The Sculpting of Conservative Judaism into an Irish Catholic

Alice Kinahan, my grandmother, attended Catholic school at an early age in Dublin before she became an Irish immigrant in her late twenties to the United States. She met my grandfather through her church in San Francisco and there she started not only a life for herself and her husband but for her many descendants as well. She had always wanted a big family, coming from an immediate family of sixteen she knew it was something predetermined. And like the Irish Catholic immigrants in the 1830s, she pushed them to be involved tightly with the congregation. She emphasized clericalism and spirituality with the trinity, stressing core significance on family values and morality. But unusually, her journey tapers from the hierarchical dominance of the Catholic religion and parallels closely with the movement of Conservative Judaism. They understood scripture exposed the laws of God but was written by humans, therefore expressing flaws.¹ These ideas were born in the 1880s basing the principles of the Orthodox Jewish traditions in reaction to the establishment of the radical Reform Jews. Rather than succeeding or changing the culture, the conservative movement settled on a medium between the two forms of Judaism. Throughout the development however, the Conservative Jews seemed almost as diverse as its predecessors. Gertel mentions the religion splitting, a silent tug of war separating the liberals from the more orthodox, painting a grey rather than its stark counterparts.² This grey encompasses my grandmother’s odyssey. As she came to America, her views were quite orthodox but soon turned sour to the tyranny of the church. They didn’t bend as far as the protestant denominations but she changed her perception of what it means to be a Catholic and like the Conservative Jews clung to the traditions she knew from her religion though expressed support for things she never would have thirty years ago. There is a growing platform in the church for optional celibacy for priests as well as woman recruited into the holy order as priests or rabbis in the synagogue.³ LGBT rights are also heavily debated, blurring the lines from a strict outline identified in the bible to a smeared gradient. The Catholic Church may not be compartmentalized into three distinct divisions like Judaism but the one church is becoming more different from state to state, from parish to parish than bread and wine.

My grandmother has constituted the history of Conservative Judaism not through her religion but through her reforms and understanding that religion cannot be put into a box. When you cut the trunk of a tree, the base may sap and tumor but the branches will grow anew, growing not a single leaf the same. What I mean by this is her roots stayed true, they were uncut when she came to America and the traditions that she held onto as a child she spread and taught to her family but when something unexpected happens, like the cutting down of a tree, you have the time to sit back, think, and learn. And that is exactly what she did, evaluating what she thought was right from wrong, as did the conservatives, and when she was ready, she branched and flowered into her religious views today. Even now, the church continues to change and learn and grow, something we as humans are accustomed to and something that Conservative Judaism and my grandmother do everyday. What is intriguing is how this reform and history of this religion can shadow so closely the development and molding of my grandmother’s traditions and beliefs. She put an emphasis on the cultuses that the church preached but began thinking of the bible less literally and more metaphorically, as code that deciphers the good, bad and the ugly. Conservative Judaism did the same in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century, questioning the bible critically yet sticking to the roots of the beliefs and practices it employed.  

           

           

 ¹ Peter McDonough, The Catholic Labyrinth : power, apathy, and a passion for reform in the American church /  New York : Oxford University Press, [2013]

² Elliot Gertel, "Is Conservative Judaism - Conservative." Judaism 28, no. 2: 202-215. 1979. ATLA Religion Database, EBSCOhost (accessed August 23, 2013).

³ Pamela Nadell "Developing an American Judaism : Conservative rabbis as ethnic leaders." Judaism 39, no. 3: 345-365. 1990. ATLA Religion Database, EBSCOhost (accessed August 23, 2013).