Author: Herbert Anderson

Herbert Anderson

Being finite is a condition that pervades human life as we know it. Mortality is a more specific way of thinking about finitude that follows the constraints of our biology. Finitude is about learning to live with limits. Mortality is recognizing decline. Because we are mortal, there is a beginning and an end to life. Within the boundaries of birth and death, however, there are many endings and beginnings for finite beings. Clocks and calendars and fences and stop signs and school bells are signs of finitude that become intimations of mortality. Living with finiteness includes accepting uncertainty and vulnerability as unavoidable and acknowledging interdependence as fundamental to human fullness. In that way, the acceptance of human finitude is prelude to both responsible decision-making and faithful care at life’s end.

We are reminded of our mortality when we recognize limits in the nature of things. Genes and cells are limiting. Body parts wear out. All living beings die. If we resist the claims of creaky knees or faulty memory or a shrinking bladder or faulty hips or other physical signs of mortality that accompany growing older and aging, it will be even more difficult to embrace the definitive mortality moment of death. The inability to embrace finitude and mark what I call “mortality moments” hinders our awareness of dying while living and diminishes our capacity to live well while dying. My aim in this article is to identify intimations of finitude and mortality in ordinary living as prelude to living well up until life’s end.1 Moreover, people who acknowledge their mortality while fully living are more likely to make appropriate and necessary end-of-life preparations.

Even though being finite and being mortal are distinguishable understandings of the human condition, they are both intimations of mortality that point to the definitive moment of death. In this article, I will follow Atul Gawande’s definition of mortality: “Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone.”2 Although signs of finitude are everywhere, they are often easily overlooked. The limits imposed on us by biology are more difficult to avoid. Perhaps the best we can hope for are inklings of the inescapability of finiteness and intimations of mortality. We begin with experiences of finitude because they are our first intimations of mortality.

Facing Finitude

Living with limits or facing finitude is more encompassing than mortality. It includes the recognition that not everything is possible, and that nothing is forever. If we have eyes to see, signs of finitude are everywhere in very common activities. “Ice cream melts in the cone.” “Summer camp ends before the first kiss.” “My favorite baseball glove wears out.” “Fresh fruit spoils.” “Children leave home.” “Friendships fade when people move away.” The experience of limits is personal as well as pervasive. The human dilemma is that we are aware of our limits; the human capacity for self-transcendence—for thinking of ourselves as creatures who die—generates anxiety about both life and death. The sad truth is that, in order to flee from death or signs of finitude or decay or aging, we flee from life and shrink from being fully alive.

According to Ernest Becker, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Denial of Death, awareness of being finite and being mortal is the central problem for humans and a source of considerable anxiety. Here is how Becker says it: “The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.”3 We try to flee from life to avoid death, but there is no escape. Becker again: “We saw that there really was no way to overcome the real dilemma of existence, the one of the mortal animal who at the same time is conscious of his mortality…. He has to go the way of the grasshopper even though it takes longer.”4 To deny our finiteness, we seek to be bigger and stronger and richer and more powerful than others so we do not feel so small. By contrast, embracing finitude—bringing death into life—is an essential dimension of human wisdom that enhances our living and our dying when we can see ourselves as finite creatures kept safe in God.

In a poem entitled “Up Against It,” Eamon Grennan uses “the fact of glass” to illustrate what a bee discovers when it hits a glass window again and again. It keeps trying to fly through “the fact of glass.” Bees do not know about finitude, so, as Grennan puts it, “they must fling their bodies against the one unalterable law of things—this fact of glass—and can only go on making the sound that tethers their electric fury to what’s impossible, feeling the sting of it.”5 The “fact of glass” is the bee’s encounter with finitude it can neither fathom nor accept because it lacks the capacity for self-transcendence. It is problematic for the human creature, however, because we are aware that “the fact of glass,” limits, and mortality await us all.

Like Grennan’s bee, we cannot penetrate glass or be in more than one place at a time. Even so, we push against spatial limits. Time is also limited. To be finite in time should be no more problematic than being finite in space. Moreover, temporal finitude can be a good thing, because it prevents monotony and provides a rounding off time so that an event or an adventure or a life can be evaluated in its totality.

Instances of Finitude

Attending to the mysteries of being finite is both a challenge and a gift. We will not see all the signs of finitude, partly because they are often hidden, and partly because we do not want to see the evidence that limits are unavoidable and that human possibilities are not endless. There will never be enough time to pursue every dream or follow every passion. Even so, the willingness to embrace finitude does not diminish dreaming or silence our passions. Instead, we practice the art of loving and losing and living on. Here are four very ordinary instances of being finite.

Making Decisions. Because agency is the generative force that prompts us to choose and act, it needs to be regarded and supported as a cherished value. Humans act. We go here and there, now or later, fast or slow. Every choice we make, however, every road we take, every dream we forsake is a reminder that we are finite. Each decision eliminates other choices we might have made. “I travel only one path at the time,” a friend once wrote to me. “When I do, I neglect other paths I might have chosen. I am so many, and yet I may be only one.” Sometimes these simple decisions to “go here and not there” are the occasion for the loss of a dream.

The gap between dreams we have and the choices we make is one reason why we fear incompleteness as much as death in human life. The end of an event is the occasion for critical review; in a similar way, death prompts a rehearsal of life. When dying individuals are disappointed with their lives or embarrassed by failure or unhappy because of unrealized expectations, the end of life becomes an occasion for fear and shame. “Even when people feel that their lives are incomplete or full of empty memories, it is important for family and friends and caregivers to help the dying person tell what they can.”6 It may be a moment of unexpected grace.

Even though options narrow as we come closer to death, deciding and deciding again and again is the work dying people can and must do. It is the task of caregivers to support deciding as long as it is possible. Here is what Karen Speerstra wrote in her hospice journal in The Divine Art of Dying:

I daily decide what to eat and how much. I listen to my body for clues. What am I thirsty for that won’t be too acidic? So far, I can decide what to wear. How much to sleep. When to nap. What to read. Which Netflix to watch. And how to spend my time with my friends…. I choose active dying just as I’ve chosen active living. I want to die as I have lived—a full participant in all life has to offer.7

Making it possible for someone who is dying to have limited but significant acts of freedom is, or least should be, a priority for family and friends and caregivers. Finite choices matter. However, honoring agency and helping people live as fully as possible until they die depends on the willingness of all caregivers to make sacrifices, to relinquish their own freedom or at least set aside their own agendas in order to be attentive to a patient’s wishes at the end. For dying individuals, these simple choices keep them as active participants in living fully to life’s end.

Finitude and Grief. Human beings attach themselves to people and things knowing all along that nothing is forever. Letting go of what we love is unavoidable because we are finite, but so are the people and things we love. In this sense, grief is an inevitable function of both attachment and finitude. Because we are finite creatures, there is no life without loss, and there is no loss without grief; hence, there is no living without grieving. It is quite simply the cost of loving. Grieving our losses helps us practice the spirituality of living with limits. No one has said this better than the poet Mary Oliver in these lines from “In Blackwater Woods”:

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the times comes to let it go, to let it go.8

We grieve what we have lost, remember what is important, affirm what is meaningful, and preserve valuable memories while at the same time letting the past become the past. This process of relinquishing or letting go is the occasion for sadness and an intimation of mortality.

A Crisis of the Middle Years. Because we are finite creatures, it is not really possible to live without disappointment or regret. “There will always be something more we could have done or should have done or would have done if only we had more courage, better luck, or more enduring trust in the goodness of God who holds the future.”9 In a review of Elia Kazan’s book The Arrangement, James Baldwin wrote the following reflection on one crisis of the middle years:

Though we would like to live without regrets, and sometimes proudly insist that we have none, this is not really possible, if only because we are mortal. When more time stretches behind than stretches before one, some assessments, however reluctantly and incompletely, begin to be made. Between what one wishes to become and what one has become there is a momentous gap, which will now never be closed. And this gap seems to operate as one’s final margin, one’s last opportunity, for creation.10

The awareness of this baffling geography is another intimation of mortality. Not everything is possible or even necessary. Our achievements are limited, that is certain, but so are our failures. Seeing failure as well as success through the lens of finite completeness is a constructive alternative to disappointment and despair.

Aging. Aging is a biological process that is relentless and seldom grants favors. “Old age is a continuous series of losses,” Philip Roth wrote in Everyman. “Old age is not a battle. It is a massacre.” Yet, as Sherwin Nuland reminds us, a person in later years should not be hemmed in by chronology even though one should never forget chronology. Both are true. That is the wonderful paradox of aging that comes from facing finitude. “Adapting brings with it the opportunity for far greater benisons and for brightening the later decades with a light not yet visible to the young.”11 The whole of a life, including growing old and dying, is a gift to be received with gratitude and worked on with courage.

Living with limits or facing finitude or marking our mortality is a central dimension of the wisdom of aging. Each of us will have our own laundry list of things we used to do and cannot do as well or at all anymore. Not a day goes by when I do not say “everything takes longer than I think it will.” I try to live with an awareness that not everything is possible.

Malcolm was taking a walk when he saw a frog on the sidewalk. He was startled to hear the frog speak. “Hey, old man, if you kiss me I will turn into a beautiful princess. I will be yours forever and we could make mad passionate love every day.” Malcolm put the frog in his jacket pocket and kept walking. “Hey, Old man, I don’t think you heard me. If you kiss me, I will turn into a beautiful princess and we can make passionate love every day.” “I heard you,” Malcolm said, “but at my age I’d rather have a talking frog.”

Life would be a lot simpler, aging a lot easier, and dying less complex if we were all a little more accepting of finitude like Malcolm. But learning to live as finite creatures is never simple; it requires courage, in part because with finitude comes contingency and the unexpected suddenness with which things happen. “The courage to accept suffering as an element of finitude and affirm finitude in spite of the suffering that accompanies” is a characteristic of authentic spirituality.12 To avoid suffering, we will seek to limit our losses to escape the grief that follows losing whom or what we love. Becker wisely observes that the human one “is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it.”13 There is no way to avoid the dilemma of being a mortal animal who at the same time is conscious of his or her mortality. This is the fundamental human paradox that accompanies every intimation of mortality.

Instances of Mortality

Mortality is a specific instance of finitude. As with finitude, we often miss the signs of mortality in ordinary daily activities. Mortality becomes personal when I can admit that I will die. But arriving at that realization takes time, even for those who spend their working days with people near death. It is, as Gawande puts it, “a process, not an epiphany.” One of the ways to enhance that process, I propose, is to mark mortality moments when they occur and pay attention to the times or situations or moments in our lives when we are more keenly aware that we are mortal—that we will die.

Our lives are made up of summers and winters, joy and sorrow, breathtakingly beautiful sunsets and degenerative diseases. The challenge for each of us throughout life is to have the courage to face the knowledge of both what is feared and what is hoped.

At least two kinds of courage are required in aging and sickness. The first is the courage to confront the reality of mortality—the courage to seek the truth of what is to be feared and what is to be hoped…. But even more daunting is the second kind of courage—the courage to act on the truth we find.14

In order to live fully as finite creatures, we need to acknowledge our limits, take death into our life, celebrate aging, and live toward death with courage and freedom. One has to decide, as Gawande wisely observes, “whether one’s fears or one’s hopes are what should matter most.”

Incidental Mortality. The initial awareness that we are mortal is usually internal and could happen at any time in the life journey. A mortality moment may be prompted by an experience of loss, by the retirement or death of a same-age friend, or by purchasing a cane. It may also simply happen in conversation as we reflect on life. A friend of mine in her late 60s was telling her husband and daughter about what she wanted “if I die.” After listening to all her requests prefaced by “if,” her husband asked quietly, “‘If’, not ‘when’?” This “if-when” moment makes death personal rather than abstract.

An internally prompted mortality moment occurs when we make decisions about the end of a life. We are encouraged to make a will or establish a trust early in life. I suspect many people avoid making these important decisions precisely because they do not want to face the reality of mortality. Or, making these decisions may become a mortality moment in the doing. People who have established a trust and determined advance directives are often still reluctant to share that information with adult children. The decisions we make in preparation for the end of a life are usually initiated from within and not in response to a medical diagnosis. They are the result of a being aware of our mortality because we are human, not because we are seriously sick or terminally ill. Marking mortality moments is a choice from within.

Life Cycle Mortality. There are predictable moments in the life cycle when bodily changes accompany an identifiable moment in the cycle of a life. I am certainly more aware of my mortality at eighty-six than I was at sixty-six or forty-six or twenty-six. When I was thirty, I needed glasses; at forty, bifocals were necessary. At fifty, a friend game me a poem about doing one thing well rather than “scattering wide seeds in many fields.” At sixty, my wife gave me a heating pad to take the edge off painful joints. By seventy I was recovering from prostate cancer, and by eighty I had a couple new artificial hips. When he turned eighty, a college classmate sent around this reflection:

Life is like a funnel. As we near the narrow end of the funnel, we are aware that our options are fewer and we don’t know how long the narrow part will last. For me that day of realization happened when I turned 80. Why 80? There is nothing magic about 80 but, unexpectedly I heard this voice saying “you have fewer years left. What will you do with them?”

Gawande has it just right: being mortal is about coping with the constraints of our biology. Many years ago, I received a Christmas letter that included a little ditty of unknown origin. “My eyeglasses are dandy, / My hearing aid is fine. / My dentures come in handy / But how I miss my mind.” Part of the complexity of aging is the incremental nature of change. For some, because of a stroke or heart attack or surgery or some other crisis, the functional loss is sudden. For others, it happens very slowly over time, and we may not recognize those changes until we are on the other side of new limits. Mortality recognition does not happen automatically.

The Death of a Parent for Middle-Aged Children. I am the oldest of eighteen cousins on my mother’s side. Even after both of my parents had died, I looked to their surviving siblings or their spouses to keep mortality awareness at bay. It was not until my Aunt Marian died at 104 that I was aware that my last buffer had gone. I am now the next generation scheduled to die. “The loss of a parent means that the penetration of death is aimed undeflected at the middle-aged children who remain…. The agedness of one’s parents, the movement into middle age and finally the death of parents all contribute to an emerging sense of one’s own finitude.15 While it is possible to preserve an unreal denial of mortality well into the middle years through manic activity, the accumulation of wealth, or emotionally impoverishing patterns of denial, the death of a parent often strains those maneuvers beyond repair. The sense that it is now my turn to grow old and die was a critical awareness for me in late mid-life when Aunt Marian died.

Impediments to Mortality Awareness

Advances in medicine, nutrition, and public health over the last two hundred years have increased the life span in advanced societies. The discovery of longevity genes in invertebrates in the 1990s “unleashed a small tsumani of startup activity” presuming that the life span could be modified by genetic changes.16 The independent National Academy of Medicine has launched an effort dedicated to “ending aging forever.” Whether through stem cell research or cryobiological preservation or cloning (again and again) or some other life-prolonging miracle measure, microbiological immortalists believe it is possible to conquer disease, cure aging, and eliminate death. While we applaud scientific advances that expand health and extend life, they may have the effect of circumventing mortality awareness. Molecular biologists promise to lengthen our days, and in modest ways they already do. Science will continue to extend the limits of human life, and new stories of aging will be written. Nonetheless we remain mortal creatures, bound by birth and death. Death is not an add-on. It is part of the creation that God declared good.

The impulse to extend life is not new. The longing for long life has been a common theme in religion, mythology, and medicine for centuries. The Hebrew Bible, for example, includes specific promises of long life for those who keep the commandants of God: “If you walk in my ways then I will lengthen your days” (1 Kings 3:14; cf. Psalm 34:12, 13; Proverbs 4:10; 10:27). The biblical commandment to honor mother and father comes with a promise of longevity (Deuteronomy 5:16). The assumption behind these promises is that long life will be satisfying because it will include good health and a sound mind. At the same time, the Bible is clear that there is no life without death.

Struggles against old age, mortality, and death will undoubtedly continue. Yuval Noah Harari suggests in Homo Deus that efforts to lengthen our days are more likely now because famine, plague, and war “have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature to manageable challenges.”17 We applaud efforts to diminish the discomforts of aging. The possibility of living longer is not without peril, however. With longer life expectancy there is a greater likelihood of acquiring a debilitating disease that would diminish the quality of life in later years. People are glad to live longer as long as they are healthy. If a healthy, long life is regarded as a fundamental human right, death remains an enemy because it violates that right. If, however, death is not the enemy but part of creation that God intended and declared to be good, then human life is better served by learning to live with mortality and sickness and death rather than railing against them.

Paying Attention to Mortality’s Inevitability

Marking mortality is important because it makes it possible for us to see death as an inevitable and necessary part of life. Paul Tillich, a widely respected Christian theologian of the twentieth century, is reported to have offered this prayer in the Harvard University chapel: “Lord, help me to bring my death into my life, lest death take my life from me.” If death is part of my life, then it—death—cannot “take” my life—my living—from me. For that reason, we can say that the dying are still living, and that death is part of my life. When we say that “death took” Sam Jones or “cancer took” Jessica Riley much too young, we suggest the opposite—namely, that death or cancer has agency outside us and can take life from us.

