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[Prior Letters (55-58) provide the Introduction to the script and its first three Acts, each of them a significant contribution to North American Judaism: 1. A Union of Congregations, a Community of Communities; 2. The Insistence on Principle and Purpose; 3. Focus on both our North American Diaspora and Israel – seeing Jewish Peoplehood as having two centers, an Ellipse, not a Circle. We now come to the fourth such contribution: Meaningful Worship.

As in the other acts, I am combining the script that we used for the final production with earlier drafts that contained additional material which we cut to save time. Braces {as here} indicate that omitted material. For dramatic effect, we replaced it with brief videos of personal recollections, which I have omitted. 

The discussion of Mishkan T’filah was written by its editor, Rabbi Elyse Frishman, who contracted covid and could not attend. Her words were read by Cantor Jill Abramson.

Compared to the other acts, the script here is more descriptive than liturgic/poetic; more content heavy, that is. The impact of the act came largely from the incredible music, planned and executed by a variety of musicians, under the guidance of Cantor Rosalie Boxt.]

*

Act 4: Meaningful Worship

The will to worship is innate:

Born the minute human beings emerged upon the earth;

An expression of the human intuition 

that there must be something more.

It is our upward, outward reach beyond ourselves,

The soul’s insistence on eternity.

It is, as well, a sacred ritual statement

of who we are and who we strive to be;

Not just prayer as words, but prayer as worship.

*

{Before Reform, worship was largely the rote repetition of prayers, often mumbled in a hurried fashion so as to complete the reading of all the pages in a prayer book. That form of prayer was, no doubt, meaningful to earlier generations who thought God demanded it and who built a monumental edifice of regulations for how, when, where, and by whom, it should be done. Modern Jews, for whom that edifice collapsed, demanded another rationale, which saw prayer (among other things) as an aesthetic exercise in reflecting Jewish identity. How we pray is who we are; as Jewish identity changed, so too did prayer itself. Each new prayerbook is a snapshot in time.

[On screen: snapshots of sample pages for each prayer book]

The Union Prayer Book, back in 1894 and 1895, reflected newly minted Reform Jews trying to demonstrate, for themselves and others, a Judaism that was not the ghettoized existence of their past. Like churches round about us, we too had our “ministers.” No one wore a yarmulka (a kippah we later called it), let alone a tallit (which back then we called a tallis). Neither the language nor the bimah had room for women. But we prayed in flowing English, with a message that was elevating. The music and diction reached beyond ourselves, and on every page, it seemed, was the prophetic message of hope.

By the 1970s we were connecting to Israel, Jewish Peoplehood worldwide, and Jewish tradition through the ages; simultaneously, we were integrating a feminist critique of our prayer-book texts. So we wrote Gates of Prayer, with tradition recovered; where men were not the only humans; and where God was not a He, a Lord, a Him. The Hebrew changed from the Ashkenazi of our European past to the Sefardi of modern Israel – not ahavoh rabboh, but ahavah rabbah, not yisgadal v’yiskadash shmeih rabboh, but yitgadal v’yitkadash shmeih rabbah.

But the real breakthrough came with reforming worship itself, not just the prayer-book words but the music and manner of praying them. Many of us now wore yarmulkahs (well, kippot) and talleisim (now, tallitot), and when women joined our ranks, we abandoned the old and boring black and blue on white, for colors, pastels, and geometric designs of every sort.}

*

1999: the biennial in Orlando,

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, our Union president,

recalls proclaiming a worship revolution.

[Video: Rabbi Eric Yoffie]: “Worship belongs to the congregants, It belongs to the synagogue. It belongs to the people….Change came fast because people were ready because they were open. Because once they were given permission, they embraced this with enthusiasm. Heartfelt worship, it turned out, was at the top of their priority list. Certainly within ten years, Shabbat worship in Reform Judaism was utterly different from what it had been.”

*

And then there was the music!

[Video: Cantor Benjie Ellen Schiller]: The appeal the NFTY music had on us teens impacted the synagogue in ways we didn’t even anticipate. That aliveness, that informality, that fun, that dynamism, that catchy beat, for our American ears had real spiritual, emotional appeal. The prayer became real. The prayer became mine and yours and we could sing it again and again. And it wasn’t leader centered as much. It was congregational centered. It was meant for all of us.”

Of all the names worth mentioning from those days, 

one stands out: 

a teen from Minneapolis, 

Debbie Friedman 

[Video: Debbie Friedman, “Sing unto God…”; then music medley, live, with congregation singing]

[Video: Cantor Benjie Ellen Schiller]: “Debbie Friedman understood in her writing, in her performing, in her prayer leading, in her teaching, the perspective of the common worshiper. She understood how we heard music, she understood how we approached a prayer. She understood that we needed to sing, we needed to wrap our mouths around these sacred words. She was interested in the human experience and the spiritual experience and there was a direct connection from her heart and her mind to her music.”

In 2011, The Hebrew Union College 

renamed its school of Jewish music, 

the Debbie Friedman School of Sacred Music.

*

Worship is our Jewish mirror on the world.

Sometimes, the mirror cracks, beyond repair: 

it no longer reflects the people, the place and the time in which we live.

Prayer becomes boring once again,

like someone else’s story, not our own,

rote recitation, a soulless performance 

for what was meant to be the soul’s privileged moment.

But change does come.

*

Rabbi Eyse Frishman: In 2007, the iphone emerged!

Our society was searching: how might we better communicate?

Consider Mishkan T’filah our new device for prayer.

As we invented, we asked 21st century questions of you:

“What do you seek?”

“What might you learn?”

“How will you feel included? Inspired?

There is no single path to meaningful prayer;

congregational customs vary.

We removed instructions that enforced a single mold.

We removed italics,

so you could choose to pray in unison or privately.

We added commentary for insight,

and full transliteration to make Hebrew entirely accessible.

The two page spread is our commitment

to diversity of belief and full participation.

We continue to ask: “How might we support your faith journey?”

*

I am a Reform Jew because Reform worship touches my life, connects me to others, and invokes the presence of God.  

I am a Reform Jew because I love services that provide music, spirituality, and community. 

