I spent last Shabbat in South Jersey at my grandmother’s house with my sister and a couple of her friends. Grandma is in Paris at the moment and invited us to appropriate the place for bachelorette party uses (no, this does not mean strippers… this means a weekend of chick flicks, pizza and ice cream, kosher vegetrian chinese food in Philadelphia, and picnics by a fountain on Bryn Mawr campus). Seeing as how I no longer travel on Shabbat, and neither does one of my sister’s friends, we decided that the weekend would start with getting to Grandma’s in time for a nice Shabbat dinner and then spending a quiet day at home, everyone observing as they saw fit.

As it happened, this worked out very nicely. I woke up relatively early, found my grandmother’s tallis, and davened alone by the window in the den with my Ohr Chadash (Sim Shalom Shabbat and Festivals with Commentary) Siddur. It was actually the first time that I had davened alone on Shabbat.

I grew up in a neighborhood which was not walking distance to any shul which my family cared to attend. We went to shul every Shabbat, but we drove. This is how my father grew up too. I never questioned this until recently. After reading the actual Conservative teshuvah on the subject I became less and less comfortable with riding to or from shul on Shabbat and Yom Tovim. I also became increasingly aware of the fact that as a family we did not restrict our driving to the trip to and from shul as the Conservative stipulates should be done. As a result, Shabbat rarely felt like Shabbat after shul was over. After I moved, I continued to take the subway to my old shul for about a year. For the last several months of that year, I made sure that I only traveled on Shabbat to and from shul and spent the rest of the day reading or napping. Most recently, I got up the courage to walk into the shul which stands two blocks from my doorstep.

Grandma’s shul is six miles from her house… A possible, but not really a reasonable walk. I am fairly certain that there is not a single synagogue in the town in which she lives. The decision of CJLS, adopted in 1960, which allows for leniency in the prohibition against riding on Shabbat in the case of travel to synagogue for the sake of worship, saw the decision as essentially an emergency measure for the sake of allowing far-flung congregants to participate in communal Shabbat worship, the cardinal institution of Judaism which is “indispensable to the preservation of the religious life of American Jewry.” The very reasonable assesment of the situation was that if one is prevented from attending shul, one will fall away from Jewish practice. This is reasonable because Conservative Jews do not learn how to practice at home.

Following on the heels of the egalitarianism debates, it might be tempting to draw a causative (or more appropriately, causal… like with gravity) line from the one to the other: as we have abandoned the woman’s role as the maintainer of home observance, we have drifted away from home observance and have come to rely on the institution of the synagogue too heavily for our “dose of Jewish” rather than leading fully Jewish lives.

But I do not think that egalitarianism is the culprit here, nor do I think that it is a symptom of the problem. I think that the problem is one that The Conservative Movement inherited from Reform and has yet to recover from. It was, after all, the Reform Movement which sought to recreate Judaism in the image of German Protestant Christianity with the pomp and aesthetic of the church as the centerpiece of religious life. We have, in many ways, taken back the synagogue from the status of “Jewish Church” in which it was cast by the Reform Movement, returning from the vernacular to Hebrew, doing away with instrumentation on Shabbat, not abbreviating our Torah reading, etc. but we have not been successful in reclaiming home worship. Regular recitation of brachot, morning and evening tefillah, these things have remained by the wayside and it is a damn shame that we have not yet figured out how to bring them back home.

It is true. Most of us are lost without a congregation and a leader when it comes time to daven. But we didn’t create the problem. Nor, however, do I think that we should despair of solving it. I honestly do not think that Conservative practice and Conservative philosophy are incompatible with observance and piety. I do think that The Movement has fallen down in it’s duty, as the halachic and observant but reasonable movement, to teach its children the basics of home observance, the value of living a holistically Jewish life. It is late, but I do not think that it is too late. These things do, however, take time, and they take charisma, and strength and tenacity and perseverence and patience.