Memories and Conclusions: Reform Judaism and Israel

Polish, Jakob Petuchowski, David

MEMORIES AND CONCLUSIONS: REFORM JUDAISM AND ISRAEL SHORT MEMORES JAKOB PETUCHOWSKI The leaders of Reform Judaism are in uproar. Israel's Prime Minister, Mr. Menahem Begin, in order to assemble a...

...The alienation of Jewish communities from one another is never beneficial...
...It's part of the trendiness of an American Judaism that goes ethnic, not only because of Israel but also because blacks and Latinos have injected the ethnic motif...
...All credit to those who pass strong resolutions and send off strong cables...
...While Israeli politics of the Left and the Right bears its full measure of responsibility for the take-over of Israel by the Agudat Yisroel and its Council of Sages, there are other factors that cannot be overlooked...
...Religious Fundamentalism is encroaching everywhere, not least of all in the United States where the White House has for years become increasingly attentive to its "Moral Majority" chaplains...
...And yet in a Jewish state what other test could there be...
...2) Petuchowski has summed it up very well: "There was very little a Reform Jew in America or in Germany had in common with an atheist Zionist in Odessa...
...It was no longer a present existential reality nor, as far as Reform Jews were .concerned, a future hope...
...at worst, it reflected disdain and insensitivity...
...But when the Jews of the West were able to leave the Ghetto behind them, the "national" component of past Jewish identity became a historical reminiscence...
...They are no less prescient than Camus in regarding the plague only in a state of remission, not of elimination...
...Fifth "plank" of the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885...
...But both our own self-respect and Israel's welfare are enhanced rather than diminished if we do active battle with those who have contempt for us and deny our authenticity...
...Moreover, the great majority of the world's Jews show no inclination to emigrate to the State of Israel...
...The arrogance of Jerusalem is perhaps even more evident in its refusal to recognize conversions to Judaism that have taken place under Conservative Jewish auspices, since, after all, Conservative rabbis do comply with the provisions of traditional Jewish Law, whereas American Reform rabbis by and large tend to ignore those provisions...
...While continuing to lend philanthropic support to their fellow-Jews who live in the land of our remote ancestors, Reform Jews might now begin to devote themselves again to the deepening and strengthening of a progressive Judaism in America, which is and will remain fiercely independent of the ephemeral political constellations in another country...
...In fact, jeopardized Jewry ignored not only the warnings of the classical Reformers but also of the classical Zionists whose premonitions were far more immediate...
...Even without moralizing about despair and defeatism, such an abandonment of hope could lead to destructive consequences that Petuchowski would regret as much as anyone else...
...For its part, the State of Israel profited greatly from the financial and political support rendered by American Reform Jews...
...It was the equivalent of the embarrassing and hastily retracted statement by Julian Morgenstern, then president of the Hebrew Union College, in the late 1920s, that the answer to the anguish of Russian Jewry was Reform Judaism...
...Yet there is danger of such a separation, brought about by clerical-political arrogance in Israel and growing disillusion on the part of American Jews...
...Yet for the leadership of American Reform Judaism, the relatively recent commitment to Zionism and to the State of Israel has been basically a marriage of convenience...
...Though fully aware of the Shoah (Holocaust), he seems to assume a certain immunity for American Jewry...
...Yet already in 1869, he contemplated what a rebuilt Jerusalem would entail by way of danger for the spiritual future of Judaism...
...Zionism and Israel can't be blamed for that...
...But now the situation has deteriorated consideri ably...
...But the "faith" that would lend plausibility to the Zionist enterprise was more likely to be the Orthodox version of Judaism (even though, in Herzl's days, Orthodox Judaism offered quite a bit of opposition to secularist Zionism) than the Reform version that contained the proclamation: "We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state...
...Their power would lead to the ruin of all...
...The United States consults with and weighs the reactions of its allies...
...This synthesis helped rescue Reform from withering on the vine, from becoming an aberration in a transformed Jewish world that have left behind a failed venture in disembodied theology...
