Reform Jews in Canada are being pulled in two directions.
There is, on the one hand, the grim reality of the world’s only Jewish state visiting famine and starvation, death and destruction, upon Gaza and its people. For nearly two years, Israel has been defaming and assassinating journalists, maiming and murdering civilians scrambling for humanitarian aid, and blocking food and medical supplies from reaching the people who need them most. Israel has ostensibly done so in an effort to rid the world of Hamas. But as the atrocities accumulate along with the the body count—more than 60,000 Palestinians dead and 154,000 wounded when we write this—it has become increasingly clear to an increasingly incredulous world that the real objective of Israel’s military campaign is to rid the world of Gaza and its Palestinian inhabitants: clearing the way for Israeli settlement of the besieged enclave, perhaps; committing genocide, regardless.
But then there is, on the other hand, the far more measured assessments of the war being provided by Canada’s Reform Jewish leadership. “We stand with Israel,” our movement’s Canadian website proudly proclaims; and Israeli flags have been placed in positions of prominence in synagogues where previously there have been none. Rabbis use their pulpits to offer prayers for the hostages held by Hamas; yet the corresponding concern for Palestinian suffering somehow always includes dog whistles to the movement’s more hawkish benefactors that Hamas, not Israel, bears ultimate responsibility for the starvation and death that have enveloped Gaza these past nearly-two years.
Every meaningful effort to rein in the Israeli war machine and find a long-term resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been formally rebuked by the Reform movement’s Canadian leadership: be that Canada’s call at the United Nations, in late 2023, for a ceasefire; or the International Court of Justice’s finding, in January 2024, that Israel’s assault on Gaza plausibly meets the criteria to be classified as a genocide; or the Government of Canada’s move, in March 2024, to restrict arms exports to Israel.
As our movement’s leaders have been quick to cast North American Jews as the real victims of the war and dissenters like us as problem children to be re-educated, all the while seeking to obstruct substantive efforts to bring even short-term peace to Gaza, it has become increasingly difficult for us to remain within Reform spaces as progressively minded Jews.
We know we are not alone in feeling this way.
Is it that the leaders who embody our movement’s progressive values cannot see with clarity the horrors that Israel’s military is inflicting on Palestinians? Or is it that these Reform leaders have simply not shared our values all along?
Do we progressives feel betrayed by our institutions, as one rabbi asked us? Indeed, have those institutions simply been lying to us all along, as one disaffected past-synagogue board executive suggested to us?
And, regardless, what are we supposed to do going forward?
Reform Jewish values are progressive values
Reform Judaism is founded on the rejection of Zionism and the embrace of social justice.
Although the movement came to prominence as an organized denomination largely in the United States, its roots are in German Jewry.
In 1818, a group of Jews in Hamburg inaugurated what would be the first Reform synagogue. Called the “Hamburg Temple,” the synagogue was named to make a theological point: Germany, rather than Zion (Jerusalem), was to be the locus of these Jews’ common life. The liturgical practices of the early Reform movement reflected this. Their prayer book did away with or substantially changed the traditional prayers for the coming of the Messiah, the Jewish return to Zion, and the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem.
The object of Reform Judaism’s reforms has always been to modernize Jewish faith and practice. Accordingly, the movement has long permitted, and at times even advocated for, the abandonment of elements of Jewish ritual and law: avoiding all forms of work on the Sabbath day of rest and keeping a strict Kosher diet, to note just two prominent examples.
When the movement spread to, and consolidated within, the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was clear to the rabbis leading it that Judaism needed to rid itself of any nationalistic drive to constitute a Jewish state. In the hugely influential “Pittsburgh Platform” of 1885, which set out the classic principles of Reform Judaism, many of the movement’s American rabbis declared that:
We recognize, in the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellect, the approaching of the realization of Israel’s great Messianic hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice, and peace among all men. We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.
The only Jewish laws left that are “binding”, they continue, are “its moral laws”. To “regulate the relations between rich and poor, we deem it our duty to participate in the great task of modern times, to solve, on the basis of justice and righteousness, the problems presented by the contrasts and evils of the present organization of society.” In other words, it should be the Reform Jewish task to dismantle the great structures of inequality and oppression, be it in Canada or, perhaps even more so, in Israel-Palestine.
