Is the “Halakhic
Authenticity” of Conservative Judaism a Broken Myth?
By Leonard Levin
Our teacher Rabbi Neil Gillman
raised many eyebrows and provoked many rebuttals in December, 2005 at the
United Synagogue convention by his pronouncement that Conservative Judaism can
no longer in good conscience call itself a halakhic movement. He argued from the “death of a thousand
qualifications”: that by retreating
successively from one recognized position after another, and failing to train
an observant laity, Conservative Judaism has demonstrated that its purported
commitment to “halakhah” does not really bind it to any positive, specifiable
content.
Rabbi Gillman had the option,
of course, given his repertoire of theological concepts, to say instead that
for Conservative Judaism, commitment to halakhah was a “broken myth,” i.e. a
meaning-giving narrative that rises phoenix-like to give one a sense of meaning
no matter what the disqualifying evidence.
Saying that would not have been nearly as controversial, and so (I am
guessing) would not have been as successful in provoking discussion and debate
on the identity and direction of Conservative Judaism, which was presumably his
purpose and was better served by the remarks he actually delivered.
A year after Rabbi Gillman’s
remarks, further events fortified his claim.
Indeed, Rabbi Gillman’s long-time intellectual sparring partner, Rabbi
Joel Roth, seemed to second Rabbi Gillman’s motion, coming from the opposite
end of the Conservative ideological spectrum, by resigning from the Rabbinical
Assembly Committee on Jewish Laws and Standards (CJLS) after its approval of
the Dorff-Nevins-Reisner paper on homosexuality. For Rabbi Roth, this action proved that
indeed Conservative Judaism could no longer lay claim to halakhic authenticity.
Yet in Winter-Spring 2006, the
journal Conservative Judaism had
published a double issue, “The Aggadah of the Conservative Movement.” Apart from Rabbi Gillman’s contribution (an
expanded and revised version of his USCJ address), nearly every piece was
devoted to affirming that halakhah indeed had a central role to play in
Conservative Judaism’s self-definition, thus supporting the “broken myth”
hypothesis.
My own position on this matter
goes back many years. Growing up in a
Conservative congregation and attending Camp Ramah, I developed a strong sense
as a Conservative Jew that has never left me.
I derived some pride from the fact that my uncle, Rabbi Max Routtenberg,
had been at one time the chairman of the Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish
Law and Standards. In my teen years I
spent a good deal of time studying the 1950 Conservative responsa on Shabbat
driving and use of electricity, which I found in Rabbi Mordecai Waxman’s book Tradition and Change. They impressed me at the time (though I had
little basis for comparison) with their careful attention both to technical
halakhic argumentation and to broad sociological analysis to supply the context
for the decisions—features which have ever since impressed me as characteristic
of the best Conservative efforts in this area.
They left me with a vision of progressive halakhic method which remains
to this day a central part of my conception of what Conservative Judaism ought
to be—my own “myth,” if you will, that still sustains me. My current paper seeks to unpack the broader
implications of that vision.
General Reflections
In the aftermath of the 2006
CJLS decision to pass both the Roth and Dorff-Reisner-Nevins responsa on
homosexuality by bare majority votes (13 votes each), a study (directed by
Steven M. Cohen) was commissioned by the Jewish Theological Seminary, the
Rabbinical Assembly, and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism to poll
Conservative Jewish “leaders and activists” as to their views on this and
related issues and their personal Jewish practice. Those polled included clergy, professional
leaders, lay leaders, and “others.” I
focus here on the findings of the poll concerning personal practice, especially
among the “lay leaders” and the “others,” which I suggest may be taken as one
significant index of the practical success of Conservative Jewish halakhic
innovations and educational efforts:
- 65% of “lay leaders” and 73% of “other”
respondents keep kosher at home. Of
these groups, 45% and 65% respectively refrain from eating non-kosher meat out
of the house, but 90% will eat fish prepared in non-kosher restaurants.
- Over 80% of the “lay leaders” attend Shabbat
services at least 3 times a month. While
slightly under half (43% of lay leaders and 49% of “others”) refrain from
shopping on Shabbat, the vast majority (89% and 69%) will drive to shul on
Shabbat. By inference, it appears that
the numbers of lay leaders and “other respondents” who drive but do not shop
(thus in some sense reflecting the ideal liberal-Conservative Jewish practice)
are 32% and 18% respectively.
- 33% of the lay respondents say daily prayers “at
least 3 times a week.” (What an oddly
significant formulation of this crucial issue!)
While these figures are
doubtless deplorable when judged from a standard of 100% compliance (bearing in
mind, too, that the respondents are a select group, presumably much more
committed than the “average” Conservative laity), they also are sharply
different from the “null hypothesis” that would predict that Jewish law, and
particularly Conservative Jewish legal decisions (such as the stands on
driving-to-shul and eating-fish-out) have no effect whatsoever on contemporary
practice. Instead, they depict a muddle,
which is pretty standard for assessments of Conservative Jewish ideology and
practice generally.
Before rushing to judgment and
conclusions, let me raise a few analogies and general considerations:
- How many taxpayers are 100% compliant with paying
all the taxes that a strict reading of the tax code would require?
