has blinded him to the indefensibility of his answer, and the poor one is not. It is my opinion that my colleagues have here been blinded to the indefensibility of their conclusion. ." Rabbi Roth argued that the halakhic legitimacy of the Conservative movement was at stake: What is at stake here, for me, and I believe for the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards as a body, is whether the Law Committee can continue to be seen as a halakhic decision-making body. For all of the breadth I believe that there is for pluralism within halakhah, some decisions are outside those boundaries. If we make such a decision, we are no longer legitimate halakhists, we undermine our authority as the interpreters of God's will, and we render the Law Committee halakhically irrelevant. Rabbi Roth ended by articulating what he regarded as the fundamental difference between the traditionalist and the liberal wings of the Conservative movement. From the traditionalist point of view, acceptance of the hypothesis that the Torah was transmitted through multiple manuscripts and redactors in no way changes its status as a Divine, "legally infallible" document, a "given" reality to which any theological theory must conform: That, then, brings us to the following issue: Assuming that the type of biblical scholarship we have all been taught is correct, does that mean that the Torah is, in fact, not Divine and legally infallible? I believe that it does not mean that. The argument here is over the following issue: Is theology the dog which wags the tail called halakhah, or is halakhah the dog which wags the tail called theology? It cannot be both ways. There can be no real doubt that normatively speaking the halakhic tradition is the given, and theology is required to fall into place behind it. Theology can, indeed, should, provide the narrative which makes the halakhic tradition intellectually persuasive and emotionally acceptable and satisfying, and that narrative can change as needed, and it need not be the same narrative for everyone. Narratives, after all, are aggadic, and thus, neither normative nor binding. That claim, incidentally, in no way diminishes their importance. Whatever narrative works is fine, so long as the narrative does not reverse which is the dog and which is the tail. In this enterprise we are again in a long chain: Sa’adia Ga’on did it, Yehuda ha-Levi did it, Maimonides did it,