The End of Conservative Judaism
Michael J. Broyde
The Conservative Rabbinical Assembly’s Law Committee announced nearly three months ago that Conservative Judaism will ordain homosexual rabbis, and while a lot of ink was spilled explaining this decision and its ramifications, I saw little long-term analysis. This, hopefully will fill that gap. I view the leftward move of Conservative Judaism as a positive development for American Jewry - quite literally, it is the end of the beginning of Judaism in America and now we can finally grow into adulthood as a Jewish community.
The truth is that there is a grand divide in the Jewish community worldwide between two groups: those who think that Jewish law (halacha) is really, truly, binding and those who do not. This division is both religiously and culturally important - it reflects a basic worldview about what being Jewish really means. Throughout the world, other than in the United States, this distinction formed the basic denominational divide and one could well understand the need for almost a schism over this issue.
Not so in America. For many decades, Conservative Judaism sought to bridge this gap, with a promise that was too good to be true. You could obey Jewish law, Conservative Judaism claimed, but ultimately Jewish law was sufficiently malleable that whatever large segments of the Jewish community wanted was shown to be permissible, and whatever struck large segments of Conservative Jewry as wrong became prohibited. Indeed, the Conservative rabbinate has consistently delivered on that promise, whether it be driving to synagogue on Shabbat (permissible), smoking (prohibited) egalitarianism (permissible) and now homosexuality (permissible).
This approach gave deep comfort to a number of generations of Jews who felt complex yearnings to comply with Jewish law, but yet a profound inability to adhere to Orthodox standards in fact. One could have his cake and eat it, too, in the Conservative movement. For decades, Conservative Judaism was the largest denomination in America, even as it was nearly nonexistent outside the U.S. and on deeply shaky intellectual footing in terms of technical Jewish law.
Conservative Judaism is nearly finished as a movement, I suspect, and the decision to permit homosexual conduct will only hasten its demise. The reasons are historical and logical. As the generations of Jewry that recall and romanticize life in Europe - either directly or through a parent - age and ultimately pass, fewer and fewer people who do not observe Jewish law as a central component of their live have an interest in even being told that their conduct is consistent with Jewish law.
Those who seek to observe God’s word through halacha see the obvious - what Conservative Judaism is doing in the name of Jewish law is bogus as a matter of Jewish law. On the other hand, those who do not seek to observe halacha find little comfort in being told that Jewish law can be reinterpreted to allow what is being done. There is no market left for Conservative Judaism.
So now that American Jewry has outgrown its adolescence, I predict a rosy future of two denominations, with many subcultures within each of these denominations. There will be one denomination (called “Liberal” in most of the world) that denies that Jewish law is binding.
Of course, within that Liberal group there will be many different cultures, some of which still adhere to many of the frameworks of historical prayer (from laying tefillin to Hebrew prayer and public Torah reading) and others who are more creative and less traditional (from guitars in worship to services in the vernacular). Indeed, there will even be some in this group that observe Jewish law, but deny that one has to. The common intellectual predicate will be that Jewish law is no more binding than any other historical legal system.
There will also be a second denomination (called “Traditional” in most of the world) that observes halacha religiously. Just as within the Liberal group there will be no cultural monopoly, so too here. The community of those who maintain fealty to the law will be quite broad - and it will even have a group that does not actually observe Jewish law, but merely wishes to. However, what unites this group is deep fidelity to Jewish law as the touchstone of all religious, ethical and legal decisions.
What will happen to Conservative Judaism, you ask? Nothing in the short run. In the long run, Conservative synagogues, institutions, rabbis and communities will generally drift more and more visibly into the Reform community. Conservative synagogues will become institutions that are ideologically Reform with more traditional liturgy and practice.
Eventually, a merger will take place. A small number of Conservative synagogues will become Orthodox, as faced with the choice of abandoning Jewish law or clinging to it tighter, they will chose the latter.
All of this, I think, is a change for the better. The reorganization of American Jewry along the lines of acceptance or rejection of Jewish law will only help people make important choices in their own religious life.
We, as a community, will have entered our adulthood. n
Michael J. Broyde is a law professor at Emory University and an Orthodox rabbi.
The Jewish Week