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By Donald H. Harrison
 SAN DIEGO—The juxtaposition of two events—a lecture by a kippah-wearing Reform rabbi at the Men’s Club at Congregation Beth Israel and the telephonic gathering of 1,000 American rabbis to hear President Barack Obama explain his national health plan—makes me wonder if some day there will simply be one Progressive Judaism in the United States, merging the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist branches of the faith.
Assistant Rabbi Michael Satz told Congregation Beth Israel’s Men’s Club that one of the 19th- century founders of the American Reform movement, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, believed that there should be just one American Judaism different from the Judaism practiced in Central and Eastern Europe by the Ashkenazim, different from the Judaism once practiced in Spain by the Sephardim, and greatly different from that religion practiced by the Jews of the biblical period.
Wise and such other founders of Judaism’s Reform movement as Rabbi David Einhorn believed that Judaism was an adaptable religion, not a rigid nationality, and that its essentials were the ethics it taught, not its rituals. The role for Jews in America, Wise and many of his colleagues believed, was to take action on such ethical teachings of Judaism as caring for the sick, feeding the hungry, and comforting the oppressed.
If rituals—such as keeping kosher, men wrapping their arms and head in tefillin, requiring men to cover their heads, conducting prayer services exclusively in Hebrew —made Jews seem foreign and prevented them from spreading ethical messages, then such rituals should be jettisoned.
Reform Jews believed that men, not God, wrote the Torah, and that while those Bible-writers got many things right, some things they got wrong. Thus one was free to reject portions of the Bible that could not withstand scientific scrutiny, but should embrace timeless concepts teaching moral behavior. Furthermore, the Reform movement believed that when the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D., and Jews spread themselves through the Diaspora, this was not a punishment from God, but rather the inauguration of a new mission for Jews—to spread God’s ethical teachings throughout the world.
This concept of the Jewish mission—to be a light unto the nations—is one of the underpinnings for the establishment in Washington, D.C., of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center, which takes positions on many pieces of legislation insofar as they further the Jewish concept of tikkun olam –that we are God’s partners in the repair of the world.
Within the last decade, the Religious Action Center began a practice of arranging briefings for rabbis—in advance of their generally well-attended High Holy Day sermons—on important issues of the day, to provide them information they might consider for presentation to their congregants. These telephonic briefings routinely have been ‘off-the-record,’ with the Religious Action Center not wanting to “scoop” the rabbis by releasing the contents of the briefings before their sermons.
This year, the Religious Action Center was able to obtain President Obama as the briefer—to provide details of his health care proposals to the rabbis and to explain some of the thoughts behind it. The President spoke for about 20 minutes on the telephone hookup, there were some questions chosen from email, and then Obama relinquished the line and three rabbis in turn addressed different aspects of health care. What was said, at least for now, was “off the record,” with the Religious Action Center seeking to adhere to its former practice. But intense media interest in any presidential statements—plus the leaking of details here and there of some of the contents of the telephonic speech—may yet persuade
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the Religious Action Center or the White House to at least make President Obama’s portion of the call part of the public record.
To hear the President’s briefing, Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist rabbis picked up receivers or turned on their speaker phones all across the nation. Leaders of the three movements had coordinated notification to their members. Additionally, some individual Orthodox rabbis listened in, according to Mark Palavin, an attorney who serves as associate director of the Religious Action Center.
A sampling of the San Diego rabbinate indicated that Rabbi Michael Berk, senior rabbi of Congregation Beth Israel; Rabbi Martin S. Lawson, spiritual leader of Temple Emanu-El, and Rabbi Leonard Rosenthal, spiritual leader of Tifereth Israel Synagogue were among the participants. Some local rabbis had scheduling conflicts so were unable to participate, among them Rabbi David Castiglione of Temple Adat Shalom and Rabbi David Frank of Temple Solel.
It is up to the individual rabbis to decide whether they wish to address health care, at all, during their High Holy Day sermons, and, if so, what to say about it. One rabbi told me that everyone seems to agree on the need to insure that all Americans receive adequate health care—no matter what their financial circumstances—but the devil is in the details. The issue has become so partisan, according to the rabbi, that anyone addressing the issue from the pulpit risks dividing his or her congregation, rather than uniting it.
Even if the rabbis decide to take up the health care issue in their sermons, President Obama has no guarantee, beyond the generality that health is good, sickness is bad, that any of the rabbis will embrace the details of his plan. So the criticism already being ginned up that President Obama is improperly interfering with religion, or even that he is attempting to turn rabbis into his ideological soldiers, is at best hyperbole.
Be that as it may, the coordination among the leadership of the three movements to get so many rabbis onto the same conference call to listen to a briefing on an important ethical issue is another indication that Wise’s dream of a single American Judaism may be moving towards realization.
That Rabbi Satz wears a kippah is symbolic of the fact that much has changed in the American Reform movement since the days when its leaders proclaimed Judaism to be a religion and definitely not a nationality. The cataclysm of the Holocaust—with Nazis murdering anyone who had a Jewish grandparent, no matter what religion the grandchild professed—forced a Jewish nationality (some call it peoplehood) on people who thought they were free to self-identify. Secondly, the establishment of the State of Israel—and the emotions of pride that it evoked in Jews throughout the Diaspora—prompted many people to reexamine their relationship to the Jewish State’s religious underpinnings and to the whole notion of Jewish peoplehood.
Moreover, some members of the Reform movement came to believe that symbolism—Jewish symbolism—can help reinforce the ethical messages of Judaism. If we wear kippot, whether we are men or women, we can remind ourselves and those observing us about the Jewish concept of respect for God and God’s teachings.
This does not mean, however, that the branches of Judaism have come so close together that they are indistinguishable. When Reform Judaism decided a person was Jewish if either his mother or his father (under certain conditions) was Jewish, it created a rift with the Orthodox and Conservative branches of Judaism which believe only the mother can pass to her child her Jewish religion. And, if further proof is needed, the deli platters laid out for the Men’s Club meeting at which Rabbi Satz spoke contained non-kosher meats on one, and cheese on another. At a Conservative or Orthodox congregation, kosher meats or dairy would have been required, and the two could not have been mixed.
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