CCAR Journal, Leon Morris, Spring 2020
One of the most oversimplified and often repeated formulations of Reform Judaism is that “we are not a halachic movement.” What do we mean by describing ourselves in this way? One possibility of being “non-halachic” is this: We are not bound by the Shul chan Aruch, Joseph Karo’s sixteenth-century code of Jewish law, nor any other specific code.
As Jewish law evolved, and particular precedents were established, there was a narrowing of the range of opinions and legal possibilities, and the shift from “halachah”—a rich, multivocal discourse with majority and minority positions— to “The Halachah”—a defined set of legal rules and standards as codified by the most widely accepted religious authorities—now feels too rigid, too inflexible for the times in which we live.
Another, more likely understanding of our being “non-halachic” is this: We acknowledge that the classic halachic texts no longer carry the kind of inherent authority for us that they did for previous generations of Jews. Our contemporary reality as (post-)moderns, and as liberal Jews, is so different from the reality in which those texts emerged. These differences are enormous and far reaching, beginning with all that was gained from the Enlightenment and from Emancipation. The genie of modernity has opened us up to ever-expanding fields of thought that change the way we think about religious life: history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, source criticism, gender studies, and much more. In equal measure, our integration with the larger world, and our deep relationships with and affection for non-Jews is unprecedented in Jewish history.
Yet another meaning of Reform as “not halachic” is that we live in a time when individual autonomy is a given. We understand that Jewish texts read through contemporary eyes are inescapably mediated by the needs and perspectives of real communities. Within those communities, each person determines their own behavior and shapes their own life, religious and otherwise. Any thing that reigns in that autonomy is to be rejected.
Any or all of these definitions of “non-halachic” give expression to the significant changes in the way we understand and relate to halachah. Inevitably we end up saying or suggesting far too often that halachah is irrelevant to our Jewish lives. Yet, the very notion of a Judaism without a relationship to halachah is both absurd and detrimental. As Mark Washofsky writes in his introduction to Teshuvot for the Nineties:
It will not do to argue that we can link ourselves to Jewish religious tradition without the halakhah, that we can substitute other “friendlier” texts in place of the legal literature . . . [Judaism’s] dominant expression is not the search for correct belief but rather a standard of practice that sanctifies us to God’s service. And that branch of traditional Jewish literature which most directly concerns practice is the halakhah . . . There is, in other words, no “tradition” of Jewish practice without halakhah.1
Virtually everything we consider familiar and normative about Jewish life is because of halachah: the structure of our prayer services and siddur; how we sound the shofar on Rosh HaShanah; that our Torah scrolls are written on parchment in a particular script; that we have a seder on the first night at Passover; that the four species we bless on Sukkot are a citron (etrog), palm branch (lulav), myrtle (hadas), and willow (aravah); and so on. The list is endless. To claim that we are “not halachic” suggests a groundless, ahistorical Jewish life that does not accurately describe any contemporary Jewish community.
In a very different cultural context from our own, Hayim Nach man Bialik’s 1916 essay (published one year later), “Halakhah and Aggadah” offered to the secular intelligentsia who were creating a new Hebrew culture in the Land of Israel a plea for the need to be grounded in notions of duty, of a shared set of actions, and of the indispensability of obligation. His words resonate with meaning for contemporary liberal Jews.
A generation is growing up in an atmosphere of mere phrases and catchwords, and a kind of go-as-you-please Judaism is being created out of the breath of empty words . . . But what is this love-in-the-air worth? Love? But where is duty? Whence can it come? On what is it to live? On Aggadah? But Aggadah is by its very nature the embodiment of volition; it admits something between yea and nea. A Judaism all Aggadah is like iron that has been heated but not cooled. Aspiration, good will, spiritual up
lift, heartfelt love—all these are excellent and valuable when they lead to action, to action which is hard as iron and obeys the stern behests of duty . . . Let there be given to us moulds in which we can mint our fluid and unformed will into solid coin that will endure. We love for something concrete. Let us learn to demand more action than speech in the business of life, more Halakhah than Aggadah in the field of literature.”2
Have we 21st century Reform Jews created a Jewish life that is all aggadah? Indeed, we are well-versed in the phrases and catch words that define our religious lives. But, echoing Bialik, where is duty? Halachah is, of course, much more than ritual. Perhaps our commitment to social justice provides one context in which we clearly articulate specific duties and obligations. Are we able to extend the realm of liberal Jewish action more broadly to encompass all aspects of life that enable individuals to embody holiness in a con crete way and build communities that share those practices?
