selected responsa culled from 1,500 years of responsa. Finally, he published eight volumes of his own responsa between 1960 and 1990
In an address delivered in 1961, Freehof says that he received 300 questions per year.'” This means that he may have answered as many as 15,000 questions over the course of 50 years!" Be that as it may, he published 59 responsa for the Commission on Chaplaincy, 30 for the CCAR Responsa Committee(which also appear in his volumes of responsa,) and 450 of his own responsa, for a total of 539 responsa.'* This is a corpus comparable in size to many Orthodox poskim in the modern era.
Rabbi Freehof published a number of important essays and introductions in which he expresses his attitude to halakhah and explains why he wrote responsa. We shall concentrate on two such essays. In“Reform Judaism and the Legal Tradition ”, which was delivered as an address to the Association of Reform Rabbis of New York City in February 1961, Freehof explained that the halakhah is no longer viable today for three reasons:“It has the power of interpretation, but no longer has the power of takanah or legislation; it is paralyzed by the Orthodox fear of all change; and it is also inhibited by yirat hora’ah, or fear of making halakhic decisions due tO self-deprecation."
As a result of these phenomena, early reformers such as Rabb! Samuel Holdheim , who was a talmid hakham , revolted like an eighteen-year-old revolts against his parents. But now that we have achieved independence from the law, we can work our way back“to
understanding the parent form of Judaism .” In the beginning of the Reform Movement, we thought that the Bible and the Prophets, especially the Prophets, would be sufficient. But now... we arc coming to see that we cannot hope for an integrated religious personality if we are permanently alienated from fifteen hundred years of the supreme