Reviewing Conservative Judaism (Part 3)

Is Conservative Judaism Halakhic?

The past two entries into this series have made reference to Rabbi Dr. Neil Gillman, of blessed memory. Gillman, for the entirety of his career, was perhaps the Jewish Theological Seminary’s foremost theologian in that he was the first to explicitly teach theology to his students. Gillman’s life’s journey is fascinating, and I highly encourage curious readers to hear him speak about it in his own words (the two that come to mind can be watched or listened to on YouTube here and here).

Gillman was born in Quebec and a life-changing lecture at McGill Hillel in Montreal left him with a burning desire to explore Jewish philosophy. He met Rav Soloveitchik, who quickly informed the young philosopher that he lacked sufficient talmudic education to pursue ordination at Yeshiva University. While, in Gillman’s telling, the Rav was adamant that he should not attend JTS due to there being “no talmud Torah there,” he would also not allow him into YU’s program without several years of gemara tutelage first.

JTS allowed Gillman in, and Professor Mordecai Kaplan quickly shattered his expectations of what Judaism was. He quickly became a self-proclaimed “Kaplanian,” and spread Kaplan’s vision to several generations of JTS-trained rabbis, almost all of whom wrote detailed personal theologies in his classes that were results (or at least responding to) his teachings. Indeed, former JTS Chancellor Arnold Eisen noted at an event honouring Gillman’s retirement that, if one begins the history of Conservative Judaism with Schechter’s arrival at JTS then Gillman had been influential on the movement for over half of its history until that very night. This makes Gillman, perhaps, one of the most under-appreciated yet overly-influential figures in the history of Conservative Judaism.

In his book, Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew, Gillman wrote that religions are products of myth - meaning that they are a group’s “attempt to discern specific patterns in their experience, and to shape these patterns into a meaningful whole that gave order to their world.” Judaism’s theological myth, Gillman wrote, was concretized in Halakhah. On this, in fact, he was quite clear: “There is simply no religious authenticity in Judaism outside of a halakhic system - not necessarily the halakhic system, but a halakhic system that concretizes our sense of covenantedness as a community to God.” What is the difference between the Halakhic system and a halakhic system? In an essay honouring Gillman, Rabbi Joel Roth articulates it well:

As I understand [Gillman], both communities are trying to live by God’s will. But, “a” halakhic community allows itself to determine what that will is, without being bound by any classical system of law, such as “the” halakhic system. So, “a” halakhic community which decided that Shabbat should begin every week at 7PM, without any connection to sunset, would be within the bounds of “authenticity” to make that into God’s will. (I have heard [Gillman] say this many times.) What would put them outside the bounds of authenticity would be a decision that affirms that Shabbat itself is not part of our sense of “covenantedness as a community to God.” … “the” halakhic community could not agree that starting Shabbat every week at 7PM could be authentic. For that community the content of the covenant is not up to them. The content of the covenant is mandated by the legal system which is itself part of the covenant!

… Put in other words: the proponents of “the” halakhic system insist that being consonant with and consistent with the system is a sine qua non of legitimacy, while the proponents of “a” halakhic system probably find it “nice,” but not at all essential, for decisions to be consonant with and consistent with the classical halakhic system.

Gillman later came to ask, however, what the point was of the Conservative Movement identifying as a halakhic one at all. The most infamous case of raising this question was at the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism’s 2005 Biennial Convention (a recording and write-up of which can be found here). In his words, the claim of the Conservative Movement being a halakhic one “is a brilliant defense mechanism because it is unfalsifiable” but is undermined on almost every level:

Our critics would charge, how can you be a halakhic movement if you permit a kohen to marry a divorcee, or permit women to serve as witnesses in judicial proceedings, or permit the use of electricity and driving to synagogue on Shabbat, or make significant changes in the core halakhic portions of the liturgy, or if you are even contemplating ordaining gays and lesbians and sanctioning commitment rituals? To these charges, we reply, “Ah, but we mean something else by the term ‘halakhah.’ We view halakhah as evolving in response to changing historical conditions.”

… But by then, our original claim has died the death by a thousand qualifications. It is compatible with all factual conditions, and therefore it has lost all factual meaning. It is a totally idiosyncratic use of the term, unrecognizable by Jews who take halakhah seriously in their personal lives. It is in effect a subjective, emotional outburst, a covert way of saying, “It’s great to be a Conservative Jew,” or “I’m proud to be a Conservative Jew,” which is totally legitimate, as long as we realize that this what we are doing. We are simply describing how we feel about ourselves.

