Back to Question of the Week Back to Archives Q: I have a friend in Netanya who is a convert (as am I) but she is an Orthodox Jew. She is one of the few Orthodox who addresses me as a Jew. Most, as you know, consider me non-Jewish which is extremely painful to hear. But one thing she has told me stands out in my mind and that is this: "If people, whatever branch of Judaism they belong to, don't want to or can't keep the mitzvot it would be better if they just admitted it to God INSTEAD of saying the mitzvot are no longer relevant!" So my question is why does Reform pick and choose among the mitzvot? I mean no disrespect by my question as I am a Reform Jew.
		A: The first thing to realise is that Jews and Judaism have always picked and chosen. The rabbis who wrote the Mishnah and Talmud did, and the Orthodox do too. For example, you just don't see rebellious sons being stoned to death much anymore, even though it is a commandment in the Torah (Deuteronomy 21:18-21) to do so. This is because our rabbis, may their memory be a blessing, found ways within their halachic process to make the carrying out of this "mitsvah" only a hypothetical, not a real possibility. (They accomplished this by developing extreme rules of evidence and a very limited definition of what constituted rebellion.) So the rabbis "chose" not to follow the mitsvah of stoning rebellious children (because their moral intuition, at a time later than the Torah, didn't let them believe God really wanted them to do it). Or to take a modern example, fifty years ago, it was considered a commandment by most Orthodox congregations NOT to have a bat mitsvah or anything like it for their daughters. A bat mitsvah was considered a violation of the command not to follow in the ways of the non-Jews. Today, many Orthodox synagogues have a celebration which, although it doesn't involve calling the young woman to the Torah, is called a "bat mitsvah." These Orthodox synagogues are "choosing" not to follow what half a century ago was a negative commandment. And they are "picking" a new positive commandment to observe. So the halachah, the legal system of mitsvot that the Orthodox claim to uphold, has itself always evolved and always involved picking and choosing. Of course, the Orthodox understanding is that there was an Oral Torah given to Moses on Mount Sinai along with the written Torah, and that the rabbis were and are the inheritors of that Oral Torah and that the Oral Torah is the basis of the halachic process of picking and choosing, and that the halachic process is a very limited and controlled process that was authorised by God Himself. If one didn't believe that the rabbis were the possessors of an Oral Torah handed down from Sinai (as I and most Reform Jews don't), one would have to conclude that (a) these same rabbis were radical pickers and choosers and innovators compared to whom all contemporary denominations are timid traditionalists; and (b) since the vast majority of what our Orthodox brothers and sisters call "mitsvot" were invented by the rabbis or other Jews (for example, lighting Shabbat candles, most of the specific prohibitions of work on Shabbat, not mixing meat and milk, etc.), one might choose to perform any of these mitsvot for any number of reasons, but one would not be bound by God's command to observe all of them. So part of the reason Reform Jews "pick and choose" is because they think that historical, literary and philosophical reasoning leads to the conclusion that our ancient rabbis were pickers, choosers, and innovators, rather than inheritors of a divine Oral Law from Sinai. Which brings us to the second point: what exactly did happen at Mount Sinai? There is a very wide range of answers to this question within the Reform movement, but I think it is safe to say that, for philosophical, historical/archaeological, and literary reasons, most Reform rabbis believe that the Torah is not the literal word of God given to Moses at Mount Sinai. This still allows for a range of beliefs: Some believe the Torah to be God's word given to Moses at Sinai, but corrupted through the human fallibility of Moses. At the other extreme, some believe that there was no Moses and the Torah was written by various people over the course of hundreds of years, but that it is nonetheless the sacred centre of Jewish striving to know God and to follow in God's ways. Obviously, these beliefs (developed out of intellectual rigour and study, not laziness or weakness as your friend seems to imply) also weaken the claim of the Orthodox system of mitsvot on Reform Jews. To sum up, if the mitsvot have been developed by Jews over the course of thousands of years of picking and choosing and innovating, it is not only our right, but our obligation to continue picking and choosing and innovating, with respect for the past and respect for our own understandings. (Upon request, I would be happy to devote a future "Reb on the Web" page to further explanations of the "philosophical, historical/archaeological, and literary' reasons that lead many Jews and others to deny the literal divine origin of the "Oral and Written Torah.") written by Rabbi Jeremy Schwartz
		last update: August 1999 Got a question for Reb on the Web? Visit our Archived Questions SHOOT*! ("SHOOT" is the Hebrew acronym for SHe'elot OOTeshuvot (Questions and Answers), the centuries-old dialogue between Jews and their rabbis.)

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