Today, the Reform movement in North America is active in social-justice advocacy for the rights of immigrants, people needing abortions, and 2SLGBTQ+ persons; and, in the United States particularly, against gun violence. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Reform synagogues enacted some of the clearest restrictions on social gatherings to limit the spread of disease: the traditional Jewish law of Pikuach Nefesh—which stipulates that any Jewish commandment must be broken if doing so is required to save a human life—became a modern ethical principle grounded in scientific evidence. So, too, is the adoption of climate scientific consensus culminating in the Reform movement promoting divestment from fossil fuels among other actions.
But there remains a substantial disconnect between Reform Judaism’s early principles and current aspirations, on the one hand, and the movement’s willingness to go along with the destruction of Palestinians, on the other.
The ongoing betrayal of Jewish progressivism
In the century-and-a-half since the Pittsburgh Platform was formulated, the Reform movement has substantially reversed its early anti-Zionism.
The “Centenary Perspective,” adopted by the Central Conference of American Rabbis in 1976, is a case in point. The document speaks of the “privileged” time in which modern Jews now live: “one in which a third Jewish commonwealth has been established in our people’s ancient homeland.” Reform Jews “have both a stake and a responsibility in building the State of Israel,” the rabbis there went on to say, “assuring its security, and defining its Jewish character.”
Was this a betrayal of the movement’s first principles, or a natural step in Reform Judaism’s ongoing response to a changing world?
One answer is to be found in the increasingly more severe marginalization of anti- or non-Zionist or human rights-focused voices within the movement. Such voices see the “security” and “Jewish character” in Israeli state-building as less than innocuous. The state-building project has, after all, been used to justify anti-Palestinian oppression: from the mass displacement of Palestinians in 1948, to settlement building, and even to torture and incarceration without trial. Such voices draw on expert consensus in the field of human rights just as other voices draw on expert consensus when speaking out about the spread of COVID or the climate crisis.
Reform activists have long had to organize outside of the movement’s existing institutions in order to fight for Palestinian human rights.
In the mid-twentieth century, the American Council for Judaism, led by disaffected Reform rabbis, became the prominent anti-Zionist Jewish organization in the United States. Israeli Reform Rabbi Arik Ascherman told us that he helped found Rabbis for Human Rights because of challenges doing the work of on-the-ground solidarity with Palestinians in the Occupied Territories from within formal denominational spaces. Ascherman now leads Torat Tzedek, seeking Israeli and diaspora Jews to volunteer their “protective presence” to Palestinians in some of the most highly targeted West Bank communities.
Ascherman spoke to Reform Jews in Canada in the days after the 7 October, 2023 attacks, but it was via the grassroots initiative Reform Jews for Human Rights–not via official Reform channels. That organization emerged in Spring 2021 out of a failed effort on the part of its organizers to dialogue with Canada’s national Reform leadership about establishing programming and advocacy that clearly centered Palestinian human rights. After months of delays, the one outcome of those efforts was a talk featuring Michael Marmur, a Reform rabbi who then had come to lead Rabbis for Human Rights, together with Asher Kirchner, an Edmonton Reform synagogue board member who had spent months volunteering in the Masafer Yatta region of the West Bank. First Kirchner was disinvited for his use of the term “apartheid” in a blog post, and then the event simply never happened.
Reform Jews for Human Rights has since had to host its own awareness events and lead its own advocacy campaigns to fill the gaps left by denominational institutions. When the organization solicited support for a letter of Jewish solidarity in protest of Canada’s roll-out of the Temporary Resident Visa Program for Gazans, it looked for signatories from each Reform institution, rabbi, and congregation in Canada. Only one Reform rabbi signed on.
The response received from another Reform rabbi is illustrative of the contradiction within the discourse of the Reform movement’s leadership, which promises justice for all but Palestinians. The rabbi indicated they were “distraught” to receive the invitation, and would not feel “comfortable” signing it, writing:
If you are a Jewish reform organization, it would be wise of you to recall the known Talmudic verse, “The poor of your own town have priority” (Baba Metzia 71a). In these trying times, with antisemitism on the rise, Jewish people being attacked worldwide, and our homeland facing an existential threat, it is more important than ever to direct our focus, energies, and resources toward our own community first. This should take precedent over supporting those who wish to destroy us and consistently seek to delegitimize and attack us on every level.
