Strengthening Reform: 9. Reform's Wrong Turn
August 6, 2008
Community | Religious Life | Torah
(18 comments)
By William Berkson
Several on this forum have looked back to "Classical Reform" somewhat wistfully, admiring the clear sense of direction and the passion and confidence that Reform Judaism had in that period. And by implication, some feel that that clear direction is lacking now. And I agree. Yet the current muddle I believe has its roots in a fundamental mistake that was made during the Classical Reform period.
The mistake was to throw the Talmud overboard.
Abraham Geiger, the early Reform leader, acknowledged the great contributions of the Talmud to Judaism. However other reformers championed the "religion of the prophets" against Talmudic Judaism. For them, the Talmud was the repository of backward medieval religious customs that needed to be rejected as antithetical to modernity.
Reform Judaism could be built solely on the Torah and the Prophets, with no need for the Talmud. Kaufman Kohler, the dominant leader of Reform in the last part of the 19th and first part of the 20th century accepted this view. He largely wrote the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 and he was head of the Hebrew Union College for nearly twenty years, until 1921. As a result of the long dominance of this view, neglect of the Talmud became the rule within Reform.
'Throwing out the baby with the bathwater' may be a tired cliché, but it really applies here. Except that more than one baby was thrown out. First of all the study of rabbinic ethics was thrown out. Rabbinic ethics is to me really the crown jewels of Judaism, so ignoring it was a tragic loss. Now you may say, "but we emphasize tikkun olam."
Reform's commitment to the pursuit of social justice is to its great credit. However, social justice is only one side of Jewish ethics, and not the strongest side at that. The great invention of liberal representative democracy by the British and Americans left the ancient monarchies of David and Solomon behind as an ideal. Judaism doesn't have any distinctive viable theory of the state and economy. What it does have legitimately from Abraham, Moses and the other prophets is a passion for social justice. We shouldn't pursue justice any less, but it does mean that there is little current distinctively Jewish contribution to the content of political reform today, and pursuit of social justice is not a distinctively Jewish effort.
When it comes to personal and communal ethics, it is quite a different story. Talmudic ethics has a rich and deep analysis of human relations. And it is to a great extent Talmudic. In fact, in every area of Judaism--ritual, theology, ethics--most of Judaism is Talmudic, not Biblical. True, the 10% that is Biblical is foundational, but still 90% of the palace of Judaism is Talmudic. In fact, that you can build strikingly different religions on that Biblical foundation is shown by the fact that Christianity and Islam build on the same or similar foundations, and end up with quite different looking structures.
Furthermore, the foundations are changed. In ethics, the Rabbinic ethics is more humane and more devoted to peace. For example, whereas the Torah is full of capital punishment, the Talmud as a practical matter cancels practically all of the harshest punishments. While there are definitely aspects of Talmudic ethics that we should modify, a lot of Biblical ethics is frankly horrifying, even by Talmudic standards, much less modern ones.
When I write that this rich ethical heritage has been largely neglected in Reform, you may think I am exaggerating. But if you read the history of the Reform movement by Michael Meyer, Response to Modernity, you can read on p. 301 that Emanuel Gamoran, founder of modern Reform Jewish education after WWI, believed that there should be less "moralizing" and that "religious and ethical values would emerge naturally in the course of developing a broader loyalty to the living, changing Jewish people."
In my view this made a wrong turn into a disaster. Instead of teaching children to be good Jews, we started teaching "Jewish identity." With the result that religious school gave little incentive to students to be Jewish. That had to come from their families, if at all.
An example of the neglect of ethics is that the brief core ethical text of Judaism, Pirkei Avot, was not taught, even partially, until recently in Reform religious schools. Avot, traditionally included in the prayer book, was, with some abbreviation, included in the Gates of Prayer, but not in the (otherwise much better) new Mishkan T'filah. And in reading Rabbi Richard Levy's current A Vision of Holiness: The Future of Reform Judaism I may be missing something, but I can't find a single word on personal ethics.
Why does this matter? It matters because most Jews today experience holiness in personal relationships, as Martin Buber emphasized, and especially in relationships with family and friends. And such relationships are elevated and sanctified by living the classic values of justice and kindness. And the principles and understanding of conflicts and difficulties that are laid out in the Talmud can greatly help us in this sacred enterprise.
I believe that what Jews want most from Judaism is that daily life, and especially family life, is lifted to a higher plane by Jewish practice. Ritual can certainly help this, but only if the focus is on the ethical core that the ritual should celebrate. Otherwise ritual is hollow.
I have gone over my self-imposed word limit, but I do want to mention in closing the another 'baby' that was thrown out with the Talmudic bath water, and that was the critical tradition. The Talmud, as Menachem Fisch points out in Rational Rabbis, is a remarkably open-minded and critical venture, carried out collaboratively over many generations. And the later students of the Talmud breathed this critical and evolving system of thought. Instead of laity and clergy being engaged in a common enterprise of critically understanding and applying the tradition to our lives, we in Reform have had 'platforms' pronouncing what Reform Judaism is. What we need most is rather a collaborative effort to applying our rich Jewish ethical tradition to the personal relationships of modern life. That is what I will turn to shortly, after a few more notes on the current state of Reform.
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This was an excellent contribution, thank you.
One of the problems with a heavy focus on social action rather than personal ethics that are firmly and directly grounded in Judaism is that what are really issues of secular political ideology or public policy preferences (which are susceptible to scholarly analyses) become treated as direct extensions of Judaism, or at least Reform Judaism.
I think that, in general, we would be better off focusing on raising children with a grounding in Jewish ethics and menschkeit and then trusting them to gravitate toward political and public positions that reflect their own application of such principles to contemporary life.