In some religious perspectives, God decides when people die, so it might be said that “God took Bernie” as if God were an outside agent acting on the human body to cause death. Although we may have outgrown the boogieman or the grim reaper as the agent of death, death is still regarded as a force or agent that acts on us from outside. If, however, death happens from within, sometimes even as an act of self-completion or self-fulfillment, it is easier to think of death as part of my life.

Each death, like each life, is personal and paradoxical. It is personal because no one can die for me. Whether by accident or cancer or a stroke or heart failure or old age or choice or hidden determination, it is personal. And it is paradoxical because death and life, dying and living, are bound together from the very beginning. In order to avoid glamorizing a good death or demonizing a brutal death, it is necessary to keep insisting that death is a contradiction or a paradox—a friend and an enemy, a moment and a process, a fate and an act, a disruptive end and the gracious fulfillment of a life.

Death is both moment and process. It is a definable instant when breath ceases and the bodily systems shut down, and it is a process of dying while living, during which our genetically programmed resources are diminishing. Death is also both a problem to be solved and a mystery to be experienced. Because death is a problem, we keep asking what must be done about this medical situation or that. Because death is also a mystery to be experienced, we ask a different question: How shall I behave toward this situation?

The ultimate aim of this article should be clear by now. Recognizing mortality moments in the midst of living is good preparation for making difficult decisions at life’s end. Embracing finitude and marking mortality throughout life are preparation for the definitive mortality moment that is not by choice and carries the weight of finality.18 It occurs, for example, when surgery determines that it is not possible to stop the spread of cancer. A definitive mortality moment could also be the result of a stroke or an accident that permanently limits physical movement or sets in motion physical deterioration that leads to death. It may also occur when a patient whose treatment may even have been successful for a time decides to discontinue it in order to live more fully while dying. Earlier decisions we might make in preparation for life’s end are usually initiated from within because we are mortal, not because we are irreversibly sick or terminally ill.

Karen Speerstra: A Definitive Mortality Moment

Karen Speerstra and I had been friends since 1977, when we lived together in Dubuque, Iowa. Shortly after retiring from a remarkable career as an editor and moving to Vermont, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Karen lived for ten years with ovarian cancer, during which time she wrote three books and traveled extensively. The treatment was successful, and she tolerated chemotherapy well, but by Christmas 2012 she had lost her appetite and her nails were turning black. If her nails were falling out, Karen wondered, what was happening to her stomach. Karen made the decision to discontinue all treatment. She called this “a moment of blessed recognition.” Some time later, Karen and I determined to write about her experience of living while dying in the book referred to earlier in this essay called The Divine Art of Dying: Living Well to Life’s End. Here is what Karen wrote about the decision to discontinue treatment:

I will consciously trade the treatment not only for more physical stamina, but also for what I hope will be a more wide-awake brain. I want to participate fully in my living until I die. And I want to be conscious enough to grasp some of the finer points of this whole mysterious “dying thing.”19

In the book, we call this definitive mortality moment “taking the turn toward death.” This action embodies the prayer cited earlier: “Help me bring my death into my life lest death take my life from me.” Karen and I wrote the book to encourage people facing a life-limiting illness to consider foregoing further curative treatment sooner rather than later and take the turn toward death so that they will have time and resources and emotional energy to live as fully as possible until they die.

This decision to suspend treatment or discontinue medical procedures designed to prolong life is never made easily. People who have ignored ordinary mortality moments or postponed hard choices throughout their lives are likely to avoid making choices at life’s end. If no planning has been done before, no advance directives agreed on, that final discernment process will take abundant time and care navigating unpredictably powerful emotions. In this process, the decision-making agent is always the one with the life-limiting illness. Taking the turn toward death is a life-affirming decision in the interest of living more fully in the time that is left. It makes it possible to garner our resources and harness our energies to live as fully as we can until we die.

We live and die and make choices in the midst of meaningful communities and the constraints of ethnic or religious traditions, insurance companies, and the government. Our choices are always limited. Nonetheless, the dying person is free to turn toward death and choose to participate fully in living to life’s end. Honoring that choice is a gracious gift that a family can give a loved person who is dying. Karen was fortunate that her decision was hers to make, and she never looked back. She was able to live fully for ten more months after that decision to take the turn toward death. Because our impulse is to hold on to those we love—to do whatever it takes to keep them alive—often at great sacrifice, it will take time for family and friends to honor the choice made. If the person facing a life-ending situation is unable to choose and has no advance directives, the process of deciding a treatment0 plan is even more emotionally and ethically complex.

More Defining Mortality Moments

Once an individual has decided to discontinue further curative treatment and take the turn toward death, other actions follow. Palliative care and new hospice criteria make it possible to enter hospice long before one is actively dying. Once a person enters hospice, curative treatment is no longer possible, although that decision can be reversed. Entering hospice may be an emotionally charged mortality moment, especially for people who want to keep their dying private. Hospice makes a private decision public. One’s dying becomes a public event even if the public beyond family and close friends is only the hospice team. Anyone who visits the kitchen will see the “Do Not Resuscitate” sign on the refrigerator door.

Of all the decisions Karen made, her determination to be transparent about dying was one of most important. She lived without hiding her dying so that she might harness her increasingly limited energy for creative quality living up to the end. Here is what she wrote in “Karen’s Hospice Journal”:

Since I tell everyone that Herbert and I are writing this book about dying, I don’t have to worry about who knows what about my current state. It takes a lot of energy to figure out whom you can safely talk to, so I’ve decided on full disclosure even though it’s hard for some of my friends to accept my candor about death. Nevertheless, transparency is what I have chosen. 20

Secret-keeping and withholding the truth about a diagnosis or a treatment plan isolates. Transparency makes it easier for communities of compassionate care to evolve. Of course, truth-telling is not an absolute and not everyone was glad for Karen’s openness, but deciding to be transparent made it possible for Karen to harness her energies for quality living to the end. Being transparent is one of those gifts that keep giving.

The decision to take the turn toward death is not the last decision a dying person will make and may not even be the most difficult. “The choices don’t stop,” Gawande has observed. “Life is choices, and they are relentless. No sooner have you made one choice than another is upon you.”21 They will include relinquishing or handing over what we value, waiting, tolerating ambiguity, trusting the kindness of strangers, making preferences clear, telling stories, sharing memories, giving gifts, waiting some more, and grieving all our losses. Because these are often ordinary choices people make when they are living but not dying, it is easy for friends and family and other caregivers to overlook the significance or the weightiness of these simple choices when we do not know if it will be the last time.

The Final Mortal Moment

Taking the turn toward death—the final mortal moment—sooner rather than later makes it possible for everyone—patient, family, friends, medical professionals, and hospice caregivers—to work toward preserving continuity for someone who is living toward death. Finally, however, there is a final mortal moment. The awareness of death reminds everyone that human beings are finite, limited, vulnerable mortal creatures. Death is also mystery because it is both the end and not the end. There is finality to death, but there is also life hidden in God. We live in that mystery that cannot be domesticated either by medical technology or by end-of-life strategies.

The task of family and friends and other caregivers is both simple and sacred: to help the dying walk with lighter footprints lest they fall. We do that in many ways. We stay present. Honor agency when we can. Eliminate secrets when possible. Bear witness to their story. Eradicate isolation and eliminate loneliness. Translate mute pain into suffering that can be shared. Practice powerlessness and embody hopefulness. And, most of all, live in their mystery. They know what we do not know. Karen wrote these words near the end of her life:

As I view my planet now from my upstairs hospice room, sharper colors outline the mountains in the distance. Two words come to mind: intensity and perfection…. Everything is mystery! It’s all so much more than I thought. All this is not easy, but it is, at some mysterious level, perfect.22

Living fully into that mystery is both active and passive, both something we do and something that happens to us. We can choose how to live until we die, and in that choosing we may influence when and how the final mortal moment occurs. Yet, death happens to us. It happens to me. That is mystery. Yet it is something I do. Death is a human act. That is also a mystery. Activity and passivity are both essential qualities of being human. The human creature is both subject and object, both actor and acted upon.

Although agency and active participation in living while dying are central, passivity and waiting are not far behind. In a culture that prizes autonomy, promotes agency, abhors dependence, and idolizes independence and self-sufficiency, we may need to remind ourselves that living and dying are always a contradiction of acting and waiting, activity and passivity. And both sides of the paradox are true. We are simultaneously choosing and deciding about living while dying and waiting for a mystery. A poem Karen wrote shortly before her death, entitled “We Wait: Notaries of Time,” includes these lines: “So, we wait. Watch. Touch / memories and share stories. / We watch planets and stars / dance to velvet rhyme. / For we are notaries of time.”23 If death is a mystery to be experienced as well as a problem to be solved, then we need to ask: How shall I live toward that moment? Living fully and actively toward that moment includes waiting. We are, after all, notaries of time.

The Rev. Dr. Herbert Anderson is a Lutheran pastor and retired professor of pastoral care. He has taught at Princeton Theological Seminary, Yale Divinity School, Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry, two Lutheran seminaries, and is Professor Emeritus of Pastoral Theology at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. An internationally known authority on bereavement, family, care of the dying, and pastoral and practical theology, he wrote his dissertation at Drew University under the supervision of Will Herberg.

Michal Raucher

In this article I review the Conservative Movement’s official positions on abortion, as seen through teshuvot from the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (CJLS), as well as statements and resolutions from the Rabbinical Assembly (RA).1 These publications, written between 1975 and 2022, have often been composed in response to a law, court case, or regulation being discussed in the American political sphere. I will demonstrate that, through these publications, the Conservative movement created an official position about abortion rights that reflected the justification framework. This framework starts from the assumption that abortion is morally wrong but can be permitted—that is, justified—in certain circumstances. I argue that the Conservative Movement’s position on abortion is ethically flawed because of its reliance on the justification framework and because it does not reflect the lived experience of abortion in the United States. In line with feminist ethical critiques of halakhah, I maintain that the CJLS and the RA have overlooked women’s experiences. Conservative Jewish leaders should revisit their teshuvot and resolutions on abortion and revise them in order to foreground and center the experiences of Jews who have had abortions.

In Trust Women: A Progressive Christian Argument for Reproductive Justice, Rebecca Todd Peters defines the justification approach. In the late nineteenth century, Christian physicians aimed to criminalize and stigmatize all abortions that they did not consider acceptable. Peters argues that they were motivated by a myth of white Christian nationalism that included an expectation that white women should be wives and mothers.2 To them, white women having abortions violated gender norms and threatened their survival in an increasingly multicultural and multifaith country.3 These gender and racial norms have persisted among white Christian nationalists today who similarly oppose abortion.4 Today, the justification approach is ubiquitous. We can see it when people or governments discuss under what circumstances abortion would be permissible. The circumstances that have received the broadest public support for decades have been those termed the “PRIM” justifications. These are prenatal health, rape, incest, and maternal health. Readers might be familiar with recent state legislatures establishing abortion bans with certain exceptions; those exceptions are often one or more of the PRIM justifications.

In a recently published article in the Journal of Jewish Ethics, Louis Newman demonstrates how narratives inform Jewish ethical approaches even though ethicists claim to be basing their moral evaluations solely on their legal analysis.5 My argument here is similar. When the CJLS approved their first four teshuvot about abortion in 1983, the justification framework was prevalent in public discourse. Although the four teshuvot from 1983 and two from the early 2000s approve of the halakhic permissibility of abortions for PRIM reasons, they exclude all other reasons. Legal scholar Robert Cover wrote that law is generated from and exists within certain narratives about self, other, and the surrounding context.6 The justification framework for abortion was—and in many ways still is—the narrative that informed Conservative rabbinic readings of Jewish law. CJLS rabbis did not admit to the way this narrative was shaping their reading of Jewish law. Instead, they claimed that their conclusions about the halakhic permissibility of abortion derived directly from the rabbinic texts. We can see the influence of the justification narrative in the language they used when discussing women who had abortions. The authors of these teshuvot wrote derisively about women who terminated pregnancies outside of their guideposts, referring to these women as procuring “abortion on demand” and terminating for their “mere convenience.”7 PRIM abortions constitute just 25% of the abortions performed in the United States. The majority of abortions are performed because either a woman cannot afford a(nother) child or does not want a(nother) child.8 CJLS responsa make it clear that these reasons are insufficient rationales for terminating a pregnancy. Moreover, the language in the CJLS teshuvot contains ideas about women and reproduction that come from the justification narrative of the Christian anti-abortion movement. As Historian Rachel Kranson has argued, Conservative Movement rabbis were engaged in an imagined discourse with the Christian anti-abortion movement and attempted to depict Judaism as in line with Christianity in terms of sexual and reproductive morals.9 This led to decades of position statements from the RA that repeated the same principles even while advocating for much broader reproductive rights.

Recently, Jewish women have published their abortion narratives in the Jewish press, and, although these narratives constitute but a small sampling, they reveal the ways Jewish women have made the decision to terminate pregnancies.10 These are stories that reflect adherence to Jewish beliefs, a desire to create Jewish rituals, and even the use of Jewish blessings in many ways, but they do not necessarily reflect the Conservative halakhic framework for abortion. These narratives offer us an alternative way of thinking about abortion in Judaism that the CJLS and the Conservative Movement’s rabbinic leaders have not considered. Fundamentally, these narratives demonstrate that Jewish women have abortions, and that they make that decision for all sorts of reasons; moreover, many women see their decision as a sacred choice despite what halakhah says about abortion. These narratives offer a significant corrective to the way the Conservative Movement’s rabbinic leaders have thought about abortion for the last fifty years. I argue that, just as the Conservative movement’s teshuvot about abortion have been shaped by their surrounding cultural narrative, a new Conservative Jewish approach to abortion should consider the contemporary context and the voices of individuals struggling to access abortion today.

The Conservative Movement has demonstrated its commitment to both halakhah and historical change. Opinions from the CJLS reflect the ways in which Conservative rabbinic leaders have altered their understandings of halakhah or created innovative halakhic responses in light of changing community norms and historical development.11 The current Conservative halakhah on abortion is outdated. It came out of a particular historical moment in which Conservative Jewish leaders were trying to establish themselves as an American religion on par with Christianity in their moral opposition to abortion. The historical context is different in 2022. A vast majority of Jews support legal abortion in all or most cases.12 As I will show in this article, even the RA currently holds a position that is much more supportive of abortion than the position they held in the 1980s. Ronit Irshai’s survey of Orthodox responsa about abortion reveals that they have changed over time and in response to different historical and particular needs of the community.13 It is time for the CJLS to approve new teshuvot about abortion that respond to the contemporary context.

I argue that new teshuvot should be informed by the experiences of Jewish people who have terminated pregnancies. In making this argument, I draw on feminist criticisms of halakhah. Irshai and Dena Davis have both problematized the lack of female voices in halakhic rulings on abortion.14 When the first four teshuvot about abortion were approved in 1983, there were no women on the CJLS. The CJLS had not yet approved of ordaining women. When women were ordained in the Conservative Movement and joined the CJLS, they added their perspectives and introduced new topics for discussion such as mourning rituals for people suffering a miscarriage or stillbirth.15 One of the teshuvot about abortion from the early 2000s was written by a woman, Rabbi Susan Grossman. Yet representation of women on the committee and among authors of teshuvot is not sufficient. Feminist ethicists have long questioned the ability of a male-composed legal code to respond to women’s experiences. As I have argued elsewhere, the “view from nowhere” angle that is common in legal codes is not actually a view from nowhere but a view from male positions that overlooks women’s experiences.16 For example, Irshai demonstrates that the rabbinic focus on the status of the fetus is missing women’s experiences of reproduction.17

CJLS teshuvot on abortion need to include—and be informed at the outset by—the experience of abortion. In The Social Justice Torah Commentary, Rabbis Emily Langowitz and Joshua Fixler argue that the legal texts about abortion fall short in seeing women as subjects in abortion decisions. They write,

The text in Exodus 21 begins with an act of violence perpetrated against a pregnant woman, and yet this woman is all but absent from subsequent conversation about this passage. Across the centuries, almost all of the voices of Jewish interpretation, and even many modern commentators, fail to acknowledge her story. The interpreters miss the opportunity to see her as subject, rather than object. To see the woman in this text as merely a hypothetical in a legal case study is to deny that cases such as these were very real to the people who experienced them. To reach a full sense of justice in our understanding of abortion, we must pair mishpatim (laws) with sipurim (stories).18

Langowitz and Fixler maintain that the biblical and legal narratives are doing harm to the people who make reproductive decisions, and they are impeding our ability to think broadly and more ethically about abortion because they are ignoring the experiences of people who have abortions. Following the suggestion by Langowitz and Fixler, I will share some examples of Jewish women’s abortion experiences in the final section of this article. In these narratives we will learn what Jewish women need from their communities and their rabbis. We will see how the justification approach to abortion is harming them. Finally, we will discover alternative ways of reading Jewish texts and constructing Jewish rituals around abortion. I maintain that these abortions are no less Jewish than those deemed halakhically permissible by the CJLS, and that the CJLS should construct a new halakhic response to abortion that reflects lived Jewish experiences of abortion.