For those mysterious moments when our soul touches the divine;

For those services when we are graced 

with insightful Jewish wisdom and inspirational Jewish music;

For those times when we leave prayer knowing that we belong, 

that we are loved, and that we matter;

Anachnu modim lakh: 

We praise you, God, and give you thanks.

[Music Live: Halleluyah – Debbie Friedman]

[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

[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]

[Preamble: As I said in my last letter – the Introduction — the script continues by laying out five lasting contributions of Reform Judaism’s 150 years. I called them “Chapters,” but a better word would be “Acts” since the script, after all, is just that, a “script” for a ritualized performance that included music, staging, visuals, and so on. What follows, then, is the first Reform contribution, Act 1, “A Union, a Community of Communities.” 

Each act ended with a ritual action. Seated on the stage, alongside the two main narrators were a set of people whom we thought of as our modern version of a Greek Chorus. At times, they led congregational participation; at other times, they read their own parts together; and at the end of each act, one or more of them stepped forward, and (as if testifying to the power of the Act’s message), recited a sentence that began, “I am a Reform Jew because….” The congregation responded with a prayer of thanksgiving based on the liturgical line from our prayer book, Anachnu modim lakh, “We praise you, God, and give thanks.” 

I haven’t included here all the stage instructions – which reader reads what, when the Greek Chorus speaks, and so on — because those instructions, while necessary for the participants, just gets in the way of someone reading the script for its message. But you have to imagine the flow of things as the spotlight shifted back and forth between the main narrators, but also the Greek Chorus, the congregation, a choir, congregational singing, and, at times, parts for individual readers (or actual video clips from the past) that appeared on a screen. As the narrator named the Act (A Union, a Community of Communities) at the beginning, for instance, many pictures of synagogues flashed upon the screen in rapid succession. 

The two exceptions to my rule of omitting stage instructions are: 1. Congregational readings, which are recognizable because they appear in italics. 2. In advance, we recorded videos of various people being interviewed, and then edited the videos so that snippets of the interviews became part of the script. In this section, for instance (which deals with the formation of our institutional organizations), we dealt with the contribution of Reform to our understanding of rabbis and cantors; and as part of that message, wanting to highlight the admission of women into the rabbinate and cantorate, we interviewed women clergy themselves to talk about their experience. I cannot reproduce the videos here, but where I have transcripts of what they say, I include their names with their words.

Finally: In all the acts, (as in the Introduction), I merged the final script with parts of earlier versions that we had omitted for reasons of brevity. The entire first section – until “Reform was smelted,” had been taken out, for instance. It includes reference to Chaim Nachman Bialik’s famous lines about the sustaining value of synagogues in the diaspora – an idea I borrowed from Rabbi Chaim Stern z”l, who used the Bialik lines in Gates of Repentance. Otherwise, changes were minor.

As Act 1 picks up, the choir has just completed singing Lewandowski’s Halleluja. Each act concluded with a different Halleluyah setting, a vocal exclamation mark.

So… Act 1]

***

Act 1: A Union, a Community of Communities: 

Halleluya moments require Halleluya people,

Gathered in communities,

Each one, in what the Rabbis called,,

A bet haknesset, 

a communal home that we now call a synagogue.

Without synagogues, we would have died, centuries ago. But synagogues took centuries to invent. For our first 1000 years, we were sustained by sacrifice, bloody temple rites, priests and levites interceding before God with burnt offerings all-consumed by fire, Passover lambs, a Yom Kippur goat released from the verdict of death and allowed to escape into the desert — the original scapegoat, that permitted the people sending it to be pardoned and to be restored to life renewed. The temple went up in flames, destroyed by Rome, itself a final sacrificial victim of those times, a crowning end to the Jewish chapter, part of an era fast receding into history. But in its place, came synagogues.

1000 years of Temples,

And then, religious revolution —

2000 years of synagogues that continue to this day.

From Baghdad to Toledo, 

To Rome, Cologne and Paris, 

Vienna, Vilnius, Vladivlostok,

Wherever Jews settled, 

They trained rabbis and built synagogues, 

For community, prayer, and learning,

To further the Jewish mandate 

To be charitable, kind and just. 

How did we do it? 

How did we survive 

through centuries of change and challenge?

We are not the first to wonder.

Hear our poet laureate from another place and time, 

The dying days of the Eastern Europe’s shtetls. 

Chaim Nachman Bialik endured those tragic years and declared:

“If you really want to know how we survived, 

Turn to the ancient battered house of prayer.

There, to this day, you may behold

Jews with faces lean and lined,

Jews who bear the exile’s heavy weight,

But forget their daily drudgery

In a tattered page of Talmud,

Who assuage their fears and troubles

In the chant of ancient psalms.

A strange and dreary sight.

Straining understanding, defying logic,

To those with no empathy and imagination!”

But if we, here and now, 

Revisit in our mind’s eye,

Those synagogues and times,

Our hearts will tell us true:

The synagogue has staunchly stood,

In good times and in bad, 

For the renewal of Jewish life, 

The replenishment of our soul.

Even as Bialik memorialized 

a dying Jewish culture in the east,

A Jewish renaissance, 

That we now call Reform,

Was rising in the west,

And we are but the latest chapter in that story.

Reform was smelted in the furnace of light 

that dissolved the medieval world 

in the fires of modernity. 

Out of the ashes was born commitment

to progress and hope, to science and reason.

Reform invited Jews 

to join the human family at its best,

by wresting from Jewish tradition

its eternal truths, not just for Jews but for all peoples. 

This was the vision brought to our shores 

by the founders of Reform, 

among them Isaac Mayer Wise,

who walked the streets of New York, and saw

The Jewish poor, the Jewishly illiterate — immigrants all –

but nonetheless proclaimed, against all odds:

“There is life in this Jewry….

I painted the future in golden hues.” 

To mine the gold, he galvanized a movement,

A Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 

The UAHC – renamed now, our URJ,

to convene a network of congregational communities,

a golden age for Jews in North America.

From the Founding Document of the UAHC

“It is the primary object of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations to establish a Hebrew theological Institute – – to preserve Judaism intact; to bequeath it in its purity and sublimity to posterity — to Israel, united and fraternized; to establish, sustain, and govern a seat of learning for Jewish religion and literature….”

