Encore ArchiveOn this page, we present essays profound or timely culled from the CLAL literary archive. Most of the articles that appear here appeared originally in the pages of Sh'ma A Journal of Jewish Responsibility, which was founded by Eugene Borowitz in 1970 and published by CLAL from 1994-1998. For further information regarding Sh'ma today, click here.
Losing Conservative JudaismBy Paul Plotkin When
I was a young boy growing up in a Conservative congregation in Toronto, Canada, I was
taught about the history of the Conservative Movement.
It was explained to me that it was not a movement in reaction to Orthodoxy,
but rather to Reform; that it was devised as an attempt to "conserve" tradition,
to "conserve" observance and practice, to redirect Judaism in a direction which
would conserve the traditionalism that Reform was seeking to eliminate while still
confronting modernity. As I grew up and
became more sophisticated in my awareness of the Conservative Movement, through exposure
at Ramah and USY, I learned there was a game that everyone played and that we all accepted
-- the rabbi was our vicarious, totally observant Jew, while the laymen were at all
different levels of observance. The
one commonality of the laymen was the bond of the synagogue with which they were
affiliated -- that, and the fact that they expected their rabbi to be the observant one
for them. While they went out and ate
non-kosher food or hot dairy food in a non-kosher restaurant, they expected their rabbi to
eat only in kosher restaurants. While they
drove to synagogue on Sabbath, they expected their rabbi to walk. While they did not keep Shabbat, they expected the rabbi to be meticulous
in his observance. And I must admit that as a
teenager, and even to the point in college when I decided that I would apply to the
seminary, I was prepared for a career in the rabbinate under those rules. Compromise
At Every Opportunity
What
I was not prepared for, and what I still have great difficulty with, was the fact that the
rules would, imperceptibly at first, but quite dramatically and quite rapidly, change
across the country. We went from having a
rabbi keep all the observances for you, to having a rabbi who would "not
observe -- just like you. Part of this
was aided and abetted by us Conservative rabbis ourselves who, through Law Committee
decisions over the years, reflected on what I would call "the Koola (compromise) Factor." Whenever
possible, a decision that could make a question in Jewish law easier for the people,
regardless of other considerations, was adopted. Soon it became the accepted and often
even the maximal level of behavior. Laws pertaining to driving on the Sabbath or laws in
different areas of kashrut are but two areas.
For example, rather than having the anticipated benefit of more participation in
synagogue and Jewish life by allowing people to drive, and rather than having more kashrut observed at a wider level by allowing
certain compromises in terms of fish, the opposite has been achieved -- not only for the
layman who is often not observing in the first place, but for the rabbis as well. There
are now numbers of Conservative synagogues across the country, congregations in good
standing of the United Synagogue, where, if a rabbi is not prepared to drive on Saturday,
he may not even apply for the position. The
decision pertaining to driving intended that if absolutely necessary, then it was
permitted to drive to the nearest Conservative
synagogue and back. I know of rabbis in
Conservative congregations who pass two or three other Conservative congregations on the
way to their congregation. The "Koola Factor" has struck. The location of affordable housing has become the
primary consideration, not its proximity to the Temple.
I've heard of another congregation which, as one of its early pre-screening
questions of candidates, asked, "Were they prepared, on coming down for an interview,
to go out for a fish meal?" If the
candidate were to choose the higher level of kashrut,
if the rabbi would choose not to compromise on that point, the congregation in essence
told him that he was not a suitable candidate to even apply, for his decision not to
exercise a "koola," a compromise, a
diminution of standards, made him totally unacceptable to that congregation. Supporting
Kosher Pizza Parlors
The
Koola Factor has had other negative implications
as well. Thank G-d, there are still
percentages of Conservative Jews who keep kosher -- larger percentages [than would be
expected] if one defines kosher in the widest of latitudes.
Most Conservative kosher Jews feel comfortable walking into any pizzeria
around the country and ordering a cheese pizza. Leaving
aside the question of suitability of cheese, there are still countless problems in the
preparation of such a hot food product: the non-kashrut
of the pots and pans, stoves, the proximity of pepperoni and other meat products, the
possibility of the mixture of non-kosher meat with cheese pizza, etc. And yet, with the rather wide application of the Koola Factor with regard to eating hot dairy out,
eating regular pizza has become an acceptable and normative activity amongst
kosher-keeping, Conservative Jews. That in
itself would not be so problematic were it not for the fact that one wonders how many more
"totally kosher" pizzerias would be available that a community
could
support where the quality of the pizza would be every bit as acceptable, but
the kashrut would be unimpeachable. Yet we have allowed the viability of such outlets
to rest solely in the hands of the Orthodox neighborhoods. Recently,
I understand, the Law Committee has been discussing the question of the acceptability or
non-acceptability of mono-diglycerides. As of
this writing, I am not aware of any decision having been rendered. But the raising of the question allows another
opportunity for the Koola Factor to enter. Let us say that there were legitimate halachic and chemical reasons to decide that
mono-diglycerides of animal origin were to be deemed acceptable. This would theoretically open up many now
forbidden products to the Conservative kosher consumer.
Surely that is the intent in raising the question, but the practical result would
be to further lessen the market for supervision of products and to discourage companies
from seeking a heksher (rabbinic approval). Now the more subtle questions of the equipment
used or the source of other questionable ingredients will go unanswered and unsupervised. What then have we gained from our decision? The Koola Factor
will have triumphed again. Higher
Morality And The Minyan
One
of the attractions that Conservative Judaism had for me, both prior to my coming to the
Seminary and during my studies there, was the intellectual discovery and the intellectual
honesty practiced. It was shown to us how
Judaism has always continued to evolve using the flexibility implicit in the oral
traditions, but that there was both a boundary to the change and a specific modus vivendi of change. As long as the changes in Jewish life brought
about through an interpretive method could be justified within the parameters
established, Judaism remained both true to its Torah source, yet flexible enough to
accommodate the necessary changes in society. It
was in the area of the "women's issue" that a flagrant exception was blatantly
manifested by some members of the Rabbinical Assembly.
The issue of women counting in a minyan,
after being debated back and forth by the Law Committee, was finally conceded to be
one in which the halachah allowed no room for
re-interpretation vis-a-vis its definition of who would constitute a minyan. Therefore,
the Law Committee went outside of the established boundaries of interpretive Judaism as
perceived through our historical analyses and, instead, began to legislate new rules based
on a "higher morality" outside of the traditional mode. The thrust in the Rabbinical Assembly pushing for
the change, in essence, said that "if the tradition does not allow for an adaptation,
we will discard the value system implicit in the traditional halachah and we will superimpose our own value
system which we deem to be of a higher ethical level and we will change Jewish law
accordingly." This,
in terms of my understanding of Jewish tradition, is a radical departure from all that we
have stood for in the movement of "tradition and change." The casuality of such actions will not be the
immediate decision rendered one way or the other but, it seems to me, the entire integrity
upon which the Conservative Movement is built.
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