Midwest Region, United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism Delegation to the 2007 USCJ Biennial

The Things That Still Unite Us

by Arnold M. Eisen

A speech delivered at the Biennial Convention of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism in Orlando, Florida, November 29, 2007

I want to begin by thanking Ray Goldstein and Jerry Epstein for the invitation to address you this evening. I think it was during my very first talk with Jerry after my appointment as chancellor-elect that I asked him about this gathering. I knew even then that I wanted to address you on this occasion on this topic. I have been looking forward to the chance to speak to you, the leaders of the United Synagogue, about the future of our Movement: a cause that is dear to you and dear to me.

Like many of you, I am a lifelong Conservative Jew. I was profoundly shaped as I was growing up by Conservative rabbis and teachers as well as by experiences such as those provided to me in USY. I still remember the excitement of my first regional kallah in Atlantic City. The singing and dancing went on well into the night. The davening had a spirit I had never encountered in my synagogue. The inspiration of those teachers and those experiences still has its effect on me four decades later. Many of my closest intellectual companions as an adult—subjects of my scholarship and sources of nourishment for my soul—have been figures affiliated with JTS and Conservative Judaism, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Mordecai M. Kaplan first among them. For the last twenty years, prior to accepting my new position, I was an active member of a wonderful Conservative community, Congregation Kol Emeth in Palo Alto, California.

I have therefore been perplexed and sometimes frustrated, as I know you have been as well, by the talk in recent years of crisis, decline, or worse in Conservative Judaism. These descriptions run contrary to what I have experienced over many decades in this Movement and experience still. They do not jibe with what I know as a scholar about the many fine professionals and highly successful institutions affiliated with Conservative Judaism. Most important of all, perhaps, negativity about our present and pessimism about our future go against the enthusiasm and energy that I have encountered in hundreds of conversations and town meetings with Conservative Jews around the country over the past eighteen months. If you visit vibrant synagogues or Ramah camps as I have, or talk to parents, teachers, and students at Schechter schools, or learn what I have learned as the parent of USYers, you will not be overcome by pessimism. We face challenges as a Movement, to be sure, and I will address them in a moment. Our numbers are declining. Our demographics are aging. A great number of our efforts are not living up to their potential. Let us not forget, however, that we also have incredible opportunities at our disposal, if only we take the action required to build on excellence and respond to the needs and aspiration of the hundreds of thousands of individuals, many of them highly learned and committed, who are proud to call themselves Conservative Jews.

That is what I want to speak to you about this evening. I’m eager to give you my sense of what we should be doing and of how JTS can help with this effort. The next few years, I am convinced, are absolutely critical. But the issues that challenge us are not entirely new. That is why I have taken my title this evening from an address that Louis Finkelstein, who served as chancellor of JTS for thirty-two years, gave to the Rabbinical Assembly in 1927—long before he became chancellor. I first came across this address while doing research for my doctoral dissertation on American Judaism. I remember that I applauded Finkelstein then for the strong stand he took on behalf of a meaningful consensus that could guide Conservative Judaism. That consensus, in his view, had to be based upon commitment to God, Torah, and Israel—and on the strong belief that change, wisely directed and carefully executed, is integral and essential to any authentic Judaism and certainly to the path we follow.

Finkelstein’s particular conceptions of God or revelation are not persuasive to me. Nor should detailed beliefs on these and related matters be definitional of a broad Movement like ours. But the commitment to Torah as a “Tree of Life” that we cling to and love, and the insistence without apology on the legitimacy of transformation in Jewish life in order to keep Torah vital—these stirred me when I first read them, and still do. Now more than ever, I think, we need to be clear on what brings us together as Conservative Jews despite our differences. Pluralism must be one of our values, but it cannot be our highest value. We must be united by far more than the agreement to disagree. I think that we are. I therefore want to share my notion of what Conservative Judaism should be and stand for in 2007, how we should chart our way of living as Jewish men and women in full, authentic embrace of Jewish tradition and full, enthusiastic participation in the society and culture of which we are a part. This vision leads me to face our future with confidence. I hope it will help you to do the same.

