Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Ph.D.

One of the hottest religious topics nowadays is “deconversion,” a word so new that it has yet to enter the official lexicon of most official English Dictionaries. The APA (American Psychological Association) describes it as “loss of one’s faith in a religion, as in a Catholic of many years who becomes an atheist or agnostic.” Jews might consider the concept alien, since we hardly have a religious “faith” to lose. 

We became a “faith,” after all, only under duress — in order to justify our citizenship in the post-Napoleonic nation states. We couldn’t be both Americans and Jews by nationality, and the western world didn’t recognize our traditional category of peoplehood, so we agreed to call ourselves a “religion,” which is to say, a “faith.” 

But we all know that Judaism is more than that. Christians who deny their faith become unchurched, lapsed, “deconverted.” Jews who leave the synagogue are not called “unsynagogued.” Even the most marginal Jews don’t use the word “lapsed.” But what about the new term, “deconverted”? Can Jews deconvert?

They can, and here is why.

Unlike Christianity, it has little to do with belief. Indeed, you have to work very hard to be read out of Judaism on grounds of belief alone. Most obviously you can adopt Jesus as your messiah; Jews for Jesus seems hopelessly oxymoronic to us. But we are not consistent. Lots of Jews are Buddhists too, Jubus: and we have no problem with that, because Buddhism too is more than just a religion, whereas Christianity, in theory, is not.

To be sure, in practice, Christianity too is a mixture of things: ethnic origins, for example (Italian, Irish and Polish Catholics are all Catholics even though they differ from one another). But whatever kind of Catholic you are, if you denounce the pope and renounce Catholic dogma and practice, you have deconverted. Jews who do not believe in God and ignore Jewish practice may still say they are Jewish and be counted as such. Hitler would have killed them; Israel is full of them.

So Jewish deconversion is about something other than faith. 

The equivalent of “faith” for us is identification as a member of the Jewish People, which we measure in two ways: how much we consider world Jewry to be “our people”; and whether we view Jewish history as “our story.” Think of the “evil child” at the seder, whose “sin” is asking “What is the point of this ritual to you” not “to me.” 

To all intents and purposes, both of these measures (people and story) have long been condensed into two pivotal symbolic events: the Sho’ah and Zionism. The former was the nightmare of our people almost destroyed. The latter was the dream of our people reborn and reunited with its past in the land of Abraham and Sarah; David and Solomon, Isaiah and Jeremiah.

Deconversion for Jews, then, is the process of turning one’s back on Jews across the globe, but especially in Israel (where almost half the world’s Jews now live); and opting out of Jewish history, especially where classical Zionism is concerned. So yes, Jews can “deconvert” and for the first time in memory, large numbers of them are doing so.

I mean, of course, young Jews with no memory of Israel before Netanyahu as prime minister: the growing cohort of Jews for whom Zionism is neither the Herzlian haven against anti-Semitism, nor the Ahad Ha’amian renaissance of Jewish culture — but rather, another right-wing state increasingly dominated by the West Bank settler movement and by ultra-Orthodox Haredim. The Gaza war is a tragedy on all counts: above all, the brutal Hamas attack itself, but also the military response (whether necessary or deplorable or both) which threatens to make Israel a pariah state, and which is catalyzing the next Jewish generation to renounce and to denounce – not the pope and Catholic teaching, but the Jewish state – both its people and its story. 

It follows that we can learn a lot from studies of Christian deconversion.

*

1. Just giving our current generational alienation the neutral name of “deconversion” helps us think creatively about it. 

2.  Deconversion is best approached less as a sin than as a strategy, by which the deconverters respond to an overwhelming sense that they just cannot go on as they are without threatening their deepest moral convictions. They seek authenticity: a match between what their innermost selves affirm as true and the kind of world they can uphold and call their own. At stake for them is not just what they say but who they are.

3. Deconversion typically unfolds in stages. The Gaza war is not so much the beginning of it all as it is the most recent and most threatening next step of many. When young people first question their traditional familial values – as they have already, on many matters — they begin to feel isolated, as if being among their parents’ generation is like living among strangers. They gravitate to others like themselves, lest they suffer the loneliness of being a cognitive minority of one — even at the cost of turning a blind eye to ways in which those ideological “others” may actually be very different. Hence the phenomenon of Jews who protest the war alongside some otherwise questionable allies, rather than revert to the loneliness of ideological solitude. 

4. When people begin to deconvert, the absolute worst opposing strategy is to double down in denunciation: to “just say no.” Those who flirt with deconversion would really prefer remaining within the fold, if only the fold turns out to have some place for them. More than they choose freely to leave, they feel forced out, because the establishment is beyond even discussing matters with them, let alone conceding that what they feel so strongly about may have some moral merit. 

5. As with all conflicts, simply debating the actual point of conflict is unlikely to change positions. A better policy is organizing conversations about what lies behind the conflict, in this case, discussions like: What about Judaism matters to you? What can we all agree upon as the redeeming factors about Israel? What kind of Israel would we like to see? Where might we agree that it has gone wrong? What might a better Jewish community here at home look like? 

Such conversations are unlikely to occur while the war goes on and Jews on both sides get increasingly locked into their own respective positions. But until calmer times arrive, we can at least avoid mistaking would-be deconversionists as “the enemy.” Just resisting the vitriol will pay huge dividends later. 

---

^[i] I am indebted to the following sources on deconversion.

Barbour, John. Versions of Deconversion: Autobiography and the Loss of Faith (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994).

Bielo, James S. Emerging Evangelicals: Faith, Modernity and the Desire for Authenticity (New York and London: New York University Press, 2011).

Harding, Susan. “Converted By the Holy Spirit: the Rhetoric of Fundamental Baptist Conversion,” in American Ethnologist (14:1) February 1987:167-181.

Hempton, David. Evangelical Disenchantment: Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

Marriott, John. The Anatomy of Deconversion: Keys to a Lifelong faith in a Culture Abandoning Christianity (Abilene: Abilene Christian University Press, 2020).

Stromberg, Peter G. Language and Self-Transformation: A Study of the Christian Conversion Narrative(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

[What follows are two different versions of the script’s conclusion, one that was used and one that was not. Looming over the decision was the question of how we should acknowledge the sins of our URJ past, the instances of sexual misconduct portrayed in the Debevoise-Plimpton Report of 2022, but also the parallel reports undertaken by HUC and the CCAR. Knowing that public apologies had been made by all these institutions, and that Rabbi Rick Jacobs was planning on apologizing once again as part of the 150^th-anniversary weekend, but prior to the Saturday night performance, I did not write yet another apology into that performance itself.

When the committee of readers met, it was felt that the script needed such an apology; and that, also, we ought to apologize for yet another blot on our past, the many years of bias against women, LGBTQ+, and Jews of color. These issues had been explored in Acts 1 and 2, but the committee felt an actual final apology was in order. 

I therefore wrote a second version of the conclusion, which highlighted “confession of these sins” by drawing on al chet, from Yom Kippur. Judaism forbids ending any Torah or haftarah reading on a negative note, so (wanting to end on a note of promise, nechemta, as it is called), I moved from confession to profession, acknowledging our past accomplishments and looking toward a future where we might continue contributing to the story of the Jewish People and the moral compass of the world.  

It might have been possible to combine the two versions, but in the interests of time, we used only the second version. The first version did not even get to the point of final editing.

Still, I provide both versions here. I’d love to know which version you prefer, and whether you think we should have combined them both somehow.

Both versions ended with a series of leaders in our movement putting on a tallit and crafting their own version of “I am a Jew because….” Some of them sent me what they wanted to say in advance; others did not. Having just a partial record of their remarks, I am not including any of them here. I can say, however, that their statements were exceptionally moving.

One more thing. The idea of punctuating the script with “I am a Jew because….” came from Why I am a Jew  (Pourquoi Je Suis Juif, 1927), a by-now famous literary work by French Jew Edmond Fleg (1874-1963). The original version introduced the affirmations by our leaders today with Fleg’s own words of yesterday. The version that we used does not – it was dropped for purposes of time.

*

VERSION ONE (that we did not use)

Let me tell you about progress. 

Progress is the difference 

between the world getting larger 

and the world getting smaller.

For countless millennia, 

Our ancestors were not Jews.

Not Abrahams and Sarahs,

But Adams and Eves.

They lived in tiny bands — large families, perhaps,

Their lives were short, 

Their imagination of the world’s enormity shorter. 

In time, the Sarahs and Abrahams arrived, 

The Josephs encountered empire,

Egypt at its height.

For their descendants,

The world was a trek across a desert,

The distance between old Pithom and Raamses at one end

And Jerusalem at the other,

On ancient Hebrew maps, and minds,

The Mediterranean was The yam hagadol, “the Great sea,” 

The largest that could be imagined. 

As the centuries unfolded

We Jews moved with them,

Mostly enjoying, but sometimes just enduring, 

Each and every chapter of Western history, 

Watching the world expand:

To Babylonia and Persia,

Then in caravans of Muslim trade,

Across North Africa, 

The magreb, “the west,” we thought it was, 

And all the way to Spain.

