Reform movement

And it was then that American Jewry took the form that we mostly recognize today, with millions of Ostjuden joining the tens of thousands of mostly German Jews who had come before.

And it was then that the Reform Movement took the form that we know, and the conservative movement JTS laid its cornerstone in 1886.

And the Bund started around this time in 1897 in Vilna.

And this was also a time when all the world was changing.

It's a very important point you made about the reality under the Palestinian Authority, how they don't live behind fences with security guards and all that, and we have to do that in the Jewish communities.

But going back to those attacks in Canada, somebody who does understand the reality of the situation is Rabbi Emil Hirsch, who is a prominent rabbi in the Reform Movement, I would say maybe the most prominent rabbi in the Reform Movement, warning on Yom Kippur during his sermon that rising hatred of Israel and anti-Semitism are not only threatening American Jews, also damaging American society.

Let's play that clip.

We are increasingly troubled because we are witnessing in these times what history taught us about past times.

And if allowed to spread, it's not only the Jews who will pay the price.

America will too.

Alex, these are very important comments, I believe, especially when you have so much of the woke or left wing or perhaps elements in the reform movement who have turned against Israel in recent years.

But ever since October 7th, Hersh has been an outspoken supporter of the policies of the state of Israel and understands truly how that affects Jews worldwide.

It's a massive problem.

Even the Reform movement is realizing that, and they're coming back to rituals today.

They're bringing it back in.

If you went to a Reform synagogue fifty years ago, no one was allowed to wear a kippah.

No one wore a tallit.

Sometimes they even prayed they wanted to change it to Sunday instead of, uh...

The Reform movement in G- in Germany wanted to change it.

They removed all mention of Israel from their prayer book.

But okay, that, that bedavka you can't do because that they did on Shabbos as well.

In fact, the Reform movement, when they started having an organ on Shabbos, they said, "Hey, every show is called the Beis Mikdash Ma'at." In fact, that's why they call it temple.

Uh, it's a miniature Beis Mikdash.

So, so avada, you can't use it to go against, uh, Gezeiras of the Chachamim about not playing musical instruments.

I hear, but the Chasam Sofer was talking about doing it on, doing it on Shabbos.

I mean, uh, that, that's...

As I, as I indicated, the, the, the initial Reform movement [coughs] believed that just like the Beis Hamikdash had musical instruments even on Shabbos, so we can do it as well.

And, and the Reform movement even had a guy do it.

And you think about the devastating consequences of what that led to, only to be followed in the 1400s by the Spanish Inquisition, where many of the greats were living at the time as well, to be followed by the pogroms in Worms and Vermezza, to be followed generation after generation by the same story.

And yet with all of that, it brings us to the 1500s, which is the time period when the Shulchan Aruch and the Rama, Rav Yosef Karo and The Rama came together, not came together, but wrote their commentaries, which are now the Shulchan Aruch that we study and is the foundation and the bedrock of everything we believe in and all that we live by, came out of all of this devastation and all of this destruction that led to it, which only continued into the Gzerot Tach v'Tat in the 1640s, which led us into one issue after the other into the 1800s with all of the Haskalah, all of the Enlightenment, and the Reform Movement that was sweeping across Jewish communities in Eastern Europe once again, which led us into the greatest calamity in all Jewish history, the Shoah, which leads us to where we are today, to the greatest renaissance of Torah life and Torah study that the Jewish people have ever known in their history.

Is this not the most amazingly prophetic, astounding promise that we have ever heard? Moshe Rabbeinu told us this promise from the outset, and we are the embodiment of that miracle.

We are the generation who is living that miracle.

There's a very short quotation from the biblical book of Nehemiah, come and let us take counsel together.

It's the motto of one of the Reform Movement organizations, and I saw it every day passing in and out of Hebrew Union College, my rabbinical school.

I actually don't remember which organization it's the motto of, so I guess it didn't really work as a motto.

But on a deeper level, it did.

Is that the halachana? The Chesam Seifer famously writes that it's awesome to have a band in a shul.

Or you could be Michalik, you could say he was talking about an organ, which was Dover Kavua, which they had from the, you know, the reform movement that brought organs into shuls.

It's one...

So it's not an organ.

It's a bunch of, you know, whatever they play with, guitars and drums or whatever.

The second thing is it's Kavua, not Kavua.

And the third is nobody cares anything about the Reform Movement anymore.

They don't even have a graduating class in their seminary.

So now we're fast-forwarding ahead a few more years.

By 1527, we're at a transitional year for the Reform movement in Brunswick.

How so?

Well, so between 1523 and 1527, there are just a few preachers who keep this up, but 1527... was the year the few Lutheran preachers remaining in the town first conducted a baptism in the German language instead of using the required Latin liturgy.

that communities became Lutheran.

In other words, unlike other areas of the empire where the Reformation as well as the counter-Reformation could be imposed by political authorities from above, as historians like to say.

The Reformation movement initially was a reform movement with quite a bit of support from below, from the people, from, interestingly, usually the lower clergy and not the more established clergy of the parishes, much less the the hierarchy of bishops, which almost universally rejected the Reformation.

And in relation to that, what it meant to become Lutheran was not simply to accept a political settlement or even to formally endorse a confession, such as the Augsburg Confession, but was to simply realize how this message of the gospel, as proclaimed by Luther and was being proclaimed by many, many others throughout the 1520s and beyond, could really enliven the religious communities, the communities of Germany and beyond.

We stand together against any attempt to harm the character of Ramadha Sharon and the values on which it is founded, Rochberger added.

Democrat member of Knesset Gilad Kariv, a Reform rabbi, past guest of Two Jewish, who previously headed Israel's Reform Movement, linked the attack to recent violence against Reform congregations, businesses operating on Shabbat, and anti-government protesters.

They will smash and break.

We will repair and build, he said.