The Union’s first historic act was founding  

the Hebrew Union College,

that Reform congregations might have Reform rabbis,

where “Rabbi” is a title, but “Reform” is no mere accidental adjective.

“Reform” has substance; it carries weight; it guarantees; it stipulates.

A Reform rabbi is a rabbi committed to some monumental propositions: 

The God who gave us Torah gave us also laws 

of chemistry and physics.

Both Torah and the universe are “books” of God

with mysteries for us to unveil.

The God in whose imagery we are fashioned, 

gave us moral scruples, 

minds to think and hearts to love.

The God who called creation good 

intended us to dance, to sing, and to be poets of our lives.

Reform rabbis do more than speak the word of God from ancient texts.

They contrive, conceive, conceptualize 

how ancient texts bring comfort, wisdom, hope and healing; 

And not just ancient texts, 

but modern words of insight, too. 

As the first Union Prayer Book put it, in 1895:

“Open, Thou, O God, our eyes 

That we may see and welcome all truth, 

Whether shining from the annals 

of ancient revelations 

Or reaching us 

through the seers of our own time.”

Like Torah itself,

the secret of synagogues too is words,

because human beings are verbal through and through.

Masters of language, magicians of phrases, architects of sentences,

of question marks and periods.

We are the people of the book;

A people who loves dearly just to talk;

A people who insists that God spoke the world into being,

A people who creates worlds of our own, through words.

Words studied, prayed, chanted, sung, discussed, devoured. 

Words to touch the heart, challenge the mind, and elevate the soul; 

Words that move us to tears; and that dry those tears with comfort; 

Words that honor the grand privilege of simply being alive, 

and words that protest on behalf of those for whom simply being alive 

is not the grand privilege it was meant to be. 

Synagogues are keepers of the Jewish conversation through time.

From the start, the College did more than just train rabbis.

It claimed continuation from the greatest seats of Jewish learning,

when the schools of Europe went up in flames,

the College saved those teachers whom it could, and brought them here. 

Of special consequence, 

it rescued Jewish music from potential oblivion, 

with its School of Sacred Music. 

Now cantors would join rabbis. 

They would celebrate the Jewish conversation in song. 

In 1883, we ordained our first class: 4 rabbis, all men. In 1893, we ordained our 100th class: 40 rabbis, 12 of them women; 7 cantors including 1 woman. Women has been acknowledged as equal to men by German rabbis in 1845. It took us over a century to act upon their declaration. In 2023, our 140th class: 31 rabbis, 11 cantors, of varied gender identities and sexual orientations.

Cantor Benjie Ellen Schiller: “I think by the fact that we were broadening the human spectrum of what a Jewish leader was by bringing in women. That alone. And the voices that we were adding to the table to leadership by being strong women, educated women, compassionate women, and Jewishly literate women. The voice of Judaism through the lens, through the mouth, through the intellect, through the heart of a woman, that changed everything. And we didn’t think of it. We just embodied it. For all of us, the voice of Judaism changed and was broadened.”

I am a Reform Jew because I am both rational and spiritual. My synagogue feeds my intellect and my soul. 

I am a Reform Jew because I am both a Jew and human being: I draw sustenance from Torah that I share with other Jews; and from science, art and learning that I share with all the world. 

For the blessing of community and synagogue;

For rabbis and cantors; 

scholars, artists, seers and sages of our time;

For the gift of still believing in hope and progress for the world;

Anachnu modim lakh: 

We praise you God and give you thanks.

[MUSIC LIVE – HAL’LUYA]

Open Letter to My Students 55: Reform Judaism in North America — The 150^th-Anniversary Script (“Introduction”)

[Preamble:

I promised I would post the script, bit by bit because of its length. What follows is the Introduction, but a longer version than what people experienced at the actual performance, because time constraints necessitated much of this being cut. For better and for worse, here is the original, modified slightly to provide continuity with the final version.

The script alone cannot provide anything like the impact of the performed version, which included music, variable lighting, video clips, background visuals, two main narrators, and a variety of speakers both on screen and in person. I wish I could replicate that here, but unable to do so, I provide just the barebones script (and, at times, an indication of the music or film clip on which the script depended in the end). 

I am enormously indebted to the best editing committee imaginable. The text was read critically in all its many stages over a four month period by Rabbis April Davis and Danny Freelander. It then went to a URJ committee of Rosalie Boxt (who quite brilliantly organized the music); Jill Peltzman (who, among other things, directed everything that went into the visuals and staging)  Barbara Weinstein (who brought concerns arising from her work at the Religious Action Center, and (deserving special mention) Rabbi Esther Lederman (who oversaw the entire project with wisdom and care). At times others too were involved, in particular, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the URJ president, at whose request I undertook the project to begin with, and whose judgements often resulted in script additions and changes. 

Journalists Dana Bash and David Gregory were superb narrators. I wish I could replicate their voices in this printed version of the script, because it was they who brought it to life with such brilliance.

The Introduction was followed by five “chapters” (each of them an aspect of Reform Jewish innovation or history) and a conclusion. The Introduction sets the tone of the evening and names the chapters, which will follow in later posts).]

***

Reform Judaism in North America — The 150^th-Anniversary Script Introduction

[Instrumental meditative music as we enter;

music changes into the Hanukah motif; background images of lighting Hanukah candles appear on screen; music fades out as the narration begins.]

December darkness is not the world at its worst,

Not for Jews, at least, For whom, December cold is Hanukah’s warmth,

A time of dedication,

To a past that is rich with meaning

And a future that, we pray, may dawn yet richer still.  

But dedication is no orphan 

Untethered to time.

All promises of perseverance, loyalty, resolve, devotion, 

Remain ethereal,

If they are not acted out

Within the real stuff of human enterprise.

The great and noble causes on which the world depends

Exist within the drama we call history

Or do not exist at all.

And that is why we Jews remember.

No people on the face of the earth 

Insists on memory more than we,

We Jews, 

Who have played a part 

In world affairs far beyond our numbers.

From Jerusalem to Baghdad,

Barcelona to Berlin, 

And now here in North America.

