CONTEMPORARY REFORM JUDAISM: AN HISTORICAL ANALYSIS
By Jonathan D. Sarna, Brandeis University
In 1895/96, the famous Zionist orator, Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Masliansky, then recently expelled from Russia, toured the United States. He visited Cleveland, and then moved on to Cincinnati, where he delivered a memorable address, in Hebrew, at the Hebrew Union College. In his memoirs, Masliansky recalled that at the conclusion of his address he turned dramatically to the venerable Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the founder and president of Hebrew Union College, and complained to him that a former HUC student, Rabbi Moses Gries, then the rabbi in Cleveland’s Temple Tifereth Israel (“The Temple”), had committed what Masliansky described as “a Hellenistic abomination. He has removed the Torah scroll – the glory of our sanctuary – from the holy ark and put it in the basement, replacing it with a copy of the English Bible.”1
In fact, Rabbi Gries, in 1894, had proudly abolished the reading of the Torah from a scroll in Cleveland. In his congregation, “the Bible was read in English from a book.”2 Wise, according to Masliansky, described this action as “an awful thing” that made him sick to his stomach.
Chatting in Wise’s home, after the lecture, Wise, according to Masliansky, “suddenly rose from his chair, and with eyes flashing” told Masliansky in a prophetic voice, to walk over to the wall. Maliansky did as he was bidden.
--“Why are you standing there and not walking further,” Wise thundered.
--“How can I walk any further,” Masliansky replied, “the wall is in the way.”
-- “So it is with my foolish students,” Wise declared. “They have gone so far out that they have come to a wall. They are banging their heads against the wall, but there is no path before them. They shall return. . . .”3
Whether or not this conversation took place precisely as Masliansky recalled it,4 many scholars have argued that Wise’s dramatic prophecy has in fact come to pass in our day. Reform Judaism, having experimented with the most radical of reforms—abolishing the Torah reading, renouncing Jewish peoplehood, moving Shabbat to Sunday, and the like – has now, so the argument goes, “returned.” Today, in Reform Judaism, the Torah is back, Jewish peoplehood is back, Shabbat is back, Hebrew is back, even the blessing mehaye hametim (who revives the dead) is back (at least as an option).
Nevertheless, and notwithstanding its seeming persuasiveness, I am going to argue this evening that the by now widely accepted cyclical interpretation of the history of Reform Judaism in the United States -- the idea that what we are seeing is a “return” to tradition –inadequately explains major aspects of post-war Reform Judaism. To properly understand contemporary Reform, it seems to me, we need to appreciate major developments that too often go unremarked: first, Reform Judaism’s astonishing twentieth century rise from third place to first place among America’s Jewish religious movements; second, the concomitant metamorphosis that it underwent in order to successfully win over East European Jews; third, its conscious abandonment of theological and ritual uniformity in favor of an internally pluralistic, “big tent” approach to Reform Judaism; and finally the implications of decisions made a generation ago concerning outreach and patrilineal descent.
The immigration of some 2.5 million East European Jews to America between 1875-1925 shattered Reform Judaism’s hope of becoming “minhag Amerika,” the predominant form of Judaism in the United States. It also profoundly shook the Reform movement’s self-confidence. Instead of growing, Reform’s market share of American Judaism plummeted. By World War I, fully 85% of American Jewry was of East European origin or descent while Reform Judaism, by and large, remained the province of a comparatively small number of German Jews and their descendants. In America’s largest Jewish community, New York City, in 1918, just 2 percent of the city’s synagogues were Reform; the rest were Orthodox in one form or another. Nor did there seem to be much chance that Reform would make inroads into this East European groundswell. The Reform movement’s basic platform, the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, ran counter to some of East European Jews’ most cherished beliefs, including Jewish peoplehood and Zionism. Moreover, the church-like atmosphere of Reform temples, the heavy use of English, the substitution of confirmation for bar mitzvah, as well as the icy German formality and the evident condescension displayed toward East European Jews by many classical Reform congregations – all suggested to knowledgeable observers that Reform Judaism would become a kind of Jewish Episcopalianism: small, smug, and paternalistically elite.5
