Reviewing Conservative Judaism (Part 1)

Following my popular review of Rabbi Daniel Nevins’ recent collection of teshuvot, I’ve found myself inundated with emails, messages, and general inquiries about how Orthodox Jews ought to engage with not only our Conservative coreligionists, but with the Conservative Movement in general. I decided that the most productive way to do so would be by dedicating a series of Substacks to this subject. While I will not be devoting every week to this exploration, I hope to write several pieces over the next 6 months or so that form a broad picture of what Orthodox Jews can and should learn from the Conservative Movement - in both cautionary and aspirational ways. I urge both Orthodox readers who do not feel it is appropriate to take the Conservative Movement seriously and Conservative readers who think an Orthodox rabbi has no place discussing their ideology to give me a chance to present what I hope to be a nuanced perspective on a relationship with is rarely discussed in recent generations.

Before delving into the subject, I want to first explain why I, as an Orthodox rabbi, am so passionate about this exploration. One social media response to my Nevins review came from a Conservative rabbi, who suggested that the question of the Conservative Movement’s status as a Halakhic entity is one “best posed by and among people who identify with the "movement" (such as it may be)” rather than by people like myself. This was my public response:

It certainly could be and people who feel that way are under no obligation to respond [to my review]! That said, I'm highly invested in the movement - my close family and friends still identify quite strongly with the movement, I keep up in current happenings, and am upfront that much of my personal religious leanings are a direct result of having been raised within it. So I ask not as a pure outsider, but as someone with one foot very much in the door of the movement.

Relatedly, in my personal opinion, I think it's important to differentiate between posing a question and attempting to answer it. I would never dream of suggesting that anyone other than engaged Conservative Jews should answer whether or not they think the movement should be Halakhic. To weigh in as an outsider is like me expecting a group of Conservative Jews to weigh in on whether mechitzot in an Orthodox shul should be 8 tefachim or 12 tefachim. It's a question that not only doesn't affect them day to day, but they aren't even in a real position to weigh in since the religious contexts are so different. That said, of course Conservative Jews have the right to ask Orthodox Jews "why would you think mechitzot are okay in the first place?" If movements have public positions, it's not only acceptable but expected for outsiders to ask questions about those positions. That's how conversations happen and, hopefully, friendships are built.

If you agree with this response, feel free to continue reading and to engage with the questions I raise! If you agree with my questioner, feel free to skip this article. I promise I won’t blame you!

I’ll close this section with my inverted spin on Rabbi Eliezer Diamond’s poignant articulation of why he left the Orthodox community in which he grew up for the Conservative Movement: Many of us who grew up Conservative/”Conservadox” and became Orthodox do not feel that we have turned our backs on anyone. We're grateful for so much of what we learned and experienced as Conservative Jews. So much of what we are is a product of our Conservative upbringing and education.

I am the Jew that I am today because I was lucky enough to grow up as an active member of the Conservative Movement. If not for my engagement with the Fair Lawn Jewish Center, Camp Ramah, USY, Rutgers Koach, Masorti on Campus, and the like I would have never given Judaism serious thought. In many ways, my decision to take halakhah seriously and ultimately become Orthodox was directly because of growing up Conservative rather than despite it. The religious choices I made were entirely consistent with the messages I was given by Conservative role models and mentors. One of the goals of this series is to explore how so many different people have gotten so many different messages from growing up in the same communities.

I’ve written much about Rabbi Dr. Neil Gillman’s famous calls for Conservative Judaism to abandon its status as a halakhic movement. Three of his books, Sacred Fragments, Doing Jewish Theology, and Believing and Its Tensions serve as a full theological portrait of this fascinating thinker who influenced hundreds of Conservative rabbis as JTS’ premier theology professor. Gillman’s public call for the movement to abandon halakhah at the 2005 USCJ convention can be listened to here.

Gillman’s 1993 book, Conservative Judaism: The New Century was originally titled “A Partisan Guide to Conservative Judaism.” It subtly advocated for his broader position while situating it within the context of a movement in jeopardy of being torn apart by its own designs. In his words, the Conservative Movement “exists in a state of perpetual tension, constantly pulled both to the right and to the left on any significant issue - yesterday women’s ordination, today the range of issues raised by a newly articulate Jewish gay and lesbian community, tomorrow some other issue. More than Orthodoxy on the right and Reform on the left, it is a movement that is held together by a consensus often on the edge of fragmentation.” This, Gillman argues, is not a bug but a feature of the Movement’s origins and decisions.

Gillman begins his historical analysis, as many do, by tying the American Conservative Movement to Zechariah Frankel’s Positive Historical School in Germany. This school of thought attempted to stake out a middle ground between Abraham Geiger’s radical Reform and Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch’s Neo-Orthodoxy. Gillman writes that

Frankel was rejecting the approach of German Reform, which he saw as capricious, radical, and hasty. He perceived it as breaking too sharply with the wishes of the broader community, both past and current. Frankel saw Reform as divisive and undisciplined.