“We Jews have many faults

But amnesia is not among them,”

Said Isaac Bashevis Singer,

Who knew that Jews remember.

Zachor and Zikaron, 

The Hebrew words for memory, 

Mean “to point.”

Day in, day out, we Jews are asked to point, 

To direct our hearts and minds and souls 

To the forces that brought us to this day and will, we pray, 

Allow us each to play our part in the universal flow of time,

To move the human drama ever forward,

To an ever better, brighter, day.

*

Three months ago, or so, we celebrated Rosh Hashanah,

Our new year day of memory, Yom Hazikaron, 

A day of pointing back with mythic consciousness

to the time the world was made.

With every shofar blast, we said

Hayom harat olam,”

“On this day the world was conceived,”

Shaped in the womb of God, 

And birthed into existence.

On Rosh Hashanah, the rabbis said,

Kol ba’ei olam, “all who enter the world” 

Appear before God.

Not just as Jews, then, 

do we greet our highest holy days,

But as human beings like everyone else, 

Confronting God’s presence, 

To be reminded of the human project:

To leave the world better off than when we entered it.

*

Three months from now, or so, we will sit around a seder table,

Marking another Jewish new year,

The month of Passover,

For we Jews have not just one but two beginnings, 

The conception of the world and the time we left Egypt.

“This shall be for you the beginning of months”

In the words of our Torah.

So the seder too remembers, 

Not the world’s conception, but the birth of our people,

For as much as we are a religion, we are a people too, 

A people born in slavery to Pharaoh – 

that we might value freedom;  

A people awestruck by a burning bush – 

that we might harbor faith

A people steeped in echoes of Sinai – 

that we might know our purpose; 

We are not just a people, 

We are a people with purpose.

And so we meet tonight as Jews of purpose

To recollect out past

To celebrate our present,

But most of all, to reaffirm our purpose.

….Shehechiyanu v’ki’manu v’higianu lazman hazeh

“We praise you God for giving us life, 

For sustaining us 

And for bringing us to where we are this day.”

*

On a single thread of insight, says the Talmud,

There hang whole mountains of vibrant creativity.

No surprise then that Reform began with such a single thread:

The daring thought that Torah is revealed 

Not just once at some magical desert mountain,

But in every age anew: 

The ever-present voice of God —

Throughout the world’s wonders, 

the advance of human reason, 

scientific progress, 

and insights from our texts and our experience 

as a Jewish People through the ages. 

 

From this single thread came a framework of Reform ideas,

In their time, profoundly novel, 

So successful, that we take them now for granted – and should not.

As the Israelites followed pillars of cloud by day and fire by night, 

So we hold fast to these pillars of inventiveness, 

Which, now as then, make us who we are.

A Union, a Community of Communities: 

Individuals need other individuals; 

and communities need other communities. 

Reform is a movement, 

Many congregations impacting the world together.

Principle and Purpose: 

Judaism is no tribal faith. 

It exists to make us fully human; 

and to pursue the great and noble causes of the human race.

An Ellipse, not a Circle: 

The Jewish People has not just one but two centers, 

the Jewish land we call Israel, 

and a worldwide diaspora – North America for us.

Meaningful Worship: 

Prayer need not be rote repetition of prayer-book texts. 

It can be, must be, touching, spiritual, inspirational, aspirational. 

A Doorway, not a Fence: 

Judaism is a response to the human condition. 

It is open to all who find it meaningful.

Authentic Judaism is not doing 

What our ancestors did, 

But doing what they would have done, 

If they were alive today. 

And Judaism, continually updated, 

Is not a burden; it was, it is, and it should be,

Pure sheer joy….

With Halleluya moments

That cantors, choirs and congregations, 

Have belted out for 150 years. 

[Introduction ends with Lewandowski Halleluja video 

by American Conference of cantors and Guild of Temple Musicians)

***

[There now follow sections on the five principles:

“A Union, a Community of Communities: 

Principle and Purpose: 

An Ellipse, not a Circle: 

Meaningful Worship: 

A Doorway, not a Fence”

These will follow in later posts]

Because he knew he was thinking, Descartes proved his own existence. I, by contrast, know I exist, and want to make sure I think.

More precisely, given the kind of person I am, I think in a certain sort of way about certain sorts of things — a truism, nowadays, in this Age of Anxious Identity. Tell me who you are and I will know something of what and how you think. 

I like, therefore, to engage synagogue leaders in questions of who they are (and how, therefore, they think). Because I do most of my presenting in Reform congregations, I take special interest in their members’ Reform identity and what the Reform label means to them. 

Most recently, I asked the question of some focus groups assembled by the URJ (the Union for Reform Judaism) to help me think about the script that I agreed to write for 150^th anniversary of Reform Judaism in North America. The participants (who included rabbis and lay leaders) had this to say:

1. Representatives of the younger generation, mostly millennials, often found it hard to say what Reform even is. Some of them went farther and thought Reform as a category largely irrelevant. The future, they said, would feature Orthodoxy on one hand and everyone else on the other. 

• By contrast, members of the older generations, Gen X and Baby Boomers, believed Reform had once been a persuasive descriptive category but bemoaned its disappearance nowadays. Their advice in writing the anniversary script was to “Go deep”: to provide the intellectual, moral, and historical depth that Reform identity once had but now seems lacking.

I was saddened by the millennials’ response, but not surprised, because sociologists regularly describe millennial resistance to being pigeonholed by organizational labels. But that is the problem: “Reform” has become an organizational label, not (as it used to be) a visionary one descriptive of a proud and committed way of being in the world. 

The older informants put their finger on the problem: our Reform movement lacks gravitas. Our institutions are no longer respected as having much to say to the world. Many people say, privately, that they have largely stopped trying. 

But lumping Jews together as either “Orthodox” or “other” is a gross oversimplification of both. Our Age of Anxious Identity is equally an Age of Identity Choices. If increasing numbers of people choose “just Jewish,” it is certainly not because they identify equally as everything, from the ultra-Orthodox Haredim to ethnic secularists; it is because (at least for Reform) there is no currently-compelling visionary content to what we say we are. 