Those East European Jews and their children who left Orthodoxy flocked not to Reform Judaism, but rather to the new and ideologically broad Conservative movement. The United Synagogue, the synagogue body of the Conservative movement, ballooned from 22 member synagogues in 1913 to 229 member synagogues in 1929 -- making Conservative Judaism the fastest growing by far of America’s Jewish religious movements. As for Reform Judaism, it was ridden with dissension surrounding the volatile issue of Zionism, and many of its rabbis were disillusioned. A nationwide survey of Reform rabbis published in 1926 found “many expressions of dissatisfaction, that Reform is in need of resurrection, reformation, revitalization, that Reform must be reformed.”6
One charismatic Reform rabbi, Stephen S. Wise of New York, went to far as to establish a new rabbinical seminary: the Jewish Institute of Religion. It boldly competed with Reform’s primary seminary, Hebrew Union College, and advocated a striking new agenda for the rabbis whom it trained – an agenda that placed great emphasis on Zionism, social justice, and the task of serving klal yisrael, the Jewish people as a whole. Seeing all of this -- two seminaries, two ideologies, two warring camps -- many foresaw a destructive schism brewing within the Reform movement. That almost come to pass in 1942, when the American Council for Judaism was established, which opposed a Jewish state and sought to restore Reform Judaism to its classical moorings.7 Two years earlier, the small, divided Reform movement claimed a membership in the United States of just 265 paying congregations and only 59,000 family memberships, meaning that there were fewer than 200,000 dues-paying Reform Jewish men, women and children in the whole country.8
When we consider that Reform Judaism today boasts more than 900 member congregations and some 1.5 million dues-paying Reform Jews9 we begin to appreciate the magnitude of Reform Judaism’s transformation over the past seven decades. Since 1940, the movement has won over large numbers of Jews of East European descent, and moved from being the smallest of America’s Jewish religious movements to the largest.
Much can be learned from looking at how this happened. First, Reform Judaism, influenced by the free-market principles of American religion, studied the ways of its religious competitors, and effectively emulated them in an attempt to attract members and improve its share of the Jewish religious marketplace. Some Reform rabbis, for example, came out in favor of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s emphasis on Judaism as a civilization. They embraced “cultivation of distinctive forms of religious art and music and the use of Hebrew,” and wrote this into Reform Judaism’s 1937 Columbus Platform – much to the horror of Classical Reform Jews like R. David Philipson.
Other Reform Jews, in a bid to attract East European Jews, reintroduced once-discarded rituals such as the bar mitzvah. Congregations in Lancaster, St. Paul, and Dallas, among others, witnessed bnei mitzvah already in the 1930s. Temple B’rith Kodesh, in Rochester, reintroduced the practice around 1940. By 1953, a survey found that the bar mitzvah “is practiced in varying degrees in 92 percent of the Reform temples.”10 That development alone removed a central impediment to East European Jews’ entry into the Reform movement.
Reform Judaism’s turn back to Zionism likewise made it more appealing to many East European Jews. The story of Reform Judaism’s re-embrace of Zionism is by now well-known. Over time, more and more rabbis and lay leaders turned to Zionism, defying traditional Reform opposition as expressed in the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform. Rabbi David Philipson, a graduate of the first class of the Hebrew Union College, historian of the Reform movement, and a participant in the Pittsburgh conference, reported to his diary in 1927 that he stood “in proud isolation in my universalistic advocacy of Judaism.” Where before, he claimed, “it was generally agreed by Jews of every shade of opinion that the Jew was such in religion only, that he was an American of the Jewish faith. Today,” he lamented, “we who hold to this description of the Jew are frequently laughed to scorn.. . .”11 Ten years later, in 1937, Reform’s new more positive attitude toward Zionism was officially recognized in the Columbus platform, which affirmed the “Obligation” of “all Jewry” to aid in the upbuilding of Palestine “as a Jewish homeland. . . not only a haven of refuge for the oppressed but also a center of Jewish culture and spiritual life.12
Reform rabbis of East European descent played an important role in producing this public transformation of Reform ideology, and the new statement, in turn, made Reform Judaism easier to market to East European Jews and their children.
Finally, a new generation of leaders assumed power in the Reform movement, and introduced critical changes in Reform Jewish education, in its youth movement, and in its women’s movement that made Reform more alluring to young Jews of every stripe, particularly those with roots in Eastern Europe.13 Classical Reform Judaism, and the ideology of the Pittsburgh Platform, by no means disappeared as a result of these changes. Rabbi Gerson Levi here, for example, was in many ways a classical Reform Jew and a follower of Emil G. Hirsch. But alternative views now gained legitimacy and that made outreach to Jews of East European descent more and more possible.
