The Movement for Reform Judaism

ALYTH GARDENS, SUNDAY 19 NOVEMBER 2006 

My family have been members of Alyth Gardens for nearly twenty-four years.  I know that makes us newcomers by the standards of the Alyth Cousinhood but this is our shul nevertheless. The statement is a little more blurry for me than for my children and my children’s children.  There are still people who ask me what I do and I reply by saying that I’m the Head of the Reform Movement in Britain.  To which they invariably reply: “How interesting – and do you have your own congregation as well?”  To which I respond through now gritted teeth: “I’ve got forty-two of them”.  But this is the one of the forty-two that I come to when I’m not working at one of the other forty-one.  This is the community in which I’m least Head of the Movement and most just another congregant.

I’ve been an exceptionally happy and excited congregant recently.  Simchat Torah was a real treat – the atmosphere was free of tension, joyful, richly communal and individually valuing. 

My congregation’s been through a long, difficult and exceedingly painful period of change.  Change is always difficult but invariably necessary.  Norman Mailer once wrote, “There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, which demanded that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same”. 

Over quite a long period now we’ve seen the burgeoning of more and more varied activities – services for every age group all over the building; a real recognition that there are many ways, many paths and that the needs of the congregants come before the bureaucracy and ‘way we’ve always done it’ of the institution.  I know how much Stephen Grabiner and Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner have contributed to that and today I’m saying a huge thank you as a member of Alyth.

And yet I should be honest.  I know I should be honest at all times and whatever hat I wear and here I want to be honest as a congregant.  I joined this community twenty-four years ago next January 1st.  I joined for one reason and one reason only – Rabbi Dow Marmur, my friend and mentor who officiated at my Bar Mitzvah and my wedding and with whose family my family have a special relationship.  Within six months of our joining, the …… dear man …… upped and left for the Holy Bosom of Toronto.  There’s a bit of me that’s still full of nostalgia for those days of uncompromisingly intellectual sermons in distinctive Polish-Swedish-English and for a regime that insisted that children should be seen but not heard – especially during services.  Not my style and yet the nostalgia is intense. 

In September 2004 Professor Steven M Cohen of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Dr Keith Kahn-Harris, one of our colleague’s husbands, published a study of Jewish identity in Britain called 'Beyond Belonging'.

At one point in the book they picked up on a very important sociological insight which has been around for about a decade but about which there is some dispute as to who first made it.  Anyway, the insight suggests that members of communities tend to fall into one of two categories – “dwellers” and “seekers”.  The dwellers are the people who, basically, like things as they are and the seekers are the people who want to push forward and bring about change.  Put more poshly and to quote Cohen and Kahn-Harris, “Dwellers are loyal to and content with established modes of religious practice.  Seekers search for personal meaning through religious involvement and are less bound to established ways of doing things”.  Dwellers rely on habitual practice within the familiar world of a particular tradition whereas for seekers the language of the journey fits their experience better.

Cohen and Kahn-Harris suggest that the overwhelming majority of moderately engaged British Jews are dwellers.  Seekers are more likely to be found in Reform and Liberal synagogues.

All of that is undoubtedly true and is a very significant factor in what makes British Jewry what it is.  The point that I would like us to focus on today is that, even within Alyth Gardens, both groups sit side by side – not always comfortably.  And what I would acknowledge about myself is that the community even contains really difficult characters who have both impulses at war within themselves.  I feel nostalgic for the days of Marmur yet know that sitting in shul with Francesca and Oliver is the high point of my religious week. 

And another thing.  The ‘problem’ of seekers and dwellers cannot be resolved by saying glibly: ‘Let’s go for balance and consensus, let’s all be rooted in tradition but open to change’.  Because the issue, at its heart, is about individuals of different experiences and personalities with differing needs.  The challenge is how you meet the very different individual needs within a synagogue and whether you can create a community in which there is genuine tolerance and respect for people who feel equally passionately but differently from yourself.

And actually, the process of change and the development of a functional community offers yet a further challenge.

