approach of mishpat ivri are irrelevant, as are the historical realities that mitigated for or against the existence of a functioning Jewish legal system beyond the realm of issur.
To be sure, he realized that there are problems with such an approach, chief among them the vexing question of Shabbat . He certainly did not want to say that the fact that Reform Jews largely ignore Shabbat means that the ongoing process of minhag has eliminated the day of rest from Judaism, though in print its absence is merely“unfortunate.” But in truth, his collapse of the entire halakhic system into the amorphous category of minhag/ practice leaves him no consistent way to criticize that nonobservance. For Freehof , vox populi may not be vox dei, since “ceremonies” are not in any case divinely ordained,” but essentially, Jewish practice is whatever Jewish people want to practice at any given historical juncture.®!
Conclusion
Freehof ’s Introduction to Reform Jewish Practice employs halakhic sources to justify an argument which is not halakhic but ideological. Freehof understands Reform Judaism to be, as a result of the Emancipation, the successor to Orthodoxy . Its succession is demonstrated and legitimated through the concept of minhag, a halakhic concept which Freehof tacitly redefines in order to equate it with what he labels Reform“practice.” However, this equation is flawed, as is his historical analysis, rendering his entire approach problematic.; Postscript:In his Introduction to Reform Jewish Practice Freehof wrote,“Reform Jewish practice is not fixed. It is still changing. But by this time it has fairly well crystallized. It has arrived for the present at least at a definite form....[A]ll the Reform practices together form a fairly harmonious unity 2" This passage reflects the essential unity of form which still marked Reform Judaism at mid-century. When that status quo began, however, to change in subsequent decades—id est, when the process of minhag, as Freehof had defined it, threatened to undermine the practice he regarded as normative, his response was not always positive. He was no longer as open to“popular creativity.” Although in his published work he struggled toward a consistent accommodation to the ongoing process of minhag within