“Who is there left among you who saw this House in its former splendor?” 

— Haggai 2:3

I refuse to abandon Conservative Judaism.

Occasionally, I wonder if this is a wise choice. I suspect I’m not alone. 

If you’re following the news, any recent updates on Conservative Judaism focus on the things that are either being cut or shrinking: programs being shut down, schools closing, congregations that can’t find rabbis, etc. 

Alongside this shrinkage, people are always constructing some plan to change the trajectory. Truthfully, I’ve lost count of how many steering committees and task forces were formed in the past three decades to “solve” these problems, with little to show for it.

I don’t blame anyone in particular. The problem is cyclical, and my record is no better than anyone else. I’ve worked in some corner of Conservative Judaism’s ecosystem for almost 25 years; and because I’m a nerd, I read almost every plan or thought piece that comes out each time a new effort to fix things takes shape. To the extent that anyone analyzes the systemic issues, it appears that muscle memory takes over, and we repeatedly blame the same culprits: organizational infrastructure, underpaid staff, etc. Predictably, this blame also results in no meaningful change.

And so, instead of attacking typical targets, let’s blame zombies.

S. Alexander Haslam, Mats Alvesson and Stephen Reicher compare long-standing and long-disproven ideas to zombies, ideas that cannot possibly be true but continue to walk among us because they “instantiate what those groups want to believe and make true.” The ideas are “dead” in that they will never work, but they cannot be killed because of forces that keep them “alive.” Haslam et al. argue that if we want to slay the zombies, we must identify the “key axioms” of zombie leadership and interrogate those axioms. 

Given the current state of affairs, Conservative Judaism has nothing to lose by giving it a try, and neither do I.

Zombies we need to slay

When I examine those repeated attempts to address the challenges facing Conservative Judaism, what I notice is that two consistent yet deeply problematic ideas always lurk just beneath the surface:

1. We decide when to label someone else’s Judaism “Conservative.”

At the turn of the millennium, when people raised in our institutions had great ideas but ran into bureaucratic brick walls, they violated social norms by establishing new institutions. Instead of remaining frustrated in the face of rules for the sake of rules, many simply left. 

We failed to adapt. Our bad.

The bigger problem, however, is that over the next quarter century, Conservative Judaism spent thousands of hours and millions of dollars trying to unring the bell, practically begging people, “Please, come back to us! We’ve changed.” It won’t happen — truthfully, I don’t think it was ever possible — but the idea still lives.

Ultimately, people decide if they want the label “Conservative.” Just because someone attends a Conservative synagogue, a rabbi belongs to the Rabbinical Assembly or a parent sends their children to Camp Ramah does not mean leaders of Conservative Judaism can choose that person’s Jewish identification. 

If someone does not want the label, we have not earned it.

For some, this sounds depressing, but to me, it’s liberating. I want to earn people’s confidence in the Judaism I practice. I am not embarrassed to say it, and I am not afraid to hold myself accountable for doing it. But the more we devote energy to a battle we already lost, the more we convince ourselves that nothing can be done. 

2. If we cannot succeed in the first goal, then Conservative Judaism serves no purpose.

Here’s where things turn interesting.

In their 2000 book The Conservative Movement in Judaism: Dilemmas and Opportunities, Rela Mintz Geffen and Daniel Elazar note that out of the approximately 1.5 million Conservative Jews in America, no more than 40,000 to 50,000 maintain the halachic standards of Conservative Judaism (Shabbat, kashrut, etc.), making the core of Conservative Judaism no larger than “a small Hasidic sect.”

Ironically, many of the communities mentioned in the previous section emerged shortly after this book’s publication, and for good reason. For over a century, there was tension in Conservative Judaism about the vision of “the core” versus the practicalities of “the masses.”

Given this juxtaposition, it should not be surprising that the remaining core focuses on pleasing the needs of like-minded people, as the groups constructing these plans are composed of people similar in Jewish practice to those who left. In this context, an implicit assumption becomes that if we cannot win back the disaffected members of the “core,” then Conservative Judaism will die.

This assumption is not only wrong but dangerous.

While I am grateful every day for some of the Jewish institutions at the cutting edge of spiritual life and benefit immensely from how those institutions enrich my Jewish life, if you gathered all the people who are deeply committed to traditional, egalitarian Judaism and actively disinterested in any label such as “Conservative” or “Reform,” the number would likely be no more than a few thousand people, a total quite similar to the numbers described by Geffen and Elazar.  

This is why the second zombie idea is so dangerous: Believing that Conservative Judaism cannot serve a purpose unless we satisfy the top 1% of engaged Jews leads us to underfocus on millions of others.

No one better understood this than — you guessed it — Chabad. 