...Nor were these isolated episodes...
...Reform Jewish leaders not afflicted by short memories cannot claim that they have not been warned...
...Liberal Judaism and Hellenism...
...Begin's nationalist orientation and those who cherish Fundamentalist religious beliefs than there is between the Zionist-Revisionist position and a philosophy of Judaism that has sanctioned so many departures from a literalist interpretation of the Scriptures that it could hardly oblige Mr...
...Since these observant people could not beat one another with halachah, they found other excuses...
...In the case at hand, that means that American Jews should initiate a campaign to halt the theocratiz-ing of Israel...
...Petuchowski overstates his case when he claims that Reform only "recently" turned toward Zionism, thereby superimposing an unnatural accretion on Reform...
...In order to retain the old splendor, it would try to impose an obedient subordination upon the rest of the world, interfering with every free development...
...Is it, as we are ritualis-tically reprimanded, because only Israel must bear the consequences of its decisions...
...In 1897, Kaufman Kohler rebuffed Russian Jewry and manifested innocence of their situation with: "Such attempts (Zionism) do not benefit, but infinitely harm, our Jewish brethren where they are still being persecuted by confirming the assertions of their enemies that the Jews are foreigners in the countries in which they are at home and of which they are everywhere the most loyal and patriotic citizens...
...While we see Israel as more than a shelter from persecution, if Jews in this age perceive it in those terms alone, it is because they justifiably see no certain guarantees against future anti-Jewish outrages...
...But in view of the fact that Jewish identity in his day still had a religious component, and since he himself called upon the rabbis to lead the "return" of the Jews to their "homeland," problems of a religious domination of the future Jewish state were inherent in Zionism from the very beginning...
...Will they not be allowed to become Jews...
...As a Reform Jew and as a Zionist, I would urge a different agenda from Petuchowski's...
...But those are the really Orthodox Jews, represented by the clericalist parties who have been invited to join the coalition, not the Reform Jews, who have their theological difficulties with both Bible and divine commandments...
...It would always be misused for the presumptuous desire to wield a spiritual and ecclesiastical hegemony over all the adherents of that religion...
...52-54...
...They evidently like it where they are...
...At that, Reform Judaism's espousal of the Zionist cause is a fairly recent achievement...
...Reform, in its earliest days, remained aloof from the realities of Jewish existence in Eastern Europe...
...In this connection, he also had some harsh things to say about the Roman Catholic Church, which, however, was something quite different from what it has since become, particularly after Vatican II...
...All of that seems to have been swept away in the wake of the destruction of European Jewry...
...If they are so allowed, how curious...
...to forge fetters for the world, endangering its progress...
...Nothing could be more abhorrent to the modern spirit, nothing could be more opposed to all that we have claimed and fought for, than to make religion the test of citizenship...
...My proposals are based on two premises...
...Jerusalem) is for us an entirely indifferent city...
...Where, as in Eastern Europe, Jews failed to obtain their Emancipation, the old national consciousness maintained itself—and, in many instances, even managed to do so while rejecting the religious heritage...
...Petuchowski's thesis is based on two major arguments: first, that classical Reformers warned against replacing the faith of Israel with a spurious nationalism that would necessarily be reduced to a corrupt theocracy...
...citizenry than do the Reform and Conservative Jews of that country...
...We are perfectly satisfied with our political and social position...
...arose with a vengeance, and has continued to agitate Israeli and Diaspora Jewry to this day...
...All credit to those who lobby in the Knesset against the religious bloc's efforts at changing the Law of Return...
...But there is an I-told-you-so theme in Petuchowski's statement that, while warranted in part, obscures a much larger truth and distorts even the limited truth it contains...
...of residing in the Land of Israel...
...It is not that we have not been warned—for over a century already...
...Begin with an affirmation of biblical proof texts that would justify Israeli occupation or annexation of "Judea and Samaria...
