Gordon Tucker - Tucker's Philosophy of Conservative Judaism

Tucker's Philosophy of Conservative Judaism

Tucker, in his writings about the Torah and the nature of divine revelation, is a leader within Conservative Judaism in articulating a position between the traditional view that the Torah is of divine origin, and a secular view, in which the Torah is seen entirely as a work of human creation. He writes, "It is the particular characteristic of Conservative Judaism to insist that religious authority is a partnership, that it comes from the reality of a revealing God and the equally inescapable reality of a seeking, evolving community through which God's words get expressed over time." The Torah, according to Tucker, "is not a record of commanding utterances from God, but rather a record of the religious quests of a people, and of their understanding of how God’s will commands them."

Tucker's liberalism and interest in philosophy reflect his role in Conservative Judaism as a leading scholar and interpreter of the works of Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972). Heschel, a rabbi who escaped the Holocaust in Europe through the help of Hebrew Union College and ultimately joined the faculty of Jewish Theological Seminary, became famous not only for his many religious and philosophical commentaries, but also for his social activism and support of the Civil Rights movement.

In the 1950s and 60s, the two most famous scholars at Jewish Theological Seminary were Heschel and Mordechai Kaplan (1881–1983). Gordon Tucker began his studies at Jewish Theological Seminary at a time when both Kaplan and Heschel were living. Both Kaplan and Heschel confronted more traditional elements within Conservative Judaism, but each of them sought to redefine Judaism in different ways. While Kaplan favored a positivist, rationalist, and scientific approach to Judaism, Heschel's approach was philosophical, mystical, and spiritual. In effect, Heschel and Kaplan offered competing approaches to the liberalization of Jewish theology.

Gordon Tucker's liberalism could be said to reflect Heschel's own political activism. According to Neil Gillman, a historian of Conservative Judaism, "Heschel insisted that his turn to political activism was prompted by his experience of living in Europe in the decades before World War II. He had been a personal witness to political oppression and was painfully aware that many otherwise good people stood on the sidelines and did not intervene. He was not going to repeat that pattern in America." Heschel's mystical spirituality lead him to become a champion within American Jewry of liberal causes and political activism.

But Tucker is not a follower of Heschel, in the same sense that Kaplan had followers within Conservative Judaism. Rather, he is a follower of what he understands to be Heschel's tradition. For Tucker, Jewish law cannot be expressed solely through a positivist legal framework. It is motivated by an underlying and evolving sense of God's will through a process in which human beings play a critical role. To find precedent for changing Jewish law, Tucker analyzes evolving Jewish moral and legal traditions. Just as Heschel did, he turns to aggadah, the non-legalistic writings that are part of the oral and written tradition of Torah scholarship. He writes that Judaism has developed a precedent over time that rejects "the practice of punishing people, and causing them undue suffering, for things they are not responsible for." Ultimately, his proposal for a new halakhic response to homosexuality was based on this precedent.