[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
Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Ph.D. 