For the Sake of Heaven: Two Views on the Nature of Jewish Belief

From The United Synagogue Review, Fall 1999

One of the highlights of the most recent KOACH Kallah, held this past February at Rutgers University, was a spirited interchange between Drs. Joel Roth and Neil Gillman on the nature of Conservative Judaism. These two friends, products of the Conservative Movement, met more than 40 years ago at Camp Ramah Wisconsin. They are now colleagues at the Jewish Theological Seminary. At least one college student noted in her evaluation that the two scholars provided so much for participants to think about that she’s “still dizzy!” We asked Rabbis Roth and Gillman to repeat their discussion for the sake of our Review readers. Below, excerpts from their responses.

From Dr. Joel Roth

There is no question that, historically speaking, there have been many Judaisms, each competing with the others for adherents. In that sense, it is probably true today, too, that there is more than one Judaism, and that today's Judaisms are also competing for adherents. It would, however, be erroneous to conclude from the existence of competing Judaisms that every brand of Judaism is entitled to call itself normative.

Anyone who wishes to do so is entitled to formulate a "new" Judaism and to attempt to compete with normative Judaism. What they cannot legitimately do is to pretend that non-normative Judaisms are, in fact, normative -- unless and until they actually become so.

In our day, Jewish Christians, for example, claim that they are a normative brand of Judaism, and they may well believe that they are. All other Jews, however, reject the claim that their brand falls within the boundaries of normativeness. Could it happen, theoretically, that Jewish Christians might persevere for a very protracted period and convince the majority of other Jews that they are, in fact, normative? Yes, in theory. But unless and until that happens, they are not normative, no matter how much they claim to be so.

In the entire post-biblical period there can only be one type of Judaism that warrants being referred to as normative, and that is Pharisaic/rabbinic Judaism. The rabbis and their disciples may not have been so great in number, even in the talmudic era itself; but, whether by historical accident or by Divine Providence, their brand of Judaism is the only one to have survived long term, and it is the only normative religious Judaism that has existed for the last 1500 to 2000 years.

Absolutely core and central to normative rabbinic Judaism is the conviction that the Torah reflects what God demands of humans, and that God's will is ultimately reflected in a legal system, which we call halakhah. There is often disagreement in halakhah, and the disagreement often leads even to divergent behaviors on the part of two different Jews who live by this system. Even more, halakhah is not static but can evolve and change, even radically. The change can be so great that what is perceived nearly universally at one time to be the halakhah might well be unrecognizable as halakhah to an earlier generation.

This does not mean, though, that Jewish law is whatever anyone wants to say it is. To the contrary, the halakhic system is as pluralistic and as flexible as it is precisely because there is a recognizable halakhic system, with recognized rules of admissibility. Nobody should confuse the diversity within halakhah as intimating that the halakhah is whatever an individual or a group decide that it is. It is simply false to claim that the only thing one can reasonably talk about is a halakhah, and not the halakhah.

From its inception to this day, the Conservative Movement has perceived itself to be the (or, at least, an) authentic continuation of the normative Pharisaic/rabbinic tradition. Indeed, for at least the first fifty years of its existence, the leadership of the Movement avoided calling it a separate movement. If it is an authentic heir to the rabbinic tradition, it must, by definintion, be a halakhic movement. There simply is no way at present to be Jewishly normative but not halakhic. The phrase "non-halakhic normative religious Judaism" is an oxymoron. Could there some day be a non-halakhic normative religious Judaism? In theory, yes. But, whatever that brand of Judaism will be, it cannot call itself normative until it actually becomes normative.

