A Valediction: Forbidding Rap Music

Schorsch's speech was strange, to be sure. Rap is not a devil whispering in the ear of Conservative Jews. It is, rather, a genre of popular music. (Perhaps Schorsch missed the essay in the back of Etz Hayim, written by R. Tupac Shakur, which makes this important distinction. Tupac is nothing if not inert.) Students writing random words in the snow is symptomatic of nothing but rabbinical students looking to have a little fun. Has the chancellor really forgotten his own yeshivah days?

But there is something very important that the rabbi said:

The history of Jewish spirituality is the never–ending effort to keep halakhah and meta–halakhah in creative tandem. Halakhah is the deed; meta–halakhah, the disposition. Halakhah is fixed, meta–halakhah fluid. Halakhah is legal, public and objective, whereas meta–halakhah is theological, private, and subjective. The intent of meta–halakhah is to inform, enrich and spiritualize our fulfillment of the mitzvot. Or to revert to my image of the aquifer, what is concealed is no less vital than what is visible.

The malaise of Conservative Judaism today . . . is that its adherence to halakhah is devoid of a spiritualizing meta–halakhah.

Perhaps he was too high-falutin in his language and snobby in his approach, but the problem is there and cannot be denied. There are many people working on pushing the cart of Conservative Judaism out of the theological-spiritual mud its stuck in, but the effort must be made. Criticising Schorsch for his criticism won't help us.

yoIn Envisioning the Future of American Jewry, Leaders Emphasize the Past

Leaders of the four major rabbinical seminaries made a rare joint appearance on October 13th at Yale University, on a panel titled “Envisioning the Future of American Judaism.” Though the speakers agreed on the most pressing problems facing the American Jewish community, they did not propose any new approaches – rather, each presented his own movement’s philosophy as framed by the history of the American Jewish community. The event, sponsored by the Program in Judaic Studies and the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale, was held in connection with the 350th anniversary of the arrival of Jews in North America.

Rabbi David Ellenson, president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, pointed out that the American Jewish community found success even in its earliest years (ballooning from three thousand Jews in 1790 to almost a quarter million at the end of the 19th century), despite the fact that the first ordained rabbi came to America only in 1840. Thus the layperson plays an outsize role in American Jewish life, bringing to the table her instinctive “doubts about the inherent validity of halachah” and the authority of the rabbi. Furthermore, today’s American Jewish community is thoroughly acculturated, sharing, for example, the mobility of the average American family, which upends traditional ethnic-religious allegiances based on kinship. While the core of the community is healthy, enjoying “a renaissance of the Jewish tradition which has been unprecedented,” the periphery “barely identifies Jewishly.” The role of HUC, concluded Ellenson, is to train rabbis who can both satisfy the core and attract the marginal.

Rabbi Yosef Blau, the Director of Religious Guidance at Yeshiva University and a leader in various modern Orthodox institutions, began with the observation that “a hundred years ago no one would have predicted that Orthodox Jewry would participate” in such a panel. After a summary of Orthodox American Jewish history (crediting Orthodoxy’s post-war resurgence to the day school movement), Blau cataloged the problems of Orthodox Judaism in America, and of modern Orthodoxy in particular: the very diversity of the movement; the attraction of newly observant Jews to ultra-Orthodoxy; the status of women; and the need to strike a “proper balance between tradition and modernity.”

Dr. Ismar Schorsch of the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary attempted to “extract the meaning” of the arrival of Jews in America. His main, somewhat strident emphasis was that the Jews “came [to America] as a group,” not merely as a collection of individuals, and that Jewish identity, flowing from the “wellspring of the Torah,” is “in deep conflict with the notion of autonomy and the sovereign self” which holds that “nothing is sacred.” Said Schorsch, “Unaffiliated Jews are not social capital for the Jewish community.” Rather, the goal should be to create more “serious Jews” – otherwise, the organized Jewish community is “at risk.”

Schorsch did not mention the Conservative movement per se in his remarks, the only one of the speakers not to put his own institution front and center. He mentioned only briefly, in response to a later question from the audience, that the movement is often passed over by its own members, who must first tend to the needs of the wider Jewish community.

Perhaps the most programmatic comments were made by Rabbi Dan Ehrenkrantz, president of the youngest rabbinical seminary represented, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (founded in 1968). “We are a small movement with a large agenda,” said Ehrenkrantz; since “Judaism is a product of the Jewish people,” future Jewish leaders must appreciate “the entirety of Jewish experience,” being “non-judgmental, yet exercising good judgment.” “We want people who can care for the entire Jewish community,” he said, “committed to Jewish history and the Jewish people without being triumphal or bigoted.” Ehrenkrantz implied that the Reconstructionist movement, whose ordained rabbis serve various functions in communities across the ideological spectrum, is well-placed to determine the direction of Jewish communal leadership: with “profound tolerance and respect for diversity, innovation, and the capability to develop communities” which give “meaning to the lives of Jews.”

