Twenty years ago this summer, I began writing my rabbinical thesis about a controversy that tested the boundaries of the Reform movement from 1991 to 1994.

Congregation Beth Adam, a Humanistic congregation in Cincinnati, sought membership in the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, now the Union for Reform Judaism. Beth Adam had removed God-language from its liturgy entirely. Its leaders argued that many modern Jews could no longer pray honestly with words that assumed a personal, commanding God. They wanted Jewish ritual, Jewish ethics, Jewish memory, and Jewish community without supernatural theism.

They also wanted to belong to the Reform movement, send children to Reform summer camps and hire rabbis from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

Reform Judaism had always made room for Jews who doubted God, argued with God, redefined God, or stopped believing in God altogether, especially after the Holocaust. Beth Adam said, in effect: We are simply the logical extension of what you already allow.

The question was never whether individual Reform Jews could doubt God, which they can and do. It was whether the Reform movement could welcome a congregation organized around God’s absence and still say what it stood for.

The answer was no. As Rabbi Gunther Plaut wrote in his responsum: “Yesh gevul. There is a boundary. If we are everything, we are nothing.”

Beth Adam’s application forced the movement to ask what it could absorb without losing something essential as a movement.

That question of the Reform movement’s boundaries has returned, not about God but about Zionism. It erupted at the Zionist Rabbinic Coalition‘s conference last month.

Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, a founder of the coalition, warned that the Reform movement cannot ordain rabbis who reject Zionism without losing something essential.

Andrew Rehfeld, the president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, where I was........

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