Louis Ginzberg - Legacy at JTS

Legacy At JTS

Ginzberg began teaching Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary from its reorganization in 1902 until his death in 1953. For fifty years he trained two generations of future Conservative rabbis. During his era, Ginzberg influences almost every rabbi of the Conservative Movement in a personal way. For some, Louis Ginzberg serves as a role model even today. Today’s leading Conservative posek in Israel, Rabbi David Golinkin, has written profusely on Louis Ginzberg. Golinkin has recently published a collection of responsa containing 93 questions answered by Ginzberg.

In the opening address, Ginzberg spoke of the need to keep Conservative Jewry under the rubric of Halakhah. The conception that in religious matters anyone, however ignorant, can judge for himself, is the direct denial of the old Jewish maxim, ‘The ignorant cannot be pious’ (Avot 2:5)… The majority vote of a Board of Directors of a synagogue is, after all, a negligible quantity when it is in opposition to the vote of historical Judaism with its myriad of Saints and thousands of Sages…The sorting, distributing, selecting, harmonizing and completing can only be done by experienced hands. Ginzberg’s initiative to base halakhic decisions on law committees and not laymen is the method the Conservative movement describes as its present one till today.

In 1918, at the Sixth Annual Convention, Ginzberg, as the acting president, declared that United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism stood for ‘historical Judaism’ and thus elaborates:

“Now let us understand the exact meaning of the expression historical Judaism…Looking at Judaism from a historical point of view, we become convinced that there is no one aspect deep enough to exhaust the content of such a complex phenomenon as Judaism…Accordingly, Torah-less Judaism… would be an entirely new thing and not the continuation of something given…