...I propose, instead, an active involvement on the part of American Jewry...
...Abraham Geiger in Judische Zeitschrift fur Wissenschaft und Leben, VII, 1869, pp...
...and so are the Jews in any number of other countries...
...Petuchowski takes satisfaction from the knowledge that American Reform Jewry is making it while European Jewry, despite the Emancipation, did not...
...Pre-Emanci-pation Jewry, excluded as it was from its surrounding society and culture, kept alive the memories of a distant national past, and looked forward to a national future, providing both past and future with a religious aura...
...If the Land of Israel represented the cradle of our faith, Reform Judaism had the courage to admit that one cannot go back to one's childhood...
...in the nature of the case, there is a far greater affinity between Mr...
...Where the specific religious commitments of Reform Judaism's founders could no longer be rehearsed with the same conviction and enthusiasm, ethnic affirmations could now be relied upon to fill the void...
...Both in his programmatic The Jewish State and his futuristic novel, Old-New Land, Herzl was far from envisaging the state he wanted to create as a theocracy...
...Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat...
...Begin's willingness to grant the Orthodox rabbinate a monopoly on deciding that question is but the latest installment of something that Montefiore had clearly foreseen, even though he might have expressed the problem in somewhat different terms...
...Begin and his policies...
...They might now remember the warnings sounded by earlier Reform leaders about the implications of "Jewish nationalism," a nationalism so vividly concretized by Mr...
...Reform and Conservative rabbis did not have a chance—not even during the three decades when a Labor government was in power...
...It had more to do with the philanthropic impulse of American Jews and with the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, culminating in the destruction of European Jewry, than with any logical extension or development of classical Reform Jewish thinking...
...If, years ago, Labor and Likud governments had realized that they could not count on unquestioning support of American Jewry, they might have been more circumspect in some of their policies...
...London, 1918, pp...
...In registering its dissent now, Reform should stress its resistance to two developments: first, not the monstrousness of the Orthodox demands, but the acquiescence of the government to them...
...If, as he acknowledges, this began around 1930 (and the origins in fact go back even further), then the span from 1930 to the present is greater than from 1885 (the Pittsburgh platform) to 1930...
...Even those elements of territorial sanctity and futuristic national expectations that Rabbinic Judaism had retained were jettisoned by Reform Judaism...
...disastrous...
...why are Israel's surest allies disenfranchised...
...The state as religion's policeman is an abomination...
...Perhaps he is also doing the leadership of American Reform Judaism a big favor...
...It's part of the me-too mentality of American Jews who respond to Fundamentalism not because it is Israeli but because it is apple-pie American...
...The ancient Rome of the Republic and the Caesars, with art amateurs making their pilgrimages to the remains of classical antiquity, that ancient Rome does not impose an oppressive yoke upon the world...
...Only Orthodox rabbis could hope to gain State recognition of their rabbinic ordination...
...But the duty of loyalty implies the right to real autonomy and whatever else goes with it...
...Sixty years after Geiger, who wrote from what seemed to be the expanding benevolence of German civilization, the overture to the Holocaust began to be played...
...a prayer for a new splendor for such places is a veritable suicide, a blasphemy of God...
...Peter's, with her ecclesiastical nimbus, that Rome will not cease...
...It is repressive because it is afraid and because it knows its own weakness...
...Perhaps he will cause them to remember, too...
...The Jews in the United States are doing rather nicely under Emancipation conditions...
...8) And in 1891, David Philipson made this contribution, hardly conceived to draw Jews closer to Reform, "The great immigration of Jews into the country at present caused by the expulsion from Russia carries with it a great danger to Judaism in its relation to the republic unless proper steps are at once taken...
...Perhaps, indeed, they will now bethink themselves of the causes that led to the birth of Reform Judaism, the negations that follow from its affirmations, and the affirmations that follow from its negations...
