The world is broken. And getting worse. So why I am still optimistic?               Just a few decades ago, the Iron Curtain fell, a grand coalition for freedom blanketed Europe, even Putin was an American ally, and I wondered then why other people were so pessimistic.              The optimistic/pessimistic divide seems to be baked into our brains, some of us leaning positive, others negative. Given both sides’ ability to argue their positions, it is hard to e ..read more

[What follows are two different versions of the script’s conclusion, one that was used and one that was not. Looming over the decision was the question of how we should acknowledge the sins of our URJ past, the instances of sexual misconduct portrayed in the Debevoise-Plimpton Report of 2022, but also the parallel reports undertaken by HUC and the CCAR. Knowing that public apologies had been made by all these institutions, and that Rabbi Rick Jacobs was planning on apologizing once again as part of the 150th-anniversary weekend, but prior to the Saturday night performance, I did not write yet ..read more

[This is the fifth and final act of the script celebrating 150 years of Reform Judaism in America. Some people have properly pointed out that Reform synagogues began much earlier, all the way back to Charleston’s Reformed Society of Israelites, which undertook liturgical reform in 1824. More precisely, then, this script celebrates Reform Judaism from the time of its birth as an official movement, in 1873. From 1824 to 1873, Reform congregations multiplied, as more and more congregations undertook various reforms, some of them more radical than others, some of them more akin to what we now ..read more

[Prior Letters (55-58) provide the Introduction to the script and its first three Acts, each of them a significant contribution to North American Judaism: 1. A Union of Congregations, a Community of Communities; 2. The Insistence on Principle and Purpose; 3. Focus on both our North American Diaspora and Israel – seeing Jewish Peoplehood as having two centers, an Ellipse, not a Circle. We now come to the fourth such contribution: Meaningful Worship. As in the other acts, I am combining the script that we used for the final production with earlier drafts that contained additional material w ..read more

[Act 3, our Reform response to Israel, differs from the others. Rather than a tale of proud Reform accomplishment from the beginning, it details the overall ambivalence of early Reform Judaism to the very idea of a Jewish State. At the same time, it tells the tale of eventually adopting the Zionist cause – with a passion. In my introduction to Act 2, I highlighted the need for a master metaphor for each section, and I struggled for some time before arriving at this one. After an initial meditation that explores history as a river of events into which we are dropped, the script moves on to the ..read more

[My last Open Letter provided Act 1: “A Union, “A Community of Communities,” the recognition that “Communities need other communities; that Reform is a movement – many congregations impacting the world together.” This, the second act, turns to that impacting of the world, namely, “Principle and Purpose,” Reform Judaism’s insistence that “Judaism is no tribal faith. It exists to pursue the great and noble causes that make us fully human.” Here too, the original script was considerably shortened, because of time constraints, so in what follows I have added back in some of the parts that wer ..read more

[Preamble: As I said in my last letter – the Introduction — the script continues by laying out five lasting contributions of Reform Judaism’s 150 years. I called them “Chapters,” but a better word would be “Acts” since the script, after all, is just that, a “script” for a ritualized performance that included music, staging, visuals, and so on. What follows, then, is the first Reform contribution, Act 1, “A Union, a Community of Communities.”  Each act ended with a ritual action. Seated on the stage, alongside the two main narrators were a set of people whom we thought of as our modern ver ..read more

Open Letter to My Students 55: Reform Judaism in North America — The 150th-Anniversary Script (“Introduction”) [Preamble: I promised I would post the script, bit by bit because of its length. What follows is the Introduction, but a longer version than what people experienced at the actual performance, because time constraints necessitated much of this being cut. For better and for worse, here is the original, modified slightly to provide continuity with the final version. The script alone cannot provide anything like the impact of the performed version, which included music, variable lighting ..read more

Because he knew he was thinking, Descartes proved his own existence. I, by contrast, know I exist, and want to make sure I think. More precisely, given the kind of person I am, I think in a certain sort of way about certain sorts of things — a truism, nowadays, in this Age of Anxious Identity. Tell me who you are and I will know something of what and how you think.  I like, therefore, to engage synagogue leaders in questions of who they are (and how, therefore, they think). Because I do most of my presenting in Reform congregations, I take special interest in their members’ Reform identit ..read more

A massive challenge facing Jews today is the story we decide to tell about anti-Semitism. We did not choose this issue; it chose us, with the hate march in Charlottesville (2017); and outright shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue (2018) and elsewhere. These, and similar incidents, however, emanated from the radical right, so we knew what to make of them: traditional anti-Semites of the Nazi variety, a lunatic fringe of sorts egged on by Trumpist rhetoric, we said. But now our attackers come from the left, and that is what is new for most of us. Exactly how pervasive this left-wing sentiment ..read more