Then Italy, and over the Alps to Germany, France, and beyond,

Thinking Europe, for quite some time,

Not just the center of the world, 

But practically the only world there was, 

Until the explorers – of oceans, not just seas —

Whose ships maneuvered dangerous capes with fancy names,

The cape at Africa’s tip, 

Where turbulent seas could kill you, 

But aptly named

The “Cape of Good Hope.”

The world was expanding,

And with it, our imagination, as well.

As the world expanded. 

So too did human cruelty.

Conquering armies slaughtered and enslaved 

And called it “Discovering.”

It’s not the moral compass I’m describing, but the geographical one,

The simple truth that most of human history saw the world getting larger.

That giant wave of world-expansion hit its peak and then receded,

Leaving in its wake a world that gets smaller every day.

Railroads, airplanes, telegraphs, phones, the internet – 

The people we once knew as strangers are now our neighbors. 

*

Reform Judaism is the chapter in our people’s history when the world began to shrink. Having once been strangers, we chose to see the larger human story as our own. Medieval Jews told the tale of Christians and Muslims, both, oppressing us; Reform Jews changed the story. They projected a time when Jews and Christians, Jew and Muslims, all the world’s peoples, would march through history, linked arm to arm, and declare the shrunken world a single neighborhood.

*

Neighbors, unlike strangers, cannot be ignored,

And history will judge us 

On how well we measure up 

To the Reform mandate of our Jewish past:

It is our religious mission

To instruct the world on the heart of the stranger and the would-be neighbor;

And, ourselves,

To live the prophetic dream 

On which our Reform fathers and mothers staked their faith.

*

Edmond Fleg, born Edmond Flegenheimer, in 1864, was an assimilated Jew. Finding nothing spiritual in the Judaism that surrounded him, he abandoned organized religion and became a liberal intellectual in Paris, with no Jewish ties at all. 

Just a weeks after he turned thirty, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army, was charged and tried for the crime of treason. Despite ample evidence that he had been framed, Dreyfus was relegated to rot in a cell on Devil’s Island, where he almost died. He was eventually released, but by then, the shock of seeing ordinary Parisians parading through the streets with anti-Semitic signs, reawoke Fleg to his Jewish identity. Another assimilated Jew, Theodor Herzl, covered the trials as a correspondent for a Viennese newspaper. Herzl founded Zionism, Fleg became a Zionist, and became convinced, “I was a Jew, essentially a Jew.”  

But knowing himself as well to be “of France, a Frenchman,” he sought the religious realities that made Judaism worth espousing, then listed them in a book entitled, Why I am a Jew.

Although he may not have known it – Reform Judaism was still taking shape, mostly  in Germany, not in France — his list was fully Reform in substance. They are now part of our Reform prayer book, a testimony to the power of Reform as an idea. 

*

[the following go on a screen, select individual voices read each line] 

I am a Jew because the faith of Israel demands of me no abdication of the mind.
I am a Jew because the faith of Israel requires of me all the devotion of my heart.
I am a Jew because in every place where suffering weeps, the Jew weeps.
I am a Jew because at every time when despair cries out, the Jew hopes.
I am a Jew because the word of Israel is the oldest and the newest.
I am a Jew because the promise of Israel is the universal promise.
I am a Jew because, for Israel, the world is not yet completed; humanity is completing it.
I am a Jew because, above the nations and Israel, Israel places the unity of humanity.

*

The most interesting part of Fleg’s book is his dedication. He wrote it not just for himself, but dedicated to his as yet unborn grandchild.

And that is why we meet tonight, to dedicate ourselves.

Not for ourselves alone, 

But for the as yet unborn Jewish generations.

It is to them, that we now pledge our faith.

(Conclusion with tallitot and “I am a Jew” statements: Final singing, Halleluyah)

****

VERSION TWO (the version that we used)

Judaism floats upon the changing tides of time,

But as much as every wave may look the same, 

The one that matters most is the one that we are riding, 

And some waves crash upon the shores of Jewish destiny with particular promise.

Such was the wave of light and hope 

That broke upon the sands of our medieval Jewish past,

And then receded,

Carrying away the notion that Judaism could not change,

And leaving in its wake the refreshing joy of possibility

That we now call Reform.

Such too is the wave which washes over us even now, 

The re-reforming of Reform.

A sign of the times is our revisiting of our past,

Glorious indeed, but not without blemish,

Some blemishes of magnitude enough

To merit the hideous label, “sin.”

We have begun to comprehend the sin of sexual abuse,

Abetted by the sin of silence over time.

Al chet shechatanu…

To the victims and before God,

We admit and repent of such abuse among our ranks.

At last, too, we have begun 

To cleanse our house of the toxic idea 

That tribe and people are the same.

We are indeed a people, not a tribe

And tribal prejudice disappears — only very slowly,

Especially against Jews of color.

Al chet shechatanu…

To the victims and before God,

We admit and repent of the sin of tribal thinking.

*

But let us do more than confess.

Let us profess too,

Profess with pride the indelible impact for good 

That we properly remember as our story.

{this paragraph was dropped, to save time; I add it in here.

Those headier times,

When the founders of Reform 

Did more than move their homes outside the ghetto walls.

When they moved their minds as well into the wider world,

Committed to the promise of a universal God

Who tasks the Jewish People with a mission,

The “mission of Israel,” they said,

Not just to bring God’s presence into the world, 

But to be God’s presence within the world.}

Let us look ahead,

To contemplate the privilege 

Of charting a future brighter still.

We are not done yet!

“For everything there is a season,” we Jews know,

“A time for every matter under heaven. 

A time to be born and a time to die….

A time to break down and time to build up.”

We pray with all our might 

That the faults which we confess 

Will die, break down, dissipate, dissolve, and disappear.

Let them be carried out to sea by the tidal wave of change and challenge

That washes clean offensive residue of former times,

And leaves behind a vacuum to be filled with all that must be born afresh, 

Newly planted and built up.

We pledge with all our might

To saturate the world with prophetic promise: 

Healing, hope and wholeness!

Decency, dignity, divinity!

The brilliance of humanity at its best,

And all that makes creation good, as God intended it! 

That has been our message these one hundred and fifty years.

It remains our message even now. 

*

Rabbi Rick Jacobs on Video: “The work ahead is to further shape a Judaism that is relevant, that is joyful, that is courageous, that is nourishing of the soul, and that becomes the Judaism that the dominant slice of North American Jews live every single day. 

We have a sense of mission to build a more just, a more equitable, a more whole, a more joyful, and a more peaceful world.”

*

(Conclusion: movement leaders, one at a time, put on tallit and say…)

I am a Reform Jew because …

[L’khi Lakh underscore when all tallitot wearers finish their statements: then segue into final Shehecheyanu]

[This is the fifth and final act of the script celebrating 150 years of Reform Judaism in America. Some people have properly pointed out that Reform synagogues began much earlier, all the way back to Charleston’s Reformed Society of Israelites, which undertook liturgical reform in 1824. More precisely, then, this script celebrates Reform Judaism from the time of its birth as an official movement, in 1873.

From 1824 to 1873, Reform congregations multiplied, as more and more congregations undertook various reforms, some of them more radical than others, some of them more akin to what we now call Conservative Judaism (which had yet to come into being). The expansion of congregations in those early years is an apt prologue to the subject of this final act, the expansion of “Who is a Jew,” “What Jews do we welcome into our midst?” and “How fully do we welcome them?”

That is to say: “To what extent is Reform Judaism a doorway (that admits people in) not a fence (that keeps them out).” For most of Jewish history, Jews have been wary of expanding the boundaries of who is a Jew; and even within the Jewish fold, some Jews were more equal than others. Most evidently, a strict patriarchy excluded women from being fully counted, but there were other restrictions as well – against deaf Jews, for example, who were classified alongside children and the mentally incompetent. 

This final act traces North American Reform Judaism’s breakthrough approach of inclusion, rather than exclusion. The most obvious examples include:

1. Active outreach to people who are in some way engaged with (or as) Jews, but who are not Jews themselves, because they feel excluded (either formally or informally) from full Jewish status; 
2. The expansion of matrilinear descent to allow children of Jewish mothers or fathers to be considered fully Jewish; 
3. Proclaiming women as equal to men, and able, therefore, to serve as cantors and rabbis. 
4. Expanding that principle of equality to the LGBTQ+ community; and 
5. Actively opening our ranks to the full gamut of humanity, most specifically, to people of color. 

Reform has never been just “not Orthodox.” From its inception, it has been a distinctive, even a revolutionary, ideology of Judaism, with a straight line running through its celebration of the Jewish People as part and parcel of human universalism to its more recent demand that we remove biases and impediments to full Jewish identity for all who wish properly to claim it. 

The master image of Act 5 is “immigration,” not just the usual notion of immigration from abroad, but immigration also from within – and a redefinition of immigration (in both cases) as a group or class of people to whom already privileged society finally grants equality of voice. 

