Branding Reform Judaism
July 14, 2008
Community
(9 comments)
By Larry Kaufman
So here we are on a blog labeled "Reform Judaism," and it seems appropriate to cogitate on what that brand name stands for, and on some of the issues that relate to it. In the interest of full disclosure let me state that I served on the committee that paved the way for the name change from Union of American Hebrew Congregations to our current style, Union for Reform Judaism - and let me further state that I thought the change was appropriate, even though I think the name is inappropriate.
What's right with the name Reform is that people know it, and recognize it as applying to the most permissive strain of mainstream Judaism in North America. What's wrong with it is that the dictionary meanings of the word itself have relatively little relevance to who we are or what we believe or what we do today. (I find support for my discomfort in the preface and prologue to Michael Meyer's magisterial history of the movement, Response to Modernity.)
Their seems to have been a sense among the original "reformers" that Judaism needed to reform itself from the insularity that had been forced on it in pre-emancipation, pre-Enlightenment Europe and to move into the mainstream, and especially to reform its liturgy into something more decorous and less linguistically esoteric.
But two hundred years later, our thrust is more to evolve as needs change than to force abrupt change because there is something wrong with where we are right now. We perhaps have a constant need to reform the world, and even to reform ourselves, but not to reform, and certainly not to re-form our religion - only to be open to the possibilities and opportunities for change as they come along.
That's why I am much more comfortable with the identifier for our movement used today throughout most of the world - Progressive. (Note that in England, two separate unions of congregations are part of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, the more "traditional" calling itself Reform, the other calling itself Liberal.) In addition to suggesting moving forward, Progressive also captures the expectation of the nineteenth-century Reformers that the day would come when all peoples would coalesce into a universal monotheistic faith community that would look very much like what they were already doing. (My house shall be a house of prayer for all peoples.)
Liberal Judaism also nicely conveys who and what we are, but we have disqualified the term as potentially applying to us by using it as our umbrella term for the collectivity of non-Orthodox streams - Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist. I'm sure there are elements in the Conservative movement that don't like being lumped with us non-halachacists, but that's their problem, not ours.
There are two other problems inherent in making the word Reform mean what we want it to. One is its co-optation by those who use it as a self-identification meaning, "I was born of Jewish parents, but I don't observe very much of the Jewish religion." The second is its use in the past tense - Reformed - suggesting a process that has stopped. (Maybe we should reserve Reformed for those who long for the days of the Union Prayer Book with its use of a poetic vernacular, with a hidden choir, accompanied on the organ, singing hymns of praise to a universalistic God.)
But whether I like the brand name Reform Judaism or not, we're stuck with it for the foreseeable future, and we have the responsibility to determine what kind of brand we would like to have, and then to do what it takes to "make it happen." To quote from the dust jacket of my branding bible, Steve Yastrow's Brand Harmony, "Your brand isn't what you say are. Your brand is what your customers think you are."
I'll broaden Steve's emphasis on customers to encompass all the people out there with whom we might interact - our Christian, Muslim, and secular neighbors, our competitors in the other streams of Judaism, plus members and potential members of our congregations. Without worrying too much about what folks think now when they encounter the term Reform Judaism, let's ask what we want them to think.
Fortunately we have progressed beyond defining ourselves by what we don't do, especially because many of us now do the things we didn't use to do in Reform Judaism. Nor do I have any quarrel with the description of what we stand for provided on the Reform Judaism website but it's too long to suffice as a branding statement.
A shorter statement appears on the How to Affiliate page of the Union website and possibly the first and last of its four bullet points could stand alone as a differentiator from the other religious streams and from the humanists and the secularists and the "just Jewish."
A God-centered Judaism that combines respect for Jewish law and Jewish tradition with a progressive religious outlook designed to remain relevant and meaningful to contemporary ... Jews....A community-focused religion that honors the personal autonomy of the individual and the institutional autonomy of the congregation, within a framework of egalitarianism and inclusiveness.
Or possibly I'm kidding myself. I know what the statement was intended to mean (Another disclosure: I was part of the committee that prepared the How to Affiliate web page) and therefore I think I know what it does mean.
But is this an adequate statement of our brand position? If not, how would you fix it? And when we have verbalized it to our general satisfaction, how do we make it come alive among those whose brand it is, so we can be perceived and recognized by others the way we want to be?
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The formal name change to Union for Reform Judaism is somewhat ironic in that it took place after so many of the officials and clerics had abandoned the effort to reform Judaism into a modern religion that was centered on the morality of the prophets and Bible. Just when they were reverting to a less progressive, less reformed model, they chose the name Reform, perhaps as a fig leaf or diversion. It's not the name that's bad; the problem for progressive Jews is what is being done in that name.
Leading reformers like Harby, Moise, Einhorn, Geiger, Bernstein and Holdheimm, felt that Judaism had lost its way. As Myers shows in Modernity, they saw the malaise and frustration among Jews who found no spiritual fulfillment in services they could not understand and which most couldn't participate in, where traditionalists spurned secular education, modern dress, Jewish emancipation, and integration with Protestants and Catholics. Large numbers were losing faith and drifting away, no longer perceiving a reason to be part of an unreformed religion that was mired in outdated and alien traditions and arcane, legalistic interpretation of ancient commentaries like the Talmud. They fought for reforms which would remake all of Judaism into a universalist religion on its mission to bring God's message to the world and were largely successful in the U.S.A.
By the 1880's the reforms had won over almost all Jews in America, until a wave of East European refugees who were largely untouched by reform, secular education, or western culture arrived to revive Orthodoxy.
Now it seems that there is a regression by some in the Reform establishment to a type of neo-Orthodox Judaism with emphasis on foreign style ritual, less analytical education, and a more segregated life. Some even argue that American Jews would all be better off in the Judeo-Islamic culture of the Israeli Middle East than in the Judeo-Christian culture in the U.S.
Can the URJ live up to its name? Will it once again be supportive of a progressive, ethical Judaism suited for the modern world?