religious talk. I repeat that I do not want to engage here the theological debate over the question of halakhah’s authority, or any authority, for that matter, over the individual Reform Jew [ want simply to emphasize that the very way we vocalize our approach to marriage and to all other religious issues is not through the use of grand but essentially empty slogans as bet m elohim or ve'ahavta lere’ekha kamokha,"” and not through a stance of critique whose terminology is borrowed wholesale from Kant , Hegel , Nietzsche , Marx , Freud , or Foucault Rather, our language is a traditional one; its grammar, syntax and vocabulary are the texts of those books that have served as our sources of value and argument for many centuries We read these texts, to be sure, as Reform Jews, a community that

has fully experienced and endorsed modernity. The perspec­

tives we can bring to halakhah, we immodestly assert, consti tute a vital contribution to the history of its interpretation. With all that, however, the language we use to verbalize our under­standing of religious practice is the language of text and tradi­tion. And the primary difference between us and others is that we want to speak this language and have trouble defining our work as Jewish unless we manage to speak

When you take this approach and speak this language, you tend to construct your world differently than do others. Let us take as an example the issue of kiddushin. Some Reform Jews argue for the abandonment of kiddushin as the proper designa­tion for marriage in our communities, on the grounds that we in fact abandoned that Rabbinic institution long ago. As proof for this assertion, they will cite the fact that we Reform Jews, at least in the United States , will accept a civil divorce as sufficient for remarriage. If we no longer demand a religious divorce, the argument goes, then we have already rejected the Rabbinic understanding of marriage, kiddushin as a legal-halakhic institu­tion, replete with its civil and financial connotations.'* We have transformed marriage into a spiritual and emotional union. Yet this argument by no means describes the theoretical basis on which our forbears actually decided to dispense with the requirement for gitin. As they reasoned it, divorce in Jewish tra­dition has always been a matter of civil rather than religious law; as such, since Jewish law can accept the validity of the civil actions of a non-Jewish court, a decree of divorce under the sec­ular law is valid for us according to Jewish law as well. In other words, although our predecessors initiated a far-reaching change