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Reform Judaism

Contemporary Reform Judaism is a mixture of Unitarianism and intellectual Rationalism, which elevates philosophy above religion. It clings, at least outwardly, to the great Jewish Holy Seasons, to the name Jew, and in the majority of its followers to circumcision. Its adherents expect the coming of the Messianic age (not of a Messiah), when justice will reign supreme and love will bind man to man. In many of its prayer-books all sacrificial prayers are omitted, and laws and statutes are set down according to the present time.

More fundamental was the change in the form of the Messianic ideal of the Jews. This ancient ideal conceived the Messianic age as emanating from Zion, under the leadership of an ideal king or leader, the Messiah. The Reform movement changed this conception into that of the Jews as a Priest-People, scattered throughout the world, and serving mankind wherever they may be, so as "to hasten the millenium." It might be said that this movement changed not only the forms of Jewish life, but also an essential element in its content. Thus, it abandoned the hope for the restoration to Zion, deleted the prayer for Zion from the Jewish prayer book; abrogated the Jewish dietary laws; and even, in some cases, changed the Sabbath day to Sunday.

As fn ancient times there were Hellenizing Jews in Alexandria, in whose minds the hope was vaguely blended with the heathen poet's conception of a coming of a golden age and a reign of universal peace, which they expressed in adaptations of old Sibylline oracles, so the coming of a national deliverer fades away in the abstract idea of human progress and improvement in the minds of developed Jews.

Reform Judaism, also called progressive or modern Judaism, is the Jewish religion as reformed in the 19th century in Germany, Austria, America, and in some congregations of France and England. The places of worship are called temples, distinguished from other Jewish synagogues by choir, organ, regular sermons, and part of the liturgy in the vernacular of the country, and in America also by family pews. The ministers of these temples are rabbis who have attained proficiency in Hebrew lore, and are graduates of colleges or universities; or preachers by the choice of the congregation, who arc mostly autodedactic students) and cantors, capable of reading the divine service and leading the choir. In some congregations the offices of preacher and cantor are united in one person. Large congregations are conducted by the ordained rabbi and the cantor: the former is the expounder of the law, and the latter presides over the worship.

A school for instruction in religion, Hebrew, and Jewish history is attached to every temple. Like all other Jews, the reformed also are Unitarian in theology, and acknowledge the Old-Testament Scriptures as the divine source of law and doctrine, but reject the additional authority of the Talmud, in place of which they appeal to reason and conscience as the highest authority in expounding the Scriptures. They believe in the immortality of the soul, future reward and punishment, the perfectibility of human nature, the final and universal triumph of truth and righteousness. They reject the belief in the coming of a Messiah; the gathering of the Hebrew people to Palestine to form a separate government, and to restore the ancient polity of animal sacrifices and the Levitical priesthood; the resurrection of the body and the last judgment day) and the authority of the Talmud above any other collection of commentaries to the Bible.

In respect to doctrine, they hold that all religious doctrines must be taken from the Bible, and must be in harmony with the loftiest and purest conceptions of the Deity and humanity suggested by the Scriptures, and confirmed by reason and conscience. In respect to law, they hold that all laws contained in the Decalogue, expressed or implied, are obligatory forever, both in letter or spirit. All laws not contained in the Decalogue, expressed or implied, are local and temporal (although the principle expressed by some may be eternal) and could have been intended for certain times and localities only.

These theories of Judaism were developed by various Jewish authors between the years 1000 and 1500; partly they are also in the ancient Rabbinical literature, but were dropped after 1500, and taken up again by the disciples and successors of Moses Mendelssohn toward the close of the last century, and gradually developed to the present system. The Reform movement founded by Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) accentuated Jewish religion, purely as a faith-religion in the Western, Christian sense. The evident and avowed purpose was to make pure Germans of the emancipated Jews by denying Jewish nationality. This was done ostensibly out of gratitude for bare justice received; really out of fear of renewed injustice. The Hebrew language was largely dropped, together with the prayers for the restoration of Zion, and with all those laws which may be called sublimated national customs.

In the Jewish "Aufklarung" of the Mendelssohnian age, indeed, when, with the political emancipation the Jews became citizens of European states and absorbed with avidity the intellectual and aesthetic culture of their environment, many cast aside these nationalist aspirations: Judaism was a religion with a mission to mankind which could only be fulfilled by the dispersion of the people. It was historically and actually the religion of a race, but none the less the Jews were nationally and in culture Germans or Frenchmen or Englishmen, as the case might be. This was also the attitude of reformed Judaism.

The reform movement came to a standstill in Germany, but it was taken up and carried forward in the United States, whither several of its ablest exponents emigrated in the fourth and fifth decades of the 19th century. Isaac Harby and a group of young members of Congregation Beth Elohim, Charleston, South Carolina, petitioned in 1824, for reform of the synagogue service. They petitioned that services be shortened, service honors were not to be bid upon, men and women should be permitted to sit together and that the service and the sermon should be in English. Their petition was rejected. Harby and his supporters split away and formed "The Reformed Society of Israelites." It was the beginning of the American Reform Judaism movement.

