The faith of the Traditionalists offers community, commitment, and continuity, wrapped in a framework of authority that will challenge anyone whose moral instincts are shaped by those of contemporary society. For two centuries, however, many Jews have yearned instead for a religion expressing moral values that match the liberal worldview in which they are enmeshed. The result is Jewish belief that I will call Progressive: the belief in a divine moral order whose eternal truths of justice and love unfold in progress through history, rather than being fixed in unchanging authority.
Jewish Traditionalism has a brand, its black-and-white outfits. Jewish Progressivism has an iconic photograph that sums up its essence. The photo was taken on March 21, 1965. In it you can see seven people, arms linked, leading the famous civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. From left to right, they are John Lewis, Sister Mary Leoline,1 Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Bunche, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Fred Shuttlesworth. They’re wearing coats against the cold and leis that had been given to them that day by a minister from Hawaii.
The Black men in the picture, all southern ordained ministers except Bunche, the Nobel Prize–winning diplomat, are giants of the civil rights movement, household names to anyone even slightly familiar with its history. Heschel was born in Warsaw in 1907. He was first ordained as an Orthodox rabbi in Poland, then earned a doctorate and a further, nondenominational rabbinic ordination in Berlin. Deported from Germany back to Poland in 1938, he managed to escape weeks before the German invasion in 1939. In the United States, he became a renowned teacher and scholar of Jewish mysticism affiliated first with Hebrew Union College, the flagship of American Reform Judaism, and then for many years with the Jewish Theological Seminary, which trains Conservative rabbis.
Heschel’s participation in the march, and the Progressive beliefs that put him there, stand for a vision of God derived from the ancient Hebrew prophets and the most foundational teachings of the rabbis. For Progressive Jews, these sources can inspire and direct our moral and spiritual lives. Unlike Traditionalists, Progressive Jews are comfortable recognizing the fallibility of the humans who have interpreted and shaped the tradition. Hence Progressive Jews can gently leave aside aspects of the tradition that cannot be reconciled with our deepest moral commitments as we experience them today. As for the halakhah that lies at the heart of Traditionalist thought, Progressive Jews consider it to be a manifestation of Jews’ best efforts at making sense of divine moral truths. Seen in this light, the law can sometimes be a guide to conduct. But it need not govern us, especially when it no longer resonates with what we believe to be morally right.
So if you are looking for a strand of Jewish thought that celebrates women rabbis, embraces gay and trans people, and emphasizes civil rights and social values like equality and free choice, Progressive Judaism is it. When a new moral truth becomes prominent in liberal Western belief, Progressive Jews see it as part of the eternal truth that God (however defined) always intended and that has now emerged through the human historical process of experience and reasoning. Traditionalist Jews think of what they call Yiddishkeit as a comprehensive way of life in the path of God. Progressive Jews mostly think of their Judaism as a religion, one that shapes their broader moral beliefs and worldview and is in turn shaped by them. Where Traditionalists see the authority of God’s law and the authority of the rabbis who interpret it, Progressives see the moral inspiration of the Bible’s teachings and the freedom of humans to make sense of Torah in light of their commitment to human equality and dignity.
The biblical prophets provide Progressive Jews with the strongest textual precedent and basis for their worldview. Take Isaiah 58, a chapter so powerful that the rabbis chose it as the prophetic reading at the morning service on Yom Kippur. For many years when I was a boy, my father received the honor of reading it in synagogue. I can hear his voice in my head, chanting the bracing message in the original Hebrew.
The thrust of Isaiah’s transmission to the people of Israel in the chapter is that they cannot achieve the closeness to God that they seek merely by performing religious rituals. They must behave justly and kindly to the weakest among them if they seek connection to the divine. God demands and desires social justice, not empty performance.
In the prophet’s presentation, the Israelites, their throats parched from not drinking or eating on a fast day, complain to God that their prayers remain unanswered: “Why have we fasted and you have seen not? Why have we afflicted our throat and you know not?”
Isaiah’s God replies contemptuously: “Is a fast I have chosen like this—a day for a man to afflict his throat? Is it to bow down his head like a bulrush, and put on sack-cloth and ash? Is this what you call a fast, a day desirable to the Lord?”
God’s own answer to these rhetorical questions is a resounding no.
Is not this a fast I have chosen? Loose the chains of wickedness. Untie the bonds of the yoke. Let free the oppressed and break every yoke. Is it not to distribute your bread to the hungry and bring home the outcast poor? When you see a naked person, cover him, and hide not from your own flesh.
