Realistic Options to Stabilize Conservative Judaism

Op-Ed: Conservative Judaism — many options, unlimited possibilities

By Marc Gary January 11, 2016 JTA       

Article Green/ Commentary Violet




NEW YORK (JTA) — When I was a law student, I took a course by a renowned professor who warned that if a prosecutor ever told us that our client only had two choices, we should walk away from the bargaining table. His point: There are always more options.

In a recent JTA Op-Ed, law professor Roberta Rosenthal Kwall said this is precisely the situation facing Conservative Judaism. Her piece, headlined “Conservative Judaism has just 2 viable options,” argues that the movement can either merge with the Reform movement or shrink dramatically to a limited core group “whose daily lives revolve around Jewish law in a way closer to modern Orthodox Jews.”

Not exactly what she said.  Doing nothing and accepting the status quo is also a default option.

Are those really the only two options open to more than a million Conservative Jews in North America? If so, we should just walk away.

Fortunately, there are other options likely to bring new vitality to the Conservative movement.

Kwall joins the voices of others who assert that the 2013 Pew Report and other data show a sharp decline in Conservative affiliation. From there, she projects a dismal future for the movement. Similar statements were made about the fate of Orthodoxy 50 years ago — look how those predictions turned out.

There is a world of difference between being a Conservative Jew and maintaining formal affiliation with Conservative institutions.  Ideology and personal expression of religious adherence are highly portable.  The real problem of United Synagogue and its related organizations is not a dearth of believers in the cause as much as it is attrition of payers into the treasury that jeopardizes the ability of those organizations to progress.

Jewish history is rarely linear. In fact, the actual numbers in the Pew Report undercut the narrative of irreversible decline for the Conservative movement.

Don't recall the narrative going in the direction of either irreversible or inevitable.

In a JTA Op-Ed titled “On Conservative Judaism, why all the talk about failure?” published last fall, three eminent scholars of Jewish history and demography note that the Pew data shows “the Conservative proportion of the non-Orthodox Jewish population is holding steady.” Importantly, the proportion of non-Orthodox Jews who identify as Conservative remains constant across the critical age groups of Jews 45-59 and 30-44 (20 percent for each group), showing no proportional decline in the younger adult generation.

When we turn from market share to impact, there is no reason to wring our hands. The movement’s Ramah camps are indisputably the most successful religious and educational camping program in North America. Most of the independent minyanim, innovative Jewish start-ups, and other cutting-edge organizations in the Jewish community are founded or led by products of the Conservative movement.

While this is all true, sort of, The Buddha had an interesting insight which he conveyed to his disciples.  If what you are told conflicts with what you observe, accept what you observe as the reality.  While the glass of Conservative Judaism may indeed still be half full, their successful contributions to American Judaism includes becoming an exporter of talent elsewhere.  The congregations that I visit, as I nominally defected in 1997, are not particularly vibrant with one very glaring exception.  The worshippers can all chime in with a catching tune giving the warmth of community but cannot read the sentence that occurs in the siddur after that tune.  The people of my Bar Mitzvah era that made shabbos happen were largely imported talent, some immigrants of my grandfather's generation, some escapees from Naziism, some of my parents generation trained for Bar Mitzvah in the orthodox shuls of the Lower East Side.  Not a lot of alumni of the Conservative Hebrew Schools or Ramah.  That came later and was not particularly sustaining.

Those cutting edge independent minyanim are indeed comprised of Conservative Jews, but those people with all they have to contribute to the larger Jewish dialog are still defectors in their current form.

The movement’s flagship Jewish Theological Seminary continues to produce leaders who are in high demand. And hundreds of thousands of Jews join Conservative synagogues and find experiences of meaning and community that are joyful, profound and inspiring.

No one denies that we face a host of challenges, including low birth rates, high intermarriage rates and a decline in affiliated synagogues. Our unique vision has not been clearly and consistently articulated for the new situation confronting North American Jewry today. And we face the age-old problem of the disparity between the movement’s commitment to Jewish law and the actual observance patterns of most of its members.

The demand might not be quite as high without the assistance of the RA Placement Service rules.  Monopolies have a way of creating demand but with a disdain for the customer. And if hundreds of thousands of Jews are happy with the status quo, then maybe there really isn't a problem to be solved.  Just have a smaller tent with a smaller budget serving the Real Conservative Jews and good riddance to the less worthy.  My guess is that if not for the budget part, that might be viable policy.

