Reform Judaism: Prophetic Except for Palestine

During most of my childhood in the 1970s and 80s, my father, a Reform rabbi, worked at the Reform movement's New York headquarters, reporting to a building that displayed the movement's mid-century motto to the passing world: "Do Justly. Love Mercy. Walk Humbly with Thy God." Carved in stone in the early 1950s, these words from Micah 6:8 were intended both as a timely assertion of Reform Judaism's support for the emergent Civil Rights movement, and as an indelible testament to Reform Judaism's elevation of social justice-oriented worldly values over traditional Jewish rituals.