Reform Judaism and Same-Sex Marriage 171

come down to us. While we are liberals and while we stand ready to criticize those aspects of the tradition which can no longer function in our religious universe, we do not start our thinking by identifying the“good” with the“contemporary,” as though the latter were a litmus test of Jewish legitimacy. We do not understand ourselves as essentially modern(or post­modern) people who are ready to accept a traditional practice only to the extent that it fits into a system of religious value that is already hewn from the stone of contemporary thought. Lehefekh: we see ourselves as essentially Jewish people who are willing to introduce changes into traditional practice when this becomes necessary.” This difference in stance is a significant one: while some others begin their discussions with no great sense of commitment toward preserving tradition, we seek to validate and to incorporate traditional practice into our lives whenever we can. We assert the primacy of the particular over some abstract, universalizable notion of religious value. To use someone else’s theological language, we might call this a pref­erential option for the traditional’. What makes a practice Jew­ ish , in this view, is the very fact that we have inherited it from the Jewish past, that it has been Jewish for longer than a few days, and that this practice has a venerable record of service within the concrete life of a people that has regarded that life as an exercise in holiness. True, the tradition arose in times and within cultural contexts much different than our own, but this does not make it our enemy, something other and alien to us. When the traditional practice seems to endorse immorality or oppression, we believe that it is better to make adjustments or to find new interpretations(which more often than not already exist in the sources) than to junk the whole system. For exam­ple, if the classical conception of kiddushin involves the legal and economic subjugation of women, we would prefer to look upon our own marriage institution as a an egalitarian perush on the traditional one, in which the woman sanctifies the man in the same way as the man traditionally sanctifies the woman, rather than to declare that the time has come to invent a new institution of Jewish marriage.® For such a new institution, whatever its advantages over the old, is unavoidably and entirely a creation of our own, and not something we have inherited from the Jewish past.”

A language of text and sources. Once we acknowledge that Jew­ ish practice isa particular phenomenon, and once we value the tradition as a positive thing and the appropriate starting point for our thinking, it follows that the language we use to express our religious consciousness ought to be the language that has traditionally been used to express it. These are the texts and sources of our sacred literature, including the halakhic litera­ture, which has always occupied a central position in Jewish