I grew up looking down on Reform Judaism. The home into which I was born in 1973, in Toronto, was Orthodox. We went to synagogue every Shabbos, and I loved walking with my father and sitting with him in the men's section. There was always a "candy man." I liked the prayers and didn't care that I didn't understand them. As a child and teenager, I had some experience with Conservative Judaism—one year that we lived abroad in Jerusalem, I attended a Conservative school and synagogue—but Reform Judaism I knew mainly as a stereotype: It was a lesser form of Judaism. In the hierarchy I was taught, Orthodoxy was at the top, then Conservative, then Reform. Orthodox and Conservative Jews such as myself who spoke and read Hebrew, could pray in Hebrew, and read the Torah, saw ourselves as superior in terms of our observance and Jewish practices.
The Reform synagogue in our neighborhood was known as "the Church on the Hill," because the architecture of the synagogue made it look so much like a church. When I attended a Reform service for a bat mitzvah, I felt judgmental and uncomfortable with the brevity of the service and the amount of English. Also, the instruments, the guitar and piano, on Shabbat were jarring to me, as I'd been taught that playing music was forbidden on Shabbat.
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