CJLS Teshuvot and the Justification Framework

The CJLS has approved six responsa about abortion, including four from 1983, one in 2001, and another in 2003. In 1975 it passed an official resolution about abortion wherein its members called for “issuing a statement for public information setting forth the traditional Jewish view” and explained that this view would be the “official position of The Rabbinical Assembly and of Conservative Judaism.”19 In other words, these teshuvot are supposed to inform the public positions of the movement. In all of them, the authors analyzed biblical and rabbinic texts, incorporated different degrees of medical information, and drew on teshuvot from prior centuries. Two ideas are central to their positions. First, according to Jewish law, fetal life is classified as “potential life.” Life begins at birth and fetal life is not equivalent to full human life, yet fetal life is sanctified as potential life. Second, because the fetus is considered potential life, abortion can be performed only for a justified reason. Although I will be focusing on the second idea, I will first offer a brief summary of the claims about fetal life.

Teshuvot from the Conservative Movement demonstrate that biblical and rabbinic teachings do not ascribe to the fetus full and equal personhood but hold a more nuanced perspective of fetal life. According to the authors of these teshuvot, the fetus is a potential life that is inseparable from the pregnant woman. In his 1983 teshuvah, Rabbi Kassel Abelson based his position about fetal status on the passage in Exodus 21:22–25 wherein men fight and one of them pushes a pregnant woman. Abelson wrote: “It is obvious that the Torah considers the death of the woman a capital offense, while the death of a fetus is a lesser offense, punishable only by a fine.”20 To make the claim that the fetus is not a separate entity from its mother, authors of teshuvot have referenced the talmudic expression ʿubar yerekh immo hu, translated by Rabbi Isaac Klein as “The fetus is thus accounted as the loin of its mother.”21 In his 1983 teshuvah, Rabbi Robert Gordis wrote: “What is fundamental is that halakha explicitly recognizes that the fetus is not a viable being while it is in its mother’s womb, since its life cannot be sustained outside its natural shelter there.”22 Contrary to Christian teachings that life begins at conception, the rabbis of the Conservative Movement maintained that, according to Jewish law, life and all its attendant rights begin at birth. Conservative rabbis discussed precisely when those rights were transferred in their discussion of one abortion procedure: an intact dilation and extraction (D&X) performed in the third trimester. The two approved responsa from 2001 and 2003 each came to a different conclusion about when birth is considered to have occurred halakhically because, after that point, this abortion procedure could not be performed unless required to save the life of the mother.23 They agreed, however, that life does not begin until birth.

The second central idea in CJLS teshuvot is that an abortion must be justified. We can see the justification framework originating in the earliest teshuvot on the topic. Klein’s 1983 teshuvah, first published in Conservative Judaism in 1959, provides an early reference to the justification framework. He wrote that “abortion is morally wrong. It should be permitted only for therapeutic reasons.”24 He argued that, because the fetus is “potential life,” there must be a therapeutic reason to support its termination. Although Klein did not say what reasons he would support, he listed several previous legal decisors who permitted abortion in several circumstances. Abelson, whose teshuvah was also approved in 1983, similarly relied on the justification framework. He wrote that “there must be a reason to justify the destruction of the potential person the fetus will become after birth.”25

Several of the teshuvot on abortion considered particular reasons. Abelson explored the question of whether abortion would be permissible after a prenatal test revealed a fetal deformity or illness, and he concluded that there is precedent within the Jewish tradition to permit abortion after a fetal diagnosis. Gordis’s teshuvah supported the legalization of abortion but insisted that abortion is not a universally moral act. He agreed with his colleagues about their determinations regarding “therapeutic” abortions and added to the list pregnancies conceived out of rape or incest. He argued that these victims should not be forced to continue pregnancies conceived out of trauma.26 The last teshuvah approved by the CJLS in 1983 was written by Rabbi David Feldman, who agreed with the others that the welfare of the mother—specifically her physical and mental health—must be the focus of any abortion approval.27 Finally, the two teshuvot written in the twenty-first century approved late-term abortion for “maternal cause, when continuation of the pregnancy poses a significant risk to the mother’s physical well-being, as determined by her physician, or in the face of maternal emotional distress, for example as when faced with a fetus with severe abnormalities.”28

The justifications that the CJLS rabbis approved are the PRIM justifications (prenatal health, rape, incest, and maternal health). Meanwhile, they expressed in their teshuvot vehement opposition and judgement toward women who terminated for other reasons. Gordis referred to women who “simply” do not want to have children, or who are motivated to terminate a pregnancy because they do not want to be “burdened by the responsibility of child-raising.” He considered women who terminate for non-PRIM reasons to be procuring “abortion on demand” and violating a “basic ethical principle”—namely the “reverence for life.”29 Feldman connected the question of abortion to the demographic challenges facing Jews. He reminded readers that those who do not procreate are “guilty of bloodshed” and analogized them to those who have “casual abortions.”30 One such “casual abortion” for Feldman is an abortion for economic reasons. In his view, financial difficulty should not justify either birth control or an abortion.31 Even Grossman’s 2003 teshuvah, which permits late-term abortions, states that abortion should not be performed for “the mere convenience of the mother.”32 The rhetoric found in the teshuvot by Conservative rabbis is reminiscent of political anti-abortion rhetoric. It reinforces moral judgments about women who do not want to be mothers, peddling stereotypes that these women are irresponsible about their use of contraception and/or that they are not thinking seriously about the decision to terminate a pregnancy. Additionally, referring to the decision to terminate as one of “convenience” undermines the physical, mental, financial, and intellectual toll of parenting. They see women who terminate because they do not want to be mothers or do not want another child as violating their social and gender norms. This line of thinking is not unique to the CJLS rabbis. In fact, it is prominent in Christian anti-abortion discourse, as shown above. It is even found in medical discourse that distinguishes between elective and therapeutic abortions. Bioethicist Katie Watson argues that this distinction is a “moral judgment dressed up as a medical judgment. Medical versus elective is code for morally justified and morally unjustified, as determined by someone other than the patient and her physician.”33 In other words, the CJLS rabbis were reflecting the moral discourse that was dominant at the time they composed their teshuvot about abortion.

It is not surprising that the CJLS and the RA have been influenced by their surrounding cultural context. Scholars have written extensively about the effect of context in rabbinic rulings and ethical discourse. Although they often use authoritative sources as evidence, a rabbinic decisor or leader ultimately makes their own moral determination based on their experiences.34 It appears, though, that CJLS rabbis were aware of the influence of the Christian Moral Majority and perhaps even welcomed it. Gordis, for example, praised conservative Christian activists for their “zeal and dedication…reminding the American people that moral issues cannot be settled merely by a majority in the legislature or by the decision of judges.”35 According to Kranson, Gordis wanted to position Judaism as a “high” religion. As she explains, “Gordis’s notion of ‘high’ religion, implicitly pitted against ‘low’ religion, referenced a colonialist discourse in which non-Christians were thought to engage in spiritual traditions that celebrated the body and encouraged sexual abandon.”36 Gordis’s concern was that Judaism would cease to be considered a “civilized religion by the American public because of its relatively lax views on abortion.”37 In order to counter this fear, Gordis and other leaders in the Conservative Movement emphasized that Jewish law imposed ethical restrictions on abortion.38 These ethical restrictions, however, reinforced the authors’ own gender and racial norms surrounding reproduction among Jews.

When viewed in this context, we can see how rabbis in the Conservative Movement were responding to the dominant American religious framework. In their teshuvot they distinguished Jewish views on fetal personhood from Catholic views; however, they ultimately aligned themselves with Christian anti-abortion perspectives through their use of the justification framework. When CJLS teshuvot employed the justification framework, they allowed the reason for the abortion to determine the status of the fetus. In cases where the CJLS rabbis determined a reason to be justified, they argued that the fetus’s “potential life” (and not actual life) is what allows for abortion. Their reasoning in these cases is that, because the fetus is not a full life, and because its life is inseparable from the mother’s life, abortion would be permissible. For example, Grossman and Avraham Israel Reisner refer to a fetus that is threatening the mother’s life as “only potential life.”39 Yet other rabbinic responsa use the category of “potential life” to argue that the fetus is a precursor to actual life, and abortion is therefore forbidden. In Feldman’s discussion of abortions that are impermissible, he writes of a “pro-natalist respect for potential life.”40 The difference between their positions on “potential life” is entirely driven by whether they view the reason for the abortion to be justified. In other words, when the reason is justified, the fetus is seen as just potential and not actual. When the reason is not justified, authors of the teshuvot argue that the fetus’s future status as a person makes abortion forbidden. Although this nuanced perspective of fetal life perhaps yields more support for abortion than the Catholic Church’s position, it is clear that the perceived legitimacy or illegitimacy of the reasoning drives the determination of fetal status.41

The RA’s Resolutions: Church and State

In the decades following Roe v. Wade, the RA released ten resolutions and five statements about abortion. The RA is the official public representative of the Conservative rabbinate. Their goals include taking strong moral positions on issues of public concern in order to offer “wise rabbinic voices, grounded in Torah.”42 In some ways, the CJLS responsa informed the rationale for the RA’s resolutions; it is not surprising, then, that the RA repeated the justification framework found within CJLS teshuvot. For example, in 1990 the RA declared: “WHEREAS, Jewish law does in fact, in a number of circumstances, sanction abortion…in cases where continuation of a pregnancy might cause the mother severe physical or psychological harm, or when the foetus is judged by competent medical opinion as severely defective.”43 The RA reprinted this line in their resolution on reproductive freedom in 1993, again in 2007, 2012, and most recently in 2022. Other resolutions did not repeat this phrase verbatim but stated Jewish legal support for abortion when a mother’s life is at risk. At the same time, these declarations restate Jewish legal prohibitions on abortion. For example, in 1993 they wrote: “Whereas Jewish law does not permit abortion on demand.”44 Additionally, in 2007, the RA’s resolution on reproductive freedom stated that “Jewish law does not condone or permit abortion for contraceptive purposes.”45

The RA has, however, also expressed broad support for abortion and reproductive rights, often in ways that are contrary to the positions of the CJLS. For example, in 1993 the RA supported the Freedom of Choice Act.46 Although it was never passed into law, this bill would have codified a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy for any reason until fetal viability, which was not in line with CJLS responsa. In 2007 the RA’s resolution “urged its members to support full access for all women to the entire spectrum of reproductive healthcare.”47 They reprinted this resolution in 2012 and again in 2019, reflecting a much more lenient position on abortion than the CJLS teshuvot permit. In their resolution in the spring of 2021, the RA expressed support for abortion access in several ways, including the expansion of telehealth options and medically induced abortions. These abortions in the first trimester are most often for reasons that the CJLS does not permit.48 In September 2021, after Texas passed SB8, misleadingly known as the “heartbeat bill,” which made abortion illegal after approximately six weeks gestation, the RA denounced the law and stressed repeatedly that it violates a “woman’s right to choose” abortion.49 This value—that a woman has the right to choose an abortion—is contrary to the CJLS teshuvot, which make it clear that abortion is permitted only in certain circumstances as determined by rabbinic authorities. In fact, several months later, in response to an RA member inquiring about Jewish legal positions on abortion, CJLS chair Rabbi Elliot N. Dorff and co-chair Rabbi Pamela Barmash clarify that “neither viability nor a woman’s right to choose is the basis of Jewish law on abortion.”50 It is therefore surprising that the RA uses the responsa discussed above as rationale for their resolutions.

The dissonance between the rationale and the resolution in so many of the RA’s public statements about abortion can be explained by the RA’s concern about a separate but overlapping issue in the public sphere—namely, the separation between church and state. This concern is a value that the RA stressed in various resolutions in the decades prior to the legalization of abortion and since then. In the case of abortion, though, it took two different forms. In the earlier statements, the RA saw religion (Judaism and Christianity) as a force that imposed moral restrictions on abortion that were not consistent with the US legal framework. While they expressed support for the legalization of abortion, they also wanted to make clear that Judaism provides moral guidance that differed from US law. In the 1990 resolution on “Abortion Rights,” they repeated Jewish legal positions and then stated that they oppose government laws imposing restrictions where personal moral or religious choices may differ. This resolution supports a “woman’s right to abortion” while also urging Conservative rabbis to represent the Conservative rabbinate’s position on abortion.51 The following year, they released another statement about abortion, here making it even more clear that religious positions on abortion will differ from political positions. They wrote: “Whereas the free exercise of a legal right, like abortion, may, under certain circumstances, violate halakhic standards, therefore be it resolved that the Rabbinical Assembly, in Convention assembled, take pains to distinguish, in the media and from the pulpit, between politics and the halakha of abortion.”52 Still aligning Jewish moral views on abortion with Christian views, the RA nonetheless supported legal access to abortion. This is in line with Gordis’s position that abortion should be “legally available but ethically restricted.”53 The ethical restriction should, in Gordis’s view and that of the RA, come from religion.

The RA’s support for the separation of church and state took a different form in later statements. By the early 2000s it was clear to them that restrictive abortion regulations were the result of the Christian Right’s influence on the US government. As such, the resolutions in the first and second decades of the twenty-first century linked their support for reproductive freedom with support for religious freedom. For example, in 2007 they reasoned: “Whereas to deny a woman and her family full access to the complete spectrum of reproductive healthcare, including contraception, abortion-inducing devices, and abortions, among others, on religious grounds is to deprive these women of their Constitutional right to religious freedom.”54 The 2019 “Statement on Reproductive Freedom” repeated this claim. Another example followed the 2014 Supreme Court ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby, a decision that allowed for-profit employers to be exempt from regulations that contradict their religious beliefs, including providing contraception as part of the health care coverage. The RA released a statement in response to this decision wherein they strongly condemned imposing an employer’s religious beliefs on their employees.55 Finally, in 2021, in their condemnation of Texas law SB8, the RA pledged to “work to overturn this egregious law and return the right to choose and religious freedom back to women in Texas and to all others similarly seeking to overturn these rights which are guaranteed under the US Constitution.”56 By the twenty-first century, the RA was no longer aligning Judaism and Christianity in their moral opposition to abortion; instead, they opposed implementing Christian views on abortion and advocated for religious freedom.57

In sum, although the RA claimed to base their public positions about abortion on CJLS teshuvot, they were in fact influenced by the way the Christian Right had shaped the debate in their cultural context. When the Christian Right was only influencing moral attitudes, the RA aligned with their position on the immorality of abortion even while supporting the legality of abortion. At this point, they saw Judaism and Christianity as having identical moral attitudes about abortion. Once it became clear that the Christian Right was shaping legislation about abortion, the RA advocated for religious freedom and distanced Judaism from Christianity. In fact, even as the RA acknowledged the conservative positions of the CJLS, they aligned themselves with liberal values in the public sphere and distanced themselves from conservative religious views about abortion, even those expressed by their own rabbinic authorities.

The RA resolutions and the CJLS teshuvot come to different conclusions about the permissibility of abortion and seem to have different ideas about the relationship between Judaism and Christianity on this issue. Yet, they both reify the authority of halakhah for determining the permissibility of abortion within Judaism. Although other teshuvot and many resolutions make use of sociological and anthropological data, the responsa and resolutions about abortion are lacking in this area. In this way, the Conservative Jewish discourse about abortion is similar to the public discourse. For decades, our understanding of religion and abortion has been primarily composed of dogmatic religious statements. In recent years, however, people have been sharing their abortion stories. In 2016, Renee Bracey Sherman founded We Testify, an organization that helps people share their abortion experiences and increases public understanding of abortion.58 Christian women have also come forward with their abortion stories.59 In the section that follows, I share Jewish abortion stories and analyze how they offer an alternative source of information for Conservative Jewish positions on abortion.

An Alternative: Women’s Experiences

The abortion narratives featured in this section have all been shared in widely accessible publications. These stories represent just a fraction of Jewish abortion stories, but, until very recently, there has not been an official way for Jewish people to share their experiences of abortion.60 Reading these experiences, it becomes clear that the halakhic response is not satisfactorily responding to the needs of Jews who terminate pregnancies. Moreover, I will demonstrate that the justification framework does harm to Jewish women by reinforcing a stigma around abortion. Finally, we will see that Jewish women have constructed alternative ways of reading Jewish texts and constructing Jewish rituals around abortion. I maintain that these abortions are no less Jewish than those deemed halakhically permissible by the CJLS. I argue that these diverse accounts of Jews having abortions are the primary appropriate source for ethical and halakhic reasoning about abortion. In order to begin to rectify the problems articulated above with the Conservative Movement’s position on abortion, we must first center the voices of those who have terminated pregnancies.

