WITHOUT MILAH AND TEVILAH

conclusion: Conversion without milah is theoretically correct; nevertheless do not do it on your own.

The Pittsburgh Platform more than any other document of our Reform past causes a dilemma for us. We read it today with a deep sense of irony; we cannot speak of its positive optimism without putting it in quotation marks. Its total rejection of Jewish national consciousness is a scandal to us, and we normally speak of it only within an apologetic framework. On the other hand, it contains the ideas that we describe as normative in Reform: Acceptance of the science and knowledge of the modern world, the acceptance of all human experience, the insistence on understanding the Jewish experience as a part of the human story. It came, as Michael Meyer has described it’, at a moment of challenge for Reform. On one side was Felix Adler and Ethical Culture offering a religion for the new age, an ethical faith for a common humanity, and on the other was a newly energized Conservative Judaism which accepted the premise of Reform, but refused to leave the anchor of law. Kaufman Kohler, as Einhorn’s heir and successor in New York , had to respond to both Adler and Alexander Kohut , the newly arrived champion of a more traditional approach to Judaism .

It was the Pittsburgh Platform which made Reform Judaism a separate movement. After Pittsburgh , it was no longer possible to minimize the matters that separated the reformers and the conservatives. This represented the intellectual and practical achievement of Kohler. It also marked a reconciliation between Kohler and Wise. The sharp antagonism between East and West was lessened as Kohlers platform came to define Reform. The Philadelphia Conference had used the German language; 1n Pittsburgh they spoke English . It did not look back at German Bildung as the ideal; it spoke in the language of American religious liberalism.'® In that way, it was a victory for Wises point of view although he accepted it with reservations.

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