How the Halakhic Community Should Respond to the Conservative Movement’s Move Toward Accepting Intermarriage?

QUESTION:

How should the Halakhic community respond to the Conservative Movement’s slow but inevitable acceptance of intermarriage as normative Jewish usage?

ANSWER:

1. The Conservative Movement’s very name is an oxymoron. It is a liberal, or more precisely, a libertine social, taste culture phenomenon   that markets itself as a religious movement. It really is not “religious” by Jewish—halakhic—or academic—i.e. philological, historical, or theological benchmarks.  How many Conservative synagogue communities boast memberships where but 10% of that membership observes the Shabbbat, Yom Tov, and kashrut according to the Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee of Jewish Law and Standards’  [CJLS] “official religion” definitions?
2. This social movement packages itself as “religious” in order to sell itself in Protestant America, and in the 1950’s and 1960’s, this packaging was wildly successful. Late Friday evening prayers became a “night out,” musical instruments, normally forbidden on Jewish holy days [bBetsa 30a], were now permitted in the synagogue on Shabbat. If people will not pay to pray, they will pay in order to be entertained.  The late Rabbi Moshe Feinstein once wrote “America is the land of the good time,” and was he ever right!  To paraphrase and apply Chabad’s popular slogan, Conservative Jewish social policy has conditioned its dwindling constituency to demand, “We want Jewish gratification now, and we won’t pay to wait.”
3. The Jewish battles of the 21^stCentury are not those of the previous century. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, there were some Conservative rabbis who were pious, sincere, and learned.  That reality is a distant memory.  At a wedding I attended in Brooklyn, New York, I bumped into a JTS professor who asked me, at that moment a member of the RCA, my thoughts regarding my rabbinic alma mater on the occasion of its reaching its 100^th ”birthday?” I answered, ”Until 120.”  That snarky remark is sadly also prophetic.  Conservative synagogues are aging, its millennials are not affiliating with the Movement, and dues collectables are declining.     It is not convincing Reform affiliates that its brand of “Tradition” is worthy of consideration or Orthodoxy that it is a legitimate religious contender. Committed Conservative parents are failing to sell their religious choice to their own children. In my south Jerusalem neighborhood, there is a non-Orthodox egalitarian “minyan” that spurned the “Conservative” label. New York’s egalitarian Yeshivat Hadar would seem to be Conservative “serious.”  That community tries to take Halakhah seriously, if not in an Orthodox fashion.  The “Conservative” Jewish “franchise” has failed. It has failed to convince its own children. Today, being “Conservative” means to affiliate formally but not seriously.
4. The JTS’s ideological problems, demographic contraction, and financial challenges cannot be ignored. Its work product, i.e. its professional graduates, are finding that their “expertise”  and professional skill sets are not valued by the dues paying, institution building, charismatic seeking marketplace.  JTS advertised that it is seeking a Rabbinics professor for a three year, renewable, non-tenure tract position. This unwillingness to offer the position as tenure tract reflects a marked market decline on its part.  Since the population that identifies with the Conservative Movement is disappearing, so are the executives, clergy, and educators that service a Movement whose services are no longer in demand, or of interest.  The Conservative Movement, like Women of the Wall, needs crises in order to get headlines and to generate excitement, and to institute jarring change in order to generate notice.  For Conservative Judaism, each “progressive” change [pun here intended] is a move to a brave new world globalist religion that has become the “orthodoxy” of the secular Left.  Even though Conservative Judaism’s actual Jewish content is negligible, there seems to be no market population to pay dues, so that rejecting intermarrieds comes at a terrible financial cost.  Once Conservative Judaism accepts intermarriages, rabbis who refuse to perform intermarriages will not find positions, and will likely be subject to non-renewal by congregants who expect their rabbis to be accommodating.

The Conservative Movement never takes positions that might alienate its laity. Since intermarriage is rife in the Conservative community, its laity is often re-affiliating with the more accommodating Reform Synagogue.  Here is how the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards  will justify allowing its  rabbis to officiate  at interfaith weddings.

1. The Committee’s name reveals that the CJLS will first consults with the Law. This Law “has a voice but not a veto.” If the Law cannot or will not be observed, the CJLS will apodictically declare that it is innovating a Jewish standard.   While legal or orders are made of norms, or “to do” or “not to do” statements,  Conservative Judaism regards these norms as suggestive guides, or folkways and not as legal obligations or ultimate concerns.
2. The Biblical passage which prohibits intermarriage is Deuteronomy 7:1-3, where the Israelite is commanded “do not marry them.” However, the “them” refers to the seven ethnic groups populating Canaan, and not to any other ethnic group—or person.  Intermarrying with contemporary Gentiles was not forbidden, or imagined, by this Deuteronomic passage.
3. Rabbinic interpretation expanded the Biblical prohibition to include anyone who is not a full-fledged, pedigreed Jew [bQeddushin 3:12, bYevamot 76a]. Since the intermarriage prohibition is invented by the Rabbis, latter day Conservative rabbis have the right to override that earlier Rabbinic legislation.

There are real difficulties with this rhetorical gambit.

1. The lay community to which this dispensation is addressed could not care less how it will be accommodated; the writing of learned responsa will not impress an indifferent, assimilating laity and apologetic justifications probably will not convince those who would like to be convinced.
2. Oral Torah law and Biblical Law are two very distinct institutions. De-oraita Law are laws carrying Toraitic valence based upon Written Torah authorization [Deut. 17:11] and are called “Torah” even though these laws are neither technically nor historically “Biblical.” See also Isaiah 2:3 for evidence of a “Torah” that is post-Mosaic that nevertheless carries the valence of “the word of the Lord.”
3. Rabbinic law remains in force even if the CJLS claims otherwise. If the CJLS feels it is authorized to willy nilly abrogate a human, rabbinic law, it remains to be demonstrated why or how the CJLS is not subject to having its own declarations ignored.
4. Children of intermarrieds rarely affiliate as serious, i.e. believing, behaving, and belonging Jews. The CJLS is however, very consistent. It appeals to Jewish law for legitimation, but will ignore Jewish law when its application might alienate the Jews in the pews who pay the dues.   The non-Orthodox affiliating Jewry is declining institutionally, demographically, and socially.  With no convincing message, without an identifiable community of the committed, and with a contracting demand for its product, Conservative Judaism’s future is bleak.  It is hardly a Movement because it is going nowhere.  After all, the differences between the Conservatives and Reform are minimal and a vestigial rule that offends the sensibilities of already acculturated Jews will be ignored.

Orthodoxy gets bad press when it attacks other Movements. Since the Rabbinical Assembly has little to sell, its own buyers aren’t buying the “product” now being sold. When a religious “movement” stands for nothing, it will be hard for it to find a platform on which to stand.   The nicer institutional Orthodoxy appears, the more people it will reach.  The prophet’s advice, “beware and be quiet,” is our most eloquent response to the non-Orthodox deviations.  Orthodoxy is bound by Jewish laws, not to parochialism for its own sake. The Conservative Movement’s acceptance of intermarriage should not come as a surprise.  It will be a desperate attempt to avoid its descent to oblivion.  Orthodoxy’s real challenge is to go back to Torah sources to define how it might embrace Jewish seekers, unaffiliated, and those with no spiritual home whatsoever.  By marketing itself as an Orthodoxy that engages modernity without compromising the Jewish law, modern Orthodoxy may replace Conservative Judaism as the center of Jewish life.