But Frankel was also rejecting the position that any change in the central beliefs and practice of Judaism is impossible. He did not endorse the view that Jewish religion, in all of its details, represents the explicit will of God and is therefore immune from cultural and historical influences.

Frankel’s position, like Schechter’s articulation of Catholic Israel, “was an extraordinary vote of confidence both in the internal dynamics of Jewish life and in the inherent goodwill of the Jewish religious community. He had faith that the caring core of the community, under the guidance of its rabbinic and scholarly leadership, would intuitively continue to locate the fine balance between continuity and development, between what to retain and what to change. His leap of faith was that Jews would not let Judaism die.”

Frankel, at the end of the day, was fundamentally a Reformer with a more conservative bent (pun intended). We will explore in the next entry why that point is so important to Gillman’s argument against the Conservative Movement ‘s halakhic status. This is also how Gillman presents those who founded what would become the Conservative Movement in walking out of the infamous Treifah Banquet.

Hebrew Union College (now the Reform Movement’s rabbinical school) was founded by Isaac Mayer Wise as a non-denominational institution to train American-born, English-speaking rabbis. A banquet was hosted in 1883 to celebrate the first graduating rabbinic class and the menu included “Little Neck clams, soft-shell crabs, shrimp, frog’s legs, beef, ice cream, and cheese.” Traditionalists in attendance were appalled and walked out. (Parenthetically, Gillman makes a fascinating note about the episode which is often left out of books and lectures on the subject:

Rabbi Wise repeatedly denied any personal responsibility for the menu… insisting that an “unscrupulous caterer” was to blame. But it was a faux pas of such major proportions that it could hardly have come about by accident. The decision seems to have been made by some of Wise’s lay supporters in the movement, maybe without his knowledge. Still, Wise’s behavior after the fact was unambiguous. He bitterly denounced the traditionalists for their concern over what he disparaged as “kitchen Judaism.” “It is about time to stop that noise over the culinary department of Judaism. The American Hebrew’s religion centers not in kitchen and stomach… It has some more important matters to attend to.” )

In 1886, following Reform’s Pittsburgh Platform (it’s self-proclaimed “Declaration of Independence” from traditional Jewry), members of the traditional camp met at Congregation Shearith Israel in New York City to found an alternative institution based on “conservative Jewish principles.”

Gillman notes that the early founders of Conservative Judaism did not feel any need to articulate formal positions. They cared more about being a big tent for enemies of Reform than have a platform themselves. He argues that the extensive writings of early figures (chief among them the newly imported Rabbi Solomon Schechter), however, show nine clear building blocks:

1. America is different… Judaism will flower in this new land.

2. Judaism can deal with modernity

3. If we are to deal with modernity, we must study Judaism in a modern way

4. Judaism has had a history

5. The community becomes the authority (Catholic Israel)

6. Hebrew must remain the language of the Jewish People

7. Zionism is a positive force in Jewish history, and it should be encouraged

8. Halakhah remains the preeminent form of Jewish religious expression

9. Halakhah does change and develop to meet new situations, but this process is gradual, evolutionary, limited to the more superficial areas of Jewish life, and always under the guidance of recognized authorities in Jewish law.

As Gillman points out through his writings, many of these building blocks contradict others. For example, if the Jewish community holds authority in changes being made, why limit those changes only to particular areas? Indeed, Gillman notes an identity crisis resulting from precisely this:

From the middle of the twentieth century through 1972, Conservative Judaism presented two faces. One was the Seminary’s - highly intellectual and academic, extraordinarily open to the most critical and scientific scholarly research, yet traditionalist in practice, barely tolerating changes in ritual observance, and largely unaware of the issues faced by the masses of Jews in Conservative congregations throughout the country.

This was the Conservative Judaism of the Seminary founders, of the group that broke with Reform over the Pittsburgh Platform, of Solomon Schechter and Louis Finkelstein, and of most of their colleagues on the faculty. It is worth noting, for example, that in the Seminary’s own synagogue men and women sat separately unveil 1984, following the Seminary’s decision to ordain women. (In 1984 a second, more egalitarian service was instituted, but the traditional minyan continues to meet today.)

The second version of Conservative Judaism was Kaplan’s. To him, Judaism is the religion of the Jewish people. What the people originally created it can continue to create and recreate in line with each new generation’s intuitive perception of what is demanded for Jews to achieve a sense of fulfillment. Thus, the entire body of belief and practice can be reshaped as the community, at its best, determines. And, Kaplan insisted, this enterprise is not at all an abandonment of Judaism but, in fact, is the guarantor of its survival. It is also the work of God - not the supernatural God of the Bible, but God as a process within nature and within human beings.

