112 Joan S. Friedman
Prayer Book. During the war years he also served as chairman of the CCAR Emergency Committee on Placement, which worked to provide chaplains for the military while not denying the people at home some rabbinic presence,’ and as chairman of the Responsa Committee of the Jewish Welfare Board's Committee on Army and Navy Religious Activities,* which resolved questions of Jewish practice for the military.
In 1944, however, Freehof published a volume, which, in retrospect, must be seen as the theoretical and practical foundation for what would become his life’s crowning achievement: the Reform responsa. This work, to which he added a second volume in 1952, was titled Reform Jewish Practice and its Rabbinic Background. Its“chief purpose,” as he stated in the introduction, was“to describe present-day Reform Jewish practices and the traditional rabbinic laws from which they are derived.”
It was a work without precedent. Other giants of Reform scholarship had produced essays and responsa on individual questions, of course, but no one had written such a systematic survey. The body of the work displays Freehof ’s textual erudition and confirms his emergence as the successor to Kaufmann Kohler and especially Jacob Z. Lauterbach, both of whose responsa he cites repeatedly. But Freehof goes further than Kohler or Lauterbach by presenting in his introduction an original theory concerning the relationship of Reform Judaism to traditional Jewish law. It is his desire to demonstrate not only that specific Reform practices are rooted in traditional practices, but that the very process by which Reform Judaism has developed its distinctive practice is itself grounded in—indeed, identical to—the actual process by which Jewish practice has always developed.
Since Judaism has always been a religion in which“deed” came first, changes in Jewish practice are also“religious revolutions,” according to Freehof. ° The destruction of the Temple in the year 70 C.E. and the subsequent growth of the Diaspora occasioned two such revolutions in ancient times.” At these times, Jewish law required massive readjustment. But the law itself was incapable of such readjustment because without the Sanhedrin,” there was no way for Jewish law to have the requisite flexibility. Thus problems such as the agunah remain unsolvable in Jewish law. Whatever flexibility and adaptability were present in the past in Jewish law was due to the“creative power” of the people, not the rabbis. Freehof identifies this creative power as minhag,