Decades after Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, launched his Uforatzo campaign, we can find Chabad emissaries everywhere. To this day, no evidence exists of a causal relationship between, for example, asking men to put on tefillin on a street corner and those men adopting the mitzvah of tefillin long-term, but that does not mean that Chabad’s outreach goals failed — far from it. Chabad believes in what it puts out into the world; and any step toward that goal, however small, is holy and redemptive. 

Yes, most people who attend Conservative synagogues are not traditionally observant. And yes, many of the people who became observant decided they needed to go somewhere else. But “failing” to achieve one goal does not dismiss the value of the entire project of Conservative Judaism. Yet decades of criticism resulted in Conservative Jews charged with charting a course for the future internalizing a message that we failed and should simply fade into history, and that nihilism seeps into every plan.

What would we do if we weren’t afraid?

For me, these zombie ideas are driven by fear: fear of what will happen if Conservative Jews decide to believe in themselves. Everyone and no one is to blame, but nothing will change unless we do something big, something that will show the Jewish world that we believe in ourselves and are ready to fight for it.

So let me tell you a secret:

Conservative Judaism already has the resources to fund every dream reaffirmed by every one of these commissions, without successful implementation, for the past 30 years. 

Really.

The problem is that our assets remain too tied up in dirt and insufficiently in people.

In North America and Israel, local and national institutions connected to Conservative Judaism own real estate properties valued at at least $100 million (and likely worth a lot more). Ironically, some of that property was bought to provide space for the very programs we can no longer afford to run.

Budgets are not financial documents but policy documents. To shift our trajectory, we need to show the world that we are ready to invest in a broken ecosystem and build it anew instead of maintaining the facade of a past that grows more distant every year. If some of those properties were sold and placed into an endowment where 5% of the principal yields $5 million per year, that endowment would be able to fund the following on an annual basis:

1. Israel trips: Give $5,000 to 400 teenagers to travel to Israel ($2 million).
2. College campuses: Hire 10 professionals at the college campuses with the largest Jewish populations as an alternative to JLIC, Meor, Chabad, etc. ($1.5 million).
3. Teenagers: Hire 10 professionals to create alternatives to JSU and CTeen to serve Jewish teenagers at public and non-Jewish private high schools ($1 million).
4. Outreach: Select one community every three years whose synagogues, day schools and camps want to create an outreach center to serve unaffiliated Jews and give them a matching grant ($500,000).

These dreams could be funded before you factor in the philanthropy we would attract during the largest wealth transfer in human history by individuals and foundations that waited impatiently for decades to see something bold from Conservative Judaism. What I describe above is the minimum of what we could do as the endowment grows, but it is far from the maximum.

Plenty of our congregations, schools, and camps are doing just fine, and may they live long and in good health. But plenty are not, and they are already deciding what legacy they want to leave when they turn out the lights. What better legacy to leave than building a new world from the old one?

If this is the part where you want to jump in and tell me why this idea won’t work, now we come to the most insidious part of our problem: The zombie ideas I mentioned above are pernicious and damaging because they give too many Conservative Jews permission to give up doing the real work. Instead, we engage in paralysis by analysis.

For decades, the Conservative Jews who were much derided for only showing up three times a year to synagogues enabled us to fund an ecosystem of congregations, schools, camps, and programs that benefited millions of Jews, none more so than the core. Today, we continue to cut back on the resources we can devote to bring those people back into the fold so that we can maintain certain facilities that, in many cases, are serving fewer people each year. This is a sad reality, but it is fixable.

The Valley of the Dry Bones

In Hebrew school, my grandfather taught me the story about the prophet Ezekiel known as “The Valley of the Dry Bones.” In this passage, God shows Ezekiel a valley of bones, and when Ezekiel instructs the bones to praise God, God gives those bones the breath of life again. Like zombies, a destroyed world comes back from the dead.

If Conservative Judaism dies, it dies by choice, and its choice was that it allowed others to convince us that demise is inevitable.

I devoted my entire professional life to making some small impact on Conservative Judaism. While I am proud of what I accomplished, I have enough battle scars that no one would fault me if I decided to give up. But I don’t, and I won’t. Too many Jews need what Solomon Schechter envisioned, a set of institutions able to hold the needs of a core and the masses simultaneously, however challenging that may be. 

Today, I see the Conservative Jewish ecosystem as a valley of bones, pieces of a once-vibrant system that can no longer survive. But we can breathe new life into it by slaying the zombies once and for all. 

And if we can do that, things will get better.

May it happen soon and speedily in our days.

Rabbi Joshua Rabin is the rabbi of the Astoria Center of Israel in Queens, N.Y., and founder of the weekly newsletter Moneyball Judaism.