The possibility of “alternative views” portended a second major change of great significance. Where the notion of a platform implied that there was a single formal statement of Reform Jewish beliefs to which adherents were expected to give their intellectual assent,14 now Reform became more internally pluralistic. A comparison of the different Reform statements bespeaks this change. Back in 1885, Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler stated that the purpose of the platform that became known as the Pittsburgh Platform was to “declare before the world . . . what Reform Judaism means and aims at.”15 Half a century later, the 1937 Columbus Platform billed itself as a “declaration of principles,” a term which allowed for more flexibility than a platform. Indeed, the new text was officially promulgated “not as a fixed creed but as a guide for the progressive elements of Jewry.”16 By 1976, the Reform movement was so broad and multi-dimensional that neither a “platform” nor a “declaration of principles” could embrace it. The document was instead described as a “Centenary Perspective.” The new document consciously celebrated “diversity within unity,” announcing that “Reform Judaism does more than tolerate diversity; it engenders it. . . We stand open to any position thoughtfully and conscientiously advocated in the spirit of Reform Jewish beliefs.”17 While the most recent 1999 document, the so-called Pittsburgh II, returns to the Columbus language, calling itself a “statement of principles for Reform Judaism,” it too acknowledges at the outset “the diversity of Reform Jewish beliefs and practices.”18
Diversity, which became a growing reality in Reform Jewish circles during the twentieth century and is now celebrated as one of its central virtues, helps to explain both the rapid growth of Reform Judaism since 1940, and the perception that it is re-embracing tradition. Precisely because Reform came to be expressed in so many different flavors growing numbers of Jews found themselves comfortable in one or another spot under the ever-wider Reform Jewish tent. Traditional Jews became welcome and Classical Reform Jews remained welcome. The majority of Reform Jews, of course, were happy to “pick and choose” among the rituals that they elected to observe.
Interestingly, as Reform Judaism committed itself to wider and wider diversity within an overarching unity, the Conservative movement in American Judaism narrowed its tent. Earlier, during the middle decades of the twentieth century, Conservative Judaism had been the broadest of America’s Jewish religious movements, stretching from Mordecai Kaplan on the left to Saul Lieberman on the right. More recently, Reconstructionists and Traditionalists have abandoned the Conservative movement, leaving its tent much more constricted. As a result, the Jewish religious movement that now covers the widest ground, ideologically – stretching from so-called Polydox Jews on the left to Jews who are Shomrei Shabat ve-kashrut on the right -- is actually the Reform movement. It has embraced the big tent that Conservative Judaism largely abandoned.
Today it is common to assert that Reform Jews are re-embracing tradition, and it is very easy to point to examples both of individuals and even of examples in the new prayer book, Mishkan Tefillah. But not everything that seems new really is new. The perception that Reform Judaism is re-embracing tradition actually dates all the way back to the 1960s. Just under 4o years ago, On March 16, 1969, Robert Gordis, writing in the New York Times Book Review, described the “far-flung, though by no means universal, striving in Reform Judaism for a return to Jewish traditional postures.”19 Theodore Lenn, in a study released in 1972, claimed that “nearly 25 per cent of the nation’s Reform rabbis favor uniting with the Conservative branch, and another 43 per cent lean strongly toward the more traditional Judaism of the Conservative movement.”20 Eugene Borowitz, in 1977, provided us with an analysis of these developments, which he attributed, among other things, to “Hitler, the spiritual debility of Western culture, and the achievements of the States of Israel.” As a result of these, he reported, an “old consensus came apart,” replaced by an angry debate between Classical Reform universalists and more traditional Reform particularists.21 By 1989, the trend had supposedly reached “full flower.” A headline in the New York Times of that year screamed “Reform Jews are Returning to Ritual.”22 But eighteen years later, in a much discussed article last summer in the New York Jewish Week, the same phenomenon was once-again reported as big news: “Reform Youth Flexing Their Ritual Muscle: Growing numbers of the liberal movement’s teens and young adults are embracing tradition, posing a challenge for leaders.” The NY Times has since echoed these same claims. 23
What bears recalling, after 40 years of such news stories, is that it refers only to some Reform Jews – a segment of the tent, not all Jews who worship therein. According to the National Jewish Population Survey, for example, 25% of Reform Jewish synagogue members always or usually light Shabbat candles and 8% keep kosher. The rest do not. Indeed, more than half of all Reform Jews attend religious services fewer than nine times a year; a quarter still come only on the high holidays or never.24 The so-called return to ritual is evident in summer camps, among the movement’s professional leaders and among leaders-in-training, but not among the majority of the rank and file. 25 Today, in the Reform movement – moreso, I think than in the past, mostly because of the influence of Israel, where all Reform Jewish professionals now spend a year – the leadership tends to be much more ritually observant than the membership at large.