Gillman’s argument was effectively that the Conservative Movement’s use of the term halakhah, as distinct from the halakhah that Orthodox or otherwise observant Jews of all stripes would be most familiar with, was an example of what Rabbi Jonathan Sacks framed as Jews being “divided by a common language.” Thus far, however, Gillman has only pointed out that Conservative Judaism follows a halakhah, but not the Halakhah. What is his argument for jettisoning halakhic identity altogether? Gillman links this with the failure of Conservative Judaism to inspire laypeople towards observance, touching on many points already raised in this series:

I have become increasingly convinced that our self-definition as a halakhic movement was created by and on behalf of our rabbinic community. From a historical perspective, this definition was thoroughly appropriate for a movement that was founded by rabbis and professors, in deliberate opposition to American Reform which was created by, and to this day remains directed by its lay community. How ironic is it, then, that our most significant failure as a movement is that we have not created a significant body of ritually observant (i.e., halakhic, even by our definition of halakhah) Conservative laypeople! Forget about the subtleties of some CJLS decisions. How many of our laypeople observe a 25-hour Shabbat, or kashrut both “in” and “out”? A familiar refrain voiced by my colleagues in the congregational rabbinate is that they don’t have a lay community that shares their values or their lifestyles, or kosher homes where they can send their children to play. My Orthodox and Reform rabbi friends rarely voice this complaint.

But, again, why should the Conservative movement see itself as halakhic in the first place? Gillman feels that this is not a given if one properly understands Conservative Jewish theology. Afterall,

We believe the following: 1. In some sense, God did reveal Torah to the Jewish people; 2. The biblical account of the revelation at Sinai as narrated in Exodus 19 and 20 is not literally true; 3. Nor is the pentateuchal narrative as a whole historically accurate; it is a much later reworking of distant communal memories in terms of the historical concerns of later generations; 4. Much of the contents of humash, both narrative and law, reflect extensive borrowings from the literature of other ancient Near Eastern peoples; 5. However we may understand God’s role in revelation, both the substance and the text of Torah as we have it is the creation of our ancestors who determined what constituted God’s will for Israel in matters of belief and practice; 6. The authority of Scripture, then, was established by our ancestors, by a human community. 7. The formulation of the Oral Torah, rabbinic literature, is totally the work of human authorities. 8. Torah is sacred because our ancestors said it was sacred. Israel sanctified the Torah.

… [Therefore] the formulation of the contents of Torah as we have it today is the creation of human beings. Torah may contain God’s will for Israel, but it is God’s will as understood by a human community, and that version of God’s will reflects the concerns of the generations that originally recorded it. If we are a halakhic community, then, it is because our ancestors determined that we should be.

That conclusion is inescapable, as are its implications: whatever authority Torah has is ab initio, the authority granted to it by a human community. I take this one step further. It is then the right and responsibility of later human communities to revisit the contents of Torah in light of their ability to reflect these later communities’ own perception of God’s will for them. To reject the original version of God’s will is not, then, in principle, to question God’s will, but rather to question that original community’s perception of God’s will, which is not the same as questioning God.

Gillman lamented that this theology, which is so well-understood by the Conservative rabbinate, was never explicated for Conservative laity. The Movement, in fact, had seemingly gone out of its way to avoid preaching and teaching the implications of its own theology to its membership. Why? “[P]ossibly because of our fear that saying all of this aloud will justify our laypeople’s generalized casualness about ritual observance, or that we may become identified with Reform.” Over time, this disconnect between the Conservative rabbinate and laity has led to "the claim of halakhic fealty being “unfalsifiable and disingenuous, it escapes any clear definition, it has failed to engage our laity who either don’t understand it or don’t view it as relating to their own lives, and it is subverted by the culture of our movement, by its academic center, and by its implicit theology. It is a claim, created by and for rabbis and designed primarily to promote our wish to feel authentic.”

For Gillman, there was only one consistent move from there:

we embrace the tension and ambiguity which has always been at the heart of our reading of Judaism. If we believe that all of God-talk is metaphorical, if we deny the historicity and the literalness of the Sinai narrative as it appears in Torah, and if we claim that the Jewish religion was essentially the creation of the Jewish people, of groupings of Jews at various critical moments in our history, functioning in response to and within specific cultural contexts which we can describe—a notion that I am convinced most of the ideologues of our movement share—then we must conclude that authority in matters of belief and practice lies within the hands of the committed Jews of every generation. To say this is to relativize all of our ideological commitments, and effectively to consign us to a life of tension—which, I suggest we should embrace and which we will find liberating.

What, then, separates Conservative and Reform Judaism?

First, we differ in how much of traditional Jewish ritual practice we want to retain, how much we are prepared to abandon or to change, and how we go about changing. In all of these areas, we are more “conservative.” That is more of an emotional stance than a theological one, and it is thoroughly legitimate on its own terms. Feelings are important. Second, we differ in our institutional loyalties. Our loyalty to the institutions of our respective movements, primarily to JTS or to HUC-JIR, is genuine and powerful. Finally, we differ strikingly in our liturgy. No one who has davened in a Reform or in a Conservative synagogue could possibly confuse the two. I have frequently suggested that were you to blindfold me and lead me into five Reform and five Conservative synagogues, I would identify the movement in less than a minute. Whatever my personal theology, I cannot daven in a Reform or Reconstructionist synagogue or from one of their siddurim. None of this is going to change.

