Gil and Tevi Troy's Non-Negotiable Judaisms

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2021

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Not long ago, Conservative Judaism was America’s largest and most vital Jewish denomination. Today, things are different; for many years now, the movement has been losing and not replacing its members. In a recent essay written to mark and reflect upon one year after the passing of his mother, the historian Gil Troy wrote that “philosophically, history vindicated [my mother’s] passionate Zionism but repudiated her pick-and-choose Judaism. My two brothers and I represent a vast historical experiment that mostly flopped: mid-twentieth-century Conservative Judaism.”

This week’s podcast looks at that experiment through the personal, private, and illustrative experiences of Gil Troy and his brother Tevi. Both passionately committed Jewish leaders who were raised in a home devoted to Conservative Judaism, they join Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to provide an intimate look at their differing journeys out of the movement, and the ways they’ve both tried to confront the questions modernity posed for them that Conservative Judaism just couldn’t answer.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Not that long ago, conservative Judaism was America's largest and most vital Jewish denomination.
0:14.0	And although there's a great deal of argument about the extent to which that's changed, and the reasons for that change,
0:19.0	nevertheless, it's plain that for many years now
0:21.9	the movement has been losing and not replacing members. One could look at that shift sociologically.
0:27.1	One could look at that shift empirically. But on today's show, we look at that shift in a very
0:31.2	different way, through the personal, private, yes, anecdotal, but also illustrative experience
0:36.4	of two passionately committed Jewish writers who were
0:39.8	raised in a home devoted to conservative Judaism and who each in their own way left the movement behind.
0:45.7	This is not a dispassionate analysis from the outside. This is an intimate reliving from the inside
0:51.4	of a family's journey out of conservative Judaism. Welcome to the Tikva
0:55.5	podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. I say out of conservative Judaism, and of course that
1:00.6	raises the question, from that to what? Well, today I'm joined by Gil and Tevi Troy, two of the three
1:06.7	Troy brothers, all of them with distinguished careers in Jewish and secular letters and leadership,
1:12.5	and one of the interesting things that we learn is that all the brothers left conservative
1:16.2	Judaism behind, but they went in different directions and affirmed different Jewish answers
1:21.0	to the questions of modern life. The text that guides our discussion is Gil Troy's recent
1:25.5	article in the Jewish journal called the non-negotiable Judaism my parents gave me, written to mark and reflect upon Gil and Tevi's
1:32.5	home life, after a year of mourning, their recently departed mother. Let me say that while of course
1:37.1	this conversation registers and explores a number of criticisms of conservative and generally
1:42.4	non-Orthodox Judaism in America, that doesn't mean that
1:45.2	there aren't exceptional and even heroic conservative leaders and rabbis, and that there aren't
1:50.3	thriving conservative communities. Of course there are. But in his Jewish journal article,
	...

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