Nineteen or so Reform rabbis met in Pittsburgh in November 1885 at the call of Kaufmann Kohler, with Isaac Mayer Wise presiding, and adopted a statement in eight paragraphs that defined American Reform Judaism for the next fifty years.
The platform is short and it is bold. Judaism is the highest conception of the God-idea, progressively revealed. The Bible's moral law binds; its dietary, priestly and purity laws were adapted to a vanished stage of civilisation and are no longer binding, and observing them now obstructs rather than aids modern spiritual elevation. Jews are a religious community and no longer a nation, so there is to be no expectation of a return to Palestine, no restored Temple and no reinstituted sacrifice. Christianity and Islam are daughter religions and allies. The immortality of the soul is affirmed and bodily resurrection, heaven and hell are set aside. The last paragraph commits the movement to social justice on the basis of the prophets.
Every one of those positions was a deliberate break, and the document says so without hedging. It was written by people who believed that Judaism had a universal message that traditional practice was obscuring, and who were confident enough about the direction of history to legislate for it.
It is also, read now, a remarkably clear photograph of nineteenth century liberal religious optimism, taken about thirty years before the century that would test every assumption in it.