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To the Editor:

For a variety of reasons it has become fashionable in recent years to disparage classical Reform Judaism. I readily admit that I have contributed my own share in criticizing certain aspects of that 19th-century (and early 20th-century) phenomenon, although I do not believe that classical reform Judaism was quite so bad as it is now often made out to have been. But I regard it as a pity that Robert Alter, in his otherwise very perceptive article on the Torah commentary of Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut [“Reform Judaism and the Bible,” February], sees fit to make that Torah commentary a peg on which to hang his condemnation of the classical Reform position. What Mr. Alter is telling us is that classical Reform related to the Bible in such a way that “the formative past could be held at arm's length,” something which the Plaut commentary is said not to do.

Nothing that I am going to say is meant to be construed as a negative comment on the work which Rabbi Plaut has accomplished. In some areas of religious belief and practice, I probably see eye to eye with Rabbi Plaut, and I regard the commentary he has produced as a remarkable achievement. But how typical is Rabbi Plaut of today's Reform Judaism? And how much closer are the Reform Jewish readers of his commentary to the Bible than were the rabbis and congregants of the “classical” phase of Reform Judaism, who, according to Mr. Alter, were kept at arm's length from that document of Judaism's formative past?

If there is one assertion about which the Bible does not waver, it is that there is a God. I submit that, at the time of classical Reform Judaism, there were fewer Reform rabbis who espoused atheism, non-theistic humanism, and agnosticism than there are today. And I mean “fewer” in the sense of percentages, since, obviously, there were then considerably fewer Reform rabbis than there are today.

There is much to criticize in the educational efforts of the classical Reformers, particularly insofar as the transmission of knowledge about post-biblical Judaism is concerned. But I submit that the Bible itself occupied a more significant place in the Reform Jewish educational curriculum in the classical period than it does today. Whole books of the Bible were actually studied in Reform religious schools, albeit in English translation, and not little snippets of verses, culled from all over the place, to furnish illustrations for such Sunday School projects as “Judaism and Social Action,” “Sex in the Bible,” and “The Jewish Woman through the Ages,” as is the educational practice today. . . . As late as the 1950's, Reform rabbinical students were still required to take eight Bible courses at the Hebrew Union College, a requirement going back to the classical past. Today only three such courses are required.

Reform Jewish worship services today may have acquired a greater emotional “warmth” than they had in classical Reform Judaism, and I heartily welcome that. But neither the wearing of skullcaps nor the increased use of Hebrew as the language of prayer is particularly biblical.

And what is so “biblical” about the emphasis on Jewish peoplehood or even nationhood, which Mr. Alter so much admires? I submit that this emphasis owes more to European anti-Semitism (with Jews all too eager to make their detractors' concepts and vocabulary their own) than to a preoccupation with biblical realities. The classical Reformers never denied that, in biblical days, the Jews had been a people. (Obviously, 19th-century definitions of “nationhood” would be anachronistic when dealing with biblical Israel.) But the classical Reformers also insisted upon the fact of development, as do their successors today.

The fact that the Jews constituted a polity in the biblical period does not have to mean that they still constituted such a polity in the 19th or the 20th centuries—or, for that matter, even in the 12th or the 16th. That is why, in Mr. Alter's phrase, the classical Reformers were able, in fact were obliged, to hold the formative past at arm's length. Like it or not, 19th-century and 20th-century American Reform Jews are not a nation, but Americans of the Jewish faith. No amount of mouthing of Zionist slogans and accepting of Zionist platforms by today's Reform Jewish establishment can gloss over the fact that American Reform Jews are not exactly breaking down the doors at Israel aliyah offices in an attempt to partake of Jewish national existence.

It is, therefore, only the slogans which have changed, not the reality. But something else has changed, too. While, as Mr. Alter complains, the classical Reformers may have attempted to separate the wheat from the chaff, the wheat which they did retain was taken very seriously by them—more seriously, I submit, than the “unwinnowed” Bible is by their latter-day successors. Rabbi David Einhorn, for example, the classical Reformer in America par excellence, did not simply reject the sacrificial cult, which occupies such a prominent place in Torah legislation, as a primitive stage of worship, the way in which that cult is cavalierly dismissed by Reform Jews today. In his book, Das Prinzip des Mosaismus, published in 1854, he tried to determine what religious principles were implied by, and inherent in, the biblical sacrificial cult; and, not desiring the messianic restoration of that particular cult, he sought more acceptable ways in which those bibical principles could be expressed by Reform Jews. When, in 1857-58, he published his prayerbook, 'Olath Tamid (“The Regular Burnt Offering”), he unashamedly quoted Numbers 28:26 on the title page, in both Hebrew and German: “The regular burnt offering, instituted at Mount Sinai—an offering by fire of pleasing odor to the Lord.”

Rabbi Einhorn conducted worship services to serve the Lord, and to fulfill an obligation which was as incumbent upon Reform Jews as the burnt offerings were upon their biblical ancestors—a truly biblical motivation which can hardly be said to be much in evidence in today's Reform Jewish worship. What is more, the many new prayers which Rabbi Einhorn himself composed used biblical imagery and biblical cadences—quite unlike the marketplace English prose, uninspired and uninspiring, of the liturgical productions of latter-day Reform Judaism. I submit that, if Rabbi Einhorn can be described as keeping the people at arm's length from the formative biblical past, then what is going on in Reform temples today must be described as involving a distance of the length of several arms.

Rabbi Plaut is certainly not responsible for this state of affairs. On the contrary, his new Torah commentary might even be effective in restoring some religious commitment to the hearts and minds of today's Reform Jews. Mr. Alter should have left it at that. For that commentary, notwithstanding the fact of its publication by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, can in no way establish the fact that classical Reform Judaism kept the Bible at arm's length. Nor does it in any way prove that today's Reform Jews, apart from Rabbi Plaut himself and a few others, are at all closer than the classical Reformers were to the spirit, the message, and the commanding words of the Torah.

Jakob J. Petuchowski
Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion
Cincinnati, Ohio

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Robert Alter writes:

Jakob J. Petuchowski's quarrel is obviously with his contemporary Reform colleagues and not with me, and I assume there are forums where they might want to answer his charges. One may hope that the current situation is not quite so dismal as he claims, and that the Plaut commentary is not the isolated expression of an individual which it seems to him. At the very least, Mr. Petuchowski will surely agree with me that the publication of such a text under the aegis of Reform Judaism would have been inconceivable fifty or a hundred years ago.

With regard to the historcial issues he raises, I should like to make just one observation. The assertion that the biblical emphasis on peoplehood was read into Scripture because of 19th-century anti-Semitism is patently false. An absolutely central and explicit notion of people-hood pervades the Bible. Israel, in the words of Balaam's blessing, is “a people that dwells alone”—not a religious confession. The Israelite faith, to be sure, underwent radical changes after the Bible, but without ever compromising the fundamental assumption that Israel was a people attached to a land (even in exile) and united by law. It was only with classical Reform that this assumption was discarded, and whatever the religious sincerity of the Reformers, that rejection of peoplehood was an estrangement from the Bible as Jews had always understood it.

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