forbidden, but could no longer be denied. The fundamental question of this paper is how Reform Jews might determine what acts are necessary or unnecessary, diminishing or delightful, as we try to observe the timelessness of Shabbat in our own particular time.
Twenty years after Bettan ’s responsum, the CCAR published 4 Shabbat Manual, as the culmination of the work of a Sabbath Committee under the leadership of Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut . Whereas both Bettan and Plaut are striving to make Shabbat viable for modern Reform Jews, Bettan ’s emphasis is on freeing them from traditional strictures, while Plaut ’s emphasis is on rediscovering the principles behind them. Much of this difference is attributable to the different reasons for which they are writing, but the divergence seems to have deeper roots. On the very first page of Plaut ’s guide, the loss of the“discipline” of Shabbat is lamented as“both tragic and unnecessary”; the manual itself is offered as“our beginning in the effort to recover Shabbat observance as an enhancement of Jewish life.”
Bettan had suggested that,“many of us might even today be true Sabbath observers in the essential meaning of the term, if we could but rescue the Sabbath from the host of unreasonable restrictions which mar its character and weaken its appeal to the modern mind.” From Plaut ’s vantage point, this revitalization of Shabbat does not seem to have happened:
Among large numbers of our people only a few negative Shabbat commandments are still observed. We do not have funerals or weddings on the seventh day, but otherwise there are more exceptions than observances. Of the positive commandments, equally little remains, like the lighting of the candles, a simple Kiddush, and an occasional visit to the synagogue®