(based on the Introduction to ShefaJournal (5766), edited by Sara Shapiro-Plevan and Rabbi Bill Plevan)

The Shefa Network was born in December of 2004 to create a virtual community of professional and lay activists in the Conservative movement and a place to discuss the movement’s direction and ways of strengthening Conservative Judaism for the future.

[There is a] widely held perception that the movement is either ideologically muddled or ideologically divided into right and left factions that cannot overcome their differences. Of course, it is easy to draw the conclusion that these two factors are related, and the Shefa listserv has hosted a number of versions of the argument that the movement’s declining numbers and institutional ineptitude are due to lack of ideological clarity. The movement’s failure to maintain high affiliation is due in part to its failure to strongly articulate a clear ideology. Whether there is in fact a cause and effect relationship between these two factors is beyond the scope of this introduction, but it is worth remembering that the right-left split in the movement was diagnosed in great detail by Mordecai Kaplan in Judaism as a Civilization more than 70 years ago and that the movement met with great success in the years after World War II, without articulating a coherent ideology or resolving differences between ideological factions in the movement.

 ... The notion that Conservative Judaism lacks a coherent ideology has of course plagued the movement since its inception. To give some historical perspective to this accusation, we have included an article by the late Dr. Robert Gordis, a rabbi and professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary who, among other important contributions, chaired the movement’s Commission on a Philosophy of Conservative Judaism, which produced Emet V’Emunah, a statement of principles for Conservative Judaism. Gordis reminds us that when Solomon Schechter arrived in America to take the reigns at the Seminary, ideological ambiguity was an advantage that allowed the Seminary and the movement it spawned to include the different voices it wanted to include: essentially anyone who did not want radical reform or rigid orthodoxy.

 … One may conclude that the “spirituality gap,” to coin a phrase, in American Conservative Synagogues is in many ways an education gap. [Transforming Shefa’s dreams] into a reality, creating spiritual communities, will require higher levels of education in Hebrew language, in liturgical music and even in Jewish theology, all of which would provide rubrics for understanding what prayer is supposed to be about. Most veterans of the movement will not be surprised by this conclusion. Many Shefa participants have already suggested that the key to the movement’s success is to raise its standards, because people will be drawn to a movement that stands for something.

The movement already sets high educational standards for its institutions, although perhaps it is time to evaluate whether these educational standards, even when successful, help feed the spiritual hunger of the typical American Jew, or help to raise up young people to be the kinds of Conservative Jews who will lead our movement into the next generation.

Perhaps one of the greatest strengths of the Shefa enterprise is the way it has avoided strict boundaries between the intellectual and the practical. Shefa has provided a very fruitful engagement between intellectuals and practitioners, many of whom should be described as falling in both categories. This is as it should be, because a religious movement needs both a coherent vision with philosophical rigor and historical perspective, and the practical wisdom to enact this vision. Usually, these two tasks are not done well by the same people, but that too is a bias that leads us to divide the world into “theorists” and “practitioners,” as if the two are from different planets. If the Conservative movement is going to succeed in creating spiritual communities in its schools, synagogues and camps, it will have to bring together the theological visions of the movement’s intellectual lights with the practical wisdom of professionals and lay people. The most important accomplishment of [the Shefa Network] may be that it has begun a conversation that includes all of these essential voices.