Is the “Halakhic Authenticity” of Conservative Judaism a Broken Myth?

Is the “Halakhic Authenticity” of Conservative Judaism a Broken Myth?

By Leonard Levin

• NOTE:  The following article is included in the book Personal Theology: Essays in Honor of Neil Gillman, edited by William Plevan, published by Academic Studies Press.  A hardcopy of this book may be ordered at: Academic Studies Press: Personal Theology (Order Book) .

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.[1]
• 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.[2]  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. ]

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[1] The instance of driving 60 MPH in a 55 MPH zone provides a striking analogy to the halakhic category of patur aval asur—“exempt [from punishment] but still forbidden”!

[2] See Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy, Chapter 1.