Only then, once justice is established, will prayer lead to salvation and God’s presence be felt:
Then shall your light break like the dawn, and your healing shall quickly flourish. Your justice shall walk before you. The glory of the Lord shall follow you. Then shall you call out, and the Lord shall answer; you shall plead, and He shall say “Here am I”—if you put away the yoke from your midst, the pointing of fingers, and the speaking of iniquity. If you pour out your throat for the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted throat, then your light shall shine in the darkness, and your gloaming shall be as the noonday sun … You shall be as a watered garden, as a source of water whose waters never fail.2
The beauty of Isaiah’s language underscores the simple power of the lesson. Connection to God cannot be attained by going through the motions of religious ritual. It requires aligning one’s actions—and those of society as a whole—with the divine plan for human justice. That plan means, for Isaiah, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and ending oppression. The yoke, Isaiah’s preferred metaphor for what must be broken, perfectly exemplifies the hierarchical domination of some humans by others.
For Progressive Jews, the prophetic lesson of love and justice resonates through all of Jewish thought. The paradigmatic Talmudic story that stands for this idea tells of a non-Jew who approached the two leading rabbis of his day, Shammai and Hillel. He made the same request of each: “Make me a Jew on the condition that you teach me all the entire Law while I am standing on one foot.”
Shammai, the head of a school remembered for advocating serious study of the Law by serious students, sent away the potential Jew. Shammai was a builder by trade (most of the early rabbis practiced trades like shoemaking or carpentry) and the Talmud says that Shammai “drove him away with the measuring stick that was in his hand.” Shammai was understandably put off by the applicant’s demand, which reflected either impatience, contempt, or both.
Hillel, whose separate school was open to all comers, reacted differently. According to the Talmud, “He made him a Jew. Then he said to him: ‘What is hateful to you, do not do to your friend.’ This is all the entire Law. The rest is interpretation. Go study.”3
This Hillel story is so famous, among Progressive Jews and beyond, that it has become a cliché. As I was writing these words, I found myself worrying that I might lose readers who have heard it since childhood and would then think of this book as too basic to be taken seriously.
But the truth is that the story of Hillel and the applicant, which occupies just a few lines in the Talmud, has the kind of compressed narrative power that the best parables achieve. Like a Zen koan,4 it is a cliché because it is both profound and profoundly simple.* Hillel does not deny that there is much to learn in the Torah. He ends by telling the new convert to go and study. He simply communicates that only one thing really matters, namely how we treat one another. The rest is secondary. We need Hillel’s message too much to dismiss it just because it has been told to children so many times.
With Hillel’s worldview to inspire them, Progressive Jews can conclude, justly, that Jewishness is capable of being welcoming and inclusive, not exclusionary or obscure. Far from deflecting or rejecting the potential Jew, Hillel brought him into the fold even before delivering on his implicit promise to teach him the Torah in a nutshell. Thus, by his actions, Hillel was enacting the same message found in his words. He was treating the prospective Jew as he would want to be treated, namely with dignity, acceptance, charity of spirit, and perhaps just a touch of humor. And indeed, Progressive Jews have always emphasized the openness that Jewishness can contain once it focuses on respecting each human as an individual.
The first Jews to develop this Progressive vision lived in nineteenth-century Germany, which at the time was undergoing a process of political liberalization that included newfound openness to including Jews within the broader political and cultural community. Those Jews were influenced by the progress that German civilization was (then) making, partly as a result of the French Revolution’s formal emancipation of the Jews, extended elsewhere by Napoleon Bonaparte. They called their movement Reform Judaism, a name that reflected an idealized picture of the Protestant Reformation as it had come to be understood by liberal Protestant Germans of the time.5 The concept of reform was meant to capture the effort to go back to the genuine origins of a religious tradition to identify its truest and most fundamental teachings, shorn of superstition, bias, and the self-interested efforts of clergy to maintain their own power. Looking back to the Bible, Reform Jews found a God who loves not only his people but all the peoples of the world; who wants social justice, not ritualized obedience; and who teaches that to be holy is to love your neighbor as yourself.
To emphasize these teachings, Jewish Reformers sought to update and streamline their liturgy and religious practices. In the process, they hoped to save Jews from abandoning their faith altogether in a world where Traditionalism seemed incompatible with modern life. That was not all, however. To Reformers, what needed to be saved was God’s universalist message, which Christianity might have co-opted but which, they firmly believed, came originally from the Jewish invention of monotheism.
