There is a third alternative: We must recognize that although Freehof was a prodigious scholar of the halakhah and knew its categories and its distinctions, in this introduction he is not writing as a halakhist but as a Reform ideologue. He is reading the halakhah through a Reform lens, but he confuses the reader because he does not explicitly admit this.
“Reform practice,” as Freehof candidly admits, is limited almost entirely to the realm of liturgy and ritual(primarily life cycle ritual)—areas of halakhah in which minhag historically played a crucial role. Reform Jewish Practice reflects the reality that for most Reform Jews,“Judaism ” meant(means?) going to the temple on holidays and perhaps Friday nights, and life cycle events, and no more.*’It happens that these fall within an area of halakhah in which minhag has traditionally been given an important voice. In particular, a fascination with minhag was a hallmark of the Ashkenazic rabbinic culture which produced R. Moses Isserles.!! Isserles ’ glosses to Karo’s Shulhan Arukh not only delineated the differences in halakhah between Ashkenazim and Sefardim but, as we have seen above, they painstakingly preserved and codified the customary practices of the Ashke nazim in liturgy, ritual, and daily life. In writing this book Free hof thought he was doing for twentieth century Reform Jews what Isserles had done for sixteenth century Polish Jews—using the tools of the rabbinic tradition itself to justify and validate the distinctive religious culture of a particular Jewish community. That is why the two citations from Isserles were excellent sources for him to cite.
Nevertheless, although Freehof knows and uses halakhic sources, he does not approach them from a halakhic perspective but from a classical Reform perspective in which no Jewish practice, however beloved or important, can ever rise above the level of“ceremony.”#? The essential truths of ethical monotheism are distinct from“ceremonies.”“Indispensable” and valued though the latter may be, they are only human attempts to express divinely revealed truths.*’ Thus, though the halakhic sources themselves accord very different weights to different“practices (de-oraita, de-rabbanan, halakhah le-moshe mi-sinai, halakhah, minhag, etc.) for Freehof it is all the same: Everything his Jews do is“practice” and carries equal weight, whether it is conversion without milah and tevilah, changes in the order of the weekly Torah reading, or having flowers at a funeral. Freehof can claim continuity