reform 477
Hence, for instance, his interpretation of a puzzling statement in the
Talmud that ‘when plague [strikes a] town, a man should not walk in
the middle of the road, because the Angel of Death walks in the
middle of the road, for since he is authorized [to strike], he walks boldly.
When there is peace in town, do not walk at the side of the road, for
since the Angel of Death is not authorized [to strike], he conceals him-
self [at the side] as he walks’:
The violence which exterminates: there is no radical difference between
peace and war, between war and holocaust ... no radical difference
between peace and Auschwitz ... Evil surpasses human responsibility and
leaves not a corner intact where reason could collect itself. But perhaps
this thesis is precisely a call to man’s infinite responsibility ...Levinas was widely recognized in France as a major philosopher, and he
was lauded by some French Jews for having encouraged an intellectual
‘return to Judaism’, but it is not clear that his writings have in fact been
used by many Jews to help to understand their Judaism rather than to
get to grips with the complexity of his thought for its own sake.^26
Discourse about the significance of the Holocaust and the State of
Israel has acquired a greater importance in the lives of Reform Jews in
the United States than the more abstract theology of the German theo-
logians of the first half of the twentieth century, but the major issues
which preoccupy Reform congregations have continued to emerge less
from theology than from changes within wider American society. So, for
instance, the principle that women have full equality in synagogue ritual
and government led eventually to the ordination of a woman rabbi,
Sally J. Priesand, in 1972, and in more recent decades to the ordination
of gay and lesbian Jews. Ordination of a woman rabbi had already in
fact occurred in Germany, where Regina Jonas, who had studied at the
Hochschule in Berlin, was ordained by the Union of Liberal Rabbis in
December 1935, an ordination endorsed by Leo Baeck in February
1942, but despite serving briefly as a rabbi before being taken away to
Theresienstadt, she made little impact on the development of Reform
and Liberal Jewry because of her untimely death in Auschwitz at the
end of 1944.^27
The decision of American Reform Jews in 1983 to recognize as Jew-
ish, without any conversion process, the child of a Jewish father and a
non- Jewish mother if the child wishes to be Jewish, has opened the way
for outreach to the non- Jewish partners of Reform Jews. The National
Jewish Population Survey in 2000 found that nearly 40 per cent of those