From Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – The Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis, 1843, by the British painter J.M.W. Turner. Wikipedia.
Prof. Sam Lehman-Wilzig – Towards the End of Conservative Judaism?
Conservative Judaism in America is in deep trouble with several recent news items illustrating just how ominous the situation has become. How did it get to this position? And does it have a real future?
Recently a friend sent me some news from my old Washington Heights neighborhood (in Upper, Upper Manhattan) where I grew up: the main Conservative synagogue there – Fort Tryon Jewish Center had to sell off its building to a condominium contractor. A minor piece of news, I thought – and then a larger item appeared a few days ago: the American Jewish University in Los Angeles (other than the JTS, the only Conservative Rabbinical Ordination school in the U.S.) was selling off its lovely campus! (https://www.jta.org/2022/02/11/united-states/american-jewish-university-is-selling-all-or-part-of-its-los-angeles-campus) True, it plans to still continue working, as the JTA reported: “American Jewish University announced the decision in a letter to its students that said the sale would help pay for more academic offerings and community programs as the institution increasingly turns digital.” Realistically, though, virtual education might help future rabbis to deal with Zoom prayers, but that’s not what traditional, Conservative, “minyan” Judaism is all about.
And then the true shocker arrived: for the coming year there won’t be enough new Conservative Rabbis to fill all the vacancies in the movement’s American synagogues!
(https://www.jta.org/2022/01/31/culture/the-great-resignation-is-fueling-a-rabbinic-hiring-crisis-that-could-leave-synagogues-without-leaders) If the most important role in an organization doesn’t have enough “workers” to fill, that sounds like the beginning of the movement’s death knell.
In a sense, none of this should surprise anyone. As a PEW survey in 2021 noted: “…a quarter of adults who are currently Jewish or were raised that way say they were brought up in Conservative Judaism, while 15% identify as Conservative Jews today. For every person who has joined Conservative Judaism, nearly three people who were raised in the Conservative movement have left it” (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/06/22/denominational-switching-among-u-s-jews-reform-judaism-has-gained-conservative-judaism-has-lost/). A large part of the reason for that is intermarriage: above 70% (!) among non-Orthodox American Jews). In short, the Conservative movement has been losing adherents for several decades. It was by far the largest of the three main Jewish-American denominations in the 1950s and 1960s. It barely beats out Orthodoxy today and has fallen far below Reform Judaism.
What happened? The short answer is that for any religious sect or denomination it’s tough to be “caught in the middle.” Religion has a tendency to push people to extremes: either “liberal universalism” (Reform Judaism; Christian Unitarianism) or “dogmatic particularism” (Orthodox Judaism; Catholicism). It’s obviously easier to go with general society’s zeitgeist flow or the converse: hunker down and adhere to strict traditionalism. Finding a middle way is fraught with compromises – not something that “religion” excels in or that most people seeking spirituality find attractive.
Perhaps the best example of this conundrum in which the Conservative Movement found itself was the mass Jewish migration after WW2 from the cities to the suburbs. The problem: in the suburbs people tended to live much further away from the synagogue – not in walking distance for most congregants. The question became: should the Conservative movement follow Reform Judaism that permitted driving to synagogue on the Sabbath, or stick to age-old halakhic prohibitions that traditionally forbade this (because the auto’s internal combustion engine involved “fire”)? After much internal, earnest, halakhic debate, a decision was issued – to split the baby in half: on the sabbath, only driving to synagogue was permitted but not to anywhere else. You don’t have to be a social psychologist to understand that this distinction wouldn’t be “understood” by the movement’s parishioners, or adhered to.
Worse yet, not only was the decision halakhically untenable (using fire is one of the 39 totally strict prohibitions regarding Sabbath activity), but this only further encouraged the movement’s adherents to live further away from the neighborhood where the synagogue was located – and that further distanced Conservative Jews from each other, even during weekdays! Any sense of a tight Jewish community quickly evaporated. From there the road to assimilation and intermarriage became a very slippery slope downhill.
Whether because of this decision or not related at all, the ensuing decades were witness to a growing sociological gap between the Conservative leadership (rabbis etc.) and the laity. Whereas the former (the Jewish Theological Seminary leading the way) continued to try and adhere to Jewish halakha in its decisions (most of the time successfully), many and then most lay Conservative Jews lived lives increasingly disconnected from Jewish law e.g., at first eating non-kosher only outside the home, and then also inside the home. There was a limit to how “liberal” the JTS could be (even the School of Hillel 2000 years ago was flexible only up to a point), and the laity either jumped ship or simply ignored the JTS strictures from on high. Indeed, one of the reasons that there aren’t enough Conservative Rabbis today is precisely this disconnect: who would want to shepherd a flock that refuses to follow the path?
Let it be said that the Conservative movement has done some wonderful work. Its Camp Ramah network is a jewel (I worked there for several years as Sports Director and Educator). The Solomon Shechter Jewish Day School chain has provided great Jewish education to tens of thousands of the movement’s youngsters. But neither could fully service the million or more congregants that Conservatism had decades ago.
Of course, if the Conservative movement ultimately disappears, that is not to say that its adherents would stop living Jewish lives. Many will continue to move “leftwards” to Reform Judaism that has become more Jewishly traditional over the years; others will move “rightwards” and find common cause with “Modern Orthodoxy” – especially its more egalitarian wing that is making mighty efforts to square Orthodoxy with the circle of women’s equality. It is questionable whether American Jewry will really suffer in any way if only two major denominations survive (three, if you want to count ultra-Orthodoxy as distinct, which in many ways it certainly is).
The future of American Jewry is not a matter of how many denominations survive; rather, it’s a question as to how many Jews remain altogether within the Jewish fold, living lives that can be said to have significant Jewish content. That could still be accomplished even without the Conservative Movement, but still a sad day for Judaism writ large.
