Response

Judaism, Summer, 1995 by Henry Feingold

Rabbi Zelizer, who many years ago was a student of mine at the Jewish Theological Seminary, asked me to comment on his essay and I, perhaps foolishly, agreed to do so. I say foolishly because in some sense his essay concerns a family quarrel in which one mixes in at one's own risk. The Conservative movement is like a ship pounded by wave after wave of problems generated by the storm of modernity. I am merely a sympathetic witness who wonders if it can survive such a battering. I confine my thoughts to the conflict concerning the determination of the boundaries of human sexuality, whose latest manifestation concerns the question of homosexual rabbis.

I need first to identify myself. I am a former president of the Labor Zionist Alliance, who specializes in the history of American Jewry primarily in the interwar period. I have no difficulty with frumkeit which is also in my family background. In fact I am a conservative on religious matters, with a small "c." I agreed with few of the positions taken in the latest Papal encyclical but I was actually relieved to discover that the Pope had not succumbed to ethical relativism. He was exactly where I expect him to be. I believe that in matters of faith some constancy is necessary unlike political ideology, religious ideology loses its appeal if it becomes too plastic, especially on matters of principle. The faithful look to it for truth whose harbinger is eternality. A faith that must be adjusted to meet the needs of the times is a contradiction in terms. But that is precisely the crucible of the Conservative movement, which more than the other branches serves as the arena in which the never-ending demands of modernity confront the imperatives of tradition as embodied in Jewish law. We can be fairly certain how the Reform movement and the Orthodox will respond to the prospect of gay rabbis in the pulpit. But the Conservative response is unpredictable or predictably uncertain. That is a sign of both its strength and its weakness.

The demands of modernity are never-ending, especially in the sphere of human sexuality where there is indeed a necessary suppression. Freud tells us it is the price we pay for civilization. Yesterday it was the agunah problem and the ordination of women, today it is the gay rabbi, tomorrow it may be the "child lover." It goes on until all groups are liberated. Liberation is the goal of modernity which it achieves in the political realm through liberalism, its secular political instrument. It seeks the latest inequity and puts it on the political agenda to become grist for the civilized conflict which is politics in the parliamentary democracies.

Under other circumstances, Rabbi Zelizer's tactics in the Rabbinic Assembly to circumvent the problem might have been effective. There can be study commissions, all manner of parliamentary tactics and always the reasoning of an engaged heart to solve the problem without bloodshed. But ultimately such problems cannot be finessed, they always surface again and behind them there are other "inequities" awaiting justice to be done. Rabbi Zelizer is a problem-solver but this problem has no solution within the present parameters of the Conservative movement. The challenge it poses to accepted tradition and law is clear, as is its potential for ripping the fabric of the Conservative movement. Clearly Chancellor Schorsch has seen that and moved to protect the institution.

I offer the following observation as a student of America's "hard" secularism and as one who appreciates the importance of maintaining the mediating role of the Conservative movement. There is a distinction between public and private at the heart of modem secularism that might prove useful to the leaders of the Conservative movement, though its use for muting the conflict between the modem and traditional entails the acceptance of a contracted influence over the adherents of the Conservative movement and the thousands of other Jews who find comfort in the path it has chosen in the past.

What most clashes with the sense of autonomy and freeness cherished by moderns is the need of the synagogue or church to intervene into the spiritual and therefore private lives of its adherents. Understandably the Hasidic rebbe who intercedes deeply into the life of his followers is jarring to the secular person who feels that he must be free, self-governing in order to fulfill hi s potential. It is no less problematic when the Orthodox or Conservative branches attempt to dictate private behavior. Everywhere we see this distinction between the private and the public sphere upheld. Prohibiting abortions would be such an intrusion by the government, as would prayer in the schools. Religion in America is in the private sphere. When one impinges on it the institution inevitably is the loser. The symptom is a growing burden of fiat and laws that are ignored. Such laws, whether they are legislated by the Vatican or the Rabbinic Assembly's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, are unenforceable and become monuments to the impotence of the institution. They are like the pronunciamentos of the governments of the banana republics of Latin America. One might well wonder what sense there is in protecting such signals of weakness. Would it not be wiser to recognize that the modem distinction between the private and public spheres is pervasive and irreversible?