The German Judaism which they brought with them was largely the product of the Reform Movement that had begun in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century. They too came with an equal zeal, determined to practice their liberal Judaism earnestly and devotedly, and they too succeeded for quite a time. And perhaps because the progressive spirit of German Reform Judaism had something, or even much, in common with the progressive spirit of America, their German Reform Judaism, in a way, struck deeper roots and underwent a more positive and conscious growth. Nevertheless, American Reform Judaism differed markedly and visibly, and in many respects even fundamentally, from the true German Reform Judaism.

Religious divisions began to appear in New York in the 1840s with the founding of a Reform congregation, Temple Emanuel, which subsequently became the largest synagogue in the world and the spiritual home to much of New York's German Jewish elite including department store owners, investment bankers and clothing manufacturers. Isaac M. Wise, the principal architect of the Reform movement in the United States, served briefly in Albany beginning in 1846 where he established the custom of mixed seating in American synagogues before moving to Cincinnati, Ohio in 1851. By 1880 almost 90% of American Jewry adhered to Reform guidelines and standards.

The adherents of reform rejected the authority of the Talmud and the rabbinical codes; they put aside also the expectation of the coming of a Messiah, the return of the Jews to Palestine, with the re-establishment of Jewish nationality and sacrificial worship; they did not believe in the resurrection of the body, but in the immortality of the soul. The dietary laws, biblical as well as rabbinical, which had their reason in the ideal of exclusiveness, fall with that ideal. Sabbath rest was understood as refraining from labour for gain; all the casuistry about prohibited works and the legal fictions by which the prohibitions are evaded are swept away. While the effort is made to maintain historic continuity in the forms of worship, the ritual and the prayerbook were recast in conformity with the principles of the reform.

One effect was anti-Semitism. The Germans did not wish Jews to become whole Germans. The Jews were no longer hated for their religion-which had become too featureless for hate - nor for their nationality which they repudiated, but for their race. The basis of Jew hatred now became physical, since the Jews had nothing spiritual left to be hated. Its reaction was to bring many Jews back to a realization of Jewish nationality, to Zionism. The Zionist movement received a great impulse in the last decades of the century from the rise of an aggressive anti-Semitism in European countries. Nationality was conceived not in a political, but in a pseudo-ethnological sense; "national culture" was the expression of the genius of a race. The Jews were a foreign element in the national body politic, socially unassimilable, a peril to the purity of the national culture just in proportion to their intellectual acuteness and their financial power. This antipathy manifested itself in different ways, from otracisms in clubs to wholesale massacres, connived at, if not instigated, by the government; but everywhere it pressed home upon the Jew the fact that he was a member of an alien race. The idea that race is the true basis of nationality, and consequently that each "race" ought to be a nation for itself fell in with the immemorial belief of the Jews and gave fresh energy to it. Zionism and anti-Semitism were, in so far, only two aspects of the same phenomenon.

Reformed Judaism abandons many of the traditions which have exposed the Jews to dislike and suspicion, and reverts to the ancient Law, which is more favorable to the modern ideas of equality and fraternity and the removal of the barriers of race and class distinctions than Talmudic Judaism. In America the Reform on the left viewed much of Rabbinic and Torah Judaism as anachronistic and anti-scientific. They wished to be fully integrated into America as Americans. They perceived the isolationism and rejectionism of fundamentalist Jewish life as the root cause of anti-Semitism.

As for the doctrine concerning the Messiah: The Reform Jew believes that so-called Messianic passages referring to a personal Messiah, have been fulfilled, either at the time of or shortly after their utterance by prophets. The Orthodox Jew looks toward the re-establishment of the Kingdom of David in Palestine, the rebuilding of the temple, the rehabilitation of the Priesthood and the reintroduction of the sacrificial cult as possible in the future, just as it was made possible after the Babylonian captivity. This difference in the interpretation of the Messianic doctrine seems to be the main dividing point between the Reform and the Orthodox Jew and finds expression in the Prayer Books used by them respectively. It should, however, not be overlooked that both Reform and Orthodox Jew hope for the coming of the day oft designated the "Messianic times" when "nations shall beat their swords into plough-shares," etc.

Reform Jews as well as Orthodox Jews, believe in the necessity of public and private worship, in accordance with the principle laid down by a Rabbi after the destruction of the temple, that "prayer takes the place of sacrifice." They believe in the observance of the Mosaic Sabbath, holy days and historical feasts. Though in some few congregations Sunday services are held, in addition to the Sabbath service, the Sunday service does not with any congregation, hold the same place in its regard as does the Sabbath service. No day can be a substitute for the Jewish Sabbath.

The Rituals used by Orthodox and Reform Jews differ somewhat in spirit, as indicated above, with regard to the Messianic hope, but mostly in volume. The Reform Jew has simply taken the old Prayer Book, representing a library of devotional literature and created gradually during the many centuries, and has reduced it as far as it was practicable, to its original rubric. The Orthodox Jew prays for the most part in Hebrew. The Reform Jew prays to a great extent in the vernacular of the country in which he lives, following the Talmudic principle, as well as the rule of expedience, that "a man may pray in any language he wishes."

The Reform Jew, like the Orthodox Jew, believes in the efficacy of ceremonials in the synagogue and the home, as a means of not merely preserving a definite religious atmosphere, but also of emphasizing truths which can be best understood by concrete exemplification. Of course the Reform Jew does not observe all the ceremonials of the Orthodox Jew. In this respect he reserves the right of being eclectic and of being guided in his electicism by the message which the ceremony still has for the modern man.