Fetal Diagnosis and Maternal Health

Fetal diagnosis and maternal health, respectively, account for approximately 12% and 13% of abortions performed in the United States. Despite these relatively low numbers, the majority of public narratives of Jewish women who have terminated pregnancies contain a diagnosis of fetal deformity or a situation in which an abortion will save a woman’s life or health.61 This does not necessarily mean that most abortions among Jews are the result of these two circumstances. Instead, it might mean that many Jewish women view these to be more acceptable reasons for abortion, which I hypothesize is attributable to the fact that Jewish law—as publicly framed by the opinions studied above—explicitly permits abortions for fetal diagnosis or maternal health. When women understand Jewish law to permit an abortion in a given case, it has the effect of reducing the stigma and shame that already permeates pregnancy termination in the United States.62

For example, most of the abortion stories in an anonymous collection of accounts from Orthodox Jewish women surround fetal diagnoses. In these narratives, women spoke about the comfort they received from a halakhic system that permitted their abortions. One woman talked extensively about the hurdles surrounding her abortion. She had to travel to another state in order to procure an abortion in the third trimester. Yet she stated:

Baruch Hashem, we had a rav, a wonderful posek, who was really amazing, who helped us through the entire process, helped us understand this experience through Halacha. We found so much comfort in the fact that Halacha had an answer, a system with which we could deal with the loss.63

Rabbi Jaclyn Cohen, who was ordained at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in 2014, wrote about her abortion for Kveller in 2020. Her narrative reveals that she felt confident there was sufficient halakhic support for her abortion. Cohen was married and had one child, a son, when she terminated a pregnancy due to a diagnosis that determined the fetus to be incompatible with life. Several doctors told her that, if she continued the pregnancy and miscarried, she would be risking physical complications and suffer emotional anguish. Cohen had experienced postpartum depression with her first pregnancy, and she feared that she might suffer even more severely if she continued the pregnancy. She wrote:

And so, I chose life. My life. My son’s and my husband’s lives. Our family’s collective life. I took the science being offered me and I listened. As painful as it was, and as heartbroken as I felt, I listened. I recalled my own education, from adolescence up through rabbinical school, on Judaism’s nuanced approach to abortion. In the our post-biblical pre-Talmudic sacred text, we read: “If a woman is in hard labor [that threatens her life]… her life takes precedence over its life.” In other words, the health and well-being of the mother is of utmost importance, even64

Cohen’s story supports the CJLS rulings that a mother’s mental and physical health take precedence over the potential life of the fetus. She even quotes the same mishnah that many of the CJLS teshuvot referenced. These two examples demonstrate that women are comforted by the knowledge that normative readings of halakhah support their decisions.

Although many people may be pleased to know that Jewish law supports their decision to terminate after a fetal diagnosis, or to preserve maternal health, these narratives also reveal that halakhah has not adequately responded to their emotional needs. In the fall of 2021, Jodi Rudoren, editor-in-chief of the Forward, wrote about her abortions. Rudoren terminated two pregnancies. The first was after she received a poor fetal diagnosis. Rudoren consulted many medical specialists before the termination, and she consulted a rabbi when considering what to do with the fetal remains. Rudoren was reading online discussion boards where other people in her situation had given their fetuses names or held funerals for them. When she asked her rabbi whether they needed to do something like that, he responded: “No…. The aborted fetus should be considered medical waste, not a person. No name, no Jewish burial—unless doing those things would help us cope, in which case it probably wasn’t prohibited.”65 It is not clear from Rudoren’s article whether she would have liked some sort of ritual, but other women do express remorse at the callousness with which their rabbis seem to deal with these abortions. One Orthodox Jewish woman explained:

Delivering the baby was another hell. My rabbi came and took the body, had it prepared and buried. I went home to deal with lying to everyone that I’d had a miscarriage. Even though I know I did everything right, asked all the right professionals, I knew people would be aghast.66

For Rudoren and others, Jewish legal support for these abortions did not necessarily translate into emotional and psychological support for the complex emotions surrounding them. The CJLS teshuvot and the prevalence of particular Jewish ideas surrounding abortion leave little space for the nuance that many people feel when they terminate a wanted pregnancy. Rudoren and others who terminate for medical reasons often grieve their loss. Yet Jewish law as interpreted by the CJLS has determined that a fetus’s status is insignificant when an abortion is justified, as would be the case for Rudoren. Many people who terminate wanted pregnancies often find that, although they know abortion was the right decision, they do not think their fetus was insignificant.67 Unfortunately, religious authorities and communities that are familiar with the halakhic permissibility of abortion after a poor fetal diagnosis may not offer the emotional support that people often need after a termination of this kind.

Not Wanting A(nother) Child

Current Conservative Jewish readings of halakhah do not support women seeking abortions because they do not want a child, because they do not want a child now, or because they cannot afford a child. Yet these are the most common reasons that people in America terminate pregnancies.68 The CJLS teshuvot demonize people who terminate out of concern for their financial or educational future and claim that this is a decision made out of “convenience.” These judgements reflect a misunderstanding about the physical and financial long-term impacts of pregnancy and childbirth.69 The Turnaway Study, a longitudinal study of women who were denied abortions, reveals that these women were significantly worse off physically and financially, and that their children’s well-being was negatively affected.70 This study, completed in 2018, was not available to prior generations of Conservative rabbis, particularly those who wrote the teshuvot discussed in this article, but these data call for a reevaluation.

There are some, although admittedly fewer, narratives from Jewish women who terminated unwanted pregnancies. Yet the stories we have represent a range of reasons why people terminate unwanted pregnancies. The narratives reveal that Jewish women decided to terminate out of concern for their educational goals, their professional goals, and the well-being of their future children. These narratives also reveal that, although women fear the stigma surrounding their decision, they also come to see their decisions as sacred moments in their lives. Jewish women who have terminated unplanned pregnancies are not callously doing so, as the CJLS teshuvot claim or imply. Instead, they are seriously considering the responsibility of raising a child and charting a course for their life and the lives of their other (or future) children.

One of the first published Jewish abortion narratives came from Sarah Tuttle-Singer, who had an abortion while she was a student at University of California, Berkeley. She expressed shame as a Jewish college student who wanted to terminate a pregnancy. “And while I sat there, vaguely nauseous and needing to pee (for the third time that hour) I avoided eye contact with the students walking by. After all, Nice Jewish Girls don’t get knocked up freshman year of college.”71 In other words, getting pregnant in college was not something that Tuttle-Singer thought was acceptable for her as a Jew. She told the social worker that she did not want to be pregnant, but that she could not afford the abortion. Fortunately, the social worker told her about a Jewish organization that provided abortion funds. Tuttle-Singer did not have to provide any reason for her abortion in order to access the funds. The support of this Jewish philanthropy not only helped her pay for her abortion, it also normalized her decision. She explained: “For the first time since I found out I was pregnant, I realized that I wasn’t the first—nor would I be the last—knocked up Nice Jewish Girl.”72 She stayed in school after the abortion, taught Hebrew school, had children, and eventually made aliyah.

In 2021 Rabbi Rachael Pass wrote about her accidental conception and her decision to terminate. Her narrative is replete with references to Jewish holidays, biblical quotes, and a miqveh ritual to mark the termination. Pass certainly saw this abortion as a Jewish decision, although she recognized that her reason would not be supported by Jewish law. She wrote:

You may have noticed that my abortion story is very Jewish. Everything from the timing of the accidental conception to the decision and procedure itself was brimming with my Jewish practice, learning and living. It is impossible to extricate my Judaism from my abortion. And yet you might also assume that my abortion would not have been Jewishly “okay,” permissible under halacha, or Jewish law, because I simply did not want to be pregnant—because mine is the kind of abortion that anti-choicers most disdain.73

Pass continued by citing the “standard Jewish line on abortion” that a mother’s life comes before the life of the fetus. She used this line to provide support for her abortion, despite the fact that it fell outside the bounds of traditional halakhic support. Pass wrote: “What does it mean that the life of the pregnant person comes before that of the fetus? …It means that the primary consideration in the Jewish question of abortion is the needs of the person giving birth, their life, their health and their dignity.”74 Pass expanded Jewish legal support for abortion to any circumstance in which a pregnant person deems it necessary. She became the arbiter of her own experience.

The CJLS teshuvot claim that women who terminate pregnancies because they do not want to be pregnant are doing so casually and callously. Yet narratives reveal that people are not making these decisions casually. In fact, they see these decisions within a Jewish ritual framework. When the pregnancy test revealed that she was pregnant, Rabbi Pass whispered the asher yatsar blessing, which she understands to recognize that God created human beings with wisdom. She then created rituals surrounding the abortion and referred to her abortion as a “blessing.” After she terminated the pregnancy, she wrote that “there is nothing more sacred than the right to live one’s life as one chooses.”75

Deborah Eisenbach-Budner also created a Jewish ritual for her abortion. When she found herself unintentionally pregnant at forty, she did not know what she was going to do. She was married with two small children, and her life was in a period of transition. She and her husband debated whether they wanted a third child. Eisenbach-Budner writes that she was pro-choice politically, but, as she considered Jewish texts and her previous pregnancies, she felt that “spiritually speaking” she was pro-life. She and her husband ultimately decided to terminate the pregnancy, and when they did, they both cried. She tried to find Jewish prayers to sanctify the abortion, but she said that “the little I found addressed only losses that followed ‘medically necessary’ procedures. I knew I needed to bring a sense of kedusha, of blessing and wholeness, to the abortion while I was experiencing it.”76 They ultimately wrote their own prayer and have shared it with others. The prayer acknowledges and thanks God for the power and responsibility to choose life. Eisenbach-Budner’s narrative reveals that, through the abortion, they chose their lives, their children’s lives, and their relationship together.77

For Pass, Eisenbach-Budner, Tuttle-Singer, and many other Jewish people, these choices are neither casual nor callous. While some people certainly feel like making the decision to terminate is clear, this does not mean it is done without emotion. More and more we see that people who decide to terminate know what it is they want from their lives and are making this decision after great consideration. More to the point, as their narratives make clear, their decisions are Jewish choices. They identify strongly as Jews making these decisions, they use Jewish texts to think about their decision, and they mark these experiences using the tools and traditions of Jewish ritual. They also search for Jewish communal support for their abortion. Some even find it. For them, and for many Conservative Jews, Judaism is not made up solely of halakhah, and Jewish perspectives on abortion are not created by reading halakhic texts. When we take these narratives seriously as Jewish perspectives on abortion, we learn that Jewish views on abortion are much more expansive and nuanced than the Conservative halakhic teachings have allowed.

Conclusions: Toward a Jewish Reproductive Justice

The argument I have advanced in this article is that the Conservative Movement’s official rabbinic authorities should write new teshuvot about abortion and make public resolutions that reflect these new positions. These teshuvot, statements, and resolutions should center the lived experiences of Jews who have terminated pregnancies.78 Doing so will validate the experiences of many Jews who do not see how their abortions—their reproductive experiences—fit within their Jewish identity and their Jewish community. It will also bring the Conservative Movement to the movement for reproductive justice. Although women of color had been advocating for reproductive justice for decades, the term and its principles were coined in 1994 by twelve Black women. The movement understands bodily autonomy as a human rights issue. The movement also centers the experiences of those most vulnerable to reproductive injustice, and its principles reflect the many ways in which the people have been reproductively oppressed. Aware of the history of forced sterilization of women of color, then, they advocate for the rights of individuals to not have children, to have children if they want, and to raise their children in a healthy and safe environment.79

As seen in many of the narratives above, Jewish women express their bodily autonomy by making decisions to terminate pregnancies. Advocating for reproductive justice means supporting an individual’s bodily autonomy. Some might say that the halakhic system cannot sustain an argument for bodily autonomy. Yet there is evidence that rabbis have respected women’s autonomy over abortion decisions in the past. Rabbi Margo Hughes-Robinson wrote of an eighteenth century rabbi in Algiers, Rabbi Yehuda ibn Ayyash, whose teshuvah about abortion prioritized the legal subjectivity of women. The teshuvah starts with Ibn Ayyash noting that women in his community are already having abortions, and none has asked for his permission. He ultimately continued to permit the practice and, as Hughes-Robinson writes, rooted his analysis “in the lived experience of pregnant people, listening to their concerns about their bodies and their families.”80 Ibn Ayyash emphasized that women can make this decision based on their embodied experiences and their family’s priorities.

The justification framework has done considerable damage to people who have had abortions. It has created a system where people are shamed for having abortions that others consider “unjustified.” This has led to a culture of stigma around pregnancy termination. Women are effectively told that they are meant to get pregnant and have children, and the only way out of an unwanted pregnancy is if that pregnancy meets certain criteria. Moreover, by requiring that one justify their abortion, the framework does not respect an individual’s autonomy over their body. Rabbis in the Conservative Movement should listen to the experiences of Jews who have had abortions and allow those voices to inform their rabbinic positions. New teshuvot from the movement should start by prioritizing reproductive experiences and creating a framework that moves away from justification and toward justice.

Michal Raucher, Ph.D., is Associate Professor and Undergraduate Director of the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University.

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Prologue

This article seeks to explore the factors that led to the rise of Conservative Judaism as the dominant American Jewish movement from the immediate postwar period until the last decade of the twentieth century and the circumstances that precipitated a dramatic change in its standing in the twenty-first century. The common yet competitive connections between Conservative and Orthodox Judaism from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s and Conservative Judaism’s subsequent but gradual adoption of innovations that originated in the Reform Movement while preserving its commitment to halakhah comprise key foci of this study. Inextricably linked to these developments is the changing role of halakhah in Conservative Judaism. Many trends are inchoate and identifying areas for further research constitutes an integral goal of this study.

A Prescient Beginning

The inaugural issue of the journal Conservative Judaism possesses a jarring date: January 1945. The end of World War II was still on the horizon. In Europe, the Battle of the Bulge, the last major Nazi offensive, was challenging the Allied advance; in the Pacific, Okinawa, the bloodiest battle of that theater, had yet to commence. Military planners were designing the ensuing invasion of Japan, with estimates of catastrophic casualties and no end to the war until 1947. The term “genocide” had just been invented, and most did not know the full extent of the mechanized mass murder of Jews that would come to be known as the Holocaust.1

In a prescient introduction to the journal, Robert Gordis (1908–92) of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) systematically identified the challenges facing American Judaism generally and Conservative Judaism in particular.2 While noting the increasing religious identification of Jewish soldiers, especially with Conservative Judaism, he succinctly pinpointed the movement’s deficiencies: weakness of organization, absence of a clearly enunciated philosophy, and widespread lack of success in its educational program.3 He even made note of the inapt name of the movement, an issue that has grown more pertinent in a politically divided society. Gordis nevertheless saw Conservative Judaism as the leading movement in postwar American Judaism:

No other group in American Judaism has grown as steadily and rapidly as Conservative Judaism. Orthodox Judaism has been, in recent years, becoming increasingly aggressive, often insisting on underlining a kind of isolationism almost Catholic in character. Yet it has steadily been losing ground, with growing numbers of orthodox rabbis going to conservative congregations, a situation true of the reform rabbinate as well, before the Chaplaincy absorbed a large number of the recent graduates. Reform Judaism has been holding its own only because of new accretions from traditionalist ranks, attracted chiefly by its social prestige or the personality of individual rabbis. On the other hand, Conservative Judaism has steadily gone forward in the number of its congregations, sisterhoods and men’s clubs throughout the country.4

Gordis did not take Conservative Judaism’s success for granted:

Many Jewish service men have for the first time been brought into contact with Jewish religious life. Their Jewish pride has been stimulated, their sense of Jewish comradeship strengthened…. All indications are that when demobilization sets in, the returning service men will at least at the beginning come to the synagogue and the rabbi for guidance and inspiration. If we have a vital program of spirituality and content to offer, they will be saved to Judaism forever. If not they will soon relapse into the old indifference.5

Gordis personified that rare combination of congregational rabbi and rigorous scholar. As an academic activist, he proposed incisive hypotheses and then personally tested them through implementation. Although well known as an influential biblical scholar, he embraced the role of religious philosopher. Conservative Jewish education in the 1940s consisted of three days a week of post–public school religious education plus Shabbat attendance. Gordis considered this regimen woefully inadequate and proposed a fourth day and a stronger curriculum, yet he declared that only a day-school education could provide sufficient Jewish learning, particularly in Hebrew.

Gordis saw the postwar potential of Conservative Judaism. He had witnessed the blossoming of the movement in the aftermath of World War I and the subsequent halt to such progress with the advent of the Great Depression.6

An Uneasy Commonality:
The Overlap and Competition of Orthodox and Conservative Judaism

On the eve of World War II, Conservative Judaism and what would come to be called Modern Orthodox Judaism overlapped theologically, halakhically, and in praxis. Many of their congregants strove for precise halakhic observance, and some achieved it. Many others were bound by a nostalgic and sincere but inconsistent commitment to observance. Although not unknown in Jewish history, the peculiarly American, paradoxical, even oxymoronic reality of nonobservant Orthodox Jews has attracted scholarly acknowledgement and analysis.7 Whether driven by financial necessity or social pressure, whether qualifying the nonobservant Orthodox person as tinoq shenishbah, mumar leteiʾavon, or even mumar lekhol haTorah, the phenomenon often linked interwar and postwar Orthodox Jews to their Conservative counterparts.8

In 1926–27, that similarity facilitated a serious attempt to unite JTS and the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS). It would be the first of two projects aimed at producing substantive halakhic cooperation between Conservative and Orthodox Judaism in America. (The second would converge on the problem of the ʿagunah, which receives attention later in this article.) The lack of consistent halakhic observance by much of the laity of both the Conservative and Orthodox communities reinforced the impression among some leading Jewish communal leaders that RIETS could be merged with JTS. Louis Marshall, perhaps the most influential Jewish lay leader of the day, initiated correspondence and meetings between financial supporters of JTS and RIETS as well as their presidents, Cyrus Adler and Bernard Revel, respectively.9 In theory, the merger seemed feasible.