About eighteen months ago Alyth Gardens, along with four other constituents of the Movement for Reform Judaism, participated in the first part of a groundbreaking piece of research.  An organisation within the British Jewish community called Jewish Policy Research was commissioned by the Reform Movement to explore the attitudes and feelings of what JPR termed ‘the peripheral members’ of five communities – Alyth, Edgware, Jacksons Row in Manchester, Maidenhead and South West Essex & Settlement. 

What the survey revealed is that we have significant numbers of members who are neither seekers nor dwellers.  By and large they are busy people who are focused upon their work and social life – a social life which tends to include a majority of Jews but has nothing to do with their synagogue.  They don’t view the synagogue as a community but rather as a service provider – a service provider of hatch’em, match’em and dispatch’em facilities though the match’em is far less frequently used than the bar-mitvah’em.  By and large their children didn’t find cheder very rewarding and since they’re very busy and the synagogue is seen as a service provider rather than a community, they don’t feel under any obligation to do much in terms of giving back.  But they’re extremely concerned, they say, about Jewish survival. 

We at the Sternberg Centre tend to refer to such families as ‘marginal Jews’.  The survey called them ‘peripheral Jews’ and many self-define as ‘secular Jews’.  I’m really open to a graphic (but not pejorative) term for them to stand alongside ‘seekers’ and ‘dwellers’.  Not pejorative because through their subscriptions they pay for the upkeep of this building not to mention Rabbi Laura’s and Rabbi Mark’s salaries.  Without them, all of our synagogues would go mechuleh. 

So, Rabbi Mark.  You and your family have been entrusted with the rabbinic leadership of one of the six founding communities of the Reform Movement in Britain.  A community with a justified reputation for intellectual strength, dynamic leadership and a unique view from the rabbi’s office.  You come to a community that has begun to change, in which warmth and enthusiasm are palpable.  And which is aware of the challenge of meeting needs, the often very different needs, of the seekers and the dwellers and the peripherals. 

A year ago someone enormously perceptive wrote the following for the Alyth Newsletter.

“The appointment of Rabbi Mark Goldsmith is a bold and exciting development, characteristic of Alyth as a community that has always provided outstanding leadership for the Reform Movement in Britain.  Mark is one of the finest Leo Baeck College graduates of his generation who has already, despite his relative youth, made a very distinctive impression.  His background in business studies and in business brings "the real world" to his rabbinate in a very special way.  He is the only non-orthodox rabbi in Britain competent to teach Jewish business ethics and his pioneering work in the field of ethical investment and Judaism has raised important issues right across the Jewish community.  Uniquely, Mark combines his practical skills and deep ethical commitment with a quite outstanding reputation in the pastoral field.  Finchley Progressive Synagogue has an enviable and justified reputation for warmth, caring and responsiveness to the Jewish needs of individuals.  That is undoubtedly a reflection of Mark's personality and gifts.  Mark is dedicated to community and responding to its needs.  He will undoubtedly respond to the very special ethos of Alyth, nurturing it and adding to it his sound judgement, moral strength and valuing of both the individual and community”.

My goodness, how right he was – whoever wrote that.  He might have added – in fact he should have added – that even more important, Mark, you’re a really lovely bloke and so is your wife (she’s a really lovely bloke too) and so are your children. 

Mind you, Mark, you need to be not just a nice bloke but all of the other things as well and more besides because the work of shifting focus from institution to individual and reaching out to meet the needs of the seekers, the dwellers and the marginals – there must be a better term, please help – wherever they are in their Jewish lives and Jewish journeys is huge.  To coin a phrase from business, ‘The day is short, and the work is great, and the labourers are sluggish, and the wages are high (so even the Mishnah has a sense of humour) and the Master of the house is insistent’.  But you have a tremendous team both professional and voluntary to work with and a congregation full of ordinary, undemanding people like me.

Simchat Torah this year was a real treat.  In some ways, not a lot had changed.  And yet everything had – the atmosphere was free of tension, joyful, richly communal yet individually valuing.  Baruch Ata Adonai Eloheinu Melech haolam, shehecheyanu v’kymanu v’higianu lazman hazeh. 

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