Conservative Judaism at a Crossroad
By Jay Michaelson
Outgoing chancellor Schorsch was right that Conservative Judaism is suffering from malaise, but 180 degrees wrong on the remedy. For Schorsch, wissenschaft remains the answer: more rational, moral Jewish thinking and sober textual reading. But American religion today - Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and otherwise - is not about rationality.
First, we live in an age of terror and unprecedented change, and the religions that are responding effectively to those conditions are the ones which get us in our kishkes - in the non-rational, spiritual, primal, mythic and even mystical aspects of ourselves.
Second, American Jews today are pragmatists: They want what works. Meditation works; serious, lively text study works (for educated elites, anyway); drum circles work; spirituality works. Rattle-your-jewelry Judaism, old clichés about antisemitism and Israel, and the sober, boring conventionality of much of Conservative Judaism just doesn’t work. Nor do dead theologies and dogmas which no one believes anymore.
Finally, the Conservative movement spent so much energy worrying about whether gays could be good Jews that they forgot to ask why anyone would want to be. Now it needs to ask, “What do we provide that nothing else does?” The answer isn’t community, ethics or culture; Jews can get those elsewhere. But the spark of divinity, the charge of holiness, the power of myth - these are treasures that we can’t get anywhere else. We just have to dare to embrace them.
Jay Michaelson is the director of Nehirim: GLBT Jewish Culture and Spirituality and a professor at Boston University Law School.
Forward.com