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Aggadah and Plausibility

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Conservative Judaism faces a profound challenge: how to craft religious narratives that resonate deeply in an age of secularization. As traditional frameworks that once made Jewish religious life self-evidently meaningful have eroded, Conservative Judaism's dominant narratives—"tradition and change," "pluralism," and "egalitarianism"—have proven inadequate, functioning more as ideological programs than as world-creating religious stories that connect practitioners to divine purpose. Drawing on sociologist Peter Berger's concept of "plausibility structures," this research analyzes various Orthodox responses to modernity and evaluates Ira Stone's proposal for a neo-Mussar movement as a potential organizing principle for Conservative Judaism. Through textual analysis of classical Jewish sources and contemporary religious thought, the research reveals that pietistic approaches like Mussar ultimately prove incompatible with Conservative Judaism's inherently moderate character and diverse constituency. Effective Jewish aggadah must instead affirm positive religious truths rather than negations, inspire devotion to God through Torah and mitzvot, and create coherent meaning structures that make both "Jewish life meaningful and Jewish death bearable." The path forward requires new aggadic formulations that integrate spiritual transcendence with concrete religious practice, drawing on the Talmudic principle of knowing God "in all your ways."

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    Published 2006

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    Jeremy Kalmanofsky