...Begin knows that, in the last resort, he can only rely upon those Jews whose religious Fundamentalism commits them to the "biblical boundaries" of the Greater Land of Israel, and whose catalogue of religious duties contains the mitzvah (the divine commandment...
...Yet his reasoning is flawed and his conclusions are dangerous...
...How this transformation was accomplished may be studied in some detail in the book by Rabbi David Polish, Renew Our Days, published in Jerusalem, in 1976, by the World Zionist Organization in cooperation with the World Union for Progressive Judaism...
...But, of course, they had already been warned long before Claude Montefiore reacted to the Balfour Declaration of 1917...
...That, and not supine passivity, is the truest expression of loyalty, not only to the Jewish State, but also to the Jewish People and its unity...
...Indeed...
...But more substantively, it is wrong to say that Zionism in Reform is not a "logical extension" of classical Reform...
...11th edition, Berlin, 1936, p. 63...
...In so doing, they helped restore Reform — a vast, alienated sector of Judaism—to the Jewish People and its struggle, a struggle that, not incidentally, is fraught with religious implications...
...He knows that there is not now, never has been, and is most unlikely to be in the future, a large-scale Reform Jewish emigration to the State of Israel from the United States of America...
...From a Reform Jewish point of view, the situation in the State of Israel was never very good...
...But that suits them, not us, since they are an oppressed minority, and we are not...
...He is also the author of several books including Renew Our Days—The Zionist Issue in Reform Judaism...
...And the leaders of Reform I Judaism are upset...
...While the institutions of Reform Judaism are to remain and to be expanded, they should now be filled with new content or, rather, with old content —the very particularistic and nationalist elements that the founders of Reform Judaism had explicitly rejected...
...While there have always been some Reform Jews, both rabbinical and lay, who were sympathetic to the Zionist cause (although not necessarily to Mr...
...Not only is it a matter of sound realpolitik for Begin to seek an alliance with the clericalist parties, which account for a much larger share of Israel's Dr...
...It was 30 centuries ago that Samaria and Judea broke off from one another and then were separately destroyed...
...Thirty years later, with the creation of the State of Israel, the problem of "Who is a Jew...
...The call to the victimized Jewish masses to turn to religion had about it, at best, a Salvationist pie in the sky naivete...
...But the Rome of the rock of St...
...The early Zionists in the Reform movement sought to correct that spurious polarization by stressing that Judaism has been a synthesis of faith and people...
...The possibility of separation as a natural historical process is grim enough...
...Its only strength is the confidence that American Jews, including Reform Jews, are too decent and too loyal to Israel to confront them...
...One can justifiably claim that classical Reform was not only short lived in Reform history but was a blip in recent Jewish history...
...I am referring to recent, not ancient times...
...They also live well enough to be able to be very philanthropic in their support of fellow-Jews who live in the State of Israel—a support that often makes it difficult to distinguish philanthropy from politics...
...Since the nineteenth century, the Yishuv has been torn by squalid battles among religious Jewish bodies, especially Ashkenazim and Sephardim, who did not shrink from involving the government (Turkey) in their quarrels and even (in the case of the dominant Sephardim) suggested to the government that their opponents were not entitled to religious rights because they really weren't Jewish...
...See David Philipson, The Reform Movement in Judaism...
...7) In 1898, Isaac Mayer Wise, father of American Reform, told the Central Conference of American Rabbis (of which he was then president): "All this agitation (Zionism) on the other side of the ocean concerned us very little...
...WRONG CXmOUSIONS DAVDPOUSH I share Professor Petuchowski's rejection of Jewish "ethnolatry" (particularly virulent in America) and of Israeli theocracy (more compatible with Ayatollism than with Judaism...
...Claude G. Montefiore, the founder of a radical brand of Liberal Judaism in England, saw this problem clearly, as early as 1918...
...Begin's version of it), it could still be taken for granted some fifty years ago that Zionism and Reform Judaism were antithetical movements on the post-Emancipation Jewish scene...
