This dependence on the German idealistic philosophical tradition is no longer so evident in Freehof . His tactic, certainly rhetorically but also substantively, is to go back to classical rabbinic responsa and adduce a Reform position from them. That is, Freehof ’s responsa present themselves as continuous not with Kant or Hegel , but with the responsa literature in general. His texts are certainly Reform in spirit, but reading them is reminiscent of reading traditional rabbinic texts once again.
We might wish briefly to speculate on the meaning of this shift. It is, of course, the case that American Reform Judaism is a different movement from German Reform. While this is self-evident, it probably does not hurt to say this occasionally. Freehof reflects in his essence the American situation, not the European one. Second, his retrieval of a virtual library of responsa material from post-Holocaust Europe provided a corpus of resources. Third, we might point to the gradual reappropriation of tradition by Reform in the post-Holocaust period. To put matters somewhat bluntly, it seemed now more appropriate to base Reform ethics on medieval rabbis than on a modern German philosopher. These reasons, among others, provide the cultural background within which Solomon Freehof ’s unique intellectual
gifts could be applied to, of(all) things, Reform responsa.
I said earlier that there were four formal characteristics of contemporary Reform responsa that I wished briefly to present. We have now mentioned three: Freehof as Reform poseq, the exponential increase in sheelot and so of Reform responsa, and the reappropriation of traditional rabbinic writings into the argument. The fourth