Making the Story Ours

I want to begin not with plans or numbers or with one or another formulation of Conservative Judaism, but with my personal center, Finkelstein’s center, our collective center as Conservative Jews—with Torah. There are four words in the portion of the Torah we read this Shabbat, Parashat Va-yeishev, that did not mean all that much to me when I was younger but that now—when I am well into my fifties, the parent of college-age children, the teacher of many students—mean everything to me. They confirm and challenge me, command me and arouse my gratitude. Most of all, they offer great blessing. The four words to which I refer are “eleh toldot ya’akov yosef:” “This is the story of Jacob—Joseph.” 

Now, Tol’dot of course carries other, more literal connotations in the Torah. Last week’s portion provides us with the generations or Tol’dot of Esau: a long genealogical list of begettings. That’s not the meaning of the word Tol’dot here. It is a usage related to the notion that introduced the story of Jacob’s lifelong battles with his brother Esau as Tol’dot Yitzak, “the story of Isaac.” It is akin to the conception that calls the portion describing the death of Sarah and eventually of Abraham—Chayyei Sarah, “the life of Sarah”—or the one that recounts the death of Jacob and the subsequent death of Joseph and names this portion Va-y’hi (”And he lived”). Jacob lives through his children as Sarah lives through hers, not so much because their DNA survives but because their story does.

That is true of all of us—a lesson that is both frustrating and wonderful. The chapters of our stories that we get to act in and witness are only a small part of the larger story of which we are blessed to be a part. That story did not begin with us, and if we are lucky, it will not end with us. Our children and our students will carry on after us, and will do so in ways that we will not only not live to see but can not even imagine. And if we have no biological children of our own, no students taught or impacted by us directly (though all of us impart lessons to one another all the time), our story is carried on by the community with which we identify. Turn the page from Va-y’hi and leave the Book of Genesis, and you learn that the family story has grown to be the story of a people. Our personal stories are bound up in its larger story, and the latter goes on shaping our individual life-narratives long after our chapters on this earth have concluded. Were we to be alive to see that continuation, moreover, we might not recognize it as our own. The rabbis captured this irony well in the famous aggadah that has Moses sitting in Rabbi Akiva’s academy, perplexed at all that is being taught in his name.

In sum: we are heirs to a narrative that we could not have dared to invent. It enfolds us, ennobles us, graces us with responsibilities and blessings. That is why if one converts to Judaism he or she becomes a child of Abraham and Sarah. The point is not biology but responsibility. One becomes an heir to the story that begins with Abraham and Sarah, a person charged with the privilege and obligation of carrying that story forward. The Torah needs us to choose to enter in to these stories, to choose blessing, to assume responsibility for keeping the stories forceful and alive.

That is my personal answer to Rashi’s famous opening question about why the Torah begins where it does. The Torah wants and needs us to step inside its pages again and again, as it were. It needs us to identify with the characters that Genesis presents to us. Our Torah is designed to secure that identification. It presents us with human beings who are less than perfect parents—all of them. They are spouses and siblings who sometimes leave much to be desired. They are human beings who are fallible and who nonetheless rise to nobility, exhibit courage, achieve piety. They are people like us, conveying the message that this story is for us.

The Torah also gives us a political and social world like the one we know from experience and history. It is a world in which strangers are sometimes persecuted but can occasionally rise to the heights of influence, one in which the powerless often suffer, and in which there are rich as well as poor. There are wars as well as treaties in this reality; altruism, kindness, and justice intermixed. This is a world like ours. This account of things could be ours, is ours.

Finally, the Book of Genesis introduces us to God through a series of encounters with our ancestors. This God, too, is like the one whom we know—and do not know. God is sometimes there when we cry out to God, but not always, at least from our perspective, and is sometimes close at hand when we wish God were more distant. The God of our ancestors is known through encounter but decidedly not through the sort of subject/object knowledge that we can label and hold firmly in our hand.