The disparity between policy and practice is not limited to Conservative Jews.  Some like Reform adapt policy to reality.  Others like Orthodox also have to deal with their reality so some keep their parking lots open on shabbos and don't evict their doctors on call who come to worship when their pagers go off.

But the answer to these challenges is not to merge the movement out of existence or to turn it into an elite cadre of modern Orthodoxy, albeit with an egalitarian twist. The first option ignores the important differences in ideology, practice and outcomes between Conservative and Reform Judaism, while the second would denude the movement of its unique characteristics of innovation and inclusiveness, rendering it unrecognizable and undermining its raison d’etre.

The second option may really be the default option, whether desired or not.  In the era of my Bar Mitzvah, as migratory patterns took young Jewish adults from the Jewish enclaves of the big cities to the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific to GI Bill funded universities to suburbia, new congregations formed and a new breed of Jew moved into towns that already had a skeletal Orthodox and Conservative base.  Some of these places had open forums, sometimes called Debate Night, where the Orthodox and Conservative Rabbis would promote the benefits of their congregation to those not yet affiliated.  Conservative entered its heyday from these forums promoting family seating, open parking lots and afternoon Hebrew schools while maintaining a reasonably identical worship experience for daily minyan and Shabbat morning, less a few responsive readings from the Silverman Siddur.  Friday night, a vestigial gathering for the Orthodox became the point of differentiation for the Conservatives with late services, discussions, guest speakers and sometimes even an organ and choir but for the most part worship did not differ a whole lot while the environment did.  As the modes of worship began to separate between Orthodox and Conservative shuls, there developed a reason to select one over the other for that reason.  As it has rebounded, traditional egalitarian is still worship conducted in Hebrew with a full Torah reading but with women.  In a sense, a revision of Debate Night where one chooses which synagogue on the basis of something other than liturgy where there is already parity.
 

The future of the Conservative movement does not lie in abandoning its distinctiveness or its innovative spirit or shrinking it to a core without a mission to the larger community.

Would challenge this.  Conservative Judaism as I experience it, or multidenominational Hillel Judaism for that matter, has always been a mosaic.  People affiliated for all sorts of reasons, picking and choosing what they wanted from synagogue programming.  There were worshippers, Hebrew school parents, Mens Club machers, whatever else, often with little intersection and crossover.  None of this is really being abandoned as much as it's natural history seems to be redistributing it.

The larger question, though, is how effectively the sponsoring institutions, which have now been around a hundred years,

As a movement, we need to clearly, succinctly and consistently articulate our vision of Judaism — a Judaism, to quote the JTS mission statement — “that is learned and passionate, pluralist and authentic, traditional and egalitarian; one that is thoroughly grounded in Jewish texts, history and practices, and fully engaged with societies and cultures of the present.”

Other than the part about egalitarian, this could just as easily describe a Modern Orthodox approach to Judaism.  Moreover, there are a number of Mara D'Atra's at Conservative synagogues in the USA and Canada who have ruled against true egalitarianism and are permitted to do that in their professional capacity and enforce it for their Conservative Synagogue.  There is also a gap between what you aspire to, what you really have, and what risks you might be willing to take to ease that gap.
 

This is not merely a branding or marketing exercise. It reflects a claim to both authenticity and inspiration that are essential to attracting new adherents.

There is of course a prohibition against geneivat da-at, or misrepresenting a product to a potential purchaser.  If you want people to think they will have authentic traditional learned Judaism when they affiliate, you have to really have it in place.  That means Hebrew schools with literate alumni, not the Framework for Excellence illusion of education, a place where somebody is able to put a cap on hemorrhaging membership when the Rabbi becomes a little too arbitrary and abrupt.  Yes, I have seen these and others and that basic protection was subordinate to the druthers of those in charge.  Branding does not make a good surrogate.  People will kind of figure out what a Beth Sodom experience is, though not necessarily right away.

We must also train a new type of communal leader — whether rabbi, cantor or educator — who understands and is equipped not merely to head a community, but to create one. We need entrepreneurial professionals who go beyond the four walls of synagogues or other institutional forms and seek out Jews who are unaffiliated and feel disenfranchised. These are the individuals to whom our sacred wisdom can bring meaning and fellowship.

