Jewish Law Responds to American Law
The second anecdote is from my own personal experience when I was a student at HUC. It was the early 1950's and a major concern of a part of the student body was in the burgeoning civil rights movement. On one occasion two of us joined two or three black members of CORE and went to Fountain Square to a segregated luncheon restaurant diner and we sat at the counter. By previous agreement we rabbinic students wore kippot as we wished to be identified as Jews . My companion sat at the counter and ordered a BLT. It is interesting to note, after the passage of over four decades, that I still recall that it was one of the black companions at that“sit-in” that commented on the incongruity of a kippah accompanied by an appetite for hazer.
My third remembrance is a more recent one. We have friends in Toledo who belong to the Conservative movement and who are, in their own manner of practice, rather traditional. They do, however, ride to Synagogue . We invited them to have Shabbat lunch with us and they refused. They would not interrupt the return journey to their home for any reason.
Whatever our personal attitude toward Jewish practice and religious observances, these disparate examples make the point, I hope, that individuals of all movements and groups in Jewish life are groping to balance, in some measure, the two dynamic poles of our existence. Much like the electrodynamic tow of the North and South Poles of our globe, our Judaism and our modernity often tug at us from the opposite extremes of our existence.’ The questions that tumble one upon the other are disturbing. The more difficult answers, to those questions, most likely more difficult because we are in a period of intense social flux, will help us define ourselves as Jews in the modern world?;
The questions I raise clearly will reflect my own position and predilections as a Reform Jew. Most certainly, they will be greatly influenced by my inclinations which are deeply concerned that essential Jewish matters should be guided, if not by, halakhah, by a halakhic process. There are more traditional definitions of halakhah.? 1 freely admit, with a small amount of discomfort, although I use the word halakhah, 1 do not use it in a Sense, that establishes absolute authority. Rather, I see halakhah as representing a Jewishly particular legal process, which has a dynamic, which does, or perhaps more properly, can respond to changes m society. Halakhah is a process which affords to both individuals and society the freedom and the mechanisms to develop new