Perhaps the most insidious feature of Reform Judaism’s seeming embrace of military nationalism to the exclusion of all criticism, is the movement’s ability to assimilate Israeli war crimes into its social-justice ethic.
We heard one rabbi give a sermon to this effect. Starvation in Gaza is an atrocity and Israel should do more to help, the rabbi declared; it even would amount to genocide if Israel was the responsible party, which it is not.
In saying all this, of course, the rabbi failed to realize that an actual academic understanding of genocide leaves no room for obfuscation. Professor Omer Bartov of Brown University explains the genocide being carried out in Gaza:
I believe the goal was – and remains today – to force the population to leave the [Gaza] Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group.
The official Reform Zionist organization, ARZA Canada, has sought votes from among Reform congregants for its slate of candidates to the World Zionist Congress, in part, on a platform promoting a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and Palestinians. Yet it has since come out in opposition to the Carney government’s stated plans to recognize a Palestinian state, adopting the same stale talking points of successive Israeli governments that such a state has to be negotiated. All the while, of course, Israel continues to expand its settlements to render a viable Palestinian state impossible.
For those who lead the Reform movement’s institutions, there is a “both sides” quality to Israel’s ongoing conflict with the Palestinian people. Every criticism of Israel’s actions must, accordingly, be tempered with a “yes, but.” Yes, Israel is murdering civilians en masse, but then Hamas did the same thing on 7 October, 2023, so Israel is justified. Yes, the Palestinian people deserve their own self-governing state, but at some indeterminate point in the future, not now. Yes, it is permissible to criticize the state of Israel, but not here—not in this synagogue, or during this prayer service, or at this Shabbat table. Passages from the Torah or the Talmud are thrown about to justify the prioritization of Jewish suffering; passages emphasizing universal human rights are ignored.
The result is that Israel is never criticized, not really; its genocidal assault on the Palestinian people of Gaza is never called what it is; and nothing is meaningfully done to bring justice to that war-torn land.
Reform Judaism after the horrors
It remains to be seen how the Gaza genocide will end.
However, what seems clear, now, is that Reform Judaism needs to change again if it is to survive the atrocities Israel is perpetrating in Gaza.
It is apparent, though, that we must do so largely without the support of our religious institutions.
Horror has a way of shattering our experience of the world. We participate in it, or we suffer it; and as a result we come to doubt whether the things we value most in life—including life itself—have any meaning left.
The horrors in Gaza are having this effect on many, us included. For we Jews who know that our institutions, and by extension ourselves as their members, have been and are complicit in furthering the objectives of the Israeli war machine, there is a felt sense that Jewish communal life itself is meaningless now; that the bonds of Jewish life, which should rise to the urgency of the present moment, have been shattered.
What do we do, as Reform Jews committed to universal human rights, in the aftermath of our movement’s betrayal of the Palestinian people, of us, of its early principles, and of the international human rights community?
We cannot afford not to organize.
That might look like working for change from within Jewish institutions—integrating ourselves into leadership structures in order to alter policies and perspectives. For grassroots impact, Reform Jews in the United States and Canada have launched a synagogue dues strike to pressure the movement’s institutions to break ranks with the broader Jewish institutional ecosystem that condones or obfuscates the Gaza genocide. And failing pressure from within, many others see a future in the construction of new Jewish institutions, which could eventually become big enough to contend with existing synagogues and Jewish community organizations. Jews are joining global “solidarity circles” with Palestinian and Israeli activists on the ground, financially supporting the work of building a humane future for all. The American Council for Judaism–Reform’s flagship anti-Zionist organization from decades ago–has been reborn.
As acclaimed American critic Peter Beinhart wrote back in 2010, “For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.” Zionism, to them it seems, means defending the indefensible. No greater example exists than that set by the Reform movement leadership. They just might find scores of us building new doors rather than entering theirs.
Editor’s Note: This article represents the views of the authors and not necessarily those of rabble.
Support rabble today!
We’re so glad you stopped by! Thanks for consuming rabble content this year.
rabble.ca is 100% reader and donor funded, so as an avid reader of our content, we hope you will consider gifting rabble with a donation during our summer fundraiser today.
Whether it be a one-time donation or a small monthly contribution, your support is critical to keep rabble writers producing the work you’ve come to rely on as a part of a healthy media diet.
Become a rabble rouser — donate to rabble.ca today.
Nick Seebruch, editor