The Torah, then, introduces us in its opening chapters to a notion of God, the world and humanity like the ones with which we are familiar. It thereby seeks to ensure that Torah is not only told by us but lived by us. We go deeper and deeper into these stories each year as we go deeper into life—and vice versa. We cross the Red Sea with our ancestors, stand at Sinai, enter into covenant, wander from promise and occasionally fulfill it—and so are led to ask with urgency: How do we keep this precious story going? The Book of Deuteronomy, the last of the Torah’s five books, makes it clear that there is to be no straying to the right or left from the way that it sets forth, no addition or subtraction from its commandments—and therefore, since each day brings new conditions in which the covenant initiated with our ancestors must be carried on, and carried on in vastly changed realities from those in which our parents and grandparents added their words to the collective conversation begun at Sinai, we must know how to interpret the Torah’s words correctly. We must carry on this story and not another—and can only do so if we adapt it to suit changing conditions. The story must be alive for us and those who follow us. God must be served with heart, soul, and might. The Torah must be lived and read that way.

The sages did so 2,000 years ago when they transformed Jewish life following the destruction of the Temple and the wide dispersion of our people. We must do so after the Holocaust and the achievement of renewed sovereignty in the Land of Israel, taking advantage of the unprecedented opportunities available to us in the societies and cultures of which we are full partners. We dig our ancestors’ wells, as Genesis would say, but do so using new technologies, permitting living waters of Torah to flow through channels which our ancestors could never have imagined.

The Contemporary Situation

Two requirements must be fulfilled if we are to perform that task and embrace that blessing successfully.

First, because Jews confront and embrace the opportunities and challenges of the contemporary world as individuals, and no longer as members of a corporate group set apart to a large extent from Gentile neighbors and Gentile culture (the situation prevailing for nearly two millennia), we must build strong communities. Only if we persuade Jews to voluntarily bind themselves to other Jews—people who know them, share many of life’s deepest moments with them, participate in a common story expressed in common sensibility—will we be able to persuade these individuals that our view of the world and of the world’s need for repair should be taken seriously, let alone that it should command their allegiance and guide their action. Without strong communities, we will not possess this power of persuasion. We will also lack the power to make a real difference, to exercise agency. Only so can we accomplish what my predecessor Gerson Cohen called “the supreme Jewish principle: letakken olam bemalkhut Shaddai (when the world will be perfected under the reign of the Almighty).” The very first requirement of every Jewish effort, then, is the creation of community.

No less, we need to fill those communities with content, meaning, Torah. Jews must be persuaded that the aim of their community is Torah: greater justice and mercy in God’s world, conceived in certain ways and not others; that we are to be guided by the convictions and commitments first set forth in Torah and expounded for centuries thereafter in Jewish texts and lives. The point, remember, is to make this story ours by telling and living it. The story must be changed if it is to be kept vital but must not be changed in ways that make it unrecognizable.

Cohen and Finkelstein believed firmly that modernity need not be an obstacle to that achievement. So do I. Enlightenment, rationality, history, science—these are not enemies but potential allies. They can assist us in understanding the world and in changing it for the good. The changes that Judaism has undergone over the centuries in response to a changing world, Finkelstein insisted, “was not one of deterioration and ossification but of growth, self-expression and foliation.” The point, Cohen wrote, is not to do “what had always been done”—first of all because the historian soon uncovers varieties in Jewish history that belie claims of what “has always been done,” let alone of one single way in which it “has always been done.” Religion, Cohen told the RA in 1985, “is an exegetical response to the world: it is not a set of preconceived answers.” And he insisted, as Conservative Judaism has insisted from the outset, that “it is possible to teach Jews to be committed to their own tradition and to be citizens of the world at the same time,” or, in another formulation, “to translate the contemporary into the mode of the classical and vice versa.” That is what the Torah has always asked of Jews. It asks it now of us.

