Here’s the irony.

The very people defending Reform Judaism’s commitment to openness sometimes seem uncomfortable when someone asks whether Reform Judaism itself still stands for anything.

I think it does.

In fact, I think it must.

Because a movement that asks nothing of its leaders eventually has nothing distinctive left to offer.

And I know there are those who will try to pick apart this blog, so let me offer my argument in a single sentence:

Reform Judaism can remain intellectually fearless while still expecting its clergy to embrace the shared foundational commitments of the movement they seek to represent.

What Reform Zionism Actually Is

Those of us who love this movement enough to ask these questions are not demanding loyalty to any Israeli government. We are not asking students to defend every military decision, coalition agreement, or settlement policy. Reform Zionism has never required intellectual surrender.

It asks for something more fundamental: an affirmation that the Jewish people are a people; that our bond with the Land of Israel is central, not incidental; that Jewish self-determination is legitimate; and that the State of Israel, however imperfect, remains part of our shared responsibility and destiny.

This should not be controversial.

Beneath it all lies a teaching older than any modern politics: Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh (כל ישראל ערבים זה בזה) — all Israel is responsible for one another (Shevuot 39a). Jewish peoplehood is not an optional extracurricular interest. Our tradition insists that Judaism is lived not only between an individual and God, but within a people bound together across history, geography, responsibility, joy, and grief.

Ruth says, “Your people shall be my people,” before she says, “Your God shall be my God.” The Talmud teaches that when one Jew suffers, we are called to feel it as though boiling water had touched our own skin. That does not mean “my people, right or wrong.” It means: my people, whose fate I cannot regard with indifference.

When future Jewish leaders no longer instinctively experience the vulnerability of the Jewish people as their own, something essential is at risk.

What This Means for Ordination

This is where Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion enters the conversation — not as the story itself, but as its most pressing application.

HUC-JIR has stated that no student who advocates Israel’s destruction, the removal of the Jewish people from Israel, or genocide against Jews — or any people — will be admitted or ordained. Those are necessary boundaries. But surely the threshold for becoming a rabbi or cantor of the Reform movement must be higher than the absence of genocidal intent.

The harder questions arise when the boundaries blur. What happens when students repeatedly amplify voices calling for Israel’s elimination? When the atrocities of October 7 are minimized or romanticized? When Jewish grief consistently receives less moral urgency than the ideologies used to explain it?

Not every offensive statement should end a rabbinic journey. But neither should every concern be dismissed by appeal to intellectual freedom. Openness is one of our greatest strengths. But openness is not the absence of conviction.

A seminary is not a university department. It does not merely educate private individuals; it forms, authorizes, and ordains people who will teach Torah, shepherd Jewish communities, and represent Reform Judaism to the world. A medical school encourages vigorous debate about public health while still requiring its graduates to embrace the ethical obligations of medicine. A seminary, likewise, can invite the widest possible intellectual exploration while expecting its future clergy to embrace the foundational commitments of the tradition and movement they seek to serve.

This is not McCarthyism. No matter how many times this is said. No one is proposing investigations, blacklists, or ideological policing.

The request is considerably simpler: that admissions and ordination standards reflect the Reform movement’s own stated commitments regarding Zionism, Israel, and Jewish peoplehood — a shared foundational commitment, joyfully affirmed.

Because ordination is not simply the successful completion of an academic program. It is the Reform movement saying to the Jewish people: “We trust this person to teach Torah in our name.” And the Reform movement does have values. Its commitment to Zionism was hard won. It should not quietly disappear beneath the language of openness.

The Reform Judaism I Still Believe In

Despite everything, I remain deeply hopeful. Looking at HUC-JIR’s incoming Year-in-Israel class, I see a number of students who seem serious, gifted, spiritually alive, and eager to serve the Jewish people. Their willingness to begin their rabbinic journeys in Israel during one of the most difficult periods in the country’s history is itself deeply meaningful. They deserve our encouragement, our investment, and our trust. For that very reason, I believe clearer expectations would strengthen — not diminish — their formation.

I write none of this because I have lost hope in Reform Judaism. I write because I have so much hope for it.

I love this movement enough to ask it to remember itself.

For more than two centuries, Reform Judaism has renewed Jewish life by meeting each generation where it is while daring to lead it somewhere better.

We have never understood covenant as a museum artifact.

But a living covenant is not a covenant without content.

Rabbi Samantha Kahn strives to instill Jewish excitement, provide guidance, offer counsel, and uncover Jewish passions for all. Kahn is a meaning-seeker, equality endorser, bigotry opposer, mindfulness advocate, social justice champion, and long-time Israel lover. She can also be found on many social media forums, including on TikTok and Substack @prettyflyforarabbi.