As a teenager, there was an organization know as LTF z"l where we read pamphlets by Chaim Potok before he became famous.  Rather good writing and analysis.  Now there is Sulam.  In Federation I was recruited for Young Leadership potential prompted by the anticipated earnings of my professional degree and not the intellect or hard work that enabled it.  There were entrepreneurs at one time, but as some of the congregations matured, loyalty and obedience too often became valued over people of creativity and imagination who challenged what was in favor of what might be.  Being prickly pretty much set you external to the USY clique and every subsequent in-crowd, irrespective of ability.  It's a tough culture to change, one often very uninviting to genuine mavens.
 

Other strategies must be deployed as well, but the Conservative movement’s future requires neither disappearance through merger nor dramatic shrinkage to an elite few. It requires dynamic and entrepreneurial leadership, a clear and compelling message, the courage to fully exploit the innovative spirit of our tradition and the commitment to create radically welcoming communities.

(Marc Gary is the executive vice chancellor and chief operating officer of the Jewish Theological Seminary.)

And more than anything it requires giving people a better experience than they expected.

The Inferior Decorators

WConservative Judaism hires marketers to give it a makeover

Somebody sent me this from the NY Post.    Me.  Post

Conservative Judaism is about to get a makeover.

Down to roughly 1 million adherents — having lost one-third of its members over the past 25 years — the moderate movement has hired a team of marketers to give it a new look.

I think they've already made the transformation from traditional modernized worship on the mid 20th Century to Sound Bites of the 21st Century.

New York’s Good Omen agency is interviewing hundreds of Conservative Jews to get their views on the movement in order to develop a new “position statement” for the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism.

I was raised and educated in the Conservative Movement, maybe spent 40 years there as a nominal adherent.  Nobody really asked me what I thought about anything during that time and if I volunteered a comment not within the druthers of the guys in charge, my intellect and discernment was summarily dismissed with a wave of the hand but not with a discussion of my comments' merits.

More than just new fonts and graphics for the group’s public messaging, the “rebranding is about understanding the experience people have with your product or service,” says Rabbi Steven Wernick, the head of the USCJ’s organizational arm. “And we know there is a level of uncertainty about precisely where the ‘brand’ of Conservative Judaism sits in our members’ lives.”

It would probably be better to go beyond interviewing those in the organizations fold but also those who used to be.  They have members who are there for some reason which may or may not be ideological.  It may be to connect with friends, they may like the Rabbi, it may be the place their family has gone for generations.  They may be synagogue consumers purchasing a seat on Rosh Hashana or a Bar Mitzvah.  These have nothing to do with Conservative Judaism but a lot to do with how many dues payments keep the congregations and assorted institutions afloat.  

Stricter than liberal Reform Jews — but with few of the lifestyle constrictions associated with Orthodox Judaism — the Conservative branch is a kind of moderate middle ground.

Conservative Jews don’t don modest black ensembles like their Orthodox brethren; they’re also open to lesbian and gay members and even allow same-sex marriage ceremonies. But they don’t sanction intermarriage and recognize only children born from Jewish mothers as Jewish.

“It’s a culturally demanding version of Judaism,” explains Steven M. Cohen, professor of Jewish social policy at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York.

On the local level, it doesn't really demand anything other than an annual financial statement of support.  People do not attend much on shabbat, graduate five years of Hebrew School without being able to sight read a paragraph of unfamiliar Hebrew even if they've just chimed in with the catchy tune the sentence before, don't maintain kashrut, haven't struggled with a Jewish text since their college days.  The institution becomes the surrogate for doing these things, not very different from the Catholics who seek an intermediary for their own confession of sin.

Cohen calls the rebranding “helpful,” but isn’t sure it’s enough to attract new congregants — or stop current ones from defecting.

“The real cause of [community] shrinkage is intermarriage and the decline of ethnic attachment among American Jews,” he says.

Might challenge the Professor on this.  The real cause is more likely how they were treated when the intermarriage occurred, not the intermarriage itself.  In my Bar Mitzvah era, 1960's a form of shunning was often advocated.  It was unworkable then and now, but still has its vestiges built into various official policies.

Wernick says the overhaul has another purpose: it can help reconnect members with the movement’s traditions.

I would like to think that the Rabbis and other honchos have been trying to do this all along, even while people were seeking greener pastures.  Remember, a good portion of the talent has migrated Orthodox as the implementation of the movement's traditions, which never really changed that much, got a little loose.

“There’s a sense that Conservative Judaism offers a strong balance between [secular] society and Judaism as a whole,” he says. “And this provides for many nuanced opportunities for partnerships and synergies for the movement.”

