The Chosen Wars

by Steven R Weisman

  At the turn of the century, the Jewish Theological Seminary was struggling under the weight of low enrollment and financial problems following the death in 1897 of its founding president, Rabbi Morais. Believing it was their duty to sustain an Orthodox seminary in spite of their own reformist inclinations, a number of members of Temple Emanu-El, such as Jacob Schiff, Louis Marshall, and Julius Rosenwald, stepped in to support the seminary. In 1902 they recruited a new president, Solomon Schechter, a scholar at Cambridge University renowned for his pioneering study of a collection of rare ancient and medieval Jewish texts discovered in Egypt (the so-called Cairo Geniza). Schechter was no stranger to the reformers’ vision of Judaism. He had studied with scholars affiliated with the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement in Berlin. But he believed that this school had “never, to my knowledge, offered to the world a theological platform of its own”—and that no such platform could be legitimately adopted for all Jews without some formal consent.16 Schechter and his disciples at Jewish Theological Seminary established the United Synagogue of America, later renamed the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. And as they sought to define a middle ground for Judaism, various congregations throughout the United States gravitated toward an institutionalization of Conservative Judaism in order to attract the flood of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Russia who might feel uncomfortable with the Reform movement’s radicalism.

  To some scholars, Conservative Judaism represented a wholly new religion comparable to Mormonism and Christian Science. Other scholars defined Conservative Judaism as a middle-of-the-road branch of Judaism as it was practiced by Americans seeking to make some but not all adjustments to modernity. The followers of Schechter sometimes called themselves Orthodox, but they also used terms like Conservative, traditional, liberal, progressive, or Modern Orthodox. But because they so confidently embraced a variety of adjustments to modernization, they were generally to remain in the middle ground or mainstream “American Judaism” that had evolved in the late nineteenth century.

  The cause of Reform Judaism at the turn of the century was also pushed in two different directions. Some congregations abandoned the reading of the Torah altogether, believing that merely displaying it in the arc was sufficient. Advocates of such changes saw them as revealing Judaism in its essential purity. Conversions occurred without ritual baths or circumcision, only instruction and commitment. The matrilineal definition of Judaism, holding that only children of a Jewish mother were considered Jewish, was increasingly overlooked as many Jews wanted children of all mixed marriages to be automatically regarded as Jewish. The Central Conference of American Rabbis, the organization of Reform rabbis, moved increasingly toward breaking with other interpretations, such as allowing cremation rather than burial.

  But because it also provoked a backlash, the Pittsburgh Platform was beginning to look outdated among many reformers after the turn of the century. Like all pendulums, the Jewish pendulum of reform started swinging back somewhat to tradition, even among reformers, as Jews looked back to their rituals to find meaning and reexamined the history of their traditions. Accordingly, they started to refine and revive rituals in the marriage ceremony and in the mourning rites. They set about reviving certain holidays like Sukkot, the harvest festival, and they accepted Hanukkah, overlooking its significance as calling for the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem, because the holiday was especially beloved among children. “There can be no healthy Reform that has not its origin in Orthodoxy,” declared Jacob Schiff, the prominent German Jew in New York, suggesting that without tradition, Reform would cause Judaism to disappear. Kohler had also declared in 1898: “Today not Reform, but Judaism, must be the sole object of our solicitude.” Not surprisingly, the changes toward both more and less reform provoked disputes between rabbis and congregation presidents, sometimes with rabbis advocating change in opposition to lay leaders, and often the reverse.

  For prayer books, Reform Jews primarily gravitated to Wise’s Minhag America and Einhorn’s Olat Tamid, but other prayer books proliferated as Reform Jews experimented with different approaches. What emerged from these disagreements among Reformers was the Union Prayer Book (Seder Tefilot Yisrael), which appeared in 1892, compiled by Rabbi Isaac Moses of Chicago and revised in the next few years by Rabbi Kohler. Heavily indebted to Einhorn, the Union Prayer Book opened from left to right, and was written mostly in English. “We rejoice that after the long, dreary night a new morn is dawning,” the book declared. “The truths revealed to Israel are becoming the possession of an even greater number of men.” The Union Prayer Book remained in use by congregations of varied leanings until the 1960s, when the Reform movement sought to accommodate widening support for Israel and a desire to return to at least some traditions in the service and in practices.

