USCJ Review - Spring 2007
Law Committee Decision Signals Strength of Movement
One of the Conservative movement’s strengths always has been its pluralism.
Within clearly proscribed halakhic boundaries, Conservative Jews have always been comfortable with the understanding that there is no one right way to do things, no one right custom that supersedes all others, no one vantage point from which the whole can be seen most clearly.
This may seem messy to the outside world, but it is our pluralism, rough with the ragged edges of real life, that shields us from the black-and-white rigidities of fundamentalism as we work out the directions in which we are meant to go.
After the eagerly awaited decisions by the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards on the status of gay men and lesbians were made in December, Conservative Jews learned that we can have openly gay rabbis – and we can reject them as well. Our rabbis can perform commitment ceremonies or refuse to do them, and our seminaries can accept gay rabbinical students or decline to admit them.
According to many Law Committee members and observers, this is a good thing; not surprisingly, given our pluralism, others disagree.
The Law Committee’s vote was on two related questions – whether the movement’s rabbinical seminaries can ordain openly gay candidates and whether rabbis can perform same-sex commitment ceremonies. Underlying those two specific questions, of course, was the entire range of questions about how gay men and lesbians fit into Conservative Jewish life.
The Law Committee first answered a similar question in 1992, affirming in a consensus statement that the statement in Leviticus upon which most of Western religions’ antipathy to homosexuality is based barred the movement from fully accepting openly gay men and lesbians. (It did, however, also make clear that gay men and lesbians could be hired for some synagogue jobs, and that homophobia was unacceptable.)
The committee itself is made up of 25 voting members; all are rabbis. It also has ex-officio members, who represent the leadership of some of the Conservative movement’s biggest organizations, and five non-voting members. All five of those members now were appointed by United Synagogue, and one of the ex-officio members is our president, Dr. Ray Goldstein. The non-voting members take part in the discussions that precede each vote, and they make use of their expertise in their own fields.
The rules by which the committee operates are complicated.
It takes six votes to pass a regular paper, or teshuva, and 13 to pass a takanah, which is not a logical extension of pre-existing law but a radical but apparently necessary change to it. There must be a majority vote to declare a paper a takanah, but the author’s consent is not necessary. Each voting member votes up or down on every teshuva or takanah on a subject; he or she does not select one and reject the others. That means that it is possible for more than one seemingly contradictory paper to pass, and even for one person to vote for both.
And for the final layer of complexity, the Law Committee’s vote is not binding, even when only one opinion is passed. Each of the Conservative movement’s synagogues is governed by its own rabbi, acting as mara d’atra, or decisor, and by its board. There are some actions that would place a rabbi or a congregation outside the bounds of the movement, but there is a great deal of freedom within those boundaries.
When the committee convened at the Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan, members voted on five papers. Each had been revised, re-revised, and revised yet again. The two-day meeting, partially open to a small group of observers, was both tense and respectful. At its conclusion, the group had voted to accept three of the five papers. One, written by Rabbi Joel Roth, upheld his 1992 paper and found that despite the pain he knew the decision caused many people, homosexual activity is not Jewishly acceptable. Rabbi Roth suggested that gay men and lesbians should live celibate lives, although he said that he knew such a demand is harsh. He also recommended that other Jews be non-judgmental; none of us is perfect. The paper was accepted by 13 of the 25 voters.
The paper written by Rabbi Elliot Dorff, Rabbi Daniel Nevins, and Rabbi Avram Reisner said that respecting other human beings as also having been created in God’s image is of supreme importance. It read the prohibitions in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 as banning only anal sex; to read it more broadly, the authors said, is to overstate and misunderstand. Therefore, there is no reason not to ordain gay and lesbian rabbis and no reason not to perform commitment ceremonies for them; gay men just must abstain from anal sex. That paper, like Rabbi Roth’s, passed, also with 13 votes.
The third paper to pass, written by Rabbi Leonard Levy, began with a denunciation of the prejudice against gay men and lesbians that has caused so much suffering. Rabbi Levy continued by suggesting that not all homosexuality is innate – a point unique to his paper – and that homosexuals would benefit from counseling. His paper passed with six votes, the minimum number necessary.
Rabbi Adam Kligfeld of Congregation Etz Chayim in Monroe, New York, voted for both the Dorff and Roth teshuvot, although one advocated for change and the other forbade it.
“The papers are contradictory, in that the authors of each of them didn’t vote for the other, and as an individual posek” – decisor – “if you believe that one of them is the only valid option than the other cannot be,” Rabbi Kligfeld said. “But I see my role on the Law Committee as different from my role as an individual rabbi. The committee is a consultative body that sets the spectrum of valid halakhic positions, and that spectrum is wide in our movement.
