The Other Side of The Coin

Rabbi Dr. Joel Roth is one of the most prominent figures in the Conservative Movement today. He has served on the Rabbinical Assembly's Committee for Jewish Law and Standards for 28 years until his recent resignation. During that time, he has also served for a period as chair of that committee. Rabbi Roth is the former dean of the Jewish Theological Seminary Rabbinical School, where he currently serves as the Louis Finkelstien Professor of Talmud and Jewish Law. He is also the Rosh Yeshiva of The Conservative Yeshiva in Israel. Rabbi Roth has published a number of writings including The Halakhic process: A Systematic Analysis and Sefer ha-Mordecai: Tractate Kiddushin.

The Commentator: What would you say is the difference between the way the Conservative movement views the halakhic process and the way Orthodox Jews view it?

Joel Roth: By and large, I think the way the Orthodox and the Conservatives use the halakhic system is quite comparable, except for one major point that I will demonstrate through an analogy. If we say that halakha is like a chessboard then when the game began, whenever that was, the chessmen are set up on the board and it's clear that each piece has certain rules and limitations as to the ways in which it can move. We all agree that the game was played with moving these chess pieces until after the Shulkhan Aruch. Now, the Orthodox world says there is a dome over the chessboard that freezes it in the place it was with the acceptance of the Shulkhan Aruch. You can still answer every new halakhic question but your answer can no longer move a chess piece. The Conservative Movement says the Shulkhan Aruch has a lot of weight of precedent behind it but there is no dome over the board. As long as you only move a pawn one row or you only move a bishop diagonally you can still make all the same moves that our predecessors were able to make. Conservative Jews will use whatever tools our ancestors used. The need to use those tools beyond extrapolation or interpretation of the Shulkhan Aruch is not so great. Although this doesn't happen very often but when it does that's what makes the newspapers.

Commie: Yet some decisions seem on the surface to be halachikly indefensible such as, for example, the decision passed by the CJLS permitting travel to and from the Synagogue via automobile on Shabbat?

JR: There is no responsum passed by the law committee that has done us a greater disservice than this responsum. On the other hand, what I want you to understand is that the authors of that paper said we understand the category of melakha sh'eyno tzricha l'gufa to be as the Ri understood it as oppose to the way Rashi understood it. Therefore, we think that the use of the automobile on Shabbat is a melakha sh'eyno tzricha l'gufah because that act could not have been done in the days of the mishkan. I think they were entirely wrong in just about everything they did. However they thought they were interpreting existing precedents in a legitimate way to allow the conclusion which they sought out to reach. So, as radical as their decision was, they tried valiantly to justify it in classical halakhic terms.

Commie: If that is in fact the case, does the question not become: are we taking halakha and viewing it objectively as its own body or are we trying to fit in our personal feelings for what is necessary into halakha?

JR: And you think Orthodox poskim don't do that?! By definition, a posek has to do that. If a couple comes to me telling me the circumstances of their child's birth and it is clear to me that on the surface that person is a mamzer, I will move heaven and earth to find some way to say that this person is not a mamzer because my heart tells me that I've got to try to make a way for this person to not be a mamzer. That doesn't mean that this is always possible. It is a fallacy, from my perspective, to think that p'sak is a dispassionate and objective undertaking. It is almost never an objective undertaking. Only once in a while, it's an objective undertaking.

Commie: In your opinion, how important is it for Conservative Judaism to remain a halakhic movement in spite of the laxity of observance exhibited by the movements laity? What measures do you think can and should be taken to increase halakha observance among the laypeople of the Conservative Movement?

JR: To me, it is critical that the Conservative Movement remain a halakhic movement. If the Conservative Movement is not a halakhic movement it should, in my opinion, fold up shop and go home. Its entire claim to authenticity is that it is a halakhic movement. If it ceases being that we have no reason to continue. The greatest educational failure of the Conservative Movement has been in its inability to transmit to its constituency that it is a movement committed to the authority of Jewish Law, and what we think that means, and to translate that into action. When we have succeeded, like with some kids at Camp Ramah, or kids on USY who learn what it is that we really stand for, they often find themselves in the dilemma of having to choose whether to remain in the Conservative Movement and have no chevra (group of friends) at all. The majority decide one of two things: either they decide to become rabbis, in which case the movement expects you to be observant, or they decide to go to the orthodox world. That is our greatest failure. We have got to undo that failure. Can we? I'm no longer as sure as I used to be. The problem is that in any given community they so stand out like a sore thumb that they become uncomfortable and decide that they have to be part of the community where their behavior is not so aberrational.

Commie: Even assuming that the laypeople would subscribe to halakha in the sense that the Conservative Movement views it, is that a movement which is really so different from the "Open Orthodoxy" espoused by Rabbi Avi Weiss? If not, what is the need for a Conservative Movement?

JR: If Open Orthodoxy is not radically different it's because they're really Conservative. I know they may reject such a claim. The truth is though if they're not radically different it's because they are in fact behaving the way the Conservative movement has always advocated. They're on their guard against being thrown out of the Orthodox world. They're being very careful to make sure that the world doesn't consider them to be conservative.

Commie: When the subject of ordaining women was still being debated by the CJLS, [Vice President of Student Affairs of JTS] Joseph A. Brodie was very critical of the fact that laypeople were allowed to render halakhic decisions. How do you feel about a non-halakhists being instrumental in the halakhic decision making process?

JR: Ultimately, the laypeople were not involved in the halakhic decision making process. Gerson Cohen, who was the Seminary chancellor, established a commission to go around and ask people what they thought about things. But when push came to shove what Dr. Cohen said 'I want the faculty to write papers on this subject and the decision will be made on the basis of the responsa of the faculty and not on the basis of what the laypeople wanted.' Why did he want to have the commission? Because he wanted to get a sense of whether it would be good for the movement to have women rabbis? Would it split the movement? How much of the movement really thought that this was a good idea? Would the most observant people in the movement decide that the movement is no longer for them if we decided to ordain women? That's what the commission was trying to find out but ultimately the decision was based on halakhic papers. What Rabbi Brodie was worried about, and with some justification, was that he never thought that my paper was non-halakhic. However, his fear was that the people who would benefit from my paper didn't care as much about halakha as I did. What he was really worried about was that I was playing into the hands of people who didn't care about halakha as much as I did. I always hoped that I would be among the leaders to make sure that it never happened that way in the movement, that we played into the hands of people who didn't care. I may not have succeeded.