Among the values underscored here — the most important, to my mind — is “dignity.” In the original script, the centrality of dignity was introduced by a particular memory that I have from my student days at HUC, when I served as a student rabbi for the deaf – the inclusion of deaf Jews being an early example of Reform’s expanding Jewish “doorway.” In the end, regrettably, the recollection was omitted from the final production (because of time limitations) but I have added it back in here {in braces}. In retrospect, I wish we had retained it! It was followed a much longer version of the celebration of dignity – which, also, was cut. I substitute here that longer version for the truncated one that was part of the performance.]

***

Act 5: A Doorway, not a Fence

They say that we, in North America are nations of immigrants,

And so we are.

But not entirely.

Our United States and Canada were once not ours at all.

Unless we are the native peoples, we are indeed immigrants 

Going back, at most, a few hundred years, 

And for most of us, a whole lot less than that.

They say, as well, 

That most of us came in one of two migrations,

The German wave and the Polish/Russian one,

Some, also, Sephardim, who arrived here first,

And a few of us later: survivors of the Shoah.

Without migrations to enrich our ranks, 

We Jews would be a sorry sort,

Shrinking in numbers, aging in body, 

Our passions declining, 

Our story devolving into yesterday’s memories, 

With barely an idea of tomorrows beyond number.

What chroniclers will we have to narrate our further chapters?

What photographers will connect the pictures of our past with photos of our future?

A healthy people needs passionate newcomers,

New migrations, with visions of their own. 

In truth, it is God’s blessing to provide migrations even now,

Because migrations need not come from foreign lands,

They need not ever have crossed an ocean.

Migration need not be a geographic thing at all!

Enslaved Africans were brought in chains,

Against their will, 

Never granted the title “migration.”

Migrants are those whose presence is acknowledged

And who find their voice among us.

Migration is the name we give to people newly noticed,

They may have been here all along, 

But only now are recognized, 

Conceded presence, 

Accorded dignity.

*

{For a very long time, rabbinic students were arbitrarily assigned to congregational internships. In 1965, my second student year, I was sent to be the rabbi at Temple Beth Or of the Deaf, in New York. One of the members taught me sign language; another interpreted for me until I was able to manage things myself. The founding member, an extraordinary woman of wisdom and of valor, the single and singular Founding Mother actually (so influential was she), took me under her wing and taught me more about being a rabbi than I have room here to say. 

When I first received my assignment, I was told of another organization for the Jewish deaf that had been run for years by a hearing woman hired by Federation. I visited her for advice, and was appalled when she told me, “Don’t give the deaf much responsibility. They cannot handle it. We have movies every Friday night, for example, and I choose what they are; they wouldn’t be able to do even that.”

Temple Beth Or was founded by deaf Jews who could not abide the paternalistic demoralization that characterized that organization. They made an appointment with Rabbi Daniel Davis, the regional director of the URJ – then the UAHC – in greater New York to investigate the possibility of founding a synagogue. To his everlasting credit, Davis supported them through thick and thin, even well after they had come into being. 

Temple Beth Or of the Deaf was an early instance of what has now become our Union’s central affirmation of welcome. It adopted a founding motto that you now will understand in full. “Temple Beth Or of the Deaf,” it read, “There is no dignity without religion.”

*

“What business are we in?” 

That can well be the most important question of our day,

Of any day, really,

Even for us meeting here,

Our Union for Reform Judaism.

It is not too much to say 

That we are in the dignity business,

Welcoming the world into our ranks,

Born Jews, Jews by choice, 

All who find meaning within the Jewish orbit; 

The straight, the queer, the black, the white, 

Chinese, Chilean, Iranian, 

Old and young.

Real welcome is a transcendent statement 

Of the highest moral merit.

The moment we are born,

And even after we die,

Judaism guarantees this elemental gift 

K’vod hab’riyot: 

Honor, for just being human.

*

(from Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5; Tosefta Sanhedrin 8:4-9) “Why was only a single specimen of humanity created first? So no race or class may claim a nobler ancestry, saying, ‘Our father was born first’; and, finally, to give testimony to the greatness of God, who brought such wonderful human diversity into the world from just a single prototype.

*

This universal welcome of all who seek to be among us

Returns us to our roots,

To the very way we began, 

150 years and more ago,

When reformers first began the work from which we benefit.

They knew, as we do, 

That ghettoes are not merely places,

They are states of mind,

The founders of Reform

Did more than move their homes outside the ghetto walls.

They moved their minds as well into the wider world.

Committed to the promise of a universal God

Who tasks the Jewish People with a mission,

The “mission of Israel,” 

They swore

Not just to bring God’s presence into the world, 

But to be God’s presence within the world.}

*

Opening wide our doors is a transcendent statement

Of the highest moral merit. 

The offer of no less a thing than dignity among us.

Dignity! 

A gemstone that cannot be bought,

The touchstone of what human beings are:

The very image of God.

Gathered in this room we see:

The many migrations in our midst,

From without and from within,

People taking their rightful place at last.

*

Our first migration from within:

Women,

Who, for our first century as Reform Jews, 

Were officially invisible: 

No women rabbis, cantors, temple presidents,

Until half a century ago. 

The migration of LGBTQ+ followed,

So eloquently voiced in a 1989 declaration of conscience

By Rabbi Alexander M. Schindler

In that watershed moment when thousands were suddenly dying of AIDS.

*

[Rabbi Schindler’s words read aloud:] I, the leader of this movement for Reform Judaism; I, a refugee, from Hitler’s Germany… declare myself a mourner for all those who have died of AIDS,

I declare myself a rabbi for all Jews, at every moment of life, not only for heterosexual Jews, or for gay Jews only at their funerals.

.I declare myself the compassionate ally of every person who is wrestling with the shame, the confusion, the fear, the endless torment involved in the inner struggle for identity…. when all is said and done, a struggle for the integrity of selfhood.

*

Our parents, children, brothers, sisters, siblings all,

Now share their voices: 

Another transformation still in process, 

Accompanied now by admissions of guilt:

Change has not come easily —

Nor painlessly, for many.

Rabbi Jackie Ellenson (on screen): As sad and painful as all these ethics investigations have been, they have enabled all of us to be honest about what we have experienced. I’d like to think the world, that the world’s problems in terms of gender discrimination, are solved, but we know they are not. So when we talk about inclusivity now, we are not only or exclusively talking about the issue of women in the rabbinate. We’re talking about people anywhere on the gender spectrum. We’re talking about Jews of Color. We’re talking about how to make what we say and pray truthful. 

Look round and see – 

How many Jews by choice are now among us,

And those who are not converts but who keep Jewish homes, raise Jewish children,

Join the Jewish conversation, 

And rightly claim their place and voice.

Those also who, for their own reasons, 

Are explorers still, 

Curating an identity in the warm embrace of Jewish values.

See also, still just here and there, signs of what is yet to come,

Those of every race and group of origin

Who are now “Us.”

*

(I have a Voice (Arian) sung)

I am a Reform Jew because Reform Judaism lives out its belief that we really are all made in the image of God. I feel welcomed and affirmed as a member of the Jewish People. 

I am a Reform Jew because Reform Judaism respects who I am. I take pride in a synagogue that is forever expanding with the full gamut of people whom God has created.  

I am a Reform Jew because Reform Judaism is not tribal. I don’t have to be born into Judaism to be fully Jewish and to claim the Jewish heritage and Peoplehood as my own. 

(Response)

For the incredible beauty of the entire human family;

For synagogues that give place, voice, and dignity to all;

For communities that embrace, that reach out and draw in, and that demonstrate God’s reality among us ;

Anachnu modim lakh: “We praise you God and give you thanks.”

(Halleluyah – Brazilian chorus v 3 [shama/teruah] chorus)

[Prior Letters (55-58) provide the Introduction to the script and its first three Acts, each of them a significant contribution to North American Judaism: 1. A Union of Congregations, a Community of Communities; 2. The Insistence on Principle and Purpose; 3. Focus on both our North American Diaspora and Israel – seeing Jewish Peoplehood as having two centers, an Ellipse, not a Circle. We now come to the fourth such contribution: Meaningful Worship.

As in the other acts, I am combining the script that we used for the final production with earlier drafts that contained additional material which we cut to save time. Braces {as here} indicate that omitted material. For dramatic effect, we replaced it with brief videos of personal recollections, which I have omitted. 

The discussion of Mishkan T’filah was written by its editor, Rabbi Elyse Frishman, who contracted covid and could not attend. Her words were read by Cantor Jill Abramson.

Compared to the other acts, the script here is more descriptive than liturgic/poetic; more content heavy, that is. The impact of the act came largely from the incredible music, planned and executed by a variety of musicians, under the guidance of Cantor Rosalie Boxt.]

*

Act 4: Meaningful Worship

The will to worship is innate:

Born the minute human beings emerged upon the earth;

An expression of the human intuition 

that there must be something more.

It is our upward, outward reach beyond ourselves,

The soul’s insistence on eternity.

It is, as well, a sacred ritual statement

of who we are and who we strive to be;

Not just prayer as words, but prayer as worship.

*

{Before Reform, worship was largely the rote repetition of prayers, often mumbled in a hurried fashion so as to complete the reading of all the pages in a prayer book. That form of prayer was, no doubt, meaningful to earlier generations who thought God demanded it and who built a monumental edifice of regulations for how, when, where, and by whom, it should be done. Modern Jews, for whom that edifice collapsed, demanded another rationale, which saw prayer (among other things) as an aesthetic exercise in reflecting Jewish identity. How we pray is who we are; as Jewish identity changed, so too did prayer itself. Each new prayerbook is a snapshot in time.

