In a wide-ranging conversation, David Wolpe—the rabbi of a large Conservative congregation in Los Angeles, the author of several books, and a regular contributor to Time—outlines his views on theology, spirituality, the rabbinate, and his own personal experiences. Herewith, his comments on the future of his denomination. (Interview by Alan Brill.)

I think of Conservative Judaism as a movement suffering from a lack of self-definition. When it was a big-tent movement, people did not want to define it for fear of losing those at the edges of the tent. But mushy movements are not growing ones. So I still believe that it is essential for the movement to arrive at a single centralized vision. And it should be [the product of] a combined effort by all the organizational branches—the rabbinical schools, the Rabbinical Assembly, the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism—with input from laity around the country. The very process of such reexamination will create dynamism, I believe, that will lead to other and better things.

But I believe deeply in its potential. Conservative Judaism takes modern scholarship seriously and is not afraid of its insights. It believes that in relationships lies the secret of our continuity. . . . And I believe that Conservative Judaism motivates people to see the larger Jewish picture. . . . That’s not a coincidence. Conservative Judaism at its best pushes people not only intellectually but communally and encourages them to think beyond their boundaries. It is, or should be, the commitment of a thinking Jew in the modern world.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.