Historically, however, each denomination has presented its own authentic alternative to being Jewish. Modern Orthodoxy devised a halachic life style in geographically dense communities where people walk to shul together. Conservative Judaism excelled at Jewish education, an historical approach to halachah and traditional davening for people who may not be all that traditional otherwise. Reconstructionism, which saw Judaism as a civilization, emphasized community formation — and small-group Havurah communities at that. Reform Judaism (which I know most about, so can say most about) gave us religion through the lens of reason; continuous revelation beyond Sinai; social justice and prophetic Judaism; courage to make cutting-edge moral judgements, like admitting clergy who are women or LGBTQ+; intentionally joyous worship; a new kind of cantor; and emphasis on spirituality.

Some of these movement identities remain healthy, clear, and viable. Judging from my focus groups, Reform is not among them. We have lost our way.

The denominational identities I want safeguarded are not organizational – not, that is, just parallel bureaucracies that thrive on generating committees, holding meetings, and protecting turf. They are visionary: entire Jewish philosophies of being, alternative traditions of Jewish artistry, that should be elaborated, not eradicated. To be sure, people can be “served” in organizational settings that are “just Jewish,” with no particular philosophy whatever: they all have religious schools, High Holiday services, rabbis on call, and the like. But synagogues that become service centers are a poor caricature of what Jewish life should be. Serving is not the issue. Identity is.  And passionate identity is harder to come by in a synagogue that flounders in inchoate generalities.

Visionary denominational identities do not erect boundaries to keep people out. Think of them as diverse photographic slices of the Jewish landscape through time. We properly learn from one another’s pictures, either borrowing or rejecting bits and pieces of the perspective that they capture — but always with respect, and always to enhance our own perception of the Jewish life we seek. Only the shallowest view of Judaism allows us to be every kind of Jew imaginable. Serious Judaism demands choices, choices of this denominational vision rather than that one, each of them constituting a doorway, not a fence; a doorway to a specific Jewish life style, in which we are invited not just to be served but to root ourselves and to grow. 

If denominational Judaism is suspect, it is not because denominationalism is bad – quite the contrary. It is because denominational bodies (some more than others) suffer hardening of their visionary arteries. At worst, they construct visions that only the inner circle of the denominational professionals find compelling, or forget they even have a vision altogether. At best, they let their visions petrify, collapsing them into sterile cardboard cutouts of reality, static repetition of two-dimensional photos rather than a kaleidoscopic vision that is always in process, always offering newly insightful ways to rekindle our passion.  

I am, therefore I think: I am a Reform Jew; so this is what I think about.

You will now understand the script I wrote for the Reform 150^th. I sought to provide an historical overview in poetic/liturgical form that at least suggested the depth of the Reform Jewish vision through time. It was a celebration of Reform as the intellectual and aesthetic artistry that it once was and still can be. 

The streamed version is supposed to be available eventually on the URJ website, complete with visual backdrops, changes in lighting, historical reminiscences, video clips, two exceptional narrators (Dana Bash and David Gregory), a cantorial choir, congregational singing, and more. 

In the meantime, I am going to post the script for you to read, in stages, as my next set of Open Letters. Stay tuned.

.

A massive challenge facing Jews today is the story we decide to tell about anti-Semitism. We did not choose this issue; it chose us, with the hate march in Charlottesville (2017); and outright shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue (2018) and elsewhere. These, and similar incidents, however, emanated from the radical right, so we knew what to make of them: traditional anti-Semites of the Nazi variety, a lunatic fringe of sorts egged on by Trumpist rhetoric, we said.

But now our attackers come from the left, and that is what is new for most of us. Exactly how pervasive this left-wing sentiment is can be debated: Well-meaning criticism of Israel’s all-out war is understandable, especially given the TV optics of mass destruction, and the Netanyahu coalition that abandoned the moral high ground long ago. But what about the image of a paraglider with a Palestinian flag posted on X by “Black Lives Matter, Chicago”?^[i] The ultra-woke left seems to hate us as much as the semi-fascist right, making Jews the single solitary subject on which both extremes agree. What conclusion should we draw? 

 The easiest solution is to say that anti-Semitism is endemic to the human experience. People Love Dead Jews (says the title of Dara Horn’s influential book). Jews are the quintessential scapegoated minority, the victims of a long list of persecutions, notes David Baddiel (Jews Don’t Count), but identity politics labels us “white,” meaning “privileged,” and, by definition, perpetrators of colonialism, racism, and all that is odious to oppressed minorities. 

Baddiel is a liberal, but conservative writer, Liel Liebovitz warns, likewise (Commentary, August 2021) that “the arc of history is long and often bends toward anti-Semitism—as is the clear pattern that emerges when you study any period of history in any corner of planet earth.”

So there you have it: New Story #1: Anti-Semitism is endemic.

It is only a matter of time until the world turns against us. Herzl was right after all. Only a Jewish state can protect us.

Is this the sad and sorry tale we will tell our children, come Passover this year? That anti-Semites are everywhere and always present, just awaiting an excuse to turn against us? How does such a tale end? At least in the old days, we could escape persecution in one country by taking up residence in another. In the global village of today, however, where anti-Semitism metastasizes instantly in media shared around the world, it is only a matter of time until no one will want us, no one but Israel, that is: But Israel against the world? The entire world? Will Israel (God forbid) be our Jewish Alamo?

The “Anti-Semitism is endemic” story runs counter to scientific argument. “Endemic” throughout time, place, and culture, assumes some kind of genetic carrier, an anti-Semite gene, perhaps. However commonplace anti-Semitism may be, must we say it is endemic? Necessary? Always and everywhere? A kind of metaphysical reality inherent in humanity itself?

To be sure, Christian culture dedicated centuries to distilling hatred of Jews within the western cultural heritage. But since the 1960s, official Christian teaching has repudiated its anti-Semitic past. Islamic views provide less reason for optimism. In a 2013 study, for example, 64% of Austrian Muslims agreed that “Jews cannot be trusted.”^[ii] But our conclusions require nuance. In 2010, 25% of Muslim high-school students in Germany who were of Arab background agreed that “It is the Jews who drive the world to disaster.” Only 2.8% of those without any migrant background concurred.^[iii] In most studies, fundamentalist Muslims are more likely to be anti-Semites; and males are more anti-Semitic than females. Does the metaphysical anti-Semitic pathogen inhabit men more than women? Or is it more likely that Muslims (overwhelmingly male) who study in fundamentalist schools pick up a cultural attitude the way believing Christians did in medieval Europe?