Though Kaplan would later found his own movement in the form of Reconstructionism, he was allowed to stay on JTS’ faculty through his retirement. He and Gillman, who self-identified strongly “not as a Reconstructionist, but as a Kaplanian” influenced much of the next generation of Conservative rabbis to their way of thinking throughout their long careers at JTS. One of the clearest case-studies of this division can be seen in the process by which the Conservative Movement decided to begin ordaining women:

The traditionalists argued that an issue such as this one, with halakhic implications, should not be submitted to the democratic process, whereby every member of the faulty - including, for example, Hebrew-language instructors - enjoyed the same right to vote as the talmudists. They proposed that the vote be restricted to the rabbis on faculty *thereby excluding faculty women, among others) or that it be referred to the reigning halakhic authority (Professor Lieberman in his day) or to a panel of halakhic authorities. Above all, the non-halakhists or, more fuzzily, nonobservant faculty, should not have a voice. There was, however, no way of determining which members of the faculty should have a vote and which should not. Moreover, in the final analysis, Cohen responded, the issue facing the school was primarily one of academic policy, not halakhah. Who determines a school’s academic policy if not the faculty as a whole? The entire faculty was to have a say, he insisted.

This decision enraged many traditionalists, who left JTS much like JTS’ founders left the treifah banquet. The newly formed Union for Traditional Judaism, perhaps unfortunately, separated themselves far from their former partners, as Gillman raises:

Can you have your own Panel of Halakhic Inquiry, and your own placement service (effectively sidestepping the Movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards and its Placement Committee) and still claim to be working within the Movement? Possibly, But the Union’s two most recent decisions - to drop the word Conservative from its name and t establish its own rabbinical seminary - seem to remove any shade of ambiguity. It would seem that even though individual members of the Union, lay and rabbinic, have retained their formal affiliation with the United Synagogue and the Rabbinical assembly, the Union itself has effectively forfeited its opportunity to influence the future course of Conservative Judaism.

This shedding of the right wing, of course, allowed even more from the Conservative Judaism to push leftward and, thus, even less room to explain to its constituency why they ought to be halakhically committed in their own lives. The UTJ’s breakaway exacerbated this, but Gillman notes that it was an issue inherent in Conservative Judaism’s approach to jurisprudence itself:

What is most important about the Law Committee is the very fact of its existence. It is one of those benchmarks that separates Conservative Judaism from Reform. Classical Reform proclaimed the principle of individual autonomy; each Reform Jew, rabbi or lay person, is encouraged to make his or her own decisions on matters of Jewish practice in the light of conscience. In contrast, Conservative Judaism has insisted that the authorities of the community have the right and the responsibility to define the parameters of legitimate religious practice. These parameters may be murky, may permit pluralistic options, and may change with time - the process is undeniably messy - but they are there in principle, and as in the case of patrilineal descent he parameters of traditional Jewish practice can always be invoked. Zachariah Frankel’s insistence on the interlocking roles of the community and its leadership has remained a hallmark of Conservative Judaism to this day. It represents the nucleus of Schechter’s Catholic Israel.

Although it is tempting to focus exclusively on the changes in traditional Jewish observance that the Law Committee legitimized, it is equally important to emphasize what it would never even think of abrogating. It may have permitted the eating of cheeses or swordfish, but it also affirmed that the large body of traditional Jewish dietary laws is still binding, that pork products and shellfish are forbidden, and that meat and milk must be separated. It may have permitted driving to the synagogue or using electricity on the Sabbath, but it also affirmed that the Sabbath remains a sacred day, that shopping, playing golf, mowing the lawn, and paying bills all remain prohibited. The bulk of festival practices and the rituals accompanying the rites of passage have also never been challenged.

What happened, then, to the part of the message that said Conservative Judaism reaffirms the ingoing validity of most Jewish ritual practice? It was certainly adhered to by the rabbis but rarely by any but a minoroity of the congregants. We have to realize that the message the Conservative rabbi was asked to transmit to congregants was subtle and complex. Both the Reform and Orthodox rabbi had a much easier task. The Reform rabbi had the right to dispense with any aspect of Jewish law, and the Orthodox rabbi insisted that it was all eternally binding as the explicit will of God. The Conservative rabbi, in contrast, had to make subtle distinctions: Sabbath observance is binding, but you can drive to the synagogue. The dietary laws are binding, but you can eat swordfish. The traditional synagogue ritual is retained, but women can participate equally. It was only natural, then, for the typical Conservative layperson to ask, If some things change, why don’t other things change as well? If I can now eat swordfish, why can’t I eat oysters as well? How do you come to these distinctions? The rabbi who had mastered the traditional texts and had deliberated their relevance may well have understood the process and could justify such subtle distinctions, but how was he to communicate them to his Jewishly uneducated and far less committed congregants?

There are many lessons here that Orthodox Jews can take away from understanding the history of Conservative Judaism and various decisions made by the movement. Who counts towards Catholic Israel, who gets a vote in the halakhic process, how that process works, and how to respond to significant disagreement are but a few. At the end of this series, I will address each of those and more explicitly. For now, let this provide much needed context in understanding the development of Conservative Judaism. Our next entry in this series will question many of these assumptions by exploring an often repressed side of the Movement’s history. to ask the questions upfront, how would the picture we have just painted change if it turned out that Conservative Judaism was a gradual breakaway from Orthodoxy rather than a sudden reaction against Reform? What changes in the narrative if American Conservative Judaism was originally an Orthodox project rather than continuous with Frankel?