Daniel Gordis lobbed a grenade into the Positive-Historical Judaism camp this past August when he published an article in which he essentially declared that Positive-Historical Judaism is exhausted and bankrupt. But this is no cranky out-of-touch expert with no skin in the game lobbing grenades; Gordis is a respected Conservative rabbi and thought leader. He is, in other words, one of the guys. When Gordis writes an op-ed stating that the movement’s flagship concept is flatlining… you pay attention.
The problem, Gordis says, was that the whole thing was rife with internal contradictions. On the one hand Positive-Historical Judaism maintained that Jewish law was binding and normative and sacred; on the other hand it acknowledged that Jewish law evolved and developed over time in response to historical circumstances and changes and thus (according to its own logic) was the result of human decisions and interventions. So, which is it? Gordis would ask. Divine or historical? And the positive-historical thinkers would answer that it was both, that to say Jewish law had changed over time did not mean that it was not authoritative. It was a very delicate intellectual and theological balancing act that, Gordis would argue, became ever more difficult to maintain the more seriously one started to use historical methods of criticism in one's own theology. By the mid-20th century, with European Jewry mostly destroyed by the Holocaust, the intellectual project of Positive-Historical Judaism looked to Gordis simply...exhausted.
This sounded great in theory (hell, it still sounds great in theory). But Gordis, long a thoughtful Conservative interlocutor who has thought a lot about the conservative moment, now says that the moment is over. That the compromise has been compromised. That the Positive-Historical Judaism idea is spent. It no longer has intellectual heft and it no longer serves the needs of Jews.
There was, in Gordis's reading of things, a deeper and more significant issue still: that once one accepts that Jewish law is a human product and not some divinely revealed "thou shalt" and "thou shalt not" program, that once one acknowledges that it is conditioned by history, subject to change, and responsive to the needs of its time and place, one has weakened it, made it less authoritative. If the rabbis of the Talmud and the rishonim were just human beings responding to their own particular time and place, then what is the argument for their decisions being binding on us now? The positive-historical thinkers never satisfactorily answered this question; Gordis never does but would point out that they tried to have it both ways, to have reverence for tradition and legal texts while at the same time acknowledging their own development and historical specificity. But the intellectual honesty of the historical argument eats away at the reverence part, Gordis would say. It's like what happens to a famous painting that has been in a museum for decades and you look at it for years and years. At some point the grime and dirt on the painting become part of the painting itself. You can't not see it.
The original core idea of Positive-Historical Judaism always had tension between its positive-historical dimension and its conservative-halachic dimension. These aren’t things that fit together naturally: rigorous historical-critical work and strict adherence to halacha. The former deconstructs. The latter constructs and binds. One accepts that the Torah, for example, was written by human beings over time. It is a product of its era. It has been edited and redacted and is a composite text. The other accepts that God’s word, Torah, is a binding document and from it flows binding legal rulings that Jews must follow in their personal and communal lives. You can’t really do one and still do the other fully. You’re going to have to choose. Conservative Judaism has been going through the motion of both for 150+ years and Gordis points out that after a century and a half it is exhausted.
This, coupled with Gordis’s sense that the institutions of Conservative Judaism in America (the movements that size should have in a Jewish majority country) are in rapid and existential decline. Synagogues closing. Rabbinical schools in the tank. Younger Jews not engaged. The Conservative movement in America is a shadow of its former self and was the largest denomination for a time. The ideological collapse of Conservative Judaism mirrors its institutional decline. If Positive-Historical Judaism is an ideology, a set of principles and premises about how Judaism should be lived today, then what does it stand for today? Tough to say. It’s not “Orthodoxy lite” and it’s not “more traditional Reform”. It’s kind of a vibe-based halachic observance? Eh. Doesn’t really move me.
In a way, he also argues that it presumed a more authentic and earnest connection to Jewish tradition than most modern American Jews have. It was based on the idea that Jews have a deep connection to our past and a genuine desire for continuity. At the same time, it was based on the idea that Jews are also intellectually modern and free and we want to engage with Jewish tradition with that sort of intellectual freedom. The problem, says Gordis, is that most modern American Jews don’t really care about halacha (or if they do care, they aren’t Conservative; they’re Orthodox) and at the same time, most aren’t also committed to serious and critical engagement with Jewish tradition. The population of American Jews who are in the middle ground that Positive-Historical Judaism is aimed at is very small. So it has no actual constituency.
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