Consider, then, what follows from what we have said:

1. To the extent that one's philosophical/theological conclusions force one to reject the centrality of the recognizable halakhic system as the sine qua non of one's Judaism, one has exited from the boundaries of the only normative Judaism that exists today -- and no amount of protestation that there have always been “Judaisms” can serve to make a non-normative Judaism normative.
2. The centrality of halakhah is the "given," not the "to be proved." Of course, we must seek the most convincing ways possible to defend that centrality. To that end, we must have our halakhists, theologians, and educators work together to defend the normative tradition in ways that will be both compelling and convincing. In that way, we will join a long line of thinkers from Saadia Gaon and on, including men like Yehudah Halevi and Maimonides.
3. It would never have occurred to these philosophers, or to any other Jewish thinkers until fairly recently (historically speaking), that the result of their philosophical/theological undertakings could legitimately be the rejection of the authority of Jewish law. They would all have recognized that such a conclusion would relegate their thought to the realm of the non-normative, and that is utterly contrary to what they were seeking to accomplish.
4. Since halakhic Judaism remains the sole normative religious Judaism today, too, the philosophical/theological inquiries of modern thinkers which end up rejecting the authority of the recognizable halakhic system is similarly non-normative. They cannot claim to be the continuation of the normative rabbinic tradition. They should recognize that they are creating a new Judaism which must compete in the marketplace for recognition as normative.

The core of the problem for most modern thinkers seems to be the issue of revelation, that is, attempting to understand "What happened at Sinai?" And that issue has become a problem because modern biblical scholarship has, for many, made the traditional view of the nature of revelation quite untenable. Thus, many moderns conclude, the authority of the halakhic system is undermined because the Torah on which it is based is not Divine in the sense that the ancients believed. But, given what we have said above, Jewish thinkers who argue thus are failing in their function as defenders of the normative faith.

The challenge of modern biblical scholarship is probably not any greater a challenge to classical Jewish thought than was the challenge of Greek thought and science, or Muslim thought. The aim of classical theologians then was to reformulate Jewish thought in order to be consistent to the extent possible with the new trends in philosophical thought, but without requiring surrender of central Jewish tenets. That must be the goal of modern Jewish thinkers, too. If they seek it, they too can find a way to make the authority of Torah dependent not on a belief in the verbatim revelation of the Torah, but in a type of Providential oversight of the human editing process of the Torah. Regrettably, though, too many moderns are prepared to sacrifice the normative Jewish tradition rather than struggle w ith how to defend it in the modern intellectual climate.

From Dr. Neil Gillman

Dr. Roth and I have been invited to debate the current state and the future of Conservative Judaism. While we are perceived to hold polar opposite positions, the reality is much more subtle. Dr. Roth himself once claimed that sometimes, he feels we are at opposite ends of the Conservative ideological spectrum, but at other times, we are remarkably close. I agree.

How to explain that paradox? The clue is that largely, we deal with two different sets of issues. Dr. Roth is a halakhist, I am a theologian. Dr. Roth is a master of the halakhic system, its scope and its internal procedures, how it works, how new issues are confronted and new decisions made. I am more interested in issues such as why there is a halakhah in the first place, and why it has any authority over us. There is no question that our different points of departure affect how we view the authority of halakhah. But where we seem remarkably close to one another is in the overlap and in how halakhah should be dealt with by Conservative Jews.

Scholars are drawn to a particular field in Jewish studies out of a conviction that this particular field is where the interesting and important questions are addressed. For me, those questions have always been theological and philosophical.

Two central theological issues in Judaism are, first, the existence and nature of God, and second, the issue of revelation, how the Torah reached us, or, more crudely, “What really happened at Sinai?” The two issues are intertwined, but to begin with the latter, I have been progressively more and more incapable of accepting the biblical version of the Sinai revelation as described in Exodus 19-24 as literally true. To me, it is neither historically accurate nor theologically coherent.

The traditionalist understanding of the Sinai event (which I do not attribute to Dr. Roth) claims that the biblical description of Sinai is literally true: God descended on a mountain at a certain place on earth and on a specific day, God spoke the words of Torah (conventionally, from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Deuteronomy) to Moses, Moses wrote down God’s words, and that is the text we have before us today. Hence God’s authority is behind every word of the Torah, which is what makes it binding in all of its detail on all Jews to eternity.

