Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove
February 18, 2006

This year is a big year for Conservative Judaism. A search process is underway for the next Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary – the institutional training ground for undergraduates, graduate students, Jewish educators, Hazzanim and Rabbis of the Conservative Movement. I have heard through the gossip channels that an announcement will be forthcoming in the near future – hopefully with white or black smoke. The significance of the search is, of course, is that it is not just a search to fill an academic post, but an opportunity for the movement to do a bit of soul searching. The Chancellor is the leader not just of the Seminary but the entire Conservative movement, and the impending choice will inevitably be a comment about the status of the movement, where it has been and the direction of in which it is heading. Emerson once reflected that “an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man;” the Conservative movement is the lengthened shadow of past Chancellors Schechter, Finkelstein, Cohen, Schorsch and now somebody new. And so as the search has been conducted, there have been a series of fascinating exchanges in journals, in the Jewish press, at conferences and beyond on what is Conservative Judaism. The search for the chancellor has yielded a lively conversation in the Jewish world, usually intelligent, but occasionally less so, on who best embodies the past and future of the Conservative Judaism. So for the next several minutes, let me throw my yarmulke into the ring. While I am fairly certain that it is a bit too late for the search committee to consider the views of the junior rabbi from Chicago in its deliberations, I do urge you to follow the decision carefully as it is certain to shape the character of the movement for the next generation.

This morning we read about the moment of revelation, where all of Israel stood at the base of Mount Sinai, recipients of Gods words. It is no understatement to say that Judaism is a religion which is moored to the concept of Divine revelation. For the purposes of this morning, I do not want to get into the question of the facticity of the biblical account: did Mount Sinai really happen, or for that matter, the question of what was actually given at Sinai, or “Who wrote the Bible?” These are important questions, but they are not the questions of the day. Rather I want to focus on one particular claim of this week’s Torah reading, the assertion that for a moment in time God pierced through the canopy of the heavens and revealed the Divine self at Mount Sinai, and the content of that revelation for Jews is called Torah.

For thousands of years, Jews have held the Torah to be singular and immutable, communicating Truth with a capital “T.” It is as close as one could get to the divine.
As the great medieval philosopher Joseph Albo formulated in his Sefer Haiqqarim – there can be no change in the Torah for three reasons: First, God does not change and thus God’s Torah does not. Secondly, the Torah was given to the people of Israel and, unlike an individual, a people does not change. Thirdly, since the Torah is Truth it cannot suffer change, for Truth is eternal.” (Jacobs, Principles of Faith, 304-305) And, so the pre-modern view is perhaps best summed up by the eighth and ninth of Maimonidies famous thirteen principles of faith, that the Torah is both divine and unchanging. Judaism’s pedigree is derived and authorized from this Sinaitic revelatory moment. God’s presence is experienced by reading the text of the Torah, or as a former Chancellor, Rabbi Louis Finkelstein expressed "When I pray, I speak to God. When I study Torah, God speaks to me."

Now you may say I knew this already, and I actually hope nothing I have said so far is terribly new, but I can not overemphasize the power of this ahistorical notion that the Torah contains eternal verities which transcend the particulars of any one historical moment, context or condition. To be a scripturally based religion means to allow for immutable and constant truths which may be unpopular, which may be inconvenient, which may be thoroughly anachronistic, which can even be offensive, but we are bound by them because they are the word of God. We live in an age and a world which values change, progress, advancement, discovery and universally held ethics. But for thousands of years to be Jewish meant that you held truth to be located in a single, particular, ancient and sacred document to which you held fast to, through thick and thin, persecution, martyrdom and otherwise.

With this as the backdrop, there is something revolutionary to reading the words of the founding father of Conservative Judaism Zechariah Frankel. Before going on to be head of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau, Frankel wrote an essay in 1845 called “Changes in Judaism.” He began the essay with the goal towards “the reconciliation of belief and life, the assurance of progress within our faith, and the refining and regenerating of Judaism from and through itself. This is the circle in which our effort must move…anything outside this circle ceases to be Judaism.” What Frankel capitalized on is the powerful distinction between Judaism and Jews. Judaism reflects the eternal written and oral law as received from Mount Sinai; Jews live in evolving conditions through the ages. A Judaism which does not acknowledge that it must function in the context of the Jews of each generation ceases to be a living religion; it becomes a museum piece, a relic of the past. And so, in perhaps the passage of Frankel’s engraved on every Conservative clergyman’s heart, Frankel writes: “Maintaining the integrity of Judaism simultaneously with progress, this is the essential problem of the present.”

Conservative Judaism at its core is a commitment to sacred text and historical context, a viable Judaism is one that draws its authority from the paradoxical affirmation of both God’s eternal truth and the conditions of the time. It is in this dualism between the timeless and the time bound, between eternity and the demands of the present by which our movement is fueled. It is called Conservative Judaism because in Frankel’s mind, a Judaism which seeks only to reform, to accommodate the sounds of modernity, becomes deaf to the call of Mount Sinai. Given the irresistible urge to change it seeks to conserve. And it is the degree by which Judaism can maintain both a spirited engagement with the calling of the age and the calling of Sinai that is the measure of who we are as a movement. Conservative Judaism is indeed burdened with many labels: “Catholic Israel, “tradition and change,” “Emet V’Emunah,” “Positive-Historical Judaism,” “Contemporizing the Tradition,” and there are even voices now calling for a new name. But branding and marketing issues aside, for me it is simple. To be Jewish, to be a Conservative Jew, is to embrace Judaism and Jews, the timeless and the time bound, Sinai and today.

