Religion is a Living Language

Because we Conservative Jews have our roots in a 19th century academic movement that stressed the "scientific" study of Judaism, we are often criticized for a lack of religious fervor, the absence of a religious quest, and a paucity of spirituality. Many people, even among Conservative Jews, believe that because we engage in rigorous, dispassionate scholarship, we view our subject--our own Jewish faith--through a lens of "otherness," as if we are studying some ancient people but have nothing personal at stake. "Where is God in all this?" they ask.

The premise of our scholarly method is that Jews and Judaism have never existed in a vacuum. Rather, we have affected our surroundings, and they have affected us. If the goal of our scholarship is to understand our own growth and development, we must understand our environment. This undertaking is not the disengaged study of some long dead or long forgotten society, but the quest for the understanding of our own essence.

For example, if I am ignorant of the creation and flood traditions of the ancient Near East, I do not comprehend the religious significance of their presence in the Torah. When I read those parshiyot (portions of the Torah) that describe the Flood, they are no less filled with religious meaning because I know we share some core tradition with other ancient peoples. Rather, their spiritual content and significance lie in our unique Judaization of those shared traditions. Indeed, if I do not recognize this phenomenon, I lose a dimension of our religious creativity as Jews. If I naively believe that we alone possess those traditions, or if I worry unnecessarily about whether they are historical fact or not, I miss the point entirely.

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