Reform Judaism Links Its Future to Change : Religion: The movement has gained popularity by moving with the times. But it still grapples with fundamental questions.

God may have cast the 10 Commandments in tablets of stone, but a religion that fails to change, so far as the nation’s leading rabbi in Reform Judaism is concerned, is destined to disappear.

And tumultuous change--from ordaining women to the rabbinate to affirming the equality of gays in synagogues--has been a hallmark of Rabbi Alexander M. Schindler’s 22-year presidency of the Reform movement in the United States.

“In a very real sense we have altered the mindscape of not just the Reform movement, but of the entire American Jewish community,” said Schindler, one of the most prominent spokesmen for American Judaism and a confidant of the late Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

But as Schindler begins his final year as president the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, he said the big question--which has long haunted Jews--still remains:

“Will our grandchildren be Jewish?”

There is reason for concern. In the past 30 years, the rate of interfaith marriage among Jews has grown more than fivefold.

Before 1965, only 10% of Jews married outside their faith, according to Pini Herman, research coordinator for the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles. From 1965 through 1974, the percentage of Jews marrying non-Jews rose to 25%, and from 1975 through 1984 it jumped to 44%.

From 1985 through 1990--the latest figures available--52% of Jews were marrying outside their faith, Herman said. The statistics were gathered by the National Jewish Population Survey.

The trend toward interfaith marriages and the growing number of Jews unaffiliated with any synagogue or Jewish agency has led Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jews--as well as non-religious Jews--to agonize over the future of their faith and culture.

Each group has a unique approach to the problem. Orthodox from the Lubavitcher movement, for example, uphold traditional Jewish law and customs. Its members take to the streets of Brooklyn and Los Angeles like Christian evangelists to urge non-practicing Jews to return to the fold.

“The key is to expose people to their heritage. Everyone in the world is searching. All you have to do is make it available to them,” said Rabbi Baruch Y. Hecht, associate director of Habad of California, a Lubavitcher group.

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Last April, one of the world’s foremost Talmudic scholars, Orthodox Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz of Israel, implored Los Angeles Jews to welcome non-practicing Jews to their Passover Seders and to continually keep the door open for introducing Judaism’s rich cultural and religious heritage to those who have drifted away.

But more than most, Reform Judaism has altered the very landscape of Jewish faith and belief in an effort to reach out to non-Jews and make itself relevant in a secular society.

It appears to be working, Schindler said. In the face of formidable demographic and societal obstacles, the Reform movement has grown from 400 congregations in 1973 to 900 congregations with 1.3 million members--the largest denomination among American Jews. There are an estimated 5.8 million Jews in the United States.

Schindler is convinced the growth is a direct result of the Reform movement’s outreach program to non-Jews in mixed marriages and its willingness to depart from biblical teachings or Jewish tradition in light of changing circumstances and new knowledge.

“I felt we only had one of two choices,” Schindler said. “Either we could do what our forbearers did--namely mourn our children, read them out of the Jewish fold--or we could accept them [and] bring them into our synagogues in the hope that the non-Jewish partner would convert to Judaism or, at the very least, the children would be raised as Jews and share the destiny of the Jewish people.”

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Among the most controversial changes was the Reform movement’s break with the Jewish law of matrilineal descent, which holds that children may only be considered Jewish if their mother is Jewish. This can become a problem in an interfaith marriage where the father is Jewish.

In 1983, the Reform movement declared that a child could be considered Jewish when either parent was a Jew and the child was brought up as a Jew.

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“There were serious repercussions,” Schindler said, in an interview while visiting Los Angeles on a fund-raising appeal. “In Israel we were damned . . . [There] it seemed even more of a break with the Jewish tradition.

“But the fact now is that 85% of American Jewry accepts the idea,” he said. Schindler contends that 10% of Orthodox rabbis also accept the idea as a matter of “de facto,” unofficial practice, but officially have not departed from the law of matrilineal descent.

Another change during Schindler’s presidency involved a rejection of scriptural injunctions against homosexuality. Those sacred writings, he said, do not fit modern insights into human sexuality.

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Drawing a parallel, Schindler said the same scriptures also ostracized lepers. Leprosy was identified with moral turpitude. Today, we know the disease is caused by bacteria.

“The analogy is obvious,” Schindler said of homosexuality. “We’ve learned a great deal about homosexuality. It is not a matter of free choice of any lifestyle. I know a great many people who have had fearsome struggles, first of all accepting their identity. To say they are doing this willfully is just wrong,” he said.

The same tension that is found within Christian communities over the “inerrancy” of the Bible can be found among Jews.

“We obviously are not literalists to begin with,” Schindler explained. “There are passages in there which we don’t accept. There are laws in there which we simply reject because we do not believe it to be the literally revealed word of God. We believe it to be the record of many individuals over many years striving to know God and this process surely is inspired by God. But once it is not literally the word of God, you feel freer to change and freer to evaluate.”

In 1987, the denomination adopted a resolution supporting the inclusion of gays and lesbians as members of congregations. And in 1989, the Reform movement called for education urging congregants to welcome gays and lesbians as singles, couples and families.

The die may have been cast as early as 1973 when the first congregation with a special outreach to gays and lesbians, Beth Chayim Chadashim (“House of New Life”) in Los Angeles, was accepted as a member of the denomination.

Today many Reform rabbis--like their liberal counterparts in some Christian churches--bless same-sex unions, an act that would be unthinkable in biblical times and remains anathema to Orthodox Jews. However, the Reform group’s Central Conference of American Rabbis continues to debate a formal resolution endorsing the blessing of same-sex unions.

There have been other changes as well. In 1972, the Reform movement began ordaining women to the rabbinate. Among them is Schindler’s 29-year-old daughter Judith, who was ordained several weeks ago.

Not all of the changes have been greeted with equanimity, even within the Reform movement. Some have wondered if Reform is becoming “minimalist” Judaism, in which the faith’s rich tradition and religious values are being so diluted as to be unrecognizable.

Writing in the denomination’s publication, Reform Judaism, in the spring of 1991, Rabbi Mark Winer warned that the Reform movement’s willingness to accept the children of interfaith marriages “could comprise a kind of Trojan horse which dilutes the compelling character of Jewish identity.”

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Its numbers may grow, Winer said, but they “say nothing about the inner content or spiritual quality of 21st-Century North American Judaism.”

Schindler argues that Judaism has always been a dynamic, changing faith.

“We feel that knowledge has to influence our judgments,” he said. “This doesn’t mean that we discard our tradition entirely, else we would be something apart from the body Jewish.

“We enter into dialogue with tradition. It’s our obligation to do so. But once we do enter that dialogue, we accord tradition a vote but we do not accord tradition a veto.”

Today, Schindler is convinced that Reform Judaism will endure, though he hesitates to predict what the face of Judaism will be 50 years from now.

“But I do know this,” Schindler concluded. “Only a religion which changes can continue to be a source of strength for people, one which recognizes what is going on and then adapts itself to those changes.

“A religion which is dynamic will survive. A religion which is static or frozen in 17th-Century Poland is just not going to make it.”