So coming back to the story with which we began: Has Isaac Mayer Wise’s prediction come true? Have Reform Jews “returned?” The big “return,” I have suggested, is Reform Judaism’s astonishing and in many ways improbable “return” to majority status within American Judaism as a whole. The growth of Reform – its ability to capture market share from other movements and to vault in size from 3rd place to 1st place among American Jewish ‘denominations’ – is a big story not only in American Judaism but in American religion as a whole, especially since it took place at a time when liberal Protestant denominations in America were rapidly declining. Reform Judaism’s willingness to change some of its beliefs and practices in order to win over East European Jews certainly played a large part in this “return.” So did its embrace of a “big tent” model of Judaism that legitimated many different ways of being Jewish. The restructuring of Reform Jewish institutions, particularly the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now the Union for Reform Judaism) under a succession of dynamic leaders also played a highly significant role.
But there is one additional factor that we cannot overlook in seeking to explain the Reform Movement’s more recent growth, and that, of course, is its outreach campaign to the intermarried. Beginning in 1978, under the leadership of Rabbi Alexander Schindler, the Reform movement began to encourage non-Jewish spouses to join Reform congregations and study Judaism. “We reject intermarriage but not the intermarried,” Rabbi Schindler declared. “Instead of reading them out, we seek to bring them in.” 26 In 1983, this decision was followed up by the movement’s acceptance of patrilineal descent, previously adopted by the Reconstructionist movement, recognizing as Jewish the offspring of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother, so long as the child identifies Jewishly. Between them, these decisions fueled a very significant rise in the membership of the Reform movement, bringing in tens of thousands of new members. Today, according to Steven M. Cohen, some 26% of the member households of Reform congregations are interfaith households.
That the Reform movement has greatly benefited, in terms of numbers, from these new members cannot be doubted. Some of our most active lay leaders today are Jews whose Mothers are not Jewish or whose spouses are not Jewish. In some communities, especially in the South, we have active leaders who themselves are not Jewish, though they love Jews, in every sense of that term. This is in many ways good news – it represents a remarkable development in terms of Jewish history -- but it poses significant challenges as well.
Some rabbis, for example, report feeling uncomfortable talking from the pulpit about subjects like Jewish peoplehood and in-group marriage. These are traditional Jewish values, but how do we talk about them in a setting where they make so many congregants feel excluded? In addition, non-Jewish involvement in the synagogue poses agonizing boundary dilemmas for Reform Jewish leaders. Should the temple treat Jewish and non-Jewish members as equals, or does being a Jew confer benefits that non-Jews can only attain through conversion? Should non-Jews be counted as part of the minyan? Should they be invited to lead the worship service or called to the Torah? Should they be permitted to recite prayers containing formulas like “asher kidshanu be-mitsvotav vetsivanu” (who hallows us with his mitzvoth and commands us) that are directed to the Jewish people alone? Should they be allowed to participate in synagogue governance and in planning the spiritual life of the congregation? As many Reform congregations are discovering, in short, the desire to be welcoming, liberal, and fair is difficult to reconcile with boundary maintenance and the demands of Jewish peoplehood.27
These conundrums hint at some of the challenges that Reform Judaism faces in the decades ahead, some of them undreamed of by rabbis of earlier generations. Most significantly, maintaining Reform Judaism’s pluralistic “big tent” poses significant challenges. As the Conservative movement discovered, big tents are difficult to hold up and easy to blow down. Defections – from the right or from the left – always loom ominously on the horizon.
In the final analysis, the major challenge, for Reform Jews, as for most movements in the American religious marketplace, is not , as Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise and Zvi Hirsch Masliansky thought years ago, that Reform Jews will hit up against a wall and bounce back toward tradition. That happened in some cases, but its effect, I think, is easily exaggerated. The real question in a competitive religious economy, is whether Reform Judaism’s numbers continue to move up or begin to fall down. By those measures, Reform Judaism’s policies over the past seventy years have succeed handsomely. As we look ahead to the rest of the 21st century, I hope that we can learn important lessons from this remarkable record of success and find ways to maintain it and extend it.
Thank you and Shabbat Shalom.
