ABSTRACT
The bulk of Israel's Jews mistakenly view themselves as "nonreligious" and the very first task of Conservative Judaism is, therefore, to correct their mistake. On yet another religious plane, Conservative Judaism's role in Israel is to stress the category of mizvot between person and person as publicly and consistently as Orthodoxy emphasizes the religious category of mizvot between a person and God. Conservative Judaism must clearly enunciate the religio-national thesis that Zionism is an organized quest to implement the Sinaitic covenant through which the readers became a people for the purpose of creating an exceptional national community, an am segulah. By systematically seeking to influence the sovereign instruments of Jewish statehood in Israel, Conservative Judaism can teach the society that the role of the mizvot, is, indeed, to refine human nature (Beresh.it Rabba 44a). This idealistic, though admittedly uphill, national educational task can become the crowning contribution of Conservative Judaism in the Jewish national homeland.
