Twenty years ago this summer, I began writing my rabbinical thesis about a controversy that tested the boundaries of the Reform movement from 1991 to 1994.
Congregation Beth Adam, a Humanistic congregation in Cincinnati, sought membership in the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, now the Union for Reform Judaism. Beth Adam had removed God-language from its liturgy entirely. Its leaders argued that many modern Jews could no longer pray honestly with words that assumed a personal, commanding God. They wanted Jewish ritual, Jewish ethics, Jewish memory, and Jewish community without supernatural theism.
They also wanted to belong to the Reform movement, send children to Reform summer camps and hire rabbis from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.
Reform Judaism had always made room for Jews who doubted God, argued with God, redefined God, or stopped believing in God altogether, especially after the Holocaust. Beth Adam said, in effect: We are simply the logical extension of what you already allow.
The question was never whether individual Reform Jews could doubt God, which they can and do. It was whether the Reform movement could welcome a congregation organized around God’s absence and still say what it stood for.
The answer was no. As Rabbi Gunther Plaut wrote in his responsum: “Yesh gevul. There is a boundary. If we are everything, we are nothing.”
Beth Adam’s application forced the movement to ask what it could absorb without losing something essential as a movement.
That question of the Reform movement’s boundaries has returned, not about God but about Zionism. It erupted at the Re-CHARGING Reform Judaism conference last month.
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, a founder of the group that is based at his synagogue, Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York City, warned that the Reform movement cannot ordain rabbis who reject Zionism without losing something essential.
Andrew Rehfeld, the president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, where I was ordained, said the seminary is committed to Zionism but also must protect serious inquiry, even when students arrive at conclusions many Jews find painful, frightening or wrong.
God and Zionism are not the same kind of commitment. One is theological. The other is historical, political and civilizational. Still, the structural questions are remarkably similar.
When does openness become incoherence? When does a movement lose the ability to say what it is trying to build and sustain?
For much of the last half century, Reform Judaism did necessary and morally serious work to expand our boundaries. Women entered the rabbinate and cantorate. LGBTQ Jews found welcome and affirmation. Patrilineal descent reshaped who was counted. Interfaith families moved from the margins toward the center. New Jews joined our communities in serious numbers. These, among many other changes, allowed people who had long stood at the edges of Jewish community to find a genuine home.
Every expansion created new questions about what values and commitments are at the center.
What happened, and I say this implicating myself as much as anyone, is that we became extraordinarily good at helping people cross the threshold, and considerably less confident naming the commitments we hoped they would discover and actively make once they were inside.
Conversion classes multiplied. Sustained encounters with Jewish texts did not always keep pace. Programs proliferated. Pathways to deep Jewish literacy did not. We learned a fluent language of welcome while quietly de-emphasizing the equally important language of obligation. We told people they belonged. We were less clear about what belonging asks.
We gave people a doorway. But we were less clear about what crossing the threshold also obligates us to do. And we failed to confront with honesty the fact that universal values alone rarely lead Jews back to particular Jewish obligation.
The path usually runs the other way: Jewish peoplehood, covenant, mitzvot, memory and commanded responsibility can open us toward the dignity of all people. But if we begin and end with universal values and minimal Jewish literacy, we should not be surprised when Jews lose the particular vocabulary of care, obligation and responsibility for one another.
If the last few years have taught us anything, it is that no one will care for Jews more than Jews. Jews must be taught to care for one another.
Yet in North America, the boundary question being asked is whether we still understand ourselves as responsible for Jews we do not know, living lives that look different from ours, carrying experiences we may not fully understand.
Peoplehood is the claim that Jews in Charlotte and Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and New York, Dallas and Paris, Buenos Aires and Madrid, are responsible for one another’s future. It does not require agreement. It does not cancel criticism. It does not excuse injustice. But it is real, and it is not, in my opinion, optional.
These days, the term anti-Zionism is being used loosely. Some Zionists are using the term anti-Zionism to deliberately delegitimize fierce criticism of Israel, opposition to occupation, anger at the current government, or rejection of a triumphalist nationalism, including the awful versions we see among West Bank settlers who attack Palestinians and ministers who advocate ethnic cleansing. These critical stances are not at all anti-Zionist positions. Indeed, these are Zionist positions because they come from the stance that Israel matters to Jews.
But anti-Zionism can also mean the belief that the Jewish people alone, among the peoples of the world, have no legitimate right to collective self-determination. It can mean that Israel should no longer exist in any recognizable form as the homeland of the Jewish people. And while such a person should be welcome in Reform synagogues, I do not understand what it would mean for a Reform seminary to authorize such a person as a rabbi or cantor.
Rabbinic leadership is about transmission and relationship. A rabbi helps Jews locate themselves within a people, a history, a covenant and a future. That work rests on a basic recognition that the people are worth transmitting. That the story is worth carrying forward. That Jews remain responsible for one another even when we are angry, ashamed, afraid, or divided.
If someone genuinely believes that Jewish collective self-determination is morally illegitimate and unacceptable, or that Israel should no longer exist in any recognizable form as the homeland of the Jewish people, that conviction shapes what they will teach, what they will withhold and what they will regard as worthy of passing on. We can’t be confident that they will cultivate Jews who are literate, who know themselves to be responsible for the Jewish people, and whose particular obligations open them toward responsibility for the world.
We need Jews formed by peoplehood, covenant, mitzvot, memory and obligation. Jews who can see Palestinian suffering without abandoning Jewish peoplehood. Jews who can love Israel while understanding the responsibilities of power. Jews who criticize their own people from a place of love rather than abandonment. Jews who can live with tension without mistaking tension for failure.
Yesh gevul does not mean we are finished asking questions. It means we know what we are trying to kindle. And we cannot authorize as kindlers those who believe that the flame has no right to exist.
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