The Movement for Reform Judaism

Rabbi Dr Tony Bayfield

This presentation was given at the Reform Movement's Leadership Day, 6th March 2007  

FIVE TAKES ON WHAT IS NEEDED TODAY

The keynote at our Leadership Day always presents me with a challenge.  On the one hand, it’s my annual opportunity to try to say something worthwhile to a group of people I respect and with whom a very great deal of responsibility rests.  That’s an exciting prospect.  On the other hand, I also recognise that this should be for you rather than for me, what is of most use to you may not be what I most want to say – and that I have a tendency to talk for longer than people want to listen.(1)

So I consulted five people on what they thought I should speak about today.  One said: You need to talk about boundaries.  What are the limits to the individual Jewish journeys; what about the needs of the community?  A second person said: What we need is to be clear about the principles of Reform Judaism.  We can then use them as a health check to see how we’re doing.  A third voice urged me to keep talking about the 2020 Vision.  Just because you know what it means, doesn’t mean that everybody else is on board.  One person said: Let’s not go back over old ground.  We need to see how we’re doing against the Twelve Projects which are the keys to implementing the 2020 Vision.  A fifth voice added: All of that’s fine but the key is delivery.  I don’t think he was referring to my lecturing style.

Whilst I thought that it was important that you knew what I’ve just said, being perverse I’m actually going to begin somewhere else.

THE FIRST REFORM PRAYER BOOK (1840)

The first Reform prayer book to be published in Britain was “Forms of Prayer, used in the West London Synagogue of British Jews, with an English translation edited by D W Marks”.  The book is dated 5601, which is 1840-1841.

The introduction is an eye-opener.  It says ‘that the great glory of Judaism is the holy scriptures.  They have been and are of great benefit to the world and are for us both “a balm for present evils” and assurance of a Jewish future.  Our liturgy’, writes Marks, ‘is primarily biblical’ and he then calls on relatively early German Jewish ‘scientific’ scholarship – Wissenschaft des Jüdentums – and the work of Leopold Zunz(2) to demonstrate that there are different layers to the liturgy and that it’s therefore dynamic and evolving.  ‘But’, he says, ‘it doesn’t hold people any more(3); that’s the problem we need to address; and the solution is that the service has to be more intelligible and morally elevating’.  A quirk as far as intelligibility is concerned is that all Aramaic – for instance the Aramaic of Kaddish – is ditched in favour of Hebrew.  More generally, anything not conducive to devotion is red-pencilled.  The odd passage which is “the offspring of feelings produced by oppression” is omitted.   Above all ‘we have shortened the service by cutting out repetitions because people cannot cope with the present length’.

What’s remarkable about the essay is that you could not have a clearer statement of British Reform Judaism at its inception 167 years ago.  The emphasis is on scripture rather than rabbinic literature; on intelligibility and moral uplift; and on religion rather than people hood.  It isn’t profoundly ideological.  It’s more concerned about style.  So it’s not surprising that the 1st Edition of Forms of Prayer isn’t very different from the standard Sephardi and Ashkenazi prayer books of mid 19th century Britain.  Note, above all, the high degree of consonance behind Marks’ essay, the liturgy itself and early British Reform Judaism.