How Halakha is Made

by Joanne Palmer

In early December, the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards will vote on one of the most contentious issues to face the Conservative movement in decades.

The committee’s 25 voting members have been considering whether openly gay men and lesbians can be ordained as rabbis and whether rabbis can conduct commitment ceremonies for gay or lesbian couples. Neither is now authorized by the Law Committee. Not up for a vote but clearly underlying the entire debate is the question of how Conservative Jewish leaders believe that halakha addresses homosexuality.

That the question is asked at all displays Conservative Judaism’s responsiveness to the world in which we live; that it cannot be answered quickly or painlessly demonstrates our ongoing commitment to halakha. To our right, in the Orthodox world, the question is dismissed; to our left, the Reform movement says that it is simply a matter of self-evident morality.

To Conservative scholars and halakhists, the question, fraught as it is with emotion, pain, and longing, must be studied exhaustively and sensitively. The results of that study, the four papers the Law Committee’s members are now examining, offer a range of options. Wildly overstated, two of the teshuvot recommend no change and the others are in favor of instituting a new status quo.

Rabbi Jerome Epstein, the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism’s executive vice president, thinks it likely that at least two of the four teshuvot will be accepted, one on either side of the issue. The Law Committee’s members are to vote on each teshuva separately, based on its own internal logic; it is possible for one member to vote for or against all four of them. Because each paper probably will need only six votes to be accepted, it is hard to imagine that fewer than two of them will be considered as halakha. If that happens, then it will be up to each congregation’s rabbi, as its mara d’atra, or decisor, to decide which that community will accept as its own halakha.

Rabbi Epstein believes that the situation presents the Conservative movement with a great opportunity to educate its members on how the system works, how the Law Committee makes its decisions, how tradition and society change each other, how we grow as Jews and as moderns through that process.

That’s why the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism has organized a series of panel discussions, where prominent rabbis, all members of the Law Committee, have explained the issues as they see them. In August, Rabbi Elliot Dorff, the rector and Sol and Anne Dorff Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, and Rabbi Joel Roth, the Louis Finkelstein Professor of Talmud and Jewish Law at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, disagreed with each other, with emotion held in check with great civility, both in Toronto and New York. Similar discussions will be held in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boca Raton, and metropolitan Washington, DC; at times Rabbi Roth will be spelled by Rabbi Joseph Prouser of the Little Neck Jewish Center in Queens, New York, and Rabbi Dorff will be relieved by Rabbi Avram Reisner of Chevrei Tzedek Congregation in Baltimore.

• Read more about the arguments for and against the changes to halakha
• See a video of the New York panel:
  • Part 1
  • Part 2
  • Part 3

It is vitally important for Conservative Jews to understand the process as well as the issue, Rabbi Epstein believes. The movement’s strength is in the tension between the tradition as we have inherited it and the ever-changing world in which we live. That is particularly true as we face contentious, emotionally laden issues. When the vote on the halakha about gay ordination and commitment ceremonies is taken in December, a well-educated laity will have the tools to understand what that vote means.