- 60- Peter J. Haas

This year was significant in other regards as well. It was at just this time that responsa began to appear in the new professional journal published by the CCAR.(35) Responsa were moving from being occasional committee reports to being part of the fare of Reform rabbinic professional reading. It was also at about this time that the Committee chair passed to Dr. Solomon Freehof . For all these reasons, then, I think we are justified in saying that the early 1950’s marks a turning point in the evolution of American Reform responsa­writing. To understand what changed and what that change might mean, we need to turn to the formal characteristics of these new-age responsa. It is to this task that we now turn.

We can sum up at least the gross formal characteristics of Reform responsa since the mid­fifties under four topics. First of all, under Freehof we see emerging the Reform equivalent, for the first time, of a poseq, that is, a rabbi who emerges as a responsa authority on the basis of his own personal qualifications, not only as the holder of an office. Second, there is an almost exponential increase in the number of Reform sheelot submitted and so in the number and themes of the resulting responsa. This is illustrated simply by the number of collections of responsa published by Dr. Freehof over the past thirty years or so: Reform Responsa(1960), Recent Reform Responsa(1963), Current Reform Responsa (1969),Modern Reform Responsa(1971). Contemporary Reform Rsponsa(1974), Reform Responsa for Our Time(1977) and New Reform Responsa(1980). In all, there is now a veritable library of Reform responsa on library shelves, dealing with a broad range of issues.

This is a far cry from the early years in which responsa of the Reform movement were