Shul goers of all stripes vote with their feet.  If more people got more out of attending Conservative prayer services, attendance in Conservative shuls  would be much stronger and more dynamic than it generally is.

Judaism is a team sport.  But it’s made up of individuals.  If you try to be true to yourself and accepting of others, anyone has a chance, in turn, of being accepted in a comminuity with different minhagim.

The problem Conservative Judaism is facing is that a growing number of it’s members are becoming too Reform to fit into traditional Conservative philosophy.  Especially young people.

My prediction for the future.  My hope, at least.  And I’m 25, coming from the camp of “Reform Jew who now goes to a Conservative Synagogue but still struggles with some of the Liturgy, but struggles more with the fact that virtually no one in my Reform congregation knows how to read Hebrew, or cares to know, and is getting lonely and frustrated.”

My hope is….

We are inches away now from there being a formal and serious discussion of the merging of the movements.  That will be one of the most exciting and energizing things in the history of American Judaism.

In my opinion, there are now only a few core pieces of Liturgy away from a huge number of Reform Jews shifting full force into a Conservative space.  Those pieces of Liturgy are the same as they have been since the beginning of the separation between the movements.  They are prayers for the Messiah Ben David, the rebuilding of the Temple, and the notion of exile.  Regarding these three differences.

1)  I think that these “conservative” Reform Jews have already come around regarding the notion of exile.  Some may still care.  But it’s less of an issue than people may think nowadays.  Certainly less than in the past.

2) “Conservative” Reform Jews are still dancing with the notion of the Temple.  I don’t think it’s because they don’t want to end up in Israel, or that they don’t love Jerusalem.  I think that it is because their Judaism is closer to that of Zionist Kibbutzim who were the backbone of the formation of Israel, than they to the notion of a shining structure on a hill.  They have trouble, however, realizing that the two types of Judaism- rural, agricultural, and urban, cultic- are not inherently separate.  

The Conservative movement should make that clear, and they should back it up with action that respects it.  Conservative Jews are almost exclusively urban.  They should start a farm, a Kibbutz, on which the movement could incubate and control, for instance, their own Kosher food program.  One that recognizes that a Conservative Jew see’s no value in a Hescher from an Orthodox food plant that pays illegal immigrants 2 bucks an hour is not, in fact, Kosher at all.

3)  Based on the prophecy of Nathan in Kings, that there is a very real and very serious argument that the notion of a Messiah Ben David was something that was refuted to his face, in his lifetime, because he murdered someone to have sex with his wife.  He blatantly broke, in that act, 3 of the ten commandments, and had he not been King of Israel, he would have been put to death for it.  Go to Kings and read what Nathan said to David.  Read that, and then try to tell a Reform Jew who sit at the gates the Conservative movement that they are wrong to not pray for a Messiah ben David.

This is a point that the Conservative movement may have to cave on.  It’s not in the “notion of a Messiah.”  Not about whether a person thinks the Messiah is a “person or an era”.  

It’s because the Talmud teaches that someone’s teacher is akin to being his Father.  And I think people have a serious problem with the notion of the Messiah being Ben David, seeing as no matter how great David may have been in his youth or in his unification, he destroyed an entire Universe by full blown murdering Uriah.  The notion of our Messiah coming from that line is, to say the least, problematic.

The Conservative movement should address that, honestly, and openly.  I think they might want to change not their notion of Messiah, but their notion of Ben David.

Anyways- that’s my take.

For those who don’t have a copy handy, I’ll quote a portion of Rabbi Dorf’s article:

Rosenzweig agreed with his friend Buber that revelation is not a matter of God speaking words: it is rather what we lean about God from ongoing encounters with Him.  “All that God ever reveals in revelation is revelation . . . .  He reveals nothing but Himself to man.”  For Rosenzweig, though, the Torah is the record of an encounter of the Jewish people with God, and, as such, each Jew is obligated to keep the commandments that he or she can.  Rosenzweig stresses that Jews are not free to choose which commandments they want to fulfill; rather, they are obligated to do whatever they can.  Sometimes we are not physically able to perform a commandment–for example, when we are ill.  Even in traditional Jewish law, under such circumstances we are not held to be at fault for failing to do what the commandment requires.  The novelty of Rosenzweig’s thesis is that he sees ability not just as a physical property but as a psychological–or, better, a relational–matter.  One’s ability to perform God’s commands, for Rosenzweig, is  primarily a function of one’s ability to feel commanded by God.  That, in turn, is a function of the depth of one’s relationship with God. 
 . . . . . . . . . . .
Similarly, says Rosenzweig, the extent of one’s obligations to God is a function of the depth of the relationship that one has been able to cultivate with God.  Consequently, each of us will have a different level of obligation to fulfill the commandments . . . .(p. 1402)