Reform Jews made their case by interpreting or reinterpreting strands of teaching found in the Bible, the Talmud, and later Jewish authorities. One instructive example is the Jewish abandonment of the ritual animal sacrifices that were at one time central to the ancient Israelite Temple cult. Reformers noticed that even the biblical prophets, who lived in the era of sacrificial practice, sometimes condemned it as a distraction or worse from true divine worship. In the book of Jeremiah, in the course of telling the Israelites not to oppress strangers, orphans, and widows and not to shed innocent blood, God puts it starkly:
I did not speak to your fathers and I did not command them on the day I took them out of the land of Egypt about matters of burnt offerings or sacrifice. Rather, this is the matter I commanded them, saying, “Listen to my voice and I will be your God and you will be to me a people.”6
In one of the Psalms, God is presented as going even further, questioning the idea that He is interested in sacrifices at all:
Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?
Offer thanks to God; fulfill your vows to the Most High.
Call on me on the day of trouble; I will save you, and you will honor me.7
After the destruction of the Temple, the rabbis who transformed the Israelite religion into the Jewish one established daily prayers that, they explained, were intended to function in lieu of sacrifices.8 Although the Talmud devotes whole tractates to studying the laws of sacrifice, the rabbis made no effort to restore the sacrificial cult. To the contrary, they specified that sacrifices should not be reinstituted until the Temple was rebuilt by divine intervention. Study, for the rabbis, substituted for sacrifice, just as prayer did.9
Early Reform thinkers understood the rabbinic deferral of sacrifice, following on the prophetic message that God did not need sacrifices, as part of an ethical revolution within Judaism. The medieval authority they invoked for this understanding was none other than Maimonides, himself scrupulously committed to preserving Jewish law in every detail. In the Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides reasoned, radically, that biblical sacrifice was a necessary concession God had made to the cultural milieu of the biblical era, in which the surrounding peoples also sacrificed to their gods and the Israelites could not have accepted a religion based purely on ethical worship. Seen this way, the prophets’ skepticism of sacrifice reflected their advanced ethical perspective. The rabbis’ eschewal of sacrifice in favor of prayer and study was the next step in making Jewish thought and practice conform to the actual divine ideal. Hence, Maimonides concluded in the Guide (although not in his code of Jewish law, intended for a mass audience) that sacrifices would not be restored in the messianic future.10
Maimonides’s radical philosophical teaching was invoked by Reform Jews as evidence of fundamental, directional, progressive change within Jewish tradition—change driven by ethical objectives. From the Bible through the Middle Ages, reformers observed, Jewish ideas about sacrifice progressed to a higher, more ethical plane. Unlike Maimonides, they concluded that the authority of the tradition is not absolute. Elements, even biblical elements, can and must be reformed and even abandoned in pursuit of moral truth.
In the last half-century, the Progressive teaching of divinely inspired social justice acquired a slogan: tikkun ‘olam, literally, repairing the world. The phrase originated from the Kabbalistic idea that in creating the finite world, the infinite God contracted, then shattered and broke into a multitude of shards. In the aftermath of that cosmic disaster, it is the ultimate purpose of the Jewish people to perform God’s commandments and thereby, act by act, repair the universe and the Godhead itself.11 Mystically, this is to be accomplished by redeeming these shards, each animated by divine sparks, from amid the kelippot, the impure and dark husks or shells that cover the sparks of divine light. As adapted by Progressives, who substituted a social metaphor for the mystical one, tikkun ‘olam has a this-worldly, more concrete meaning. It calls for human effort, alongside God, to make the world more just and hence more perfect.
PROGRESS
Today, Progressive Jewish thought extends well beyond the Jewish Reform movement, with which 37 percent of American Jews currently identify.12 What I am calling Progressivism includes much, though not all, of what is confusingly called Conservative Judaism, which with 17 percent is the next largest institutional movement of American Jews. Reconstructionist Judaism, with less than 4 percent, is also Progressive.