I don’t minimize anti-Semitism in the world. But we are fools to consider it a pathogenic human cell that is somehow carried genetically and beyond our ability to erase.

I prefer Story #2, the theory that cultures respond to crises by fastening blame on scapegoated outsiders. Modi’s India and Sri Lanka’s Buddhists fixate on Muslims; Orban’s Hungary resurrects the Jewish threat; as do American extremists on both left and right, who simultaneously blame each other as well. 

If the cause of anti-Semitism is crises, the proper study of it should identify the crises that bring it into being, and in our case, it is a worldwide crisis of fear, of imagined scarcity, of a dystopian apocalypse about to strike.

In recent memory, we have suffered 1. a global shutdown from a plague called covid; 2. mounting climate change that could erase life as we know it, and that meanwhile brings floods, fires, and storms of increasing ferocity; 3. an economy where everyone but the super rich feels poorer; 4. uncontrolled migrations from failed states; 5. enhanced computerization that takes away jobs; 6. the multiplication of terrorists, dictators, and now war: first in Ukraine; then in Israel and Gaza. And the brutality of it all is broadcast around the clock and in real time across mass media that feast on horror. 

The war in Gaza provides a convenient outlet for people’s fears, for there is plenty of blame to spread around. Would Hamas have attacked no matter what? Yes. Is the Palestinian Authority corrupt and weakened to the point where dialogue partners are hard to find? Again, yes. But are the policies of the Netanyahu government also to blame? For sure. We properly stand with Israel but should not be surprised at heated critiques from those who sympathize with images of civilian suffering in Gaza. These critics are not all anti-Semites, although some are. 

In any event, whether they know it or not, they are part and parcel of a world of scarcity and fear, where you are either for us or against us. John Gray, a scholar specializing in Thomas Hobbes, fears an all-out “war of all against all between self-defined collective identities… an unrelenting struggle for the control of thought and language” where “enclaves of freedom persist, but a liberal civilization based on the practice of tolerance has passed.”^[iv]

Will it come to that? 

Anti-Semitism is real, but if we paint ourselves into our own corner as necessary victims of an imagined anti-Semitic pathogen, and needing, therefore, to join this war of all against all, we may unwittingly help bring the worst to pass ourselves. We do have enemies, but we also have allies, chief among them the current president of the United States and the majority of politicians in both parties, despite the outliers on the extremes of left and right. We need to enlist our allies, not give up on them all just because some of them turned out to be turncoats; and together to fight anti-Semitism, not give up on it.

The easy approach is to imagine an inherent anti-Semitic pathogen, worse even than the Bubonic Plague, because the plague is carried by rats, while anti-Semitism is carried in the human genetic makeup. I hate to quote acerbic journalist H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), who himself said some nasty things about Jews,^[v] but Mencken’s most famous adage applies here. “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” Hatred of Jews is such a complex problem. We cannot afford to get it wrong.

---

^[i] Reported, for example, in Time (October 14, 2023), See https://time.com/6323730/hamas-attack-left-response/

^[ii] https://isgap.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jikeli_Antisemitic_Attitudes_among_Muslims_in_Europe1.pdf, p.7. Cf. Gunther Jikeli, European Muslim Anti-Semitism: Why Young Urban Males Say They Don’t Like Jews  ((Indiana University Press, 2015).

^[iii] Jikeli, Anti-Semitic Attitudes … In Europe, p. 17.

^[iv] John Gray, The New Leviathans (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2023), p. 5.

^[v] Robert Kanigel, “Did H.L. Mencken Hate the Jews?,” Menckeniana 73 (Spring 1980), pp. 1-7.            

Years ago when I wrote the Faculty Blessing for the New York HUC Ordination, I included the wish that the ordinees’ be blessed with devoted students. The fullness of that wish became abundantly clear this past Saturday night, as we celebrated 150 years of Reform Judaism in North America, and my own students over time presented me with a book in my honor: Communities of Meaning: Conversations on Modern Jewish Life Inspired by Rabbi Larry Hoffman. A few people spoke; a cantorial choir actually sang to me as I received the book. No wonder I was, and still am, overwhelmed by intense gratitude.

The editors, Rabbis Lisa Grushcow and Joe Skloot, largely kept me in the dark as the book took shape. When publisher David Behrman finally sent me the advance copy, I began rationing my reading of it, just one or two of its contributions at a time, and only on Shabbat, to make it last. I discovered that each section features an excerpt from something I had written over the years, followed by two or three short meditative essays prompted by the excerpt – making the book a genuine conversation among magnificent authors from all walks of life, people I have had the blessing to know; all of it framed in a non-technical way so that you don’t have to be an expert to understand it. 

The Talmud is filled with lavish promises about the blessings that flow from having students, and now, I know why.  

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But I don’t like the word “student,” because it suggests a degree-granting institution with classrooms where people go to get filled up with knowledge that another person, the teacher, already has; and the Jewish model (where a student is a talmid) is so much more than that. A student studies; a talmid “learns.” 

This traditional activity of “learning” carries the Yiddish verb lernen, but just as talmid is more than “student,” so too, lernen is more than “to learn.” To get at an English equivalent, I differentiate “learning” from “finding out.” Learning is what we do when the teacher already knows the answer, and “students” just hear it, take notes on it, and now know it the way the teacher does. “Finding out” is the activity of inquiring about something that no one fully knows yet, and, in fact, may never fully know at all. 

Life’s big questions are always things we have to “find out.” They require  curiosity, open-minded questioning, listening to others, factoring in what experts already do know, and then daring to think creatively. Jewish lernen is this kind of finding out. It implies more than soaking up what a teacher has already mastered. It gives learners an active voice of their own. The Talmud (Ta’anit 7a) thus likens learners to pieces of wood that are set on fire. As burning pieces of wood ignite one another, so learners posing questions sharpen one another’s curiosity. 

