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One of the hottest religious topics nowadays is “deconversion,” a word so new that it has yet to enter the official lexicon of most official English Dictionaries. The APA (American Psychological Association) describes it as “loss of one’s faith in a religion, as in a Catholic of many years who becomes an atheist or agnostic.” Jews might consider the concept alien, since we hardly have a religious “faith” to lose. 

We became a “faith,” after all, only under duress — in order to justify our citizenship in the post-Napoleonic nation states. We couldn’t be both Americans and Jews by nationality, and the western world didn’t recognize our traditional category of peoplehood, so we agreed to call ourselves a “religion,” which is to say, a “faith.” 

But we all know that Judaism is more than that. Christians who deny their faith become unchurched, lapsed, “deconverted.” Jews who leave the synagogue are not called “unsynagogued.” Even the most marginal Jews don’t use the word “lapsed.” But what about the new term, “deconverted”? Can Jews deconvert?

They can, and here is why.

Unlike Christianity, it has little to do with belief. Indeed, you have to work very hard to be read out of Judaism on grounds of belief alone. Most obviously you can adopt Jesus as your messiah; Jews for Jesus seems hopelessly oxymoronic to us. But we are not consistent. Lots of Jews are Buddhists too, Jubus: and we have no problem with that, because Buddhism too is more than just a religion, whereas Christianity, in theory, is not.

To be sure, in practice, Christianity too is a mixture of things: ethnic origins, for example (Italian, Irish and Polish Catholics are all Catholics even though they differ from one another). But whatever kind of Catholic you are, if you denounce the pope and renounce Catholic dogma and practice, you have deconverted. Jews who do not believe in God and ignore Jewish practice may still say they are Jewish and be counted as such. Hitler would have killed them; Israel is full of them.

So Jewish deconversion is about something other than faith. 

The equivalent of “faith” for us is identification as a member of the Jewish People, which we measure in two ways: how much we consider world Jewry to be “our people”; and whether we view Jewish history as “our story.” Think of the “evil child” at the seder, whose “sin” is asking “What is the point of this ritual to you” not “to me.” 

To all intents and purposes, both of these measures (people and story) have long been condensed into two pivotal symbolic events: the Sho’ah and Zionism. The former was the nightmare of our people almost destroyed. The latter was the dream of our people reborn and reunited with its past in the land of Abraham and Sarah; David and Solomon, Isaiah and Jeremiah.

Deconversion for Jews, then, is the process of turning one’s back on Jews across the globe, but especially in Israel (where almost half the world’s Jews now live); and opting out of Jewish history, especially where classical Zionism is concerned. So yes, Jews can “deconvert” and for the first time in memory, large numbers of them are doing so.

I mean, of course, young Jews with no memory of Israel before Netanyahu as prime minister: the growing cohort of Jews for whom Zionism is neither the Herzlian haven against anti-Semitism, nor the Ahad Ha’amian renaissance of Jewish culture — but rather, another right-wing state increasingly dominated by the West Bank settler movement and by ultra-Orthodox Haredim. The Gaza war is a tragedy on all counts: above all, the brutal Hamas attack itself, but also the military response (whether necessary or deplorable or both) which threatens to make Israel a pariah state, and which is catalyzing the next Jewish generation to renounce and to denounce – not the pope and Catholic teaching, but the Jewish state – both its people and its story. 

It follows that we can learn a lot from studies of Christian deconversion.

*

1. Just giving our current generational alienation the neutral name of “deconversion” helps us think creatively about it. 

2.  Deconversion is best approached less as a sin than as a strategy, by which the deconverters respond to an overwhelming sense that they just cannot go on as they are without threatening their deepest moral convictions. They seek authenticity: a match between what their innermost selves affirm as true and the kind of world they can uphold and call their own. At stake for them is not just what they say but who they are.

3. Deconversion typically unfolds in stages. The Gaza war is not so much the beginning of it all as it is the most recent and most threatening next step of many. When young people first question their traditional familial values – as they have already, on many matters — they begin to feel isolated, as if being among their parents’ generation is like living among strangers. They gravitate to others like themselves, lest they suffer the loneliness of being a cognitive minority of one — even at the cost of turning a blind eye to ways in which those ideological “others” may actually be very different. Hence the phenomenon of Jews who protest the war alongside some otherwise questionable allies, rather than revert to the loneliness of ideological solitude. 

4. When people begin to deconvert, the absolute worst opposing strategy is to double down in denunciation: to “just say no.” Those who flirt with deconversion would really prefer remaining within the fold, if only the fold turns out to have some place for them. More than they choose freely to leave, they feel forced out, because the establishment is beyond even discussing matters with them, let alone conceding that what they feel so strongly about may have some moral merit. 

5. As with all conflicts, simply debating the actual point of conflict is unlikely to change positions. A better policy is organizing conversations about what lies behind the conflict, in this case, discussions like: What about Judaism matters to you? What can we all agree upon as the redeeming factors about Israel? What kind of Israel would we like to see? Where might we agree that it has gone wrong? What might a better Jewish community here at home look like? 

Such conversations are unlikely to occur while the war goes on and Jews on both sides get increasingly locked into their own respective positions. But until calmer times arrive, we can at least avoid mistaking would-be deconversionists as “the enemy.” Just resisting the vitriol will pay huge dividends later. 

---

^[i] I am indebted to the following sources on deconversion.

Barbour, John. Versions of Deconversion: Autobiography and the Loss of Faith (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994).

Bielo, James S. Emerging Evangelicals: Faith, Modernity and the Desire for Authenticity (New York and London: New York University Press, 2011).

Harding, Susan. “Converted By the Holy Spirit: the Rhetoric of Fundamental Baptist Conversion,” in American Ethnologist (14:1) February 1987:167-181.

Hempton, David. Evangelical Disenchantment: Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

Marriott, John. The Anatomy of Deconversion: Keys to a Lifelong faith in a Culture Abandoning Christianity (Abilene: Abilene Christian University Press, 2020).

Stromberg, Peter G. Language and Self-Transformation: A Study of the Christian Conversion Narrative(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

[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 150^th-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]

[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:

1. 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; 
2. The expansion of matrilinear descent to allow children of Jewish mothers or fathers to be considered fully Jewish; 
3. Proclaiming women as equal to men, and able, therefore, to serve as cantors and rabbis. 
4. Expanding that principle of equality to the LGBTQ+ community; and 
5. 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)