THE SACRED CLUSTER:

The Core Values of Conservative Judaism

Ismar Schorsch



If dogmas or doctrines are the propositional language of a theological
system, core values are the felt commitments of lived religion, the
refraction of what people practice and profess. To identify them calls
for keen observation as well as theoretical analysis.

Conservative Judaism is best understood as a sacred cluster of core
values. No single propositional statement comes close to identifying
its center of gravity. Nor does Conservative Judaism occupy the center
of the contemporary religious spectrum because it is an arbitrary and
facile composite of what may be found on the left or the right. On the
contrary, its location flows from an organic and coherent world view
best captured in terms of core values of relatively equal worth.

There are seven such core values, to my mind, that imprint
Conservative Judaism with a principled receptivity to modernity
balanced by a deep reverence for tradition. Whereas other movements in
modern Judaism rest on a single tenet, such as the autonomy of the
individual or the inclusiveness of God's revelation at Sinai (Torah
mi-Sinai), Conservative Judaism manifests a kaleidoscopic cluster of
discrete and unprioritized core values. Conceptually they fall into
two sets - three national and three religious - which are grounded and
joined to each other by the overarching presence of God, who
represents the seventh and ultimate core value. The dual nature of
Judaism as polity and piety, a world religion that never transcended
its national origins, is unified by God. In sum, a total of seven core
values corresponding to the most basic number in Judaism's
construction of reality. The Centrality of Modern Israel
Hebrew: The Irreplaceable Language of Jewish Expression
Devotion to the Ideal of Klal Yisrael
The Defining Role of Torah in the Reshaping of Judaism
The Study of Torah
The Governance of Jewish Life by Halakha
Belief in God

THE CENTRALITY OF MODERN ISRAEL



The centrality of modern Israel heads our list of core values. For
Conservative Jews, as for their ancestors, Israel is not only the
birthplace of the Jewish people, but also its final destiny. Sacred
texts

, historical experience and litu rgical memory have conspired to
make it for them, in the words of Ezekiel, "the most desirable of
all lands (20:6)."

Its welfare is never out of mind. Conservative Jews are the backbone
of Federation leadership in North America and the majo r source of its
annual campaign. They visit Israel, send their children over a summer
or for a year and support financially every one of its worthy
institutions.1 Israeli accomplishments on the battlefield and in the
laboratory, in literature and politics, fill them with pride. Their
life is a dialectic between homeland and exile. No matter how
prosperous or assimilated, they betray an existential angst about
anti-Semitism that denies them a complete sense of at-homeness
anywhere in the diaspora.

And their behavior reflects the dominant thrust of Conservative
Judaism not to denationalize Judaism. Even in the era of emancipation,
Zion remained the goal, as it was for the Torah, an arena in which to
translate monotheism into social justice. A wo rld governed by
realpolitik needed a polity of a different order. The liturgy of the
Conservative synagogue preserved the full text of the daily amida (the
silent devotion) with its frequent pleas for the restoration of Zion.
Heinrich Graetz, who taught at the movement's rabbinical seminary in
Breslau and autho red the most nationalistic history of the Jews ever
written, inspired Moses Hess to pen one of the earliest Zionist tracts
in 1862 and would not write of the biblical period until he had
personally visited Palestine in early 1872. During the last two
decades, well over 100 Conservative rabbis have made aliyah, oft en at
the cost of professional satisfaction, attesting not only to movement
ideology, but personal courage.

This is not to say that Conservative Judaism divests the diaspora of
all spiritual value or demands of all Jews to settle in Israel.
Ironically, the state of Judaism is far healthier outside the Jewish
state, where Judaism is indispensable for a resil ient Jewish
identity. Most Israelis have sadly been severed from any meaningful
contact with Judaism by the absence of religious alternatives and by
the erosion of sacred Jewish content in the secular school system
where 75% of Israel's Jewish children are educated. And yet, the
miracle and mystery of Israel's re storation after two millennia out
of the ashes of the Holocaust continues to overwhelm Conservative Jews
with radical amazement and deep joy.

HEBREW: THE IRREPLACEABLE LANGUAGE OF JEWISH EXPRESSION



Hebrew as the irreplaceable language of Jewish expression is the
second core value of Conservative Judaism. Its existence is
coterminous with that of the Jewish people and the many layers of the
language mirror the cultures in which Jews perpetuated J udaism. It
was never merely a vehicle of communication, but part of the fabric
and texture of Judaism. Words vibrate with religious meaning, moral
values and literary associations. Torah and Hebrew are inseparable and
Jewish education was always predic ated on mastering Hebrew. Hebrew
literacy is the key to Judaism, to joining the unending dialectic
between sacred texts, between Jews of different ages, between God and
Israel. To know Judaism only in translation is, to quote Bialik, akin
to kissing the bride through the veil.

