Conservative Judaism and the twenty-first century.

Torah lies at the center of our experience as Jews. It is how we interact with Torah that defines us as Conservative Jews.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote about the difference between Matan Torah and Kabbalat Torah. Matan Torah, the Giving of the Torah, was a one time event, represented in the fixed text of the Torah. Kabbalat Torah, the Receiving the Torah, is the ongoing effort of every individual and every generation to understand and apply Torah, as our understanding of God's will, to the ever changing conditions and challenges of life. This effort occurs within the context of community, whereby our allegiance, while primarily directed to God, is, by extension, extended to the People Israel, with whom God made the special covenant reflected in the eternity of Torah. It was through our application of Torah as a community, particularly through the ever expanding interpretation of halakha, that we remained a people even without a land of our own. It will be through our commitment to the application of Torah, as expressed through halakha, that we will remain a people.

As Conservative Jews, we have been very good at teaching Torah. We have interpreted it through literary and historical analysis. We have applied it effectively to contemporary conditions through the teshuvot of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards. We served twentieth century and particularly post-Holocaust Jewry well: legitimizing Judaic Studies, carefully modernizing our received Hebrew liturgy, and enfranchising women, even as we maintained our commitment to tradition.

We have an important role to play in the twenty-first century as well. At this critical juncture, we offer faith-based morals without fundamentalism, religious passion without dogmatism, and belief in God without a rejection of scientific method. We are the religious movement that continues to emphasize balance in a world desperately in need of balance. We value the balance between tradition and change, the balance between personal autonomy and communal obligation, the balance between commitment to one's own faith interpretation and respect for those of others. In a fragmenting world, we continue to uphold the value of pluralism and mutual respect and cooperation. Etz Hayim Torah and Commentary reflects the best of these values by including a variety of voices and perspectives that at one and the same time embrace faith and science, emotion and praxis, morals and modernity.

What we have sadly failed to do as a movement is to train and retain a generation of the personally observant. Admittedly, this was hard to achieve in the post-Holocaust world. The Jews who flocked to the Conservative movement were largely refugees (actually or spiritually) from a European Judaism destroyed by Hitler. They wanted to be embraced by the warm feelings evoked by the traditions in which they grew up. At the same time, however, they rejected the limits placed by Old World restrictions on their personal choices and autonomy. To survive and thrive in America meant being American first. Yet this is not the full story. At the heart of the post-Holocaust Jew was the nagging suspicion that the mitzvot, the commandments, did not really matter so much in a world in which both the pious and the non-observant faced the same fate in Europe's ovens. Self-defense and defense of Israel replaced Torah as the primary expressions of Jewish Peoplehood. Despite the rebirth of Israel, God's Presence remained hidden behind the smoke rising from Auschwitz.

It has taken more than a generation to reconstruct a theology that moves beyond Auschwitz. Rabbis Harold Kushner, Harold Schulweiss, David Wolpe, and Naomi Levi all offer contemporary post-Holocaust theologies that place God back in the center of our personal experience and religious journey through a world often filled with pain and tragedy. Their messages of hope and comfort focus on what God can do for us. They have provided an avenue for the modern Jew to return to God even as we continue to question God's power and choices regarding the often sorry state of the world.

We are now at the cusp of asking a more difficult question: What can we do for God? The answer lies at the heart of any hope we may have for developing a deeper commitment to Jewish practice among our laity, and by extension, for the future of Conservative Judaism.

Sociological studies show that the younger the generation, the less members want rules and expectations. They want autonomy and acceptance. Therefore, the first and only thing that can reach them is God's unconditional love for them, and by consequence, their unconditional love for God.

Once God is at the center of our lives, our priorities begin to shift. How we spend our time, how we spend our resources, what we eat, how we treat others, all start to change, because we will make decisions based on what we believe God wants rather than what we want.

To do that, we return to Torah. That is really what Torah, and by extension halakha, is all about: finding out what God wants.

When we put God back at the center of all we do, our congregations will change. Our expectations of our lay leaders will change, as will our expectations of our rabbis. There will be less administering and more ministering. We will expect our leaders, and by extension all our members, to live lives of integrity and balance in concert with what God wants of us in every interaction within and outside the synagogue. This may be threatening to some. But it is essential for our future.

Passion for what God wants will transform our lives and by extension drive us to share the strength, joy and hope we experience with others. As we serve God, we will feel a driving need to share God mainly because our passion for God raises within us a passion for God's creatures, other people. We will therefore become authentically and passionately welcoming to newcomers and seekers. In this way we will attract and retain those Jews, and even perhaps the otherwise unchurched, hungry for spiritual authenticity and the special combination of balance only Conservative Judaism offers. (See the work of Tom Bandy on transforming congregations in this way.)

Such passion for God is completely Jewish. From the shema of Rabbi Akiva, to the poetry of Yehudah HaLevi, to the devekut of the kabbalists, passion for God has been part and parcel of the Jewish experience.

That does not mean we must have a single unified theology or set of praxis before we ask what God wants. While specific details may differ, as Conservative Jews, our answers will, by necessity, include Shabbat, kashrut and limud (study), as well as acts of gemilut hasadim and tzedakah, because they are all part of Torah, and of how Jews throughout the millennia have understood what God wants of us, as expressed through halakha.

This is America. What of the rest of the world?

Israel is the heart and soul of the Jewish People. Conservative Judaism, the Masorti movement, is the best hope for saving the Jewish soul of the Jewish State, bringing the joy of Jewish observance and knowledge to the average Israeli alienated by ultra-Orthodox religious coercion. Israelis are desperately seeking their own souls. Our support of Conservative institutions in Israel is therefore a critical component of securing the future of the Jewish State. The challenge will be how to keep God, and therefore Torah, ministry instead of administration, at the center of our growing movement in Israel.

What is true in Israel is also true around the world. Jews throughout Europe and South America need us to be the best and most dynamic Conservative Jews we can be to support them where their lives as Jews are far less secure, economically and politically, than our own.

As the Reform movement begins to embrace a greater degree of traditional practice, those among our membership most committed to personal autonomy (a cardinal value of Reform Judaism) may be drawn to shift their membership to the Reform synagogues. They may report disaffection due to the quantity of English, or lack thereof, in our services, or the number of hours required by our Hebrew schools. The tendency among our lay leadership, worried about membership numbers, is to encourage accommodation in any number of areas. That is not the answer. Rather, just the opposite. We can now focus our energies on our core values and in this way ultimately build a stronger and more committed laity, and therefore a more attractive and vibrant Conservative movement.

In the language of Emet v'Emunah, each of us is on a journey to God's holy mountain. It is a journey of faith, learning, and practice. Different people join the journey at different places in their lives and proceed along the journey with different side trips and at different paces. We can be welcoming, accepting and expecting all at the same time for that is also what God wants of us. Indeed, it is how God has treated us and our ancestors.

Conservative Judaism is unique in that we can be totally God-centered without becoming extremists. We can embrace the totality of Torah's claim over our lives without becoming fundamentalists. We can hold both modern scholarship and science together with spirituality and a passion for God in the world. In these ways, Conservative Judaism is uniquely positioned to make a major contribution not only to the future of the Jewish people, but also to the survival of the world.

SUSAN GROSSMAN is spiritual leader of Beth Shalom Congregation in Columbia, Maryland. She is a member of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards and one of the editors of Etz Hayim Torah and Commentary.