There is nothing wrong with the ideology, which can be rather portable.  For me, and undoubtedly for others, there was a lot wrong with the experience of dealing with the institutions and the leaders who carried their banner.  Branding doesn't fix this.  A more traditional Tochacha/Selicha/Teshuva/Mechila might give more of a fighting chance.

Working on These

Twice a year I divert from my askance look at Judaism and medicine to direct some effort at myself.  In recent half-years I've designated a dozen projects worthy of my effort, few reach fruition but the exercise in directing myself toward an end point has its own inherent value.  From Thanksgiving to Christmas, including some unimpeded vacation time, I sorted through some of the semi-annual planning, identifying a project in each of twelve categories.  They had to meet the SMART criteria:  specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time restricted, in this case mid-year.  

1.  Mental:  I purchased a CME program from the New England Journal of Medicine that will give me 50 badly needed credits for my next licensure.  There is a 2-3 month window for doing the research, all of which appears in the NEJM.

2.  Family:  One day a month belongs to Irene.

3.  Health:  My weight will decline under 155 lb.   This is a perennial effort which almost reached target last winter when I was very consistent with diet modification.  It requires consistency of effort.  The diet component I've done in part before.  The exercise component has never been what it should be. 

4.  Personal:  I will have read two books, one fiction and one non-fiction.  I've pretty much selected the books, Herzog by Saul Bellow and The Myth of the Cultural Jew by Roberta Kwall.  I can read more, but I want the project to be without excuses for failing to complete them.

5.  Long Term:  My blog will generate 15 comments.  Actually I have very little control over what people do and tried to take that into account in my planning.  I also express myself irrespective of readership.  Yet my Jewish world has not been interactive in recent years.  Much of my synagogue experience the last few years has been dull, people sitting in a room with the Rabbi or somebody else speaks, questions that are more likely to be deflected than addressed in the way I might expect as a college graduate.  I thought the infusion of blogging would remedy that but I do not really encounter a lot of that.  Oodles of sermons that Rabbi's post on Blogger or their congregation's web site.  Some very good analysis in The Forward et al, easily accessible and with some interaction in the comments but little of it is sustained.  So while I cannot affect what anyone does with what I write in my blog, I can format it in a more inviting way, soliciting advice from electronic, printed and personal sources to bring this project forward.  

6.  Financial.  I will be a serious participant in this year's tax preparation.  One of Irene's expected tasks, though I used to do this as a resident.  It lapsed and I should relearn how to gather the data and present it to the CPA.  This is the only project one of two projects whose completion is guaranteed by a deadline imposed by somebody other than myself.

7.  Purchase:  I will cook in my cosmetically upgraded kitchen.  This one has been on the wish list forever.  I have the money to make the purchases but it is one that needs to be a joint project.  I think it attainable but will need some joint decisions on where to put our current too much stuff and what order to do the multiple sub-projects that create the end result.  Step 1, the lighting.  Once in the ceiling in the places it needs to be, contractors can do the rest one step at a time.

8.  Friends:  Four new friends.  Never had a lot of friends and kept the few that I've acquired indefinitely, which most people would think is good.  Yet between work and shul, I have become friendly with people but none really extend beyond the pleasantries of the hospital and synagogue.  I have no other outlets either.  There are forums for connecting with others and a value to trying.

9. Community:  I will create a sustainable non-worship activity at AKSE.  For all my usually friendly jabs at my synagogue it is in many ways the best forum in the area for bringing people ahead Jewishly.  I've done a few rather important things over the years, from insisting that a novice Rabbi be given training to enable him to progress professionally to the annual education forum that people have insisted be maintained even after I dropped out in, frustration.  In a place that seems in the relentless pursuit of mediocrity, a leadership preoccupied with enhancing revenue to the neglect of the experiences, creativity of natural explorers such as myself have been devalued.  While my mind has generated useful things, it hasn't in a while and the worship has a life of its own that nobody particular wants to sparkle.  But any number of things can better connect those whose participation is currently at the margins.  That's where the handful of people who can imagine what might be instead of protecting what has already become ingrained have a value even it it means swimming upstream.

10.  Frontiers:  I will submit for publication four articles, two medical and two Jewish.  I just like thinking about my medical experience and my Jewish perspectives.  One medical opinion piece found its way to cyberspace, though not print.  It was a good piece of analysis and I derived much gratification from the few people who commented upon it.  While I have enjoyed my entry into the pageants of medicine and Judaism each has room to become more interactive than they currently are.  The marketplace of ideas can never have too many items on the shelves.

