, Kiddush Hashem, and so forth. A Judaism in which these notions are no longer strongly impressed on our daily living would lack all content and direction; and many fear that American Judaism, Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox, has arrived at that stage. But perhaps we are too pessimistic. A friend of mine tells me of a conversation with a busy, important man, two generations removed from any connection with the synagogue, who startled him with the remark, “I hope you can manage to help out on this; it would be a real mitzvah.” It is easy enough to minimize this as a meaningless relapse into a forgotten way of seeing things, really just a matter of words and not of moral vision.

I should like to suggest, however, that no Jew who identifies a good deed as a mitzvah has been wholly alienated from the Jewish way. There is of course considerable distance between the casual mention of the word mitzvah and the type of commitment that Judaism defines as mitzvot maasiyot, precepts of action. Mitzvah and averah were not confined in the usage of our parents to religion in the narrow ritualistic sense, but actually signified religion as ethos, moral conduct that figured forth the divine. Similarly, such phrases as an erlicher Yid, an upright Jew, and es passt nit, it is not becoming, were not mere phrases, but imperatives and affirmations standing for the highest values in the tradition of our parents. In the ghettos and communities of Europe, in the homes and synagogues and market places of our parents, there was a strong religious conviction that such and such must be the conduct of a Jew, this was how a good Jew ought to behave.

Much of this has survived in America: we can see it in the record of our past here, and all around us in the present. We can see it in the help provided the immigrant by the landsmanshaften ; in the Jewish unions of an earlier day and fraternal organizations such as the Workmen’s Circle and the Labor Zionist Farband with their emphasis on mutual aid and cooperation; in such civic organizations as the American Jewish Committee and the various defense agencies; in the magnitude of Jewish overseas relief during the two world wars, and for Palestine, and now for Israel; in the vast network of community-supported social welfare and medical institutions and agencies that American Jews have built. All these institutions have been closer to the Jewish past than they themselves suspect, and they are what they are because that past was what it was. And this is equally true of Reform Judaism, whose adherents played so large a role in creating these American Jewish institutions.

We can see all this plainly if we recall the institutions and customs in that past which gave substance to the ethos of our parents. Here are some: bikkur holim, visiting the sick; nihum aveilim, comforting the bereaved; hachnoses orhim, sheltering and helping the stranger and the traveler; gemilas hasodim, lending money without interest to those in financial distress; tomche aniyim, aiding the needy of all sorts. There were other “rules,” too, to cope with all the vicissitudes of life in the community, and it is here obviously that much of the original inspiration behind Jewish philanthropy, domestic and overseas, can be found; and it is equally clear that this motivation, in changed and perhaps attenuated form, still exists and has the power to move. But “social service” has become, inevitably and properly, professionalized, and unless we can find some way to restore the religious ethic of tzedakah, is there not danger that the animating impulse will wither?

It will be helpful here to realize that behind the specific Halachic prescriptions, which once governed life but have since lost much of their particular applicability, there was also a “transcendent” and general element, a broad overarching normative commitment. We can see this expressed in the concept of Kiddush Hashem, denoting Jewish martyrdom, the readiness to die for the Ehad, for the God of Israel. But this same force also shaped the homeliest and plainest conduct, and even manners. Any gracious act, any indication of man’s goodness and spirituality, was referred to as Kiddush Hashem. And the expression an “upright Jew” meant not only one who observed all the detail of the commandments and the ritual injunctions, but one who was wholehearted and upright, doing good and shunning evil. By that same token, any unkindness, any boorish act, any disrespect of learning, any diminution of the tselem Elohim, the “divine image” in man, was described as a hillul Hashem. Why cannot Reform make the concepts of Kiddush Hashem and hillul Hashem part of our living in America today?

_____________

IV

Religion in America tends to be easy, to serve as an anodyne and provider of “peace of mind.” Reform too has inclined to be a religion of accommodation, suiting itself to pleasant family life in a world that is supposed to be getting better and better. But central in Reform has been the Messianic doctrine of the ethical and spiritual redemption of man and society. Are we to believe that the Messianic dream has already been fulfilled, that we have entered into the Kingdom?

Reform stresses—in Rabbi Freehof’s formulation—the ethical commandments of Judaism. Yet in practice, in daily living, how does Reform differ from Orthodoxy, or from any religious group that does not place its chief emphasis on the ethical commandments as mandate both for the individual and the community? How is one to explain the lukewarm attitude of Reform’s latest conference toward some of the issues of our day that are not transient political controversies but concern the survival of the very foundations of the Judeo-Christian ethos and heritage? One noted with disappointment that the ever present menace of Communist totalitarianism went virtually unmentioned at a conference of men who cherish the prophetic teachings and their passion for righteousness and human dignity.

