Reform Judaism, or Re-formed Jews?

The other day a friend and I were talking about our journeys from the liberal Jewish homes of our childhoods to Orthodoxy. My journey began when I was a child but took almost 30 years; my friend’s was faster.

One of the most important milestones in my journey occurred when I was a freshman in college. As I wrote some 20 years ago,[i] I read in a history of the Jewish Reform movement that one reason the movement eliminated the Jewish kosher laws was that since eating is social, the end of kosher meant friendships between Jews and Gentiles could develop, and anti-Semitism would end. Turning to the copyright page, I found that the book was published in 1928 in Berlin, Germany, just before Hitler came to power. Although I took more than ten more years to become Orthodox, I knew in that moment that Reform had nothing to say to me.

After that conversation with my friend, I remembered the first time I liked the idea of separate seating in synagogue—men and women separated by a mechitza (divider), whether that was a curtain, wall, or balcony. Many customs and laws that I’d been taught were bad, anachronistic holdovers from the primitive (traditional) form of Judaism had, I discovered, great purpose. I thought a post about some of those things would be interesting. I decided to begin by researching what Reform Judaism says today.

Well, what I found was an encyclopedia article, Reform Judaism in the United States, that both stunned me and explained a lot, although it derailed the concept I had for this post.

“Reform [movement] thinkers in Germany made the case for women’s equality in Judaism and the abolition of anachronistic laws and customs that stifled the public expression of women’s religiosity,” [ii] according to an article in the Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women.

The article mentioned Reform’s interest in abolishing “anachronistic laws and customs,” but little actually touched on traditional Judaism. However, it is an excellent example of how much of value is destroyed by changes imposed from outside a culture or institution by well-meaning but arrogant people who judge based on their own narrow experience what must be done to improve the lives of others.

Family Pews

The long section on “family pews” is a case in point. Seating the family together was a Reform innovation for Jewish worship, replacing separate male-only/female-only seating required by Jewish law. Separating men and women in the public sphere is certainly weird by today’s standard, when schools teach even small children that men can be women and women can be men. But there are many reasons completely separate from discrimination and suppression of women for separate seating. Let me explain using some examples from my life.

What changed my mind about separate seating was harassment. At the Conservative synagogue where I prayed was a man around my age, also single, who was interested in dating me. We were acquainted; I was not impressed, but he did not take “no” for an answer. Every Sabbath he sat next to me, squeezing close so that from leg to shoulder he was pressed against me. I tried to find seats between the end of the pew and another woman, but people—thinking, I suppose, that they were helping true love—slid over to make room for him. Even after I point-blank told him to leave me alone he continued. His annoying behavior, which made prayer impossible for me, only ended after I asked a couple of the other young men to tell him to find other places to sit. With separate seating, this cannot happen.

In “family pews,” families sit together. I know from years in Reform and Conservative synagogues that this togetherness continued into the social hour after the service. Usually family groups huddled according to the men’s friendships, with the men chatting about golf, football, or politics while the wives monitored the kids. Men and women without partners were usually ignored. They ended up hanging around the edges or simply not staying for the social hour. This created a two-tiered society: married/partnered, and not. This was unhealthy and in my experience led to singles avoiding synagogue services altogether.

With fewer and later marriages, smaller families, and more professional, high-power women today, the situation has probably changed. But at least one generation of people were made to feel unwelcome in the synagogue because of family pews. This certainly contributed to the rise of intermarriage: feeling unwelcome, singles left the synagogue, the prime place in the diaspora to meet other Jews. Instead, they met at health clubs and singles bars. Even Jewish Community Centers failed Jewish singles, since in order to be profitable most opened their doors to non-Jews.

Once I began attending Sabbath services with separate seating, I discovered benefits beyond protecting women from unwanted male attention. (For men, the benefit is less distraction by women.) While certainly synagogues differ, in many children are welcome, both in the men’s section and the women’s. Small children like to be where the action is, so in kid-friendly synagogues they tend to be with Dad for at least part of the service. Dads, in synagogues I’ve attended, have no trouble sending rambunctious children, some even barely beyond the toddler stage, back to their mothers who generally remove them if they continue to be noisy.

