Can Reform Judaism get its mojo back?

Reform Judaism is the largest movement in American Jewry. The Union for Reform Judaism represents 900 congregations with 1.5 million members.

It recently chose a dynamic new president, Richard Jacobs. True, Jacobs’ election caused an uproar: he drew criticism from the right for his support of J Street and the New Israel Fund, and charges from the left that the people he brought to URJ did not include enough women.

Still, the fact that a URJ leadership change could stir such controversy is a sign that people care about the movement’s future.

But the Reform movement faces problems far deeper than the distractions of political correctness and ideological minefields. The recent UJA-Federation study of the New York area’s Jewish population provides a sense of where those problems lie.

The number of Reform Jews in New York has declined both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the Jewish community. A startling 74 percent of Jewish children in New York can be identified as Orthodox.

New York’s trends are apparent in other population centers as well, especially the decline in synagogue affiliation and the growing numbers of interfaith families.

The American Jewish community as a whole cannot survive if there is no non-Orthodox movement to which American Jews can belong; in other words, survival depends on a strong Reform movement.

But in light of current trends, is that possible? Some have already answered in the negative.

In 2009, Rabbi Norman Lamm, chancellor of Yeshiva University, declared, “We will soon say Kaddish for the Reform and Conservative movements.”

Even within the Reform movement, Rabbi Dana Evan Kaplan recently wrote that without a serious revision in basic structure and heightened expectations of Jewish living, Reform Judaism is doomed.

I am not so pessimistic. But, if the survival of a strong Reform movement is indeed possible, what will it require?

The first indicator of the movement’s problem — the decline in synagogue affiliation — is not hard to understand. Increasingly, American Jews simply choose not to join synagogues. People see synagogues as too expensive, boring, or irrelevant.

This trend is most pronounced in precisely those parts of our country, like the West and Southwest, where the Jewish population is growing most rapidly. The recent economic downturn has merely accelerated an already-existing trend.

Thus, if Reform Judaism is to survive, the primary task of its leaders is to focus steadily on promoting synagogue affiliation. Synagogue membership is the citizenship card of Jewish life.

It provides the resources needed to create places in which the growing intermarried population can raise Jewish children and Jewish learning can be transmitted to the vast majority of Jewish children, those who do not attend Jewish day schools.

Synagogue membership provides funding for the URJ and social capital for other Jewish organizations.

This task does not require us to “re-imagine” synagogues or transform the ways in which they are funded; the challenge must be not redefined but met.

Reform synagogues simply need to do what synagogues have done for the last 2,500 years: serve as centers of Jewish living and community. And Reform synagogues, in particular, must maintain an open door for anyone who wishes to walk through it.

But if that is the central task, are Reform leaders up to it? The movement needs high-quality clergy, of course; it also needs committed lay leaders.

The Reform movement was built on the basis of lay-rabbinic partnerships. We need to attract strong dynamic lay leaders who see and feel that the future of the Jewish people rests in their hands and not just in those of professionals.

Moreover, if lay leadership is stronger, rabbis will be freed to do what they are most qualified to do: articulating a compelling case for Jewish meaning in 21st-century America.

Despite American Jews’ extensive achievements in secular learning, they have produced no significant Jewish theology since Mordecai Kaplan’s 1935 “Judaism as a Civilization.”

Judaism needs a view of God incorporating advances in neuroscience, an understanding of Jewish identity that includes the many interfaith families who raise Jewish children while incorporating references to other faiths, and an understanding of Zionism that goes beyond boilerplate affirmation.

The job is fully large enough to occupy the time and energies of the Reform rabbinate; strong lay leadership will give Reform rabbis a better chance to succeed at it.

In 1969, Rabbi Richard Levy, later to become president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, wrote that the American Reform synagogue has “defaulted” on all three of its traditional functions: building community, nurturing study, and engaging in meaningful worship.

Since he wrote, the default has only deepened. If it is not addressed now, there may be no future opportunity for repair.

Former Milwaukeean Rabbi Evan Moffic is the spiritual leader of Reform Congregation Solel in Highland Park, Illinois. This article was first published by Jewish Ideas Daily (www.jewishideasdaily.com) and is reprinted with permission.