This was of course no sign whatsoever of sympathy; but was it not a sign of incomprehension and partial spiritual insensitivity? Isn’t it just at a conference of rabbis that the threat of Communism to what is most precious in the Jewish and human heritage should be clarified and exposed—and not in the routine phrases of politics, but in the language of those whose first and final concern is with the great imperative in Leviticus—“proclaim liberty throughout the land”? Does not one have a right to expect that out of such a conference as this ringing words would come to arouse the conscience of the lethargic and the unimaginative to the abomination that is Soviet totalitarianism?

One noted, too, not much sign of the spirit of prophetic ardor or of rabbinic ethic in what was said about Israel. Israel’s achievements received the praise they merited; but one would not know from the convention that there was a Kibya, too, that there are Arab refugees, that the Arab minority in Israel—like the Jews in the Diaspora—complain about restrictions on their rights, that, indeed, Liberal Judaism itself is denied the right to its full and free expression in the new state.

Much was heard about the evils of McCarthyism at the convention. But one noted that hardly a phrase was uttered on this subject that was not an echo of what had already been proclaimed from a hundred platforms—honest, sincere, but pale and stereotyped. The words lacked any special Jewish, rabbinical ring. As it happens, one of the profoundest Hebraic contributions to religious thinking is the notion of repentance, teshuvah : literally, a return, but a return to righteousness, to wholeness, a restoration of the harmony between man, society, and God. Who if not a rabbi should remind us that an important element in the evil that is McCarthyism is its refusal to acknowledge the reality and the cleansing power of repentance, of teshuvah; that McCarthyism’s essential sin consists precisely in the fact that, far from accepting or encouraging a change of heart in the Communist, it cuts him off forever from any possibility of reform and redemption?

_____________

Judaism has exulted in the beauty of holiness. But what happens to the beauty and the holiness of the Sabbath eve when after a short service and an earnest sermon there follows a crude program of “professional entertainment” with song and dance and jokes? It was fine to have, as we noted, the Sabbath greeting so warmly exchanged. But it was a little bewildering to observe hundreds of rabbis sitting down to three sumptuous meals a day for almost a week in a lavish summer resort, without a b’rachah, a benediction, a word of “grace” upon their lips to sanctify the bread they ate.

If Reform is to cull from Halachah the highest ethical and spiritual commandments of Judaism, if it is to preserve the best of Jewish tradition and insight into the nature of man and his relations with his fellows and with God, if it hopes to create a style of life for American Jews in consonance with their spirit, it cannot easily give up such disciplines, such modes of ceremony and of conduct (nor fail to create new ones)—both holy and beautiful—as are implicit in the “making” of the b’rachah.

_____________

No specific “program” can be sketched for Reform, nor indeed for American Judaism as a whole. That is our common enterprise, but we are not groping in darkness. The basic human decencies, the quality of Jewish uprightness, the character of Jewish religious commitment—these are not a strange land waiting to be discovered, but something immediately available to us in our past and even in the present, and in large degree among Reform Jews as among the adherents of the other variants of Jewish religion. Time, however, is necessary for the shaping of a Jewish style of life in America. And, more important, there must also be the will and vision for it. This will and vision must reach out to the home (if the idolatry of television, the card table, the dinner table, and all the latest comfort-serving contraptions are not to push out all else), to the synagogue and temple (if entertainment, “uplift,” and popular lectures and mere “activities” are not to blot out entirely the “experience of holiness”), to the Sunday school and afternoon schools, and to the office, store, and factory.

Reform’s allegiance to the millennial Shema, “Hear, O Israel: the Eternal our God, the Eternal is One,” is unquestioned and unquestionable. But there is an ethical and religious corollary to the Shema: it is the great imperative: “Be ye a holy people unto Me, for I your God am a holy God.” The fulfillment of this imperative is Israel’s continuous vocation, its Imitatio Dei. Here Reform has faltered, as all of us who live in time and finitude must in some degree falter. But its aspiration today is to falter less, to approximate more nearly the fulfillment of the great imperative in our day, so that it may be more truly both Reform and Judaism. Its opportunity is great—but it has done hardly more than enter on the task.

_____________

¹ One must claim a divine sanction—in the literal sense—if one insists, as does Orthodoxy, that a specific Halachah, in all its detail, is a final and closed system to be followed for all time. But to believe in Halachah, as such, as the Jewish view of the religious life, as a discipline of life, requires only “objective”—not divine—validation. Such validation can be found in the wisdom of experience, in the voice of the heart. And there is also the exacting test of consequences: the efficacy of Halachah in Jewish history, not as a dead hand of the past, but as a “pillar of fire” to illumine the present and the future. Beyond this, Reform would seem to suggest, there is no certainty.