The Message of Conservative Judaism

Notice that I have moved from an account of what is required in order to tell and live the Torah’s story in our time to the stance taken by Conservative Judaism on these matters. Like Finkelstein and Cohen, I do not regard modernity or its culture as enemies. Nor do I see Conservative Judaism as “the best we can do in difficult circumstances of modernity,” our time being a bad one that Jews and Judaism have to get through somehow, with Conservative Judaism viewed as a compromise with the good that is suited to the limits of the possible. No. Our age, like every other, resists and challenges Judaism’s demanding message that we and the world need correction and improvement. But Conservative Judaism is far more than a moderate path to be navigated between alleged extremes in a world gone wrong. The point is not the paths not chosen: Reform or Orthodox. We believe, rather, with all due respect for other ways of Jewish living, that Conservative Judaism is the most authentic way of doing what the Torah has always wanted us to do. This is the set of paths along which Jews are meant to teach and live Torah.

Mordecai Waxman was right fifty years ago when he responded to dissatisfaction with the name of our movement—dissatisfaction, I would add, that is virtually as old as the name itself—by reminding Conservative Jews that their Movement had always clung to the position that “it is not a denomination in the Jewish fold. It holds that it is Judaism. It is the Jewish tradition continuing along its path in time and space with its characteristic dynamism.”

Right. We are living and teaching Judaism. Sometimes I think that the name should be “Just Judaism,” with a pun on “just.” Or “Judaism, period.” But for the moment at least we will continue to call our way of teaching and living Torah “Conservative Judaism.” I propose that we define its path this way: “We are women and men committed to full and authentic engagement with the Jewish people and the Jewish tradition, heart and soul and mind, as well as full engagement with the society and culture of which we are a part, again heart and soul and mind.”

There is tension betweens these aims, to be sure. But it is a fruitful tension, the one that Torah intended. Conservative Judaism got it right. Let us affirm this without apology. I will set my forth my understanding of Conservative Judaism’s essential message and task in more detail in a moment.

Before doing so, however, I want to deal with the challenges that we are now facing. Our course is right, but we are at present off track in several respects. Following Mordecai Kaplan’s lead in his brilliant book Judaism as a Civilization, and particularly the strategy of analysis laid out in its table of contents, I want to consider what ails us, why, and what should be done about it. What do we have going for us? On what strengths should we build?

Let’s agree, first, that our numbers are apparently falling both in absolute terms and as a percentage of American Jewry as a whole (the numbers of which are falling too or soon will be, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the American population). We are also aging as a Movement. In part it seems that our declining numbers are the result of forces beyond our control. We were strong in small towns and cities that are now losing population because they lack opportunities for employment. The synagogues in those communities are merging or closing their doors. We suffer, too, because Jews are moving from areas of the country (especially the Midwest) where Conservative Judaism has traditionally been strong to areas (the South and Southwest) where we have historically been weaker.

Another likely factor, according to sociologist Steven M. Cohen (my partner in writing The Jew Within), is the decline of what we and others call “ethnic Judaism.” Conservative Judaism has always stressed loyalty to klal Yisrael and has benefited from that principle. Our Movement embraced Zionism when it was spurned by others. Our members are disproportionately represented in the lay and professional leadership of communal institutions such as federations and Hebrew colleges. Loyalty to klal Yisrael is weakening among American Jews today. Almost half the representative sample polled ten years ago for The Jew Within said they feel no obligation to fellow Jews over and above their obligation to humanity in general. Nearly three quarters said they do not feel very or extremely attached to the State of Israel. These trends have worsened in the decade since. Our Movement, with its stress on klal Yisrael as a core value, is negatively affected.

Finally, there is no doubt that significant numbers of Jews have moved from Conservative Judaism to Reform or (to a lesser extent) to Orthodoxy. In the latter case, they are attracted by strong communities, passionate davening, and a sort of learning not often available in Conservative auspices. In the case of Reform, they may feel more comfortable with a service in which English predominant, or a synagogue in which the children of a Gentile mother are counted fully as Jews and in which rabbis or cantors are available to perform the wedding of an interfaith couple. Our Movement has not adopted patrilineal descent and will not do so. These challenges are formidable and must be faced.