11.  Travel:  I will visit three wineries that I've not visited before.  At least one project has to be a slam dunk.  I've only had a negative experience at a winery one time.  More commonly I get to praise the effort and pride that people have in their work and express a genuine interest in learning about what they do to bring their vintages about.


12. Home:  All papers under my control will be removed from flat surfaces.  This is a big one, the project most likely to frustrate me.  I phrased it so as not to need help from anyone else, as I am not optimistic about getting help from anyone else.  Yet relief from relentless clutter, even if temporary, gets me ahead.  Had I needed assistance of another person it would not satisfy the criteria of attainable.

Or Might Not Be the Best Options

The 2 Options Left for Conservative Judaism

Roberta Rosenthal KwallDecember 22, 2015Image: JTS

(JTA) — The Conservative movement was once the very embodiment of what it meant to be an “American Jew.”

As the 130th anniversary of the founding of its flagship Jewish Theological Seminary approaches in 2016, the centrist movement that historically straddled the polarities of Reform and Orthodox is struggling to maintain its identity and attract new followers. The movement’s congregational arm recently hired branding consultants to provide it with a clearer identity.

They might do better with a branding iron.

As one who was raised as a Conservative Jew, I believe there are only two realistic choices for the movement. One option is to acknowledge that it has become virtually indistinguishable from Reform Judaism and the two denominations could merge their institutional structures. The other option is to carve out a much narrower middle ground catering to the smaller group of Conservative Jews seriously committed to observing Jewish law but in an egalitarian worship framework.

There are many more than two realistic options.  While I greatly admire the thought that went into the Reform Movement's current siddur, Mishkan T'fillah, which opens many options for their Rabbis in conducting worship, it is a long way from Siddur Sim Shalom which carries a very traditional mode of worship in its pages.  This would not be a merger as much as a takeover.

The ideological roots of Conservative Judaism date back to Europe in the mid-19th century, but the denomination was defined by Solomon Schechter, who served as president of the Jewish Theological Seminary from 1902 to 1915. The Conservative movement clung to rituals far more tightly than did the Reform movement, which was characterized in those days by a pronounced rejection of Jewish law and tradition. But compared to Orthodoxy, Conservative Judaism was more liberal in practice and ideology.

For many years, Conservative Judaism’s middle-of-the-road message was a very good fit for the majority of American Jews. By the 1940s the movement boasted the largest number of affiliated families.

What changed?

What seems to have changed in many respects is maturity of the movement with its adaptation to American reality, some of which went well and some of which did not.  Mixed seating and driving on shabbos have acquired prompt, widespread and permanent acceptance with little negative consequence other than perhaps dispersal of participants over a wider geographic area than if driving were restricted and maybe some ridicule in the manner in which the driving decision was reasoned and conveyed.  Egalitarianism is more mixed, widely accepted and expanding the talent pool but with a little baggage as it becomes one more litmus test for a movement that has too often created absolute You're In or You're Out choices among its participants.  I think that is one of the things that distinguishes mature organizations from those that are more entrepreneurial and fluid.

Sociologist Samuel Heilman has documented the growth and strength of Orthodox Judaism beginning in the later decades of the 20th century. Meanwhile, many Reform synagogues have manifested a return to tradition, embracing once-discarded practices such as Hebrew prayer, the celebration of life cycle events, and the wearing of kippahs and prayer shawls. In contrast, many of the Jewish law opinions of the Conservative movement have become more liberal on certain issues, further blurring some lines between Conservative and Reform Judaism. Natural attrition and an increasing number of unaffiliated Jews also have taken a toll. All of these factors have resulted in a one-third drop in Conservative movement affiliation over the past 25 years.

During my year of Kaddish about six years back, I worshiped at the Reform congregation which had a late Friday night service that would assure 10 Jewish men who I estimated by counting kippot at the start of services.  While tradition is back, it is a very superficial return.  Kippot are optional, not mandatory, the content of the liturgy varies from week to week based the many options the Mishkan T'fillah prayer book offers the Rabbi, Oneg shabbat is milchig though for occasional communal Federation shabbatot labelled pareve is offered, there is an organ, candles are kindled on the Bimah after sunset.  This is a long way from Conservative Light, distinguishable enough to make the worship experiences unique between the two.