[On screen: snapshots of sample pages for each prayer book]

The Union Prayer Book, back in 1894 and 1895, reflected newly minted Reform Jews trying to demonstrate, for themselves and others, a Judaism that was not the ghettoized existence of their past. Like churches round about us, we too had our “ministers.” No one wore a yarmulka (a kippah we later called it), let alone a tallit (which back then we called a tallis). Neither the language nor the bimah had room for women. But we prayed in flowing English, with a message that was elevating. The music and diction reached beyond ourselves, and on every page, it seemed, was the prophetic message of hope.

By the 1970s we were connecting to Israel, Jewish Peoplehood worldwide, and Jewish tradition through the ages; simultaneously, we were integrating a feminist critique of our prayer-book texts. So we wrote Gates of Prayer, with tradition recovered; where men were not the only humans; and where God was not a He, a Lord, a Him. The Hebrew changed from the Ashkenazi of our European past to the Sefardi of modern Israel – not ahavoh rabboh, but ahavah rabbah, not yisgadal v’yiskadash shmeih rabboh, but yitgadal v’yitkadash shmeih rabbah.

But the real breakthrough came with reforming worship itself, not just the prayer-book words but the music and manner of praying them. Many of us now wore yarmulkahs (well, kippot) and talleisim (now, tallitot), and when women joined our ranks, we abandoned the old and boring black and blue on white, for colors, pastels, and geometric designs of every sort.}

*

1999: the biennial in Orlando,

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, our Union president,

recalls proclaiming a worship revolution.

[Video: Rabbi Eric Yoffie]: “Worship belongs to the congregants, It belongs to the synagogue. It belongs to the people….Change came fast because people were ready because they were open. Because once they were given permission, they embraced this with enthusiasm. Heartfelt worship, it turned out, was at the top of their priority list. Certainly within ten years, Shabbat worship in Reform Judaism was utterly different from what it had been.”

*

And then there was the music!

[Video: Cantor Benjie Ellen Schiller]: The appeal the NFTY music had on us teens impacted the synagogue in ways we didn’t even anticipate. That aliveness, that informality, that fun, that dynamism, that catchy beat, for our American ears had real spiritual, emotional appeal. The prayer became real. The prayer became mine and yours and we could sing it again and again. And it wasn’t leader centered as much. It was congregational centered. It was meant for all of us.”

Of all the names worth mentioning from those days, 

one stands out: 

a teen from Minneapolis, 

Debbie Friedman 

[Video: Debbie Friedman, “Sing unto God…”; then music medley, live, with congregation singing]

[Video: Cantor Benjie Ellen Schiller]: “Debbie Friedman understood in her writing, in her performing, in her prayer leading, in her teaching, the perspective of the common worshiper. She understood how we heard music, she understood how we approached a prayer. She understood that we needed to sing, we needed to wrap our mouths around these sacred words. She was interested in the human experience and the spiritual experience and there was a direct connection from her heart and her mind to her music.”

In 2011, The Hebrew Union College 

renamed its school of Jewish music, 

the Debbie Friedman School of Sacred Music.

*

Worship is our Jewish mirror on the world.

Sometimes, the mirror cracks, beyond repair: 

it no longer reflects the people, the place and the time in which we live.

Prayer becomes boring once again,

like someone else’s story, not our own,

rote recitation, a soulless performance 

for what was meant to be the soul’s privileged moment.

But change does come.

*

Rabbi Eyse Frishman: In 2007, the iphone emerged!

Our society was searching: how might we better communicate?

Consider Mishkan T’filah our new device for prayer.

As we invented, we asked 21st century questions of you:

“What do you seek?”

“What might you learn?”

“How will you feel included? Inspired?

There is no single path to meaningful prayer;

congregational customs vary.

We removed instructions that enforced a single mold.

We removed italics,

so you could choose to pray in unison or privately.

We added commentary for insight,

and full transliteration to make Hebrew entirely accessible.

The two page spread is our commitment

to diversity of belief and full participation.

We continue to ask: “How might we support your faith journey?”

*

I am a Reform Jew because Reform worship touches my life, connects me to others, and invokes the presence of God.  

I am a Reform Jew because I love services that provide music, spirituality, and community. 

For those mysterious moments when our soul touches the divine;

For those services when we are graced 

with insightful Jewish wisdom and inspirational Jewish music;

For those times when we leave prayer knowing that we belong, 

that we are loved, and that we matter;

Anachnu modim lakh: 

We praise you, God, and give you thanks.

[Music Live: Halleluyah – Debbie Friedman]

[Act 3, our Reform response to Israel, differs from the others. Rather than a tale of proud Reform accomplishment from the beginning, it details the overall ambivalence of early Reform Judaism to the very idea of a Jewish State. At the same time, it tells the tale of eventually adopting the Zionist cause – with a passion. In my introduction to Act 2, I highlighted the need for a master metaphor for each section, and I struggled for some time before arriving at this one. After an initial meditation that explores history as a river of events into which we are dropped, the script moves on to the metaphor of our age-old Jewish love affair with Israel as a dramatic performance – to which Reform Jews arrived late.  

The script had been virtually completed before the Hamas attack on October 7. It had to be rewritten with the attack in mind. Among other things, every act was to have ended with a different version of Halleluyah, but that seemed distinctly out of place here. Act 3, therefore, supplies a medley of Israeli music as underscore, culminating in the congregational singing of Hatikvah, instead. 

The performance featured many visuals projected onto a screen as backdrop for the tale being told. I cannot remember all of them, but here and there, where I do recall them, I indicate what they were (in brackets).

Here too, a great deal was cut for the sake of time. The original supplied more history than we had time for. I had set it in prose-like documentation, intended to be read by historians appearing on a screen. I reproduce that original here, {in braces}. Most significantly, Rabbi Ira Youdovin, the leader of the first Reform delegation to appear at a Zionist congress had given us first-person account of the event. We had to shorten it for the performance, but his account is worth preserving in full, because otherwise, it will go unremembered, unacknowledged; and it is a story worth telling. I have therefore included it all here.]

***

The river of events that we call fiction flows inexorably forward.

People and plot are established early; 

Later chapters embellish the tale, 

Until, at last, we reach the end and close the book.

The river of reality runs forward too, 

But there is no end, no final page to turn. 

And the story is our own. 

We, its characters,

Who are dropped unceremoniously into the plot

Without first reading the prior chapters,

Must navigate the river backward

To understand how we got there. 

*

Just so: 

On October 7, Simchat Torah, this very year,

we were plunged into the story of Israel attacked.

Along with Jews around the world, we too joined hands and hearts 

In fear and horror,

Crying out to all the world:

“We will not allow the Jewish state to perish!”

Tonight, with every ounce of who we are,

We reaffirm that pledge.

Am Yisrael Chai, “The Jewish people lives.”

And so, too, does the Jewish state.

“Our Jewish hope of two millennia.”

Tonight as well, we trace the river backward, 

To recollect those early chapters of our story

When Zionism was no obvious conclusion: Not at all!

*

“Latecomers to the theatre will have trouble being seated.”

A sorry truth we all know, 

Whether Broadway or the movies,

But especially classics, long-running shows 

With depth and drama,

Shows with themes on which we stake our lives.

Our own Jewish drama of the centuries

The longest running show in all our history,

is the Jewish people’s love affair with Israel,

repackaged and renamed in recent times, 

as “Zionism.”

But Reform came late to the show;

And we had trouble being seated.

*

The script unfolded in stages:

Herzl’s frantic visits to world leaders;

Zionist congresses,

Where Jews, who have argued better than most — 

Going all the way back to Talmudic debate —

Contended over what that state would be.

Then the Balfour declaration during World War I,

And waves of immigrants, from Eastern Europe mostly,

Places where Jews were trained to see themselves as ethnics – 

Like Poles, Ukrainians, and all the rest,

But ethnics who lacked a homeland, 

And cared little for religion,

which mostly got in their way. 

Zionism – not religion – 

was their entrance ticket to the dance of modernity.

Not so, German Jews, the Jews of Central Europe

where modern-day religion was their project.

Proudly Jewish, by religion,

but citizens of a modern western state, 

they rejected Jewish nationhood,

and brought that bias here.

The United States and Canada were their homes; not Israel.

*

Resolution of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1898

“We are unalterably opposed to political Zionism. The Jews are not a nation, but a religious community. Zion was a precious possession of the past, the early home of our faith, where our prophets uttered their world-subduing thoughts, and our psalmists sang their world-enchanting hymns. As such, it is a holy memory, but it is not our hope for the future. America is our Zion.”

*

There were exceptions: great Reform rabbis

Without whom a Jewish State might never have succeeded.

But in those early years, 

the age-old drama of reclaiming a Jewish home 

played to packed houses day after day,

without very many Reform Jews in attendance.

We were, quite frankly, ambivalent.