For simplicity’s sake, I don’t mind using the terms “student” and “teacher,” because that is all the English language offers. But I understand teachers and students differently. As a teacher, I do know more than my students about technical issues: the history of prayer, for example. But the important questions are not technical: how we should pray today, and what our prayer accomplishes, for example. I have thought longer about such questions, but my students are not inconsequential to the solutions we “find out” together. 

But even finding out can be just an academic exercise, and I have decided that our truest students are not just those with academic curiosity and excellence – much less are they merely those who memorize academic lessons, pass courses and get degrees from us. They are people whose lives we teachers have touched by our kindness to them, our wisdom for them, our love of them, and our confidence in them. They respond in kind: gratitude for the depth of care and counsel we have shown, not just the academic lessons we have taught. I don’t minimize the important role of intellectual and academic excellence. But the official content of lecture- and lesson-plans are just a bare beginning. Academic content becomes Torah if and only if what we teach — and we who teach it — touch students’ lives. 

Rabbinic wisdom likens students to biological children, a lesson we normally take to mean that teaching students rises to the level of raising sons and daughters. But maybe it’s the other way around. Raising sons and daughters is supposed to emulate the rabbinic ideal of “teaching” students, which is to say, loving them enough to see to their formation, their character, and their deepest selves; and then launching them on their own way forward.

Much as they may have been grateful for the academic lessons of my classes, no one honored me last Saturday night because I had taught them the proper origin of the Amidah or the clever way that Union Prayer Book editors drew upon the Jerusalem Talmud to universalize the prayer for healing. That sort of teaching is indeed what professors are paid to do: conduct research, add to the knowledge of a professional field, and impart what they can of it to students. But Jewish teachers are called rabbis, and rabbis impart Torah – not just academic facts but wisdom for life, including faith in and love for the people whose lives our wisdom touches.

It occurs to me then that when I address these “open letters to my students,” I mean concentric circles of people whom I respect and in whom have faith. My students can also become my teachers, because their love for me can match my love for them; and because they will have wisdom that I do not. Sometimes, as the Talmud puts it (Taanit 7a), “More than I have learned from my teachers, I have learned from my students.” 

Never was that so clear to me as this past Saturday night. Thank you, all my students, the students of my students, and their students too – in endless circles of curiosity and finding out. I never wanted to be a professor, actually. I wanted from the start to be a rabbi. When I moved from Cincinnati to teach in New York, I threw out my PhD certificate; but saved the s’michah of rabbinic ordination to put on my wall. Professor is my job; rabbi is my calling. I was never so happy to have that calling as when Rabbis Skloot and Grushcow, on behalf of all of you, presented me with this book. I am in grateful awe of all who planned it, all who wrote in it, and, by extension, all who will read it and teach it to others, in the endless chain of Torah learning throughout the generations. 

Here’s what I know about the war: Hamas is a radicalized terrorist group that would slaughter every Jew in Israel, if it could: think of it as “another six million.” Israel must try to eliminate it. Israel must also try to limit collateral damage to Gaza civilians. But war is hell and there is no way to avoid at least some such casualties, especially because of the way Hamas embeds itself among civilians and their institutions. 

I know something else also: Jews are news; and the media are happily pandering to a public that cannot get enough of blood and gore, this time factual, not fictional, so all the more sensational and saleable – like those “True crime” series, but “True War” instead. I know also that except for ever-new examples of wartime horror, most of the pundits, analysts, and commentators don’t know anything more than I do. Anyone who knows the important stuff, like the Israelis’ actual military strategy, can’t talk about it.

I know also that our thirst to know more anyway morphs easily into addictively following the 24/7 coverage. I will call it “going down a rabbit hole,” even though the point of that image is the endless tunnels that rabbits build, just like Hamas, and the fact that I even think of that parallel is a sign of my own obsessive desire to know more than what is available to me. 

The deeper you tunnel into rabbit holes, however, the darker things become; and I watch myself, and others, lose perspective in the darkness. We, who believe nothing else that is metaphysical, somehow return like the swallows to Capistrano to the notion that anti-Semitism is somehow baked into the universe like the speed of light or the law of gravity; even our so-called friends will eventually turn on us, we say. Don’t they always?

Well, no, they don’t “always,” but even the grandest of delusions may have some truth behind them: witness the anti-Semitism of erstwhile allies in academic circles, for example — scholars who normally thrive on weighing evidence for and against their claims, but who (when it comes to Israel) go down their own rabbit hole of self-righteous liberation politics instead. They are, however (so far, anyway) the exception, not the rule. The great majority of people I know support Israel’s right to defend itself. They cringe at civilian casualties as well, but so do I.  

Rabbit-holing has another terrible consequence. It saturates our consciousness, corrodes our mental circuitry, dissipates our energy, and saps the spirit to the point of terminal fatigue. 

It is time to escape the rabbit hole. I will keep up with the news in a responsible way; if, perchance, there is actual evidence that should affect my understanding, I will attend to it. With a few notable exceptions, however, I will kick the habit of wallowing in the interminable columns, podcasts, op eds, and media posts that offer advice, opinion, and assessment by so-called experts who are really just guessing themselves, after all. Instead, I will think long-term. I, personally, cannot do very much about the war; but I can begin to ponder what we must do when the war finally ends. 

Here is my short list of issues we have allowed to fester; issues that we have sometimes tinkered with but never handled seriously; issues that require urgent post-war attention; issues, also, that we really can do something about.

For starters, we will have to renegotiate our relationship with that part of the left which really is anti-Semitic. For example, I still think black lives matter (in lower case), but I am appalled at the anti-Semitic voices of Black Lives Matter (in Caps). Equally, we must confront the rampant anti-Semitism of academia that I mentioned above, a task that will entail us Jewish academicians having difficult conversations with our university colleagues; and Jews, in general, making hard decisions about what colleges to support with their philanthropy — and with their children’s attendance.

Then too, there is the tragic matter of the Israeli government and its policies. There is nothing good about the reigning Israeli coalition; we have known this all along; we cheered the Saturday-night resistance by Israelis; but we have allowed ourselves to be coopted by the government which pretends to listen to us, and then holds us in utter contempt while continuing its immoral agenda of Jewish terrorism on the west bank. 