What Is Halachah, Then?
When Abraham Joshua Heschel addressed the CCAR convention in 1953, he presented a broad conceptualization of halachah that might find a place in Reform Judaism:
A Jew is asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of thought: to surpass his needs, to do more than he understands in order to understand more than he does. In carrying out the word of the Torah he is ushered into the presence of spiritual meaning. Through the ecstasy of deeds he learns to be certain of the presence of God. Jewish Law is a sacred prosody. The divine sings in our deeds, the divine is disclosed in our deeds. Our effort is but a counterpoint in the music of His will. In exposing our lives to God, we discover the divine within ourselves and its accord with the divine beyond ourselves.3
A “discovery of the divine” that is expressed through “the ecstasy of deeds” encompasses a whole array of human action. Halachah, after all, is derived from the verb lalechet (to go or to walk). Halachah is the path, or the “way,” in which Judaism is lived out in the world. Ethics and ritual, personal practice and communal ob ligation are all encompassed by halachah. Perhaps the most fitting contemporary translation of halachah should be “spiritual practice.” Spiritual practice comprises actions we perform to orient us toward holiness, to gain a heightened awareness of the world around us, to experience a sense of profound connection—with ourselves, with those who lived before us, with those who will come after us, with our people, and with God.
Halachah, of course, is not only personal spiritual practice. It is the way in which the community gives expression to its deepest values. As Leon Wiener Dow writes so beautifully in his award winning meditation on halachah:
The Divine voice that bursts forth into the wide open from the written verses of Torah demands actualization, and the halakha is its fulfillment. The unremitting insistence of the halakha is that the encounter with the Divine must, for the sake of its veracity, find expression in the world . . . Holiness must manifest itself in all aspects of life, private and public. The “language” of doing thus becomes constitutive of community: the halakha, in this respect, is none other than the shared doing of the Jewish community.4
Liberal Judaism and Halachah
Barbara, a friend of mine in her eighties, once shared a story with me. Fifty years ago, as a young woman in her thirties, she tragi cally lost her husband and was left to care alone for three small children in the suburbs. Immediately after the funeral, she turned to her Reform rabbi for guidance about how she should be mark ing this period of loss and mourning. She was eager to receive from him some set of Jewish guidelines that would be a comfort for her in her loss. Her rabbi told her that she “could do anything she wanted.” After all, he reminded her, “That’s the beauty of being Reform.”
To be sure, her well-meaning rabbi wanted her to feel free to mourn her husband in her own way, without feeling bound by traditional religious law or custom that could have been alien to her. Perhaps he assumed that most of the traditional mourning practices would be artificial and completely irrelevant to a modern twentieth-century family living in the suburbs.
He could have said instead: “Judaism provides a treasury of spiritual practices that can be a source of comfort and support in times like this. They include things such sitting shivah, refraining from social obligations through sh’loshim, and reciting the Kaddish. I can help you navigate your own way through these traditions, but all of them have enormous potential for strength and healing.”
Reform must no longer be afraid of the word “halachah,” nor place itself outside of this rich language of discourse about duty and about the details of living Jewishly. Beyond the specific duties and obligations that emerge within our religious lives, halachah is also a language of discourse, a methodology that demonstrates creativity, interpretation, and ex pansiveness. Of course, as liberals, our attitude toward halachah is shaped by the acknowledgment of its historical development. But just as the Torah’s profundity and contemporary meaning is not eliminated when one acknowledges human authorship and redaction of its words and the historical context in which it emerged, halachah is not rendered irrelevant by placing it in its historical context. To the contrary, for a movement that celebrates human in genuity and adaptability to new social circumstances, the halachic literature provides us with models for the application of Jewish ideas and values to real life.
Reform Judaism has tended to argue against “The Halachah” as if it were a monolithic system synonymous with the most rigid expressions of ultra-Orthodoxy. Because Reform rejects the traditional role of women in Judaism, for example, or because mamzerut represents an unethical category, we Reform Jews often assume that to attach ourselves to the halachah would result in either an oppressive religious determinism or reflect a deep inconsistency in our liberal religious lives.