I believe that we do so bearing great strengths and resources.

Consider first the talented and dedicated professionals—thousands of them—who work on our behalf.

Note the many fine institutions and organizations—again, thousands of them— affiliated with our Movement: synagogues, day schools, congregational schools, youth groups, camps, mens clubs, sisterhoods, the Fuchsberg Center and Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem, and many others in this country and around the world.

Remember, finally, the most underutilized resource of all: lay people in the hundreds of thousands, many thousands of them knowledgeable and committed and just waiting for their talents and energies to be tapped. We can and must make use of their abilities.

Three areas of action demand particular effort right now: message, quality, and structure. I will speak about message at some length, and conclude briefly with a few comments about quality and structure.

Let us be honest. We have fallen down on the job where message is concerned. We have not made clear why Conservative Judaism developed and what it stands for. Too many of our members, and even some professionals, do not understand that we are far more than a middle ground between Reform and Orthodoxy. Many believe that we do not stand for anything in particular. I confess that I like the notion of an inclusive “big tent” but not the metaphor. It conveys the mistaken thought that what matters is that you and I are inside and not outside the tent. I believe that what matters is what happens inside the tent, what Conservative Jews do and learn together. That is what I’d like to speak about now.

I shall do so by drawing upon a key text by Franz Rosenzweig, an essay called “The Builders,” written originally as an open letter to Martin Buber. In my book Taking Hold of Torah, I laid out five elements of any authentic contemporary Judaism that I believe flow from Rosenzweig’s essay. They are community, learning, Jewish time and space, the language and grammar of Judaism, and wrestling with God. These form the basis of my approach to Conservative Judaism as one specific path on which contemporary Jews live and teach Torah, the most effective and authentic path I know. That path consists, to my mind, of ten key principles or elements, the number itself pointing to the fact that the list is not exhaustive and could be formulated differently. Please hear it in that spirit. These are the ten elements that define and formulate Conservative Judaism for me, the Jewish way to which I believe we are committed.

Learning. All of Judaism requires learning, of course. But Conservative Judaism requires Talmud Torah with particular urgency, for we are committed to the notion of careful but resolute change in Jewish belief and practice, change undertaken in order to preserve tradition and keep it vital. One cannot transform tradition authentically unless one knows it well, really know its texts and history in all its complexity and variety. Only so can we alter tradition responsibly and with the confidence that we are carrying it forward through that change rather than damaging or rupturing the Torah that is so precious to us. Learning is essential to Conservative Judaism. Let me just add in this connection that if we lose some of our best young people to Orthodoxy because they are unable to learn a page of Gemara in our shuls and schools we deserve to lose them. Every one of our synagogues and other institutions must be a site of high-quality, engaged Jewish learning. It is crucial to all we believe and practice.

Community. We must wrap Conservative Jews in synagogue-centered communities. These communities, unlike what sociologist Robert Bellah calls “lifestyle enclaves,” must bind individuals together for more than one narrow activity or interest. They must bear on important aspects and moments of life. Community-building is the key skill that needs to be mastered and practiced by the leaders, lay and professional, of all our institutions. If someone can stand at an oneg Shabbat and not be greeted, or be hospitalized and have to worry about how the family at home will be fed, or sit shiv’ah and not have enough people there to offer comfort and make a minyan, or have a simhah and celebrate alone—there is no community in that place. When people know the joy of celebrating Shabbat and holidays together, of learning together, or building a school or program together, of growing old together in shared meaning so deep it need not be expressed—they know community. The Conservative schools and shuls, sisterhoods and men’s clubs, youth groups and camps that succeed are always sites of real community. We are blessed with camps and day schools that offer community in abundance, and must make sure our many other institutions— particularly our congregations and congregational schools—do so as well.

