USCJ Review - Spring 2006
Conservative Judaism as a Dynamic Force for the Jewish People
In thinking about Conservative Judaism and why Conservative Judaism remains a vital spiritual force, I could not think of any way to approach this other than the personal. So I am going to start from a very personal place.
I am one of those Conservative Jews who found his way to Conservative Judaism having been raised on the margins of Jewish life entirely. I was a member of a different movement, but I was not a very involved member of that movement. I found my way to Conservative Judaism in college, because it offered a Judaism that was at once progressive and traditional, that reached to the past with reverence and honor, yet honored that past by keeping it open to change as each new generation saw God's will distilled through a living tradition. That way of being Jewish spoke to my soul then, and speaks to my soul now. I know no other way to present my love of Conservative Judaism than from the place that I stand. I once told an interdenominational group that if our numbers continue to decline, I will be the one who picks up the last Silverman siddur (I guess now I get to use the Harlow), and I will be the last one to attend the last Conservative synagogue. But I am not going anywhere.
I was admitted to rabbinical school 20 years ago; those were heady times. I walked into the halls of the Jewish Theological Seminary for my interview and was greeted by two rabbinical students who demanded: "Are you going to strengthen the left or the right?"
"I don't know," I said. "I just need to know where the interview is."
It was a somewhat polarized time, and I knew even then that I needed a way to remember who I am, and to remember who I am called to be as rav, or I would forget. The distractions of the rabbinate, the demands of our institutions, the kinds of pressures that are brought to bear on public leaders, that sort of pressure makes it virtually impossible to stay true to one's own essence - to remember who we are meant to be.
In 1985, two years into being a rabbinical student, I wrote the credo that's reprinted in this article. I wrote it to myself as a way of remembering who I am in the world. I want to fast-forward for a moment, and then we are going to read it together.
One of the joys about being the dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the University of Judaism is that because my students spend the third year of the program studying at the Schechter Rabbinical Seminary in Jerusalem with their fellow rabbinical students from New York, Buenos Aires, and Budapest, I get 10 days of aliyah every year visiting them. While I was in Israel, my friends in the Masorti movement gifted me with the siddur, Va-Ani Tefillati, that the Conservative movement in Israel has produced. It is, to my mind, the most wonderful siddur I have ever seen; I love it, and I use it all the time. Imagine my surprise when I came back to the United States and discovered that it fits inside the ornate silver case that my in-laws had given me years ago. So, like the Conservative movement, I daven from a siddur that is completely and gaudily traditional on the outside, and a little feminist and daring on the inside.
Inside the front cover of the siddur I have glued my credo, which I make a point of reciting every day:
The two core assertions of traditional Judaism, assertions which I cannot prove but upon which I stake my life:
The first axiom is that God is loving, compassionate, wise, and passionate about justice.
The second is that the Torah and rabbinic tradition is the preeminent vehicle for Jews to articulate a sense of God's will and to concretize that will in our daily lives and our social structure.
I refuse to read halachah or the Torah insuch a way that it makes God seem cruel, nor will I sever the intimate connection between God's will and God's Torah.
God is just, and halachah embodies God's love and justice. From these two points, an agenda of ritual profundity, compassion, and social justice emerges organically and traditionally.
We, my friends, stand in that unstable place that asserts that the Creator of the universe brought us, and all life, into being, as an act of love. We find ourselves called to emulate our Creator by showering our love upon each other. By expanding rings of love and inclusion, we testify through our deeds and our lives to the love and the justice that are our surest pathways to God.
The Torah, although it came to us from God, comes through us, and we believe that God gave us this wonderful mesorah and this wonderful, and living, body of literature, through generations of Israelite sages, prophets, rabbis, and philosophers. Because the Torah is alive, we choose how to prune it, how to shape it, and how to translate it from book into life. A Jew who believes that the book was handed literally and immaculately can choose to read it as cruel. But Jews, who have said from the beginning that we have a hand in shaping this book and shaping how it lives in the world, have an obligation to make sure that each and every time we translate Torah into life we do so in a way that God's love and justice is apparent and clear.
We make our choices because we are God's servants; because the greatest privilege we know is to be Jewish; because to stand at the foot of Sinai is to be forever transformed, forever changed, and forever liberated. No pharaoh can hold sway over us. No dictator, outside or inside, can force us into habit, or conformity, or dullness. We are a people who have been summoned to approach the world awake and alive. For me, Conservative Judaism is that vessel that allows me to stand with integrity in the place of my ancestors, borrowing the Torah from my children. And being able to bring the holiness that our people, at our best, has ever embodied takes courage.
You can, if you choose, freeze the tradition and continue to reenact it; but it is dead. You can, if you wish, do what you wish, and occasionally reference the tradition, but it is naked. The trick in life is to live in a living Torah, to be able to take sustenance from its waters, and to transmit to our children a tradition that reflects God's wisdom and our own. I remind you that our Torah tells us that the nations of the world are to look at our ways, and by our actions say, "What a wise people, and what a great God."
Judged by those criteria, we Conservative Jews have a lot of work remaining.
Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson (www.bradartson.com) is the dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the University of Judaism, where he is vice president. He is the author of It's A Mitzvah! Jewish Living Step-By-Step and The Bedside Torah: Wisdom, Visions, & Dreams. His new book, The Gift of Soul: Spiritual Resources for Leadership & Mentoring is scheduled for publication in spring 2006.
