Middle of the Road

The first thing that struck me about the Conservative movement's website was that it wasn't as bright, welcoming, and user-friendly as the Reform movement's. Maybe that just means they need a new webmaster, but the layout didn't make me want to explore it more. Although their site took political stances as well, they were not nearly as uniformly left-wing as the Reform website. Republicans or Democrats could call themselves Conservative without much conflict of interest. Instead, the site focused on more humanitarian issues that everyone (or just about) can get behind, like ending the genocide in Sudan. When the movement talked about itself, it seemed to take on a defensive posture. It constantly asserted that it DID have a clear mission statement and tried to make itself out as the best of all worlds. Maybe this posture comes from the general feeling that the Conservative movement is just an undefined "middle ground" that the article talks about.

Personally, I used to consider myself a Conservative Jew and was active in Koach here on campus. Even though I still like the services (I find them the most approachable of the three movements), the more I learned about the movement, the less I identified with it. Part of the problem is that even scholars and rabbis officially representing the movement couldn't seem to take a stand on religious issues. As the article states, main contributors to the Conservative movement differed in their conceptions of G-d. This disagreement is the main source for my confusion; when the concept of G-d is so hazy, why are the halakha binding? (Or is there no difference between laws that are in the Torah versus laws that were developed by rabbis?) A former rabbinic intern from JTS described the Torah as a product of "Divine inspiration." I'm still not sure exactly what this means. The Conservative website constantly emphasizes "history" and "historical continuity" pointing to an academic/critical approach to the Torah. But again, if the Torah was written by man, then why feel obligated to follow it today? I think this uncertainty adds to the development of the Conservative movement adapting its beliefs to the "trends" of the day. One of the biggest examples I've seen of this firsthand is my friend's Conservative rabbi who told him that premarital sex is okay. It seems like the rabbi is just telling his young congregants what they want to hear (or what they're going to do anyways) because he ignored a whole set of laws concerning the issue (like the mikvah, etc.).