As I did with respect to Traditionalism, I am intentionally introducing a new term, Progressivism, that refers to underlying beliefs about the divine. What unites Progressive Jews today is the frank recognition and acknowledgment that to be worth maintaining, Jewish life and thought must cohere with our deepest moral commitments. What God wants (however metaphorically or loosely we understand God) cannot be in contradiction to what is just and right. When we see a new moral truth, we know it must be part of the divine order. Moral truth and divine truth are and must be consonant, perhaps even identical. As a result, Progressive Jewish thought lends itself to social justice activism. Leading Progressive rabbis write or edit books with titles like There Shall Be No Needy: Pursuing Social Justice Through Jewish Law and Tradition13 and None Shall Make Them Afraid: A Rabbis Against Gun Violence Anthology.14
Perhaps surprisingly, Progressivism has something in common with Traditionalism. Under both worldviews, it is in principle possible to conceptualize the Jewish relationship with the divine as consistent with our moral intuitions. For Progressive Jews, when we achieve what we consider to be moral progress, we can be sure that we are acting as the divine plan would suggest. For Traditionalists, whatever God has commanded— as interpreted by the rabbis—is inherently moral in the deepest sense. In neither system of thought need it be painful to reconcile the divine will with our human efforts to understand the right way to live.
You can see why Progressive Jewish thought has been around for so long—and also why Progressive Jews continue to flourish, notwithstanding the unceasing warnings of Traditionalists for nearly two centuries that Progressivism must inevitably die out. Most human beings look to spirituality to infuse life with meaning and to share community with people they love. Most people aren’t looking for constant contradiction and struggle; they are looking for consistency and sustenance. Progressive Jewish thought offers meaning making that aspires to enhance spirituality without contradiction and to create inclusive community without necessary conflict.
Two main challenges nevertheless face the religious-communal side of Progressivism.† One is theological: What makes Jewish belief distinctive when its teachings are interpreted as universal and inclusive? What, if anything, separates Progressive Jewish theology from the theology of Unitarian Universalism, or for that matter from other universalisms like those that can be found in Buddhism or Daoism? Progressive Jews still want to be Jews. Yet the particularist strands of Jewish thought from the Bible to the present can sit uncomfortably with Progressive universalism that encompasses the equality, dignity, and freedom of all humans in their relation to God.
The other challenge is practical: How can Progressivism be institutionalized into a cohesive religious community? If Judaism is conceived as a religion that teaches high-level moral values, can those values be connected successfully to the daily life of a religious community, which for Jews was long shaped by common prayers and ritual practices? Adding to this challenge, for Progressive Jews, God need not be understood as an omnipotent or omniscient being who answers individual prayers. God can be a force of moral order, or a cosmic Oneness, or a spark of divine spirituality in each being, or something else. The Progressive God is certainly not a Lawgiver whose mandates are concerned with quotidian details of prayer, food, sex, and Sabbath observance. How can an abstract Oneness be experienced in an immediate, human way that unites members of a community?
This difficulty of finding meaning in religious ritual is the problem faced, for example, by the bar mitzvah boy in the Coen brothers’ theodicy film A Serious Man (2009). He’s going through the motions, reciting words he doesn’t understand in a setting that means little to him except that it is somehow connected to his ancestors. He’s been smoking pot, the only way to get through the experience and maybe a metaphor for a nonspecific seeking of spirituality that isn’t being remotely satisfied by the Jewish manhood into which he is supposedly being inducted. If you haven’t seen the movie, you can look up the bar mitzvah scene on YouTube, but you almost don’t have to. It’s meant to be an archetype, one familiar to every American Jew with any connection to institutionalized Judaism. The archetype can be summed up in one word: alienation. The ritual is supposed to be constitutive of being Jewish. But it isn’t meaningful. So if that’s Judaism, then Judaism itself is not meaningful.
I don’t mean to suggest that Progressive Jews can’t feel powerful connection to the temple and the prayers recited there. Historically, however, throughout the generations, Progressive Jews have tended not to participate in temple ritual in the way that Traditionalists occupy the synagogue thrice daily and at length on the Sabbath. The overwhelming majority of Progressive Jews attend sporadically, finding themselves in the temple for high holidays a couple of times a year and for life-cycle events like baby namings, bar and bat mitzvahs, and funerals. This pattern of attendance is not so different from the Lutheran Protestantism of Germany and the Nordic countries, where many people mark life events in church but the beautiful edifices remain empty much of the time.
Unlike Traditionalists, who are not terribly concerned by most of the external critiques of their worldview and community, Progressive Jews and their leaders take these challenges seriously. They want to justify, explain, and understand why it is meaningful to be a Jew. And they want to create and sustain strong ties of connection, notwithstanding the recurring worry that most Progressive Jews do not feel fully drawn into the institutional communities to which they may nominally belong.
