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What is Reform Judaism? An ongoing conversation…..

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paper written for a rabbinic conference on reforming religion

One of the questions we ask ourselves and repeatedly try to answer, albeit not with great success or satisfaction is:   – what is Reform Judaism? Rabbi Morris Joseph in his sermon at WLS asks the very same question at the turn of the 20th Century, saying “It may not be superfluous to point out that Reform does mean something. Not all of us, I am afraid, are very clear as to this point…Reform means a great deal more than the organ and no second day festival…Reform stands for a great, a sacred principle, of which these things are but symbols…it is an affirmation of a desire, an intention, to cling faster than ever to all that is true and beautiful in Judaism. ..Reform has, first and chiefly, to convert those who have ranged themselves under its banner to nobler ideals of living. This is the great truth which nearly all of us miss. Reform is not a movement merely; it is a religion, a life. …it is not merely the expression of a creed, negative or positive, but a pledge binding those who identify themselves with it to the highest ideal of conduct, to a higher ideal even than that which contents the non-Reformer.. “One might say that the emergence of Reform Judaism in the late 18th Century was a not a religious development at all, but a European lay initiative, arising from the effects of the Enlightenment. It began by ‘modern Jews’ challenging prevailing traditional religious beliefs and designing a form of Judaism that would enable Jews to be accepted both as individuals and as a group into European society.  [Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86), father of the Jewish enlightenment (Haskalah), more than any other forged a way of holding the two worlds together in a way that Spinoza(1632-77) had not been able or willing to do a century earlier ]

Rabbis only got involved much later in the mid 19th century, and by using academic study (Wissenschaft des Judentums) tried to formulate ideological and theological positions and to support the emerging Reform innovations.  It seems to me that that pattern has continued in European Reform Judaism – the continuing communal challenge to traditional ideas, the continuing desire to be part of the mainstream modern world, coupled with the rabbinic task of creating the bridges which allow for modernity to impact on Judaism without causing it to lose its particular flavour and perspective. 

As rabbis, ours has become the task of formulating the ideology and of co-creating the overarching principles that contain and maintain our Reform Jewish values. We take for ourselves the shaping and determining of the boundaries that retain our particular identity, while allowing for the diverse expressions of these principles that will emerge in different communities at different times.

There is a prevalent myth behind many of the challenges to the legitimacy of Reform Judaism that somewhere there must be an objectively authenticated Judaism, (orthodoxy). 

But any survey of the history of Judaism will instantly reveal that each generation responds to the needs of its time, adapting to their contemporary political, geographical and historical exigencies.  While it may take great pains to profess otherwise, classical Rabbinic Judaism is one long process of change, reformation and adaptation – even now.  The rabbinic dictum that Revelation took place only once and for all time, in the form of an Oral Law given simultaneously with the Written Torah at Sinai, and which is to be mined from the text only by the initiated who possess a set of carefully hewn hermeneutical principles, was a device that gave Jews, for many generations, the permission to read the text both exegetically and eisogetically, and thus to keep it alive and relevant.  It was a brilliant device, but somewhere along the line a distortion has appeared so that the notion of one given Revelation which is unfolded by the knowledgeable and trained elite seems to have become frozen, and with it congealed the ongoing and dynamic process of Jewish response to the world.  Scholars began to argue over minutiae rather than focus on the Reality the minutiae were designed to remind them of.   The purpose of lively debate became to prove right or wrong, rather than to increase the richness of the understanding.  And suddenly authenticity became something everyone sought uniquely for themselves, while denying it to others.                     

Progressive Judaism emerged as a reaction to this congealing of responsive Judaism.  Its innovative and brilliant insight was that of progressive revelation. Instead of there having been one total disclosure at the theophany which we are still unpeeling, it reframed the rabbinic teaching to produce the same effect with a different instrument. Progressive Judaism taught about Progressive Revelation – as each new person reads the text, there is a possibility of new understanding of the divine purpose.

Unlike classical rabbinic Judaism, this new thing was not considered to have been discovered or uncovered, as having an independent existence.  Instead we are clear that it is  the interaction between reader and text that brings it into being.  By bringing our own experience, our own values into our reading of the text, we bring forth a particular reading which did not pre-exist.  We emulate our Creator in this continuing act of creation. By language we cause new things to exist – we call forth new worlds and populate them.In the preamble to the Statement of Principles adopted in 1999 by the Pittsburgh Convention of the CCAR, is the comment “Throughout our history we Jews have remained firmly rooted in Jewish tradition, even as we have learned much from our encounters with other cultures. 

