Union For Reform Judaism: Serving Reform Congregations in North America

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Erev Rosh Hashanah 5764
Friday, September 26, 2003

At the upcoming biennial conference in Minneapolis this November, it is expected that the name of our movement will be changed from the Union of American Hebrew Congregations to the Union for Reform Judaism. In some ways, this is a very superficial issue. The change is being made for the sake of clarity and brand recognition. The name Union of American Hebrew Congregations, often called U-ac, or UAHC, is not widely recognized. I know. I've had the experience of telling people that I am off to a meeting of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations - and been greeted by polite stares of incomprehension.

How did we get such a strange name anyway? And what does this name change tell us about Jewish identity in America today?

The UAHC was formed in 1873 under the leadership of Rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise. He envisioned one national organization for all of American Jewry. The term Union reflected post civil war usage. In 1873 the word Hebrew was the preferred polite way of speaking about those of the Mosaic persuasion, the word Jew being a racial slur, not unlike the 'n' word in the 1950's. (Interestingly United States Army and Marine dog tags use H for Hebrew and not J for Jew to identify Jewish soldiers even today). Finally, the UAHC was an organization of lay people and not just of rabbis, and so the word ''congregations".

Attempts were made to change this unwieldy name beginning with the UAHC Biennial in 1946 but it has been one misadventure after another. The first attempt resembled our current governor's race: everyone and their brother had an idea for the new name. In the end, though the final tally was in favor of a change, the choice of a new name was postponed.

In the 1950's the name change was associated with other changes the Reform movement was going through: the introduction of more Hebrew, the yarmulke, tallit and Bar Mitzvah, and was fought by some of the historic classical Reform congregations.

In 1973 the handling of the issue at the Biennial was bungled. The youth group representatives got their signals crossed and unrolled the banners with the new name before the delegates had voted on the proposal. Delegates felt like they were just a rubber stamp and didn't vote for the name change.

The last attempt, at the Biennial of 1995, failed unexpectedly after a delegate from the floor pointed out that the acronym of the proposed new name, Union of Reform Jewish Congregations, spelled U R J C. That was almost as problematic as the name temporarily chosen for the national Jewish educator's organization, now JESNA formerly the Jewish Educational Society of the United States, J.E.S.U.S.

The new proposed name, Union for Reform Judaism, has been checked out from every angle and enjoys widespread support. The word union was preserved to convey the idea that in our movement authority moves from the bottom up, unlike the Catholic Church, for example, or even Protestant denominations, where bishops or ad judicatories exercise authority over congregations. Reform Judaism is who we are, and the name with which others identify us. A byline, serving congregations in North America, lets people know we are talking about the United States and Canada.

The switch from the word Hebrew to the word Jew is at one level just a concession to common usage, but it also represents something more.

Hebrew was the name used by Jews struggling for acceptance. In the 19th century, immigrant Jews in America and Jews coming out of the ghettoes in Europe, could not take it for granted that they would be accepted as Americans, Germans, or Frenchmen. Jews were viewed as foreigners, even when they had lived in the community for centuries. Their Jewishness was something that others felt needed to be overcome in order for them to be deemed worthy of citizenship. This was a time when Jews sought to stress what they shared in common with all people, when Jews were encouraged to be "a Jew in their home, but a man on the street." Those who have friends who are immigrants today, or whose parents or grandparents were first generation Americans, may be able to understand more fully the longing to fit in. It was hard to find one's place when America was just beginning to think of itself as a melting pot (this was way before the salad bowl image we use today), and European countries were very homogenous in ethnicity and religion. Being a Jew was a disability not an identity. It wasn't something you would flout, or even speak about publicly.

Today we are in a very different situation. In recent decades, in fact for much of most of our lifetimes, we have been uninhibitedly Jewish. Some combination of Israel's victory in 1967, and the Black is Beautiful movement in the United States, made us feel empowered about putting our Jewish identity forward. We wear Jewish stars and mezuzot as jewelry, put Hanukiyot up in public places and insist in a variety of ways, that our Jewish identity be recognized. While Jews of the 19th century would have been delighted to be viewed as Caucasians, I know many Jews who look for an "other" spot on the demographic section of various surveys, wanting to express their special identity. To me this difference is captured by Adam Sandler singing his famous Hanukah song, while Irving Berlin wrote "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas".

But there's an irony in all this Jewish pride. While we may be much more public about being Jewish than previous generations, we are also in many ways a lot less Jewish. Alain Finkielkraut, a French Jew and well known journalist and political commentator talks about this in his book "The Imaginary Jew." He notes that while 19th century assimilating Jews were trying to prove their humanity, the current group of Jews, whose humanity can be taken for granted, seem to need to prove their Jewish ness.

He writes: "A Jew within, a man without; this, you will recall, was the slogan of the first assimilation. Without always admitting it to ourselves, we practice the same principle in reverse; we're Jews without, for our friends, for the public, for the outside world, while within, in the intimacy of our daily lives, we're just like everybody else, followers of the same styles and prey to the same fascinations, without any cultural specificity all our own... This is Judaism reduced to self- enunciation (expression)."

This generation of Jews, have Jewish ness, he notes, but what is it? It's not a national identity, nor a religion. It's perpetuated not by religious practice, nor by the building up the homeland, but by the family, entrusted with the task of perpetuating a sense of Jewish ness. And because it is so intensely related to family, it becomes forever tied into our issues of individuation and maturity, our relations with our parents, more than to God or history. This Jewish ness is just who we are, like having blue eyes, or being left handed, and so we wonder why we are always being harangued to learn more about being Jewish or to practice our Judaism in particular ways. Finkielkraut observes in some circles a rediscovery of the charms of tradition but notes "it is a strange mysticism where ritual is disassociated from belief." He himself felt that he was Jewishly possessed of "only the vaguest of reminiscences": while seeming to others "perpetually Jewish-ly obsessed". In all of this, I think he has hit upon something relevant to American Jews as well.