THE GOD OF THE COVENANT
Progressive Jewish theology in the contemporary era has focused on the covenant between God and the people of Israel as a central organizing theme. When Traditionalists think about the covenant at Sinai, they tend to cite the rabbinic story I mentioned in the last chapter, in which God lifted the mountain above the heads of the Israelites and told them to accept the Law or be buried.15 In stark contrast, for Progressive Jewish thinkers, the covenant is the archetype of a voluntary act. God and the people choose each other freely.16 The relationship is therefore mutual at its core, and remains so forever.
Drawing on tradition that imagines all Jews as having been present for the covenant at Sinai, Progressive Jewish thought makes the covenant into an inclusive metaphor for a faith relationship that necessarily recognizes the value and humanity of all Jews. In this picture, all Jews are equally Jews by choice.17 There is therefore no theological difference between someone born a Jew and someone who becomes a Jew at a later time.
What, though, distinguishes the people who choose this covenantal relationship with God from the rest of humanity, who are also God’s children? To Traditionalists, the answer is straightforward: God chose the people of Israel, as the Bible recounts, not because the Israelites were more numerous or better than other peoples but simply because God loved their forefathers. The Jews, descendants of the Israelites, are a distinct people and a holy people insofar as they possess God’s freely given grace. There is no reason for Jewish chosenness beyond God’s will.
To Progressive Jews focused on the reciprocal, voluntary relationship between God and Israel, chosenness must be something different, something grounded in mutuality. Yet it also cannot be exclusive, at least from God’s perspective. Progressive Jews are universalists in the sense that they embrace the equality of all humans before God. Their egalitarian God cannot love some people more than others because of who they are. God might choose some people in some way, but then he also must choose all others in some comparable way. If God preferred the Jews or held them to a higher standard or just enjoyed a closer relationship with them, that God would not be a truly universal, egalitarian God.
From this theological perspective, the best solution to the puzzle of chosenness is to say that all humans imagine themselves in some special relationship with a God—and that there is nothing exclusionary about that relationship, because God is, after all, universal and infinite. It is therefore a kind of miraculous feature of the Progressive God to be able to choose everyone and yet have everyone feel specially chosen. The Sinai covenant is just one possible covenant, yet it is meaningful for those who participate in it. All that is required for belonging is to make a voluntary choice to opt in. That is why Reform Judaism makes it easier to become Jewish than do other strands of Judaism. It is why Reform temples are relatively more welcoming of non-Jews as regular participants than congregations of other movements.‡
There is something extremely attractive about the idea that anyone may enter the covenant with God and that the barrier to entry is nothing more than the desire to seek the connection. This raises, however, an important related question: Does the individual seeking a covenantal relationship with God have to believe in that God’s existence?
In mainstream Protestant Christianity, all the believer must do to enter into the kingdom of Heaven is to accept Jesus Christ as savior. But that act of faith cannot be skipped. It is constitutive of being a Christian. No one will object if you participate in Christian worship or study the Gospel, because the faith is available to anyone. And most of the time, no one will check up on you to see if you are faithful, because that is between you and God. Yet as a matter of conscience, which is where true Protestant Christian faith resides, you must believe to be saved.
In believing that the individual may freely choose to enter into covenant with God, Progressive Jewish theology opens the door to a more universal, accessible, inclusive, welcoming form of Jewish life than any other. At the same time, it does seem to suggest that someone who wants to participate in this covenant must believe in God, in some way or form. A covenant must be between multiple parties. It would seem strange for me to enter into a covenant with myself or with my projection of myself onto the divine sphere. How could one seek a covenantal relationship with something imaginary?
THE CIVILIZATION APPROACH IN CONTEMPORARY PROGRESSIVE JEWISH LIFE
Needless to say, this apparent requirement of belief poses a problem for many would-be Progressive Jews, including for some who would like to be Progressive Jews by choice. Progressivism grew up in tandem with modern beliefs in voluntary choice and equality. Those beliefs have long coexisted with skepticism about whether God exists. What’s more, Reform Judaism first arose partly to provide an option for Jews who had rejected the authoritarian God of Traditionalism and did not want to embrace liberal Protestantism.18 Many people in that situation were not theistic believers but skeptics. In practical terms, Progressivism needs, and has always needed, an option to provide for the skeptical nonbeliever.
