Eugene Borowitz (1924-2016) was born in Columbus, Ohio, to parents originally from Lithuania who spoke Yiddish at home. He proudly stated that he was the product of a mixed marriage between a cerebral Lithuanian grandfather and an emotional Hasidic grandfather. He earned his bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Ohio State University and then entered Hebrew Union College, where he received his rabbinical degree and later his doctorate in Hebrew letters with a specialization in rabbinic literature.

For over fifty years, Rabbi Borowitz taught theology at Hebrew Union College, the Reform rabbinical seminary. His teachings changed the approach of Reformism, where individual autonomy and the rejection of halacha were the main paradigm of the movement. He proposed a Judaism where the individual lives the biblical covenant with God, fulfilling his mitzvoth, commandments, while retaining the freedom to make his own religious decisions, based on knowledge and personal commitment.

Borowitz said that, derived from the ideas of the Enlightenment and Modernity, humankind thought that with the sole use of reason we would have solid and universal values. That we would find our ethical system for ourselves, since we are thinking beings. That we don’t need it imposed on us from outside, as divine commandments do. But that didn’t work, Eugene tells us. The Holocaust and its horrors proved otherwise. The people of Kant and Schiller, with all their culture, took evil to unimaginable extremes. We believed that reason and science would be the basis for elevating humanity to higher levels, but what they did was make everything relative and plunge humanity into a vacuum of values. Morality lost its religious basis.

Yet, Borowitz said, most Jews do not want to return to living in a ghetto. We can no longer renounce the benefits that modernity brought us, such as equality and pluralistic democracy. We, he said, non-Orthodox Jews, would like to be more religious and lead a «more Jewish» life, but without losing our right to determine for ourselves which aspects of Judaism we accept and observe.

He called it renewing the Covenant with God, bringing modernity, equality, and democratic pluralism into creative conversation with the particularities and traditional practices of rabbinic Judaism. It meant moving from a modern Judaism that sought to be universal to a postmodern Judaism that manifests itself in a particular truth. The reformism of modernity sought to conquer, control, and banish the past, while postmodernism rescues and allows some traditions of the past to influence the present and the future.

Borowitz did not consider himself a «rationalist.» His principles were grounded in his own particular experiences and those of his community, avoiding positions based on reason and the universal. But he also did not accept the orthodox position that denies the autonomy of the individual and only accepts complete obedience to the law, regardless of one’s own conscience.

Eugene Borowitz was undoubtedly one of the most influential thinkers of Reform Judaism. In his writings, he was able to reconcile personal freedom with the ancient tradition of Judaism.

By Marcos Gojman.

Bibliography: Eugene B. Borowitz, «Renewing the Covenant,» and other sources.