“I’m a Conservative Jew.” Here’s How Rabbi Orlofsky Responded

When I was in NCSY, there was a fellow there, wonderful fellow, and his father was the caner in one of the largest conservative synagogues in Long Island. And he came to an NCY event and he would fight with everybody saying, "I'm conservative." And so people would try to argue with him and they all got stuck. And finally someone said, "Maybe you can talk to this kid." He's got a big chip on his shoulder cuz he's conservative. So he comes to me and he says, "I'm a conservative Jew." I said, "Okay." Okay. He said, "Well, what do you think about that?" I said, "I don't know. What does it mean?" He said, "I follow conservative Judaism." I say, "You believe in God?" "Yeah." "You believe in Torah?" "Yeah." "You believe in the rabbitic tradition?" "Yeah, I don't know. Sounds like we believe in the same thing." And that was it. That was the end of it. Once I stripped away his label and we have so much more in common than we have that divides