Menachem Mendel

Some Conservative Jews are probably very offended by Rav Ovadiah Yosef’s latest comments.

Those who study in religious schools affiliated with Conservative Judaism do not practice Judaism, Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef has declared in a recent [pesak halakhah].

Such students “do not follow Jewish religious law”, Yosef wrote, adding that most of them “do not believe in a God-given Torah.”

The Shas spirtual leader concluded that Conservative schools could not as such ordain rabbis, adding further that the “Torah must not be instructed” by students of that stream of Judaism.

The Shas website isn’t very up to date, so I couldn’t read the original source, but here is the radio report that seems to be the source for the Haaretz article. The question seems to come down to how does one balance legitimizing a movement that you may see as heretical and the possibility that a teacher may influence students. I would have hoped that Rav Ovadiah would see the possibility of influencing someone as outweighing possible questions about legitimacy, but I can live with his decision. I also think that he might be surprised by the level of knowledge and halakhic observance among many Conservative rabbis, but so be it.

One statement of his that I think is correct, is that most Conservative rabbis and rabbinical students “do not believe in a God-given Torah.” Leaving aside the interesting use of “most,” it is true that most Conservative rabbis do not understand God and revelation in the way that Rav Ovadiah does and he is legitimately claiming that these opinions are outside of the Orthodox discourse of Judaism. I disagree with him, but much of what Conservative rabbis and Jews believe is often fairly untraditional in the orthodox sense of the term.

Adam Kirsch, in a review of Jewish Theology in Our Time: A New Generation Explores the Foundations and Future of Jewish Belief, a recently published book edited by Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, wrote (emphasis added)

In Bnei Berak—and, for that matter, in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Crown Heights—are thousands upon thousands of Jews who not only know with utter certainty just what Judaism is and what God wants from them, but are willing to defy the powers of the earth to do it. Meanwhile, the contributors to this book—edited by the rabbi of Manhattan’s Park Avenue Synagogue, Elliot Cosgrove—can barely even use words like God and Judaism without a blizzard of explanations and qualifications.

Kirsch continued, in what I think is one of the most perceptive articles about non-orthodox (and some orthodox) theology in some time, and asked,

But say that, like these writers and the majority of human beings, you do have an intuition of divinity in the world. This may be the basis for religion, or perhaps spirituality. But is it a basis for Judaism? To put it more sharply: Do the traditional texts and practices of Judaism have any claim on a Jew, or is she just as free to define her beliefs by drawing on Christian or Buddhist sources, or for that matter secular ones (art, music, literature)?

He concluded and wrote,

In his afterword, Cosgrove expresses a certain degree of surprise at the book he has produced. He notes that certain subjects that might be expected to feature in contemporary Jewish theology—“the Enlightenment, Shoah, or establishment of the State of Israel”—go practically unmentioned here. But that is because these writers do not see it as part of their task even to touch on subjects like providence and theodicy. The existence of evil can present a theological problem only if you believe that God has the power to restrain or permit evil, and the God we see in these pages has no such power. It follows that this God would be extremely hard to pray to in times of need. A useful sequel to Jewish Theology in Our Time, in fact, would be accounts from these rabbis of how their theology works in a pastoral setting. When comforting a mourner, as when organizing a protest, it is probably much easier to be able to say, “God will rule for all eternity”—which doesn’t, of course, make it true.

I doubt that the God and Rav Ovadiah and the God of these authors, whose opinions I identify with more-guilty as charged, has much in common, although I am often known to be wrong.

Posted on July 4th, 2010 under Israel, Jewish Thought, Rabbinic Authority • RSS 2.0 feed • Both comments and pings are currently closed