“I saw my role not as determining policy on whether or not the Conservative movement should or should not be endorsing same-sex unions,” he continued. “I saw my role as considering whether or not each individual paper itself makes a lucid, valid, compelling halakhic argument. If so, then it earns my vote. I thought that both papers were argued with halakhic and moral rigor; I thought both deserved the halakhic light of day.”
There were some political implications to his vote, Rabbi Kligfeld added. “I argued throughout the deliberations that all of these papers should be submitted to a 13-vote threshold, not because the argumentation was categorically a takanah but because the issue was potentially so divisive, and because the proposed changes were such a radical break from established precedent – a point granted even by the authors of the liberal papers. I thought that we wouldn’t want to make a change of this magnitude without this vote. I think it is significant that we walked out of the room able to say that a majority of the Law Committee believes that there is halakhic validity to this change.
“The Conservative movement is broad, robust, and governed by good principles,” Rabbi Kligfeld concluded. “We had the courage to say that there is not only one answer on this very loaded, difficult, and challenging topic. That means that if you’re on the side that says no, you’re not homophobic, and if you’re on the side that says yes, you’re not a wrecker of Torah.”
Rabbi Joseph Prouser of the Little Neck Jewish Center in Queens, New York, was a strong supporter of Rabbi Roth’s teshuva. He is lesssanguine than Rabbi Kligfeld about the movement’s future. “I think that it’s far from certain at this point,” Rabbi Prouser said. “I think it will be decades before we are able to come out from the shadow of this decision, which redefines how the Conservative movement thinks about itself and approaches Jewish law.
“I think that the pluralism arguments were naive at best,” he continued. “The traditionalist position has been relegated to the periphery of the Conservative movement.” He sees a parallel to the outcome of the vote to count women in minyanim; far more Conservative Jews are comfortable in egalitarian minyanim than in noneglitarian ones, and he noted that his own congregation is egalitarian. He still defines himself as a Conservative Jew. “I have no immediate plans to disaffiliate,” he said carefully. “I hope that colleagues with a traditional approach to the Conservative movement and halakha will find a mechanism to make their leadership felt within the movement.”
Rabbi Avram Reisner of Chevrei Tzedek in Baltimore, Maryland, a co-author of one of the teshovot that passed, was heartened by the vote but also understands the discomfort with it. “I was pleased that our paper was convincing to a significant part of the committee,” he said. “I was not at all surprised that it was not convincing to everybody on the committee – in fact I would have been amazed if it had been.” Although it was a decision firmly based in halakha and in close reading of the text, he said, still “it was a huge break from traditional understanding. I hope that over time it will not create a huge rift, and that some of the people who oppose it today will grow into it in the next few years.” He added that for many years, he had disagreed with the understanding he now embraces. “It was a revelation to me when I stopped and looked closely at the biblical text,” he said. It was a revelation he deeply welcomed, because “rejecting the biblical text was not an option for me. In 1992 I voted with the consensus because that’s what I felt that the Torah was demanding. But there is a lot of water under the bridge in life between 1992 and today. I found that there was a way to maintain fidelity to Torah and still find a route of compassion. The arguments in the paper were technical arguments, but they were about honoring the Torah and finding that route of compassion.”
And anyway, “The very structure of the Law Committee as advisory presumes that there is no one dogmatically right way,” Rabbi Reisner said. “Instead, it presumes that we are all interpreters of the tradition, and that on hard issues you’re likely to represent differing opinions.” As long as we can rise above the passions raised by the issue and keep talking to each other, he believes, the movement will flourish.
Rabbi Gordon Tucker of Temple Israel Center in White Plains, New York, wrote one of the teshuvot that was declared a takanah; although it received seven votes thus it did not pass. The fifth paper, by Rabbis Robert Fine, David Fine, and Myron Geller, also was voted a takanah. It received six votes and so did not pass.
In his paper, where he advocated rethinking some of the ways in which halakha is made, Rabbi Tucker argued for authorizing all gay sexual relations, as long as those relations would be subject to the same restrictions that Judaism applies to sexual relations in general.
He feels that the Conservative movement will weather the split created by the vote. “Absolutely,” he said. “That I am willing to prophesy – with the proviso that the movement must create and articulate for itself a better and more compelling definition of itself than it has heretofore had. I do believe that we can do that. But if we are just a vital center or a passionate center or any other kind of center, we are just defining ourselves vis-a-vis others. If the ends move, then the center moves. So our task should be to find that definition.”
