After facilitating a discussion on reforming Judaism with an audience of Reform Jews I felt I had a better handle on the real challenge facing contemporary Reform Judaism.
My focus was on taking the old forms of Judaism—kashrut, Shabbat, God, prayer, Torah—and reforming them: ethical consumption, play, self-realization, contemplative practice, and critical/imaginal thinking. What I found was people in no need of such reforming because they had lost interest in form altogether.
They didn’t need to remake kosher because they had no intention of ever restricting their consuming in any way other than person preference. There was no need to rethink Shabbat because they had stopped thinking about Shabbat long ago. God wasn’t taken at all seriously, and prayer was a matter of social convention and communal gathering in which the liturgy itself was irrelevant. While some in the class enjoyed Torah study they had no need to find new meanings in the text because they didn’t engage Torah as a source of meaning, but as a lesson in history.
Simply put, my passion for reforming Judaism wasn’t shared by the people with whom I hoped to reform it. While I yearn for a Judaism where old forms yield to new meanings, my students wanted a Judaism without form, or at least without any form that demanded anything from them. Their rejection of form wasn’t driven by a passion for freedom, but by a desire to be left alone. The goal isn’t to be free from constraints—they have no constraints—but to avoid any hint of constraint. But again this isn’t a drive toward freedom or anarchy, both of which I can respect; it is simply apathy. And against that we may be powerless.