Let me be clear: Hamas would have attacked us no matter what; in no way are we Jews to blame for the Hamas incursion. But on its own grounds, we need to resurrect the possibility of a two-state solution and do all we can to break the back of an adventurist right wing that has taken Israeli policy captive, poisoned world opinion against us, and made it difficult for our own young Jewish generations to love Israel as their parents do. To be sure, it is not clear what dialogue partners we even have on the Arab side of things. But we can at least clean up our side of the street, if for no other reason than the moral imperative that we say we represent.

Finally, we will need to invest heavily in our own diaspora creativity. I am, and always have been, a fervent Zionist; in no way do I question the need for a thriving Jewish State of Israel. But the Jewish People constitute an ellipse, not a circle: it needs an equally thriving diaspora, and it is time we poured much more money, time, and attention into transforming diasporas around the world into an entire network of communities where Jewish life flourishes.

The opposite of “rabbit holes” is “blue skies,” where we look up to heaven itself with the endless possibilities of imaginative creativity. While the war is on, we leave no doubt about our will for Israel to defend itself. When the war ends, we should leave no doubt about our will to become serious about an agenda that we have too long avoided. 

Is there anyone who doesn’t yet know that life is a journey? Rabbi Alvin Fine (1937-1999) popularized the idea with his exceptional poem by that name, but the idea has pedigree, going back, it is said, to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, however, said only something like that, although a Methodist theologian (Lynn Hough, 1877-1971) interpreted Emerson that way in a 1920 Sunday school lesson, and from the Methodist Hough to the Jewish Fine is not itself a bad journey, come to think of it.

For most of history, journeys happened over roads, so “Life as a Road” is another common metaphor: as in Disney’s Anastasia (“Life is a road and I wanna keep goin’”).

I think about this sort of thing every year as the High Holy Days approach, and I hate to say it, but none of my examples so far – not Fine, not Emerson/Hough, and certainly not Disney — tell the whole truth. They romanticize life too much, make it seem like a five-part Netflix series: a moving tale about overcoming the challenges along life’s way, because it’s not the destination but the journey that counts. 

Well, maybe, but I get a more realistic image from Mark Twain (The Gilded Age) who describes “a not very well defined road, which did not seem to know its own mind exactly, and, after straggling through the town, wandered off over the rolling prairie in an uncertain way, as if it had started for nowhere and was quite likely to reach its destination.” 

That is the real way in which life is a road. We can pretend all we want that life is responsive to  the rules of rational choice, but if we look back honestly, we will probably admit that Like Mark Twain’s road, life seems frequently “not to know its own mind,” then to “straggle” through stages and even “wander off … in an uncertain way.” 

That is my experience, anyway. As much as I look back to find a pattern, I confess to life being largely the product of chance: being in the right (or wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time; the people I met (or didn’t). How is it that I managed to grow up in an economic boom, not a bust? In Canada, just after World War II, not in Lublin, Berlin, or Minsk, just a decade earlier? I never had a long-term plan to become an expert liturgist (which I had never heard of until I practically already was one).

Then too, there is the way “the road had started for nowhere and was quite likely to reach its destination.” I first read that line as Mark Twain had intended it: it’s just plain funny! With life in mind, however, I stopped laughing. Life too starts for nowhere and inevitably (not just “quite likely”) gets there in the end – the nowhere of our death. In our last moments, we may think back to how we planned on getting to one “somewhere” after another; how luck, good and bad, got us to a variety of “somewhere elses”; and how we are finally running out of any “somewhere” to be, because however long our body may still hang around, the “I”, the “me”, the “person,” who now barely inhabits that body, is about to exit time and space – and be “nowhere.”  It doesn’t take the Talmud for us to know it; but the Talmud does say it. We will die against our will, and among the things we cannot know, the one at the very top of the list is the day that death will find us (Avot 4:29, Pes. 54b) – and we will be “nowhere.”

The High Holy Days are nothing, if not a sustained confirmation of life’s tenuous uncertainty. I don’t especially like that confirmation: who would? But serious religion raises serious reflections, and in the end, I am always glad to have spent Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur on more solemn fare than watching the US Open or finding another good restaurant in which to while away an evening. 

I know the High Holy Day prayer books very well – I have helped edit more than one – and I confess that they are massive, crowded with verbiage, and full of imagery that no longer resonates with us. Indeed, the liturgy is so impenetrable at times, that it’s easy to get lost in the prayers without actually praying. Here’s one of the things I do to extricate myself from spiritual disaster.

I try each year to find just one single prayer that promises to touch my life. For a while, I linger there, while everyone else is moving on. I eventually catch up, but I remember my prayer’s page number so I can return to it, when other prayers lose or bore me. This year, as I ponder life being a road that wanders (we know not where) and then ends in “nowhere” (we know not when), I suspect that I will stop at a prayer called Hayom, “Today,” because however tenuous my tomorrows may be, my todays are present and real.

Today, strengthen us,

Today bless us,

Today, exalt us,

Today, show us kindness.

Today, inscribe us for a good life.

Our “todays” are destinations along the road; and life is just as much each daily destination as it is the road or journey through them. “Todays” are also mysteries, chance meeting points in time and intersections in space, where different people’s life trajectories miraculously coalesce, as if, for today, we have all stopped together for the same red light. By tomorrow the light will change and we will go our separate ways. Who knows where the people I meet today are going? Who knows what they are going through? For some, today is non-stop brilliant sunshine and bluebirds of happiness. For others today is physical or mental misery that feels like torture. 

Hence this year’s prayer choice: “Today.” We spend too much time plotting a path to the tomorrows that we cannot control; too little time harvesting our todays that are actually upon us. It is not nothing, each and every day, to have feel strength enough to go on; and to carry others whose strength is temporarily spent; to realize that we are blessed and to share the blessing amply; to feel exaltation and to lift up those who are ground down; and both to give and to receive as much kindness and goodness as our soul can find. 

“Today,” we pray, may we know all this, not just the “today” of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but all our “todays,” for the “todays” are all we have.