The People as the Source

This affirmation reframes the traditional relationship: where classical Judaism sees the people as constituted by a covenant given from God, Reconstructionism sees the tradition as arising from the people's own evolving experience. It makes community and peoplehood central and treats law as folkway, binding by the weight of communal life rather than by divine command. The belief is the organising idea of the smallest of the major American Jewish movements and is closely tied to its distinctive, naturalist understanding of God.

The movement institutionalised with the founding of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College near Philadelphia in 1968. Reflecting its view of Judaism as a human, evolving civilization responsive to its people's changing life, Reconstructionism became the first major American Jewish movement to ordain openly gay and lesbian rabbis, in 1984, well ahead of the Reform movement's parallel decision in 1990 and the Conservative movement's in 2006, a sequence that illustrates how the different denominations' theological starting points, Reconstructionist peoplehood, Reform autonomy, and Conservative halakha, have translated into different paces of change on the same practical questions.