Klal Yisrael. The face-to-face communities just described are joined to the community of Israel in the larger sense, the Jewish people. Only so can we be God’s partners in the fulfillment of creation and take on our share of responsibility for humanity and the earth. At this point in our people’s history, it is especially crucial that all of us work to counteract the attenuation of ties that bind the Jewish people to one another and to overcome the intolerance sometimes shown by one group of Jews for the others. Our presence at the denominational center has traditionally carried with it a high degree of appreciation and respect for Jews of other movements. It confers the obligation that we cooperate with them wherever possible to build up Torah and the Jewish people. Masorti Olami presents us with a key tool with which to strengthen the ties binding Jews around the world.

Zionism. Conservative Judaism has been pro-Zionist from the beginning. Recall Solomon Schechter’s passionate address on the subject, published exactly a century ago. We live at a time and in a place of significant disengagement from the State of Israel. We must reverse this. The situation is absolutely critical. Our links as Conservative Jews to the Masorti Movement in Israel and to the Schechter Institute in Jerusalem confer the obligation on us to use those instruments in a way that brings the Jewish people together. I promise that JTS will do so to the best of its ability. I hope that our Movement as a whole will do so as well.

Hebrew. Conservative Judaism began, remember, when Zechariah Frankel walked out of a convention of rabbis back in the 1840s over the issue of Hebrew. He, unlike the majority of those present, regarded Hebrew as an essential, non-negotiable element of Jewish prayer. The reason was not God’s inability to understand prayer in the vernacular or the halakhic illegitimacy of its utterance. Neither was the case, in his view. Frankel insisted upon Hebrew as an indispensable way of conserving the ties linking every Jew to Jews throughout the generations as well as to Jews living throughout the world. Hebrew is no less crucial to us today. It not only links us to Israelis and to the generations, but it gives us direct access to key texts of our tradition. I will never forget hearing a friend—a man then in his fifties—report that when he first heard the Shema recited as part of the chanting of Torah, after learning enough Hebrew to understand the words one by one, he burst into tears. I was filled with tears on hearing that story. Our synagogues, schools, and camps have long resounded with Hebrew. It is an aspect of our commitment as Conservative Jews that we must never lose.

The “grammar” of Jewish commitment: changing the world. We are a community bound by covenant to God and to one another, constituted as such in order that we join God in bringing the world into line with God’s demand that it be good, even “very good,” as God pronounced it on the sixth day of creation. Our responsibilities extend beyond ourselves; we are heirs to the remarkable claim that the world as it exists is not good enough, and that we, with the help of God and Torah, have the ability to make it better. That is why the Torah constituted us as a covenant people rather than as a collection of individuals joined in common belief (though we share a great deal in the realm of belief) or in common quest for personal enlightenment (though our tradition offers such enlightenment in abundance). We know that fulfillment to the self comes as part of a community working to increase justice and compassion in the world. Our prophets enunciated this task with unmatched clarity, and our sages and teachers have worked ever since to keep the message alive in our midst and to make our community an effective vehicle of its realization. The world must be transformed. In our generation that task has come to include change that will achieve the literal safeguarding of the planet. We dare not shirk our duties as Jews in this regard. The work is not ours alone, and as Pirke Avot taught, we will certainly not complete it. But to “desist from it” is out of the question for Jews. The world needs us to take on this work. Torah requires it of us.

I am one of many Conservative Jews in our generation who has been shaped and motivated by the teachings and example of Abraham Joshua Heschel. My life was altered by his commitment to marshal his learning of Torah and his devotion to God in the service of transforming the world. This work has always been a feature of Conservative Judaism and I trust it always will be. Heschel and my other teachers—my mother and father, first of all—brought me to understand the rabbinic conviction that mitzvah is much more than commandment. It is certainly not a burden. Mitzvah means gift, responsibility, obligation, discipline, passionate commitment, love. We know that our tradition has a great deal to say to the world. It is our privilege to make its voice heard not only in what we learn and teach, and in the communities we build, but in the actions we take to increase justice, compassion, and peace.