These are some of the sentiments which prompted Zacharias Frankel, the
founder of Conservative Judaism in central Europe, to break with
Reform over the issue of Hebrew at the Frankfurt Rabbinical Conference
in 1845. Despite the leniency of Jewish law, he was not prepared to
endorse a resolution which would acknowledge that synagogue services
could theoretically dispense with Hebrew. Given the rapid shrinkage of
Judaism with the advent of emancipation, the fostering of Hebrew for
Frankel became a symbol of historical continuity and national unity.
Mu ch of his scholarly oeuvre was intentionally written in Hebrew. And
the language has remained at the heart of the Conservative agenda ever
since.

Hebrew became the language of instruction of the Seminary's Teachers
Institute not too long after its opening in 1909, as well as the
language of daily conversation in the Ramah summer camps which it
launched in the late 1940s. The Conservative synagogue never expunged
Hebrew from the liturgy, and its supplementary Hebrew school, despite
the constraints of a very pared-down curriculum, never gave up the
struggle to teach a modicum of Hebrew literacy to the young. If
anything, the Solomon Schechter day schools of the movement, an
achievement of the past two decades, excel in the teaching of Hebrew
language.

The revival of Hebrew in the last century-and-a-half, that is Hebrew
Reborn as Sholom Spiegel put it in the title of his celebratory book
of 1930, is as singular a feat as the creation of the Jewish state.
Hebrew has been wholly transformed from an un wieldy classical medium
of liturgy and learning into a modern Western language fit for the
sciences and sensibilities of secular society. Diaspora Jews can
little afford to remain deaf to the sounds of Hebrew as they can
ignore the fate of the Jewish state.

In a Jewish world of sundry and proliferating divisions, Hebrew must
emerge as the common and unifying language of the Jewish people, and
nothing would advance that vision more effectively than to redefine
Zionism today solely in terms of the ability t o speak Hebrew. To
restructure the World Zionist Organization by earmarking all of its
budget to the intensive teaching of Hebrew to diaspora Jews would
create many more Zionists (that is, Jews who appreciate the centrality
of Israel) than all the atavis tic politics of the current Zionist
establishment. The natural bonds of language and culture bind more
firmly than those of abstruse ideological constructs.

I offer as example the young Mordecai Kaplan, then dean of the
Teachers Institute, struggling to perfect his command of Hebrew to the
point where he could preside over its faculty meetings and public
events in Hebrew. In the 1920s he made the followin g poignant entry
in his diary:

"Here is another failure I have to register against myself. Due to
the lack of energy necessary to train myself to speak and write
Hebrew with ease, I am afraid to venture on those occasions to give
an address i n Hebrew."2

Of such failures, the fabric of Jewish unity is sewn!

DEVOTION TO THE IDEAL OF KLAL YISRAEL



The third core value is an undiminished devotion to the ideal of klal
yisrael, the unfractured totality of Jewish existence and the ultimate
significance of every single Jew. In the consciousness of Conservative
Jews, there yet resonates the affirmati on of haverim kol yisrael (all
Israel is still joined in fellowship) - despite all the dispersion,
dichotomies and politicization that history has visited upon us, Jews
remain united in a tenacious pilgrimage of universal import.3 It is
that residue of Jewish solidarity that makes Conservative Jews the
least sectarian or parochial members of the community, that renders
them the ideal donor of Federation ca mpaigns and brings them to
support unstintingly every worthy cause in Jewish life. Often communal
needs will prompt them to compromise the needs of the movement.

Such admirable commitment to the welfare of the whole does not spring
from any special measure of ethnicity, as is so often ascribed to
Conservative Jews. Rather, I would argue that it is nurtured by the
acute historical sense cultivated by their lead ership. In opposition
to exclusively rational, moral or halahkic criteria for change,
Conservative Judaism embraced a historical romanticism that rooted
tradition in the normative power of a heroic past. To be sure, history
infused an awareness of the richness and diversity of the Jewish
experience. But it a lso presumed to identify a normative Judaism and
invest it with the sanctity of antiquity. It is that mixture of
critical breadth and romantic reverence that imbued men like Frankel,
Graetz, Schechter, Kaplan and Louis Finkelstein with the love of klal
yisrael. And, fortunately, they all commanded the litera ry gifts to
disseminate and popularize their views.

