124 Joan S. Friedman
with tradition for Reform on the basis of the power of minhag only because he has tacitly collapsed the distinction between minhag and halakhah. It is all merely“practice” or“custom.”
For example, in describing Reform practice around the public reading of the Torah , Freehof uses the terms“custom” or“customary” to refer to the traditional annual and triennial cycles, the modern Reform use of a combination of the two, the practice of calling up two members of the congregation to unroll and roll up the Torah , raising the Torah , reading the Haftarah, and calling a certain number of men to the Torah on Sabbaths and other days.* These matters fall within the realm of liturgical and ritual practice, the area of greatest flexibility with regard to minhag, yet even so, not everything is reducible to minhag from the point of view of the halakhah. Calling seven to the Torah on Shabbat morning is mandated by the Mishnah without discussion or alternative, and is properly understood as law, not mere custom.
Realizing that Freehof is writing about halakhah through a classical Reform perspective also explains why, in a book which is essentially a sefer minhagim, he can include without further distinction questions of issur such as the rejection of special marriage laws relating to kohanim,*> conversion without milah or tevilah,*® elimination of“legal” aspects of Jewish marriage in favor of civil guarantees and replacing the ketubah with“an ethical homily,”#” replacement of the get with civil divorce** attendance by kohanim at funerals, and the permissibility of cremation.” From a halakhic perspective none of these is subject to change on the basis of minhag.
One other tacit assumption, also a hallmark of the classical Reform era, also undergirds Freehof’s thought: the conviction that Orthodoxy is a system of the past, that it is inevitably doomed to disappear in the modern world, and that Reform Judaism is the next stage of Judaism 's evolution and the form in which it will survive into the future. Freehof’s invocation of the post 1970 changes in Judaism as precedent for contemporary changes initiated by Reformers, his assertion that traditional practice was for a world that has now completely disappeared, his description of Orthodoxy as“an ideal, an heroic self-discipline”—honored more in the breach than the observance’: all these reflect the certainty that Reform would eventually become the Judaism of all religious Jews , not merely one movement among several. In this context the following passage becomes