The more compelling question is whether the particpants care one way or the other.  For me, I just wanted 10 Jewish men present for Kaddish and then took advantage of things like the best sermons and musical experience in town.  My own observance and Jewish knowledge remains Conservadox.

Visit most Conservative synagogues on a Saturday morning when there is not a bar or bat mitzvah and likely you will find mostly an older crowd. Where are the children of Conservative Jewish baby boomers? According to sociologists of American Judaism as well as anecdotal evidence, the really serious ones often migrate to modern Orthodoxy or attend independent prayer groups (minyans) that lack an official denomination. Many of the others put their Judaism “on hold” until they have a family, at which point many find Reform a better option for a variety of reasons — not the least of which is intermarriage. Since Conservative rabbis still are prohibited from performing such marriages, Reform becomes an easy choice for these couples. The 2013 Pew Report on the American Jewish community found that 30 percent of Jews raised Conservative have become Reform.

What your affiliate with and what you really are do not always coincide.  Many of the previously Conservative Jews who move in a different direction are more consumers of congregational affiliation than ideological affiliantion.  My own congregation while nominally Orthodox in most of its practices depends heavily of men raised and educated Conservative who found our local USCJ affiliate lacking in some way.  Many of those going Reform really have no ideological center.  They are purchasing with their congregational membership a cadre of friends, acceptance if they have intermarried, patrilineal descent if they need it for Bar Mitzvah, a Hebrew school large enough to give the kids social contacts, or the personality and intellect of the Rabbi.  It makes no difference to the consumer purchase if Torah is read from a scroll on shabbos.

A merger between the Conservative and Reform movements is more than a theoretical possibility. Surveys over the past 15 years show that although Conservative Jews still exhibit higher degrees of traditional observance than their Reform counterparts, a growing number of Conservative and Reform Jews agree on hot-button social issues such as interfaith and same-sex marriage, as well as the determination of Jewish status based on either parent rather than only the mother. A formal union between the movements could afford a majority of the American Jewish community a greater sense of unity as a result of one governing institutional structure rather than two.

This comes at a very high price, including a next generation without the education to decode Hebrew, the loss of very stable and valuable Conservative institutions such as Ramah and USY, the option for those who succeed to migrate towards Orthodox if that is appropriate.  Not a good deal for Conservatives.  In his outstanding book, Getting Our Groove Back, Scott Shay devoted a chapter to the evolving implosion of institutional Conservative Judaism, regarding it as one of America's great Jewish disasters.  While there is much reason to criticize those institutions and how they operate, the loss of transmission of tradition and knowledge which an institutional absorption of Conservative into current Reform would cause some very irreplaceable damage.

The alternative is for the Conservative movement to narrow its audience by refining its mission. A tribute to Conservative Judaism is that it has produced a core group of Jews whose daily lives revolve around Jewish law in a way closer to modern Orthodox Jews but who insist on an egalitarian worship community. By contrast, the Rabbinical Council of America, the largest organization of Orthodox rabbis, last month issued a resolution banning its members from hiring a growing number of Orthodox women who are being groomed as clergy.

These exist now, mostly as transdenominational assemblies of worshipers without engaging in the non-worship activities of a synagogue or subsets of people within an active Conservative synagogue who ditch Shabbat Service Lite to conduct full Torah reading et al in a smaller room while the usual service goes on in the main sanctuary with the hired clergy.  While it may be a form of salvage of Conservative Judaism, in another way it illustrates it failure to insist that what the central leadership aspires to remain the norm.

One of the distressing elements of how Conservative institutions present themselves in recent years has been the pitching of ideology over substance.  A congregation seeking members will advertise as egalitarian as their main draw when perhaps it should be the quality of the Jewish experience or its educational opportunities that forms their product differentiation.  Too many divrei Torah and Conservative sponsored podcasts promote the egalitarian ideology when they might be better promoting the insights of Torah without those strings attached.  

There was a time in my formative years when new suburban communities experiencing a growth in Jewish population would sponsor a form of Debate Night, inviting usually the Orthodox and Conservative Rabbi's of the community to tell the newcomers why they ought to consider their congregation.  The Conservatives sort of had an advantage.  We're just like them in worship but your family can sit together, you can live where you want and drive here, and the youngsters can go to the outstanding public schools and still learn enough for Bar Mitzvah with us.  It was a form of parity and then some.  When you promote egalitarianism as your distinguishing feature instead of the quality of the Jewish experience as your distinguishing feature you have irreversibly lost the parity that made you succeed in the past.