On the surface, the institutions’ presidents seem to have much in common. Adler (1863–1940) was born in America, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, and earned the first American Ph.D. in Semitics at Johns Hopkins University (1887).10 In 1908 he became president of the newly established Dropsie College and remained in that role for the rest of his life. After the death of Solomon Schechter in 1915, Adler became acting president of JTS in 1916 and president in 1924. He led both institutions simultaneously until his death in 1940. A prolific scholar, Adler was a founder of the Jewish Publication Society (1888) and the American Jewish Historical Society (1892). He edited the American Jewish Yearbook (1899–1905) and was a departmental editor of The Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–06).11

Revel (1885–1940), a Lithuania-trained rabbi who had attended the Telz yeshiva and received semikhah at the age of sixteen, came to the United States in 1906. In 1912, he received the first Ph.D. granted by Dropsie College. In 1915, he left a family business to accept the dual roles of president and rosh yeshiva of RIETS. In those capacities, he framed RIETS’s academic structure, oversaw the emergence of Yeshiva College (YC) in 1928, the building of its campus in Washington Heights, and the establishment of its various divisions, including the graduate school that would posthumously bear his name.12

Both Adler and Revel were master builders and visionaries who maintained their scholarly output while administering and planning the growth of institutions that would become centers of Jewish scholarship and the training of rabbis and other klei qodesh.13 Yet, if one examines the educational philosophy of these leaders and their institutions, it becomes clear that the merger of JTS and RIETS was doomed from its inception.

Adler and Revel intersected at the nexus of Dropsie College, but their disparate connections to that institution dramatize their differences.14 For several decades after its founding in 1907 and its opening in 1909, Dropsie College was the only nontheological institution in the United States that offered the Ph.D. in Judaic studies. Revel’s dissertation, “The Karaite Halakhah and Its Relation to Sadducean, Samaritan, and Philonian Halakhah,” granted under Adler’s presidency, refuted Abraham Geiger, a key figure in the promotion of Wissenschaft des Judentums. Further, Revel had sought to found an organization that would unite Jewish academicians under Orthodox auspices, to the exclusion of non-Orthodox scholars, and even invited Adler, a devout Jew, to join.15

Adler had helped to bring Schechter to JTS from Cambridge, saw critical scholarship as central, and felt that JTS was broad enough in scope to accommodate faculty with relatively radical ideas. Schechter’s discovery and publications regarding the Cairo Genizah, his standing as Reader in Rabbinics at Cambridge (1894) and Professor of Hebrew at University College London (1897) fulfilled the ideals of earlier practitioners of Wissenschaft who saw the university as the rightful place of Jewish studies.16 Schechter himself enthusiastically espoused Wissenschaft and the critical analysis of texts and history it advocates as a “Temple of Truth.”17

Schechter and Adler evinced an openness to a wide spectrum of colleagues. Schechter invited Hebrew Union College (HUC) President Kaufmann Kohler to the dedication of the JTS campus (1903) and spoke at the opening of HUC’s new campus in 1913.18 Although opposed to Reform Judaism, he worked amicably with Kohler on the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–6) and even attended an outing with Kohler and radical Reform Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch.19

Adler built on Schechter’s academic edifice of scholarly respect and ideological diversity and thus resisted attacks on JTS’s most radical faculty member, Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1983).20 Born in Lithuania, the son of a Volozhin-trained rabbi, Kaplan was ordained at JTS in 1902. At that time, JTS was seen as a seminary for training Orthodox rabbis, albeit rabbis with university training, fluent in English, and accustomed to American culture. Kaplan took an educational position at Kehillath Jeshurun. In 1908, while on his honeymoon in Europe, Kaplan received semikhah from Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines (1839–1915). Reines, a founder and the first head of Mizrachi, was also a product of the Volozhin yeshiva, Lithuanian Jewry’s elite and most selective rabbinic center of learning.21 Despite his pedigree and Orthodox bona fides, Kaplan was already ambivalent about Orthodoxy and in 1909 willingly accepted Schechter’s invitation to become principal of JTS’s newly established Teachers Institute. Kaplan also served as the first rabbi of New York’s (Orthodox) Jewish Center, from its opening in 1918 until 1922, when his personal conflicts and disagreements with members led to his decision to resign. Kaplan’s rejection of Orthodoxy had become more pronounced, and, that same year, 1922, he organized the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, the synagogue vehicle that helped pioneer his development of Reconstructionist Judaism. Judaism as a Civilization (1934) laid out its program.22 Throughout this ideological evolution, Kaplan remained a key faculty member at JTS under Adler.

Kaplan’s (a)theological radicalism, which culminated in his rejection of a personal God who acts in human affairs, reached a defining moment with the publication of Reconstructionism’s Sabbath Prayer Book (1945).23 The work garnered no small share of popular criticism and led Agudath Ha-Rabbonim, the union of staunchly Orthodox rabbis, to issue a dramatic and immediate excommunication (ḥerem) of Kaplan, with one of its members burning the siddur.24 The ḥerem sealed Kaplan’s standing as a lightning rod among the most stringent elements of Orthodoxy, elements that were and remained integral to RIETS’s identity and mission. Yet his dramatic excommunication had an unintended consequence: it publicly revealed that leading members of JTS’s Talmud faculty were committed to defending Kaplan’s right to his views and, by extension, to academic freedom.

Since 1902, Louis Ginzberg (1873–1953) had led and built JTS’s renowned Talmud department, the pride and nexus of the Seminary. A product of the Lithuanian yeshivot of Telz and Slobodka, he also earned a doctorate at University of Heidelberg in 1898. Ambivalent about Wissenschaft des Judentums, he was nevertheless a committed advocate of the “Positive-Historical School” that became the Conservative Movement. Committed to the principles of Zacharias Frankel and the pedagogical method of the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar Fraenckel’sche Stiftung in Breslau, he produced rigorous critical scholarship. A descendent of Abraham, the brother of the Vilna Gaon, Ginzberg was a polymath who possessed the exquisite Lithuanian rabbinic credentials that made him formidable in Orthodox circles.

Ginzberg and Kaplan were “lifelong combatants.”25 Ginzberg served as the primary decisor of halakhic questions (poseq) for the Conservative Movement until 1927, when Kaplan and others succeeded in replacing him in his role as chief poseq with the Committee on Jewish Law of the Rabbinical Assembly (RA).26 Nevertheless, when the Agudath Ha-Rabbonim issued its ḥerem against Kaplan in 1945, Ginzberg, Saul Lieberman, and Alexander Marx opposed it in English and Hebrew publications, although they also critiqued and condemned Kaplan’s siddur.27

In retrospect, the proposed merger of JTS and RIETS was naïve. Kaplan’s evolving personal theology and concept of Judaism as a civilization in the 1920s made him a major stumbling block in the 1926–27 merger negotiations. The interlocutors acknowledged this fact at the time, but the greater barrier was methodological and theological, Wissenschaft versus the traditional talmudic exegesis and Breslau versus Volozhin.28

Ironically, the rabbinic representatives of the two institutions, Ginzberg and Revel, possessed similar Lithuanian talmudic backgrounds as well as the rare brilliance that marked that elite community. It was no coincidence that RIETS was named for Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Spektor (1817–96) who gave semikhah to many Volozhin-trained scholars and, in the 1880s and 1890s, encouraged them to go to America to serve communities in halakhic need.29 It was no coincidence that leading members of JTS’s Talmud faculty were either trained in Lithuania (Ginzberg in Volozhin, Lieberman in Slobodka) or students of those who were, but they also were committed to the critical methodology instilled by their university training.

To a significant degree, RIETS developed in response to its competition with JTS. In 1886, Russian Jews had established Yeshivat Etẓ Chaim, an elementary school, and in 1897, Rabbis Moses Matlin, Yehuda David Bernstein, and David Abramowitz founded RIETS as the first advanced yeshiva in the United States. RIETS became an amalgamation of both in 1915.

By 1902, the number of Orthodox rabbis who had been trained in Europe and come to the United States in the late nineteenth century was sufficient to establish a rabbinic association, the Agudath Ha-Rabbonim. On July 29, sixty Orthodox rabbis hailing from Lithuania, Russia, Poland, and Austria-Hungary met in New York City. They came from around the United States and Canada, from cities including Montreal, Toronto, Bangor, Des Moines, Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, Omaha, and Denver.30 Many, if not all, were the Orthodox rabbinic heads of their respective communities with the title of av beit din. Membership in the Agudath Ha-Rabbonim required yadin yadin ordination from a European luminary, rabbinic leadership of an Orthodox congregation, and a commitment to using Yiddish almost exclusively.31

By instituting a Volozhin-like, Yiddish-speaking curriculum and eschewing practical rabbinic training or secular learning, Agudath Ha-Rabbonim sought to make RIETS the counterbalance to JTS and even the budding Orthodox Union among whose leaders were Henry Pereira Mendes and Bernard Drachman, former JTS faculty members whom Schechter had fired. Those dismissals added a personal dimension to Orthodoxy’s ideological opposition to JTS and its rabbinic graduates. As Michael R. Cohen has observed, “[t]heir estrangement from the Seminary orbit helped split the modern Orthodox world in two, and…would have vast implications on the separation of Orthodox and Conservative Judaism in the ensuing decades.” 32

Crafted and to some degree controlled by members of the Agudath Ha-Rabbonim, RIETS’s curriculum did not play well with students seeking positions in the American rabbinate. Indeed, from 1906 to 1908, some RIETS students engaged in strikes. More importantly, some decamped for JTS. The competitive threat of JTS to RIETS did not go unnoticed or unanswered by the Agudath Ha-Rabbonim. In 1904, it issued a ḥerem against any synagogue that employed a JTS graduate.

Rabbi Bernard L. Levinthal (1864–1952) of Philadelphia was among the supporters of the ḥerem, yet indicative of both the overlap and separation between Orthodox and Conservative Judaism. A central if ambivalent leader of the European-trained Orthodox rabbis who founded Agudath Ha-Rabbonim and established RIETS and its early curriculum, Levinthal had studied at the yeshivot of Bialystok, Vilna, and Kovno and had received semikhah from Rabbi Spektor. Having arrived in the United States in 1891, he was the de facto chief rabbi of Philadelphia. Jeffrey Gurock has described him as his “era’s most ambivalent, conflicted, and perhaps hypocritical immigrant rabbi.”33 Despite his support of the 1904 ḥerem, he nevertheless accepted the decision of his son, Israel, to attend and receive ordination from JTS (1910). This inconsistency may be due in part to the fluid denominational identity of JTS in the first decade of the twentieth century. It may also be reflected in Schechter’s view of JTS as a seminary training rabbis who could serve Orthodox congregations, as well as in Schechter’s general discomfort with such labels. As Mel Scult stated it, “For Schechter’s generation, the words Conservative and Orthodox are used interchangeably.”34

Orthodoxy’s impact on JTS did not stop with its faculty. From the late 1920s until well into the postwar period, many of RIETS best students came to JTS. Israel Levinthal’s choice to attend JTS was indicative of an increasing trend. Revel’s assumption of leadership in 1915 and his curricular revisions quelled some of the student discontent, but the exodus to JTS continued.35 Beginning in the 1920s, RIETS suffered an ongoing brain drain of rabbinical students to JTS, by then its arch-competitor. Despite the formal establishment of YC in 1928, that trend increased with the Great Depression. Between 1938 and 1945, 37% of Seminary graduates came from YC.36 In 1936, two of JTS’s five rabbinic graduates had yeshiva backgrounds; in 1938, five of eight did; in 1939, five of eight had studied at YC’s college or high school. Nevertheless, a YC background was no guarantee of admission to JTS. In these same years, between 20% and 35% of those rejected for admission to JTS had come from YC.37

Even more momentous than the migration to JTS, the quality of the students who came proved transformative for JTS, Conservative Judaism, and RIETS itself. Gordis personified JTS’s capacity to attract RIETS’s best. He had attended RIETS’s Talmudical Academy for high school where his teachers identified him as profoundly gifted in Talmud.38 He completed a bachelor’s degree at City College of New York and a Ph.D. at Dropsie College before entering JTS, from which he was ordained after two and a half years in 1932 at the age of twenty-four.39 In 1937, he was appointed to the faculty of JTS, teaching Bible and philosophy of religion. While at JTS, Gordis served as a student rabbi at Temple Beth El of Rockaway Park, Queens, where he remained as rabbi for thirty-eight years. There he attacked the lacunae he had identified in his 1945 introductory article for the first issue of Conservative Judaism. In 1951, he opened the Beth El Day School, the second Conservative Jewish day school.40

Gordis personified the phenomenon whereby JTS attracted the best of YC, but he was not alone. Between 1946 and 1957, 60% of those accepted into the graduate rabbinical program came from Orthodox homes. For those who completed their rabbinical training in JTS’s elite four-year program, YC was the primary baccalaureate institution. In that same period, 51 out of 162 rabbinical students came from YC. By the mid-1960s, 20% came from Orthodox homes. By 1972, two members of JTS’s graduating rabbinic class had received their bachelor’s degrees at YC.41 By the late 1970s, virtually no one had.42 The numbers are stark, but they do not reveal the full impact of this history. Many who received their undergraduate training at YC and later trained at JTS became distinguished members of JTS’s faculty—for example, Max Arzt, Gerson D. Cohen, Shaye J. D. Cohen, Mayer Rabinowitz, and Jack Wertheimer.43

The influence of an Orthodox upbringing and especially a YC/YU education on interwar and postwar Conservative Judaism did not stop with the JTS faculty and students. Congregational rabbis with such backgrounds played key roles in molding the movement and constructing its success. Yet they did so not by themselves but in tandem with their JTS classmates and colleagues who had received their pre-rabbinic Jewish education within the movement. Nevertheless, the defining, demonstrable contribution that yeshiva-trained Conservative rabbis made to the movement can be demonstrated by a sampling of those who reached particular prominence.44

• Morris Adler (1906–66) was often seen as Detroit’s leading rabbi in his era. He attended RIETS and remained a proud alumnus of YU while he served as the rabbi of one of the largest and most eminent congregations in North America.45 He was the first chairman of the RA’s redefined Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (CJLS, 1948–51) and co-authored (with Jacob Agus and Theodore Friedman) the historic 1950 responsum permitting automobile travel to synagogue and the use of electricity to enhance Shabbat observance.46
• Harry Halpern (1899–1981), one of the RA’s most influential presidents, received semikhah from RIETS and earned two law degrees before entering JTS and earning a second ordination.47
• Isaac Klein (1905–79) was close to ordination at RIETS when he transferred to JTS, where he was ordained (1934). He was one of only three people (Boaz Cohen and Louis Finkelstein were the others) to receive semikhah (Hatarat Horaʾah) from Ginzberg. Klein also earned a Ph.D. at Harvard under Harry Wolfson. A traditionalist in Jewish law and prolific scholar, Klein taught practical halakhah at JTS and served on the RA’s CJLS (1935–79) and the Joint Bet Din of the Conservative Movement. He was a pulpit rabbi who led two congregations over thirty-eight years and president of the RA (1958–60), but his crowning achievement was A Guide to Jewish Religious Practice, a work that was meant to be a halakhic guide for Conservative Jews.48
• Aaron Landes (1929–2014) graduated summa cum laude from YU, where was class valedictorian and president of the student body. He was rabbi of Beth Sholom Congregation in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania for thirty-six years while simultaneously becoming the second Jewish chaplain to make flag rank (Rear Admiral) in the United States Navy.49
• Israel Herbert Levinthal (1888–1982) personified the overlap between Orthodox and Conservative Judaism. Born in Vilna, Lithuania, the son of Rabbi Bernard L. Levinthal and the descendant of twelve generations of rabbis, he was brought to the United States in 1891 and raised in Philadelphia. Levinthal earned a BA from Columbia University in 1909, was ordained in 1910 by JTS, where he also earned a Doctor of Hebrew Letters in 1920. In addition, he earned a JD from New York University in 1914. He introduced late Friday night services at Brooklyn’s Petach Tikvah (1915–19) and, in 1919, he became the first rabbi of the Brooklyn Jewish Center. He built on Kaplan’s synagogue-center model, and the center’s synagogue (1922) housed a pool, gym, and auditorium. He moved the center firmly into the Conservative sphere, introducing mixed seating and the RA and United Synagogue Sabbath and Festival Prayer Book (1946). He was considered one of the greatest preachers of his day and served as president of the RA (1930–32). Levinthal’s wholesale commitment to advancing Conservative Judaism stands in odd contrast with his father.50
• Judah Nadich served as rabbi of New York’s Park Avenue Synagogue from 1957 to 1987.51 Although his public profile did not emphasize his yeshiva training, it is documented. As president of the RA in 1974, just two years after Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) ordained Reform Judaism’s first female rabbi, Nadich requested the CJLS “to ‘give careful consideration’ to his proposal to admit ordained women.”52
• Chaim Potok (1929–2002) received a BA in English literature summa cum laude from YU in 1950, ordination at JTS in 1954, and a Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania in 1965. He taught at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles and became an editor of the Jewish Publication Society of America. His greatest recognition came from his carefully crafted bestselling novels, including The Chosen (1967), The Promise (1969) and, My Name is Asher Lev (1972), as well as his non-fiction (Wanderings, 1978).
• Harold Shulweis (1925–2014) was ambivalent about Orthodoxy while attending YC.53 Rabbi of Valley Beth Shalom (1970–2014) in California, he began synagogue-based ḥavurot and established Response, a support and educational organization welcoming members of the LGBTQ+ community before the invention of the term. His books sought to develop and reframe Jewish theology. Newsweek (and the Encylopedia Judaica) described him as “the leading Conservative Rabbi of his generation.”54

As this group illustrates, yeshiva-trained Conservative rabbis did not necessarily occupy the traditional wing of Conservative Judaism. They chose their own paths. As Michael Cohen has recently demonstrated, the wide variety within Conservative Judaism can be traced to Schechter’s inability or unwillingness to actualize his own vision for the movement and his decision to pass that responsibility to his disciples and later alumni of JTS.55

During the first three decades after World War II, these alumni and their intellectual heirs led Conservative Judaism to become the largest American Jewish movement, but one that, despite all efforts at diversity, could not avoid debates that would produce division, occasionally schism, and, undeniably, attrition. Cohen uses the figures of “Heretic” (Kaplan) and a “Maverick” (Herbert S. Goldstein) to illustrate both division and diversity in Conservative Judaism. Kaplan’s radical originality and its impact on virtually all modes of Judaism have received incisive, systematic analysis.56 Goldstein is less well known but indicative of the broad boundaries of Conservative Judaism well into the mid-twentieth century.

