Reform Judaism for Teachers module - Touro Synagogue

Introduction
Lesson #1
How Our Past Affects our Future
This lesson introduces participants to three pivotal time periods in Jewish
history. Two of these—the era of Rabbinic Judaism (70‐500 C.E.) and the Haskalah, or
Jewish Enlightenment (1650‐1850) — greatly influenced the development of Reform
Judaism. The third period, the Holocaust (1939‐1945), had a profound impact on key
aspects of the Movement’s philosophy.
Understanding the events that have shaped our Movement in the past can be
extremely helpful in giving students a context within which to evaluate our choices as
we move forward in history. The emergence of Rabbinic Judaism and the introduction of
the Talmud that followed the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem (70 C.E.)
provided a model for reinterpreting text to reflect the circumstances of the time. During
this period, our Sages and scholars worked to record both oral and written laws and
commentaries, initiating a process that in some respects continues to this day.
The Enlightenment, or Haskalah, brought about an age of struggle and
uncertainty as Jews began to search for new ways to reconcile living in the modern
world with their Jewish identity. The Enlightenment followed a period of major anti‐
Semitic persecutions, including the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and the
Expulsions. The ideals of the Enlightenment, most notably embodied in the credo
espoused in The French Revolution (“liberty, equality, fraternity”) called for elimination
of the different treatment of people based upon their religion or social background. This
opened a world of choice for Jews, many of whom abandoned Judaism in order to
assimilate into the larger European culture.
Unfortunately, however, the horrors of the Holocaust followed the
Enlightenment only one or two centuries later, forcing even the most liberal of Jews to
face the harsh reality that a universalistic perspective does not necessarily mean full
acceptance. Rabbi Eugene B. Borowitz describes the shift in Reform Jewish thinking that
Union for Reform Judaism-Department of Lifelong Jewish Learning
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