While halachah may not operate with the same sort of authority it once had, it still has some authority. As Mark Washofsky has written, halachah’s real authority for twenty-first-century Jews lies in its ability to be persuasive.5
We are grateful to live without religious coercion. None of us is prepared to fully abandon our own autonomy even if we could. Yet, in deciding how to act in the world in ways that reflect a sense of goodness and holiness, we need help. We cannot do that entirely on our own. As Robert Cover wrote, “There is a difference—intelligible to most pre-adolescents—between the directions ‘Do what you want’ and ‘Do what you think is right or just.’”6 A Reform approach to halachah should seamlessly weave together a careful reading of those classic texts that have always been central to Jewish life—Mishnah, Talmud, commentaries, and responsa literature—with research drawing from fields as diverse as history and science and informed by all of the many contemporary disciplines that inform our lives. A dialogue with our classic texts will certainly elicit critique, and at times may even be alienating as we “mind the gap” between their perspectives and our own. Yet, there is much within our halachic literature that can be retrieved “as a discourse with a serious claim on contemporary Jews,” in the words of Martin Jaffe.7
Of course, the texts are reflective of the particular times and places in which they were written. There is a significant challenge in applying ancient texts to contemporary situations. Still, the past is not irrelevant. The ways previous generations have dealt with issues and challenges help us to understand what this moment still shares in common with the past, and to fully appreciate exactly how it differs. The exposure to halachic opinions helps us to take note of eternal values, modes of thought and deliberation, and categories of concern still deserving of our attention.
This sort of Reform approach to halachah is reflected in the prodigious work of the Responsa Committee of the CCAR. Moshe Zemer, of blessed memory, and Walter Jacob, have provided us with the seminal principles and criteria for Reform philosophy of halachah.8 Mark Washofsky and the Freehof Institute of Progressive Halakhah have advanced these ideas and fostered serious study to aid scholars in this work. Now we must ask how this work might provide the basis for an expanded engagement with halachah within the institutions of our Movement and within our synagogues. The possibilities are endless, but might include Shabbat guidelines for our camps and conventions that would be considered by our congregations if they so choose. This work might lead us to stress the primacy of the Jewish calendar in Reform Jewish life, reclaiming the Festivals and their observance. An expanded engagement with halachah might also enrich our op portunities for Jewish learning and help us to embrace the mitzvah of talmud Torah more fully.
Such an expansion of our engagement with halachah in Reform Judaism would reorient our liberal religious lives. If halachah were seen as an indispensable component of liberal Jewish life, Jewish identification would shift from feeling to action, from ideas to concrete ways in which those ideas would be expressed through deed. An engagement with halachah would promulgate the notion that practice is primary and would thereby encourage all Jews to do more—more social activism, more work on improving their character, more ritual practice, and more acts of kindness.
A deeper engagement with halachah would also broaden our realm of Jewish study. Halachah is the “room” of Jewish life and learning where the most interesting conversations are happening. A rapprochement with halachah would help us to acquire a language that would anchor our own creativity in frames of reference and categories that add depth and connect our contemporary questions and issues to the Jewish past.
A renewed engagement with halachah would also remind us that we are not (or do not want to be) isolated individuals. We live with others in community. We seek to build Jewish communities with some measure of shared behavioral patterns through which our commitments are lived out and best expressed. Halachah is a way, as Wiener-Dow explains, for “human beings to meet in time.” “What does it mean for human beings to meet in time? Ultimately, it implies that individuals relinquish a part of their autonomy in order to share their doing with others in time.”9
A rapprochement with halachah would remind us that while ideas and values are central to Jewish life, a religious civilization invested in transmission of those ideas and values must find concrete expressions in daily life.
Notes
1. W. Gunther Plaut and Mark Washofsky, Teshuvot for the Nineties: Reform Judaism’s Answers to Today’s Dilemmas (New York: CCAR, 1997).
2. Haim Nahman Bialik, Revealment and Concealment: Five Essays (Je rusalem: Ibis Edition, 2000), 86–87.
3. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997).
4. Leon Wiener-Dow, The Going: A Meditation on Jewish Law (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), 100.
5. Mark Washofsky writes, “Our teshuvot are advisory opinions; they are intended to serve as arguments in favor of a particular approach to a particular issues of observance. Their ‘authority,’ whatever we mean by that word, lies in their ability to persuade.” Washofsky, Teshuvot for the Nineties, xxvii–xxviii.
6. Robert Cover, “Books Considered,” New Republic, January 14, 1978, p. 27.
7. Martin S. Jaffee, “Halakhah as Primordial Tradition,” in Interpret ing Judaism in a Postmodern Age, ed. Steven Kepnes (New York: New York University, 1996), 88.
8. See Walter Jacob and Moshe Zemer, Progressive Halakhah: Essence and Application (Tel Aviv and Pittsburgh: Rodef Shalom Press, 1991).
9. Wiener-Dow, The Going, 51.
16 CCAR Journal: The Reform Jewish Quarterly