...The truth is that the Jewish religion has made a Jewish state almost inconceivable...
...went unheeded because they were issued in an environment that was antiseptically removed, psychologically and existentially, from those to whom the warnings were addressed...
...Those who wanted to continue being Jews invested their Jewish identity with an exclusively religious meaning, looking to the world at large as the scene for a future flourishing of Judaism, not to a geographical concentration on the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean...
...Second, Orthodoxy as a political structure (as distinguished from Orthodoxy as a halachic system) is acting out its essential weakness...
...Yet there is no evidence that Emancipation has proved to be a failure elsewhere...
...Petuchowski's formulation would have Reform Jewry change its agenda from preoccupation with Israel to a centripetal involvement in our own inner affairs, since, as he strongly suggests, we don't have much in common with Funda-mentalist-Jingoist Jews...
...The warnings by classical Reformers Rabbi David Polish is the past president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis and the founding Rabbi of Beth Emet, Evans ton...
...I don't expect another genocidal Shoah in 60 years (the gestation process takes longer), but American history leaves no room for complacency, nor does the current chipping away at the Constitution by forces that use abortion and public school prayer as wedges for more ambitious transformations...
...The underlying reality is that people in Israel and in the United States know that American Jews, in supporting Israel, will not take a stand of conscience...
...Her power is gone...
...They should, however, not have been surprised...
...If ten French Christians immigrate into Palestine and live there for five or seven years, are they to be refused the rights of citizenship and naturalisation...
...At a time when emigration from the State of Israel is rising by leaps and bounds, and when so many Russian Jews choose not to settle in the State of Israel, Mr...
...Yearbook, Central Conference of American Rabbis, Vol...
...Regardless of the merits of Geiger's and Montefiore's positions, a people whose existence stood in jeopardy had no stomach for encyclicals from sources that stood detached and remote from their fate...
...If Classical Reform Jewish doctrine, so it was argued, was predicated upon the success of the Emancipation, and if the Emancipation can now clearly be seen as an exploded delusion and a horribly disappointed hope, it should follow that the basic assumptions of Classical Reform Judaism must now be rejected...
...The threat of a break induced by religious and political zealotry becomes a present danger to Jewish survival, and it does our survival no service to throw up our hands in disgust and turn our backs in rejection...
...But what is required is organized effort by American Jews, for cynics in Israel's government take the "conventional" protests in stride...
...Yearbook, CCAR, Vol...
...Jakob J. Petuchowski is The Sol and Arlene Bronstein Research Professor in Judaeo-Christian Studies at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, Ohio...
...second, that Reform Jewry, having mistakenly ignored that warning, should now be tending its own religious garden instead of preoccupying itself with Israel...
...To choose instead to tend our own garden is to abdicate that responsibility...
...Both of these errors caused a schism in Jewish life that neither side was eager to heal...
...At that time, he wrote: But religion has become so integral a part of the Jews that if an attempt were made to form a new Jewish state, it would be exceedingly difficult to know how to deal with it...
...But while Ayatollism is a vicious phenomenon, it will subside, and we would be derelict if we did not help it subside...
...Begin, by his recent actions, has now indicated that he no longer finds that marriage to be so convenient...
...324f...
...In Nazi Germany it was a terrible failure—a failure extending even to the latter-day adoption by Jews of such Nazi concepts as that of the Jews as a "foreign nation" living in "host-countries...
...It may be tempting to abandon hope in an Israeli society whose own people, whether by voting with their ballots or their feet, seem either to be endorsing the regression or opting for the Diaspora...
...Abraham Geiger, one of the founding theologians of Reform Judaism, died a decade or so before the world had heard from and about Theodor Herzl...
...When Reform Judaism came into existence, it arose as a Diaspora religion, building in part upon those foundations already laid by Rabbinic Judaism, which facilitated a considerable independence from any religious institutions located in the Land of Israel...
...religion as the state's Foreign Ministry is usurpation...