The “pattern for living” that constitutes the normative Jewish response to the presence and demands of God is called mitzvah. It is articulated in our tradition through what Heschel beautifully termed the “polarity of halakhah and aggadah.” Conservative Judaism, more than any other, has always identified itself with the rabbis and sages who first developed that polarity. Finkelstein and Cohen, in the essays that I have referred to, took pains to identify with those sages and derived from them the ambition to preserve Judaism by renewing it for our no-less unprecedented situation.

Halakhah is, to my mind, an essential element of the grammar of Conservative Judaism. It has always been such for good reasons. Our community cannot maintain and strengthen itself without collective norms that are developed authentically—and ever-developing—out of the Torah, the halakhic tradition to which we are the heirs. It is inevitable that we will disagree among ourselves, as the interpreters of law always have, on how best to understand the applicability of inherited norms in new—sometimes radically new—situations. We will differ, too, in our understanding of the proper balance and relationship between halakhah and aggadah. Heschel’s great book, Heavenly Torah, showed that Jews have always disagreed on these points. But it is crucial to the viability and thriving of Conservative Judaism that we treasure the process of halakhic decision-making and aggadic interpretation, and know that in cleaving to this process, far more unites us than divides us.

I believe this is the case right now. I hope you do too. If time permitted, I would set forth the numerous areas on which we agree—areas broader and deeper than the several matters on which in recent decades we have manifestly disagreed. One of the reasons why I have initiated discussion about mitzvah this year in our Movement is precisely so that participants in this discussion will see that despite disagreements about the source of mitzvah (God, conscience, community, tradition) and about which mitzvot they find especially meaningful and compelling, they belong in this discussion, resonate to its language, are in the Movement that best suits their commitments. With proper respect for one another and the process by which we interpret Torah for our day, I believe that Conservative Judaism emerges from these discussions stronger rather than weaker. “These and these are words of the living God,” says the Talmud. They are certainly the marks of a living tradition of Torah.

Time. It is obvious to all of us, as we look forward to the celebration of Hanukkah in a month pervaded in North America by the observance of Christmas, why the preservation of Jewish time is so important to the preservation of Judaism. It is all the more important for the Conservative Movement because we are dedicated to full, open embrace of the society and culture of which we are a part, and which form such an integral part of us, as well as to full embrace of Jewish tradition. Shabbat has always been key to Conservative Judaism. It must remain so. I would venture to warn that without renewed commitment to observance of Shabbat, our Movement cannot be confident of its future. Haggim have always been of similar importance to Conservative Judaism, and they, too, must remain so. Try to imagine September without the Yamim Nora’im, or spring without Pesah. Try to imagine Conservative Judaism without vigorous observance of these days, ever a source of sacred meaning in our lives. We need these temporal frameworks in which to remind ourselves of who we are and what we stand for. We cannot do without these precious commandments that we learn to love and cherish as they become filled, year by year, with memories of time spent well with ancestors and descendants, family and friends.

Space. Our problem in the diaspora is the loss of public Jewish space and time, once available in ghetto or shtetl and still available to some degree in Israel (and remarked upon by every first-time Jewish visitor) as well as in self-segregated Jewish communities of the sort you and I have chosen not to live in. We need spaces marked by our symbols, and not someone else’s, in order to convey our values and reinforce our commitments. Moses Mendelssohn, at the start of the modern period in Judaism, bemoaned the loss of Jewish gates and doorposts. He knew that if Jews were to venture forth into the larger world and yet remain Jews, guided by Torah, their homes had to be marked by mezuzot and other reminders of God and Torah. Kashrut, I believe, is such a marker, and it has therefore been key to Conservative Judaism. We “eat out” in non-kosher restaurants to differing degrees. We construct the kashrut of our homes in different ways. But the commitment to kashrut remains an essential element of Conservative Judaism—a way of both sanctifying the self through the key activity that we otherwise have in common with all living creatures and of setting apart our Jewish selves through a key activity that we share with all other human beings.