- How many automobile drivers are 100% compliant
with the speed laws and traffic controls (traffic lights and stop signs)?
- How many players of board games (such as
Scrabble and Monopoly) adhere strictly to all the rules of those games (incl.
no abbrs., Proper Names or Yinglish)?
- How many practitioners of amateur music
(including everything from classical chamber music and jam-sessions to singing
popular songs in the car and the shower) are 100% compliant with the “official”
original scores of the music that they so often freely appropriate and adapt to
their imperfect memories and creative impulses?
- Is the notion of Sinaitic (or divine) revelation
applicable to any of the analogies I have just listed?
- Is the broader notion of a divine will operative
in the general order and structure of society entirely irrelevant to these
cases (for instance, would the loss of a human life, due to speed-limit
infraction, be any the less a diminution of the “divine image? Is the etymology of “music” [< “muse”] perhaps
testimony to the divine spirit that animates it?)
- Would the array of activities described here
(public finances, public transportation, games, music) be significantly
affected if their respective codes were – instead of being honored in the
breach – abolished entirely? (You bet!)
- Must we, because of the infractions in all the
areas listed (and many others), entirely forfeit our conceit to being, by and
large, a “law-abiding society”? (I
should hope not!)
A few
corrections of commonplace misconceptions may be gleaned from these
considerations:
- Law does not have to be mirrored perfectly in
social reality to be an effective constitutive element of that reality. Though the “underground economy” of untaxed
earnings is indeed enormous, the amount of earnings on which taxes are paid is
many times greater – enough to support the activities of all the federal, state
and local governments.
- Even when “honored in the breach,” law can be an
effective and essential constraint on behavior.
A 55-MPH speed limit may not get many motorists to drive under 55 MPH,
but it may deter a majority from exceeding 65 MPH, and even this imperfect
deterrent (when backed up by spot enforcement) can save many lives.
- Many social practices are simply inconceivable
without law. Even if Scrabble rules may
be frequently broken, without a general pattern of rule-observance from which
these deviations occur there would be no Scrabble (and the same applies to
Shabbat, family ties, economic life, and most forms of social existence).
- Though the specifics of most laws are
indisputably human-devised, all law operates within constraints that are beyond
human ability to change, and that from a religious perspective may thus be
viewed as God-given. Among these are:
o
The dependence of human beings on the natural
order;
o
The interdependence of human beings on one
another;
o
The correlation of rights and obligations (for
social services to be provided, someone must pay taxes);
o
The inherent tradeoff of rules and freedom (for
Scrabble or music or Shabbat to be possible at all, I must restrict my
spontaneity and channel my behavior within predefined limits);
o
The givenness of social institutions and their
history as facts that are formative of my identity and the necessary
starting-point of any socially-meaningful behavior (I mythically “went out of
Egypt,” therefore I carry the lessons of that experience in my dealings with
the oppressed, etc.);
o
The embedding of the entire human project within
the larger natural history of life and the universe (viewed religiously as God’s
creation), with whatever implications of purposiveness and responsibility we
derive from that perspective.
What Is Broken?
It is not hard to see in the
traditional Jewish account of the Sinaitic revelation of Torah a classic case
of what Peter Berger (building on Emile Durkheim) described as a projection of
the social order on the cosmos.
According to this view, the legal-social
institutions of ancient Israelite society and rabbinic-medieval Jewish society
constitute a social fact to those respective societies, confronting the
individual as an objective reality. The
objectivity and necessity of that reality were mythically expressed in the
story that God revealed the essential rules governing that society (in more or
less detail depending on one’s interpretation) in the Sinaitic theophany. In that theophany (declares the
Deuteronomist, in mythic terms that stretched literal credence even in ancient
times), the unborn as well as the living were present. (Not just the unborn persons, but the
as-yet-not-conceived rules and ordinances of future legislation—mountains
hanging by a hair—as many a rabbinic aggadah expresses!) An apt parallel would be to declare that in
1620, the 300,000,000 presently-living Americans crossed the Atlantic within
the confines of the good ship
Mayflower
and landed all together on Plymouth Rock, a fact which they now recollect and
celebrate every November on Thanksgiving Day.
(In every generation, each American must see him/herself as if s/he
personally crossed on the
Mayflower! And we have not made allowance for the
percentage of non-compliance with this ritual.)
Yet it is precisely such a counterfactual narrative that expresses
poetically a part of the essence of being Jewish or being American that can
hardly be expressed otherwise at all, and certainly not so powerfully and
concisely.
But as Rabbi Gillman has
taught us (in the name of Paul Tillich, but in his own initimitable way), such
a myth, when brought out into the light of day, tends to be rationalized and
concretized from a mythic to a literal formulation, and exposed at the same
time to falsification. In that literal
formulation, “God revealed these laws” becomes a separate action and
transcendent ground of the imperative status of the laws....
[For the continuation of this article, purchase the book, Personal Theology: Essays in Honor of Neil Gillman, edited by William Plevan, published by Academic Studies Press, or contact the author of the article at Reblen@aol.com. ]