The great contribution of Reform Judaism is that it has enabled the Jewish people to introduce innovation while preserving tradition, to embrace diversity while asserting commonality, to affirm beliefs without rejecting those who doubt, and to bring faith to sacred texts without sacrificing critical scholarship”We like to use the language of tradition with modernity, continuity with change – we present ourselves as an evolving expression of the Judaism of the ages, so that in the language of Pirkei Avot, Moses may have received (kibel) Torah at Sinai (whatever that means); handed it on (m’sarah) to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, the elders to the prophets, and the prophets passed it on to the men of the great assembly – and we see ourselves in that chain of tradition, receiving something all the way from Sinai, taking charge of it in our own times.

The website for the Reform Movement tells us “It is a religious philosophy rooted in nearly four millennia of Jewish tradition, whilst actively engaged with modern life and thought. This means both an uncompromising assertion of eternal truths and values and an open, positive attitude to new insights and changing circumstances. It is a living evolving faith that Jews of today and tomorrow can live by”. The front page of the annual report for the Reform Movement makes much of the words “Renewing, Revitalising, Rethinking, Representing – Reform”.  The prefix re- meaning “again, back” is only added to verb bases  The Movement website presents five core principles: “welcoming and inclusive; rooted in Jewish tradition; committed to personal choice; men and women have an equal place; Jewish values inspiring social change and repair of the world”  Reform Judaism calls itself ‘Living Judaism’.  We see ourselves being in the continuous present – we were not the subject of a Reformation, once and for all, but are always in the process of reforming our theological understanding and its practical expression.  And we keep re-forming ourselves. Thus it is important that we have as healthy an interest in the process of how reforming takes place as we have in the content of our Judaism. So we have to ask ourselves – on what basis are we challenging the present and changing the status quo?  What are the ways in which we do this? Who is the ‘we’ who is deciding? How is reform happening?

The phrase ‘Living Judaism’ brings us to some interesting places. We recognise Judaism as a living system.  And let’s have some definitions here: Living systems are open self-organizing systems (meaning a set of interacting or interdependent entities forming an integrated whole) that have the special characteristics of life, in that they are self sustaining and interact with their environment. They are by nature chaotic. As Meg Wheatley says  “If you start looking at the processes by which living systems grow and thrive, one of those is a periodic plunge into the darker forces of chaos. Chaos seems to be a critical part of the process by which living systems constantly re-create themselves in their environment.” ….Living systems, when confronted with change, have the capacity to fall apart so that they can reorganize themselves to be better adapted to their current environment. She goes on to say “We always knew that things fell apart, we didn’t know that organisms have the capacity to reorganize, to self-organize. We didn’t know this until the Noble-Prize-winning work of Ilya Prigogine in the late 1970’s.  But you can’t self-organize, you can’t transform, you can’t get to bold new answers unless you are willing to move into that place of confusion and not-knowing which I call chaos.” (Meg Wheatley)

I would like to introduce to you some learning not from the traditional sources, but from the modern world of biology and complexity:

The first is the notion of a self organising system: Self-organization is the process where a structure or pattern appears in a system without a central authority or external element imposing it. This globally coherent pattern appears from the local interaction of the elements that makes up the system, thus the organization is achieved in a way that is parallel (all the elements act at the same time) and distributed (no element is a coordinator). In a self organising system the collective following of a few simple principles can lead to extraordinarily complex, diverse and unpredictable outcomes. 

One example is the way that birds flock in the sky. It can be predicated on just three simple rules:

Always Fly in the same direction as the birds around you

Keep up with the others     

Follow your local centre of gravity (i.e. if there are more birds to your left, move left. If right, move right)

The second is the idea of punctuated equilibrium: This is a theory that comes from evolutionary biology, which suggests that evolution is not a slowly progressive and continuously ongoing event, but that instead species will experience little evolutionary change for most of their history, existing in a form of stasis. When evolution does occur,  it is not smooth, but it is localised in rare, rapid events of change. Instead of a slow, continuous movement, evolution tends to be characterized by long periods of virtual standstill (“equilibrium”), “punctuated” by episodes of very fast development of new forms. Punctuated equilibria is a model for discontinuous tempos of change. According to those who study such things, “Self organised living systems are a conjunction of a stable organisation with chaotic fluctuations.” (Philosophy Transactactions A Math Phys Eng Sci. 2003 Jun 15;361(1807):1125-39.  Auffray C, Imbeaud S, Roux-Rouquié M, Hood L.)

