After tracing the evolution of the Reform liturgy, Clifford E. Librach reviews Mishkan HaNefesh (“Tabernacle for the Soul”), a High Holy Day prayer book (maḥzor) recently released by the Central Council of American Rabbis:

Without question, this maḥzor is the most traditional prayer resource ever produced by the American Reform movement. . . . The maḥzor’s agenda of reclamation is clearest in the Yom Kippur sections. In an unprecedented act, the new book restores to its traditional location . . . the classical description of God as having thirteen divine attributes of mercy. This passage, from the rabbinic interpretation of Exodus 34, is contained in a Yom Kippur evening section, S’liḥot (“penitential appeals”). These attributes are recited to assuage the pain of confession with the assurance of God’s responding mercy, and the reliability of His forgiveness. . . .

The Avodah service [a detailed liturgical description of the holy day’s Temple rites], long a source of Reform consternation because it clearly and deliberately attached Yom Kippur to the Temple, has been reinstated. Avodah had been part of the liturgy [published in the 1970s], but it was almost always entirely skipped or replaced in toto by American Reform congregations. . . .

In another break with the Reform past, . . . [the maḥzor] incorporates the official prayer for the welfare of the state of Israel, as published under the auspices of its (Orthodox) chief rabbinate, complete with its reference to the state as reishit ts’miḥat g’ulateinu (the “first flowering of our redemption”). The Yom Kippur commemoration here ends with the exclamation L’shanah ha-ba’ah biyrushalayim! (“Next year in Jerusalem!”). This unvarnished appeal for the coming of the messiah had been [a] longtime Reform bugaboo.

Yasir Arafat was often quoted as saying that his “strongest weapon is the womb of an Arab woman.” That is, he believed the high birthrates of both Palestinians and Arab Israelis ensured that Jews would eventually be a minority in the Land of Israel, at which point Arabs could call for a binational state and get an Arab one. Using similar logic, both Israelis and their self-styled sympathizers have made the case for territorial concessions to prevent such an eventuality. Yet, Yoram Ettinger argues, the statistics have year after year told a different story:

Contrary to the projections of the demographic establishment at the end of the 19th century and during the 1940s, Israel’s Jewish fertility rate is higher than those of all Muslim countries other than Iraq and the sub-Saharan Muslim countries. Based on the latest data, the Jewish fertility rate of 3.13 births per woman is higher than the 2.85 Arab rate (since 2016) and the 3.01 Arab-Muslim fertility rate (since 2020).

The Westernization of Arab demography is a product of ongoing urbanization and modernization, with an increase in the number of women enrolling in higher education and increased use of contraceptives. Far from facing a “demographic time bomb” in Judea and Samaria, the Jewish state enjoys a robust demographic tailwind, aided by immigration.

However, the demographic and policy-making establishment persists in echoing official Palestinian figures without auditing them, ignoring a 100-percent artificial inflation of those population numbers. This inflation is accomplished via the inclusion of overseas residents, double-counting Jerusalem Arabs and Israeli Arabs married to Arabs living in Judea and Samaria, an inflated birth rate, and deflated death rate.

The U.S. should derive much satisfaction from Israel’s demographic viability and therefore, Israel’s enhanced posture of deterrence, which is America’s top force- and dollar-multiplier in the Middle East and beyond.