Reform Judaism Re-Appraises Its Way of Life: How Restore the Spirit of the Law, Without Its Letter?
What was remarkable about the recent sixty-fifth annual convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (Reform) was the unmistakable manifestation throughout of the close tie between Reform and traditional Judaism—a much closer tie, indeed, than the critics of Reform, friendly or hostile, care to see or admit. Reform’s six hundred rabbis did not start with astonishment when one of the younger professors at Hebrew Union College proclaimed from the platform: “There is no Judaism without Halachah”—that is, without traditional Jewish Law. Nor did it seem incongruous to them that the Conference should seize on the seven hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the death of Maimonides virtually to appropriate him for Reform—and not as the rationalizing philosopher of The Guide for the Perplexed, but as the great codifier, in the Mishneh Torah, of Talmudic law. And there was something of the loveliness of traditional Judaism—not as theology or ritual but as a style and way of life—in the