The nonvoting members of the Law Committee find themselves moved by the experience. “It feels awesome to be on the committee,” said Dr. Marilyn Lishnoff Wind of Bethesda, Maryland. “The committee is the finest halakhic minds in the movement, so regardless of what they’re discussing the level of discussion is incredible. Being a layperson able to sit in on those discussions, and participate in them, is an amazing experience.”
Dr. Wind is a pharmacologist. “Sometimes we can bring expertise from our own fields to the discussion,” she said; she’s often able to contribute information when the discussion turns to medical subjects. “And then we also bring the perspective of amcha” – of the people – “and we can tell them how we think congregations are going to react.
“Halakha has to take the community into consideration,” she continued. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t grow. We see things very differently than people did 2,000 years ago, because we know different things, and because our community is different.”
She thinks the decisions on the gay/lesbian issue were “the best decisions for the movement” and she does not think that coming to a split decision means that the movement is indecisive. “Hillel and Shammai” – the founders of famously at-odds schools of early Talmudic sages – “always disagreed.” Both opinions were reported, “and that doesn’t mean they were wishy-washy.”
Rosalind Judd of Albany, New York, another nonvoting Law Committee member, said, “It’s an extraordinary honor to be on the committee. It allows me to appreciate the seriousness and depth with which issues are approached.” She pointed out that the committee approaches all the questions it tackles with equal seriousness, and the assignment requires a huge amount of reading.
“The split vote says that as a movement we have people who come to their Judaism from different directions and who have very strong feelings and very strong understandings of the law – and those understandings don’t always dovetail,” she said. Like Dr. Wind, Ms. Judd finds the example of Hillel and Shammai useful. “I have to say l’havdil here,” she said – she had to make a distinction between those scholars, revered for a millennium, and the scholars of our generation – but “we have no difficulty looking at the conflicts between Hillel and Shammai and saying that’s fine. They just don’t agree. One says the Chanukah candles should be lit in one direction and the other says the other, for example, but that’s just pluralism. Over the course of the centuries custom has followed Hillel more often than not, but it has worked itself out over the course of centuries. It seems that in our own generation, though, we seem to have a great deal of difficulty in accepting that two very learned rabbis who have the right to make legal decisions, by virtue of their study and their knowledge, can come to very different conclusions. For some reason, many people in the movement seem to feel that this should never happen. But it does happen.
“I think that in the next 50 or 100 years the issue will sort itself out. For now, though, it is entirely reasonable to have two directions.
“I am very optimistic about the Conservative movement,” she concluded. “I see the movement and its members moving toward greater involvement in Jewish education, in the direction of greater observance of both custom and of law. The leaders of the movement must be able to communicate the concept of pluralism.”
Marc Gary of Atlanta, Georgia, is a lawyer, as are the other two nonvoting Law Committee members, Franklin Kreutzer and Mark Rotenberg. Mr. Gary is deeply moved by his work on the committee. “I felt that the decisions were extremely thoughtful and sensitive; it was on an extremely highly level intellectually,” he said.
He feels that his background serves him well. “There are some parallels to the American legal system, and of course some distinct differences,” he said. “As a lawyer, it doesn’t strike me as strange that we can vote on each teshuva. Each voting member decides whether each teshuva can be considered a valid position. You have to vote on each one individually.”
He, too, feels that the outcome was a good one. “The committee tried to come up with a consensus position and couldn’t do so,” he said. “In light of that, it seems to me that the best way for the committee to go forward is to present two alternatives, both of which were well thought out, well reasoned, and well based in sources, and allow the mara d’atra of each congregation to determine what is most appropriate for the community.
“I think it says that a movement that welcomes both creative thought about halakha and diverse opinions well founded in halakha is a movement that will be able best to address issues of modernity while at the same time preserving the essential character of halakhic Judaism.”
As confident as Mr. Gary was about the decisions, he was even further encouraged by a meeting called by his own synagogue, Congregation Or Hadash in Atlanta. On a rainy winter Sunday during playoff season, more than 50 people met to discuss the teshuvot. The synagogue has only about 250 member families. “I was amazed,” Mr. Gary said. “It was very cordial, and very respectful; people were trying to understand the meaning of the decisions.
“People are attracted to the kind of really creative, really thoughtful effort that we are making to make the halakha a vibrant, living thing today,” he said. “They really are excited to be part of that movement. The atmosphere in that room was just great. People were on both sides of the issue, and they were asking probing questions and making thoughtful comments.
“It was a terrific discussion. And it’s really something to build on.”