Goldstein (1890–1970) was ordained at JTS in 1914, when such ordination did not necessarily define one as a Conservative rabbi. He was also ordained by Rabbi Shalom Jaffe, vice president of Agudath Ha-Rabbonim. Goldstein taught homiletics at RIETS and founded the Institutional Synagogue, the prototype of the synagogue center even before Kaplan, his former teacher and ongoing ideological opponent, succeeded in spreading the concept. He was the only person to be president of both the Rabbinical Council of America and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, and he was also president of the Synagogue Council of America. A fully Orthodox rabbi, Goldstein did not break his ties to JTS, was “well received” when he spoke there in 1937, and remained a member of the alumni association (i.e., the RA) until at least 1939.57

Deciding Halakhah in the Postwar Era

While the yeshiva-trained, JTS-ordained rabbis constituted a prominent faction within Conservative Judaism, the rigorous, text-based training that all rabbinical students received at JTS together with the commitment to halakhah that was an absolute requirement for admission and ordination produced rabbinic alumni bound to find solutions to contemporary problems of praxis through Jewish law rather than congregational consensus. Membership in the RA affirmed and enforced this halakhic commitment. As Kaplan’s disciples gradually shaped Reconstructionist Judaism, dissenters appeared, but the RA expended vast effort in developing halakhic mechanisms that would permit a variety of responsa within the bounds of halakhah.

In 1948, the RA reached a watershed. It restructured the composition, scope, and powers of its Committee on Jewish Law and renamed it the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (CJLS). As Pamela Nadell notes,

The CJLS agreed to circulate among the RA minority and majority reports signed by those members of the CJLS subscribing to each opinion. Members of the RA were free to follow either responsum, even if the minority opinion bore only a single signature. However, in the event the CJLS made a unanimous recommendation, it became the official position of the RA, binding on all members.58

Two years later, the CJLS adopted responsa that acknowledged an ongoing reality of Conservative Judaism: congregants’ observance typically does not reflect the halakhic standards of their movement or their rabbis. The then upcoming generation that had fought World War II and come home to affiliate with existing synagogues and establish new ones did so in budding suburban communities. The ubiquity of the automobile characterized this new American life and facilitated living in single-family homes in neighborhoods where the distance to the synagogue made walking arduous or impossible. In 1950, the CJLS issued decisions permitting driving exclusively to synagogue for communal worship and the limited use of electricity on Shabbat. Morris Adler, Agus, and Friedman authored the “Responsum on the Sabbath,” which was linked to a call for a national Sabbath Revitalization Program.59 Ben Zion Bokser issued a responsum opposing driving.60 Remarkably, two of the three authors of the permitting responsum (Adler and Agus) possessed strong Orthodox credentials.

Despite these seemingly radical halakhic positions, Conservative rabbinic leaders, especially as represented by JTS’s Talmud department, whose members did not subscribe to such leniencies, maintained ties with Orthodox colleagues that could potentially address difficult halakhic issues. As others have noted, the thorniest of these challenges was the problem of the ʿagunah, a challenge that “obsessed” the RA from 1930 to 1970.61

Along with Ginzberg, Lieberman (1898–1983) had become the paramount figure in a globally eminent Talmud faculty. Recruited to the faculty by both Ginzberg and Finkelstein in 1940, Lieberman was regarded by many as the greatest talmudist of his generation (and perhaps others). He corresponded with the leading Orthodox decisors in Israel and America and received their respect and recognition. He did not hesitate to seek major cooperation with them, nor to chastise them publicly when he felt circumstances warranted.62 Lieberman was Dean of the Rabbinical School (1948) and Rector of JTS from 1959 until his death, but whether he was a Conservative Jew has spawned scholarly debate.63 Lieberman, JTS’s Talmud faculty, and most of its other faculty members and administration were Orthodox in observance. Indeed, David Golinkin has argued that at least until 1959 and perhaps until Finkelstein’s retirement in 1972, JTS was de facto Orthodox.64 Yet, Lieberman was neither Orthodox nor Conservative, and he eschewed such labels. Punctilious in observance, critical in scholarship, he generally avoided involvement in the halakhic debates that animated the RA—with one shining exception: the problem of ʿagunot. In 1953, the year Ginzberg died, Lieberman uncharacteristically entered the halakhic fray. He proposed a taqqanah to add a clause to the ketubah that would allow an ʿagunah to force a noncompliant husband to come to a beit din and ultimately to civil courts for disposition. Lieberman enlisted the support of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903–93), rosh yeshiva of RIETS and Modern Orthodoxy’s leading halakhic authority. Soloveitchik sought to facilitate the establishment of the joint beit din that would have the recognition of both the Orthodox and Conservative rabbinates.65 Soloveitchik faced enormous pressure from the Orthodox rabbinate to reject an association with the Conservative rabbis and especially a joint beit din, pressure that he could not ultimately overcome. When agreement had seemed to be on the horizon, representatives of the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America (RCA) demanded that the RA expel some of its more halakhically lenient members, a requirement that ultimately upended the joint beit din and Orthodox acceptance of Lieberman’s solution.66 Both groups eventually found reasonable, though not comprehensive solutions to the ʿagunah problem, the RA through a system of annulment when absolutely needed and the RCA though the establishment of a halakhic prenuptial agreement that progressively fines a divorcing partner for erecting a barrier against a spouse’s remarriage.67 Indirectly at least, the issue and Lieberman’s solution also stimulated serious thought among Orthodox scholars.68

Beyond the magnitude of the ʿagunah issue itself, the sincere but eventually unsuccessful efforts on the part of Lieberman and Soloveitchik illustrate the halakhic cooperation and recognition that Orthodox and Conservative rabbinic leaders considered achievable. Juxtaposed with the often overlapping rabbinic training and traditional halakhic orientation of many RA members, the incident of the Lieberman clause documents the inherent affinity and even alliance between Orthodoxy and Conservative Judaism into the 1950s and beyond.

In December 1970, the limits of the halakhic flexibility of the RA and its CJLS would be defined amid crisis. Under chairman Benjamin Kreitman (1966–72), the CJLS instituted structural changes. “While it still considered unanimous decisions binding on RA members, the committee recognized that its authority in this matter was limited to ‘moral persuasion.’ Now minority opinions voiced by one member or subscribed to by two in a written responsum carried ‘official and equal standing’ with the majority’s opinion.”69 In theory, this structure solved the problem of halakhic process by recognizing halakhically legitimate dissenting opinions. Yet, to be effective, every one of the twenty-five members of the CLJS had to commit himself to be bound by normative, historic halakhic principles and methods, to work within the boundaries of Jewish law. It was not to be. An emergency erupted when one member of the CJLS ruled that tevilah, one of the primary elements of the conversion process (giyyur), was unnecessary for conversion. This rejection of a fundamental element of personal status caused sixteen members of the CJLS to resign, effectively disbanding the committee. It did not reorganize for two years, until a special commission had found a solution.

In 1972, in recognition of the potential power of one or two members of the CJLS to legitimize extreme (typically permissive) opinions for Conservative Judaism, minority opinions were defined as requiring the signatures of at least three members of the CJLS, a number that was raised to six in 1985.70 Always cognizant of the classic role of the congregational rabbi as mara’ de’atra, the CJLS recognized its general inability to enforce its decisions with meaningful sanctions. In one area, however—namely, officiating at an intermarriage—the RA has compelled compliance by exercising its ultimate sanction: immediate expulsion. Section III (c) of הצנע לכת: A Code of Professional Conduct for Members of the Rabbinical Assembly bars members from officiating on pain of expulsion.71 Historically, this rule also prohibited RA rabbis from attending an intermarriage, but that provision was lifted in 2018.72

The RA continues to enforce this policy. In earlier decades, members who flouted this provision were brought before their colleagues at RA conventions, given the opportunity to defend themselves (although few did), and, if the act was admitted or proven, formally expelled.73 More recently, the RA has put in place internal structures to expel such members and since 2021 has posted a list of those expelled since 2004.74

If enforcement of halakhic discipline among RA rabbis is effectively limited to banning officiation at intermarriages, maintaining such observance among congregants is impossible. While the nonobservant Orthodox Jew has increasingly become an oxymoron in most Orthodox synagogues, Conservative Jewish congregants have been seen as consistently lax.75 In his influential 1970 analysis of Conservative Judaism, the sociologist Marshall Sklare wrote : “The fact is that there is not a Conservative synagogue in the country where most congregants practice the mitzvoth [commandments] according to the Conservative regimen.” Seymour Siegel echoed Sklare’s findings: “We have found, much to our chagrin, that many times we are legislating without a constituency.”76

Scaling the Summit and Hints of Decline: 1945–90

In the three decades after World War II, Conservative Judaism responded substantively to the challenges and opportunities that Gordis had identified as the war still raged in 1945.77 Three key developments illustrate the movement’s bold response: Camp Ramah, the Schechter Day School Network (SDSN), and United Synagogue Youth (USY). These three youth-oriented programs allude both to Conservative Judaism’s postwar success and to a decline that has emerged since at least the 1990s.

From the establishment of the first Camp Ramah in Wisconsin in 1947, the system has grown to ten overnight camps and five day camps serving 11,700 campers and university-aged staff members plus three hundred young Israeli adults.78 At Camp Ramah the camper lives a consistently Jewish life in concert with halakhah as interpreted by Conservative Judaism.79

The precedent set by Gordis’s own establishment of a Conservative Jewish day school in 1951 helped establish a model that led to SDSN with forty-five schools as of 2022. Parallel to Camp Ramah, the goal of the Schechter school was immersion in Jewish life and learning. Yet, SDSN began to decline in the 1990s. As of 2012, it had lost around a third of its schools since 1993, declining to 11,338 students today from 17,563 in 1993.80 This loss led the SDSN to break away from the movement.81

Beginning in 1951, USY and its local synagogue chapters provided a positive religious experience for teenagers in Conservative synagogues. Unlike Camp Ramah and Schechter day schools, access to USY essentially came with synagogue membership and sometimes even that was not required. As a consequence, USY was accessible to Conservative youth without the parental outlay of the substantial tuition that characterized the other two institutions. Nevertheless, the current USY website does not mention religious observance in its description of the program.82

In the decades immediately following World War II, Conservative Judaism reached a summit that it has not yet scaled again. Schechter had envisioned JTS as “nonpartisan rabbinical school…whose graduates would be immersed in the academic study of Judaism.”83 Yet, he gradually realized that JTS’s financial stability necessitated more. His disciples prevailed upon him to establish an association of the congregations that could benefit JTS and advance its mission. Thus, in1913, Schechter founded the United Synagogue of America and became its first president. Omission of the word “Conservative” was significant and intentional, reflecting the inclusivity inherent in Schechter’s concept of Catholic Israel.84 The United Synagogue of America in 1913 began with 22 charter congregations. By 1916, 50 congregations were members, 150 in 1922, 220 in 1927, and 229 by 1929.85 The Great Depression saw a decline in membership, but the return of soldiers after World War II with its concomitant rise in weddings and the postwar baby boom translated into a dramatic rise in Conservative synagogues.

Throughout the war and its multiple theaters, American and Canadian Jewish soldiers witnessed Jewish chaplains conducting services, counseling, and burying the dead. In all, 95 JTS alumni served as chaplains.86 This number constituted 31% of the 309 rabbis who were commissioned in the United States Armed Forces in World War II (as compared with a total of 26 in World War I). Reform rabbis exceeded this number (136, or 44% of the total), but, as Gordis had predicted, exposure to Conservative chaplains led many veterans, who were children of Eastern European immigrants raised in traditional homes, to affiliate with Conservative congregations upon their return to civilian life.87 The participation of rabbis as chaplains had an additional effect. Just as American Jews served in higher numbers than their proportion in the population, Jewish chaplains represented approximately two-thirds of the eligible qualified rabbis of the country and exemplified a commitment with which veterans could identify.88

By 1949 the United Synagogue had 365 congregations. From 1955 to 1957, United Synagogue welcomed 131 new synagogues, 58 from 1957 to 1959, and 80 more from 1959 to 1961.89 By 1971, at the conclusion of postwar growth, the United Synagogue had 832 congregations, comprising some 350,000 families with an estimated 1.5 million members.90 This number of members remained steady or may have grown as high as 1.6 million according to the 1990–91 Jewish Population Study.91 Despite these impressive figures, as early as 1970, data had begun to presage a decline. Between 1965 and 1971, not one new Conservative synagogue was founded.92 Between 1970 and 1990, Conservative membership remained virtually stationary, increasing by only about 40,000, or 3%, from the 1.53 million who reported themselves as having been raised as Conservative Jews.93 On the other hand, 41% of all affiliated individuals in 1990 belonged to Conservative congregations, and 40% of American Jews identified with Conservative Judaism.94

Descending the Summit

A quarter century later, new data confirmed a dramatically different picture of decline in Conservative Jewish numbers and identification. In 2013 and 2020, the Pew Research Center conducted two surveys of American Jews. They revealed that, in 2013, 18% (17% in 2020) identified as Conservative Jews, down from 40% in 1990–91. Numerically, the Conservative Jewish population in the United States had dropped from just under 1.6 million, to some 915,000 in 1990, to between 660,000 and a half million in 2020.95 The number of congregations in the United Synagogue of America (renamed in 1991 the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism) had dropped from 832 in 1971 to 760 in 2003, and to 562 affiliated congregations as of 2020.96 The membership per congregation shrank, and mergers became increasingly common.

Other statistics seem to be more revealing. As of the 2020 survey, “Conservative Jews are older than Jews who identify with other streams.” The median age of Conservative Jews is sixty-two, fifty-three for Reform, and thirty-five for Orthodox.97 Even worse, only 8% of Jewish adults under thirty identify with Conservative Judaism, compared to 29% of those under thirty who identify as Reform and 17% under thirty who identify as Orthodox.98 Conversely, 3% of Jews over sixty-five identify as Orthodox, while 25% identify as Conservative.

These data suggest a growing Orthodox population and a declining Conservative one. Part of this phenomenon is due to fertility rates: “The average Orthodox household in the survey contains 2.0 children, compared with 0.3 children per household among Conservative Jews and 0.5 children per household among Reform Jews.”99 Due to these rates and other factors of preserved identification, “fully one-in-ten U.S. Jewish adults under the age of 30 are Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox (11%), compared with 1% of Jews 65 and older.”100 This trend implies significant changes in the denominational composition of American Jews in coming decades.

The twenty years between 1970 and 1990 witnessed little demographic change in the number of Conservative Jews, but that period transformed Conservative Judaism. The 1970–72 crisis in the CJLS portended fundamental changes that would reshape the movement, most especially in its heartland, the United States. In 1972, the same year as the CJLS was reconstituted, Finkelstein retired after thirty-two years as Chancellor of JTS.101 This was the same year HUC-JIR ordained America’s first woman rabbi. Oddly, the concept of a female rabbinical student had a long history at JTS. In 1903, Henrietta Szold (1860–1945), founding president of Hadassah and celebrated translator and editor, had set the precedent that a woman could study at JTS on the condition that she did not seek ordination.102 In 1939, Helen Hadassah Levinthal (1910–89), daughter of Israel and granddaughter of Bernard Levinthal, became the first woman to complete the entire course of study in a rabbinical school (Jewish Institute of Religion [JIR] in New York), though she was denied formal ordination.103 Nevertheless, HUC-JIR’s action catalyzed a debate and process that would take more than a decade to resolve. As previously noted, in 1974, Nadich, then president of the RA, requested that the CJLS consider women rabbis. Surrounding the issue in the 1970s were halakhic questions regarding counting women in a minyan, their serving as shelikhot tsibbur, and the issue of ʿedut.104 Political and social, as well as the halakhic issues, framed the debate on women’s ordination.

