Trends in Reform and their broader implications.

Grossman, Lawrence K.

THE REFORM MOVEMENT HAS CONTRIBUTED SIGNIFICANTLY to Jewish life, and its future course is bound to affect the fate of Jews in the United States and around the world.

Beginning in early nineteenth-century Germany, when an insular traditional Judaism, just emerging from the ghetto, found itself incapable of addressing the corrosive challenges of modernity, Reform showed that one could retain Jewish identity while participating fully in the majority culture. In this respect Reform blazed a trail for other Diaspora Jews, who today navigate comfortably between their Jewish and secular worlds--if sometimes in ways that would not have made the founders of Reform happy. Even the most religiously Orthodox accept, albeit only de facto, the necessity for some acculturation in order to preserve their way of life, implicitly testifying to the truth of Reform's insight, the need for some synthesis between tradition and modernity.

It was Reform, too, that pioneered an active Jewish public-policy role within the Western nation-state, an imperative now taken for granted in Jewish circles far removed from Reform. This has been especially true in the United States, where Reform took the lead in applying Jewish teachings to the struggle for social and economic justice. The Jewish push for religious dialogue with the Christian world was a Reform innovation, and the ramified pattern of American Jewish organizational life would be unthinkable without the early efforts of Jews largely associated with Reform. The movement produced great leaders--Stephen Wise and Abba Hillel Silver come to mind--who were esteemed by Jews across the ideological spectrum.

Given the central importance of Reform in Jewish life, it is strange indeed that Dana Kaplan's American Reform Judaism is the first book to present a complete and coherent picture of what has become the largest stream of Judaism in the United States. Kaplan traces Reform's history, theology, liturgy, educational efforts, activities in Israel--and, more controversially, its outreach to the intermarried, gays, and lesbians, and the "patrilineal descent" ruling granting Jewish status to the children of Jewish fathers and Gentile mothers. Immediately upon publication, American Reform Judaism became the standard work on the subject.

As a guide to contemporary Reform, American Reform Judaism is a worthy sequel to Response to Modernity, Michael Meyer's magisterial history of the world-wide Reform movement from its German origins two centuries ago until the late 1970s. But the two books are sharply different in tone, both because so much has changed over the last quarter-century and because Kaplan, unlike the full-time academic Meyer, has had considerable experience "in the trenches" as a congregational rabbi. The view from the pulpit is likely to be less rosy than from the seminar room.

The Reform Judaism that Meyer portrayed certainly had its problems, but was, nevertheless, bursting with optimism. "In many respects it remains internally divided," Meyer concluded his book. "But with fresh growth, creativity, and an expression of unity, it completed the 1970s with greater self-confidence and better founded hope."

Kaplan is far more ambivalent about Reform's course and future prospects, and he signals his own mixed feelings by having Arthur Hertzberg, an outspoken critic of Reform, write the foreword, and Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism and the acknowledged leader of American Reform, the afterword.

Several of the book's chapters, rich in factual information and interpretive insight, yet reveal unresolved tension, as if Kaplan is struggling to force himself to believe that Reform, despite the evidence he himself adduces, is on the right track after all. Often, he uses the final paragraphs of chapters to lend a note of optimism to otherwise sobering findings.

Two examples illustrate Kaplan's uncertainty. The chapter on Jewish education describes the abysmally low standards that prevail in Reform schools, but ends with the incredible assertion that the great German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig would be pleased with the way Reform was responding to the challenge of transmitting Jewish learning to the next generation. And in the chapter detailing how Reform overrode centuries of Jewish tradition to equalize heterosexual and homosexual relationships--"It is hard to imagine a single prophet finding the idea even remotely acceptable," he points out--Kaplan closes with good news that is dependent on a trite hypothetical: "If gays and lesbians indeed commit themselves to making Reform Judaism even more vibrant, then the Reform revolution will certainly succeed" (p. 232).

The specter that haunts Kaplan throughout the book is the possibility that the numerical growth of Reform Judaism has come at a terrible price: the abandonment of any guidelines, let alone requirements, for affiliation. Identification with Reform, in all too many cases, is nothing more than the default position for people who are Jews in name only--and sometimes not even that, as many Reform congregations encourage the participation, in varying degrees, of unconverted, non-Jewish spouses of members, and of children who are being raised as both Christians and Jews. Contemporary sociologists of religion have learned from the great flowering of fundamentalist forms of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam that religions making the heaviest demands and requiring the most sacrifices are the most successful, leaving us wondering about the future of Reform.

That a good number of younger Reform Jews are observing more religious rituals than their parents hardly compensates for the collapse of official standards since, as Kaplan notes, these observances mostly stem from a longing for "spirituality." Hence their selective nature, as people conduct a kind of cherry-picking of those rites that evoke subjective feelings of transcendence. The Reform outreach mantra, "We are all Jews by choice," is a far cry from the sense of Divine commandment that has been central to Judaism from its earliest days, and still flourishes in traditional circles.

To be sure, Reform from the start was based upon rejection of the Shulhan Arukh, the code of Jewish law, or any other compulsory standard for the conduct of Jewish life. Indeed, Kaplan demonstrates in detail how averse Reform Jews are toward having anyone tell them what to do. He describes how a set of suggested, nonbinding guidelines for reintroducing certain traditional practices, reflecting the new interest in ritual, was rewritten six times, the end product so watered down that by the time the Central Conference of American Rabbis voted approval in 1999, it had become almost meaningless.