This frees each parent to pray undisturbed for part of the service. Second, it strengthens the father-child bond: the father has full responsibility for the child. Feminist literature claims was not the case in the past. However, nurtured as it was in the synagogue, this bond clearly was neither rare nor denigrated in traditional Jewish homes. Children who wanted to stay with Dad learned to sit quietly, a lesson in self-discipline that served them well in later life.

Separate seating permits men to go off to pray without their families. This removes pressure on mothers to get children dressed, fed and out the door on Shabbat morning. Many women with small children simply don’t go to synagogue. With family seating, the absence of mother and children can raise gossip or make the lone father feel uncomfortable. We will never know how many Reform men (by definition not raised to accept the traditional Jewish law that they pray daily, preferably communally) gave up synagogue attendance because they did not want to sit alone.

In addition to making the synagogue a friendly place for children, separate seating provides other benefits to children. Both men and women are acquainted with many kids, giving them opportunities to mentor the young, to truly rejoice in the milestones of other people’s children, and to provide guidance and support to children with only one parent. “Stranger danger” and child-child bullying is reduced when children who feel threatened have many safe people to run to. This is not to say all men in a synagogue are safe; my cousin’s early-teen daughter was approached inappropriately by a congregant, and a friend told me that her community housed and even gave synagogue honors to a registered sex offender. Things like this should never happen.

Meanwhile, behind the curtain, women also have many benefits. In the communal space known as the women’s section it is easier for women to see, and thus relate to, other women. This enhances friendships, which strengthens the community. It may also lead to more marriages since those singles looking for marriage who are acquainted with married people are more likely to be introduced to possible spouses than those who hang around only with other singles, who see them as competitors.

But the founders of the Reform movement either were unaware of these benefits or did not care. According to the encyclopedia article, “This move [to family pews] helped both American Jews and non-Jews understand the religious identity of Jewish women as more akin to that of their Christian neighbors—enabling them to be seen as the moral guardians and exemplars of their families, rather than as exotic Jewesses sequestered in separate galleries.” [iii]

Personally, I find this statement absurd. Considering that the German Empire (1817 to 1918) considered women’s role to be children, kitchen and church,[iv] and even late 20^th century feminists complained that Christians wanted to keep their wives “barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen,”[v] only a fool, or someone desperate for Christian approval, would write this. And which Jewish men considered Jewish women “exotic Jewesses?” Only those who had adopted Christian attitudes toward appearance.

Communal Responsibilities

In Europe, compulsory education was rare prior to the mid-1800s. For millenia, women educated girls at home in all the things they needed to know to care for families. This has been denigrated by feminists, but before the Industrial Revolution, which began only 200 years ago—recently in the long march of Jewish history—women’s skills are what clothed, cleaned, fed and healed. Jewish girls were taught by their mothers all these skills. Additionally, mothers taught all the details of Jewish law necessary for keeping a kosher home, the cleanliness aspects of which may have impacted Jewish survival rates during unsanitary times. But now, these skills were considered archaic. Moving women out of the home into public life became a core value of Reform Judaism.

According to the article, encouraging women, beginning in childhood, to participate in their synagogues was another “improvement” introduced by the Reform movement. Bat mitzvahs that were just like traditional bar mitzvahs became important for their ceremonial function. No mention is made of any spiritual significance, either for boys or girls.

Synagogue women “were often steered to arenas such as religious education and synagogue décor.”  Décor was certainly significant since, as the article already made clear, impressing the Christian neighbors was a key value. The article does not explain when or how the women who provided Jewish education were supposed to learn enough about Judaism to teach, but it does explain why, 65 years ago, I found my Sunday School teachers unable to answer even my simple questions.

