The rabbis on a committee that sets religious policy for Conservative Judaism have voted to maintain the status quo on the roles that homosexuals may play in the movement’s institutions.
The move by the Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards means that lesbians and gay men are welcome to join and participate in congregations, camps, youth groups and schools as individuals.
It also means that openly gay men and women will continue to be refused admission to the movement’s rabbinical and cantorial schools. And rabbis affiliated with the movement will be prohibited from conducting “commitment ceremonies” for gay and lesbian couples.
The law committee left it to individual rabbis to determine whether lesbians and gay men may be active as youth leaders and teachers, as well as to what extent they may receive religious honors during worship services and hold lay leadership positions.
The traditionalist position, articulated by Rabbi Joel Roth, who chairs the law committee and who will soon be dean of the Jewish Theological Seminary’s rabbinical school, got support from 13 of the 23 rabbis who ruled on the policy.
According to Roth, “the biblical and rabbinic sources do not really lend themselves to permissive interpretations,” and there is no modern scientific evidence sufficient to overturn the halachic (legal) tradition regarding homosexuality.
The only proposal attracting significant support that might have altered the current position was offered by Rabbi Elliot Dorff, provost of the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, the West Coast affiliate of JTS.
His position advocates that the status quo be maintained while the heads of all three branches of the movement institute a commission that would spearhead a movement-wide study of both heterosexual and homosexual norms.
UNITED SYNAGOGUE WON’T COOPERATE
Dorff’s position was adopted by the law committee, which requires a proposal to win only six votes from the panel’s 25 voting members to pass. The six-vote requirement means that two or more opposing opinions are often adopted by the committee.
Committee members present were evenly split on Dorff’s proposal: Eight voted for it, eight voted against it and seven abstained.
And the heads of two of the three central institutions of Conservative Judaism pre-empted some of the authority that the teshuvah (legal opinion) could carry by saying that their organizations would not participate in the proposed commission.
Rabbi Jerome Epstein, executive vice president of United Synagogue, the movement’s congregational arm, stated in a March 19 letter to Rabbi Roth that he was also speaking on behalf of JTS Chancellor Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, and that neither of them would participate in the study effort.
Roy Clements, a law committee representative of the congregational arm, said “there is no need” to conduct a study to find out the needs of the movement vis-a-vis homosexuality.
“It’s a non-issue,” said Clements, who is one of five non-voting lay members on the committee. “There are more important issues that the movement needs to study together, like intermarriage.”
Advocates of Dorff’s proposal strongly disagreed.
Rabbi Gordon Tucker, outgoing dean of the JTS rabbinical school, compared those unwilling to study the needs of Conservative Jews to colleagues of the astronomer Galileo who refused to look through his telescope for fear of what they might see.
“I cannot understand what is so scary about studying an issue,” he said. “We need to be informed jurists before we can act. There are things going on beneath the surface in our community that we don’t have the first sense of the magnitude of.”
‘MOST EMOTION-LADEN ISSUE EVER’
In any case, according to Dorff, passage of his teshuvah mandates that a commission be formed by the Rabbinical Assembly to study the issue — with or without the congregational and seminary arms of the movement.
JTS Chancellor Schorsch circulated a second letter to members of the law committee, in which he said he fears that if the law committee “were not to reaffirm the halacha with a single unequivocal opinion, but to admit a second voice that elevates a homosexual relationship to the status of an equally valid communal norm, the lines separating Conservative from Reform and Reconstructionism would have been profoundly and irreparably blurred.”
Several more letters from individual gay and lesbian Conservative congregants, and a petition signed by 50 members of four Manhattan Conservative synagogues, were sent to the law committee rabbis before their meeting.
Richard Gottlieb, a gay member of one New York congregation, in his letter urged the law committee members to carefully study current medical and psychological research on gay and lesbian issues and to “talk directly with the many gay and lesbian members of the Conservative movement, as well as their heterosexual fellow congregants.”
Deciding the role of gays and lesbians in Conservative Jewry was described by one law committee member, Rabbi Ben Zion Bergman, as “the most emotion-laden issue” ever to come under the panel’s consideration — “even more so than the ordination of women.”
While a clear mandate for maintaining the traditional interpretation of halacha, and the policies that many gay and lesbian Jews find exclusionary, was adopted by the law committee, the more than 20 hours of on-the-record rabbinic consideration did not leave gay and lesbian Conservative Jews without any change in their legal standing.
As Rabbi Dorff pointed out, “there is now a teshuvah on the books that says engaging in homosexual acts is not toeva,” an abomination.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.