ABSTRACT
This is a time of great gestation in Reform Judaism. As a movement of modern Jewish religious expression, it is grappling with issues that transcend its Reform character, reaching into the very essence of Judaism's capacity to survive modernity and postmodernity. Modernity was an extension in time of a linear past. Its ideas reformed, reconstructed, or otherwise reshaped notions of the past. Post-modernity's New Age religious movements make no pretense of seeking past validation for contemporary ideas or beliefs. They are claimed to be new, as the age is claimed to be new, and their often bizarre ideas, or so they appear to be to traditionalists, are not validatable by any fact or experience of the past. Their validation is in their being and not by any context from which they seem to emerge.
