Special to WJW

A friend of mine once gave me a book of quirky quotations. My favorite (and the shortest) is from critic and artist Manny Farber: "Š context Š"

In the charged atmosphere following the conclusion of last week's meeting of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly, everyone seems ready to make a pronouncement about the future of Conservative Judaism. I'm with Manny.

More than a decade ago, a consensus was reached on this (and other) matters of human sexuality, and the process continued during the deliberations of the CJLS over these teshuvot (responsa).

That process is far from over. The door to a complex and tantalizing roomful of questions has been pried open, and the exciting result is to engage them and transform traditional Judaism once again. It will energize Conservative Judaism for decades to come.

Reactions to the headlines that celebrate or condemn miss the point. Like Judaism in general, Conservative Judaism is (to the frustration of many) more about process than decision. The person who reads only the conclusion of a rabbinic opinion, ignoring the examination of sources and reasoning, misses the point. A proclamation of moral values has no worth unless it finds resonance among the people.

Our movement has an ongoing laboratory on this subject. Twenty-five years ago, the CJLS made a decision predicted to split Conservative Judaism and destroy its credibility ‹ the decision to ordain women. It took decades to realize how much has been left undone by that decision, even as we have benefited from its blessings.

Our greatest peril from these recent decisions by the CJLS is that we will forget how much hard work needs to be done in reimagining family, sexuality and spiritual consciousness in context.

Meanwhile, some people will quit. Some people will join. The short-term spike or dip in affiliation rates is irrelevant and misleading.

Conservative Judaism will be stronger if it continues to address with integrity the often paradoxical nature of Jewish law and Jewish life. It will weaken if it capitulates to political pressures instead of the process of progressive historical development. I am a terrible prognosticator, but my experience tells me that we may bump and lurch, but we will stick to our principles.

I make that representation because of my own preferences among the positions considered. Even though I will rely on the permissive positions articulated in one teshuvah, my sympathies lie with the process employed by the other two, and my preferences with the papers deemed to be takanah (decree) and left unaffirmed.

I start from a dangerous place in a legal system ‹ a general principle. Hillel's axiom, "That which is noxious to you, do not do to your fellow," seems to me to sum up the essence of Torah and Jewish law built upon it. For thousands of years, the rest of that axiom, "the rest is commentary, go and study," has been the modus operandi of decisors and disciples alike.

Two of the affirmed opinions rely on the bedrock value that whatever scholars understand as the meaning of Torah has the validity of Torah itself. Indeed, most Conservative rabbis gleefully teach a section of Talmud that affirms that even when God contradicts the majority of rabbis, the law follows the rabbinical ruling, not the new revelation. Those teshuvot (and I) are loathe to dismiss thousands of years of unambiguous teaching, and even more so to proclaim that religious law can be immoral.

Hence, I would have preferred to declare that the restrictions placed on same-sex intimacy, from the Torah forward, emerged from a lack of knowledge about human sexuality, and simply interpret them out of existence.

By identifying a sacred Jewish relationship as mutual and monogamous ‹ that is, an imitation of God's relationship with the Jewish people ‹ we could preserve both the intent of Torah and Hillel's distillation of it.

The preservation of prohibitions on same-sex relationships decrees that gays and lesbians must choose between loneliness and sin, both of which are equally noxious to me (and, more important, to Torah). Jewish law should not validate that dilemma, nor declare homosexual orientation itself a disability.

And while I regret that the permissive teshuvah seeks to preserve in Halacha the vestige of that attitude, my respect for the scholarship in it leads me to accept it as an effective compromise.

The two papers that were not affirmed will become study documents as part of the CJLS archive. They will be a part of future discussions on the nature of our sacred covenant with God. That sacred covenant remains my context.

Jack Moline is rabbi of Agudas Achim Congregation in Alexandria.