Doesn’t it just define Judaism through the ages, and Reform Judaism in our world – A conjunction of a stable organisation with chaotic fluctuations. And these chaotic fluctuations that punctuate our history are the drivers of very fast development and change.I’m sure we can all think of the events – Abram living with his family in Ur Casdim until God says “Lech lecha”. Exodus from Egypt. Sinai. Entering the land; Destruction of first and then second temple, Exile and Return; loss of Northern Kingdom….coming closer to home the development of oral law, of synagogue communities, rabbis taking over from priests in the religious leadership, Karaites; Mishneh Torah, Shulchan Aruch, Expulsion from Spain and Portugal, Moses Mendelssohn and the Haskalah, large scale Aliyah from Russian empire; Salanter and the mussar movement; Hasidim and the lubavitcher dynasty; Israel Jacobson and the Seesen school experiment to name just a few.

The question I have now is – if we truly are a living self organising system, then we are not so much driven by our ideology or our tradition as we are a people whose structure develops without a central authority or external element imposing it. Instead what we become develops from the local interaction of the elements that makes up the system, – that is the people within Judaism. With enough impetus and enough individuals wanting it – or doing it -we become who we are in a way that is parallel (all the elements act at the same time) and distributed (no element is a coordinator). 

An example – Pesachim 66a – Hillel could not remember how to carry the knife for the pesach sacrifice on Shabbat. His response was “But,” he added, “things will work out, because even if Jews are not prophets themselves, they are the sons of prophets.” The next day, Shabbat Erev Pesach, these semi-prophetic Jews arrived at the Temple with their animals for the Pesach sacrifice. From the wool of the lamb protruded a knife, and between the horns of the goat a knife was to be found. Upon seeing this Hillel proclaimed: “Now I recall the law I learned from Shemaya and Avtalyon. This is the procedure which they taught me!So how do we hold on to the continuity / tradition we assert is integral to the change /modernity we bring.

Second question – If we do truly function along the lines of punctuated equilibrium, then what are the next things to punctuate our equilibrium? What will bring about the rapid development after our periods of stasis? Should we be looking out for them and encouraging them?

Third question – complex systems emerge from the utilisation of a few very simple rules. Morris Joseph knew what the rules were in Reform Judaism even if, according to his sermon, his congregation on the whole didn’t.  Firstly that it was “religious, and that its religious life must be expressed in public worship”. Reform Jews may be “less bound ritually and ceremonially, but are therefore more bound religiously and morally”Secondly that” in order to live, Religion has to adapt itself to the shifting ideas of successive ages”Thirdly, that while progressive Religion is a great idea, progressive goodness is a far greater one. Reform has, first and chiefly, to convert those who have ranged themselves under its banner to nobler ideals of living. Reform is a religion and a life”

Tetzaveh:

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The interface between God and human beings is fraught with potential both creative and destructive. It is uncharted territory where we wander, sometimes alone and sometimes with companions and while we might pay attention to the stories told by those who have more recently gone before us, our constant and most useful guide is Torah.

Torah teaches us the boundaries others have met, the pathways our predecessors have taken, gives us a glimpse into what we might be looking out for.

To some extent, we could call Torah a manual for those who wish to undertake a spiritual journey. But it is a limited manual. It offers no guarantees about reaching the desired destination, it offers some advice sketches out some road signs and extends the hope that as others have done, then so maybe can I.

This limited manual can be a great comfort, but it also creates many problems for us. We have a desire to know “how to do it”, we want to be told that if we behave in a certain way we will reach such-and-such a place. We often want to have concrete guidelines like all those recipe books and television programmes that state very clearly “if you follow my instructions you will have a perfect cake every time”. Increasingly I am asked how to do something or is something allowed or forbidden, not out of curiosity and a genuine need to explore, but because people are seeing religion as the repository of the skills needed to achieve – or rather they are seeing rabbis and priests as the people who hold the secret and can either open or close the door to God.