*

In 1935, as Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws crippled German Jewry and 60,000 Jews escaped to Palestine, the British Mandatory powers cut off further Jewish immigration.

Two years later, the UAHC resolved the following:

“We see the hand of Providence in the opening of the Gates of Palestine for the Jewish people at a time when a large portion of Jewry is desperately in need of a friendly shelter….The time has now come for all Jews irrespective of ideological differences to unite in the activities leading to the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.”

*

“Irrespective of ideological differences:” 

Even non-Zionists, that is.

We were still psychological miles away 

from aligning fully with the Zionist Movement.

What made us change our mind?

*

{Part of our conversion to Zionism was the post-World War II guilt, the shame that washed over American Jews who had to come to terms with its abject failure to save the six million. Parents of the 1940s and ‘50s remember being unable even to share the story with their children. The Shoah went unmentioned, even as survivors with tattooed arms moved in next door. Then came two events that elevated the Shoah and the State of Israel in the public imagination. In 1961, [image of Eichmann trial appears on screen] the trial of Adolph Eichmann brought the truth of the Holocaust into the open; and almost exactly one year before, there appeared a movie that no one alive back then will forget: [movie poster of Exodus appears in screen] Exodus, a heroic tale of Israel’s founding despite all odds to the contrary.

Yet even then, Reform Jews had trouble signing on as actual Zionists. Most Reform Jews supported Israel proudly, but with notable exceptions, Reform Jewish leaders lagged behind the people. They watched from the sidelines, proud of Israel, the upstart of the Middle East, but reasonably convinced that we could cheer her on without being actual Zionists.}

*

An early harbinger of things to come had been 

HUC President Nelson Glueck,

Who, already in 1954, 

Procured a site in Jerusalem. 

Just a school for archeology, 

But with a synagogue sanctuary: a religious presence. 

At its 1963 groundbreaking, David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, 

Moshe Sharett, and Abba Eban, all participated. 

Reform Judaism had come to Israel,

Not as a mighty wind, an earthquake or a fire,

But as a still, small voice,

Because, officially, Reform Judaism still hesitated,

Until 1967: the Six-Day war.

{If you weren’t alive back then, you will have trouble imagining the fear that struck us to our core: no internet or satellite coverage; just nightly news to tell us how the war had gone that day. The Israeli army was still untried. We feared the worst: another Holocaust, this one on Jewish soil. And only when Israel had won, did the frightening truth set in. What if we had lost?}

That was our turning point.                                                                      

But we were latecomers, 

and “Latecomers to the theater have trouble being seated.”

Rabbi Ira Youdovin, ARZA Director

at the 1978 Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, 

where Reform Jews made our first appearance, 

Recalls the story:

*

[What follows is the whole story as told by Rabbi Youdovin, not just the greatly shortened version that we presented at the event itself.]

{Rabbi Ira Youdovin: “Our nine delegates arrived in Jerusalem without the foggiest idea of how to go about getting things done.  None of us had ever been to a Zionist Congress, which has quaintly arcane rules and even its own language.  We had to learn words we had never heard before …a new language, new procedures, new rules—which kept on changing.  The AZF office in New York had little information. Several competing organizations offered to help, but only if we merged with them, which we didn’t want to do.

“I got my first taste of this when I went to get credential for the delegation.   The clerk informed me that a minimum of fifteen seats were required to form a si’ah, a ‘voting block.’  And if ARZA didn’t have a si’ah, the best he could do was issue tickets for seats in the visitors’ gallery. Needless to say, these did not include the right to vote or participate in floor debates.  At this point, he had to excuse himself, leaving behind a stack of delegate credentials missing only the name of the delegate. So I swiped the number ARZA needed, plus a few extras, stuffed them into my briefcase and fled. That’s how Reform Judaism’s first delegation to a Zionist Congress won its rightful place in the Congress hall. (To this day I don’t know whether the clerk was guilty of bureaucratic clumsiness, not unknown in the WZ0; or if he has doing a favor for this stupid American who had brought a group of people from a great distance without knowing the rules of the game.)

We came with a resolution favoring religious pluralism in Israel.  And it worked, but not without incredible drama! 

As the Jerusalem Post reported,

‘The tedium of the 29th Zionist Congress was shattered twice yesterday by shouting, pushing, singing and booing in a confrontation over religious pluralism in the World Zionist Organization. The hubbub ended with approval by a majority of the plenum of a resolution calling for Jewish education programs in the Diaspora based on the principle of equality for all trends, including the Conservative and Reform movements.’

When the resolution was proposed from the floor by Former Education Minister and Laborite Aharon Yadlin, some young

Mizrahi and Herut [religious and right-wing bloc] delegates rushed to the stage to take control of the microphone. Chairman of the Zionist Executive Arye Dulzin called for a second vote to be held in the afternoon since sixty delegates demanded it. When the afternoon session started, and Dulzin called for that second vote, he was booed by supporters of the resolution (ARZA, the WUPJ, the Conservative Movement’s World Union of Synagogues, Hadassah, Labor).

A majority approved the resolution, and delegates from Mizrahi and Herut stormed out of the hall for consultations, and returned in a snake-dance, singing Utzu etza ve’tufar  (the biblical phrase meaning ‘Your counsel shall be voided.’ The proponents of the resolution drowned out the opponents with a rendition of Hinei mah tov u’mah na’im  (‘How good it is … to dwell together’). A shoving match between the dancers and security guards ensued. As the Post reported, “The ceiling-to-floor portrait of Theodor Herzl teetered precariously in the fray.”}

But the resolution had been passed.

*

“This Zionist Congress calls on the State of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people to implement fully the principle of guaranteed religious rights for all its citizens, including equality of opportunity, equality of recognition and equality of governmental aid to all religious movements within Judaism.”

*

[Anna Kislanski, CEO of the Israeli Reform Movement, on screen]

Anna Kislanski: “As the years went by, we have really become part of Israeli society. So now we have more than 120 Israeli ordained rabbis. The majority of them are sabras or came to Israel when they were very little. People are so grateful for the support of the Jewish community, for the fact that you can tell our stories, for the fact that you can make the case for Israel outside of Israel.”

*

I am a Reform Jew and a Zionist, because Reform Zionism embraces the Jewish State of Israel and the prophetic vision of what a Jewish state should strive to be. 

For the mystery of Jewish Peoplehood;

For the wonder of Jewish history;

For the miracle of the Jewish State of Israel;

Anachnu modim lakh: 

We praise you God and give you thanks.

SINGING OF HATIKVAH

[My last Open Letter provided Act 1: “A Union, “A Community of Communities,” the recognition that “Communities need other communities; that Reform is a movement – many congregations impacting the world together.” This, the second act, turns to that impacting of the world, namely, “Principle and Purpose,” Reform Judaism’s insistence that “Judaism is no tribal faith. It exists to pursue the great and noble causes that make us fully human.”

Here too, the original script was considerably shortened, because of time constraints, so in what follows I have added back in some of the parts that were cut. Where large chunks were omitted (not just a line here and there), I bracket them with braces {as here}. Significantly, in the 1966 letter from a southern congregation objecting to integration, a paragraph was omitted on the grounds that it might be too painful for us to use publicly. I disagreed. I thought it provided necessary honesty about the depth of racism at the time, so I restored the text to include it here {in braces}. 

What I cannot reproduce on paper, especially with this second act, is the impact of video clips (hearing the voice of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, from over 100 years ago, a champion of social justice before we had a name for it); watching Rabbi David Saperstein speak to us from the Religious Action Center; and seeing rabbinic student Kelly Whitehead describe what it means about to be ordained as a rabbi who is black in a movement that is still overwhelmingly white.

Each act ties the Reform Movement to a different dominant image of the human condition. Act 1 featured the human need for community. Act 2 explores the human need to matter.  This act too, ends with ritualized statements, “I am a Jew because….”; a congregational response: “Anachnu modim lakh. We praise You God and give You thanks”; and a version of Halleluyah (in this case the one by Leonard Cohen.]

***

{Human beings are not forever things:

We grow, mature, and age,

And then we die.

Foreverness comes clothed in causes. 

History is the perpetuity of these causes —

The great and noble callings of our species.

So we are Jews be-cause:

Because the human spirit thrives on linking its eternity to causes.

Reform began in Europe, 

With Jews who, having left the ghetto, 

Were leaving Judaism too,

Because Judaism seemed oblivious to causes,

Because it did not seem to matter.

*

To matter is a curious thing.

We are born without being asked

And die against our will;

And in between, we inhabit this curious thing called life:

An infinitesimally tiny drop of personal time

In the grand universal scheme of eternity.

Yet we want our drop to matter.

By linking Judaism to this will to matter,

Reform gave those who were shedding their Jewish identity 

Reason to be Jewish once again.

Reform is insistence on the causes that matter.

*

The romantic, William Blake saw “eternity in a grain of sand.”

We Jews see eternity in a grain of care, a speck of hope, a pinpoint of promise 

In the vastness of the human story 

Which we get to enter only briefly:

Mere walk-on actors for cameo roles in the drama of whole centuries and more.

But roles that matter because we join ourselves to causes.

*

What did Eve and Adam learn from the tree of knowledge?

