Halakha Binds, and Develops

Conservative (Masorti) Jews affirm that halakha, Jewish law, is binding upon them, and at the same time that it has always developed through the interpretation of qualified scholars responding to new conditions. The movement holds together two commitments that it sees as historically inseparable: fidelity to the received legal tradition, and the recognition, drawn from modern historical study, that the law has changed over the centuries through rabbinic reasoning. Its rabbinical body issues rulings that can permit change, on questions such as driving to synagogue or the roles of women, while insisting the process remain within halakhic method.

The movement's intellectual roots reach to Zecharias Frankel, a nineteenth-century German rabbi who broke from the more radical wing of Reform at the 1845 Frankfurt rabbinical conference to found what he called Positive-Historical Judaism, insisting that Jewish law be studied through its actual historical development even while remaining religiously binding. Solomon Schechter later carried this approach to the United States, reorganizing the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York from 1902 and shaping it into the institutional and intellectual center of what became American Conservative Judaism, a movement that has continued to understand halakha through the same combination of historical-critical scholarship and binding religious authority Frankel first articulated.