Additional remarks were made by John Butler, a Yale expert in the history of American religions. “Religion in America has a doubtful future,” he began, quoting the consensus of experts in the late 19th century. Ever since the beginning of the modern era, religious leaders in America have worried that religion can’t compete with the attractions of high technology, urbanism, youth culture, and everything else beckoning from outside the walls of the church (or synagogue). According to Butler, they needn’t have worried, and they needn’t worry today. American religion (and Judaism as an exemplar of this tendency) remakes itself in just those ways necessary to succeed in time of transformation: from immigration to urbanization, and from city to suburb. The importance of religion in this year’s presidential election, and its near-absence from, say, French political campaigning, point to religion’s solid place in American public life, and should help to place in context dire rabbinical warnings of Jewish communal collapse.

Also worthy of note is what was not represented on this panel. In the introductory remarks, it was pointed out that a similar Jewish communal meeting of the minds occurred some forty years ago, at a Yale-Harvard-Princeton Hillel colloquium. At that event, however, there was a representative of “humanist Judaism.” The fact that no such representative, or indeed, any voice from outside the Jewish religious establishment, was present at this year’s panel might bespeak either a shrinking of American Jewish intellectual diversity, or (more probably) reveal the roots of the event itself, which was originally planned to inform Yale students interested in ordination about the different programs available. In any case, established, institutional voices are unlikely to propose bold suggestions for solving the Jewish community’s future problems.

Postscript: The new issue of the YU Commentator, Yeshiva University's student newspaper, features the text of Rabbi Blau's prepared remarks, as well as a write-up of the panel itself by Menachem Butler.

Conservosexuality

It seems Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, the chancellor of JTS, has issued his psak:

"The principal reason for not ordaining [homosexuals] and not performing commitment ceremonies is that there is simply no halachic justification for it," Schorsch said.

Whether he was asked for his judgment seems immaterial to Schorsch himself. (Does this mean that even the Conservative movement now approves of daat Torah, i.e. rabbinic infallibility?)

I have the sinking feeling that I will have to write something on this issue in the coming weeks. Just for purposes of preview, I'd like to lay out the points that any pro-homosexuality pseudo-teshuvah would have to detail. ("Pseudo-teshuvah," because I'm not a rabbi.) Of course, one would first and foremost, from a Conservative halachic perspective, have to deal with the drown-'em-in-erudition-but-skimp-on-the-argumentation teshuvah of Rabbi Joel Roth, which stretches over a numbingly wide expanse in the latest collection of responsa from the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards. To devote even a preview blog to a point-by-point refutation of Rabbi Roth's teshuvah, however, would take hours. So I'll save that for the main event.

In any case, here are the bare outlines of what I would try to say.

1. Any statement in the Torah cannot be understood without interpretation. Any so-called "simple reading" of the Torahs prohibition is not relevant to a halachic argument. [Though I think it's relevant to mention Jacob Milgrom's argument in his Anchor Bible commentary on Leviticus, according to which homosexuality, only between men, and only in the Land of Israel, is prohibited because it does not lead to conventionally borne offspring. He recommends that gay couples adopt children.]

2. However, the chain of Biblical interpretation is not broken. Halachic authority is not based on unquestioning acceptance of Talmudic conclusions, but rather on understanding of their approach and exercising our own intellect and fear of God within that system.

3. In an important Talmudic discussion, the word תועבה (toevah) is interpreted as a term of moral censure: תועה בה (to'eh bah), "straying in it." What this means is the material of that lengthy discussion, which I won't go into here. Suffice it to say, however, that despite Rabbi David Weiss Halivni's claims to the contrary, the Rabbis did approach ajudication in explicitly moral terms on more than one occasion, this being one of them.

4. If Chazal took into account their criteria of moral censure in understanding the meaning of the term toevah, it would be inappropriate for us not to take into account our moral criteria. However, moral arguments for the immorality of homosexuality are unconvincing.

5. How to treat the Torah verses halachically is, obviously, a complicated matter, but it would not be out of place to mention that the rabbis often halachically "uprooted" sections from the Torah, or reinterpreted them into something close to legal impossibilities. This would seem to be viable in this case as well.