  Kohler’s takeover of Hebrew Union College in 1903, after Wise’s passing and a year after Schechter’s appointment at Jewish Theological Seminary, solidified its identity as a Reform organization. Biblical criticism became a main part of the academic curriculum and the College also rejected what it called “Jewish nationalism,” the ultimate expression of Jewish peoplehood and attachment to the Holy Land. Looking outward, arms of Reform Judaism—the Union’s Board of Delegates on Civil Rights—sought to combat anti-Semitism, laws prohibiting work on Sunday, Bible reading in public schools, and restrictions on immigration. Kohler and Schechter maintained good relations with each other as Reform and Conservative Judaism increasingly took over the mainstream of American Judaism.

  But one of the most powerful trends within Reform Judaism continued to evolve as it became increasingly identified with the cause of social justice. Rabbinical sermons in all the mainstream parts of American Judaism increasingly focused on social and economic issues. Though long in coming, this trend forcefully cast aside earlier concerns in the nineteenth century about being identified with socialism, or indeed with any cause outside Jewish concerns. Jewish interest in such matters also grew out of the era of protests, strikes, and demands among farmers, workers, and others left out of the general prosperity of the Gilded Age.

  These developments fed into the growth of the populist and progressive political movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as Christian exponents of the social gospel, many of them citing the biblical prophets along with Jesus as advocates for moral treatment of the poor and the oppressed. In 1891, Pope Leo XIII had issued his encyclical “Rerum Novarum” (“Revolutionary Change”) on the “rights and duties of capital and labor,” addressing the condition of workers. Jewish leaders could not help but notice, and they too cited the prophets Amos, Isaiah, and Micah. (“What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, to love kindness, and walk humbly with your God?”)17

  The Jewish version of the “social gospel” of Christians flowered in the 1920s when the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the organization of Reform religious leaders, campaigned against child labor and in favor of worker rights generally. Their interests expanded to white slavery, venereal disease, working conditions and rights, juvenile delinquency, profit sharing, health care, and housing. In 1923, the Central Conference worked with the Federal Council of Churches of Christ and the National Catholic Welfare Council in attacking the seven-day, twelve-hour-a-day work week in the steel industry.18

  After World War I, a serious divide among Jews opened up, focusing on Zionism—the goal of establishing a secular Jewish homeland or state in Palestine. The First Zionist Congress had taken place in Basel in 1897, provoking disapproval from the Reform establishment. But the Balfour Declaration by Britain in 1917, supporting a “homeland” for Jews in Palestine in response to the efforts of Theodor Herzl and the Zionist movement, appealed to many American Jews, reformers included, who began to see the ancient Jewish homeland as a place of refuge for the dispossessed in Europe and the Middle East, if not for themselves. (Prominent among these Jews was Louis D. Brandeis, elevated to the United States Supreme Court in 1916, a thoroughly secular
ized Jew who passionately joined the Zionist cause.)

  But generally speaking, Reform Jews continued to see themselves as Americans first, and America as their Zion, and the Zionist movement as not for them. American Jews continued to fear being seen as harboring dual loyalties, a perception they worried might fuel anti-Semitism. Not all Reform Jews were anti-Zionist, but over time in the twentieth century, there arose a “Zionization” of the Reform movement.

  In 1919, Kohler finally agreed, declaring: “Let Palestine, our ancient home, under the protection of the great nations, or under the specific British suzerainty, again become a center of Jewish culture and a safe refuge for the homeless.” The shift toward supporting a homeland for the Jews gathered strength throughout the middle of the twentieth century. After World War II and the Holocaust, the transformation of American Jewry into supporting creation of a state of Israel was complete.19 Complete, that is, until controversies arose about Israel’s policies in the West Bank territories in recent years.

