The theology of conservative Judaism

Judaism, Spring, 1998 by Arnold Jacob Wolf

I do not think it is an accident that the Seminary should find itself pushed, as it were, out of the Jewish scene and on the world scene. It did not do it out of choice. It was not that all of a sudden we got a brainstorm and decided we must go ahead and try to help build peace in the world. It is because the institution itself was built on these very foundations [emphasis added] of peace and understanding between people who are different, encouraging differences and being grateful for differences. (I, p. 208)

The brief tenure of Gerson Cohen (1972-1986), tragically cut short by an illness which later took his life, was one of both debate and progress. Finkelstein had been the icon of the Conservative movement, aloof, remote, other-worldly, living a monastic life. Cohen was different: young, American, charming, clearly the movement's leader, fighting off dissenters on the right (calling for a "Traditional Conservative Judaism") and on the left, which founded the Reconstructionist Rabbinical School in Philadelphia. The burning issue of his tenure was the ordination of women to the Conservative rabbinate, a step first opposed by Cohen and, finally, powerfully endorsed by him.

Inside his faculty, the dour and powerfully connected neo-Orthodox scholar Saul Lieberman, and the aging but eloquent and acute Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionism and a naturalist in theology, split the faculty and student body into opposing factions. Indeed, the whole movement looked to be fragmenting. It was Cohen's task to make progress and yet not to divide Conservative Judaism. He succeeded in both; the first women to be ordained by the Seminary bore his endorsement.

Similarly, it was his openly Zionist outreach to the State of Israel that ended, once and for all, the Seminary's indecision and ambivalence about the Jewish State and the Zionist movement. He created outposts of Conservative Judaism in the Land of Israel, and began each of his lectures in the Hebrew language. Cohen was not given time or opportunity to consolidate his proliferating movement's thinking. Perhaps, that task still lies ahead.

The profound question for the Seminary, one that lay underneath more obvious conflicts and that pervades all modern rabbinic (perhaps also Christian) schools of theology, is the conflict between Wissenschaft and Torah or, as University departments of the theology often put it, between Scripture and the scientific study of ancient sources. Is the Torah the Word of God or is it a series of historically embedded documents of a given time and place, to be studied like any other ancient text, with neither prejudice nor preference.

Louis Ginzberg, the Seminary's greatest talmudist, tried to combine both sensitivity to traditional values in rabbinic texts and impeccable scholarship of the modern kind, which would elucidate what only such intellectually honest scientific research programs could disclose.

Alexander Marx and Louis Finkelstein also desired to be loyal both to modern scholarship and to traditional Jewish rabbinic interpreters, with considerable success. But, as Jonathan Sama points out in his brilliant chapter "Two Traditions of Seminary Scholarship," the dilemma was never entirely resolved, perhaps never could be.