Relationships Between Jewish Religious Movements - Conservative Views

Conservative Views

Conservative Judaism holds that Orthodox Judaism is a valid and legitimate form of normative rabbinic Judaism; it respects the validity of its rabbis. Conservative Judaism holds that both Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism have made major and unjustifiable breaks with historic Judaism, both by their rejection of Jewish law and tradition as normative, and by their unilateral acts in creating a separate definition of Jewishness (i.e. the latter movement's acceptance of patrilineal descent as an additional way of defining Jewishness.) Despite this disagreement, Conservative Judaism respects the right of Reform and Reconstructionist Jews to interpret Judaism in their own way. Thus the Conservative movement recognizes the right of Jews to form such denominations, and recognizes their clergy as rabbis, but does not generally accept their decisions as valid. Thus, for example, the Conservative movement typically does not accept Reform converts to Judaism whose conversions did not meet the requirements of Jewish law as being Jews.

The Conservative movement, while respecting the validity of Orthodox Rabbis, believes that Orthodoxy has deviated from historical Judaism through an insistence on the halachic principle of binding legal precedent, in particular with respect to relatively recent codifications of Jewish law. A prominent Conservative spokesman has written:

Reform has asserted the right of interpretation but it rejected the authority of legal tradition. Orthodoxy has clung fast to the principle of authority, but has in our own and recent generations rejected the right to any but minor interpretations. The Conservative view is that both are necessary for a living Judaism. Accordingly, Conservative Judaism holds itself bound by the Jewish legal tradition, but asserts the right of its rabbinical body, acting as a whole, to interpret and to apply Jewish law.

(Mordecai Waxman Tradition and Change: The Development of Conservative Judaism)

The Conservative movement, however, has clashed with Orthodoxy over its refusal to recognize the Conservative and Reform movements as legitimate, and in February 1997 Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, the Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, claimed that Orthodox organizations in Israel politically discriminate against non-Orthodox Jews, and called on Reform and Conservative Jews, as well as the Jewish Federations throughout the United States, to stop funding Orthodox organizations and institutions that disagree with the Conservative view of pluralism. Several weeks later, at the movement's annual Rabbinical Assembly conference in Boston, he called for the disintegration of Israel's chief rabbinate and its network of courts.