Visions for a Future
Gordon Tucker

My years as a rabbinical student at Jewish Theological Seminary (1971-1975) coincided, as they did for so many of my contemporaries, with a "critical awakening," by which I mean a first serious encounter with what it means to understand religion historically. For those of us (nearly all of us) who had grown up with the Hertz Torah commentary, which had relentlessly polemicized against any source-critical approach to the text of the Torah, this encounter brought with it the all-too-natural thrill of tasting the forbidden fruit. In fact, we were acculturated in those days – if not exactly by design, then certainly as the effect of well-worn institutional habits – to revel in our ability to make committed, traditional halakhic observance (in those days, the Seminary had only a separate-seating synagogue) coexist with the cutting-edge and often iconoclastic ways of reading sacred texts that we drank up from our teachers. It was heady and supremely energizing. We never quite put it this way, but in effect we were smugly asserting superiority over Orthodoxy and Reform. Here was the brash unspoken logic: we were more authentic than Reform because we were committed to traditional Jewish behavioral norms, and we were more authentic than Orthodoxy because we did not accept, fetish-like, beliefs about the text and about revelation that could not stand up to honest historical inquiry. That was our own quirky version of the phenomenon of Conservative Judaism defining itself by what it was not. It served the self-righteous needs of young, energetic students eager to explore new intellectual frontiers (and it always feels good to feel superior). But it was quirky nonetheless, and it is hardly an enduring formula for how to define an approach to Jewish study, observance, and action in the world.

Since healthy religious movements cannot be built on the sorts of things that motivate "wiseguy" students, it is no surprise that many are currently feeling an ebb in Conservative Judaism's "biorhythm." Thus, the common denominators uniting so many of the pieces offered here and on the Sh'ma website (www.shma.com): (1) our lamentable failure to put forward a positive vision of who we are; (2) the need to live out such a vision in practice; (3) the need for an aspirational mission for the future; and (4) the critical necessity of an argument for why all of this is crucial for the Jewish world and not just an eccentricity of rabbis and others in an inner circle of sorts.

The ideas that follow need urgently to become part of the agenda of the leaders of the Conservative Movement. These include Judith Hauptman's urging that the complementary relationship of halakhah and aggadah be taken seriously and made to have practical effect, Daniel Greyber's reminder that we are a religious movement that must make the presence of God and the service of God palpable, and Aaron Brusso's plea for an unapologetic argument for the nobility of belief in the ongoing human role in revelation – what I would call the "dignity of history," the stage on which God, after all, chose to create and place all of us.

Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote (in his introduction to the second volume of Torah min Hashamayim ): "Is it really appropriate to say 'all is well with me' when contempt outside the fold and indifference within take their toll, so that there is no peace? Just look, and you'll see how powerless we have become to prevent wholesale loss of faith." Powerless, that is, unless we articulate the power that our ideas have always had, far beyond the rarefied atmosphere of the academy. It is important that Conservative Judaism succeed, living as we do in a world in which religious fervor slides all too easily into fundamentalisms that deny history, that demote human responsibility in favor of divine intervention, and that promote linear visions of truth that ultimately dismiss and even demonize others. Heschel sensed this a half century ago, and the hour for exercising the leadership that will focus Conservative Judaism's powerful ideas and resources (both here and in Israel) is very much upon us.

Gordon Tucker is Senior Rabbi of Temple Israel Center in White Plains, NY, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Jewish Philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and a long-time member of the Rabbinical Assembly's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards. He recently published a translation of Abraham Joshua Heschel's three-volume Hebrew work Torah min Hashamayim , titled Heavenly Torah .