Open Letter to My Students 57: Reform Judaism in North America — The 150th-Anniversary Script (Act 2)

[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]