But Kaplan senses that over the last generation, Reform antinomianism has developed a new dimension. It no longer simply denies the authority of Jewish law, but embraces a postmodern erasure of all conventional boundaries. The unprecedented openness of American society to Jews, leading inevitably to rising rates of Jewish-Christian marriage, and the collapse of traditional values among much of the college-educated population have undermined taken-for-granted standards that even the most theologically radical Reform Jew before the 1960s would not have questioned.

For all of Classical Reform's insistence on the inviolability of personal conscience, and its willingness to accommodate, de facto, the life choices of individuals, the movement, up until just a few decades ago, unequivocally denounced intermarriage as a threat to Jewish survival. Officiating at a mixed marriage made the rabbi a pariah among his colleagues, and did not challenge, in principle, the rule that the mother's religious identity determined that of the child. One can only imagine what the great historical leaders of Reform, believers in the traditional family, would have said about same-sex marriage. Suffice it to recall the late Jakob Petuchowski's comment on Reform's espousal of unrestricted abortion rights--that a movement that began by rejecting ceremonial law in favor of ethics had ended by abandoning ethics as well, and, like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, it had ceased to exist as a living entity, leaving nothing behind but its smile.

Simply put, while Reform has always resisted the imposition of religious obligations on the individual, in our time it has lost the power to resist American culture, which values autonomy, inclusivity, and nonjudgmentalism. It is a culture that distrusts distinctions--between religions, between genders, between sexual orientations--and views them as discrimination. While hardly alone in the Jewish community in succumbing to the relativist pull of postmodernity, Reform is its primary institutional expression. This is surely ironic, given the movement's original "prophetic" impetus; the biblical prophets were, after all, nonconformists who defied the conventional wisdom of their times and were sometimes made to suffer for it.

The awkward use of prophetic rhetoric in defense of what is popular in liberal circles may help explain why Reform pronouncements often sound so hollowly grandiose. The movement's criticisms of Israeli policies, for example, are often couched in the self-righteous language of "telling truth to power," while in substance they follow the standard line espoused by those in "power"--in the UN, academia, the media, and elsewhere--that Palestinians are a victim people and Israelis their oppressors. In fairness, such Reform statements became rarer with the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000. Kaplan cites another delicious example of misplaced Reform prophetism, the widely publicized decision of Rabbi Paul Menitoff, executive vice president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, to resign from the Boy Scouts of America and make the ultimate sacrifice of returning his Eagle Scout badge in protest over the organization's firing of a gay scout leader.

American Reform Judaism has implications far beyond the confines of the movement it studies. Since Reform has been so central to the development of American Jewry as a whole, and the openness and freedom it espouses has made it the Judaism of choice for a plurality of American Jews today, other denominational expressions are affected by its actions.

It is often said that Conservative Judaism, despite its official adherence to traditional Jewish law, is only ten years or so behind Reform. Conservative Jews are buffeted by the same social forces as their Reform cousins, and the pressures to readjust religious norms to fit are intense. Ask any Conservative rabbi, and he or she will describe how congregants cannot understand the exclusionary policy whereby the movement bars its rabbis from performing Jewish-Christian weddings, thereby alienating the young people. The recent surge in Reform membership has come mostly at the expense of Conservative Judaism, which is losing out on the growing number of intermarried families. While the current major conflict roiling Conservative waters concerns gay marriage and the ordination of gay rabbis, once that is resolved (inevitably in the affirmative), officiating at intermarriages and the Jewish status of the children will be next on the agenda. A substantial segment of the Conservative laity are reportedly already in favor of following Reform and adopting the patrilineal-descent criterion.

If developments within Reform have pulled Conservative Judaism in untraditional directions, they have had the opposite effect within the precincts of Orthodoxy. There is much less anti-Reform (and anti-Conservative) invective from Orthodox leaders now than there was a half-century ago. This is not because Orthodox antagonism to the non-Orthodox movements has lessened; quite the contrary. Whereas Orthodox rabbis used to see the more liberal streams as real threats, offering Jews alternative ways to practice the faith that were less demanding and more in consonance with modern ways, they now believe that Jewish expressions outside of Orthodoxy are simply doomed to disappear as they make their peace with the inexorable tide of intermarriage, below-replacement-level birthrates, and rampant cultural assimilation. Why attack an opponent, they reason, who is busy destroying itself? The isolationist tendencies in Orthodoxy, embodied in the smug notion that it alone carries the key to Jewish continuity, are encouraged by the revolutionary changes in Reform that Kaplan delineates.

Much, then, is riding on the future of the Reform movement. Will it somehow manage to remain Jewish in essence as well as in name, providing institutional proof that Judaism can thrive while engaging the secular society in which it lives? Or will it prove, in the end, a terminal form of a once-great religion called Judaism, disappearing into the postmodern American melting-pot, leaving only sectarian Orthodox Jews behind to gloat, "We told you so"?

The ultimate fate of Reform, of course, is beyond our ken. But Dana Kaplan's American Reform Judaism provides the available evidence for anyone seeking to formulate an educated guess.

LAWRENCE GROSSMAN is co-editor of the American Jewish Year Book and Associate Director of Research at the American Jewish Committee. Beginning in 1988, his annual articles on "Jewish Communal Affairs" for the Year Book have traced the development of Judaism in contemporary America.