NOTES
1 Zvi Hirsch Masliansky,
Kitve Maslianski: Neumim, Zikhronot, U-Masa’ot (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1929), 2: 190-93. I use here the partial annotated translation by Gary P. Zola, “The People’s Preacher: A Study of the Life and Writings of Zvi Hirsch Maliansky (1856-1943),” Ordination thesis, HUC-JIR, 1982, 156=163, esp. 161.
2 Lloyd Gartner, History of the Jews of Cleveland (Cleveland: Western Reserve Historical Society, 1978), 155. See Gries’ own The Jewish Community of Cleveland (1910), 5-6, available on-line at http://clevelandjewishhistory.net/gries-history.html (accessed November 18, 2007).
3 Modified from Zola, “A People’s Preacher,” 163.
4 Zola, “A People’s Preacher,” 228 n.113, observes that Masliansky spoke at HUC on two different occasions. The students’ HUC Journal reports on visits both in its issue of January 25, 1896 and December 10, 1899. Masliansky, in his memoirs, may have conflated the visits. Although Jacob R. Marcus, United States Jewry (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), III, 653, dates the incident described here to 1899, the earlier date seems much more likely considering that the dispute over Gries’ actions took place in 1894-95.
5 Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 132-134, 144-151, 193-197, 206-207, 249.
6 Central Conference of American Rabbi Yearbook 36 (1926), 317.
7 Sarna, American Judaism, 249-254.
8 See the chart, based on UAHC Annual Reports, in Marc Lee Raphael, Profiles in American Judaism (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984), 197.
9 http://urj.org/about/ (accessed November 18, 2007).
10 Leon A. Jick, “The Reform Synagogue,” in The American Synagogue: A Sanctuar Transformed, ed. Jack Wertheimer (Hanover: NH: University Press of New England, 1995 [1987]), 100; Gerry Cristol, A Light in the Prairie: Temple Emanu-El of Dallas 1872-1997 (Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University, 1998), 203; Peter Eisenstadt, Affirming the Covenant: A History of Temple B’rith Kodesh (Rochester: Temple B’rith Kodesh, 1999), 191; American Judaism, December 1953, as cited in Frank Adler, The Centennial History of Congregation B’nai Jehudah of Kansas City 1870-1970 (Kansas City: B’nai Jehudah, 1972), 243; Jacob R. Marcus, The Jew in the American World (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 438 (quoted).
11 David Philipson, My Life As An American Jew (Cincinnati: John G. Kidd, 1941), 361-62.
12 Meyer, Response to Modernity, 389.
13 Sarna, American Judaism, 249-255.
14 This definition follows J.Gordon Melton (ed.) American Religious Creeds (New York: Gale, 1988), III, p. xiii.
15 Proceedings of the Pittsburgh Rabbinical Conference November 16, 17, 18, 1885 (Richmond: CCAR, 1923), 9.
16 Michael A. Meyer and W. Gunther Plaut, The Reform Judaism Reader: North American Documents (New York: UAHC Press, 2001), 199-200.
17 Ibid, 204-5, see Eugene Borowitz’s important commentary on this statement in his Reform Judaism Today (New York: Behrman House, 1977), Book I, pp.91-139.
18 Meyer & Plaut, Reform Judaism Reader, 208.
19 New York Times Book Review, March 16, 1969, p.29.
20 New York Times, June 18, 1972, p. E7. Notwithstanding these numbers, 41 % of the Reform rabbis, according to Len “defy tradition and officiate at mixed marriages.”
21 Borowitz, Reform Judaism Today, 101-105.
22 Ari Goldman, “Reform Jews Are Returning to Ritual,” New York Times, June 26, 1989, p.A14.
23 Debra Nussbaum Cohen, “Reform Youth Flexing Their Ritual Muscle,” Jewish Week, August 10, 2007; for a discussion and critique, see http://jewschool.com/2007/08/13 your-head-a-splode/ (accessed 8/16/2007).
24 Ament, American Jewish Religious Denominations, 30-31.
25 E.g. Goldman, “Reform Jews Are Returning to Ritual,” and Cohen “Reform Youth Flexing Their Ritual Muscle.”
26 Joseph Berger, “Rise of 23% Noted in Reform Judaism,” New York Times, November 1, 1985, B5.
27 Sarna, American Judaism, 363; Michael A. Meyer, “The Role and Identity of Non-Jews in Reform Temples,” Gesher 48 (Winter 2002), 66-74 [in Hebrew]; Jerusalem Report, September 5, 1996, p.27.
