This meeting took place a full generation before the Israeli government appointed a commission to try to strike a similar compromise, a full generation before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made his recent trip to Indianapolis to quell the outrage of 4,500 American Jewish leaders over the power of Israel's Orthodox rabbinate in determining who is a Jew. The outcome in Denver offers a cautionary tale to all those American Jews who believe that an Israeli commission, government or prime minister can heal the social and theological rifts in this country. The joint conversion panel, as the Denver experiment was known, collapsed in acrimony in 1983. It did so for reasons that had everything to do with America and with the challenge that the USA's embrace poses to a people whose very identity had been forged partly by their status as outsiders, pariahs, scapegoats. But that, perhaps, gets ahead of the story.
Obscurity makes the schisms no less real.
Jewry in the past two centuries has evolved from a faith that offered the choices only of Orthodoxy or secularism to one with a range of denominations that differ markedly in the degree of observance to the religious law called halakha. American Jewry in 1997 encompasses a spectrum of belief and practice almost as wide as Protestantism, with its span from blue-blood Episcopalians to Sun Belt evangelicals. Those disparate Protestants, however, make no pretense of subscribing to the same earthly authority. All religious Jews in some way honor halakha but in dramatically varied fashion. So whether the issue at hand involves keeping kosher, driving on the Sabbath, or allowing women to read from the Torah, the branches of Judaism routinely disagree.