Indeed, the fact that Reform (and even parts of Orthodoxy) find themselves moving closer to Conservative Judaism in practice is actually a sign of success even though the Conservative Movement is the one shrinking in demographics:

I find it fascinating that though we have long been aware that our location as the center among American Jewish religious movements has made us uniquely vulnerable, recent developments in American Reform and Orthodoxy suggest that both of those movements are slowly gravitating back to the center. The pace is understandably glacial but the direction is clear. In the past decades, American Reform has come to embrace Hebrew, Zionism, significant aspects of traditional synagogue ritual, and even, most recently, an appreciation of the value of conversion. Orthodoxy, for its part, has begun to recognize Jewish women as halakhic authorities in their own right, and even allowed them to assume selected but significant liturgical/ritual roles. These developments should be appreciated as a backhanded tribute to where we have located ourselves all along.

This understanding, if accepted, leads to a reality similar to what Conservative Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove has described. A global religious community separated by institutional affiliations in which “the difference between Reform, Conservative, and Modern Orthodox Jews is a difference of degree and not of kind.”

But need this be the case? Gillman’s call was passionate and his students numerous, but he was not without his critics, the most articulate of which was his student Joel Roth. Responding directly to Gillman, Roth wrote as follows:

If authentic Judaism is halakhic, as I have argued, then the absolute centrality of halakhah to authentic Judaism is the “given” and not the “to be proved!” The absolute centrality of halakhah is the axiom of authentic Judaism, and axioms need not be proved precisely because they are presumed to be correct. That is what the status of halakhah is currently in authentic Judaism… the language of halakhah is not merely a desirable option among many other options, it is the only option, for it alone is the language in which the will of God is ultimately expressed, and it alone is the language in which what we write will be legitimately perceived…

In this construct, theology is without a doubt the handmaiden of halakhah. And this is what that means: Since halakhah is the “given,” theology cannot undermine its “given-ness” and remain an authentic theology. Does this imply that there is such a thing as an authentic theology, intimating that there is also such a thing as an inauthentic theology? Yes, it absolutely does. The purpose of the authentic theology is to provide the “myth” which rationalizes and defends halakhah as the given of authentic Judaism. And since the acceptance of Torah as the “constitution” of the halakhic system is critical to understanding how the halakhic system works, it must follow that a primary job of an authentic theology is to supply the myth/myths which does/do that.

In his book The Halakhic System, Roth even notes that halakhah, with it’s particular and internally-consistent rules of operation, would be binding regardless of the historical or theological realities that Gillman pushed for. In his words, “the halakhic system qua system is independent of any considerations of the accuracy of the historical claims of its basic norm. Whether or not it is “true” that the Torah embodies the word and will of God is of great historical and theological significance, but of no legal significance.” Furthermore, Roth argued that the Conservative Movement’s claim of being halakhic is a falsifiable one in that once no fealty whatsoever is given to any halakhic system the claim has been falsified! Indeed, Roth wrote that many of the CJLIS’ most controversial teshuvot were “weak of poorly argued, but they were still within legitimate parameters of halakhic deliberation and did not prove in any way that we are not a halakhic movement.”

After implying Gillman’s theology, which sought to undermine rather than support halakhic commitment, Roth went on to call attention to a further risk of Gillmanian thinking:

I certainly agree with you that our Movement has failed to create a committed and observant laity. It is our greatest failure. I agree that the main reason for this failure is that we have not communicated a sense of obligation. Indeed, it is my understanding that we use the word “obligation” very rarely, certainly so regarding anything that has to do with ritual observance…

There may be very cogent historical reasons which explain why we were so reticent to speak of “obligation” to our community, but we can’t give up on the possibility of succeeding now where we have failed in the past. If we do give up, we will “simply fritter away our identity.” The last clause implies clearly that you believe that we have an “identity” which distinguishes us from all others. It is that which we must emphasize and make clear. The problem, of course, is how you define just what that “identity” is! You and I do not agree on that subject, and we can’t both be correct. Thart, of course, is a big problem. This is the type of tension you see, and on which you think we thrive. I am not as certain as you are that we are thriving on it.

In retrospect, Roth was correct that the Conservative Movement (at least in its North American articulation) did not have room for both perspectives. Which approach won out, how does that inform and impact the current state of Conservative Judaism, and why should Orthodox Jews care? Stay tuned for the next entry in this series which will get to the bottom of all of those questions by exploring a controversial case study.