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Thursday September 6, 2007

Seminary leader’s plans call for talking and more talking

by ben harris
jta

Long before he emerged as a leading scholar of American Jewry, and decades before he would be looked to as the potential savior of the Conservative movement, Arnold Eisen was gunning for a journalism internship at the Washington Post.

As an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, Eisen was a candidate for editor of the student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian. The position brought with it a summer job at the Post.

Eisen lost the election in what was then the greatest disappointment of his life.

That election diverted Eisen’s career path to academia — he spent the last two decades and change at Stanford University as a professor of religious studies, where he was one of the nation’s most respected scholars in modern Jewish thought.

On Wednesday, Sept. 5, he was inaugurated as the seventh chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, the flagship of Conservative Judaism.

“I’ve been writing and thinking for 25 years about changes I’d like to see made, and now I have a chance to help make them,” he told j.

But even as Eisen settles into his new post as head of the movement’s chief academic institution, it is the values of the profession he did not pursue more than those of the academy that are figuring prominently in his plans.

In describing his vision for the coming year, Eisen speaks of dialogue rather than direction. He intends to spark conversations within the movement, facilitated by JTS, in place of “canned lectures.” And he believes that being a Conservative Jew is largely about what journalists — and Jews — love most: talking.

Eisen takes the JTS helm at a time when many see the Conservative movement as floundering, its numbers in decline and its ideology muddled. Once the largest synagogue denomination in America, Conservative Judaism has fallen into second place behind the Reform, and it has become routine to speak of the movement’s lack of direction and coherence.

What concerns the incoming chancellor most is not the supposed apathy within the movement — a notion he says is “nothing less than absurd”— or even the decline in its numbers. “Numbers don’t keep me up at night; Israel keeps me up at night,” Eisen said. “I’m worried about the security of Israel, and I’m worried about the apparent decline in attachment on the part of American Jews to Israel.”

Eisen plans to focus on building stronger ties between American Jews and Israel. It is part of a commitment by JTS to the Jewish people, one of three constituencies — along with the Conservative movement and the broader North American society that Eisen wants the seminary to serve.

He also plans to promote dialogue between Jews and Muslims similar to the Jewish-Christian dialogue begun by Louis Finkelstein, the seminary’s legendary leader from 1940-72.

But it is the movement itself where expectations for Eisen’s tenure are the greatest. The movement has been through a bruising year in which a controversial decision to ordain gay clergy polarized the rabbinic leadership and sparked fears that the denomination could not hold.

Eisen has said that the movement’s historic commitment to religious pluralism — the notion that competing views of Jewish law, or halachah, can peacefully coexist — is not enough to hold Conservative Judaism together.

Instead he wants Conservative Jews to think more deeply about the notion of mitzvah that Eisen says is really a much richer idea. It is a task, he says, that is urgent for a movement that has struggled to straddle the gap between fidelity to traditional Jewish law and modernity.

“My task and my intention is to take my personal experience, the lessons of my scholarship and what I’ve learned by talking to all sorts of Conservative Jews, and distill that into a message that is coherent and I hope compelling, to help improve the matter of structure and cooperation among the various arms of the movement, and to help ensure better quality across the board in all the efforts we do,” Eisen said. “That’s my job.”

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