492 A History of Judaism
Reform was bolstered by a strong personal piety, scholarly rigour and a
clear vision of the role of the history and future of the people of Israel.
Hence his definition of the theology of the historical school within Juda-
ism: ‘It is not the mere revealed Bible that is of first importance to the
Jew, but the Bible as it repeats itself in history, in other words, as it is
interpreted by Tradition.’ This traditionalist theology, which allowed
for halakhic change in so far as it reflected the current practice of Israel
as a whole (however that is to be determined), is strikingly close to the
attitude of the Pharisees to ancestral tradition in the period of the
Second Temple. It is not accidental that the large study of the Pharisees
by Schechter’s longest- serving successor as head of the Seminary, Louis
Finkelstein (who was connected to the Seminary from his ordination in
1919 to his death in 1991), reveals as much about the preoccupations
of twentieth- century Jewish life in America as about the Second Temple
group which is its ostensible subject.^17
Schechter brought to New York a remarkable faculty of European
scholars, helped not least by the comparative prosperity of many Ameri-
can Jews in the early twentieth century, and in 1913 he founded the
United Synagogue of America, which (nowadays under the less ambi-
tious title ‘United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism’) coordinates the
affairs of Conservative congregations in the United States and Canada.
The original title of the organization reflects the hope, which had been
paralleled early in 1873 by the Union of American Hebrew Congreg-
ations, that this form of Judaism would become standard in the new
country of America. For much of the twentieth century this hope seemed
not unreasonable. Since the Conservative ideology was of a dynamic
tradition shaped by Jews themselves, it allowed for a great deal of reli-
gious self- expression in keeping with American ideals of individuality,
without either the elaboration of written rule books characteristic of
contemporary orthodoxy or the painful extrusion of a consensus on
matters of principle characteristic of Reform. Abraham Joshua Heschel,
a teacher at the Jewish Theological Seminary from 1946, urged in his
influential God in Search of Man, published in 1955, that Jews should
seek to rediscover fervour and conviction not through rational argu-
ment but through existential decisions clarified by reason, to enable
themselves to experience awe and reverence, to open their minds to the
evocative language of the Torah, and to evoke the mystery of existence
through experimenting with the observance of mitzvot. Heschel’s spir-
itual and moral approach struck a chord particularly with students at
the Seminary in the 1960s.^18