The theology of conservative Judaism

Judaism, Spring, 1998 by Arnold Jacob Wolf

The power of the movement derives, in my view, from the strong leadership that it has enjoyed (unlike that of Reform or Orthodox alternatives), strong in scholarship, charisma and, at least originally, conviction. The Reform movement was fatally handicapped by an improbable theological history which begins in America with the ludicrous Pittsburgh Platform, a document of late Enlightenment hubris that surrenders all that is precious in our tradition in favor of crudely rationalist proclamations. Orthodoxy has been compromised by an obscurantist temptation that has continually, and increasingly, undermined even its brightest and most eloquent spokesmen. The two dominant American theologians of our century, both from the Seminary, Mordecai Kaplan in the first half and Abraham Joshua Heschel in the second, are matched only by the lonely voice of Joseph B. Soloveitchik in Neo-Orthodoxy and the synoptic dialectics of Eugene Borowitz in Reform Judaism. While it is, of course, true, as these annals show, that both Kaplan and Heschel were marginalized at the Seminary, they were still able to produce eloquent disciples and interpreters who have conveyed their vision to many searching American Jews who came to feel their impact, if only at second hand. In a sense, we are now all Reconstructionists in our behavior and followers of Heschel in our longing for spiritual moorings.

Another plus for Conservative Judaism was surely its placement in New York City, the heartland of Jewish ethnicity and the center of its intellectual life. While the Seminary located uptown, far from the teeming masses of Jews on the lower East Side (no accident that), so that sometimes the students had to be transported far downtown to see Zionist groups or other varieties of living Jewish self-expression, they were still close enough to breathe the atmosphere of really existing Jews. This contrasts sharply with the Rav, living isolated in Boston, or even more, with the Hebrew Union College in the once important Queen City of the West, which turned out to be a backwater, at least in Jewish history.

It is commonly said that the Seminary was created by and with the money of German Reform Jews to make sure that the new Jewish immigration would be moderate and moderately enlightened in its sudden Americanization. This tums out to be far from the whole truth, though the anomaly inhering in technical direction of the school residing in men who did not accept its theological principles or its ritual performance, remains puzzling. Whatever the Schiffs and Warburgs wanted, however (and I am not at all sure they knew exactly what they wanted), the Seminary was to be Schechter's or Adler's or Finkelstein's and not theirs. For decades, the Seminary was the whole movement, until, at last, it discovered that it could only survive by creating a more independent movement. In Reform, of course, it was the movement that created the school, and in Orthodoxy there was and is no unified movement at all.

There are some surprises in this great compendium of information and interpretation. There were more German Jews on the JTS faculty than at the Hebrew Union College. The attitude of leadership toward Zionism was equivocal, to say the least. Cyrus Adler and Louis Finkelstein were hardly in favor of political Zionism, though both learned something from the rational Jewishness of Asher Ginsberg. What strikingly emerges here are the distinctly critical views of such enthusiastic Zionists as Mordecai Kaplan, who were early concerned about the Arab question and about the increasingly secular spirit of the yishuv. The ethical and Biblically prophetic Judaism that co-existed in these thinkers along with a more compromising rabbinic approach, was not always comfortable with pre-state yishuv or, later, Israeli behavior, and that goes far to explain why the alumni were always more vigorously Zionist than nearly all of their mentors. Even the Holocaust hardly moved the school to re-think its theology or to act vigorously in response to Hitlerism. While HUC was welcoming a number of professors and students, JTS was intent on strictly maintaining admissions standards, inviting hardly a single teacher from Hitler's Europe. The closeted academicism of the school was never so powerfully underlined as in its unwillingness to change much of anything because of the Shoah or following the creation of the State.

The founders and leaders of the Seminary were not theologians. They permitted no chair of constructive theology while they insisted on more or less traditional mastery of Talmud. But Schechter and Finkelstein were more than simple philologists or editors of Talmudic texts, though they certainly were that. They worked to make rabbinic Judaism relevant to their putative constituencies, and they succeeded as well as anyone in this century. Schechter's essays and Finkelstein's Akiba and The Pharisees were pioneering attempts to portray Judaism as more, and more profound, than any second-hand Biblicism. They radically portrayed the rabbis as profoundly political and, at the same time, creatively theological. Their successors in the Seminary produced such masterpieces as Heschel's Theology of Ancient Judaism and Kaplan's Judaism as a Civilization, models that continue to resonate to this day. Though HUC was long headed by a famous theologian, Kaufmann Kohler, it produced no books of that caliber until very late in our century. Conservative Judaism has yet to focus consensus on a coherent doctrine, but Reform hardly has come to understand even the key theological questions. The Rav produced loyal disciples but they quickly segmented his teaching into a quasi-Hegelian left and right Orthodoxy in bitter dispute.