There is a second problem in modernity – we have forgotten how religious language works, we are so goal centred we pay too little attention to the process, we have lost understanding of symbolic language and our sensitivity to metaphor and allegory is blunted in our need for certainty. The chain of tradition in which generations told the stories they had heard from their ancestors and fed their descendants with the ‘hiddushim’ the innovations they had found, has been disrupted and dislocated. The multiple varieties of ways to understand the torah text that can be seen in Midrash, in the aggadic texts recorded in Talmud, in the rabbinic commentaries on bible and on each others works – they might be recorded but their meaning is often either misunderstood or completely lost.

I am not talking here about the knowledge of Hebrew – indeed there are certainly many more people fluent in the language alive now than ever before – but rather about the understanding of religious process, of symbols and thought processes and of whole concepts that unspokenly underpinned the midrashic and aggadic texts .

Rather than admit to ourselves that our understanding is weakened, it seems to me that we have created structures that make sense to our modern minds and our need to know the recipes, and we try to ignore or dismiss the rest of our tradition as being archaic or irrelevant or magical thinking.

So how does one get back into the living meaning of Torah in order to be able to delve deeper into our spiritual search and come closer to the God who revealed Godself with such clarity to our ancestors that it seemed they were meeting almost face to face.

One way certainly is through studying the Hebrew text, examining the original words both with and without the overlay of rabbinic commentaries in order to reveal the clusters of meanings that are embedded in those words.

Another way is to personalise the text, to find its echoes resonating within our own souls and to extend the meanings into our own experience.

In traditional rabbinic exegesis, these two methods go hand in hand, creating a dynamic and relevant understanding of Torah, to help us use the ‘guide book’ in our own spiritual journey.

Sidra Tetzaveh is, on the surface, a continuation of the instructions about the Mishkan, the physical structure erected by the Israelites in the desert as a constant symbol and reminder of the presence of God.  There are instructions about the building followed by the details of the priestly garments, the anointing of the priests and the offerings they are to bring.

The challenge is to find the relevance to us – progressive Jews who have given up the special status of the Cohanim, who have a real revulsion against animal sacrifice, who have expunged the prayers for its return and for the return of the Temple with all of its offerings, hierarchies and structures from our prayer books.

The relevance to us can be found once we begin to look past the minutiae of the detail of the ritual and let the text speak to us. We are dealing here with the creation of symbols that speak of the presence of God and of the boundaries that will prevent us from getting too close to a power that could overwhelm us so that we lose our own self. We are looking at creating a conduit, to find ways to relate to God. And this is an age old problem every generation must address.

In Sidra Tetzaveh we see the making of a structure that will operate through time and space, connecting the outer world and the inner one, involving both action and prayer, uniting us as one people while at the same time connecting each one to God. It was a structure for its time, one we can hardly comprehend, yet we continue to read it because it has things to teach us still.

The verse which begins the sidra “v’ata tetzaveh et b’nei Yisrael, v’yikhu elecha shemen zayit zach katit l’maor leha’a lot ner tamid”  You shall command the children of Israel that they will bring pure beaten olive oil for the light, to cause a lamp to burn continually” is an important one for us. Each of us has a responsibility to keep alight a ner tamid, a continually burning light. Each of us has the responsibility to do it for ourselves, to keep a spark alive in our own souls and our own lives.

The ner tamid in a synagogue is usually explained as being a symbol of the continuing presence of God, and we have taken the idea of externalising it by having one in every synagogue, hanging over the Ark. A light is kept burning in every synagogue to be an outward sign of the light that is burning in every Jewish soul.

Sometimes the symbolism can take on a new and even painful dimension – I remember hearing a survivor of the Shoah, Hilda Schindler, describe how after Kristallnacht in Berlin she saw the ner tamid of the Fasanenstrasse Synabobe burning brightly on the ground.

There are other symbols in this sidra – the anointing and ordaining of the priesthood whose special task is to take care of the boundaries between the Jews and God, and whose economic and functional dependence on the Israelites only points up their special task rather than diminish it – a task that we now have in our own homes and study houses. There is the focus on the garments of the High Priest, on which we model the clothes for the Sefer Torah, and so once again remind ourselves that people and objects can function at the interface of God and humanity.

