Hi Chevre,

Here's an attempt to respond to Bill's interest in "concrete, directed
conversations," to try to bring together some of the great ideas that
have already been put forth within this community, and to draw on some
of the conversations that I've had over this past year. (I'm a JTS
rabbinical student who has spent the past year at Machon Schechter in
Jerusalem, which has offered a nice setting to come together with
Conservative Jews from all over the world and think about these issues.)

Here are some preliminary thoughts that I've had lately about what we,
as a movement, might want to do:

1. Get over our fears of talking seriously about halakhah. I think
that we tend to teach that halakhah is an important idea, but we don't
want to offend people by telling them too much about what halakhah
obligates the individual to do. We're very good at talking about
halakhic theory, and we have lots of great ideas as a movement about the
theory, but we've been less good about being willing to teach about the
ways in which halakhah is designed to influence the smallest details of
daily life. I've heard stories from observant Conservative Jews who
have felt embarrassed to ask their rabbis questions about proper
berachot for particular foods - it seemed easier to ask an Orthodox
rabbi, who would surely be interested in the question.

If we want to create a truly educated laity, we have a lot of work to do
in this area; as Sara Shapiro-Plevan pointed out a few months ago, our
tendency is to "teach the 'easiest' mitzvot that are palatable to our
congregants because they already are practiced." Even our halakhic
literature in print tends to pay attention to big issues, rather than
the small details of a halakhic life that occupy so much of the Talmud's
attention; we have books like Isaac Klein's guide that avoid too much
detail, that don't bring Talmudic sources, and that are not in serious
dialogue with thousands of years of tradition. We need a sort of
Conservative "Arba Turim" - i.e. a highly pluralistic legal code,
complete with commentaries from different rabbis who disagree with each
other, that can give an accessible presentation of the varying options
available for the practice of halakhah.

2. Be willing to distinguish between minhag and halakhah, between
traditional customs and binding obligations. This is an approach that
I've learned from my teacher Moshe Benovitz this year, and it's one that
I think should be taken very seriously throughout the Conservative
movement: we should be a proudly halakhic movement, but can distinguish
ourselves from Orthodoxy by focusing on the idea that our obligations
are to do mitzvot d'oraita and mitzvot d'rabanan rather than treating
every "custom of our ancestors" as if it were binding. Customs are good
and important things, but it's in the realm of custom (rather than
halakhah) where it's fair to say that tradition has a vote, not a veto.
When extra-halakhhic customs lead us in directions that bring about
unnecessary and painful restrictions, we ought to give them less weight
and focus instead on the halakhic bottom line.

Examples of where we ought to be focusing on the halakhic bottom line -
and thereby making ourselves much more welcoming - include the issue of
homosexuality, where rabbis like Simcha Roth, Elliot Dorff, and others
have recently done a good job with this approach, being willing to
discard medieval prejudices and to return to the actual halakhah as
brought in the Talmud. I think that we should be approaching the issue
of intermarriage in a similar way, where we can deal with real halakhic
issues where relevant but should not be inventing hundreds of new
restrictions precisely designed to make intermarried families feel
unwelcome and alienated. (Needless to say, I'm highly embarrassed by
the way the Conservative movement has historically handled
intermarriage, but I'll restrain myself from writing at length about
that for the time being.)

3. Make connections between halakhah and aggadah, between our binding
obligations and the theological and ethical values of our tradition. We
are pretty good at doing this, and have produced some good literature on
how various aspects of ritual and prayer ought to be impacting our
behavior, character, and worldview, but this is something we should
really be making into one of the hallmarks of the Conservative movement.
Part of the trick is defining what our "aggadic" values are, being able
to articulate in a concise way what the Conservative movement stands
for. My teacher Rabbi Ira Stone has been doing some important work in
that arena, showing the various attempts over the past century to
concisely define the aggadah of the Conservative movement, and
suggesting where we should go from here - that's a project to which we
should be paying attention.

