Shofar Nisan/Iyar 5770
Jewish Family Congregation www.jewishfamilycongregation.org
April 2010
From the Rabbi’s Desk When I was a kid growing up in Winnipeg, Canada, there was no Reform congregation in the city. In fact, there were some big Reform congregations in Toronto and Montreal, but none in the west. In my world, Reform was looked down on, considered almost not Jewish. I was, as a young adult, part of a group that established Temple Shalom in Winnipeg, about 44 years ago, because we were disgusted by the hypocrisy of some of the people leading the local Conservative congregations at that time, people who looked down on Reform Judaism for its leniency but in their own personal lives, actually behaved like Reform Jews. These people did not follow the dietary laws or the restrictions on driving and shopping on Shabbat that Conservative Judaism requires (and which Reform does not impose). They prayed exclusively in Hebrew, though they did not understand the language, and considered the Reform prayerbook pathetic, because, at the time, it was primarily in English. They mocked Reform Judaism because, at the time, it actively discouraged the wearing of kippot and tallitot. Some of the people who were very vocal in their rejection of Reform Judaism were my own family. Nonetheless, a small group of us began meeting in each other’s homes, just as the original reformers in Germany did, about 200 years ago. The group grew slowly, and finally got to be too large to hold services in homes, so we rented space. After a while, we hired a part-time rabbi, too. Our High Holy Days services drew substantial crowds. But our membership came mostly from people who were not born and raised in Winnipeg; people from eastern Canada or from the United States, who had been exposed to Reform Judaism before, became the core of our temple. As far as I know, even now, Winnipeg’s Reform congregation has trouble recruiting members because of the community’s bias against liberal Judaism, though Reform has changed in many ways since Temple Shalom began. From the Rabbi’s Desk The President’s Message Service Schedule Oneg Schedule Early Childhood Center The Religious School Social Action Committee JFCAdults
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Reform Judaism came into existence as a response to the way Jewish religious practice had ossified over the millennia. Many prayers, poems and hymns were added to the basic prayer service, and nothing was ever taken away, so that a Shabbat morning service could take four hours. Moreover, the services were conducted exclusively in Hebrew, which most German Jews, like the majority of today’s American Jews, did not understand. There was no sermon. The men and women sat separately, and the women could not participate in the service at all. And the services were conducted without any decorum, so that they sometimes felt chaotic and unsatisfying. And there were other issues, too. When they studied the prayers, those early reformers discovered that they were praying for the restoration of the Davidic monarchy Reform has matured over the 200 years since it was begun, and how it got where we are today is an interesting story.
and the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem (which implies the return of animal sacrifice). The former put their loyalty to their homeland at risk, and the latter offended their sensibilities. Reform caught on quickly in Germany, just as Protestantism had done 200 years earlier on the same fertile intellectual turf. It was exported to the United States with the emigration of German Jews in the middle of the 19 th century. These people valued Reform Judaism because it enabled them to remain identified as Jews while blending into the mainstream of American society. They prospered in this country, and built large urban temples for their spiritual homes. They brought rabbis from “the old country,” who translated the prayerbook into English, shortened the services by eliminating repetitions and certain prayers they found meaningless, and introduced the sermon, delivered in the
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