THE DEFINING ROLE OF TORAH IN THE RESHAPING OF JUDAISM



The fourth core value is the defining role of Torah in the reshaping
of Judaism after the loss of political sovereignty in 63 B.C.E. and
the Second Temple in 70 C.E. to the Romans. In their stead, the Rabbis
fashioned the Torah into a portable homelan d, the synagogue into a
national theater for religious drama and study into a form of worship.
Conservative Judaism never repudiated any of these remarkable
transformations. Chanting the Torah each Shabbat is still the
centerpiece of the Conservative se rvice, even if all too often it is
lamentably done according to the triennial cycle and then without
liturgical aplomb. Though historically defensible, the cycle makes a
sham of Simhat Torah, even as it suggests the decline of Torah in our
lives.

More substantively, the cycle misses a precious chance to reinvigorate
Shabbat. As the rhythm of the Jewish week is to be set by Shabbat, so
should the content of individual home study be informed by the weekly
Torah portion. Conservative Jews increa singly evince a hunger for
access to holy texts. To restore the reading of the entire parasha
each Shabbat, to train a cadre of congregants, both young and old, to
become proficient Torah readers and to help congregants in studying
the parasha prior to S habbat would create a kahal kadosh, a holy
community, joined by a sacred calendar and text. Jews would then come
to the synagogue on Shabbat morning prepared and primed to listen to
the Torah reading, to recapture a touch of the numinous of the Sinai
exp erience which, at best, it is designed to reenact.

For Conservative Jews, the Torah is no less sacred, if less central,
than it was for their pre-modern ancestors. I use the word "sacred"
advisedly. The Torah is the foundation text of Judaism, the apex of an
inverted pyramid of infinite commentary, n ot because it is divine,
but because it is sacred, that is, adopted by the Jewish people as its
spiritual font. The term skirts the divisive and futile question of
origins, the fetid swamp of heresy. The sense of individual
obligation, of being commanded, does not derive from divine
authorship, but communal cons ent. The Written Torah, no less than the
Oral Torah, reverberates with the divine-human encounter, with "a
minimum of revelation and a maximum of interpretation."4 It is no
longer possible to separate the tinder from the spark. Wha t history
can attest is that the community of Israel has always huddled in the
warmth of the flame.

THE STUDY OF TORAH



Accordingly, the study of Torah, in both the narrow and extended
sense, is the fifth core value of Conservative Judaism. As a canon
without closure, the Hebrew Bible became the unfailing stimulus for
midrash, the medium of an I-Thou relationship with the text and with
God. Each generation and every community appropriated the Torah afresh
through their own interpretive activity, creating a vast exegetical
dialogue in which differences of opinion were valid and preserved. The
undogmatic preeminence of Torah spawned a textually-based culture that
prized individual creativity and legitimate conflict.

What Conservative Judaism brings to this ancient and unfinished
dialectic are the tools and perspectives of modern scholarship blended
with traditional learning and empathy. The full meaning of sacred
texts will always elude those who restrict the range of acceptable
questions, fear to read contextually and who engage in willful
ignorance. It is precisely the sacredness of these texts that requires
of serious students to employ every piece o f scholarly equipment to
unpack their contents. Their power is crippled by inflicting upon them
readings that no longer carry any intellectual cogency. Modern Jews
deserve the right to study Torah in consonance with their mental world
and not solely thr ough the eyes of their ancestors. Judaism does not
seek to limit our thinking, only our actions.

This is not to say that earlier generations got it all wrong. Nothing
could be further from the truth. To witness their deep engagement with
Torah and Talmud is to tap into inexhaustible wellsprings of mental
acuity and spiritual power. It is to di scover the multiple and
ingenious ways - critical, midrashic, kabbalistic and philosophical -
in which they explicated these texts. Like them, Conservative scholars
take their place in an unbroken chain of exegetes, but with their own
arsenal of questions, resources, and methodologies. No matter how
differently done, the study of Torah remains at the heart of the
Conservative spiritual enterprise.

