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Conservatism -- The Issue is Not Law

Art Green (Sh'ma, 2/23 December 31, 1971)

The crisis of change in the Conservative Movement, so carefully discussed in Sh'ma (1/20), calls for some further reflection. How right Jacob Neusner is when he laments the missed opportunity for confrontation with the real issues that make up the crisis.

It seems to this Conservative dissident, however, that we have been dealing with symptoms rather than causes. True, the crisis came to the fore on the issue of Halakhah, with the resignation of the Law Committee. But the underlying crisis of Conservative Judaism lies not in the realm of Halakhah, but rather in the demise of significant Agadah, in the lack of a seriously taken religious ideology, out of which must spring the motivation for religious practice.

I do not here refer to the decline of the mythic power of the Seminary itself over Conservative Jews. The very fact that an institution was able to find sufficient vacuum to assume that mythic role over the past several decades in itself says a great deal. And Eugene Borowitz is right in his claim that the seminary did fulfill that role to a large extent. The line as it was given to future rabbis while they were students in the rabbinical school seems to have run something like: "We are an institution committed to Halakhah. You are now a part of this family (read: institution). Therefore you too will be committed to Halakhah. You are not to do anything, once you are out in the field, to bring discredit to the Seminary. And the Seminary is Halakhic; we have determined that Halakhah is gut far yidn.

The failure of practice as ideology

But institutional image is not Agadah. "Do it for Papa" failed as a rationale for religious observance in most of the families that created the American Conservative synagogue. Said with the voice of institution-family, it has even more of an empty ring.

Further discussion requires a definition of the term Agadah as I am using it. For our purposes I mean by Agadah the attempt to re-read the underlying mythic structures of Judaism, dealing with God, the God-man relationship, the role of Torah, the mission of Israel, and the rest, in such a way that they again provide a living basis for Jewish faith and practice. The Conservative Movement has shied away from this task. It was well-known in my day at the Seminary that God was never mentioned outside the liturgy. One had the feeling that theology was too controversial a subject: one could control (more or less) the religious behavior of faculty and students, but what would we ever do if we discovered that we were non-believers? And many of us, on both sides of that classroom lectern, were. No, better not to talk about it. Better to risk idolatry and convert practice itself into ideology than to risk confrontation on such unpredictable issues.

What's beyond historical scholarship?

Yet at the same time Conservative Judaism has a crying need for a re-reading of Agadah. Historical criticism, which lies at the very core of that movement's self-definition, calls all the old faith-assumptions into question. Education in the movement at all levels is based on text study, as it should be. But what is the text? How does one relate to the theological assumptions of past generations? Is Schechter proposing that we live with the naive folk-theology he ascribes to the Rabbis? What is the authority base of Halakhah for one who accepts the scholarship of Ginzberg and Finkelstein? Wherein lies the sacredness of the Talmudic text after one studies with Lieberman and David Weiss? What happens after we accept Biblical criticism? Do we still have a theology of revelation? If not, what is the observance thing all about?

We have all accepted historical self-consciousness and critical method applied to the sources of Judaism. That is no longer at issue. But that very historicism makes a demand upon us: in this evolving history, we too must stand somewhere. If we are to be living religious Jews and not just scholars of the Jewish past, we must begin by seriously confronting theological issues. Conservative Judaism, however, has produced great scholars, but almost no serious theologians. That has been left to Reform; the finest minds to come up through the Conservative ranks have directed themselves to historical scholarship.

The critical need for a new theology

The crisis in Agadah becomes manifest in Halakhah. For Halakkah, especially in the open society, requires a theological base; it is not socially self-enforcing. What the Conservative Movement is left with is not Halakhah, but traditionalism, or, indeed, conservatism. Traditionalism is self-justifying: it has no meaning other than its desire to survive; it has no defense other than the beauty of the way of life it seeks to preserve. Obviously, it will not withstand great pressure, for its beauty turns to repressive ugliness when its back is against the wall in struggle.

Those who would claim that the Conservative Movement is truly Halakhic, rather than traditionalist, must wear a peculiar set of blinders. Selective Halakhah, chosen on the basis of the popularity of certain institutions among American Jews, is simply not Halakhah. Under pressure from the Orthodox, Mikveh (the ritual bath) for converts is now a great rallying-cry. But what of Mikveh for non-converts? How does a rabbi claim to be operating within Halakhah when neither his wife nor any of the brides he has married off has ever seen the inside of that noble institution? Here is a mitzvah de-oraita (a commandment recognized as having Biblical authority), a basic claim of the Halakhic system, by now rather a dead letter to most of the Conservative rabbinate.

Now if we are to speak of a new Halakhah ("a Halakhah" rather than "the Halakhah", as Seymour Siegel used to put it), that is a task that can be undertaken with integrity. But again, it cannot be done until we know theologically where we are. A new Halakhah can only proceed from a new Agadah.

No, I do not believe that the day of Conservative Judaism is over. I do believe, however, that the crisis is upon us, and that continued escapism can be nothing but a foreboding of imminent decay.