Print This Essay - The Jewish Theological Seminary

By: Arnold M. Eisen, Chancellor, The Jewish Theological Seminary
Visit the blog at: http://www.jtsa.edu/CJBlog
Learning
The questions facing every Jew and every generation of Jews are these: What
role will we play in fulfilling the age-old covenant linking Jews to one another, to
God, and to the world? What word will we say in the conversation begun at
Sinai? What chapter will we write in the story that goes back to Abraham and
Sarah?
One cannot answer these questions responsibly without serious Jewish learning.
Our knowledge of how Jews have lived and taught Torah until now must be
broad and deep enough to be adequate to the challenge of teaching and living
Torah now and in the future. That challenge includes the momentous questions
posed by every serious human being: How shall I use my time on earth well?
How can I be a good person? How can I make sure I leave the world better than I
found it? How should I think about and serve God? Jewish human beings want
answers to these questions as well as the others I have named. We need the
answers. That is what drives Jewish learning.
Conservative Judaism at its best offers distinctive formulations of both the
questions and the answers:
• It speaks forcefully, honestly, and authentically to contemporary dilemmas,
in the conviction that the Torah, properly interpreted for changed
conditions, offers the wisdom needed to guide us through present-day
complexities.
• Our Movement maintains that the diversity of voices sounding forth from
the sacred texts of our tradition, and the variety of ways Jews in the past
have applied the Torah’s teachings to new circumstances, are essential to
the Jewish future.
• Conservative Judaism believes that Jews require knowledge of the rich
encounter between learned and observant Jewish communities and the
larger societies and cultures in which Jews participate.
All of these elements shape Conservative Jewish learning. We believe that all
are needed to make the world better by means of Torah.

Louis Finkelstein, the chancellor of The Jewish Theological Seminary from 1940
to 1972, summed up what he considered the “fundamental premises” of
Conservative Judaism in the twin affirmations that Judaism “is a developing
religion” that has always undergone change; and that “this change was not one
of deterioration and ossification but of growth, self-expression and foliation.” Our
task and privilege, now as ever, is both to study the sages of old and to emulate
them: to render Judaism compelling for our revolutionary age, as our learned
ancestors did for theirs.
Finkelstein’s statement explains why, for Conservative Jews even more than
others, the rabbinic principle holds. “Talmud Torah ke-neged kulam: the study of
Torah is weighed against the importance of all the other commandments
combined.” The task of following the Torah’s precepts is difficult. Relating Torah
to the finest insights of the larger culture and responsibly adapting Judaism to
changed conditions, when necessary, is still more so. Both tasks require
thorough, complex, and nuanced knowledge of the Jewish past, including
understanding of the manifold ways in which Jews over the centuries have
interacted with the larger cultures of which they were a part.
Indeed, the Conservative vision of Judaism as evolving religious civilization only
makes sense if one has studied enough Jewish history to know that our tradition
has always been evolving in this fashion—sometimes radically and sometimes
gradually, at times explicitly and at other moments unaware.
Learning Torah, for Conservative Jews as for all others, remains one of
Judaism’s major commandments—a discipline of study and practice that I shall
describe in detail in my next posting.
But it is crucial to stress, as Finkelstein did, that Jews often come to love the
learning of Torah. That passion is nurtured for Conservative Jews, I think, by the
distinctive ways in which our learning combines study of text with study of the
history that shaped the text and was shaped by the text; this wider lens takes in
both the history of Jewish communities throughout the centuries and the
interactions between those communities and Gentile societies and cultures.
Conservative Jews, like others—if fortunate in their teachers and studypartners—experience
moments of excitement, joy, and gratitude from active
participation in the age-old conversation with Torah.
I will never forget the man in his 50s who, in tears, told our prayer group of the
day he had first understood the Shema’—word by word—when it was read from
the Torah.
Or the times when study of the dilemmas facing a Jewish community hundreds of
years ago informed and inspired members of synagogue and Federation boards.
Or the heated conversation about drawing boundaries between Judaism and the
larger culture in relation to the Mishnaic passage about “Rabban Gamliel in the
bath of Aphrodite.”

Or my own formative realization, as a teenager, that serious study of medieval
commentators on the Torah held out the promise that I could join them. My
thoughts mattered. Their disagreements opened space for new voices.
It is deeply meaningful to come closer to tradition in this way, and that connection
is intensified when no question is ruled out of limits, no body of knowledge
considered irrelevant. Every experience of personal and professional life assists
our understanding of what Torah means and what it wants of us.
Learning of this sort partakes of both obligation and passion. As Finkelstein put it,
“We are drawn to the Torah with the bonds of love for it and for its norms. We
love its ceremonies, its commandments, its rules and its spirit. We delight in its
study . . . And it is this response to it that we want to hand down to our children.”
This does not happen every day—but it happens enough of the time, touching us
deeply enough, that the learning we do matters greatly and clearly stands as one
of life’s great pleasures. We bring everything we have to the learning—all we
are—and we are more than repaid for the investment.
I think it is Conservative Judaism’s approach to learning that, more than
anything, makes our Movement unique. We seek—and, in my experience, often
attain—a distinctive balance between text and history, tradition and
contemporary dilemmas, halakhah and Aggadah, continuity and change, focus
on distinctive Jewish wisdom and attention to the interaction between Judaism
and other civilizations. We want women as well as men at every table of learning,
and value the diversity of voices heard at every table of learning, even as we
strive for common practice worthy of our shared devotion. In doing so, we carry
on the conversation begun at Sinai in word and deed, and in a way that no other
path in Judaism can attempt or achieve.