Moreover, it is pursued with the conviction that critical scholarship
will yield new religious meaning for the inner life of contemporary
Jews. It is not the tools of the trade that make philology or history
or anthropology or feminist studies threate ning, but the spirit in
which they are applied. Rigorous yet engaged and empathetic research
often rises above the pedestrian to bristle with relevance. Witness
the tribute paid by Moshe Greenberg, professor of biblical studies at
the Hebrew University and a graduate of the Seminary, to Yehezkel
Kaufmann, who a generation earlier pioneered a Jewish approach to the
critical study of the Hebrew Bible.

Yehezkel Kaufmann embodied a passionate commitment to grand ideas,
combining the philosopher's power of analysis and generalization with
the attention to detail of the philological exegete. His lifework is a
demonstration that the study of ancient texts does not necessitate
losing contact with the vital currents of the spirit and the
intellect.5

THE GOVERNANCE OF JEWISH LIFE BY HALAKHA



The sixth core value is the governance of Jewish life by halakha,
which expresses the fundamental thrust of Judaism to concretize ethics
and theology into daily practice. The native language of Judaism has
always been the medium of deeds. Conservativ e Jews are rabbinic and
not biblical Jews. They avow the sanctity of the Oral Torah erected by
Rabbinic Judaism alongside the Written Torah as complementary and
vital to deepen, enrich and transform it. Even if in their individual
lives they may often f all short on observance, they generally do not
ask of their rabbinic leadership to dismantle wholesale the entire
halakhic system in order to translate personal behavior into public
policy. Imbued with devotion to klal yisrael and a pervasive respect
for tradition, they are more inclined to sacrifice personal autonomy
for a reasonable degree of consensus and uniformity in co mmunal life.


Collectively, the injunctions of Jewish law articulate Judaism's
deep-seated sense of covenant, a partnership with the divine to finish
the task of creation. Individually, the mitzvot accomplish different
ends. Some serve to harness and focus human e nergy by forging a
regimen made up of boundaries, standards and rituals. To indulge in
everything we are able to do, does not necessarily enhance human
happiness or well-being. Some mitzvot provide the definitions and
norms for the formation of communit y, while others still generate
respites of holiness in which the feeling of God's nearness pervades
and overwhelms.

The institution of Shabbat, perhaps the greatest legacy of the Jewish
religious imagination, realizes all three. The weekly rest it imposes
both humbles and elevates. By desisting from all productive work for
an entire day, Jews acknowledge God's sov ereignty over the world and
the status of human beings as mere tenants and stewards. But the
repose also conveys an echo of Eden, for Shabbat is the one fragment
left over from the lost perfection of creation. Shabbat seeds the
tortuous course of human history with moments of eternity, linking
beginning to end while softening the massive suffering in between.
Stopping the clock and diminishing the self allow others to reenter
our lives. We are transposed to another dimension of reality.

Shabbat is an exquisite work of religious art created out of whole
cloth by the meticulous performance of countless mitzvot. We join with
family, friends and community in a symphony of ritual-clothing,
candles, table-setting, prayer, food, song and st udy - to turn
Shabbat into the Jewish equivalent of a country home. To gain renewal,
we give up a measure of dominion. The hallowed tranquility that ensues
helps us reach beyond ourselves. Like the halakha as a whole, Shabbat
at its best invests the or dinary with eternity and life with ultimate
meaning. Submission to God sets us free.

Never has this heroic effort to generate pockets of holiness in our
personal lives been more important than today. Emancipation has thrust
Jews irreversibly into the mainstream of contemporary civilization,
with incalculable benefit to both. We are d etermined to live in two
worlds and have won the right to be different, individually and
collectively, without impairing our integration. The question is
whether our Judaism will survive intact? Our sensibilities as Jews
have been transformed and the di screpancies between the two worlds
beg for accommodation.

The challenge, however, has not induced Conservative Judaism to assert
blithely that the halakha is immutable. Its historical sense is simply
too keen. The halakhic system, historically considered, evinces a
constant pattern of responsiveness, change and variety. Conservative
Judaism did not read that record as carte blanche for a radical
revision or even rejection of the system, but rather as warrant for
valid adjustment where absolutely necessary. The result is a body of
Conservative law sensitive to human need, halakhic integrity and the
worldwide character of the Jewish community. Due deliberation
generally avoided the adoption of positions which turned out to be
ill-advised and unacceptable.

Nevertheless, what is critical for the present crisis is the
reaffirmation of halakha as a bulwark against syncretism, the
overwhelming of Judaism by American society, not by coercion but
seduction. Judaism is not a quilt of random patches onto which
anything might be sewn. Its extraordinary individuality is marked by
integrity and coherence. The supreme function of halakha (and Hebrew,
for that matter ) is to replace external barriers with internal ones,
to create the private space in which Jews ca n cultivate their
separate identities while participating in the open society that
engulfs them.

