Reform Responsa- 67 ­

we do must be grounded in the literature of our common heritage, just as was true in the early Middle Ages.

It is, of course, the notion that a concept of Reform halakhah is beginning to manifest itself in our movement that is so interesting. I think this represents an amportant stage in the re­rabbinization of Reform. The Reform movement began as a lay movement that was soon explicitly rejecting traditional rabbinic authority, as were other modernist movements such as Hassidism two generations earlier and as Zionism would two generations later. It gathered rabbinic support only gradually and has still not fully done so. But even the rabbis who gradually came to lead the movement in Germany in the 1830’s and 1840’s were hardly rabbinical in the classical sense. They were more modern academicians than anything else. In Tact, by the late nineteenth century, German Reform was still presenting itself as a kind. of universal religion: of reason, completely pushing aside its particularistic roots. The movement, especially in ethnic-conscious America has turned back the other way. There is among us a strong sense of ethnic identity, of a common history and heritage, and a commitment to take charge of our own particular destiny as a people. In this change, Reform has slowly become re-rabbinized in the sense that it is turning away from reliance on secular philosophy and turning toward its indigenous spiritual authority centered in the rabbinic office. This development, I submit, is evidenced in the new flourishing of Reform responsa, a literature which draws its lifeblood from the values, principles and rhetoric of the rabbinic estate. What is emerging, of course, in not the classical rabbinic responsa of Orthodoxy. We are in the process of creating our own modern rabbinic culture. In this process of birth, the