Reconstructionist Judaism
The Reconstructionist movement, founded in the 1940s by scholar Mordechai Kaplan, is the newest and smallest division of Judaism (the other groups are Orthodox, Conservative and Reform). In America, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, envisioned Reconstructionist Judaism and elaborated on the idea of Judaism as not only a religion but also a peoplehood. Reconstructionists see in Judaism principally a certain culture and a certain set of ethics. Reconstructionist Jews, rejects the concept of the Jews as God's chosen people, yet maintains rituals as part of the Judaic cultural heritage. By the mid-1990s, both the Reform and the Reconstructionist movements had revised their prayer books to strike a delicate balance between tradition and innovation and to make important contributions to the shape of American Judaism.
Judaism bases its condemnation of homosexuality on the purity laws in the Book of Leviticus. Now a group of Jews is beginning to examine those laws, and is coming up with new ideas about them. The most liberal of Jewish movements, the Reconstructionists, allows gay men and lesbians to be ordained and to wed. The relatively new Reconstructionist Judaism was formed to unite all Jews as one people regardless of past upbringing, gender, and sexual orientation. By the 1970s, bat mitzvah had generally become indistinguishable from the bar mitzvah ceremony celebrated by boys in the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist communities.
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