What insight did they gain that drove them out of paradise,

If not the realization that Eden wasn’t real.

An oasis is not the desert.

A coffee break is not the work we do.

Eden was perfection, 

But it came with a snake

To explode the fantasy 

That we can live forever in such paradise.

Our progenitors learned to enter the world 

Where causes are the things that gives life meaning.

Reform is Judaism fixated 

On meaning, monumentally.

We are Adam and Eve, humanity without a Garden,

Updated for our time.} 

*

Reform imagined a new kind of Judaism and a new kind of rabbi: 

A Judaism that cares about the human condition. 

And rabbis who call us to a world that is better than what we have.

It did so by reading the Bible differently. 

*

For its first 2000 years, Jews had known the prophets 

Only as snippets of Haftarah readings, 

Chanted in Hebrew that few even understood. 

Reform brought the prophets to life 

By accenting their message of social justice, 

Proclaiming an era of Prophetic Judaism. 

Take Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, for instance, 

Whose booming sermons demanding justice 

Filled vast auditoriums

Over 100 years ago. 

[AUDIO CLIP – STEPHEN S. WISE]

*

The most painful moral defects are those cancers of conscience

That metastasize with sinful subtlety.

Poisoning the core of a nation’s very psyche. 

Such is the American tragedy of slavery.

In the terrible war for the soul of the nation, 

The sad truth is: 

Rabbinic voices could be heard 

On either side of the slavery question.

When the Civil War was finally over,

It still took an entire century 

To excavate the American conscience, 

Brush off the silt and sediment of its indifference

And take responsibility as the moral beings 

Whom God intended us to be,

We Reform Jews among them. 

Where had we been for that hundred years? 

*

1865: the Civil War ends.

1965: This UAHC Statement on Synagogues and Social Action

“Judaism offers no easy escape from the problems of life and rejects the device of passing all responsibility for social problems to God… A synagogue which isolates itself from the fundamental issues of social justice confronting the community and the nation is false to the deepest traditions and values of the Jewish heritage.”

*

Only in the 1950s and ‘60s 

did America’s vocabulary begin to ring 

with the newly poignant language of ongoing oppression

and the jangling discords of injustice:

Bull Connor in Birmingham; 

Ku Klux Klan Nightriders in St. Augustine Florida. 

Fourteen-year old Emmett Till, mutilated, murdered, 

and dropped dead-weight into Mississippi’s Talahatchie River. 

But their opposite, as well:

Freedom Riders, 

The Little Rock Nine, 

A lunch counter at Woolworths, 

Rosa Parks, 

John Lewis, 

“I have a dream.” 

Liberty in the making at last.

Acting with prophetic conscience, our movement took a stand, despite objections from some southern congregations, who wrote letters such as this one:

*

To Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath, president of the UAHC.

May 1, 1956,

“It was the unanimous opinion of our board that segregation is not a religious issue and not a Jewish issue….

The Jews in this community have been accepted in social and educational activities without prejudice or discrimination. The Jews in this community mingle with the white non-Jews and form a large percent of their country clubs, business clubs, and civic activities in general…

{If integration is had at this time, it would mean 60% of the enrollment of our grammar schools would be Negro students. A large percent of these Negro children come from homes with no special background or environment, and a large percent of them are the result of illegitimacy. It would only retard the white Jewish children, as well as the white Gentiles to have their children placed under this integration and environment.}

Feeling as we do, we respectfully urge your fine organization not to embarrass and injure the Jews of this community and other Southern communities who feel as we do, by having it broadcast that the Jews as a whole are actively working to desegregate the South.”

But the official stand remained. 

We marched for integration,

And issued calls to conscience. 

[VIDEO HERE : CIVIL RIGHTS MARCH]

[MUSIC LIVE: “MAKE THOSE WATERS PART”]

*

Sitting in the Religious Action Center, Rabbi David Saperstein recalls the role we played in striving for social justice.

David Saperstein: “So by the shaping of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 … some of the most famous civil rights leaders in America sat around this very table…and crafted their contribution to the seminal foundational civil rights laws that changed the face of civil rights and social justice in America. And for 30 years, every single civil rights bill that was put before Congress, the civil rights community sat in this conference room and mobilized how we were going to support it.
Hy Bookbinder, who was the legendary lobbyist for the American Jewish community, used to say, ‘If the walls of this room could talk, they would resound with some of the greatest social justice achievements of the 20th century in America.’”

*

Those were heady days, the 1960s, 

Messianic, even, to protesters of the time.

But when no messiah came, 

The world moved on to other things; and so too did the protests, 

While the cancer, never fully cured, 

Reappeared in other, devious, ways.

The arc of the moral universe may indeed bend toward justice, 

But only laboriously. 

For the 1960s are 60 years in the past, 

And so much has still not happened.

Yet, some things have.

Student rabbi Kelly Whitehead will be ordained this Spring.

She gave this sermon to the Hebrew Union College community.

*

[Rabbinic Student, Kelly Whitehead: “Eved, the biblical word for slave, is first used by Noah, who curses the descendants of his son Ham, saying they will be eved avadim, the ‘meanest of slaves.’ And so it happens: Ham becomes the father of the African people, who later become enslaved by white Europeans.

Our founder, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, rejected that biblical lesson, but failed to attack the institution of slavery itself. Once the Civil War began, Wise declared that ‘silence must henceforth be our policy, silence on all the questions of the day.’

The Rabbis of our past could not envision that blackness and Jewishness could be intimately intertwined.

Yet here I am.”

*

To be Reform is to draw hope from history 

and shepherd humanity to a better time.        

We stand on the shoulders of generations past. 

But even on those shoulders,

we stand on tiptoes, heads held high, eyes peering ahead 

to envision a future with God’s promises realized,

because of a messiah who turns out to be ourselves.

[MUSIC LIVE: WE RISE]

I am a Reform Jew because I want my life to have purpose: Reform Judaism helps me make a difference in the world.  

I am a Reform Jew because Reform Judaism adds depth to my days: My synagogue is a community of conscience. 

For the gift of mind and heart; consciousness and conscience;

For eyes and ears that see and hear a world crying out for help;

For the prophets of the past, 

Whose call to justice, love and righteousness 

We can renew in our own time;

Anachnu modim lakh: 

We praise You God and give You thanks.

[MUSIC LIVE: HALLELUYAH, LEONARD COHEN]

[Preamble: As I said in my last letter – the Introduction — the script continues by laying out five lasting contributions of Reform Judaism’s 150 years. I called them “Chapters,” but a better word would be “Acts” since the script, after all, is just that, a “script” for a ritualized performance that included music, staging, visuals, and so on. What follows, then, is the first Reform contribution, Act 1, “A Union, a Community of Communities.” 

Each act ended with a ritual action. Seated on the stage, alongside the two main narrators were a set of people whom we thought of as our modern version of a Greek Chorus. At times, they led congregational participation; at other times, they read their own parts together; and at the end of each act, one or more of them stepped forward, and (as if testifying to the power of the Act’s message), recited a sentence that began, “I am a Reform Jew because….” The congregation responded with a prayer of thanksgiving based on the liturgical line from our prayer book, Anachnu modim lakh, “We praise you, God, and give thanks.” 

I haven’t included here all the stage instructions – which reader reads what, when the Greek Chorus speaks, and so on — because those instructions, while necessary for the participants, just gets in the way of someone reading the script for its message. But you have to imagine the flow of things as the spotlight shifted back and forth between the main narrators, but also the Greek Chorus, the congregation, a choir, congregational singing, and, at times, parts for individual readers (or actual video clips from the past) that appeared on a screen. As the narrator named the Act (A Union, a Community of Communities) at the beginning, for instance, many pictures of synagogues flashed upon the screen in rapid succession. 

The two exceptions to my rule of omitting stage instructions are: 1. Congregational readings, which are recognizable because they appear in italics. 2. In advance, we recorded videos of various people being interviewed, and then edited the videos so that snippets of the interviews became part of the script. In this section, for instance (which deals with the formation of our institutional organizations), we dealt with the contribution of Reform to our understanding of rabbis and cantors; and as part of that message, wanting to highlight the admission of women into the rabbinate and cantorate, we interviewed women clergy themselves to talk about their experience. I cannot reproduce the videos here, but where I have transcripts of what they say, I include their names with their words.

Finally: In all the acts, (as in the Introduction), I merged the final script with parts of earlier versions that we had omitted for reasons of brevity. The entire first section – until “Reform was smelted,” had been taken out, for instance. It includes reference to Chaim Nachman Bialik’s famous lines about the sustaining value of synagogues in the diaspora – an idea I borrowed from Rabbi Chaim Stern z”l, who used the Bialik lines in Gates of Repentance. Otherwise, changes were minor.

As Act 1 picks up, the choir has just completed singing Lewandowski’s Halleluja. Each act concluded with a different Halleluyah setting, a vocal exclamation mark.

So… Act 1]

***

Act 1: A Union, a Community of Communities: 

Halleluya moments require Halleluya people,

Gathered in communities,

Each one, in what the Rabbis called,,

A bet haknesset, 

a communal home that we now call a synagogue.

