Some of the most controversial and central issues shaping Reform Judaism today – intermarriage, patrilineal descent and gay marriage – will be the focus of an upcoming conference of Reform rabbis.
Several hundred Reform rabbis from around the world are expected to attend the annual convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, slated for March 24-28 in Philadelphia.
The theme of the gathering is “Outreach and Intermarriage – Come Let Us Reason Together.”
Two resolutions – one supporting civil marriage for gays and lesbians and one to establish a task force to study the ramifications of patrilineal descent – are expected to pass.
Outreach, intermarriage and patrilineal descent are being revisited by the rabbis now because of the tensions these issues have engendered within the movement during the past several years.
They also come at a time when the movement’s longstanding emphasis on outreach has come into conflict with many Reform Jews’ search for spiritual authenticity, which has led to greater emphasis on traditional Jewish practices.
The recent experience of many congregations suggests that there is an inherent tension in trying to be both broad and particularistic, in trying to be completely inclusive of interfaith families while ensuring that synagogue that synagogue leadership and rituals are completely Jewish.
On the question of intermarriage, the Reform rabbinical organization passed a resolution formally discouraging officiation in 1973.
But autonomy in decisionmaking is a central tenet of Reform Judaism and so the organization does not, and cannot, prohibit its rabbis from officiating.
A recent survey of CCAR members conducted by one Reform rabbi in New Jersey, Irwin Fishbein, found that 48 percent of Reform rabbis are willing to perform a marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew.
Fishbein runs an organization called the Rabbinic Center for Research and Counseling, which publishes a list of 231 Reform and Reconstructionist rabbis willing to officiate at intermarriages.
Officiation at intermarriages is a matter of individual conscience, as is every other decision for Reform rabbis, said Rabbi Simeon Maslin, president of the CCAR.
Maslin, the rabbi of Congregation Keneseth Israel in Elkins Park, Pa., is personally opposed to officiating at intermarriages.
He took issue with Fishbein’s survey findings and estimated the percentage of members who would officiate at an intermarriage to be between 33 percent and 40 percent.
Whatever the numbers, Reform rabbis are under considerable pressure from their congregations to perform intermarriages, several sources said.
According to the 1990 National Jewish Population Study, 62 percent of Reform Jews who married since 1985 married non-Jews.
And for many rabbis, it has become a litmus test for whether they will or will not get jobs.
There have been several cases in which rabbis’ contracts have not been renewed by their congregation because they refused to officiate at mixed marriages, said Rabbi Elliot Stevens, executive secretary of the CCAR.
An illustration of the unprecedented congregational pressure that some are bringing to bear on the rabbis is the fact that David Belin introduced a resolution on the subject at the Feb. 5 executive meeting of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the congregational arm of the movement.
The proposal urges the CCAR to change its 1973 resolution opposing officiation “and instead adopt a neutral resolution neither favoring nor opposing rabbinic officiation.”
The committee deferred consideration of the resolution until the UAHC’s trustees’ meeting in June.
“In many communities, people find it very difficult to get a Reform rabbi to do” intermarriages, said Belin, who was the founding chairman of the UAHC’s Commission on Reform Jewish Outreach.
“The rabbis who don’t [officiate] use the CCAR resolution as a rationale,” said Belin, who is also president of the Jewish Outreach Institute, which is not affiliated with the Reform movement. “The resolution also has an impact on how young rabbinical students feel” about officiating at intermarriages.
The UAHC has never before adopted a resolution in an attempt to influence the policy of the CCAR, but Belin said he thinks it is appropriate that the congregational arm of the movement do so now.
“The movement has constantly reinterpreted Jewish tradition in large part as a result of the concerns of lay people, and met the needs of lay people,” said Belin, an attorney in Des Moines.
One of those reinterpretations, largely spurred by the realities of Reform life, was the 1983 adoption of patrilineal descent as Reform movement policy.
The policy accepted people as Jewish if either parent was Jewish, and if they had a Jewish education. That acceptance contradicts the traditional definition of Jewishness as being inherited through the mother’s line.
Such acceptance had been the movement’s practice for many years. But even 13 years after becoming movement policy, it remains problematic for some Reform rabbis.
Reform rabbis in Canada, with the support of those in Europe, Israel and some in America, are introducing a resolution at the CCAR convention that, if passed, would create a task force to study the impact of patrilineal descent and to clarify the policy.
Questions that have emerged from the policy include whether the “public and timely acts” of identification included in the original wording are obligatory and whether someone whose mother is Jewish but who is not educated as a Jew is to be considered Jewish, said Rabbi Elyse Goldstein of Toronto.
“There’s no solid standard across the movement for what’s expected. It’s more like a smorgasbord to choose from,” said Goldstein, who runs an adult Reform education program, called Kolel, in Toronto.
Although Canadian, Israeli and European Reform rabbis would like to rescind the policy, such an effort would be “futile,” Goldstein said. “There is no chance of changing the reality of patrilineal descent.”
More than 90 percent of Reform rabbis support the patrilineal descent policy, said Rabbi Paul Menitoff, executive vice president of the CCAR.
Rabbi Elliot Stevens of the CCAR acknowledged the problems inherent in the patrilineal decision.
“It’s not clear who decides someone’s Jewish status, and what happens when one rabbi considers someone Jewish and another does not because of their family practice or background,” he said.
Goldstein also expressed concern that the policy has made it much easier for men to intermarry because it obviates the stigma connected with having non- Jewish children.
She also said that with patrilineal descent, she is “worried about continuity, about all these Jews who the rest of the world doesn’t consider Jewish.”
Rabbi Peter Knobel, spiritual leader of Beth Emet-The Free Synagogue in Evanston, Ill., is one who will oppose the resolution.
“I don’t see the necessity for a task force,” he said. “Is it a question of clarification or is it an attempt to reserve our decision?”
“I’m not in favor of disenfranchising large numbers of people who most people consider to be Jews and who are loyal to the Jewish community,” he said.
On the issue of gay marriage, the Reform rabbinate is expected to adopt a resolution supporting civil marriage for gays and lesbians.
A great deal of informal discussion is also expected at the conference on the related but separate of religious sanctification of same-sex partnerships.
The group will likely take a position on gay religious weddings, which are often called commitment ceremonies, at next year’s convention, when the organization’s Ad Hoc Committee on Human Sexuality presents its final report.
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