The Movement for Reform Judaism

Mr President; my President — Sir Sigmund; Deputies; this is a very great honour. It’s an honour because there is no institution that is more important to the future of British Jewry than the Board of Deputies.

I’d like to try to substantiate that statement in a characteristically oddball kind of way and begin with two related sets of statistics.

Conventional wisdom has it that 60 years ago, British Jewry totalled around 400,000 souls (1). According to the 2001 census returns we are now less than 270,000. The precise figures are open to challenge but the steady and seemingly inexorable decline is not.

Though it’s even harder to state with precision, it seems probable that sixty years ago those 400,000 Jews represented a figure larger than that of all the other minority faiths put together (2). Today, there are 1.6 million Muslims, more than 550,000 Hindus, 336,000 Sikhs and 267,000 of us — with the Buddhists threatening to challenge us for fourth place.

What does it signify, this decline in numbers? What are the implications of our fall from first to fourth place in the non-Christian minority stakes? Why do the two related sets of statistics make the Board of Deputies so important?

Three answers.

My first answer starts with a really perceptive observation by Michael Wegier of the UJIA. Michael wrote recently: “It has been possible, during the past decade, to paint two entirely different pictures of the British Jewish community. On the one hand, it is argued, ours is a community in crisis. It is marked by demographic decline, increased intermarriage and assimilation; by the breakdown of identity, the fracturing of community, and weakening attachment to Israel. But recent research has suggested a quite different reading may [also] be possible. British Jewry is home to thriving day schools, transformed synagogue communities, unparalleled levels of adult learning and outreach provision; it is a community discovering innovative and creative expressions of Jewish identity, one continuing to love Israel through good times and bad” (3).

I am absolutely certain that both pictures of our community are true and that, to a significant extent, the two pictures appear at different places on an axis which runs from ultra-orthodox to secularist non-affiliated and from the North West London ghetto to the rural shires.

I am equally certain that to console ourselves with the positive picture and ignore the negative picture is an untenable strategy because there is a point at which a minority community, however committed and active, lacks the numbers to sustain itself and re-exposes itself to the same, remorseless cycle of attrition.

The entire Jewish community needs our attention and it is clear that no single ideology, no single strategy will meet all needs. Our future depends not on institutional survival alone but on enabling every Jew to find meaning and purpose in their Jewish identity. There is no group capable of speaking to everyone and all the resources, all the talents, all the insights we can muster are desperately needed and of enormous value.

Thirty-five years ago I became friendly with another Cambridge undergraduate. He was studying a highly debatable subject for a Jew, philosophy. I was studying a much more suitable subject for a Jew, law. Jonathan Sacks and I have been close friends ever since. He and I have often said that our friendship is beshert and that we must use it in the interests of the community, to model a core value that we share. Namely that “religious differences, which should always be treated with respect, should not prevent different sections of the community from working together for the common good. Indeed, wherever they can do so, they must do so”.
It is a token of our relationship that I say this only after consulting him and in complete support of what he said when he last addressed you.

The Board of Deputies is the most important place where all sections of the community can come together, think about the diverse needs of our very varied, highly individualistic population, can differ with respect but recognise the full extent of our shared responsibility for the community as a whole, for both aspects of Michael Wegier’s portrait. The Board is the place where we can both express our deeply held, personal commitments yet recognise that either we live and work together or we die divided.

That is the first demographic lesson. We need each other. We have to support each other. We have to build a community in which, al tehi vaz l’chol adam , we ‘hold no person insignificant and no strategy improbable, for there is no individual that does not have their hour and no institution that has not its place’ (4).

I’ve now worked with three Presidents in my present role - with Eldred Tabachnik, Jo Wagerman and with you Henry. No three people could have done more to advance the Chief Rabbi’s injunction that we must work together whenever we can and that our differences should be treated with respect. No three people could have done more to recognise the importance of every group and every individual to the future of British Jewry. May the Board of Deputies continue to develop and play that decisive, community-embracing role in our common future.

My second answer addresses the question of the meaning of those statistics which have transformed our status amongst religious minorities in Britain, the fall from first to fourth place. They must mean that the role of the Board of Deputies in protecting the interests and the safety of our community has grown over the last sixty years rather than declined. It couldn’t be more apparent than it is right now, if you ken what I mean!

There is a cartoon to be drawn of all of you assembled as you are now — with one single, solitary Deputy red-faced — and captioned: ‘The only Jew who didn’t have personal access to Number 10’. Despite that talent for networking, it would be all too easy for us to slide down the scale of public importance. ‘What do they matter — 0.5% of the population and declining? We in Government, in the churches and in society at large have bigger fish to fry, greater worries and concerns’. Education syllabuses could now focus on more numerous minorities and ignore Judaism and the Jewish heritage. Britain could follow the cynical lead of France. Numerical insignificance coupled with expediency could so easily govern public policy to our detriment.

These are dangerous times when others seeking a different relationship to British society may undermine the accommodation that we have built — from shechitah to faith schools. These are dangerous times when the number of acts of violence and desecration are increasing. These are dangerous times characterised by a recrudescence of anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism, expressed in fantasies about the Israel/Palestine situation as the key to world peace. These are dangerous times when it becomes all too easy to ignore the fact that Judaism has a geography as well as a history and that by 2020 more than half the Jews of the world will live b’Eretz Yisrael . These are dangerous times when we simply cannot afford for the decline in our absolute and relative numbers to remove us from the political and social radar. Never did we need the work of the Board of Deputies to defend our interests more.

But there is a third task which is also yours — ours — and on which I want to lay equal emphasis with the other two. We are told in the Torah that we are not the most numerous of people. Our smallness is something in which I have always taken comfort (!) and I am seriously driven by the awareness that the Jewish mission has never been realised by power or by might, ki im b’ruchi (5) but by the religious spirit that has sustained us these nearly four millennia. We Jews have sustained the Jewish journey not through numbers and not through withdrawal into ourselves — we were ghettoized by others, we didn’t choose the ghetto — we have sustained ourselves with an absolute determination to give of the values of Judaism to wider society, to be a blessing to all the families of the earth (6). We are the authors of social justice, the originators of Tikkun olam , repair of the world. That is our defining meaning, that is our existential purpose which goes far ‘beyond survival’ (7).

Once again the Board must lead the way, reminding us as a community that if we are not for ourselves who will be for us, but if we are only for ourselves, mah anu what are we? (8)

Our agenda, I believe, is framed by three questions:

How do we, in our diversity, best sustain ourselves? How do we, in our relative numerical decline, defend ourselves? And how do we continue to contribute to the building of a multi-faith, multi-ethnic society in Britain founded on the prophetic values of social justice? The ‘how’ is clearly a matter for ongoing debate and discussion. That each question reflects a non-negotiable task for each of us and those we represent is, I believe, beyond question.

Even as it recognises the significance of today and the honour you have paid me, the Reform Movement pledges itself to support the Board of Deputies and the shared agenda I have outlined with every fibre of our being. Chazak, chazak v’nitchazek .

1 The figure given in the Jewish Year Book for 20 years from 1950 onwards was 450,000. Professor Barry Kosmin, however, has argued that this overstates the number by more than 90,000. Being Reform I have gone for a middle of the road position!
2 With thanks to Brian Pearce, Interfaith Network.
3 UJIA Strategic Review, 2005.
4 Paraphrasing only slightly Pirkei Avot 4:3.
5 Zechariah 4:6.
6 Genesis 12:3.
7 Obscure allusion to ‘Beyond Survival’, Dow Marmur, DLT.
8 Pirkei Avot 1:14.

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