An influential solution to this problem was devised by an Orthodox-trained Progressive rabbi named Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1983), who was arguably the most influential American Jewish theologian of the twentieth century. His magnum opus was his 1934 book Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American Jewish Life. In it, Kaplan proposed that Judaism could be sustained and practiced even if it were separated from its traditional theological underpinnings, including belief in God. The key was to conceptualize Jewish tradition as a civilization into which Jews found themselves thrown by birth and by history. They could choose to draw on that civilization and its traditions, to be its bearers. They could then live and think as Jews without having to insist on a special or unique relationship with an actually existing God who chose them.
From the standpoint of Kaplan’s Reconstructionism, the covenant between God and the Jewish people is the historical legacy of a time when Jews did indeed imagine themselves to be uniquely chosen. One need not literally believe the covenant to be real or true to continue engaging in Jewish life. A Jew can just keep on thinking and praying and acting as a Jew without worrying about God’s existence. The joke that sums up this point of view is that Reconstructionists direct their prayers “To Whom It May Concern.” Or in another version, the Reconstructionist declaration of faith is, “There is no God, and Mordecai Kaplan is His prophet.”
Reconstructionism started as distinct from Reform and Conservative Judaism. Over time, however, there has been a gradual convergence between Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist communities, that is, between the movements that espouse Progressive Jewish ideals. The movements still maintain formally separate congregations and formally separate rabbinical schools. Nuances of theological difference remain too. But what actually happens in synagogue and home prayer and practice is increasingly similar. Convergence in core beliefs is fueling convergence in ritual.
For example, from the origins of Reform Judaism, one of the key reforms was to reduce the use of Hebrew in prayer (or even eliminate it altogether) in order to make the experience more accessible and meaningful. Today, most Reform temples, under the indirect influence of Kaplan, use significantly more Hebrew in their liturgy than they once did. Where in the past the Reform service was highly formal, with relatively little congregational participation, today most Reform temples encourage singing along and strive for greater informality.
The use of the guitar in worship is a symbol of this convergence. In the early years of the Reform movement, one of the most significant innovations was the introduction of the organ to the temple, an understandable development in the German society that had produced the church music of Bach as an elevated form of divine worship.19 The organ became part of American Reform Judaism, much as the organ remained an important part of American Christian worship into the twentieth century.20 In Reform congregations, singing tended to be professionalized rather than participatory, often performed by a trained cantor and choir.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new trend in Jewish worship, known as the Havurah movement, began to use the acoustic guitar in worship. Havurah is a Hebrew word that means, roughly, a group of like-minded people arranged in community for some purpose. The Havurah movement was self-consciously part of the youth culture of the era. Its participants felt uninspired by the large, formal, distant Jewish congregations that predominated at the time. Their prayer circles—for that is what they were—drew organically on the folk music trends that were then popular. (The direct descendant of the Havurah movement today still exists under the name of Jewish Renewal.21)
The Reform movement did not initially embrace the guitar in temple, although Reform summer camps and youth groups experimented with it. The austere formality of most Reform services persisted through the 1970s and into the early 1980s. In the context of Reconstructionist Judaism, however, the influence of the Havurah movement was felt powerfully and more quickly. The guitar helped create an atmosphere of informality and group participation through song that was highly relevant to the historical moment, and it became a regular presence in Reconstructionist services. Then, eventually, over a decade or more, the guitar became normalized into Reform worship, no doubt as a result of its use in Reform movement summer camps. In large Reform temples, it became common to see a congregant or even the cantor employed by the temple standing in front of the lectern, playing the guitar and singing. Often the singer would be amplified by a microphone, long present in Reform temples and indeed often necessary as an effect of their size and design.
As singing along to an acoustic guitar gradually became a cultural relic of the 60s and 70s, the use of the guitar in Reform temples nevertheless persisted. Along with it came a Reform rapprochement with collective singing of popular Hebrew liturgical songs as part of the worship service in order to connect worshippers to an accessible, distinctively Jewish spirituality. All this went along with a return to elements of Jewish traditional seasonal liturgy and worship that most Reform temples had abandoned for a century or more. Reform Judaism had treated the prayer shawl, the palm frond on Sukkot, and even the Hebrew language itself as relics of an outdated, superstitious past. Reconstructionism treated these features of traditional Jewish practice as components of the civilization that could be updated but must still be preserved. Today, the vast majority of Reform congregations have taken on the Reconstructionist perspective.