It is a good thing that we feel more comfortable today, than one hundred years ago, about embracing the word Jewish and about putting ourselves forward as Jews. And the strong family ties that we experience at the core of our Jewish identity are important. But can family-ness be the sum total of our Jewish identity? A generation ago, in many of our childhoods, being Jewish was rooted in something larger -- if not in religion than at least in an ethnic community. American Jews had Jewish neighborhoods, Jewish secular organizations, Jewish foods, and even a Jewish sensibility, though we often debated what exactly that was. Our children have the dining room table: with holidays dominated more by our family's style than Jewish tradition, and life cycle events that take place within a circle of family and family-like friends. So I wonder is just "being Jewish" enough to sustain a person in the face of serious illness or death? Does it provide meaning at times when the other things that have dominated our lives, whether our careers or caring for our children, recede a bit from the foreground. If all we have is just "being Jewish", then perhaps it is not so surprising that many go off to seek meaning in other places.

For Finkielkraut the family-ness of contemporary Jewishness was important, he himself is the child of survivors, but it was not enough. In his quest for Jewish meaning, Judaism became for him "not simply a matter of expression or personal sincerity." Writing about his own life, he notes, from my family: "I absorbed only a droning fixation on my identity, while I came to seek ... a spiritual dimension to my role in the course of human events." The adoption of his own Judaism, beyond Jewishness, came as he experienced Jewish culture that transcended family, Jewish learning at the level of his other intellectual pursuits, and Jewish action, as the revival of Anti-Semitism in France and extreme anti-Zionism in the left, called him into action. Seeking out Jewish literature, art and film, he developed what he called Jewish memory. He became a student of Immanuel Levinas, a teacher who straddled traditional Talmudic teaching and the western philosophical tradition to give new life to what for him had been "a moribund symbolic system, " and he became an activist for Jewish issues in his role as a journalist.

This year in Minneapolis, our movement will try and answer the question: Who are we? Our answer will be that we are the Union for Reform Judaism, the address of a generation proud to be Jewish, committed to non-fundamentalism in our religious outlook, and institutionally governed by democratic principals.

For all of us sitting here tonight, Rosh Hashanah calls upon us to answer that same question: who are we, and to consider of what our Jewish life consists. Much may be family loyalty, the gift of our family's affection and unique history, but how does that relate to our commitment to the congregation, the local Jewish community, and to Jews around the world? Someone said: "Portnoy was more than the sum of his complaints". Can we offer our children more than, "please- don't leave me, please don't forget your origins?"

The Reform movement's first challenge was to prevent Jews who were attracted to Western culture, science and philosophy, from concluding that Judaism was something they had to abandon in order to become a part of Europe or America. Its second challenge, which marked the years after World War II, was to re-embrace the particularity of Judaism, the folkways and customs that give an emotional richness to our unique identity.

Our contemporary challenge is to remember that we are a religious faith, providing meaning as well as community. Without reneging on our movement's stress on intellectual honesty, we must provide answers to the questions humans have always faced about living in the face of death and about understanding in what way our life matters. Preparing for the class I will teach this fall on Reform Judaism, I was struck by the majesty of classical Reform. For all its faults, for all that we have moved beyond its need to be acceptable to others, it insisted on facing honestly and in a way that was congruent with the rest of our lives, life's most difficult questions. Our movement today must do no less.

We have not always been called Jews. At first, in Biblical times we called ourselves and were called by others Ivrim, from the word la-avor to cross over, the ones from over there, the outsiders. Later we called ourselves B'nai Yisrael, the children of Yisrael, a name given to Jacob after he struggled with an angel, which the Torah translates: "for you have striven with God and with man and survived". The term, Yehudi, Jew comes from the tribe Judah, descendents of Jacob's fourth son named by his mother Leah: "This time, I will praise God. "

The term Jew is rarely used in pre-exilic writings except by Jeremiah. One use is in the well known Haftorah reading in which Jeremiah is purchasing land in Anatot on the eve of the massive attack of the Babylonians. In the presence of all the Yehudim, Jews, at this most discouraging moment in Jewish history, he writes up a deed: " For thus says the Eternal God of Hosts, the God of Israel: houses, fields and vineyards shall again be purchased in this land." Yehudim, Jews, are those who, in the face of disaster, continue to hope and work for the future.

The word Yehudim is used once again when Jeremiah chastises the people for failing to allow their slaves to go free in the seventh year. He reminds them of the commandments of the Torah, to do justice, and remember that you were slaves in the land of Egypt. Yehudim, Jews, are those who are called upon to heed the voice of conscience.

Jew became a common term only with the return from Babylonian Exile, a turning point in Jewish history. That post exilic period was a Jewish renaissance, a time when being Jewish began to mean something different and grander than it had ever meant before, when Judaism became a religion and not just a nationality.

May the choice of a new name for our movement usher in a similar period of renewal for our community and for each of us. May the name Jew be recited with pride and may it hold great meaning for us. Descendents of Ivrim, those willing to stand alone, and of B'nai Yisrael, God wrestlers, may we figure out what it means for us to be Yehudim, Jews, preservers of hope and of conscience.