Thread by @JustSayXtian

Another really good thread by @Mandalorthodox following on the one I QTed yesterday. I agree with everything he's putting forth in here, AND I also have a bunch of thoughts sparked by it regarding the position of Reform and other liberal movements in Jewish continuity.

https://twitter.com/Mandalorthodox/status/1430701303529971714

The issue I take with Orthodox Jews (not @Mandalorthodox ) positioning Orthodoxy as the ONLY legitimate continuation of traditional Judaism is not the assertion that seeking truth is important, it's that the other streams don't also make that assertion.

https://twitter.com/Mandalorthodox/status/1430715579749605376?s=20

The positioning I keep seeing (and will probably see in the replies to this thread) is that the Reform movement was a *rejection* of the notion that there is a meaningful, truth-centered Judaism in continuity with Jewish tradition full stop. That's not at all what it was.

It's true that the Reform movement was pushing a LOT of change, all at once, and it was a scary and existentially challenging thing for a lot of Jews. But those changes weren't ungrounded, and they weren't happening in a vacuum.

This was all happening in the context of Jewish emancipation in Europe. For a long time, Jewish life had been ghettoized and isolated. There were social and legal barriers to Jewish participation in larger society. And then all of a sudden those barriers disappeared.

Once those barriers were gone, a LOT of Jews found that they wanted to participate in gentile society. Observance got lax. Younger Jews, especially, made it clear that if they had to choose between secular and Jewish life, they chose secular.

The Reform movement was founded, not proactively as a way to create a Jewish life that encouraged Jews to assimilate, but reactively as a way to create a Judaism that could accommodate Jews who were already assimilating or assimilated.

And it wasn't founded by uneducated, ungrounded radicals. It was founded by Rabbis. Highly educated, highly respected Rabbis. Abraham Geiger, generally considered the founder of the Reform movement, was the Chief Rabbi of Breslau.

Those Rabbis were doing what Rabbis do. They were interrogating and processing Jewish text and tradition in order to present to their community a modality of Judaism that would be not just tolerated, but embraced.

The point was not to unmake tradition, or to abandon Jewish observance. It was to modulate tradition and observance in such a way as to not lose a whole generation of Jews who were *already* leaving.

And the Rabbis who were doing that were not just throwing things out and making things up willy-nilly. They were pursuing an interrogation of Jewish law and tradition with intellectual rigor, grounded in text. They were looking for the right answer.

https://twitter.com/Mandalorthodox/status/1430703683755515907?s=20

In Shabbat 148b there's a story where Rava bar Rav Hanan asks Abaye, why do we not stop women who sit by posts next to alleyways, which Rava forbids? Abaye says "In these matters we rely on a different principle: Leave Jewish people alone"

He goes on to explain that, since they know people will ignore them and sit there anyway, it's better not to inform them so that they'll be violating the prohibition out of ignorance instead of intentionally, which carries a higher liability.

What the founders of the Reform movement were doing was of a similar nature - they were reacting to Jews who had made clear that they *would not* be bound by certain aspects of traditional halakha, and establishing a way of Jewish life that those Jews would accept.

The Orthodox movement, and later the Conservative movement, thought it was taking things too far. That principle is traditionally limited to correcting ignorance, not changing the approach to halakha full bore. And that's okay. That's a legitimate belief to hold.

But it can't be argued that the Rabbis who did *not* think that it was going to far were adopting that belief in bad faith, or with disregard for tradition and Jewish particularism *at all*. Geiger was *very* concerned with rooting his Judaism in text and history.

The principles of Reform Judaism were especially rooted in the Prophets - the term "prophetic Judaism" was sometimes used to describe the movement, which emphasized the message consistently presented in Nevi'im of prioritizing ethics and justice over ritual observance.

Geiger applied a historical-critical analysis to Jewish text and concluded, not that the Torah wasn't divine revelation, but that revelation is continuous, in every generation, and must be continuously received and interpreted.

And even that is supportable from our own sources and traditions. In this week's parsha, in fact, Rashi comments on Dev. 26:16 that "each day [God's commandments] should be to you as something new, as though you had received the commands that very day for the first time"

My point here is not that anyone has to *agree* with this approach to Jewish continuity. It's just that it is a valid and supportable approach to Jewish continuity. Maybe it's not for you. That's okay, that's why we have different movements within Judaism.

It's just important to note that liberal Judaism, even radical Judaism, was never approached as a *break* with traditional Judaism, but a furthering step in traditional Judaism.

Just like the Tana'im, the founders of Reform did not describe themselves as innovators, but as reclaimers of tradition. Geiger said:
"Reform Judaism was not a rejection of earlier Judaism, but a recovery of the Pharisaic halakhic tradition, which is nothing other than the (1/2)

principle of continual further development in accord with the times, the principle of not being slaves to the letter of the Bible, but rather to witness over and over its spirit and its authentic faith-consciousness. (2/2)"

Not so different from other points in Jewish history.

https://twitter.com/Mandalorthodox/status/1430701709882544129?s=20