Meanwhile, in Conservative synagogues, historically divided on whether to play instrumental music as part of the Sabbath service, the guitar, formally permitted in 1970, gradually came to be accepted. By 2015, roughly half of Conservative congregations used instrumental music during Shabbat prayer.22 The change reflected a much deeper shift among Conservative Jews, many of whom, from the 1980s forward, gradually gave up the ideal of adherence to binding Jewish law and began to treat their religious practices as community customs, much like Reconstructionists. While some Conservative rabbis may construe the law differently, most of their congregants are squarely Progressive in their thinking, treating Jewish values as congruent with the ideals of social justice.
JUDAISM WITHOUT GOD? TEMPLES WITHOUT PEOPLE?
Reconstructionist theologians don’t object to anyone believing in God. But at the most fundamental level, they treat God as a metaphor—and they treat the Jewish God as a metaphor created by the Jewish people. Can there be Jewish life without God, or at least with a metaphoric God? This theological question is intertwined with an institutional question: Can Progressive Jewish life produce sustaining, spiritually meaningful communities at a large scale?
The reason these questions are connected is that Kaplan’s civilizational approach, designed to enable the flourishing of Progressive Jewish life without belief in God, relies essentially on collective community. A civilization is not just a group of people but a group of people united by a comprehensive way of life that includes common geography, practices, cultures, and ideas. That may be a bridge too far for Reconstructionist Judaism in its current institutional format. But a lively synagogue community might conceivably function as a kind of partial substitute. If Reconstructionist Jewish communal life could be sufficiently embracing, then the no-God option might be a viable form of Progressivism.
As we shall see in the next chapter, Judaism as a civilization is alive. There are Jews whose communities are fully civilizational, encompassing intense communal relationships and home-based religious practices that infuse everyday life outside the synagogue. But this cannot be said of most Reconstructionist Jewish congregations, nor of most Reform or Conservative ones. Under the best of circumstances, the no-God option is extremely challenging to maintain at the communal level. When the great bulk of the community believes in God and practices civilizational Judaism accordingly, it’s possible, if difficult, to be the skeptic in the corner of the synagogue who thinks God is at most a metaphor but keeps on participating fully in the life of the community. (I’ve been that person at various stages in my life, so I know both that it can be done and that it can’t be done easily.)
What is almost impossible is for the entire community to embrace the notion of God as a metaphor while maintaining the communal energy necessary to make a civilization. The recurrent question for any intentional community, including any religious community, is, “Why are we doing this?” A Progressive Jewish community that believes in some sort of God can answer, “We are doing this to become closer to the divine.” For believers, nothing could be more transcendently important. A Progressive Jewish community skeptical of God’s existence can try to answer by saying, “We are doing this because we believe in sustaining Jewish civilization.” But that answer raises the question of why the civilization ought to be sustained.
The best way to make this problem concrete is to imagine a parent telling an eleven-year-old child that the kid will be having a bar or bat mitzvah (or b-mitzvah) in a year or two.§ If the family is embedded in a community where the ceremony is the norm, conversation will likely move rapidly to when, where, and who the DJ will be. If the family is less embedded in those norms, the kid may well ask, “Why?” The answer that this will bring you closer to God and our community of believers will work if the kid also believes in God. If not, the answer that Judaism is a civilization or a culture to which the family belongs is possible. Yet it is difficult to give that answer if the family in fact is not embedded in a culture where the ceremony is so common as to seem natural and automatic.
Judaism is of course a distinct culture, and all cultures have some inherent value. Yet I don’t choose to spend my time sustaining most cultures unless I have a particular affinity for them or love of them. I may have sufficient affinity for Jewish civilization. But to get that affinity, an affinity powerful enough to keep me coming to the synagogue and connected to a close-knit community, it helps for me to have grown up in such a community or to be yearning for a connection to it. That in turn is far more likely to happen when the community offers the comprehensive experience of common ritual observance, support, and connection that can be found in Traditionalist or (as we will see) what I will call Evolutionist circles. In principle, civilizational community does not require God. But in practice, it almost certainly does require an appeal beyond universal liberal values plus particularized weekly worship.
