PETER KNOBEL

of the State of Israel raises the hope that a renewed halakhah can yet establish a state infused with a covenantal ethics of human worth, justice and peace.”

Finally the halakhic formalists make the rabbi-decisor the ultimate judge of what is ethical and unethical. Within the covenantal model the rabbi serves as advisor and not decisor. Our model is one of shared decision making. The final arbiter is to use Borowitz ’s rich phrase,"the Jewish autonomous self" where self, tradition and community have been allowed to interact.

Elliot Dorff , in a significant paper on the central issues raised by this paper, specifically rejects the covenantal method as a way of making halakhic decisions. He writes:

Nevertheless I think that this approach is wrong headed. My view ultimately rests upon three factors:(a) my appreciation of the strengths of a legal approach to the moral issues in life and the corresponding weakness of the suggested alternative:(b) my conviction that personal responsibility can be retained in a properly understood halakhic system; and(c) my confidence that when properly understood, legal methods can enable Jewish law to treat realities as new as contemporary medical phenomena.

At least from a Reform theological perspective, which desires to re-invest the tradition with authority, a new understanding of our reading of the texts is necessary. Only then we will be able to offer advice that is clearly derived from a coherent reading of the tradition.

While a case can be made that in Reform responsa we follow the halakhic formalist method, I wish to argue that it is the covenantal method that we implicitly use and we should consider it the normative method for Reform halakhic decisions. Its advantage is to proceed from a Reform Jewish understanding of what it means to be human and the

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