15 February 2012 | 22 Shevat 5772

In his book, Doing Jewish Theology: God, Torah and Israel in Modern Judaism, Rabbi Neil Gillman, Professor Emeritus of Jewish Thought at the Jewish Theological Seminary, wrote these words:

I have long felt that to think and live as a Conservative Jew is to live in a state of perpetual tension (page 191)

I remember when I heard Rabbi Gillman first offer those sentiments.  I was already an ordained rabbi and had served in congregational life for some number of years. Rabbi Gillman’s words resonated inside of me like few other words about Conservative Judaism.  Counterintuitive as they were (after all, religious perspectives and practice should evoke peaceful thoughts and spiritual contentment) Rabbi Gillman’s statement challenged me to put my disparate theological beliefs into words.  He encouraged me to embrace the tension of life as a traditional yet progressive Jew rather than to rationalize or shun it.

I thought of Rabbi Gillman’s perspectives about living in a state of perpetual tension as I read and discussed a recent Noam Neusner op-ed that appeared in The Forward with our Tuesday classes’ participants this week.  Neusner’s column takes the Obama Administration’s recent health care coverage disagreement with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and uses it to consider the proper parameters of religious thought, doctrine and action.  Can religious perspectives only govern a faith organization’s actions when it interacts with its own adherents?  Does the organization lose the right to act on those views when it serves others in the community beyond its own religious adherents?

Noam Neusner’s op-ed, though rooted in a very specific contemporary disagreement between two powerful bodies outside the Jewish community, suggests that the answers to the questions I have just asked can have significant bearing on how we perceive some important Jewish values.

Just as Rabbi Neil Gillman encourages us as Conservative Jews to embrace the tension we sometimes recognize in our tradition, so Noam Neusner urges us to live with a new tension he discerns in the present disagreement between the Obama and the Catholic Church.  I hope you will click on the link above and read the op-ed.