In 1983, after a decade including a special commission and extensive debate and only months after the unexpected death of Lieberman, who had opposed women’s ordination, JTS admitted women and ordained Amy Eilberg in 1985, thirteen years after Sally Priesand was ordained at HUC-JIR. The ordination of women inevitably led to the Conservative Movement’s eventual embrace of egalitarianism, whereby women took equal roles with men in almost all ritual and halakhic activities.105

In 1985, Alexander Schindler, president of Reform Judaism’s congregational association, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC, later the Union for Reform Judaism, or URJ) from 1973 to 1996, confidently observed that “it usually takes [the Conservative Movement] about 10 years” to follow Reform’s precedent.106 Regarding the ordination of women, Schindler’s sardonic generalization had held true, but Chancellor Cohen, Finkelstein’s successor (1972–85), understood the challenge that egalitarianism represented. Simultaneously, he called for the “developing of our [i.e., Conservative Judaism’s] approach to halakhah.”

Conservative Judaism had placed halakhah at its center as a primary tenet—from JTS’s founding in 1886, to Schechter’s arrival in 1902, to the vision that he and his JTS disciples proffered, to Ginzberg’s responsa, to the 1927 establishment of the RA’s Committee on Jewish Law, to the developments for decision-making by the CJLS (1948, 1972, 1986) and the vast corpus of responsa that the CJLS has produced, to Klein’s manual of Jewish law.107 It was thus no coincidence that throughout these years Conservative Judaism had a close affinity with Orthodoxy. Well into the 1960s, Orthodox rabbis had led Conservative congregations and joined the RA. The two movements used almost identical traditional liturgies, and it is popularly assumed that, up to the 1950s, mixed seating is what differentiated the synagogue rituals of Conservative congregations from their Orthodox counterparts. Yet, the facts are more complex, for even the defining boundary of mixed seating was porous. For example, in 1950, Agus began a thirty-year career as founding rabbi of Beth El Congregation, Baltimore. He persuaded his congregants to introduce mixed seating and, as we have seen, co-wrote the CJLS that allowed congregants to drive to Sabbath services.”108 That same year at Adath Israel in Cincinnati, Rabbi Fishel Goldfeder, who possessed quintessential Orthodox credentials, supported mixed seating, although the issue caused a split in the congregation.109

At the same time, American Orthodoxy had not yet made the meḥitsah an absolute condition of congregational membership. In many traditional congregations formally affiliated with the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations (OU), the option of at least a section of mixed seating remained. In the 1980s, the OU finally began rigorous enforcement of a meḥitsah requirement, but the last OU Orthodox synagogue with mixed seating did not change its policy until 2005.110

JTS’s decision to ordain women and Conservative Judaism’s accompanying embrace of egalitarianism precipitated a schism on the right. For some Conservative rabbis and congregants, the specter of a decision that would cleave Conservative Judaism not only from Orthodoxy but from what they regarded as the fundamental norms of halakhah required radical action. In response, David Weiss Halivni (1927–2022), JTS’s leading Talmud scholar, left his post at JTS and accepted a faculty appointment at Columbia. Halivni, his rabbinic disciples, and their lay supporters founded the Union for Traditional Conservative Judaism in 1984 (Union for Traditional Judaism [UTJ] after 1988) and established a yeshiva, the Institute of Traditional Judaism (ITJ) to grant semikhah (although the semikhah program has been suspended since 2010), a rabbinic association, and published responsa.111 Although it is still active, the ITJ has faced challenges.112

Conservative Judaism’s split with its right wing in the aftermath of the 1980s ordination controversy did not siphon off large numbers from the movement, but the loss invariably rebalanced the movement somewhat toward the left. The larger theological and halakhic left wing had broken away twenty years earlier. Kaplan remained at JTS and did not countenance separation from Conservative Judaism. Yet, beginning in 1940 with the establishment of the Reconstructionist Foundation, Kaplan’s son-in-law, Ira Eisenstein (1906–2001), charted a path that would lead to the rise of a separate, new movement. Gradually, Reconstructionist congregations led by rabbis who espouse Kaplan’s religious naturalism and view of Judaism as a civilization, a synagogue association (eventually called Jewish Reconstructionist Federation), and a well-regarded journal emerged, but the event that formally defined a fourth Jewish movement was the founding of a full-scale rabbinical school, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 1968.113

Conservative Judaism Defined—in Theory

Shorn of its left and right wings by the 1980s, Conservative Judaism could define itself in formal terms. In 1985, forty years after his article introducing Conservative Judaism, Gordis became chair of the Commission on the Philosophy of Conservative Judaism, a group of thirty-five scholars and lay people who spent three years producing Emet Ve-Emunah: Statement of Principles of Conservative Judaism.114 This would-be pivotal publication of Conservative Jewish tenets spurred immediate discussion in congregations, but its impact proved fleeting. As of 2022, the websites of both the RA and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism lack any direct reference to it.115 With one exception, standard works on the movement give it passing reference or ignore it.116 The exception is Elliot N. Dorff’s Modern Conservative Judaism, which begins many chapters with an explication of the immediate topic as depicted in Emet Ve-Emunah.117

Conservative Judaism has nevertheless addressed major issues as they have arisen. Sexual orientation and particularly the rights of gay and lesbian people within Conservative Judaism was one such major issue. In 2006, the CJLS adopted three responsa ranging from stringent to lenient.118 Four members of the CJLS resigned in protest: the authors of the two more stringent responsa (Joel Roth and Leonard R. Levy, both members of JTS’s Talmud faculty), Mayer Rabinowitz, another member the JTS Talmud faculty, and Joseph Prouser, congregational rabbi, independent scholar, and the current editor of this journal.119 The 2006 resignations did not precipitate a crisis as had happened in 1970. Indeed, in 2007, less than a year after Ismar Schorsch had retired as JTS’s chancellor, JTS announced the admission of gay and lesbian applicants to its rabbinical school.120 In 2012, the CJLS adopted the ritual mechanisms and documents for officiating at same-sex marriages and divorces.121

In his farewell address after twenty years as chancellor (1986–2006), Schorsch criticized the attitudes of the seminary’s students. Building on the principles embodied in Emet Ve-Emunah, he defined Emet as the “spiritual aquifer which invigorates observance by making it meaningful” and Emunah as “a spiritual life animated by halakhah.” He accused JTS students of abandoning the deep, scientific scholarship of Wissenschaft des Judentums. “Our addiction to instant gratification has stripped us of the patience to appreciate any discourse whose rhetoric is dense and demanding. Mindlessly, we grasp for the quick spiritual fix.”122 The aquifer had run dry, he said. Schorsch’s remarks elicited anger, rebuttals, and reflection across the Conservative Movement.123

The Influence of Reform Judaism

Reform Judaism’s HUC-JIR had begun to admit gay and lesbian students in the late 1980s. JTS had done so twenty years later (2007). Although the number of years varied, Schindler’s observation that the Conservative Movement follows Reform innovations remained true. Nevertheless, on a variety of fundamental principles, Schindler’s glib assessment fails. Although Conservative Judaism no longer regularly finds common cause with Orthodoxy, it has not become a permutation of Reform. Although it often partners with Reform on social issues, Conservative Judaism has maintained a separate identity.

The primary boundary that separates Conservative Judaism from Reform remains halakhah. Reform Judaism is informed by halakhah but not obligated to it; Conservative Judaism is obligated to halakhah as defined by the structure for decision-making by the CJLS and the vast corpus of approved responsa.124 As mara’ deʾatra, the “lord of the place,” the Conservative congregational rabbi decides Jewish law for his or her synagogue.125 Yet, there are enforceable limits—namely, the Standards of Rabbinic Practice that reinforce the halakhic requirements of personal status:

1. No Rabbi shall perform a marriage for a divorced man or woman unless such a person has obtained a get or hafka‘at kiddushin.126
2. A member of the Rabbinical Assembly or of the Cantors’ Assembly may not officiate at the marriage of a Jew to an unconverted non-Jew, nor may he/she co-officiate at, nor be present at a purely civil ceremony, nor may the Conservative synagogue be used for such a marriage.127
3. Ascription of Jewish lineage through a legal instrument or ceremonial act on the basis of anything other than matrilineal descent; or supervision of a conversion which omits tevilah in the case of females, or tevilah and brit milah in the case of males, shall continue to be regarded as violations of the Halakhah of Conservative Judaism. They shall henceforth be violations of a Standard of Rabbinic Practice and be inconsistent with membership in the Rabbinical Assembly…128

The clearest example of these Standards is the RA’s prohibition against officiating at an intermarriage. Some rabbis and lay leaders would consider changes, but as of this writing, the Standards remain intact. Keren R. McGinity, the USCJ’s interfaith specialist has recently argued for a “new narrative” regarding intermarriage in Conservative Judaism.129 Her proposal has received a systematic rebuttal from Wertheimer, whose publications on Conservative Judaism justly qualify him as the movement’s foremost historian and analyst.130

In 2022, reconsideration of the RA’s standard prohibiting rabbinic officiation at intermarriages went beyond theoretical debate. Since 2018, the RA has set in motion opportunities for reconsideration of the Standards of Rabbinic Conduct.131 On December 11, 2022, the RA’s president emailed an extensive letter to the membership detailing initiatives including working groups and procedures that could lead to such changes.132 The president’s email did not remain among the RA membership, and the issue attracted coverage in the popular press.133 A summary in the email begins by noting: “[O]ur RA and its culture has been shifting away from hierarchy and enforcement, and towards an emphasis on wisdom, trust, and mutual support of our colleagues.”134 This phrasing could be understood to suggest that a goal of some in the RA could be to abrogate the enforcement mechanism—namely expulsion from the RA—for conducting intermarriages. The RA was quick to reject this interpretation, stating that the goal was to clarify how members should act within current rules.135

Historical precedent suggests that unintended consequences could arise if the sanction were nonetheless eliminated. An analogous case appears in the experience of the Reform Movement regarding rabbinic officiation at interfaith marriage ceremonies. In 1909, Reform Judaism’s rabbinic body, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), stated its position that “mixed marriage is contrary to the Jewish tradition and should be discouraged.” In 1973, the CCAR reiterated this policy and declared its opposition to participation by its members in any such ceremony: “The C.C.A.R., recalling its stand adopted in 1909 ‘that mixed marriage is contrary to Jewish tradition and should be discouraged,’ now declares its opposition to participation by its members in any ceremony which solemnizes mixed marriages.” In 1982, in a separate Reform responsum, these positions were reinforced and enumerated again.136

Despite this policy, as of 2017, 84% of Reform rabbis officiate at intermarriages. These findings represent a jump over two decades. In 1995, a survey of Reform and Reconstructionist rabbis found that a combined 47% would officiate at intermarriages.137 Since Reform Judaism is not bound by halakhah but simply informed by it, the CCAR has no mechanism for enforcing its policies.138 As a consequence, since at least the 1970s, many Reform rabbis have conducted intermarriages. One datum that is presumably unattainable is the number of Reform rabbis who conduct such marriages not out of an ideological commitment but in order to preserve their rabbinic positions.

Beginning in the 1970s, rabbinic search committees in some Reform congregations began to require candidates for rabbinic positions to conduct intermarriages. In such cases, congregations curtailed the rabbi’s freedom to take positions of principle regarding officiation at intermarriages. The concept of a free pulpit in which rabbis had decisive authority and the right to express their views was not alien to Reform Judaism. When, in 1905, as a candidate for rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in New York, Stephen S. Wise was told that his sermons would be reviewed in advance by the synagogue’s board of trustees, he founded his own Free Synagogue (now the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue) in which no one could contest his exclusive rabbinic authority or “his right to speak and act as he chose.”139 Wise went on to become one of America’s most renowned rabbis, achieving recognition as an orator, Zionist leader, and founder of JIR (1922). His influence and ideals influenced many in the Reform rabbinate.

Conservative Judaism has defined itself at least in part by its deep commitment to Jewish law, or halakhah. The vast corpus of responsa outlined in these pages documents the process by which Conservative rabbis have made decisions. The RA’s three Standards of Rabbinic Practice are fully consistent with the historic halakhah of Jewish personal status, and expulsion from membership enforces compliance. That sanction also protects RA members from congregational pressures that could otherwise place their positions in jeopardy. Without such a sanction, the experience of the Reform Movement could become a prototype for the future of the Conservative rabbinate.

The issue of rabbinic officiation at intermarriages differs from all other controversial decisions taken by Conservative rabbis. Although some RA members opposed responsa like those permitting traveling on Shabbat or same-sex marriages, the proponents of those positions presented their cases in halakhically sourced responsa. Rabbinic officiation at intermarriages has no halakhic basis, no lenient versus stringent position. Such a marriage has no standing in rabbinic law. It is thus not within the authority of a rabbi as maraʾ deʾatraʾ to permit, since the maraʾ deʾatraʾ can only rule within the boundaries of halakhah. Thus, for the RA to allow its members to conduct such weddings would uproot the movement from its halakhic foundation and alter the very definition of Conservative Judaism.

Conservative Judaism faces a related challenge: the difference in observance between the congregant and the rabbi. As one Conservative rabbi told me anonymously and with evident irony, Conservative and Chabad rabbis are alike in one major respect: their congregants do not practice the same level of observance as the rabbi. The Orthodox and Reform Jews do so, he added. The Pew surveys of 2013 and 2020 confirm this yawning inconsistency and document the fact that Jews who received strong Jewish educations in the Conservative Movement now make up 10% or more of Orthodox congregations.140 An Orthodox rabbi observed that “Ramah is a great feeder for us,” and a lifelong, affiliated Conservative Jew who now increasingly attends services at Chabad stated that the Conservative Movement demands only “lip service and dues.”141

The tendency to avoid confronting laypeople with the centrality of halakhic observance can even affect Conservative Judaism’s most gifted leaders. In 2014, JTS Chancellor Arnold Eisen proffered a partial solution to the unabated increase in intermarriage. Leaving aside the Jewish tradition of discouraging prospective converts until they demonstrate a strong voluntary commitment, Eisen invited members of the public to convert. Through an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, he encouraged Americans who do not practice any faith to consider Judaism. He called on Conservative rabbis to “to use every means to explicitly and strongly advocate for conversion” and described the road to conversion as “a process of learning and living that culminates in a religious ceremony where immersion into an ancient ritual bath creates a new religious identity.” Yet he omitted any reference to the halakhic requirements of freely and sincerely accepting the “yoke of the commandments” (kabbalat ʿol hamitsvot) and a male’s obligation of milah or hatafat dam brit.142

Eisen’s call echoed Schindler’s own 1978 proposal to Reform Jews to proselytize “unchurched” non-Jews, “God‐seekers who voluntarily ask for our knowledge.”143 Conservative Judaism did not embrace Eisen’s call. However, although it had taken twenty-six years rather than ten, Schindler’s observation about Reform Judaism’s impact on the Conservative Movement had proved true again.

Eisen’s successor as chancellor, Shuly Rubin Schwartz (2020–), has worked assiduously to strengthen JTS, to contemplate ways to address the Conservative Movement’s current challenges, and to build on the seminary’s distinguished faculty. Raised in the movement and connected to it through her own career and her family over three generations, her penetrating scholarship prepares her to envision solutions to the problems that affect Conservative Judaism.

The river of enthusiasm that brought gifted, Orthodox-educated students to JTS from Schechter’s days to the 1970s has reversed course. Anecdotal evidence reinforces Pew’s statistics, suggesting that in many Young Israel and other Modern Orthodox synagogues, a substantial proportion of the membership came from Conservative Judaism. Further observation suggests a surprising additional trend in need of study: an unknown but significant number of Orthodox rabbis in the Modern, Hasidic, and Haredi communities grew up in Conservative Judaism.144

Some factors in Conservative Judaism’s demographic decline can be attributed to American attitudes to religion generally. American Jews are “far less religious than Christians and Americans overall.”145 Further, Jews are not unique. Declines in American Christianity from 90% in 1972 to 64% in 2020 to between 54% and 35% by 2070 are predicted based on trends in “switching”—namely, the popularity and acceptability of changing religions.146 Nevertheless, the outflowing of Conservative Jews to Reform, Orthodoxy, or no religion at all cannot be denied. The 2020 Pew study states that

67% of Americans raised as Orthodox Jews by religion continue to identify with Orthodoxy as adults. Similarly, most people raised as Reform Jews by religion also identify as Reform today (66%). The retention rate for those raised within Conservative Judaism is lower; four-in-ten people (41%) raised as Conservative Jews by religion continue to identify with Conservative Judaism as adults.147

This demographic leakage has had a material effect. Non-Orthodox institutions have faced unprecedented financial challenges and have responded pragmatically. Under Eisen’s effective leadership, JTS addressed long-standing fiscal concerns by selling the air rights to its campus to finance a new library and dormitory.148 American Jewish University, home to the Ziegler rabbinical school, acknowledged that “the cost of maintaining our Bel Air [California] campus during the COVID-19 pandemic had run counter to the university’s mission” and sold the campus.149 Neither Reform Judaism on the left nor the Union for Traditional Judaism on the right was immune. Reform’s HUC-JIR announced plans to address a record $8.8 million deficit and a drop of 37% in rabbinic school enrollment over the last fifteen years by closing most of its original flagship campus in Cincinnati after 147 years.150 The UTJ sold its building to a member congregation and suspended its semikhah program in 2010.151

These institutional financial difficulties highlight the fiscal problem faced by individuals—namely, the price of being a Conservative Jew. Beyond the expected expense of synagogue dues, the cost of a Schechter day school education or a summer at Camp Ramah can burden even an affluent family. Further, Conservative programs typically exceed the costs of comparable Orthodox equivalents.152

Finally, nomenclature matters. In the twenty-first century, “conservative” possesses a political connotation. The time to rename Conservative Judaism has long since arrived. That is the reason this journal, although the direct successor to Conservative Judaism, has a new name. “Traditional Judaism,” “Authentic Judaism,” “Halakhic Judaism,” “Masorti Judaism”—suggestions for the movement are welcome. However, maintaining the status quo constitutes an unforced error against a younger generation unaware of the original meaning of “Conservative” Judaism.