And, this challenge is as compelling now as it was for Frankel’s time. Every epoch, every age brings with it a new set of –isms, a new set of values, a new truth. And, there is an unquestionable allure to the ideals of our particular moment, even if we know they may be ephemeral. I, however, find Sinai to be an intensely compelling force in my life. In a world in which we are constantly accommodating ourselves to what is changing, there is something to be said to the power of what is fixed. The great Anglo writer G.K. Chesterton uses the image of a man who wants to paint the world a certain color – say blue, and over the course of a life time if he really committed himself he may leave the world a little bluer than when he entered it. But the person who keeps changing his desired color, one day red, the next day yellow, there would be nothing to show for it at the end of his days. Chesterton argues that moderns keep changing the paint color, our ideals and values, and so our efforts are fleeting (Orthodoxy, 108-110). What about changing ourselves to fit the fixed ideal? We don’t need to always rebel against antiquity, sometimes we need to rebel against novelty. A new siddur does not need to be written every day, there is a point and a power to reading the ideals of the past ages even when they don’t match up to your day to day life. If the point of religion was simply to affirm beliefs and values already held dear I would recommend a book club and gym membership. But to affirm something eternal in an ephemeral world – well, that is what religious people are trying to do. American Jews need to know that it is ok, if fact downright desirable, to side with the angels every so often. God’s voice, as emanated from Sinai still thunders: as Jews we have an obligation to have it heard.

And yet, we know that Sinai is the beginning but never the end. The famous insight of the midrash on this week’s parasha is especially relevant to issue. Ben Zoma notes that in Exodus 19:1 it states that the Israelites entered the Sinai wilderness on “This very day.” Ben Zoma asks why the verse states ‘this’ very day as opposed to what may seem more syntactically correct – “On ‘that’ very day.” Ben Zoma answers his own question with the insight that year in and year out, day in and day out, a person must see himself as if he stood on Mount Sinai - “this very day.” Indeed, the power of Sinai lies in the fact that it is temporally located both in the past and in the present. “Every epoch,” wrote Ranke, “is immediate to God…” As a Conservative Jew, I insist on recognizing the demands and ethics of my own time. And, sometimes, the Truth as stated in the Bible does not agree with the truths of my own historical moment. As Lincoln once commented: “It is not that which I do not understand in the Bible that bothers me. It is that which I understand only too well.” Certainly in our own day we don’t go very far in sacred texts to see that the eternal verities of Sinai may not be so eternal after all.

And, no wonder, Conservative Judaism is much easier said than done. As Conservative Jews we seek authenticity, not comfort; we know that being Jewish is found in the paradox, not in cheap platitudes. And we argue, because given the time bound and the timeless we will inevitably disagree on what is what, and who is authorized to distinguish between the absolute from the contingent. We stand at the river of tradition with a sieve of history, hoping that the dirt falls through, wanting to retain the precious metals, but it remains entirely unclear the measure by which certain elements are designated part of God’s Revelation and others are not. It is this exchange and interaction which is who we are; we continue to ask time bound questions in the face of the timeless. And though I could complain, and though the future is uncertain for our movement, I have never been as proud and as confident to be a Conservative Jew as I am today. I recommend it to anyone, it is the only religious conversation I care to be part of. I care deeply about who will be the next Chancellor because I care deeply about the movement.

I want to conclude by sharing with you an insight by a man who preceded Conservative Judaism, the great Hassidic master, R. Levi Yitzkhak of Berditchev (1740-1810). To understand his insight – you need to be familiar with the rabbinic concept known as “Teyku.” When the rabbis of the Talmud argue and neither side wins, or there is not enough information to make a judgment the rabbis declare “Teyku” – it has come to mean a “tie” both in the Talmud and in modern Hebrew. Embedded within Teyku is the Hebrew letters Taf, Yud, Kuf and V, an acronym for “The Tishbite will solve the difficulties and problems.” The rabbis reason that in the future days, when the Tishbite, namely the prophet Elijah, the harbinger of the world to come arrives – he will solve the standing legal disputes. Rabbi Levi Yitzhak asks the very reasonable question, why should Elijah solve the disputes, after all this morning we read that it was through Moses that the Torah was given, one would think that Moses would be better equipped to speak with authority on the precise content of revelation. Rabbi Levi Yitzhak explains that Moses, who no longer belongs to this world, can not render decisions, because he is unable to speak to spiritual needs of the day. But Elijah, who never dies, is attuned to the spiritual needs of his day and every day and therefore only he can speak with authority on the meaning of Torah, only he can solve the disputes. The import of this answer is rather stunning when you really take it in. Truth, though given to Moses at Sinai, is no longer his to adjudicate. Only the participants of a particular age and era are authorized to say what the eternal truths of Sinai are and are not. It is a stunning thought, a bit paradoxical, very messy, but that is the core of Conservative Judaism - everything else is commentary.