BELIEF IN GOD



I come, at last, to the seventh and most basic core value of
Conservative Judaism: its belief in God. It is this value which plants
the religious nationalism and national religion that are inseparable
from Judaism in the universal soil of monotheism. Remove God, the
object of Israel's millennial quest, and the rest will soon unravel.
But this is precisely what Conservative Judaism refused to do, even
after the Holocaust. Abraham Joshua Heschel, who came to the United
States in March, 1940, to emer ge after the war as the most
significant Jewish theologian of the modern period, placed God
squarely at the center of his rich exposition of the totality of the
Jewish religious experience.

To speak of God is akin to speaking about the undetected matter of the
universe. Beyond the reach of our instruments, it constitutes at least
90 per cent of the mass in the universe. Its existence is inferred
solely from its effects: the gravitationa l force, otherwise
unaccounted for, that it exerts on specific galactic shapes and
rotational patterns and that it contributes in general to holding the
universe together.

Similarly, Heschel was wont to stress the partial and restricted
nature of biblical revelation.

"With amazing consistency the Bible records that the theophanies
witnessed by Moses occurred in a cloud. Again and again we hear that
the Lord `called to Moses out of the midst of the cloud' (Exodus
24:16)..

. We must neither willfully ignore nor abuse by allegorization these
important terms. Whatever specific fact it may denote, it
unequivocally conveys to the mind the fundamenta l truth that God was
concealed even when He revealed, that even while His voice became
manifest, His essence remained hidden."6

For Judaism, then, God is a felt presence rather than a visible form,
a voice rather than a vision. Revelation tends to be an auditory and
not a visual experience. The grandeur of God is rarely compromised by
the hunger to see or by the need to captu re God in human language.
And yet, God's nearness and compassion are sensually asserted. The
austerity of the one and the intimacy of the other are the difference
between what we know and what we feel. God is both remote and nearby,
transcendent and im manent. To do justice to our head and heart, that
is, to the whole person, Judaism has never vitiated the polarity that
lies in the midst of its monotheistic faith.

I know of no finer example of this theological view than the berakhah
which introduces the psalms (pesukei de-zimra) of the morning service.
Its function is to praise God before we make our petitions. But, in
essence, it is really a meditation on the nature of the deity we are
about to address. Before we pray, we take a moment to orient
ourselves. My quite literal translation of the text encompasses the
first few lines, which are all I wish to comment on.

Praised be the one who spoke and the world sprang into being.
Praised be that one.
Praised be the maker of the beginning.
Praised be the one who spoke and acted.
Praised be the one who ordered and executed.
Praised be the one who has compassion for all the earth.
Praised be the one who has compassion for all of nature's creatures.
Praised be the one who rewards those who fear God.
Praised be the one who lives forever and endures till eternity.
Praised be the one who redeems and rescues.
Praised be God's name

.

What I find striking and altogether typical of Judaism in this ancient
paean is the crescendo of appellations for God through a preference
for circuitous verb forms. Despite a fervent desire to encounter and
behold God, there is a palpable reluctance to depict or render God
concrete, to traduce the mystery. The author takes refuge in verbs
rather than nouns.

The very first appellation alludes to the strategy: "Praised be the
one who spoke and the world sprang into being" - an awkward name for
God that quickly brings to mind the majestic and imageless description
of creation in the opening chapter of Genesi s. Not a word is wasted
there on what God looks like, on what God's sex might be, on what God
did before creation. The Torah simply implies that there is but a
single God who is absolutely transcendent and chose at some point to
call forth the cosmos. And that creation is effected with effortless
elegance through ten verbal commands. No consultations, no warfare, no
labor!

It is wholly in the spirit of that supreme expression of biblical
monotheism that our rabbinic author works. The act of creation becomes
the name by which God is known. Theology compels us to turn verbs into
nouns. We know God not through appearance , but effect. Only the
experience of divine action falls within our ken. Our author even
forms an adverb "bereshit" (in the beginning) into a noun and God
rises before us as "the maker of the beginning."