4. Keep expanding serious adult education opportunities. I view the
Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem as one of the most important
institutions that the Conservative movement has, and feel very strongly
that we should be expanding its reach, so that it can reach out to a
wider range of students. We should also be setting up other serious
learning institutions wherever we have large numbers of Conservative
Jews. The summer learning institutions that have sprung up at various
Camp Ramahs are an important manifestation of this. The idea of
Conservative Kollels in major cities across America, which Jonathan
Zuess suggested on this listserve some time ago, is also a great idea.
And I want to reiterate what Sara Shapiro-Plevan posted here: that we
should reduce our focus on the "child-oriented learning" within our
synagogues, and strive to make serious adult learning the centerpiece of
what goes on there.

5. Find new ways to support Conservative Jewish Day Schools. Serious
Jewish day-school education is undoubtedly one of the best ways to
strengthen the movement, but we don't have the financial resources to
make it possible to provide such an education to more than a small
number of students. Most parents can't afford private school tuition;
even if they can, they've already paid their taxes, and would generally
prefer to send their children to a decent public school at no extra cost
rather than paying for a Jewish day school. I think that the best
public policy solution for this problem is some sort of school voucher
program, which the Conservative movement publicly opposes. I know that
this idea is not popular, but it seems to me that revisiting our policy
statements - or, at the very least, giving more serious and creative
attention to thinking about how to fund Jewish education - would be a
good course of action.

6. Refocus the way we think about Bar and Bat Mitzvah training. Since
parents are interested in having their children undergo some sort of
training, we should take advantage of the time we have with our students
to focus on things that will be more lasting than teaching them to read
Torah or Haftarah. There are lots of other "mitzvahs" (commandments)
that are likely to be more meaningful to students, and we should find
ways to focus on whatever will create a lasting connection, even if that
means ignoring Torah reading altogether. In many cases, I'd rather have
students spend the equivalent amount of time working on their Hebrew.
I'd like to imagine that the educational environment leading up to Bar
and Bat Mitzvahs is a Beit Midrash (study hall) model, along the lines
that Sara suggested, with lots of opportunity for individualized
learning, rather than a classroom.

7. Refocus the JTS Cantorial School. I think that we have great
programs for training rabbis and educators within our movement; we also
produce many wonderful cantors, but, as was pointed out in this forum,
we also produce some performance-oriented cantors whose approach to
prayer turns people off from Conservative shuls. This is obviously not
a new problem: Abraham Joshua Heschel has a fantastic essay ("The
Vocation of the Cantor") on this topic in _The Insecurity of Freedom_
(an essay which anyone who ever serves as shaliach tzibbur should read),
where he suggests that the goal of the cantor should be to model
dialogue with God through prayer and to arouse the devotion of
congregants. His essay was doubtlessly intended to have some influence
on the way that cantors are trained in the Conservative movement, but
his critique has still not been sufficiently taken into account. My
wife discovered this earlier this year, as she applied to cantorial
schools. The curriculum for the training of Conservative movement
cantors, she found, is still highly focused on music theory and art
songs, and not sufficiently focused on training cantors to be leaders
who can teach and inspire humble prayer and devotion. A number of other
cantorial schools (e.g. AJR and Hebrew College) have stepped up to fill
the vacuum, and offer programs that are much more focused on Jewish
content (including halakhah), education, and creating kavannah in
tefillah. Many students go through the JTS cantorial school and find
ways to customize their programs to get the training that they really
need, but we have some serious restructuring work to do if we want to
make Heschel's vision of the humble shaliach tzibbur the norm in the
Conservative movement.

8. Find some way to improve our fundraising mechanisms within the
movement. I have a certain pride in the fact that the Conservative
movement is a coalition of organizations rather than a single
organization with many parts, but it seems to be counterproductive when
it comes to making the most of our resources. It pains me to hear that
every time a new and innovative educational program within the
Conservative movement has been proposed - Camp Ramah, the Schechter
School System, the Ziegler (UJ) Rabbinical School, the Conservative
Yeshiva - influential voices at JTS have opposed their creation on the
grounds that it would deplete an already limited donor base. This sort
of infighting is a real mark of shame for our movement, but I sense that
it still continues to this day. Getting rid of it seems like an
important priority.

Apologies for such a long post. I think that's it for now.

Shabbat Shalom,
Geoff Claussen