Trustees of Sinai

What Conservative Judaism Taught Me About Stewardship

The older I get, the more I find myself asking a question I did not spend much time thinking about when I was younger: What happens to the things we have been given when it is our turn to pass them on?

I think about this when I look at my grandchildren. I think about it when I consider what it means to be Jewish. And, somewhat unexpectedly, I think about it when I remember my years as an engineer.

For nearly fifty years, my work involved understanding how things functioned, why they were built the way they were, and what might happen if someone changed them. I learned early that a system rarely makes sense when you look at only one part of it. The person who designed it may have understood something the rest of us have missed. A feature that looks unnecessary may have been put there for a reason. Before making a change, you need to understand what you are changing and what might be lost.

I carried that way of thinking into my retirement. I did not immediately recognize that I had carried it into my Jewish life, too.

For much of my life, I thought about Judaism in terms of my own responsibilities. Was I observing enough? Did I understand the teachings? Was I doing what was expected of me? Those questions have not disappeared, nor should they. But as I have gotten older, I have become less interested in treating Judaism as a set of obligations that I must get right and more interested in understanding what I have been entrusted with.

There is a difference between the two.

An obligation asks what I must do. An inheritance asks what I must care for, understand, and eventually leave to someone else.

That distinction has helped me understand why Conservative Judaism has meant so much to me.

People sometimes describe Conservative Judaism as a middle ground between Orthodoxy and Reform. I understand the description, but I have never found it sufficient. It makes the movement sound as though its purpose is to find a comfortable position between two opposing views. What I have come to value is something more demanding: the belief that Jewish tradition deserves both our loyalty and our serious engagement.

That means neither accepting everything without question nor assuming that everything should change because the world around us has changed. It means taking the tradition seriously enough to study it, to wrestle with it, and to accept that we may not always reach the same conclusions as those who came before us.

I know that approach appeals to the engineer in me. But it also reflects something I have come to believe about being Jewish.

We did not write the Torah. We did not begin the Jewish story. We did not establish the covenant. We entered a conversation that had been going on for generations before us, and we have a responsibility to decide what we will contribute to it.

One passage in the Talmud has stayed with me as I have thought about this.

In Menachot 29b, Moses is shown the study hall of Rabbi Akiva, who lived many centuries after him. Moses sits at the back of the room and listens as Rabbi Akiva teaches. The discussion becomes so difficult for Moses to follow that he grows distressed. The Torah being taught has developed through layers of interpretation and argument that he cannot understand.

Think about what that means. Moses, the man associated with receiving the Torah at Sinai, cannot follow a class about the Torah.

Then one of Rabbi Akiva’s students asks where a particular teaching comes from. Rabbi Akiva answers that it is a law given to Moses at Sinai.

Moses is comforted.

I have returned to this story more than once, and I no longer read it simply as reassurance that the Torah has remained connected to its beginnings. I also see an acknowledgment that continuity does not require sameness. The tradition has developed in ways Moses could not have anticipated, yet the students understand themselves to be working within the inheritance he received.

That is a remarkable way to imagine the relationship between generations. The person who stands at the beginning of the story may not recognize everything that happens later. Still, the story can remain his.

I wonder what Moses would have thought if he could have seen all the centuries that followed: the arguments, the new interpretations, the communities scattered across the world, and the different ways Jews have tried to live out the same covenant. I cannot know. But the Talmud seems to suggest that a living tradition must be capable of reaching beyond the understanding of even the person who first received it.

That thought has become more personal as I think about my grandchildren.

They will grow up in a world I cannot fully imagine. They will have access to knowledge I never had, face problems I never encountered, and ask questions that might not occur to me. Their lives will not be mine, and I cannot expect their Judaism to be an exact reflection of my own.

What I hope is that they will find something in Judaism worth returning to, even when they have questions about it. I hope they will feel that they can enter the conversation without having to pretend that they already know the answers. I hope they will understand that questioning a tradition does not necessarily mean rejecting it.

I cannot decide what Judaism will mean to them. That is part of what it means to pass something on. We can teach, explain, invite, and set an example. We cannot do the next generation’s thinking for them.

Perhaps this is where the idea of stewardship becomes most important to me. A steward has responsibility, but not unlimited authority. The things entrusted to us are not ours to dispose of simply because we happen to be holding them. At the same time, we cannot fulfill our responsibility merely by keeping them untouched. We have to understand what makes them worth preserving and how they can continue to matter.

That is the challenge I see in Conservative Judaism. Its commitment to tradition asks us to take the past seriously. Its willingness to engage with change asks us to take the present seriously, too. Neither responsibility cancels the other. The difficulty lies in honoring both.

I do not always know where that balance should lead. I am less troubled by that uncertainty than I once was. After a lifetime of trying to solve problems, I have learned that not every important question has an answer that can be reached by applying the right method. Some questions require patience. Some require listening to people with whom we disagree. And some require us to acknowledge that the people who come after us will see things differently.

I have begun to think that our responsibility is not to ensure that the next generation reaches our conclusions. It is to give them a tradition substantial enough to challenge them, a history deep enough to sustain them, and the freedom to make their own lives within it.

The Jewish story did not begin with us. It will not end with us, either. For a little while, we are responsible for what has been placed in our hands. Then someone else takes their turn.

I find that both humbling and reassuring.

I cannot know what my grandchildren will make of the Judaism I pass on to them. I can only hope they will find in it something worth studying, questioning, arguing about, and loving. If they do, the conversation will continue, even if it sounds different from the one I have known.

That may be the most important thing I have learned from Conservative Judaism: faithfulness is not always a matter of keeping things exactly as they were. Sometimes it means accepting the responsibility to help them live.

Sinai belongs to no single generation. We receive its inheritance, do what we can with it, and leave it for those who follow.

We are not the owners of Sinai. We are its trustees.