A Loyalty Test Is Not the Way to Encourage Reform Zionist Commitment

Reform leaders who are advocating that Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) should deny rabbinic ordination to students with non- or anti-Zionist views have forgotten the lessons of the College’s recent failed experiment with red lines.

When I entered HUC-JIR in 2003, students were required to sign a pledge promising that if they were to get married while enrolled in the program, their spouse would be Jewish. Violating that commitment would make them ineligible for rabbinic ordination.

I am not aware of the College having to enforce the policy, but enforcement was never really the point. The pledge was a symbolic act designed to show the movement’s commitment to an ideal that was already slipping beyond its grasp.

In 2001, the Central Conference of American Rabbis declared that Reform rabbis should teach their congregations that “Jews should marry Jews.” Yet by the early 21^st century, intermarriage rates were approaching 70 percent. The effort to encourage Jewish endogamy by requiring clergy to model it had clearly failed. In 2024, HUC-JIR repealed the policy.

The proposal to require rabbinical and cantorial students to affirm a Zionist pledge is similarly misguided.

Supporters argue that the Reform movement is proudly Zionist and its clergy should uphold that commitment. They ask whether HUC-JIR would ordain someone who opposes LGBTQ+ inclusion or gender egalitarianism. If not, why ordain someone who rejects Zionism?

The comparison packs a rhetorical punch, but its logic is weak. It would be pointless to ask an HUC-JIR student to declare loyalty to LGBTQ+ inclusion or gender egalitarianism because those principles enjoy close to unanimous agreement in the movement. Yes, Zionism is a core Reform value, too. But if there continue to be substantive disagreements on this principle within the Reform community, the question is whether a compulsory clergy pledge would help strengthen Reform Jews’ Zionist commitments. I contend that it would not.

The reality is that members of the Reform community do disagree, sometimes passionately, about how Jewish identity should be expressed in the modern world. Many embrace Zionism enthusiastically. Others struggle with the relationship between Jewishness, nationalism, and state power. Although official Reform institutions have affirmed Zionism since 1937, the debate is still very much alive, especially among younger Reform Jews. Advocates of the Zionist pledge know this; otherwise, they would have no reason to propose such a policy in the first place.

Their argument that Reform clergy should embody the movement’s commitment to Zionism ought to be taken seriously. But the failure of the endogamy pledge to reinforce the movement’s official position on intermarriage, when many in the Reform community disagreed with that position, highlights the limits of that strategy. Reform Jews are far more likely to be receptive to serious learning and self-discovery than to being told what they are allowed to think.

Indeed, Reform Judaism historically has relied more on education than on doctrinal tests to advance its values. This is because we know that Jewish understanding evolves over time through study, experience, and debate.

HUC-JIR’s purpose is not to ensure dogmatic loyalty but, rather, to train thoughtful clergy capable of leading diverse communities. As a student, I was required to study some of Reform Judaism’s sharpest critics, including Rabbis Joseph Soloveitchik, Moshe Feinstein, and Samson Raphael Hirsch. Wrestling with their ideas did not weaken my Reform commitments. It strengthened them by challenging me to articulate what I believe and why.

This should not be surprising. The Jewish people are called B’nai Yisrael because our ancestor wrestled with God, with others, and with himself. Wrestling with difficult questions has been a defining feature of Judaism since the Talmud, and we rightly deplore efforts in our own history to enforce conformity by banning contested ideas. Conditioning ordination on a loyalty pledge would undermine that proud tradition.

HUC-JIR should encourage our future clergy’s commitment to Zionism as a core Reform value, but President Andrew Rehfeld is right to resist imposing an orthodoxy on them. The better approach would be to require students to do intensive coursework in the full range of Jewish perspectives—from Herzl, Ahad Ha’am, Jabotinsky, and Kook to Einhorn, Kohler, and Teitelbaum. The goal should not be indoctrination but intellectual rigor. Students should grapple with the political and theological arguments, develop their own views, and learn how to guide congregants through these difficult conversations.

Red-line proponents are correct that the College has a right to expect students to uphold its core commitment to Zionism. But sacrificing other core Reform values like free inquiry, individual autonomy, and pluralism is the wrong way to do it.

Honest study and open debate remain the best ways to shape principled Reform Jews. No Reform institution should tell people what to think. Its task is to teach them how to learn, how to wrestle, and how to engage faithfully with the most difficult questions facing the Jewish people.

–

*Rabbi A. Brian Stoller was ordained at HUC-JIR/Cincinnati in 2008. He is the author of Politics & Pluralism: Essays on Democracy, Antisemitism, Power & Culture in an Age of Polarization (Vayinafash Press, 2026).