  Reform Jews had not been the only ones to resist creation of a secular state for Jews, at least at first. Many deeply Orthodox Jews also saw Zionism in its early phase as a threat, because they considered the Jews’ return to the Promised Land something that could be delivered only by God. Moreover, the Zionist movement in Europe was overtly secular, sometimes flagrantly mocking traditional Jewish practices. Over time, many in the Orthodox establishment have accepted the Jewish state as useful but continue to reject its secular authority over Jewish matters.

  The Americanization of Judaism continued to develop in the pre–World War II decades with the founding of the Reconstructionist movement by Mordecai Kaplan, a former Orthodox rabbi born in Lithuania. Kaplan founded the Orthodox Jewish Center in 1918 but left Orthodoxy because of his evolving definition of Judaism as a “religious civilization” not dependent on belief in a personal and anthropomorphic conception of God, divine revelation, or traditional laws. He was initially most comfortable as a Conservative Jew, but eventually founded his own Reconstructionist branch of Judaism. Despite Kaplan’s declaration that Jews were welcome to embrace traditional Jewish practices, his publication of a Reconstructionist prayer book led to his excommunication by the Union of Orthodox Rabbis in 1945.

  In the 1920s, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of New York established the Jewish Institute of Religion, a liberal seminary that sought to compete with Hebrew Union College by being openly Zionist and by embracing some traditions that the College had rejected. The American Jewish Congress was also founded to represent pro-Zionist American Jews. Stephen Wise’s institute later merged with Hebrew Union College in 1949.

  By 1924, the passage of the National Origins Act severely curtailed the immigration of Jews to the United States by imposing strict quotas on immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. By 1930, the gates to the United States from Eastern Europe were closing, ending the massive migration of preceding decades, putting the number of Jews in the United States at a little more than four million. The advent of Hitler in the 1930s was another cataclysmic event for the identity of American Jews, as Rabbi Stephen Wise led the warnings to the dangers of European Jews posed by Nazism. But reform Jews of this period remained primarily focused on their own domestic concerns, in part because news from Hitler’s Germany was fragmentary.

  Meeting in Columbus, Ohio, in 1937, the Central Conference of American Rabbis felt the influence of the yearning for a return to tradition. Once again declaring that the Jewish message was “universal, aiming at the union and perfection of mankind under the sovereignty of God” and that it was entirely consistent with science and modernity, the Columbus conference declared its embrace of “the doctrine of the One, living God, who rules the world through law and love,” not the “God idea” of Pittsburgh. In another throwback to tradition, the Columbus Platform honored the Torah “both written and oral,” though there was no specific reference to the Talmud, the central text of the “Oral Torah.” “Each age has the obligation to adapt the teachings of the Torah to its basic needs in consonance with the genius of Judaism,” it said, in the only reference to the possible obsolescence of Talmudic teachings cited in the Pittsburgh document.

  The Columbus charter also avoided rejection of Jewish “peoplehood” as previous declarations had done. Rather, it spoke of the people of Israel as bound by a common heritage, and of Palestine as holding “the promise of renewed life for many of our brethren.” Moving with full force toward the embrace of social justice, the Columbus Platform called for “the elimination of man-made misery and suffering, of poverty and degradation, of tyranny and slavery, of social inequality and prejudice, of ill-will and strife.”20

  Following all the horrors of the Holocaust that came to light after World War II, Jewish synagogue membership grew in the 1950s, along with support for the state of Israel as a signal responsibility for American Jews.

  The 1960s buffeted Jewish identity in the United States. American Jews had gradually moved from American cities to its prosperous suburbs, where dozens of new synagogue congregations flourished. Comity with non-Jews was made easier after a milestone was achieved by the Vatican Council, which declared in 1965 that Jews were collectively absolved for the murder of Jesus. Another turning point for American Jews occurred in 1967, when Israel was besieged by its Arab neighbors and struck back with a stunning military victory, capturing the West Bank, the Sinai, Gaza, and Eastern Jerusalem. American Jews responded across the board with a deeper devotion to Israel’s security and perhaps an appreciation of its identity.