But an unchanging, soaring, bodiless deity is also beyond human
suffering. To counter that conclusion, the prayer immediately moves
from creation to love. The God of Israel remains engaged, a soul mate
as much as a prime mover. God's compassion exte nds to our planet and
all its creatures as well as to the chosen people, "those who fear
God." God is not an ineffable "It" but a caring "Thou," or, as Buber
once said of his own faith in God: "If believing in God means being
able to speak of Him in the third person, then I probably do not
believe in God; or at least, I do not know if it is permissible for me
to say that I believe in God. For I know, when I speak of him in the
third person, whenever it happens, and it has to happen again and
again, ther e is no other way, then my tongue cleaves to the roof of
my mouth so quickly that one cannot even call it speech."7

As this lilting paean makes so clear, for the rabbinic mind God was
conceived in polarities, lofty yet loving, imageless yet intimate,
hidden yet revealed. Conservative Judaism is very much part of that
ancient Jewish quest for a comprehensive underst anding of God.

More broadly still, Jewish tradition continues unbroken in
Conservative Judaism, where yearning for God wells up primarily not
from reason or revelation but from the blood-soaked, value-laden and
textually rooted historical experience of the Jewish peo ple. It is
surely in order to ask in closing whether this unique constellation of
core values has ever coalesced into a vivifying ideal. I would submit
that in its Ramah summer camps the Seminary created an extension of
itself: a controlled environment f or the formation of a model
religious community. Over the past half-century Ramah has compiled an
extraordinary record of touching and transforming young Jews to become
the most effective educational setting ever generated by the movement.
All the core v alues of Conservative Judaism are present in spades,
defining and pervading the culture.

Let me single them out. The centrality of Israel finds expression in
the large contingent of Israeli staff members brought over each
summer, who often return to Israel themselves enamored of Conservative
Judaism in the wake of experiencing Ramah. The ir presence also
reinforces the use of Hebrew as the camp's official language, while
the value of klal yisrael promotes the priority of community and the
inclusive spirit of camp programming.

On the religious side of the ledger, the Torah constitutes the
lifeblood of camp life. The parasha is a basic text of study during
the week and read in full every Shabbat, giving dozens of youngsters
the chance to master the skill. A myriad of daily classes and Shabbat
study groups symbolize the devotion to learning (in the Conservative
manner), and halakha governs every aspect of life, from daily services
to human relationships to relating to the environment. Each week
culminates in the magnificent choreography of Shabbat that puts
Judaism to music by imbuing everyone with a sense of belonging and
intimacy, of uplift and holiness. And finally, the engaged figure of a
Seminary scholar-in-residence teaches and personifies the core values
that animat e the whole noble experiment.

Ramah is not the conscious articulation of an ideological blueprint
but rather the natural impulse of a vibrant, authentically Jewish
religious culture, proof positive that Conservative Judaism bespeaks
an organic, distinctive and transformational real ity. What Solomon
Schechter once said of Rabbinic Judaism, when he ventured to
crystallize its theological underpinnings, holds true no less for its
modern counterpart:

A great English writer has remarked that `the true health of a man
is to have a soul without being aware of it...' In a similar way the
old Rabbis seem to have thought that the true health of a religion
is to have a theology without being awa re of it; and thus they
hardly ever made - nor could they make - any attempt towards working
their theology into a formal system, or giving us a full exposition
of it.8



Today, Conservative Judaism pulsates with many pockets of intense
religious energy. Its congregational life, national conventions, USY
pilgrimages and Schechter day schools increasingly manifest models of
religious community shaped by its core values. More than ever, the lay
leadership of these ventures consists of serious Jews for whom
Conservative Judaism is hardly "a halfway house" (Sklare). The
longstanding gap between Seminary and synagogue has also been largely
transformed into a common callin g to perpetuate rabbinic Judaism in
an open society. What Conservative Judaism offers the growing number
of Jews hungry for the holy is a sacred cluster where standards are
coupled with compassion, scholarship with spirit, piety with
intellectual honesty , and parochial passion with universalism - a
prescription for salvation in this world and the one to come. 2/8/95

NOTES
1) Ismar Schorsch, In Defense of the Common Good, New York, 1992, pp.
1-2.
2) Journal of the Alumni Association of the Seminary College-Teachers
Institute, June 1992, p. 4.
3) The traditional prayer for announcing the new month. My
translation.
4) Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man, New York, 1956, p.
274.
5) Moshe Greenberg, The Anchor Bible: Ezekiel, 1-20, New York, 1983,
p. v.
6) Heschel, op. cit., p. 193.
7) Rivka Horwitz, Buber's Way to "I and Thou", Philadelphia, 1988, p.
105.
8) Solomon Schechter, Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology, New York,
1936, pp. 11-12.