Did the Reform Movement Cause the Holocaust?
A Mind-Numbing Response to Mind-Numbing Twitter Antics
The date is August 25th, 2023. Society is astoundingly dumb. The average IQ has plummeted to a pristine 65 on a good day. In a moment to cement these trends, a Twitter user, Yakovolf, enlightened us with this pearl of wisdom:1
“The reform movement was ten times more detrimental to Judaism than the holocaust.”
Of course, as all Twitter discourse tends to, the conversation deteriorated towards the lowest common denominator: blaming the Reform Movement for the Holocaust. This is not an unfamiliar talking point to those who have spent any meaningful time in Orthodox circles. The best part is that it is very straightforward and easy to do! The Torah is chock full of warnings about the horrors that God will punish us with if we violate the terms of the Covenant, how the Prophets would bemoan rampant degeneracy and syncretistic practice as the root cause of God’s wrath, and Rabbinic literature which condemns heretics and sinners in the harshest of terms. All of this is true. Those sources most certainly exist and in broad terms they say what the most rabid haters of the Reform movement claim they do. However, there is a glaring flaw in this line of argumentation:
It is extremely dumb.
Alas, it is not uniquely dumb, but in a just world it would be.2
A good place to start would be Bava Bathra 14b which makes it clear that Haggai, Zekharya, and Malakhi were the final prophets. Without prophecy, any religious cause for death or destruction is unknowable, unless there’s been a resurgence of Nevua lately. If you are willing to claim to have the power of prophecy, I would like you to message me and review my portfolio.
Was it the Reform Movement that caused the Holocaust ? The Maskilim? Secular Jews? The Zionists? The Misnagdim? The Chosidim? Who knows? This ahistorical tendency to blame something other than the actual proximate cause without the seal of prophetic approval is, quite frankly, insanity in my modest opinion. Look, I understand that Qamsa and Bar Qamsa were both jerks, but in practice, the 10th Legion had a lot more to do with the destruction of the Temple and the slaughter of thousands of Jews far more than any act between two individuals.3
In a similar vein, the notion that the Reform Movement is responsible for the world’s first industrialized genocide ignores something incredibly obvious and important: Nazis. Nazis. A regime that was ideologically committed to murdering every Jew on the planet. Respectfully, I think the people who shot Jews into ditches and crammed their corpses into ovens were more culpable for the Holocaust than a bunch of Jews who were desperate to prove how German they were.
Because of how recent the Holocaust was and scale of Nazi atrocities, it naturally occupies a massive space in the collective Jewish consciousness. However, there have been no shortage of horrific massacres perpetrated against Jews. The Reform Movement was not in the Rhine during the First Crusade, nor was it in Ukraine during the Khmelnytsky Uprising. Yet thousands of God-fearing, pious Jews lost their lives. What sin did they commit that warranted their murders? Allow me, in the line of the “argumentation” that the Reform Movement was responsible for the Holocaust somehow, assign blame4 to the innocent souls who were burned alive and butchered in Eastern Europe. As we know, the dominant custom in Ashkenaz at that point in time was to follow the calculations of Rabbenu Tam, meaning that Shabbath would both start and end later than we5 generally say it does. And therein we have our solution! Everyone knows that someone who is Mehallel Shabbath is obligated in the death penalty! We solved the mystery behind hundreds of thousands of dead Jews, and we didn’t have to impugn the reputation of the glorious Bogdan Khmelnystky to do so! [insert the world’s largest Has waHalila here]
Having now vomited an entire day’s worth of food up and taking a cold shower after putting the above in writing,6 at the very least you can understand the absurdity and cruelty of making such an argument. You could make this case for a whole host of other practices that we would no longer consider normative. I understand the difference here: my example is about righteous people7 who believed in God and the Tora etc. whereas the Reform movement were the worst heretics to have ever walked the Earth. From a Jewish perspective the latter proposition is quite frankly (no pun intended) ludicrous. The Berakha against Minim, who was the instituted against? Rabban Gamliel never met a Reform Jew. If anything, those heretics had a lot more direct culpability for the atrocities of the Holocaust. Of all the heresies to ever exist, Reform Judaism, respectfully, is an extremely boring one and in some respects has merely formalized a certain substrata of Jewish life that always existed.8
Of course we, with the benefit of hindsight can make all sorts of judgements about the past. We can harshly criticize the founders of the Reform Movement, but there are plenty of Orthodox figures who were urged their congregants to stay put despite the advancing Wehrmacht forces (hint: you’ve heard of at least one of them). It is so easy, in our era of kosher wagyu steaks, bungalow colonies, and Pesach programs in Jakarta, to judge the decisions of others. But it is important to remember some basic humility. Some day in the future, there will be Jews who look at things we do and say “Oy! How could they be so meikel on X?!”9 They will judge as backwards and possibly heretical. Who knows. A good rule of thumb is what Hillel says in Avoth 2:4.
As we hem and haw about which Jewish group was metaphysically responsible for the Holocaust and spew inane, sectarian, and revisionist dreck on the internet it is important to maintain some perspective. Yes, the Nazis were bad, but maybe six million innocent Jews just forgot to check their mezuzahs.10
I am quite literally too dumb to embed a Tweet or “Xpost” in an article please help
I want to make something clear: I don’t think that people who believe in stupid thing are stupid. In fact, I know that some of you reading this may agree with the argument I am attacking. I do not think of you as less intelligent nor as lesser people. I just wish to disabuse you of your dumbest notions. A Mashal: A close friend of mine who is objectively brilliant was a diehard John Kasich supporter in 2016 and was enthusiastic about voting for Biden without any shred of irony whatsoever. He remains a very close friend.
Additionally, to read the incident as “history” is to treat Hazal like fools.
I am not actually casting blame on any Jew who died during the horrific masssacres of the First Crusade. This is an exercise in demonstrating the sheer ghoulishness of the central claim.
Those of us non-Chasidim at the very least
I genuinely felt vile for putting such a monstrous notion on my screen. Hopefully it will illustrate the point if nothing else.
Though a quick survey of responsa from the era may call that absolute assumption into question
Future piece idea: “My Bubbie was Very Frum, but Everything She Cooked was Chazer Treif”
As much as I would like to dream that they will ask how we could be so Mahmir, but I’m (not) paid to be a realist not an optimist.
I pray to God that this is the most macabre thing I ever write. Truly.