Before Orthodoxy

Jewish tradition has always been more plural, symbolic, and visionary than its later codifiers acknowledged. It’s time we remembered.

Contemporary Jewish discourse too often treats tradition as a closed, fixed system—something to be defended by repeating formulas rather than re-examining foundations. Recent comments by a Likud MK dismissing Reform Jews as “not really Jewish” reflect this impoverished view: a view that confuses rigidity for authenticity, and historical selectivity for continuity. But Jewish history tells a far more complex story—one in which Reform Judaism may be closer to the spiritual and narrative core of Jewish tradition than its critics imagine.

Reform Judaism, though founded in the modern period as a rationalist project of ethical and liturgical reform, paradoxically reinstates much older currents within Jewish life. Its embrace of ambilineal descent and its prioritization of prophetic ethics, moral universality, and aggadic imagination reflect not merely a rupture with halachic Judaism but a return—however refracted through modern language—to ancient forms of spiritual and civilizational Jewish identity.

Reform’s allegorical approach to scripture echoes the exegetical practices of Philo of Alexandria and the broader Hellenistic Jewish world—not as a way of harmonizing Torah with foreign ideas, but as an attempt to access its deeper spiritual strata: its cosmic, ethical, and metaphysical dimensions. We see similar impulses in the Wisdom of Solomon, in the Qumran texts, and in the apocalyptic and prophetic writings of Ethiopian Jewry, which share imagery and themes with Qumran: a Judaism in which allegory, prophecy, and cosmological vision converge.

As scholars such as Erwin Goodenough emphasized, this non-rabbinic, visionary Judaism—richly evident in archaeological remains like the synagogue at Dura-Europos—persisted far longer, and across a wider geographic expanse, than rabbinic historiography acknowledged. Reform Judaism, in this light, does not simply modernize but reactivates a long-suppressed tradition: one that understands Jewish experience as formed not only through law and lineage, but through revelation, narrative, and symbolic participation in a divine story.

For this reason, when we attempt to think coherently across historical layers—attending to the real purposes, debates, and transformations of actors—rather than accepting a reified and retroactively constructed notion of “tradition” whose genealogy we fail to interrogate, we open ourselves to new, and indeed more coherent, possibilities. Ironically, many fundamentalist forms of religion that claim to uphold tradition actually reify select medieval concepts within modern ideological shells—forgetting that codification itself was a relatively late development in Jewish history, and for much of our tradition, was neither the norm nor the standard for religious life.

By contrast, those that hold space for both invention and critical reason also hold space to plumb the Ancient depths of tradition—to encounter it not as a static inheritance, but as a living, recursive structure capable of renewal, a renewal that does not sever from the past, but holds the capacity to touch its very Origin.