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October 24, 2003/Tishri 28 5764, Vol. 56, No. 5
Conservative Jews: Numbers don't tell all
JOE BERKOFSKY
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
It's a Shabbat morning, and Rabbi David Wolpe looks out over the main sanctuary of Sinai Temple in downtown Los Angeles at a sea of faces.
Normally, Wolpe sees 1,000 intrepid Shabbat synagogue-goers, he says, not bad for a synagogue with 1,600 families.
Of the Shabbat faithful, typically "980 drive to synagogue," Wolpe says. "Many don't drive home afterwards; they go out."
And therein lies the central paradox of today's Conservative movement.
The movement "gen-erates tremendous activity and commitment," Wolpe says. Yet, "in my experience, most Conservative Jews have a traditional feel, but not a very halachic approach," he says, using the term for Jewish law.
Historically, that tension has animated the movement, which grew as an alternative to Reform Judaism a century ago and officially adheres to halacha while synthesizing modern interpretations of tradition.
But Conservative Jewry is facing a critical crossroads.
Once the dominant postwar stream of American Judaism, movement membership ap-pears to be falling while the more liberal Reform and Reconstructionist movements, and the more traditional Orthodox movement, are gaining ground.
In 1990, for instance, 38 percent of Jews identified themselves as Conservative for the National Jewish Population Survey, but only 33 percent did so a decade later.
"The Conservative movement has been in demographic decline for nearly two genera-tions," says Jack Wertheimer, provost of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. JTS serves as the movement's established academic heart along with the newer and, some say, more liberal, University of Judaism in Los Angeles.
Most of the nearly 770 synagogues affiliated with the movement's United Synagogue congregational arm have yet to feel that population drop sharply because of a mini-baby boom filling congregational religious schools, Solomon Schechter Day Schools and Camp Ramahs - but the crunch will hit as those children grow, experts say.
"The movement has got to figure out how to adjust to that reality," Wertheimer says.
As movement leaders grapple with that dilemma, several hundred congre-gational leaders will be gathering for the 2003 biennial of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism in Dallas on Oct. 26-30.
The conference, titled "Preserving the Jewish Past, Living the Jewish Present, Building the Jewish Future," comes as prominent figures in the movement debate just why they are losing members.
Some even question the notion that the movement is shrinking.
"The issue for me is, we're not growing," says Rabbi Jerome Epstein, United Synagogue's executive vice president.
But he says that in the past 10 to 15 years, United Syna-gogue has seen its membership rolls remain steady.
Indeed, Epstein and others contend that the focus on numbers misses the point. Some even maintain that fewer members translates into a leaner, meaner movement, spiritually and religiously.
"The numbers may drop, but you have a more passionate core that in turn generates greater numbers," Wolpe says.
Steven Bayme, national director of contemporary Jewish life at the American Jewish Committee and a visiting JTS history professor, says the prognosis of the movement's health also depends on how it is ap-proached.
From "the top down," Bayme says, the movement is seen as being based on a critical mass of Jews living their lives according to halacha and receptive to modern Jewish scholarship. But, he asks, "how many individuals in con-gregations keep Shabbat, kashrut and family purity" by visiting the mikvah, or ritual bath. "The level of observance is much lower than the leadership would want."
Yet the movement has provided a "middle road," Bayme adds, a path for non-halachically religious Jews who want Jewish "en-richment" and Jewish families.
"Behind the numbers, I don't see decadence, I see a tre-mendous amount of vitality," Bayme says.
Much of that vitality centers around synagogue life.
Conservative synagogues have largely taken root in middle-class suburbia. Yet they also have sprung from 1960s-era spiritual-renewal drives, such as the havurah movement, Bayme and others say. At its genesis, that movement sought to establish intimate prayer by trans-forming largely passive congregations centered around a rabbinic leader to active hubs for family life.
While some believe demographics present a challenge, Werthei- mer says there are "structural" issues facing the movement as well. Power rests on the local, congregational level, he says, but "the flip side is the movement is not a well-coordinated movement."
Unlike the Reform move-ment, for example, the Conservative movement's congregational arm, its rabbinic assembly and other organizations do not coordinate closely.
The result has been that synagogues have been left to rely on local resources in their planning, rather than on national or even global trends, he says.
In the Greater Phoenix Metropolitan area, there are six congregations that identify as Conservative.
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