Without synagogues, we would have died, centuries ago. But synagogues took centuries to invent. For our first 1000 years, we were sustained by sacrifice, bloody temple rites, priests and levites interceding before God with burnt offerings all-consumed by fire, Passover lambs, a Yom Kippur goat released from the verdict of death and allowed to escape into the desert — the original scapegoat, that permitted the people sending it to be pardoned and to be restored to life renewed. The temple went up in flames, destroyed by Rome, itself a final sacrificial victim of those times, a crowning end to the Jewish chapter, part of an era fast receding into history. But in its place, came synagogues.

1000 years of Temples,

And then, religious revolution —

2000 years of synagogues that continue to this day.

From Baghdad to Toledo, 

To Rome, Cologne and Paris, 

Vienna, Vilnius, Vladivlostok,

Wherever Jews settled, 

They trained rabbis and built synagogues, 

For community, prayer, and learning,

To further the Jewish mandate 

To be charitable, kind and just. 

How did we do it? 

How did we survive 

through centuries of change and challenge?

We are not the first to wonder.

Hear our poet laureate from another place and time, 

The dying days of the Eastern Europe’s shtetls. 

Chaim Nachman Bialik endured those tragic years and declared:

“If you really want to know how we survived, 

Turn to the ancient battered house of prayer.

There, to this day, you may behold

Jews with faces lean and lined,

Jews who bear the exile’s heavy weight,

But forget their daily drudgery

In a tattered page of Talmud,

Who assuage their fears and troubles

In the chant of ancient psalms.

A strange and dreary sight.

Straining understanding, defying logic,

To those with no empathy and imagination!”

But if we, here and now, 

Revisit in our mind’s eye,

Those synagogues and times,

Our hearts will tell us true:

The synagogue has staunchly stood,

In good times and in bad, 

For the renewal of Jewish life, 

The replenishment of our soul.

Even as Bialik memorialized 

a dying Jewish culture in the east,

A Jewish renaissance, 

That we now call Reform,

Was rising in the west,

And we are but the latest chapter in that story.

Reform was smelted in the furnace of light 

that dissolved the medieval world 

in the fires of modernity. 

Out of the ashes was born commitment

to progress and hope, to science and reason.

Reform invited Jews 

to join the human family at its best,

by wresting from Jewish tradition

its eternal truths, not just for Jews but for all peoples. 

This was the vision brought to our shores 

by the founders of Reform, 

among them Isaac Mayer Wise,

who walked the streets of New York, and saw

The Jewish poor, the Jewishly illiterate — immigrants all –

but nonetheless proclaimed, against all odds:

“There is life in this Jewry….

I painted the future in golden hues.” 

To mine the gold, he galvanized a movement,

A Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 

The UAHC – renamed now, our URJ,

to convene a network of congregational communities,

a golden age for Jews in North America.

From the Founding Document of the UAHC

“It is the primary object of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations to establish a Hebrew theological Institute – – to preserve Judaism intact; to bequeath it in its purity and sublimity to posterity — to Israel, united and fraternized; to establish, sustain, and govern a seat of learning for Jewish religion and literature….”

The Union’s first historic act was founding  

the Hebrew Union College,

that Reform congregations might have Reform rabbis,

where “Rabbi” is a title, but “Reform” is no mere accidental adjective.

“Reform” has substance; it carries weight; it guarantees; it stipulates.

A Reform rabbi is a rabbi committed to some monumental propositions: 

The God who gave us Torah gave us also laws 

of chemistry and physics.

Both Torah and the universe are “books” of God

with mysteries for us to unveil.

The God in whose imagery we are fashioned, 

gave us moral scruples, 

minds to think and hearts to love.

The God who called creation good 

intended us to dance, to sing, and to be poets of our lives.

Reform rabbis do more than speak the word of God from ancient texts.

They contrive, conceive, conceptualize 

how ancient texts bring comfort, wisdom, hope and healing; 

And not just ancient texts, 

but modern words of insight, too. 

As the first Union Prayer Book put it, in 1895:

“Open, Thou, O God, our eyes 

That we may see and welcome all truth, 

Whether shining from the annals 

of ancient revelations 

Or reaching us 

through the seers of our own time.”

Like Torah itself,

the secret of synagogues too is words,

because human beings are verbal through and through.

Masters of language, magicians of phrases, architects of sentences,

of question marks and periods.

We are the people of the book;

A people who loves dearly just to talk;

A people who insists that God spoke the world into being,

A people who creates worlds of our own, through words.

Words studied, prayed, chanted, sung, discussed, devoured. 

Words to touch the heart, challenge the mind, and elevate the soul; 

Words that move us to tears; and that dry those tears with comfort; 

Words that honor the grand privilege of simply being alive, 

and words that protest on behalf of those for whom simply being alive 

is not the grand privilege it was meant to be. 

Synagogues are keepers of the Jewish conversation through time.

From the start, the College did more than just train rabbis.

It claimed continuation from the greatest seats of Jewish learning,

when the schools of Europe went up in flames,

the College saved those teachers whom it could, and brought them here. 

Of special consequence, 

it rescued Jewish music from potential oblivion, 

with its School of Sacred Music. 

Now cantors would join rabbis. 

They would celebrate the Jewish conversation in song. 

In 1883, we ordained our first class: 4 rabbis, all men. In 1893, we ordained our 100th class: 40 rabbis, 12 of them women; 7 cantors including 1 woman. Women has been acknowledged as equal to men by German rabbis in 1845. It took us over a century to act upon their declaration. In 2023, our 140th class: 31 rabbis, 11 cantors, of varied gender identities and sexual orientations.

Cantor Benjie Ellen Schiller: “I think by the fact that we were broadening the human spectrum of what a Jewish leader was by bringing in women. That alone. And the voices that we were adding to the table to leadership by being strong women, educated women, compassionate women, and Jewishly literate women. The voice of Judaism through the lens, through the mouth, through the intellect, through the heart of a woman, that changed everything. And we didn’t think of it. We just embodied it. For all of us, the voice of Judaism changed and was broadened.”

I am a Reform Jew because I am both rational and spiritual. My synagogue feeds my intellect and my soul. 

I am a Reform Jew because I am both a Jew and human being: I draw sustenance from Torah that I share with other Jews; and from science, art and learning that I share with all the world. 

For the blessing of community and synagogue;

For rabbis and cantors; 

scholars, artists, seers and sages of our time;

For the gift of still believing in hope and progress for the world;

Anachnu modim lakh: 

We praise you God and give you thanks.

[MUSIC LIVE – HAL’LUYA]

Open Letter to My Students 55: Reform Judaism in North America — The 150^th-Anniversary Script (“Introduction”)

[Preamble:

I promised I would post the script, bit by bit because of its length. What follows is the Introduction, but a longer version than what people experienced at the actual performance, because time constraints necessitated much of this being cut. For better and for worse, here is the original, modified slightly to provide continuity with the final version.

The script alone cannot provide anything like the impact of the performed version, which included music, variable lighting, video clips, background visuals, two main narrators, and a variety of speakers both on screen and in person. I wish I could replicate that here, but unable to do so, I provide just the barebones script (and, at times, an indication of the music or film clip on which the script depended in the end). 

I am enormously indebted to the best editing committee imaginable. The text was read critically in all its many stages over a four month period by Rabbis April Davis and Danny Freelander. It then went to a URJ committee of Rosalie Boxt (who quite brilliantly organized the music); Jill Peltzman (who, among other things, directed everything that went into the visuals and staging)  Barbara Weinstein (who brought concerns arising from her work at the Religious Action Center, and (deserving special mention) Rabbi Esther Lederman (who oversaw the entire project with wisdom and care). At times others too were involved, in particular, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the URJ president, at whose request I undertook the project to begin with, and whose judgements often resulted in script additions and changes. 

Journalists Dana Bash and David Gregory were superb narrators. I wish I could replicate their voices in this printed version of the script, because it was they who brought it to life with such brilliance.

The Introduction was followed by five “chapters” (each of them an aspect of Reform Jewish innovation or history) and a conclusion. The Introduction sets the tone of the evening and names the chapters, which will follow in later posts).]

***

Reform Judaism in North America — The 150^th-Anniversary Script Introduction

[Instrumental meditative music as we enter;

music changes into the Hanukah motif; background images of lighting Hanukah candles appear on screen; music fades out as the narration begins.]

December darkness is not the world at its worst,

Not for Jews, at least, For whom, December cold is Hanukah’s warmth,

A time of dedication,

To a past that is rich with meaning

And a future that, we pray, may dawn yet richer still.  

But dedication is no orphan 

Untethered to time.

All promises of perseverance, loyalty, resolve, devotion, 

Remain ethereal,

If they are not acted out

Within the real stuff of human enterprise.

The great and noble causes on which the world depends

Exist within the drama we call history

Or do not exist at all.

And that is why we Jews remember.

No people on the face of the earth 

Insists on memory more than we,

We Jews, 

Who have played a part 

In world affairs far beyond our numbers.

From Jerusalem to Baghdad,

Barcelona to Berlin, 

And now here in North America.

