[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 150th-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]
Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Ph.D. 