The search for a usable future

Judaism, Summer-Fall, 2005 by David Starr

In reflecting upon Conservative (or Positive-Historical Judaism), I begin with its history in the person of Solomon Schechter. That is one way to understand its accomplishments, ideas and values, its tensions and contradictions, and its current condition and cloudy and uncertain future. When we look at Conservative Judaism we see a movement without an ideology, or perhaps a movement that contains divisions so deep it is hard to see how the disparate parts can be reconciled into some larger whole. The conflict or ambivalence concerns philosophical questions which concern the purposes of Jewish life, the direction of Jewish history, and from whence authority derives for adjudicating these matters.

Even a casual reading of Schechter's writings reveal his own struggles with these questions, issues that loomed large for Fin-de-Siecle Jewry. Schechter lived as a tripartite Jew: one part neo-Hasidic pietist, one part Wissenschaft academician and what he liked to call "skeptic," and one part nineteenth-century romantic spiritual nationalist (though of an unconventional sort, given his antipathy to political nationalism). The latter quality breathed life into and transcended the other two qualities, as epitomized in his famous if opaque notion of "Catholic Israel," the mythic and passionate love of tradition and the generations of Jews who assented to and transmitted it. He resisted creating a new movement a la Reform or Orthodoxy; to the contrary, he viewed historicism mostly as a means of reading text and questioned whether it would even last as a tool for meaning and purpose. Schechter believed in a lawgiving God and a law that actualized through the interpretive act which constituted the heart of Jewish civilization, i.e., Oral Torah. This delicately balanced view some charged obscured the relationship of God and Torah with the historical community as the interpreter of God's word. (1)

In an era when much of Jewry struggled with categorical questions of Jewishness as religion or as ethnicity, Schechter managed to create a vision broad enough to capture a large middle ground. He appealed both to those traditionalists who craved middle-class status and its modernist, scientific culture, and to the children of Eastern European Jews for whom an ethnocultural Jewishness felt right, even as it distanced itself from either theology or halakha as authoritative. In some subtle way, though, Schechter never would have countenanced this formal bifurcation: in the hands of his disciple Mordecai Kaplan, for whom history and community replaced God and Torah as warrants for Jewish life; and tradition as folkways jostled aside classical notions of behavior as commandments mandated by God.

Looking back, one sees the salvific power of that unity rhetoric and the beauty of Catholic Israel as a vision of Jewishness as a historical phenomenon. But culture never remains fixed, since each generation reshapes its values and practices in some fashion. In Schechter's neo-romantic age, the concept of Catholic Israel resonated with his followers. His neo-romantic unity rhetoric created at least an imagined community and culture connecting past, present, and future, a kind of counter-nationalism vis-a-vis more materialist constructions like Zionism. We should resist engaging in revisionist history that dismisses the power of history for Schechter's generation; but we should also insist upon our right to forge contemporary understandings addressed to the concerns of our times.

Consider Schechter's great colleagues and contemporaries who advocated creative engagement with Judaism and Jewish culture for the purpose of revitalizing Jewish life. Asher Ginsberg (Ahad Ha'am) and Mordecai Kaplan come to mind. Ginsberg viewed cultural nationalism as a tool for revitalizing the group, historically and existentially. He maintained that "The relation between a normal people and its literature is one of parallel development and mutual interaction," with each goading and responding to the other. (2) Kaplan, influenced by both Ginsberg and Schechter, insisted that true Jewishness mandated loyalty to Jewish historical experience. He cited Schechter's view that the modern traditionalist engages in "an enlightened skepticism combined with a staunch conservatism." (3) All three thinkers grew up "inside" Jewish life, informed by a deep intimacy with Jewish culture. All three thinkers sought to salvage and recast Jewish life.

Often seen as passionless and too academic, ironically Conservative Judaism rests upon love and tribalism. Its mythic reading of Jewish history and culture rests upon a highly emotional, romantic passion for the Jewish people's myth and tradition in all of its complexity and its unity. (4) But post-moderns stand outside that tradition; they seek not a creative betrayal of it as a way of re-engagement, but rather a discovery of Judaism for the realm of the personal and the communal, seeking to shape identity and the group. They desire God and Torah, not history or myths about history. It is no accident that the two modern movements which most revolved around peoplehood--Conservative Judaism and secular Zionism--are both floundering. Tribalism is out, spirituality is in. What is now to be done?