This is the reason, I think, that Progressive Jewish institutions often struggle to create and shape communities in which most of their nominal members actually want to participate regularly. They don’t have difficulty attracting members who share their liberal values, wish to be connected to Jewish life, and are glad to have temples they can attend for life-cycle events and high holidays. God may bring them to the temple. If so, it is a universal God whose worship can be accomplished as well through supporting liberal social causes as through worship; better, even, since the Progressive God cares much more about justice and the repair of the world than about ritual or prayer. Jewish civilization may bring them to the temple. If so, however, that civilization is unlikely to be sufficiently compelling to keep them strongly connected without the more comprehensive set of rituals and practices that come with Traditionalism and are practiced by Evolutionists as well.
PROGRESSIVISM AND SPIRITUALITY
That leaves the option of a Progressive Judaism infused with deep and powerful spirituality, the kind the Havurah movement and its successor, Jewish Renewal, have aimed to create. Jews have long sought after this kind of spiritual experience. Hasidism came into existence precisely to infuse traditional Jewish life with transcendent spiritual experience and meaning. The Havurah movement self-consciously drew on some elements of Hasidism, including its emphasis on melody and song as direct routes to religious experience. Neo-Hasidism does the same, drawing on popular mysticism alongside music.23 In recent decades, Hasidic mysticism has influenced some Progressive rabbis. I recently heard Menachem Mendel of Kotzk (1787–1859), known as the Kotzker Rebbe, invoked skillfully under a huppah in a field in Jackson, Wyoming, to explain the breaking of the glass at a Jewish wedding (“There is nothing so whole as a broken heart”).
Today, however, spiritualized Progressive Jewish life outside the temple tends to cluster around thinkers and leaders who openly draw on non-Jewish, Eastern spiritual traditions that are popular in the contemporary West. There is the Jewish Buddhist (lovingly nicknamed the JewBu) and the Jew interested in Hindu yogic and meditative practice (the HinJew). Many of these Jews are also interested in Jewish mysticism, a set of traditions that evolved in complex relation with other mysticisms, including Christian mysticism and Sufi Islam (itself influenced by South Asian mysticisms). Drawing on such parallel traditions as well as on Kabbalah, the scholar-practitioner-mystic Rabbi Jay Michaelson defines what he calls a “nondual” version of Jewish mysticism this way: “The deepest secret is that, despite appearances, all things, and all of us, are like ripples on a single pond, motes of a single sunbeam, the letters of a single word. The true reality of our existence is Ein-Sof, infinite.” From this it follows that “ultimately, everything is one—or in theistic language, we are all God.”24 A person who believes in this way may certainly be Progressive, believing in spiritual truths that are divine, eternal, and closely matched with human dignity, equality, and freedom.
One might expect that Kabbalah, in a form like the one Michaelson captures in his beautiful book Everything Is God (2009), would become a powerful infusing force in Progressive Jewish thought and life. Americans raised in nearly all religious denominations—or none—increasingly identify as “spiritual” and seek what we ordinarily think of as religious experience through exposure to popular versions of meditative Buddhism, Hinduism, and other New Age spiritualities. Jews are no different. In fact, Jews have been disproportionately influential in bringing Buddhism and Hinduism into American spiritual life. And young Israelis who travel to South Asia in large numbers after their army service have brought Indian meditative practices into Israeli cultural and religious experience.
Somehow, despite the prominence in the 2000s of a popular Hollywood-focused Kabbalah community (some would say a near-cult), distinctively Jewish mystical tradition has not yet become part of mainstream Progressive Jewish institutions. Part of the explanation may be generational: older Jews who dominate Progressive Jewish institutions may not be as drawn to New Age spirituality as younger Jews are. Perhaps the generational dynamic is more subtle: those older Jews who were drawn to Buddhism and Hinduism self-consciously separated themselves from institutional Jewish life, leaving behind (and in charge) those Progressive Jews who were more focused on social justice and less on inward spiritual experience. Or maybe those Jews who favor institutional Progressivism are simply not drawn to mystical experience.25
The Jewish Renewal movement, heir to the Havurah movement, has a small number of congregational adherents, such as Romemu and Congregation Beth Elohim in New York. These congregations display undoubted features of Kabbalistic Progressive community. Yet as a sociological matter, mystical Jewish spirituality does not at present play a major role in formal Progressive Jewish life. To see a resurgent Jewish spirituality linked to liberal values, one must look elsewhere: to a conception of Jewishness that seeks to evolve the tradition without turning into pure Progressivism.