Reform Judaism

They... put something called ethical monotheism at the heart of Jewish theology.

And we can see there were tensions within the reform movement at the time, but they understood their American citizenship as an opportunity to resolve that question.

Are Jews a nation? Is Judaism a religion? or Jews in ethnicity.

And they wanted to assimilate into an understanding of American-ness that could mean that they would have Judaism as a religion.

And there were tensions that then played themselves out within the Reform Movement.

We include a number of different dissidents who rejected the way in which the Reform Movement in the United States was assimilating and embracing Zionism, beginning in 1937, 1938 with the Columbus Platform, where they moved away from their anti-Zionist stance to a more non-Zionist stance, with tentative support for the Jewish nation state, Jewish settler colonial project that had been unfolding in Palestine at the time.

And so we recover a lot of these dissidents.

Another prominent one was Rabbi Elmer Berger.

He was the son of a Portuguese conversos.

For those of you who don't know what that is, those are Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism during the Inquisition.

And his family ended up fleeing Portugal to the Netherlands.

His mother died when he was very young, when he was six, I think just shy of six years old.

I mean, there may be others, but Spinoza is going to be the first one that's going to put it down in a real philosophical context and going to challenge the divinity of the Bible.

Now, okay, so he does that.

Who cares? Who cares is that in that milieu that you're living, the Jews were invited to come to live in Holland.

Holland was, we would call then at that time, a little bit progressive, meaning that you could come in and live.

Orthodox Judaism continues to forbid homosexual intercourse.

Reform Judaism allows it.

Conservative Judaism, until the last few years, held the Orthodox view, but now renders conflicting opinions within itself, so they're not monolithic on this subject, they're multifaceted.

But yeah, I think we would have these resources.

We kind of referenced it earlier.

What was reform Judaism in America's attitude towards Zionism before 1948? And I think this is also a forgotten part of the story.

Yeah, I mean, this is something that for me was completely new, even though I knew this story.

In 1943, the middle of the Holocaust and the Second World War, the largest synagogue in the American South, Beth Israel of Houston, Texas, the oldest synagogue in Texas, it actually dates to before Texas joined the Union.

And then when I found this archive of what had actually happened, I was absolutely astonished.

And I'll leave that to readers who want to read the actual story of it.

But what was so interesting to me about it was what was the attitude of the Reform Jews to Zionism and why? And this is something that's very, very deep in Reform Judaism.

It's not a side issue.

However, just to synthesize it, when all these secret societies came around, and it was, of course, Illuminism, the Jews had their own Illuminism.

and the Sabbatean Frankist went and influenced it, and eventually it led to Reform Judaism, Progressive Judaism, and 80% of today's mosques, sorry, synagogues here in America, they reflect today that form of Judaism, no longer traditionally Judaism.

So that already, and then the ones who claim they're more orthodox, like for example, the Chabad Lubavitch movement is a traditional orthodox, that's BS.

I have the evidence.

Yes, that's true.

And a lot of it goes back to Reform Judaism in Germany in the mid-19th century, the mid-1800s.

And a lot of the Jewish believers you'll encounter just go up to them and say, were you raised following the dietary laws? And many of them will say no.

In fact, it wasn't until I came to faith in Yeshua that I got convicted that I needed to probably do this.

And while we might think, for example, some interpretations or applications are a bit extreme, There are Jewish traditions which can recognize it as a bit extreme.

So just look at the differences between orthodox, conservative, and reform because the reform tradition, going back to the 1880 Pittsburgh platform, decreed that all Levitical rituals were unnecessary for the Jewish community.

And that's why in a great deal of Reform Judaism, you see the kosher dietary laws not being observed.

You can go to a gathering at a synagogue and be served shrimp cocktail and crab cakes.