Given that the center of Orthodoxy has moved further to the right over the years, it is highly unlikely that these views concerning female participation will change anytime soon. This reality opens the door for a slimmer but more cohesive Conservative movement that potentially could draw members from pockets of modern Orthodoxy as well the proliferating independent minyans sharing these practices. According to a national survey conducted in 2007, nearly half of those who attend independent minyans grew up in Conservative synagogues and another 20 percent in Orthodox synagogues. This group alone provides a solid target audience for a refined Conservative movement.

There was an interesting podcast by one of my favorite speakers Rabbi Jeremy Wieder on www.yutorah.org where he addressed the role of Modern Orthodoxy in current times.  While halachah as the Orthodox poskim interpret it cannot accept gender equality of worship, the more general Jewish theme of treating people in as dignified way as possible makes the role of women a moral imperative that cannot be ignored, and in fact wasn't ignored in Biblical and Talmudic times either.  The end point may not be equality but the need to be respectful and offer opportunities persists.  In any community, it is the Orthodox women who are prevented from equal opportunity who still become the most Jewishly knowledgeable and Jewishly identifiable women in their communities.  Some people will of course set equal participation as their sine qua non but if that were really the case an observant core within the Conservative movement would be a good deal larger than it is now.  More likely though, the outcome will be like what my shul has, learned people who owe their knowledge and skills to their Conservative educations of fifty years ago who are not willing to sacrifice the educational and worship advantage that we have to defect across town to get gender equality.  That option has now been there for thirty years, long enough to have a result far different than exists now.

This second alternative will face obstacles. It probably will further shrink the movement; this will have financial consequences. It will depend on rabbis who are willing to set and demand higher religious norms with respect to all areas of Jewish observance. But the payoff is that it would provide a viable and distinct identity for the denomination.

When you become dependent on institutions over people, volume matters a lot if you want those institutions to have the resources they need to conduct their usual business.  A smaller tent may indeed make the Movement more vibrant but they need the support of the big tent of low utilizers.  In that sense it is a little like insurance where you need a lot of people putting in and deriving nothing from what they put in to protect the subset that smash up their cars each year.  The Conservative Movement has already had shrinkage.  While they could say good riddance to the Inferior Conservative Jews who went elsewhere, thus declaring themselves as something other than Real Conservative Jews, it is that shrinkage which jeopardizes the defining institutions.

The easiest route for the Conservative movement is to make cosmetic changes to its big tent brand and hope that better marketing will bring in more numbers, but this goal does not seem realistic. Neither does a merger with Reform just yet.

As Candidate Obama reminded us, "A pig with lipstick is still a pig."  They are going to have to make some really difficult decisions, not so much on how to promote from without but to give some very clear direction to advancing Jewishly the people who remain.  They really are not Reform as most of us understand and experience Reform.

I would urge the movement to reclaim Solomon Schechter’s mission of “conserving” the Jewish tradition by focusing on its strongly observant but egalitarian constituents. This path will allow the movement to preserve a unique legacy.

This is what they have been doing for about thirty years.  The results are contraction and aging.  They may need to content the Movement with being a niche product, though an important niche in the American Jewish mosaic.

Much thanks for a terrific essay.

Roberta Rosenthal Kwall is the Raymond P. Niro Professor at the DePaul University College of Law. She is the author of “The Myth of the Cultural Jew: Culture and Law in Jewish Tradition” from Oxford University Press, 2015.

Read more: http://forward.com/opinion/327774/the-2-options-left-for-conservative-judaism/#ixzz3vcG3ImaB

No Clergy

We have an unusual circumstance this shabbat with the Rabbi away in Israel and the Cantor out ill.  So we see what our men can do.  I am ba-al shacharit, we have a ba-al musaf, a person who gives a uniformly superior D'Var Torah, leaving us to get Torah reading done.  About five guys stepped up to the plate, so we'll see how it goes.  Mincha/Maariv a little less secure. Hopefully no surrogate for those irritating Aliyah Sound Bites which I think mar our weekly experience.

I came of age Jewishly in Hillel sanctuaries where students created the weekly services they wanted.  There are problems when the shabbos reaches it peak in your 20's followed a suburban sanctuary wasteland dependent on hired professionals, often less talented than the students but more sustainable, if not more reliable.  But's that's what we have with a brief welcome interlude from time to time when we can return to what we once had.