News from the 2007 Biennial Convention

Friday, November 30

Most of us gathered here in Orlando yesterday, looking forward to four working days together, punctuated by a Shabbat where we will celebrate both our unity and our diversity.

But another group got together two days earlier to do social justice work, a mission that always has been vital to Conservative Jews.

On Tuesday evening, a group of delegates met here at the hotel, and then on Wednesday morning they went out into Orlando on Tzohar Orlando, determined not only to make some small difference in the world but also, and perhaps even more strongly, to learn more about worlds outside their own.

The group, led by Dr. Richard Lederman, split into two; one went to Give Kids the World, a program for terminally ill childen and their families, and the other met with migrant workers at the Gleaning Project.

“I thought it would be a really exciting way to start the biennial, doing something that is not directed toward me but instead to something bigger than me,” said Roz Judd, a United Synagogue board member from Albany, New York. “And it was phenomenal. It was in an area that I really had no information about, and not only did I learn but it put a face on the problem for me.” Participants in the Gleaning Project pick up the leftovers that remain in the field after the paid workers go through it, much as the biblical Ruth and her peers did. In this case, the crop was cucumbers, which, as Roz learned, ooze a white goo that ruins a careless picker’s clothing. The cucumbers are picked in 50-pound bags; they are too big, too small, too curly, or otherwise wrong for commercial use, and they are destined for food pantries, soup kitchens, and similar places.

In the afternoon, Roz and the rest of the group met with high-school students who are migrant workers. Like our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, they came here, learned English, and want to go to college and have careers. Unlike our ancestors, though, they cannot. “It was heartbreaking,” she said.

“This was outside everything I know,” said her husband, Gary Judd. “It just blew my mind. And absolutely I’d do it again. It was a powerful way to start the convention.”

Chancellor Eisen on What Unites Us

The international biennial convention began with a series of blasts on a huge shofar that past president Franklin D. Kreutzer grinned, hefted, and blew. That ceremonial business complete, International President Raymond Goldstein introduced the plenary speaker, Dr. Arnold Eisen, the new chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, to the work of United Synagogue.

In an impassioned, formally organized speech, Dr. Eisen, a birthright Conservative Jew, told us that despite news stories about a crisis in the movement, the truth is that there is great excitement and the possibility for a wonderful future. We must not “surrender to alleged decline” but make sure that both the outside world and our own members understand what we are.

“The greatest gift my parents gave me, outside life itself, is making me a Conservative Jew,” Dr. Eisen said. “As Conservative Jews we can walk unafraid at whatever this society throws at us and whatever it blesses us with. It will make us stronger and make Torah stronger. Not only do we have nothing to fear from the future, we have everything to hope for from it.” Instead we must be more clear and more proud of our real accomplishments.

We must continue to dance the intricate minuet between tradition and change; we must be in love with the tradition and undertake change very carefully, but change it we must. In doing so we will be doing nothing new –change has been part of Judaism from the beginning.

Chancellor Eisen listed 10 principles of Conservative Judaism. He fleshed them out, passionately and fascinatingly, but here are the bones: Learning, because we cannot engage with the tradition without really knowing it, and we must know it not superficially but in depth; community, because the stories of synagogues where Jews can stand around at a kiddush week after week and never be spoken to are true, and “if we can’t build a community we don’t deserve the Jews we don’t have”; klal Israel, because many of our people head community-wide organizations and that is something about which we should be proud; Zionism, because our movement was the first to embrace it and because it is at our movement’s heart; language, because you need both the vocabulary and the grammar for the understanding to be deep and real; tzedakah, because tikkun olam is a core Conservative principle; conversation, because we can disagree with each other but we must talk to teach other; Jewish time and space, because if you don’t have Shabbat you don’t have Judaism; and God, because although we can’t agree on anything about God we must be free to discuss, believe, disbelieve, and perhaps, if we are supremely lucky, even to encounter.