Our texts speak in many languages in order to make their meaning available to us. It is improper of us to try to distil down the lessons, to accept that there is only one accepted meaning that is taught by someone else and should not be challenged. The beauty of traditional Judaism and the beauty of contemporary progressive Judaism is that we have refused to join in the process of passively accepting the judgements of others.

My first synagogue President, Mervin Elliot z”l used to say that for us Reform Jews tradition had a vote but not a veto. I liked the pithiness of the language when I first heard it,  but now some thirty years later I appreciate more the acceptance of the past and the willingness to explore the present and the future that is embedded in it.

When we come across texts like those in Tetzaveh we can either treat them like a manual or recipe book, decide that those people who are descendants of the Cohanim must have some special power and role that we cannot decipher, and walk away from the challenges of how we build the bridges and the protective structures whereby we can come close to God in this day and age. Or we can take up the challenge, see a product of its time have something that can speak to us today, transmuted perhaps or extended or even echoed, and create the Judaism that does the same work today that the mishkan and priesthood did in biblical times.  We can remind ourselves that we are supposed to be (as we read only a few chapters earlier) “a nation of priests and a holy nation”. Each of us can take on the role, keep alight the ner tamid in our own places and lives, and find that each of us has something to teach, each of us has something to offer the community, each of us protects and nurtures the spark of divine in the world.

(sermon given 2017 lev chadash)

Toledot: there are more generations and more branches in our family tree than we notice – meet Mahalat bat Ishmael the fragrant bringer of hope

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וַיַּ֣רְא עֵשָׂ֔ו כִּ֥י רָע֖וֹת בְּנ֣וֹת כְּנָ֑עַן בְּעֵינֵ֖י יִצְחָ֥ק אָבִֽיו: ט וַיֵּ֥לֶךְ עֵשָׂ֖ו אֶל־יִשְׁמָעֵ֑אל וַיִּקַּ֡ח אֶת־מַֽחֲלַ֣ת ׀ בַּת־יִשְׁמָעֵ֨אל בֶּן־אַבְרָהָ֜ם אֲח֧וֹת נְבָי֛וֹת עַל־נָשָׁ֖יו ל֥וֹ לְאִשָּֽׁה:

“And Esau saw that the daughters of Canaan were displeasing to Isaac his father. So Esau went to Ishmael and he took Machalat the daughter of Ishmael son of Abraham, sister of Nevayot over his women/ in addition to his other wives, for a wife for himself.”

So ends the sidra of Toledot. It began with Isaac marrying Rebecca and pleading with God for her to have children. Having conceived twins who are struggling within her, Rebecca is informed that she will give birth to two nations who would be not be equal. The firstborn, Esau, was red and hairy. The second born was holding on to his brother’s heel so they named him Jacob (heel). Esau became a skilled hunter and was the favoured child of his father, but Jacob remained close to home and his mother. The bible recounts the story of Esau coming home famished after a hunting trip and selling his birthright blessing for some of the delicious red stew that Jacob had made.

The narrative continues with the story of a famine and Isaac goes to the Philistine King Abimelech for support, having been told by God to not leave the land as his father had done. Isaac settled in Gerar, and for fear of being killed because of Rebecca’s beauty, he follows the example his parents had given and told Abimelech that Rebecca was not his wife but his sister. Abimelech however found the lie out, and in order not to attract punishment from God, warns the Philistines not to mistreat the couple.   Isaac grows wealthy and the Philistines begin to hate and envy him to the point where he is unsafe. Isaac moves his household away to Rechovot, and then has an encounter with God at Beersheva where he receives the covenant of blessing. Abimelech, understanding that Isaac is the heir to his father’s relationship with God seeks a peace treaty with him which is sealed with a feast.

Now we return our focus to the family. Esau married two Hittite women, Judith bat Be’eri and Basemat bat Elon, and Isaac and Rebecca are bitterly upset.

