Off to Mexico

This will likely be my last post for about a week as I am departing early Sunday for the Rabbinical Assembly Convention in Mexico City. Why Mexico? Weather alone would not draw us. Rather, we go to Mexico to show our support for the Latin American Conservative Jewish community. Over the last 20 years our Movement has really taken off in the Southern Hemisphere and we now have a Rabbinical School in Buenos Aries.

Among the hot topics at the Convention will, of course, be the ordination of Gay and Lesbian Rabbis by our Movement. Much has been and will be written on the topic. The issues go far beyond homosexuality. Very few among the leadership or laity of the Movement wish to marginalize the gay community. There is deep and abiding respect for all Jews, for no one is more sensitive to what it feels like to be treated like The Other than Jews. The question is how to reconcile the Torah, which expressly forbids homosexuality, and the hearts and souls of homosexual Jews who want and deserve a comfortable place in our Movement. If we were part of a Movement that did not see Jewish law as binding, the issue would be fairly irrelevant as the Torah’s laws would no longer be compelling. If, on the other hand, we saw Jewish law as immutable, the topic would be moot as well. But because we are part of a Movement that sees Jewish law as both binding and evolving, the issue is more complicated.

Some see this process as moving too slowly. Some attribute this to a lack of resolve, or worse, some back room politics designed to keep the gay community at bay. That’s not the way I see it. I believe the Law Committee of the Movement is taking the deliberations seriously, not just because it is challenging an explicit statement of Torah, but because it is looking at the larger issue of what it means to be a Movement. On one hand we have people who say, “If we are a Movement we must be clear and unequivocal on where we stand on the issues.” It is for this reason that the Rabbinical Assembly Law Committee advocated an 80% majority for statements on issues of tremendous importance, like this one. Others see our Movement as a Big Tent, with room for lots of opinions and practices. They would argue that if a position paper receives the necessary 6 votes of the Committee, thus making it an accepted opinion, that would be enough. Some Rabbis would accept the opinion and some would not. It would not be seen as a Movement wide statement. We could not use it to say “The Movement stands for…” but it would successfully address the issue at hand with both scholarship and compassion.

This subtlety seems lost on some. In our world today people want quick and easy answers for just about everything. We want a Movement that speaks with one voice and yet we want that voice to be all-inclusive. Can it be done? We’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, I think we should take the Talmud’s advice “Dan L’chaf Zechoot” and give the leaders of the Conservative Movement “the benefit of the doubt”. They are good people with caring hearts and bright minds who are trying to guide us through fog to the light of a new day.