Reform Responsa- 63 ­

characteristic, which I take as significant, is the publication of Responsa of the C.C.A.R. in 1954 and more recently of Walter Jacob ’s collection of past responsa of the CCAR in his American Reform Responsa.(36) I think these are significant because they reflect a willingness on the part of American Reform to acknowledge, preserve and make accessible its own response tradition. It signals, I believe the acceptance of writing responsa into American Reform Judaism . These collections indicate that writing responsa is now an accepted, long-standing and important part of American liberal Judaism .

Let me sum up my argument so far. We have now seen the outstanding features of Reform responsa from the publication of Noga Hatzedeq to the present day. Our review has revealed both successes and failures. We have seen the formally Orthodox material in Noga Hatzedeq prove to be sterile within Reform Judaism. At the same time we saw that the"Gutachten "-genre also failed to seen an ongoing literary tradition. On the other hand, the American style of responsa has proven to be vital and fecund. Since the point of this study is to learn about the nature of Reform halakhah, and we have chosen to do so through an examination of its characteristic literature, responsa, we must now try to draw some lessons from the evidence before us.

I think we can account for the failures of the German Reform responsa fairly easily. The Noga Hatzedeq style failed to catch because, as I said, it was too bound up with the contemporary Orthodox mode of responsa-writing, and so depended too heavily on the presuppositions that made Orthodox responsa work, presuppositions that the Reform movement was specifically dedicated to denying. The Gutachten on the other hand were