Returning to Reform

Opinion

By Jacob Neusner

Published November 25, 2009, issue of December 04, 2009.

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Once upon a time, there was a young man, a third-generation American who was raised in a classical Reform temple, who in the Reform manner celebrated becoming a bar mitzvah and who was confirmed in the Reform rite. He was inspired by his temple’s rabbi to himself become a Reform rabbi. He held national office in the National Federation of Temple Youth, and he was admitted to the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College.

Then, on the very day this young man was supposed to begin studies at Hebrew Union College, he instead entered the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, the intellectual citadel of Conservative Judaism. He agreed to give up the lobster dinners, the veal parmigiana and the BLT sandwiches that he had loved, and even to quit smoking on the Sabbath, as admission to JTS demanded.

[Excerpt – see full article at The Forward – link in “Returning to Reform heading above”]

Rabbi Jacob Neusner is the Distinguished Service Professor of the History and Theology of Judaism and a senior fellow of the Institute of Advanced Theology at Bard College. This essay is adapted from an address that he will be delivering December 1 at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York for the 2009 Dr. Fritz Bamberger Memorial Lecture.