Open Letter to My Students 56: Reform Judaism in North America — The 150th-Anniversary Script (Act 1)

[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]