“We Jews have many faults

But amnesia is not among them,”

Said Isaac Bashevis Singer,

Who knew that Jews remember.

Zachor and Zikaron, 

The Hebrew words for memory, 

Mean “to point.”

Day in, day out, we Jews are asked to point, 

To direct our hearts and minds and souls 

To the forces that brought us to this day and will, we pray, 

Allow us each to play our part in the universal flow of time,

To move the human drama ever forward,

To an ever better, brighter, day.

*

Three months ago, or so, we celebrated Rosh Hashanah,

Our new year day of memory, Yom Hazikaron, 

A day of pointing back with mythic consciousness

to the time the world was made.

With every shofar blast, we said

Hayom harat olam,”

“On this day the world was conceived,”

Shaped in the womb of God, 

And birthed into existence.

On Rosh Hashanah, the rabbis said,

Kol ba’ei olam, “all who enter the world” 

Appear before God.

Not just as Jews, then, 

do we greet our highest holy days,

But as human beings like everyone else, 

Confronting God’s presence, 

To be reminded of the human project:

To leave the world better off than when we entered it.

*

Three months from now, or so, we will sit around a seder table,

Marking another Jewish new year,

The month of Passover,

For we Jews have not just one but two beginnings, 

The conception of the world and the time we left Egypt.

“This shall be for you the beginning of months”

In the words of our Torah.

So the seder too remembers, 

Not the world’s conception, but the birth of our people,

For as much as we are a religion, we are a people too, 

A people born in slavery to Pharaoh – 

that we might value freedom;  

A people awestruck by a burning bush – 

that we might harbor faith

A people steeped in echoes of Sinai – 

that we might know our purpose; 

We are not just a people, 

We are a people with purpose.

And so we meet tonight as Jews of purpose

To recollect out past

To celebrate our present,

But most of all, to reaffirm our purpose.

….Shehechiyanu v’ki’manu v’higianu lazman hazeh

“We praise you God for giving us life, 

For sustaining us 

And for bringing us to where we are this day.”

*

On a single thread of insight, says the Talmud,

There hang whole mountains of vibrant creativity.

No surprise then that Reform began with such a single thread:

The daring thought that Torah is revealed 

Not just once at some magical desert mountain,

But in every age anew: 

The ever-present voice of God —

Throughout the world’s wonders, 

the advance of human reason, 

scientific progress, 

and insights from our texts and our experience 

as a Jewish People through the ages. 

 

From this single thread came a framework of Reform ideas,

In their time, profoundly novel, 

So successful, that we take them now for granted – and should not.

As the Israelites followed pillars of cloud by day and fire by night, 

So we hold fast to these pillars of inventiveness, 

Which, now as then, make us who we are.

A Union, a Community of Communities: 

Individuals need other individuals; 

and communities need other communities. 

Reform is a movement, 

Many congregations impacting the world together.

Principle and Purpose: 

Judaism is no tribal faith. 

It exists to make us fully human; 

and to pursue the great and noble causes of the human race.

An Ellipse, not a Circle: 

The Jewish People has not just one but two centers, 

the Jewish land we call Israel, 

and a worldwide diaspora – North America for us.

Meaningful Worship: 

Prayer need not be rote repetition of prayer-book texts. 

It can be, must be, touching, spiritual, inspirational, aspirational. 

A Doorway, not a Fence: 

Judaism is a response to the human condition. 

It is open to all who find it meaningful.

Authentic Judaism is not doing 

What our ancestors did, 

But doing what they would have done, 

If they were alive today. 

And Judaism, continually updated, 

Is not a burden; it was, it is, and it should be,

Pure sheer joy….

With Halleluya moments

That cantors, choirs and congregations, 

Have belted out for 150 years. 

[Introduction ends with Lewandowski Halleluja video 

by American Conference of cantors and Guild of Temple Musicians)

***

[There now follow sections on the five principles:

“A Union, a Community of Communities: 

Principle and Purpose: 

An Ellipse, not a Circle: 

Meaningful Worship: 

A Doorway, not a Fence”

These will follow in later posts]

Because he knew he was thinking, Descartes proved his own existence. I, by contrast, know I exist, and want to make sure I think.

More precisely, given the kind of person I am, I think in a certain sort of way about certain sorts of things — a truism, nowadays, in this Age of Anxious Identity. Tell me who you are and I will know something of what and how you think. 

I like, therefore, to engage synagogue leaders in questions of who they are (and how, therefore, they think). Because I do most of my presenting in Reform congregations, I take special interest in their members’ Reform identity and what the Reform label means to them. 

Most recently, I asked the question of some focus groups assembled by the URJ (the Union for Reform Judaism) to help me think about the script that I agreed to write for 150^th anniversary of Reform Judaism in North America. The participants (who included rabbis and lay leaders) had this to say:

1. Representatives of the younger generation, mostly millennials, often found it hard to say what Reform even is. Some of them went farther and thought Reform as a category largely irrelevant. The future, they said, would feature Orthodoxy on one hand and everyone else on the other. 

• By contrast, members of the older generations, Gen X and Baby Boomers, believed Reform had once been a persuasive descriptive category but bemoaned its disappearance nowadays. Their advice in writing the anniversary script was to “Go deep”: to provide the intellectual, moral, and historical depth that Reform identity once had but now seems lacking.

I was saddened by the millennials’ response, but not surprised, because sociologists regularly describe millennial resistance to being pigeonholed by organizational labels. But that is the problem: “Reform” has become an organizational label, not (as it used to be) a visionary one descriptive of a proud and committed way of being in the world. 

The older informants put their finger on the problem: our Reform movement lacks gravitas. Our institutions are no longer respected as having much to say to the world. Many people say, privately, that they have largely stopped trying. 

But lumping Jews together as either “Orthodox” or “other” is a gross oversimplification of both. Our Age of Anxious Identity is equally an Age of Identity Choices. If increasing numbers of people choose “just Jewish,” it is certainly not because they identify equally as everything, from the ultra-Orthodox Haredim to ethnic secularists; it is because (at least for Reform) there is no currently-compelling visionary content to what we say we are. 

Historically, however, each denomination has presented its own authentic alternative to being Jewish. Modern Orthodoxy devised a halachic life style in geographically dense communities where people walk to shul together. Conservative Judaism excelled at Jewish education, an historical approach to halachah and traditional davening for people who may not be all that traditional otherwise. Reconstructionism, which saw Judaism as a civilization, emphasized community formation — and small-group Havurah communities at that. Reform Judaism (which I know most about, so can say most about) gave us religion through the lens of reason; continuous revelation beyond Sinai; social justice and prophetic Judaism; courage to make cutting-edge moral judgements, like admitting clergy who are women or LGBTQ+; intentionally joyous worship; a new kind of cantor; and emphasis on spirituality.

Some of these movement identities remain healthy, clear, and viable. Judging from my focus groups, Reform is not among them. We have lost our way.

The denominational identities I want safeguarded are not organizational – not, that is, just parallel bureaucracies that thrive on generating committees, holding meetings, and protecting turf. They are visionary: entire Jewish philosophies of being, alternative traditions of Jewish artistry, that should be elaborated, not eradicated. To be sure, people can be “served” in organizational settings that are “just Jewish,” with no particular philosophy whatever: they all have religious schools, High Holiday services, rabbis on call, and the like. But synagogues that become service centers are a poor caricature of what Jewish life should be. Serving is not the issue. Identity is.  And passionate identity is harder to come by in a synagogue that flounders in inchoate generalities.

Visionary denominational identities do not erect boundaries to keep people out. Think of them as diverse photographic slices of the Jewish landscape through time. We properly learn from one another’s pictures, either borrowing or rejecting bits and pieces of the perspective that they capture — but always with respect, and always to enhance our own perception of the Jewish life we seek. Only the shallowest view of Judaism allows us to be every kind of Jew imaginable. Serious Judaism demands choices, choices of this denominational vision rather than that one, each of them constituting a doorway, not a fence; a doorway to a specific Jewish life style, in which we are invited not just to be served but to root ourselves and to grow. 

If denominational Judaism is suspect, it is not because denominationalism is bad – quite the contrary. It is because denominational bodies (some more than others) suffer hardening of their visionary arteries. At worst, they construct visions that only the inner circle of the denominational professionals find compelling, or forget they even have a vision altogether. At best, they let their visions petrify, collapsing them into sterile cardboard cutouts of reality, static repetition of two-dimensional photos rather than a kaleidoscopic vision that is always in process, always offering newly insightful ways to rekindle our passion.  

I am, therefore I think: I am a Reform Jew; so this is what I think about.

You will now understand the script I wrote for the Reform 150^th. I sought to provide an historical overview in poetic/liturgical form that at least suggested the depth of the Reform Jewish vision through time. It was a celebration of Reform as the intellectual and aesthetic artistry that it once was and still can be. 

The streamed version is supposed to be available eventually on the URJ website, complete with visual backdrops, changes in lighting, historical reminiscences, video clips, two exceptional narrators (Dana Bash and David Gregory), a cantorial choir, congregational singing, and more. 

In the meantime, I am going to post the script for you to read, in stages, as my next set of Open Letters. Stay tuned.

.