{"id":1448,"date":"2018-03-27T12:51:31","date_gmt":"2018-03-27T12:51:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/?p=1448"},"modified":"2018-03-29T12:17:13","modified_gmt":"2018-03-29T12:17:13","slug":"halakhic-community-conservative-intermarriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/2018\/03\/halakhic-community-conservative-intermarriage\/","title":{"rendered":"How the\u00a0Halakhic\u00a0Community Should Respond to the Conservative Movement’s Move Toward Accepting Intermarriage?"},"content":{"rendered":"

QUESTION:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

How should the\u00a0Halakhic<\/em>\u00a0community respond to the Conservative Movement’s slow but inevitable acceptance of intermarriage as normative Jewish usage?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

ANSWER:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The Conservative Movement’s very name\u00a0is an oxymoron. It is a\u00a0liberal, or more precisely, a libertine social, taste culture phenomenon\u00a0 \u00a0that markets itself as a religious movement. It really is not “religious” by Jewish\u2014halakhic<\/em>\u2014or academic\u2014i.e. philological, historical, or theological benchmarks.\u00a0 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’\u00a0 [CJLS] “official religion” definitions?<\/li>\n
  2. This social movement packages itself as “religious” in order to sell itself in Protestant America, and in the 1950\u2019s and 1960\u2019s, this packaging was wildly successful. Late Friday evening prayers became a “night out,” musical instruments, normally forbidden on Jewish holy days [bBetsa 30a],\u00a0were now permitted in the synagogue on Shabbat. If people will not pay to pray, they will pay in order to be entertained.\u00a0 The late Rabbi Moshe Feinstein once wrote “America is the land of the good time,” and was he ever right!\u00a0 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.”<\/li>\n
  3. The Jewish battles of the 21st<\/sup>Century 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.\u00a0 That reality is a distant memory.\u00a0 At a wedding\u00a0I 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\u00a0alma mater<\/em>\u00a0on the occasion of its reaching its 100th<\/sup>\u00a0\u201dbirthday?” I answered,\u00a0\u201dUntil 120.”\u00a0 That snarky remark is sadly also prophetic.\u00a0 Conservative synagogues are aging, its millennials are not affiliating with the Movement, and dues collectables are declining.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0It is not convincing Reform affiliates that its brand of \u201cTradition\u201d 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.”\u00a0 That community tries to take Halakhah seriously, if not in an Orthodox fashion.\u00a0 The “Conservative” Jewish “franchise” has failed. It has failed to convince its own children. Today, being “Conservative” means to affiliate formally but not seriously.<\/li>\n
  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”\u00a0 and professional skill sets are not valued by the dues paying, institution building, charismatic seeking marketplace.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Once\u00a0Conservative Judaism accepts\u00a0intermarriages, 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.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The Conservative Movement never<\/em> 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.\u00a0 Here is how the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly\u2019s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards\u00a0 will justify allowing its\u00a0 rabbis to officiate\u00a0 at interfaith weddings.<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. The Committee\u2019s name reveals that the CJLS will first consults with the Law. This Law \u201chas a voice but not a veto.\u201d If the Law cannot or will not be observed, the CJLS will apodictically declare that it is innovating a Jewish standard.\u00a0\u00a0 While legal or orders are made of norms, or \u201cto do\u201d or \u201cnot to do\u201d statements,\u00a0 Conservative Judaism regards these norms as suggestive guides, or folkways and not as legal obligations or ultimate concerns.<\/li>\n
    2. The Biblical passage which prohibits intermarriage is Deuteronomy 7:1-3, where the Israelite is commanded \u201cdo not marry them.\u201d However, the \u201cthem\u201d refers to the seven ethnic groups populating Canaan, and not to any other ethnic group\u2014or person.\u00a0 Intermarrying with contemporary Gentiles was not forbidden, or imagined, by this Deuteronomic passage.<\/li>\n
    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.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

       <\/p>\n

      There are real difficulties with this rhetorical gambit.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

        \n
      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.<\/li>\n
      2. Oral Torah law and Biblical Law are two very distinct institutions. De-oraita<\/em> Law are laws carrying Toraitic valence based upon Written Torah authorization [Deut. 17:11] and are called \u201cTorah\u201d even though these laws are neither technically nor historically \u201cBiblical.\u201d See also Isaiah 2:3 for evidence of a \u201cTorah\u201d that is post-Mosaic that nevertheless carries the valence of \u201cthe word of the Lord.\u201d<\/li>\n
      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.<\/li>\n
      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.\u00a0\u00a0 The non-Orthodox affiliating Jewry is declining institutionally, demographically, and socially.\u00a0 With no convincing message, without an identifiable community of the committed, and with a contracting demand for its product, Conservative Judaism\u2019s future is bleak.\u00a0 It is hardly a Movement because it is going nowhere.\u00a0 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.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

         <\/p>\n

        Orthodoxy gets bad press when it attacks other Movements. Since the Rabbinical Assembly has little to sell, its own buyers aren’t buying the \u201cproduct\u201d now being sold. When a religious \u201cmovement\u201d stands for nothing, it will be hard for it to find a platform on which to stand. \u00a0 The nicer institutional Orthodoxy appears, the more people it will reach.\u00a0 The prophet’s advice,\u00a0\u201cbeware and be quiet,\u201d is our most eloquent response to the non-Orthodox deviations.\u00a0 Orthodoxy is bound by Jewish laws, not to parochialism for its own sake. The Conservative Movement\u2019s acceptance of intermarriage should not come as a surprise.\u00a0 It will be a desperate attempt to avoid its descent to oblivion.\u00a0 Orthodoxy\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n\n

        <\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

        Orthodoxy\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":1449,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[85,82,101,78,105],"tags":[],"coauthors":[86],"class_list":["post-1448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-denominations","category-halakhah","category-life-cycle","category-modern-judaism","category-relationships"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1448"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1458,"href":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1448\/revisions\/1458"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1448"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utj.org\/viewpoints\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}