Now we come to the last phase of Isaac’s life. He is old, his sight is poor, he knows it is time to give the blessings to his sons. He asks Esau to hunt and prepare a dish of his game for him after which he will bless him. Rebecca overhears, and, when Esau is gone, she instructs Jacob to bring her young goats in order for her to make a meal for Isaac that Jacob can take him and receive the blessing. Jacob does not think this will work- Esau is hairy, Jacob is not. Isaac on touching his son will understand the deception and may curse him. Rebecca responds by taking the curse upon herself, and demands that Jacob do as she has told him. She makes coverings from the skins of the goats and food from the flesh, dresses Jacob in Esau’s clothing and sends him to his father. The text is ambiguous as to whether Isaac recognises which of his sons is with him, but he goes with the flow, blessing Jacob with the special blessing. Esau returns, discovers his blessing is already given to his brother and in his distress asks his father for another. Isaac blesses him with abundance, but also with the hope that he will one day break the yoke of subservience to his brother. Esau’s fury is a danger to Jacob and so his mother arranges that he is sent to safety with her family under the pretext that this will keep him away from Canaanite women and help him to marry within the family group.  Esau hears this, understands that his first two choices of wife were not acceptable to his parents, and so he goes to Ishmael his uncle in order to marry Machalat, his cousin, the daughter of Ishmael.

Machalat is family. She is the daughter of Ishmael the beloved son of Abraham and of Hagar, whom God comforts when she and her son are near to death in the wilderness having been expelled from the camp. Hagar is the first person who is recorded as giving a name to God.   We are told that “she called the name of the Eternal who spoke to her, You are El Ro’ee (a God of seeing)” (Gen 16:13)  So Machalat is the grandchild of a woman who encountered God.

There are two biblical texts naming the wives of Esau, and they do not exactly coincide. One tells us the three wives are Yehudit bat Beeri, Basemat bat Elon and Mahalat bat Ishmael (Gen 26) whereas the second tells us they are Adah bat Elon, Basemat bat Ishmael and Oholivamah bat Anah (Gen 36).  The gemara resolves the problem by saying that Basemat/Machalat were the same woman, and whereas the name Basemat means fragrant, Machalat comes from the same root as forgiveness – mechilah – and that in marrying her all the sins of Esau were forgiven (JT Bikkurim 3:3)This would explain how, when the brothers meet up again years later, Esau is warm and welcoming, having given up the bitterness and anger caused by his brother’s betrayal, he too, having been forgiven, is able to forgive.

Basemat, whose name implies great sweetness, gives Esau a son and names him Re’u-El –friend of God. Is it accident that the name plays with and even seems to echo the name her grandmother gave to God – El-Roee? What is clear is that while Esau has many other children, only this son is named with a reference to God.

It feels like a hint – Hagar and Basemat were not destined to be part of the main thread of the narrative, but they were important nevertheless, they had their own very good relationship with God and their lives impact upon our history.

The bible may not be focussed on these women, or on this lateral branch of the family tree, but it considers them important enough for them and their descendants to be recorded. We know about Rebecca, her initial infertility and her later challenge to God once her difficult pregnancy was begun. We know how she took care to direct the narrative so that Jacob would become the link in the chain of tradition. We know about Sarah, her initial infertility and her derisive laughter in responding to God’s telling her that she would yet bear a child to be the link in the chain of tradition. But the bible reminds us there were other women who also had encounters with God, yet who did not go on to become matriarchs in our tradition.

Our historic commentators do not much notice these women, and if they choose to do so it is usually to make a point about the men they are connected with, and to be honest, they are not often kind to the women nor interested in them and their experience. But now we have a different set of lenses, modernity chooses to unpeel the layers of patriarchy and look again at the unvarnished text. Machalat the daughter of Ishmael appears to be a woman who, like her grandmother, knows God. Her marriage to Esau seems to change him, their son is a friend of God, the same God who appeared to abet Esau’s trauma. She brings forgiveness – mechilah – and she brings hope. Hope for the brothers who were destined to be in an unequal power relationship but whom we see later in life are both wealthy, settled family men. And in bringing the hope that transforms the relationship of brothers born to struggle against each other, surely she can be the touchstone for us in our generation when we know we are not forced or destined to hate each other. Machalat bat Ishmael, she brings the fragrance of hope and optimism. She deserves to be noticed.

 

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/56/dd/4b/56dd4b96809fb5e941fcbd8129daae88.jpg

 

Image is “Mahalat” [Yishmael’s daughter, Esav’s wife] by Siona Benjamin