Download What do Conservative Jews believe

What do Conservative Jews believe?
[ Based on "Conservative Judaism: From Our Ancestors to Our Descendents"]
Conservative Jews believe that God revealed his will to Moses and the Prophets. However,
this revelation was recorded by people, and passed down through the centuries until it was
redacted in a final form during the time of Ezra. Thus Conservative Jews are comfortable
with the findings of archeological and linguistic research, and critical textual study, which
reveals that the text of the Torah consists of several documents coming from different times
and places. In fact, Conservative Jews make use of literary and historical analysis to
understand how these texts developed, and to help them understand how they may applied in
our own day. Rabbi David Novak explains why accepting modern biblical scholarship poses
no threat to classical Judaism:
"Higher" biblical criticism is concerned with the dating and composition of the biblical text.
Even if one accepts the assumption common to all biblical critics - namely that the
Pentateuch in particular is made up of various documents (J, E, P, D, etc.) which were written
at different times by different authors, one can still view it as a unity because of the way that
it was accepted in subsequent Jewish history. Once the official text as agreed upon in the time
of Ezra, the Jewish people had an indisputable point of reference for both law and theology.
Thus, the theory which accepts both a possibly diverse origin along with a definite
subsequent unity enables one to be a traditionalist without being a fundamentalist.
[David Novak "A Response to 'Towards an Aggadic Judaism' " _Conservative Judaism_
Vol.30(1) Fall 1975 pp.58-59]
Within the Conservative movement there are varied schools of thought with regards to the
process of Revelation. Rabbi Elliot Dorff (D1) has summarized these schools of thought in
the following categories:
Verbal propositional content - Conservative I
God made His Will known through a verbal Revelation at Sinai, and perhaps at other times.
The Revelation to Moses was by far the clearest and most public, and is the most authentic
and binding recording of God's will. The Revelation at Sinai, and those that followed,
however, were written down by human beings as they best understood it; Hence there are
diverse sources of biblical literature, each of which is influenced by the author's own
understanding. This position bridges Orthodox and Conservative theology, and in fact is
accepted by a few Modern Orthodox Jews.
Rabbi Harlan Wechsler writes "Revelation is more than a divine presence; it yields divine
commandments, all of which are binding....[yet] God's word is subject to human hearing,
hearing that is frustrated by the inherent limits of language." David Novak writes "not only
do people experience a Presence when God makes himself manifest, they also hear the word.
The denotion of the word is initially intelligible, and thus the word can become a matter of
discourse in the community."
Non-verbal propositional content - Conservative II
Human beings were divinely inspired by God with a specific message, but not in a verbal-like
fashion. Abarham Joshua Heschel explains: "As a report about Revelation, the Bible itself is
a midrash. To convey what the prophets experienced, the Bible could either use terms of
descriptions or terms of indication. Anu description of the act of revelation in empirical
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categories would have produced a caricature. That is why all the Bible does is to state _that_
revelation happened; _How_ it happened is something they could only convey in words that
are evocative and suggestive."
Jewish law is thus a combination of divine revelation and human articulation. It seems to this
editor that there are two sub-categories within this:
(A) Specific propositional content
Abraham Joshua Heschel notes that a revelation from God differs from any other type of
inspiration in that the receiver of a revelation experiences not only a specific message, but is
aware that it is God who is giving that message. Moreover, not only does the prophet witness
God, but the prophet feels that he himself is being experienced by God. In other words
Revelation is similar to what you experience when you meet someone: You perceive the
other person and their message, and you also know that you are being seen and heard as well.
Judaism is not the religion of an unknown God. It is built upon a rock of certainty that God
has made His will known to His people. To us, the will of God is neither a metaphor nor a
symbol nor a euphemism, but more powerful and real than our existence. (H1,89)
...the function of mitzvot is not to express ourselves but to express the will of God. The most
important fact is that God speaks...the mitzvot are words of God which we try to understand,
to articulate. (H1,92). Let us never forget: If God is only a symbol, He is a fiction. But if God
is real, then He is able to express His will to us unambiguously.(H1,99)
..."God spoke" is not a symbol. A symbol does not raise a world out of nothing. Nor does a
symbol call a Bible into being. The speech of God is not less but more than literally real (D1,
122)
It was not essential that His will be transmitted as sound; it was essential that it be made
known to us. That sound or sight is to the transcendent event what a metaphor is to an
abstract principle. (D1.,124) The prophets bear witness to an event. The event is divine, but
the formulation is done by the individual prophet. According to this conception, the idea is
revealed; the expression is coined by the prophet. (D1,125)
(B) General propositional content
Ben Zion Bokser writes:
"Man receives a divine communication when the divine spirit rests on him, but man must
give form to that communication; He must express it in words, in images and in symbols
which will make his message intelligible to other men. Out of this need to give form to the
truth that is revealed to him, the prophet places the stamp of his own individuality upon that
truth."
Robert Gordis writes that:
"God's creative power enters man's spirit in countless areas, such as science, art, music,
literature....But when God reveals a glimpse of His truth on man's total relationship to the
universe, when God grants insight on man's nature and duty, the human being that God has
chosen as His spokesman has experienced Revelation".
Non-propositional content; Communal guidance - Conservative III
Conservative III differs from II by teaching that though God inspired people with his
Presence by coming into contact with them, God did not reveal a specific message. Instead,
Revelation is simply the disclosure of God Himself. The Torah is seen as the human response
that records how we responded to God when we came into contact with the Eternal.
In this school of thought, the idea that God transcends human understanding is held as the
most important factor. Neil Gillman writes "I insist that God transcends human understanding
and language. That is what makes God, God. To believe that human beings can understand
God is idolatry, the cardinal Jewish sin. The alternative to idolatry ...is to claim that all
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characterizations of God are metaphors crafted by human beings....We discover God and
create the metaphors/myths which reflect our varied experience."
Nevertheless, people who follow this line of thought still believe that the Will of God
influences Jewish law. As Elliot Dorff writes in "Knowing God: Jewish Journeys to the
Unknowable" each time a Jew studies the Torah or its rabbinic commentaries, God is
revealed anew. In fact, the Talmud declares rabbinic interpretation superior to biblical
prophecy: "Rabbi Abdimi of Haifa said: Since the day when the Temple was destroyed, the
prophetic gift was taken away from the prophets and given to the Sages. Is a Sage not also a
prophet?" The question is rhetorical, the answer clearly is "yes". The Talmud immediately
goes on to say:
"What Rabbi Abdimi meant to say was this: although it has been taken from the Prophets,
Prophecy has not been taken from the Sages. Amemar said: A Sage is even superior to a
Prophet, as it says "And a Prophehas the heart of Wisdom" (Psalms 90:21) Who is usually
compared with whom? Is not the smaller compared with the greater?" (Talmud Bavli, Bava
Batra 12A)
For people in this school of thought, Jewish law has authority both because it represents the
attempt to spell out God's will, and because Jews are members of a covenanted community,
and have obligations to God and to the Jewish community.
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