las vegas | Listening to Conservative rabbis talk about their movement is like witnessing an intervention.
They talk of “saving” Conservative Judaism — and sometimes they blame the parents when things go wrong.
“Reform rabbis speak positively about their movement and less positively about their synagogue, while Conservative rabbis speak positively about their synagogue and less positively about their movement,” said Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt of Congregation B’nai Tzedek in Potomac, Md.
Weinblatt was one of nearly 300 Conservative rabbis who came to Las Vegas this week for the annual convention of the Rabbinical Assembly, the movement’s rabbinic group. On the agenda, as usual, was the future of Conservative Judaism — what the movement is, where it’s headed and how rabbis can get that message out to the world.
“Whatever turmoil and angst [there is] at the top, we have a lot of great synagogues and terrific rabbis,” said Rabbi Daniel Pressman of Congregation Beth David in Saratoga. “The need for a vital center in American Judaism is so strong that we will find a way to restructure and reposition so people don’t treat us as the sick man of American Judaism.”
At this gathering, there was little of the grumbling by key Conservative synagogue leaders that reportedly prompted the development and release last month of a new strategic plan to restructure the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism.
Instead, there was energy, even a little bravado, at the conference, and criticism was tempered by concern for the Conservative movement’s future.
“We need a new financial model,” said Steven Wernick, executive vice president and CEO of USCJ and the man in charge of overseeing the restructuring of the congregational umbrella group. “Less edifice and more personnel. Multiple minyanim in the same building — the Hillel model.”
What will the new strategic plan, a year and a half in the making, mean to members of Conservative congregations? Not much, said Wernick — at least, not for a while. “It’s navigational. The implementation plan — how do we get there — is what we’re working on now.”
The Conservative movement’s three main institutions — the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Rabbinical Assembly and the USCJ — are modeled on the separation of powers within the U.S. government rather than on anyone’s notion of the most effective way to deliver religious services and build Jewish community.
“The Conservative movement is not these institutions,” said Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly. “These institutions are more than 100 years old and in urgent need of rethinking.”
The convention featured formal discussions among USCJ leadership and key figures among a group of about 50 rabbis who have been pushing for completely overhauling the organization. They call themselves Hayom: Coalition for the Transformation of Conservative Judaism. Those discussions took place behind closed doors, but their message is no secret, nor is the rabbis’ dissatisfaction with the new strategic plan.
“The clock has started moving faster, and it’s up to the chancellor and the R.A. to determine the fate of the North American Conservative movement,” said Rabbi Menachem Creditor of Congregation Netivot Shalom in Berkeley, a leader of Hayom.
Creditor helped craft the strategic plan, which, he says, “left some of the most dissatisfied communities dissatisfied,” despite his and his colleagues’ best efforts.
Some of the Hayom congregations, including Netivot Shalom, have refused to pay the full dues assessed them by the USCJ. Those dues can run upward of $80,000 a year for the largest shuls. It doesn’t pay, said one rabbi who preferred to remain anonymous, “because we don’t get anything for that money.”
“I’m not sure the organizational structure matters to people in my pews,” said Rabbi Howard Lifshitz of Congregation Beth Judea in Long Grove, Ill. “The institutions of the Conservative movement are unknown to them. Most people who come into my synagogue want to know how their participation will touch them, what it will add to their lives.”
Along those lines, there’s always an on-going discussion among Conservatives about how it defines itself: neither Orthodox nor Reform, but what?
“Part of the problem of being in the middle is that it’s almost impossible to have a razor-sharp definition of who we are,” Pressman said. “Our ideas have been very successful.”
In one session at the conference, Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of Manhattan locked horns with Rabbi David Wolpe of Los Angeles over solutions to the movement’s malaise.
Kalmanofsky championed a Judaism of purpose and complexity, one that moves beyond the 20th-century emphasis on helping Jews fit into American society and concentrates instead on helping them “find moral and spiritual purpose” — a “passionate authenticity” that will “seed, nurture and harvest opportunities for people to find depth.”
Wolpe argued, on the other hand, for a coherent ideology that “could be put on a bumper sticker,” to let Jews know what the movement stands for.
“Intellectual complexity is not the way to bring people into your synagogue,” he said. “You have to pray to something expressible. You can’t beseech a nuance.”
During a panel on what Conservative Judaism will look like in 20 years, Rabbi Edward Feinstein of Valley Beth Shalom in Encino said, “The Conservative movement belongs to us, and we’ll either fix it or bury it. We’re the rabbis. We need to get together, stop the bulls—t, and get it done, or we’ll become a shrinking, dwindling, heteronomous movement with very little to say.”