God. Last but certainly not least, Conservative Judaism must include tefillah—serious encounter and wrestling with God—at multiple points in life and in the multiple ways provided by our tradition. Let us admit that tefillah is perhaps the most difficult Jewish act demanded of the contemporary Jew. We live in a profoundly secular and sometimes anti-religious culture, for all that the vast majority of Americans profess to believe in God and pray to God regularly. The task of coming near to God is much harder for Jews because we find ourselves caught between religious fundamentalism on the one hand and secularism on the other. The challenge posed to faith by the Holocaust has not helped matters. Conservative Judaism, we recall, refuses to insulate Jews from contemporary culture and sees no need to “safeguard” faith from science and history. We rather embrace these as potential ways to God, believing, as I noted earlier, that we are meant to love God with all we are: heart, soul, and mind.

Tefillah has always included study as well as petition, quest, and longing for God’s presence as much as encounter with that presence. It articulates praise but also anxiety and doubt. More than anything, perhaps, it seeks to express gratitude for being. Heschel and others have written powerfully of our need to pray, most of all perhaps when we feel ourselves unable to pray.

I hope that Conservative Judaism will continue to emphasize the importance of this effort and to assist Jews in undertaking it. I hope that our synagogues will be houses of heartfelt tefillah—and that they will also be houses of real learning and community, batei midrash and batei Knesset. If we lose young people to other movements because they fail to find authentic, passionate prayer in our congregations, I say again that we deserve to lose them. Many of our synagogues are currently filled with passionate tefillah. Some, unfortunately, are not. But we must also construct the genuine communities needed to facilitate prayer, the learning communities that can attract even atheists to the synagogue, the warm and welcoming communities that, as the old joke goes, will attract not only Cohen, who is there to talk to God, but Schwartz, who is there to talk to Cohen.

That is my agenda for Conservative Judaism, the ten elements or principles that to my mind comprise the indispensable message of a thriving Conservative Judaism. In conclusion, I want to say a few words about the two other major tasks that lie before us—the areas that require determined work right now, and that if significantly improved will make for great achievement and renewal. I speak of quality and structure.

We have many excellent programs, organizations, and activities. Some, however, are less than excellent. Mediocrity is a luxury that we can no longer afford. Jews have more choice than ever about where to spend their days and direct their resources. Conservative Judaism has more competition than ever before. Recall, though,that most Jews do not choose synagogues or schools, camps or youth groups, exclusively or even primarily because of ideology or denomination. They go for quality. If we offer it, they will come and will return for more.

In many cases we know how to achieve this quality. In others, we can find out fairly easily if we are determined to do so. Conservative Judaism currently boasts a great deal of quality in our institutions, professionals, and laity. I am convinced that if we make such excellence more uniform and widespread, numbers of adherents will follow. If we do not, failure is virtually inevitable.

Finally, we need to work on structure. Our Movement suffers all too often from lack of coordination and partnership. In all too many synagogues, rabbis do not work effectively with cantors and educators, and all three do not work successfully with lay leaders. The diverse arms of our Movement do not often work together as they might. Our new joint magazine, Kolot, only proves how much more could be accomplished if we set our minds to partnership. Resources would follow. So would membership, energy, and enthusiasm.

The Task Ahead

We can do all of this. We can make our shuls and schools, our camps and youth groups, and our mens’ clubs and women’s league chapters places of real community. We can fill them with greater teaching and living of Torah. We can “link the silos” of our day schools, camps, and congregational schools. We can train lay and professional leaders who know how to build communities and cooperate with others in the service of Torah. We can make the non-Jews in our midst feel more fully a part of our congregations, and we can increase the learning and observance of our laity without guilt trips or finger-pointing. We can excite Conservative Jews about the life of mitzvah, the joys of a path marked by both halakhah and aggadah. We can remind Conservative Jews of the blessing stored up in the ancestral stories that it is our privilege to tell, to live, and to carry forward.

You and I can do this together. I promise you that JTS will be a full partner in this effort. I hope that the United Synagogue and all of you will be so as well. May the chapters that we add to the story of Israel add blessing to our lives, and increase justice and compassion in the world.

Thank you.