[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:
- 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;
- The expansion of matrilinear descent to allow children of Jewish mothers or fathers to be considered fully Jewish;
- Proclaiming women as equal to men, and able, therefore, to serve as cantors and rabbis.
- Expanding that principle of equality to the LGBTQ+ community; and
- 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)
Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Ph.D. 