7 - Reform

Summary

MY OWN BACKGROUND was nominally Orthodox so far as my parents and family were concerned, but ultra-Orthodox during my studies in the yeshiva. In those days Reform possessed not the slightest allure. My parents, like the majority of Jews in Manchester, tended to view the Reform movement with complete indifference. They knew that there was a Reform synagogue in the city, frequented mainly by Anglicized Jews of German origin, but which they themselves would have had as little thought of joining as they would have of not keeping a kosher home. The teachers at the yeshiva hardly ever bothered even to attack Reform Judaism, which was never seen as presenting any kind of a challenge. This was in any event quite natural for a yeshiva on the Lithuanian pattern, since no Reform movement had arisen in Lithuania.

There was only one occasion when the rosh yeshivah, Rabbi Moshe Yitshak Segal, mentioned Reform Judaism to me. I had been engaged to preach in Southport over Yom Kippur. Preaching was new to me, so I asked the rosh yeshivah to give me a suitable topic on which to talk. He referred me to the talmudic passage (H. ullin 91a) which deals with the mysterious visitor who wrestled with Jacob (Gen. 32: 25). This ‘man’, the Talmud opines, was none other than the guardian angel of Esau. There are two opinions as to the form the angel took when he fought with Jacob, raising dust which reached to Heaven. According to one opinion the angel appeared to Jacob in the guise of a heathen, but according to another opinion, he appeared in the guise of a scholar, a talmid h. akham. The rosh yeshivah interpreted the raising of the dust to Heaven to mean that when a Jew wrestles with angelic forces the outcome of the struggle has an effect on his progress in heavenly matters. At times these forces appear as ‘heathens’, as those totally opposed to Judaism, and these are easily vanquished since a sincere Jew will always refuse to be diverted from a clearly perceived truth. The danger is present when these forces appear in the guise of talmudic scholars, when, as with Reform Judaism, they seek to persuade the loyal Jew that Judaism is best served when modernist tendencies are seen part of the faith's demands in the contemporary world.