  The 1960s were also a time of racial turmoil in the United States. Reform and Conservative Jews generally supported the civil rights movement even as some were alarmed by a flare-up of anti-Semitic rhetoric among some African-American militants. By the late 1970s, a series of social upheavals in America challenged all branches of Judaism. The Reform and Conservative movements suddenly had to adjust some of their traditional practices in the face of demands for equal treatment by women and, much later, by gay Americans. They also had to deal with the increasing phenomenon of intermarriage, and whether to recognize the children of these marriages as Jewish if their mother was not. (Recognition of patrilineal Jewish identity, which began in the nineteenth century, accelerated in the late twentieth century in non-Orthodox circles.)

  Another quandary for American Jews in more contemporary times has been the growing embrace of Jews—and of the state of Israel—by the evangelical Christian community. This embrace has occurred just as American Jews were growing uncomfortable with that community’s opposition to rights for women and gays—and, as recent surveys show, as younger American Jews grow increasingly critical of the treatment of Palestinian Arabs in Israel and the West Bank. Yet, in the face of these threats, American Jews continue to remain in solidarity with the liberal political order and on the liberal side of the Democratic Party in elections all the way through the Obama and Trump eras. Still, the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, territory held by Israel since the 1967 war, has threatened to drive a historic wedge between Israel and the American Jewish community generally, testing Jewish loyalty to Israel among Reform and (to a lesser degree) Conservative Jews.

  In 1976, shortly after the centennial anniversaries of the founding of Hebrew Union College and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the Central Conference of American Rabbis called for yet another Reform rabbinic conference, this time in San Francisco. The conference adopted what it called a “centenary perspective” that accelerated the process of Jews returning to an acceptance of their identity as a people as well as a religion, moving away from the declarations of rabbis in the nineteenth century. “Born as Hebrews in the ancient Near East, we are bound together like all ethnic groups by language, land, history, culture, and institutions,” the platform declared. “But the people of Israel is unique because of its involvement with God and its resulting perception of the human condition.” Once again, the Reform movement expressed support for “universal justice and peace
,” noting that a third of all the world’s Jews now live “in our people’s ancient homeland” and that Jews everywhere “are bound to that land and to the newly reborn State of Israel by innumerable religious and ethnic ties.”21

  Then, in 1999, the most recent iteration of Reform Jewish attitudes again reaffirmed tradition, pluralism, social justice, and tolerance of conflicting views in Judaism. Taking note of the platforms of 1885, 1937, and 1976, the 1999 document said the “great contribution of Reform Judaism is that it has enabled the Jewish people to introduce innovation while preserving tradition, to embrace diversity while asserting commonality, to affirm beliefs without rejecting those who doubt, and to bring faith to sacred texts without sacrificing critical scholarship.”

  Rather than reject the “sources of our tradition,” the Reform movement embraced them as a path to understanding the “holiness” of the Jewish people. It affirmed that humans are created in God’s image—as it says in the Bible—again a distant cry from the rejection of an anthropomorphic and “personal” God of the nineteenth century. The 1999 platform held that Jews “encounter God’s presence in moments of awe and wonder, in acts of justice and compassion, in loving relationships and in the experiences of everyday life.” The Torah, it said, has become a “manifestation of God’s love” for humanity and central to Judaism and the focus of study. There must be “renewed attention” to the traditional commandments of Judaism, but there was no specific reference to the body of Oral Law or Halakha that had been effectively abandoned. The Messiah was again treated metaphorically, and the increasingly popular use of the ancient concept of tikkun olam, “repairing the world,” was cited to “help bring nearer the messianic age.” Seeking to reconcile support for Israel with uneasiness over treatment of Palestinians, the platform rejoiced in the state of Israel, but noted that it did so in support of Israel fulfilling the rights “for all its inhabitants” and striving “for a lasting peace between Israel and its neighbors.”22