I cannot accept that view, primarily for its simplistic anthropomorphism. No God I believe in goes up and down, or speaks words. When applied to God, these statements must be understood as metaphorical, not literal, and however well these metaphors reflect my ancestors’ experience of God, these metaphors remain the creation of human beings. Whatever God had to do with revelation -- and more liberal Jewish theologians have described this Divine dimension in different ways -- what we have is a document that is thoroughly pervaded by the humanness of its recipients and of those who composed it. To me, the claim that God literally speaks is idolatrous; if God is really God, then God does not literally speak.

This theological conclusion was also impelled by the way Torah is studied at the Seminary. We accept and teach the findings of higher biblical criticism: The Torah is a composite of several documents, written at different times by different parts of the community, integrated into the document we have probably some time in the fifth century BCE (or roughly seven centuries after Moses), and it contains manifold reflections of the cultures, ideas and institutions of the neighboring middle-eastern communities with which our ancestors were intimately familiar. The biblical account of revelation is therefore not history but historiography, not a photograph but an impressionistic painting, not literally accurate but a thoroughly human interpretation of an event that lies beyond the realm of direct human perception, comprehension and language. (A more expanded version of my thinking on this issue can be found in my Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew, chapters 1-2.)

The authority for what was included in Torah remains God, but it is God’s authority as interpreted and understood by human beings. In other words, God willed whatever the community or its leaders understood God to will. But if from the outset, what made it into Torah is the perception of a community of Jews, then every subsequent community has the right to revisit Torah and to judge whether or not it reflects its own personal understanding of God’s will. Our conflicts with the original text is not directed at God -- for none of us knows what God demands in its purity -- but rather against the interpretations of God’s will by earlier communities of Jews.

Halakhah, then, is not the will of God, but Israel’s understanding of the will of God -- a very different matter. If the former, then the system as a whole and its internal procedures are rigidly determined; the parameters within which we can expand or contract the system are intrinsic, set by God. Human freedom of interpretation is correspondingly limited. If the latter, the authority for the halakhah is rooted in human communities, our own community can then reshape the system in terms of our own faith commitments, and the parameters within which we do this work are extrinsic, set by an individual community of Jews, wherever this community wants to set them. My view of halakhah, then, reflects my theological commitments as to how it came into being in the first place.

This is the point where Dr. Roth and I meet, and then part company. Not for a moment do I want to imply that Dr. Roth shares the traditionalist position on revelation. If anything, what surprises me most about his position is his claim that this theological issue is irrelevant! He insists that halakhah is the classic and distinctive form of Jewish religious expression, that we must accept its contents, parameters and interpretive procedures as a given, and work with and within them. I respond with a series of “Why” questions: Why is there halakhah in the first place? Why this system? Why does it have any authority on us? And why are we bound to the internal interpretive procedures that Dr. Roth claims are inviolate? I have become increasingly impatient with those who insist on talking about “the” halakhah or “the” halakhic process, as if these were monolithic, self-evident and predetermined forms. I believe there are many different halakhic systems and halakhic processes, determined consensually by the many different Jewish religious communities among us who choose to live as Jews.

For it is clear to me that the implication of my position is that the subjective, human factor invariably plays a decisive role in shaping the system to express our many alternative readings of Judaism, that the system is much more fluid, its parameters much more open to consensus, much more pluralistic, and considerably more messy and imprecise than Dr. Roth would see it. He does acknowledge this subjective factor in halakhic decision-making, but he claims that there are intrinsic limits to our subjectivity, set by the system itself in its original formulation. I would define these parameters much more broadly than he would.

But what I call the “overlap” in our positions rests in our shared conviction that some halakhic system is intrinsic to Jewish expression (i.e., that our sense of being covenanted to God should be concretized in obligated behaviors), that there is some element of inherent subjectivity in its internal processes (though we disagree on how much), and most important, that our Movement has failed significantly to communicate thecentrality of Jewish ritual practice to our lay people. We probably disagree on the strategies we should pursue to correct this unfortunate state of affairs.