...The first is that the clerical intrusion into the day to day life of Jews in Eretz Yisroel is not new, and has always been Both our own self-respect and Israel's welfare are enhanced if we do active battle with those who deny our authenticity...
...The absence of true consultation impairs Israel and American Jewry alike...
...For years now, Jerusalem has dictated to the Jews of the Diaspora how they are to understand Judaism, what kind of Jewish education they are to give their children, what the agenda of their meetings is to contain, what their newspapers are to print, and how they are to feel about living in "the only place on earth" where the "full Jewish life" can be lived...
...But more, once-liberal Jewish religious life in America is tilting increasingly toward a pop-Orthodoxy that threatens to wipe out the rationality and the social consciousness that Reform once fostered...
...Classical Reform was no "logical extension" of Rabbinic Judaism, certainly not in respect to its stress on Reform's exclusively theological nature...
...But perhaps a Diaspora Jewry that has repeatedly acclaimed the "primacy" of the State of Israel in modern Jewish life has deserved this "put-down" of its own religious competence...
...Some of their politicized cohorts have a heritage of coercive-ness and vindictiveness whose reincarnation we witness today...
...3rd edition...
...The present situation is largely due to the throttling of dissent, not only from Jerusalem but from American Jewish leadership...
...I am not sure whether Reform Jews are in the mood for it, because I fear that many non-Orthodox Jews in America are prepared to accept any enormity from Israel without challenging it, even if a similar enormity in the United States would send them into the streets...
...This applies with special emphasis to the present government, which, from the beginning, counted confidently on an undeviating chorus of approval from American Jewry...
...Far from it...
...That was feasible as long as the Ghetto walls were still standing...
...Begin knows, because he remembers...
...New York, 1967, p. 356...
...Yet evidence is mounting that many Jews have reached the limits of their patience...
...But that is just how the leaders of the State of Israel would like to see it, particularly when the organizations of American Jewry, including the Reform Jewish Establishment, can be relied upon to support whatever Israeli government is in power...
...Menahem Begin, in order to assemble a somewhat shaky coali. tion government, indicated to the clericalist parties, essential for that coalition, that he would work for even greater controls to be exercised by the Orthodox Establishment in the State of Israel over the definition of the "Jewish status" of Israel's citizens...
...If Jews are to be chastized at all, it is for their failure to heed these warnings of imminent disaster...
...There was very little a Reform Jew in America or in Germany had in common with an atheist Zionist in Odessa...
...Alas, Geiger's forebodings have become present reality — and not only in connection with the question of who decides what a valid conversion to Judaism is...
...Even in its own terms, the creation or re-creation of a Jewish "nation" in modern times, particularly on a secularist basis, was not without its problematic aspects...
...One could argue the reverse...
...It is natural enough, and even necessary, for American Jews to attack the betrayal both of Zionism and of Jewish religion by an alliance of political and clerical recidivists...
...if they are not so allowed, how monstrous...
...But was the Emancipation a failure...
...Yearbook, CCAR, Vol...
...second, our concern not merely with the single issue of religious freedom but with the extension of religion into the State's foreign policy in the name of God...
...A Jerusalem with a mighty Jewish population would be the tyrant's strong castle of Judaism, the Jewish Rome...
...The "right of dissent" must be established—and exercised...
...If Zionist scholars have erred in their insistence on the exclusively national character of Judaism, an error that is too egregious to linger on, classical Reformers erred just as damagingly in their dogma that nationalism is foreign to Judaism...
...Dissent might be most constructively expressed if there were a tradition of authentic and official consultation between Israel and Diaspora Jewry...
...A few telephone calls from key agencies, especially fund-raising bodies, that "this is not the time" or "this is not in Israel's best interests," will throw resistance into ineffectual tokenistn...
...Theodor Herzl himself, the founder of political Zionism, had argued: "It is only by the faith of our fathers that we recognize our historical community...

Vol. 6 • October 1981 • No. 9


 
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