The Self-Extinction of Reform Judaism

With the festival of Chanuka approaching, the war to reform the Jewish spirit comes into focus.

The above chart (copied from here), based on researched American data, crystallizes the specter "Reform Judaism" casts upon Jewish sanctity, showing that its adherents cannot withstand the test of time beyond 3 or 4 generations before they are swallowed up and lost from the Jewish people. Even a Hitler could not have devised so good a strategy to quietly annihilate so many Jewish souls.

Leaving aside the reason for their fragility or vulnerabilty to self-extinction, by the time their grandchildren are born, most of these will already have been subsumed under Gentile persuasion; Their Jewish genomes will have migrated out of the collective Jewish gene pool and their Jewish souls will have lost their moorings to Jewish tradition and intimacy with G-d.

But there is a strange twisted logic many Reform Jews apply. If they were to admit they prefer chiselling away at tradition to relieve their anxiety about perceived constraints on their mode of easy living, that would at least be refreshing. But rather, at least if a representative website's reasoning is any indication, convenience isn't at the core of the issue. Here's how that website rationalizes their philosophy:

"The word 'Reform' in the name of our Movement is a recognition that reform is part of our way of life, as it has been for Jews throughout the centuries."

While the assertion that reformism has been around "throughout the centuries" is authentic, it conceals a spurious statistic the above chart addresses - and we must separate the authentic fact from its spurious justification. It may well be true a fringe of Judaism always prefers assimilation or reform, but that does not mean that they - as a collective body - are perpetuated. This is the crucial point: Reform Jews of today are definitely not descendants of Reform Jewry of the past. Reform Jews - as Jews - self discard. After 2 or 3 generations, most are already intermarried and their assimilation into the Gentile world is complete.

Their claim of a centuries-old "tradition", therefore, is deceptive. Their duration, in fact, occupies miniscule fragments of history. In the space of a few generations, they will have lost their Jewish identity.

Every generation has fringe elements that might drift to reformism ("conservative" or "reconstructionist" included). But these offshoots simply disappear from the Jewish horizon in a few generations. There simply is no longevity to their compromising way of life. In fact, they fare no better than secular Jews, most of whom have been "kidnapped from birth" by their foreign culture, in preserving a Jewish identity.

The permanence of Judaism rests in Torah-true tradition. Torah is the glue of Jewish civilization. The Reform "movement" does not survive. To attribute tradition to reformism is the voice of lemmings taking comfort in mass flight from Torah -- headlong to self-extinction.