At the same time that Reform Judaism encouraged women to take leadership roles outside of the home, the larger world was sending women into the workforce. First this happened because of a labor shortage at home due to World War II, but women unhappy at giving up their freedom and paychecks when the soldiers came home became the foundation for the wave of feminism that began in the 1960s. Raising children, which was the central function of Jewish life for 3000-plus years, became secondary in the USA, and secondary within Reform Judaism. Synagogue leadership, political activism, and career became the touchstones.

The path to ordination of women rates a lengthy discussion, which includes the typical complaints of feminists: salary issues, sexual orientation, responsibilities for children, sexual harassment, and so forth.

Gender Equity became important more than 30 years ago. A “gender-sensitive” prayerbook was issued in 1993 which tinkered with traditional imagery and language of previous prayer books, including making language gender-neutral. This included removing all male pronouns for God. Sarah, Rivka, Leah and Rachel, the Matriarchs, were also given a prominent place in the prayerbook. However, the article is quick to point out, “otherwise, few changes appeared in the Hebrew text or translations of the refurbished Gates of Prayer.”[vi] (To me, this is like saying, “Yesterday a tornado demolished the White House. But don’t worry, the fence and lawn at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue had only minor damage.”)

The effort to bring gender equity to Reform Judaism is very personal to me. In the mid-1990s I was a professional Jewish storyteller living in Massachusetts. I had a signed contract to perform at a Reform temple and called the day before to be sure everything was in order. At that time I was told that I was required to remove all references to God as “he” from my performance. Had this requirement been mentioned previously I would have refused the job; the pay was not commensurate with the effort involved in relearning an hour’s worth of stories to accommodate them. When I explained this, they told me they were cancelling the performance. I reminded them that according to the contract, this was not a valid excuse to cancel, so they owed my fee. They refused. For all their concern with gender equity, my threat to sue was not adequate. My husband had to speak with the temple treasurer and threaten in order for me to be paid.

The emphasis on public roles, at least as detailed in the subject article, appears to have been managed by the denigration of women’s traditional—familial—role. This included raising Jewish children who were competent and knowledgeable about those roles. Like most people who are confident in their roles, enough children grew to be proud of themselves as Jews that Judaism survived 2000 difficult diaspora years.

Disappointment

The article title, “Reform Judaism in the United States,” led me to expect an article about how the Reform movement reformed Jewish practice to make it more modern, and welcoming to women who wanted public involvement in the spiritual aspects of the religion. However, the article contained nothing about Judaism as a way of expressing spirituality, or as a faith. Rather, it is a paeon to the liberation of women and their public roles within Judaism and the larger world. It is, indeed, an explanation of Reform Judaism as a political movement, not a religious one. How successful has this been?

According to the Pew Research Center,[vii] while 44% of American Jews age 65 and older identify as Reform, only 29% of those ages 18-29 do. At the same time, while only 3% of American Jews 65 and older identify as Orthodox, 17% of those in the 18-29 group do. It looks to me as though the choice to focus on the feminist agenda and the push to put women in the public sphere has not been as Jewishly meaningful to younger people as one would hope the founders of the movement intended.

But then again, it is possible that their actual goal was to prove to their Christian neighbors that they were more modern, more forward-looking, and thus more deserving of respect than what was accorded to traditional Jews. Judging from the lower percentage of young people identifying as Reform, and the dramatic rise in anti-Semitism demonstrated by the riots and hostile demonstrations since the beginning of the Hamas War on October 7, 2023, their effort has failed.

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[i] See Geshelin, H.B. What Jews Do,  https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/132774/jewish/What-Jews-Do.htm, accessed December 18, 2023.

[ii] Goldman, K., Reform Judaism in the United States, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/reform-judaism-in-united-states, last updated June 23, 2021, accessed Dec. 17, 2023.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Barefoot and Pregnant, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barefoot_and_pregnant, last update Oct. 5, 2023, accessed Dec. 12, 2023.

[v] Op. cit.

[vi] Op. cit.

[vii] Pew Research Center, Jewish Americans in 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-americans-in-2020/ , May 11, 2021, accessed December 18, 2023.