Conservative Judaism says Jewish law is binding and also changes over time
Conservative Judaism treats religious law as obligatory yet historically shaped, drawing its authority mainly from the Jewish people's acceptance across generations. For decades it deliberately avoided a formal creed. Its first real statement of beliefs, issued in 1988, still admitted a wide range of conflicting views within the movement.
The movement, also called Masorti Judaism, traces its roots to Rabbi Zecharias Frankel and his 19th-century positive-historical school in Europe, but it only became a full institution in mid-20th-century America. Its main congregational body is the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, and its largest seminary is the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Estimates put it at close to 1.1 million people worldwide, third among Jewish movements, with over 600,000 registered adult members.
Vagueness about theology was built in from the start. Frankel thought theology itself foreign to traditional Judaism, and opponents on both his left and right accused him of obscurity. The seminary only opened a course on Conservative theology in 1985. The 1988 platform, Emet ve-Emunah, affirmed God as creator and governor of the universe while calling divine nature elusive; in 1999 the rabbis Elliot Dorff and Gordon Tucker argued that a single shared theological vision was neither possible nor desirable.
Ideas about revelation shifted markedly. Frankel pioneered critical study of the Mishnah, treating the ancient rabbis as creative contributors, yet refused to apply such methods to the Five Books of Moses. From the 1920s seminary faculty accepted biblical criticism while holding that a spoken revelation at Sinai had occurred. By the 1970s most Conservative thinkers saw revelation as non-verbal, with scripture a human record inspired by an encounter with God. Mordecai Kaplan went further, treating all scripture as purely human, and his followers eventually formed the separate Reconstructionist movement.
What holds this together is community. Rabbi Louis Ginzberg wrote that one could study the Sabbath's origins like a professor and still keep every strict detail, because its holiness rests on millennia of observance rather than its origin. Solomon Schechter placed authority in the collective conscience of what he called Catholic Israel. Practice reflects the balance: prayers asking for restored animal sacrifices were mostly rephrased into the past tense.
Source: Conservative Judaism