The Continuing Challenge

Almost sixty years after Robert Gordis wrote his introduction to the first issue of Conservative Judaism, his grandson Daniel, a rabbi, scholar, and prize-winning writer, penned an article with the funereal title “Conservative Judaism: A Requiem.” “Sans Conservative Judaism,” he said, “the vision of a traditional, literate non-Orthodox Judaism will be gone. And that is a terrible loss, for Orthodoxy no less than for American Jewish life at large.”153 Writing in response to the publication of the 2013 Pew study and, almost simultaneously, the appearance of the RA’s 981-page The Observant Life: The Wisdom of Conservative Judaism for Contemporary Jews, Daniel Gordis saw the former as a clarion call and the latter as missing the point by omitting any reason for caring about halakhah.154 He mocked lenient, socially justifiable responsa that, in his view, defied logic even for the Jewishly uneducated: “These men and women of the pews were not talmudic scholars, but they were sufficiently educated and had enough common sense to know that if combustion on Shabbat was prohibited, then driving on Shabbat simply had to be a violation of Jewish law.”155 He concluded with a challenge: if neither Orthodoxy nor liberal Judaism answers the needs of the American Jew, “is there no option for Jewish continuity other than Israel?” “There must be,” he concludes. “Those who care about the future of the Jewish people had better embark now on the search for what it might be.”

In the same year that Daniel Gordis issued his requiem for Conservative Judaism, the movement’s scholarly journal of the same name ceased publication. Revived now as Masorti, a more felicitous and apt title that conveys the movement’s just claim as an heir to Jewish tradition, law, and living, this new incarnation of rigorous—yes, Wissenschaft—scholarship can propose and test ideas that meet the challenge that yet another Gordis has issued.

Rabbi Jonathan Rosenbaum, Ph.D., is President Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies at Gratz College and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. He serves on the academic advisory board and as associate editor of this journal.

Chancellor Shuly Rubin Schwartz

As I formally assume the chancellorship of JTS, a role I assumed two years ago at the start of the pandemic, I feel a sense of gratitude to so many. I have the privilege of building on the achievements of my two immediate predecessors—Chancellor Emeritus Arnie Eisen and Chancellor Emeritus Ismar Schorsch—as well as the five previous leaders of JTS. I am honored to join their ranks, all the more so as the first woman in this role. I am grateful to our board of trustees for their support and confidence in me; to my senior team, who partner with me in developing the vision for JTS’s future; to our faculty, students, administrators, and staff, whose dedication to learning, to each other, and to the wider community enables us to thrive; and to our extraordinary alumni, who not only offer their counsel and support, but who every day demonstrate the impact of a JTS education on strengthening the Jewish community and bettering the world.

My devotion to JTS stems from my own family—individuals whose love of JTS, of Judaism, and of service to the community brought me to this institution and to the position I now hold. It is 102 years since my maternal grandfather graduated from JTS’s Teachers Institute. Both my parents were alums, as were many family members, some of whom are here today. They were drawn to JTS, as was I, for serious learning, for community, and for its rich vision of a learned, stimulating, joyous Judaism. That’s the kind of Judaism I experienced at home: my father’s love of Jewish learning, observance, and tradition; my mother’s devotion to Jewish culture—especially the Hebrew language; and their joint commitment to bringing others closer to Judaism.

In my maternal grandmother I experienced a loving model of a woman deeply devoted to family and to her work outside the home. A dedicated volunteer initially, she moved into the work world, was widowed in her early fifties, and eventually became executive director of a Jewish children’s services organization. Little did I know that my life would hew so closely to hers. But eighteen years ago, I, too, experienced the premature death of my beloved husband, and also of our adored son, within five months of each other, leaving a gaping hole in our family that will never fully close. This period gave me a window into Judaism’s power to sustain, despite my inability over many months to sing God’s praises and participate in communal life. I grieved publicly, gradually refueling my soul through the embrace of my family and of the JTS community, as well as the satisfaction I derived from meaningful work. This shattering experience sharpened my sensitivities to others’ pain, hopefully enabling me to alleviate some of theirs. It also heightens the joy and gratitude that I experience with my cherished family and closest friends. As we recite in the Grace after Meals: ʿal hakol, adonai elohenu, anaḥnu modim lakh umevarkhim otakh. For everything, God, I thank You and praise You.

We are at a moment of great societal upheaval. We face massive challenges and opportunities, the likes of which we have not seen since the aftermath of World War II. We worry about the climate crisis; the unbridled power of technology; challenges to reproductive rights, privacy, and democracy here and around the world; and more. We also worry that despite the urgency and magnitude of these concerns, the incessant media cycle and lack of a shared base of information make it hard to engage productively with others, to undertake the hard work that is a prerequisite for transformational change.

I believe wholeheartedly—in fact, I have staked my career on the belief—that education is key to such change. Education—deep understanding born of intense intellectual engagement. Education—the spirit of collegiality and obligation to the common good and to a common community. Sadly, the educational sphere has narrowed as a space for the vigorous exchange of ideas. It has become increasingly hard to engage with others whose perspectives differ from our own. Many bite their tongues or preach to echo chambers rather than confronting opinions that might sow doubt or offend.

These challenges resonate in distinctive ways in the Jewish world as well. First, American society’s polarization has unleashed alarming antisemitic sentiment and activity at a level not experienced in decades. While the Jewish community may unite against this shared threat, underlying societal polarization has also exacerbated tensions among Jews around other issues, notably the State of Israel and the value of religious pluralism. Once we feel alienated from one another on a particular issue, once we stop seeing the humanity even in those with whom we disagree, we lose the desire to come to the table at all; we dig in our heels and resist relationship building and collective problem solving.

Second, as the 2020 Pew Research Center Report on Jewish Americans shows, fewer Jews are building rich, sustaining Jewish lives bound up with the Jewish story, Jewish practice and learning, and helping Jews in need. Yet the report also shows that the vast majority of American Jews feel tied to the Jewish people. They already have a foot in the door. Our task is to get them over the threshold, to help them intensify connections they intuitively feel. How?

In the Jewish sphere as well, education is key. When I look to my predecessors for insight, I am keenly aware of the monumental role they played in fortifying Jewish life and North American society in their time. Chancellor Louis Finkelstein’s aspirations, articulated in 1945, particularly resonate: “The political, the economical, the cultural and even the moral and spiritual realms are interdependent. There can be no religious piety without social justice, no lasting economic prosperity without the sense for the spiritual; no political stability without compliance with moral principles.1 This integrated approach—so rare in his day and rarer still today—epitomizes JTS’s uniqueness and provides a compelling response to today’s challenges.

What do I mean by this? Learning to appreciate life’s complexity in a nuanced manner—that is the foundation of an integrated life. That is the essence of JTS’s educational philosophy: the cultivation of nuance: intellectual, religious, and emotional.

First, a nuanced intellectual life. At JTS we treasure our superb faculty, who produce scholarship that illuminates our past, our texts, and our values. We also treasure our material heritage, so much of which can be found in our library. Just three weeks ago I viewed a small women’s Seder Berakhot, or Book of Blessings, printed in Vienna in 1736, which includes a gorgeous Omer counter. It, along with recent scholarship, sheds light on the intensity of women’s daily ritual lives. It touched the core of my religious longings by tying the daily practice of counting the days from Passover to Shavuot to Jewish women’s practice over the centuries. Accessing our tradition can do this for all of us: when we prepare a favorite family recipe, sing a Hebrew song, or light Shabbat candles, we connect to a rich heritage that adds depth and significance to our lives.

In embracing a nuanced intellectual life, we explore primary sources not only in the form of sacred texts but also of marriage documents, melodies, modern fiction, and Omer counters, and which today would include websites, podcasts, and social media. When Solomon Schechter in his inaugural address quoted the phrase “I regard nothing Jewish as foreign to me,” he signaled a commitment to this expansive kind of Jewish learning. We examine these sources through lenses of interpretation that illuminate, challenge, and problematize our understanding. We consider context; we study history and the evolution of ideas over time; we use contemporary analytical tools to offer fresh interpretive possibilities. This approach cultivates our students’ critical thinking skills, so that students will develop into astute observers, analyzers, and interpreters.

Finally, we learn from one another. Engaged with their students, faculty also encourage ḥevrutah, learning with others, for as Rabbi Ḥama, son of Rabbi Ḥanina, taught, based on the phrase in Proverbs 27:17: Barzel bevarzel yaḥad, “iron sharpens iron.” Study partners sharpen one another (b. Taʾanit 7a). When we learn from others, we hone and reassess our views; we grow to disagree respectfully and generatively. We come to appreciate that it is the search for an elusive truth, not the truth itself, that invigorates both us and our ancient tradition. We grow more comfortable with complexity.

This nuanced intellectual life leads naturally to a second arena of JTS’s distinctiveness: a nuanced religious life. We achieve this by integrating our intellectual insights with a spiritual life anchored by halakhah, cultivated through daily prayer and ritual and deepened through a relationship with God that can touch the depths of our souls and the heights of our spirits. This integration of intellectual and religious life will prompt us—I daresay compel us—to change, in ways both subtle and seismic. To me, this impulse is epitomized by Henrietta Szold. Steeped in Jewish learning and observance from her earliest years, Szold continued to strive for more. She became JTS’s first female student in 1902, after assuring Solomon Schechter that she would not seek rabbinic ordination (something that happily changed, thanks to the leadership of Chancellor Gerson Cohen, and is reflected in our diverse student body and rabbinate today).

Szold’s prodigious education emboldened her to put her own stamp on the Jewish story. First, she made Jewish learning available to English-speaking Jews through her editorial and translation work. Second, she founded Hadassah to advance the Zionist project and empower Jewish women. Third, in 1916, she challenged the traditional convention that only males were obligated to recite Kaddish for deceased relatives. Upon the death of her mother, she declined a friend’s offer to say Kaddish with these words:

Jewish custom is very dear and sacred to me. And yet I cannot ask you to say Kaddish after my mother. The Kaddish means to me that the survivor publicly and markedly manifests his wish and intention to assume the relation to the Jewish community which his parent had, and that so the chain of tradition remains unbroken from generation to generation, each adding its own link. You can do that for the generations of your family, I must do that for the generations of my family.2

Szold knew that she needed to both maintain the unbroken chain of tradition and add her own link to it. For Szold, as for us, a nuanced religious life must be anchored in the past—in halakhah, in text, in tradition—and be ever-evolving. Engaging with this tension, not fearing it, that is the essence of the nuanced religious life that we embrace, we live, we treasure at JTS.

When we cultivate a rich intellectual and religious life, we foster the third element of JTS’s educational philosophy, that of a nuanced emotional life. We recognize the complexity of human emotion and know that we can love our family, people, and country even though they will at times make us angry, deflate us, even break our hearts. Our tradition doesn’t shy away from human fallibility. Think of the Torah’s depictions of our ancestors—Abraham, Sarah, Moses, and others. All are flawed, complicated. Knowing that we will occasionally be disappointed by those we love, feel exasperated by our study partners, and disagree with those we care about does not deter us from engaging. Rather, it grounds us in humility, encouraging us to look more deeply into one another, to lift up their strengths and find our common humanity. 

We see the challenge of emotional nuance playing out around Israel. We feel joy and elation at the existence of the State of Israel. We celebrate its culture and achievements. Yet this state that we love deeply can also crush our hearts—when its government discriminates against our way of practicing Judaism or when its policies fail to ensure the dignity and rights of Palestinians, Arabs, and others in its midst. As we do with our loved ones, we choose to double down on love, which drives us to work ever harder to shape and influence Israel’s choices and direction.

Ultimately, this commitment to nuance and complexity prepares JTS students to develop compelling visions of change and effective plans of action in response to the urgent challenges of our times. In this moment of polarization and lack of deep Jewish engagement, I am also convinced that our nuanced approach is key to opening doors to a rich, meaningful Jewish life for many others in our community. Our educational approach, our programs, and our stellar alumni can influence them to plant both feet within the Jewish community and ultimately lead it to a robust future. 

What concrete steps can we take to achieve these goals? First, JTS must make its exceptional offerings available to many more people: By developing flexible degree and certificate opportunities both here and online to supplement our signature in-house programs. By expanding community learning and professional development opportunities. By optimizing the virtual platform that proved so effective during the pandemic, when we grew to appreciate the deep hunger for our kind of learning throughout the world. Second, we must educate future leaders who will bring nuanced conversations to the communities they serve and use the skills and dispositions they have developed to ignite transformational change. To amplify our impact, we will convene and model public discourse across the ideological and religious spectrum, bringing Judaism to bear on the major issues of our era. 

Our campus provides a spectacular setting for achieving this. Our initiatives will elevate JTS as a vibrant hub for nuanced teaching, learning, and engagement. And we will ensure the greatest possible reach by inviting people to join us both in person and online. As we attract many more people, we’re going to give them compelling reasons to stay. How?

• JTS will expand relationships among our students and others drawn to lives of service through strategic collaborations with others, including sister seminaries and Morningside Heights institutions.
• JTS will bridge the secular/religious Jewish divide by providing opportunities for Jewish artists—musicians, writers, actors, sculptors—to access Jewish learning and living. Such experiences will not only deepen their art, it will also attune JTS students to the dynamic possibilities that can emerge through the integration of Judaism with the broader cultural milieu.
• JTS will nurture a mature and nuanced relationship between North American Jewry and Israel.
• JTS will bring leaders from various faith traditions together to address the moral issues of our day.
• Finally, JTS will bring together a broad range of individuals to articulate the ties that bind us as Jews and generate a confident, courageous, nuanced religious ideology—a Conservative Judaism for this century.

These initiatives are both bold and ambitious. But, as a historian, I know that they also build upon JTS’s historic strengths: Solomon Schechter’s early adoption of Zionism and promotion of Conservative Judaism, Mordecai Kaplan’s broad vision of civilizational Judaism, Abraham Joshua Heschel’s political activism, all my predecessors’ interfaith engagement, and more. The North American Jewish community encompasses a wide range of practices, allegiances, and aspirations. Let’s prepare all who engage with JTS to become the confident, innovative, moral leaders that the Jewish world needs! 

When I think about this moment, I’m drawn to the famous talmudic story in tractate Menahot 29b. When Moses went up Mount Sinai to receive the Torah, he found God tying crowns on the letters of the Torah. Moses asked what was preventing God from giving the Torah without these decorative additions. God explained that these additions were important, necessary—that in the future, a Jew would pore over them and derive Jewish law from each and every one of them. Moses didn’t fully understand. He demanded that God explain. So God sent Moses into the future to Rabbi Akiva’s study hall. Moses listened to the hum of learning, hoping to recognize words of Torah. Instead, Moses realized that he did not understand a word of what they were saying! Dejected, Moses felt that his Torah knowledge was lacking. But then, the story continues:

When Rabbi Akiva was discussing a matter, his students said to him: Rabbi, minayin lakh? My teacher, from where do you derive this [teaching]? Rabbi Akiva said to them: halakhah leMoshe miSinai. It is a law transmitted to Moses from Sinai. When Moses heard this, when he heard his name, when he heard a reference to the Torah he would soon deliver at Sinai, nityashvah daʿato. His mind was put to rest. He recognized that this new teaching would grow from the Torah he was about to receive.

Moses came to appreciate that Jewish learning would and should be ever evolving. And God taught Moses—teaches all those who look at the letters of a Torah scroll—that evolution is divinely sanctioned, that through this process, Torah becomes eternally meaningful.

That is our task as a people and as an institution—to educate ourselves and others, to probe our tradition for new meaning that will engage our minds and souls, to provide nourishment that will give us hope in a promising future, to cultivate nuance and mature insight, and, most of all, to educate the next generation of leaders who will carry on this tradition for generations to come. We have much to do. I look forward to partnering with the extraordinary JTS community to achieve our goals. Together, we can jumpstart the change that fuels Judaism’s longevity.

May we succeed in our efforts. 

Dr. Shuly Rubin Schwartz, Irving Lehman Research Professor of American Jewish History, is the eighth chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary.