The Movement for Reform Judaism

Rabbi Tony Bayfield

There are 2 billion Christians in the world, 1.2 billion Muslims and just 13 million Jews. The Jewish community in this country has reduced from 400,000 in 1950 to 267,000 today – 267,000 out of a population of 60 million. According to the 2001 census, Harlow Jewish community consists of just 190 souls. What Jewish leader, what Jewish organisation would not be obsessed with numbers?

Sometimes, I console myself with a verse from Deuteronomy (Ch7 v7) which says, “You aren’t the most numerous of people, [too right], you’re the least”. Yet 3,000 years later we’re still around. But then I think: ‘So has it really always been the same?’ And at first glance, the answer is an uncomforting ‘no’.

We’re about to start reading the Book of Numbers. I don’t mean now – five addresses is quite enough without a Torah reading as well – I mean the week after next on Shabbat. It’s always struck me as a curious name for a Book of the Torah but since it contains the details of a census and statistic after statistic and name after name, it’s not surprising that Christian tradition chose this title. What is surprising is the result of the desert census. For, according to the Book of Numbers, there were 603,550 males over the age of twenty yet fit enough to bear arms. If you add in the women, the children and the elderly, that gives a figure of around 2 million.

There are a lot of problems with that figure. First, how on earth could you sustain a population of 2 million in a wilderness (the Hebrew name for the Book of Numbers is B’midbar which means in the wilderness) even allowing for the miraculous appearance of manna and quails and Miriam’s Well. Second, bearing in mind that population figures in the ancient world were very, very much lower than population figures today, how does that square with God declaring in Deuteronomy that we aren’t the most numerous of people, we’re the least. And thirdly, how come there’s no reference whatsoever in Egyptian history to the exodus of 2 million slaves? We’re used to governments covering up unpalatable truths but if Pharaoh couldn’t conceal from the world what his Deputy had been up to with Tracey, could he really have kept quiet about 2 million dangerous foreign nationals being allowed to escape having not completed their sentences in Egyptian slave labour camps?

Seriously, it stretches credulity beyond breaking point, that figure of 603,550 males. I know that the standard response is that God can do anything that He chooses but She usually sticks to the credible and realistic.

A few years back there were a number of scholarly articles which suggested a possible solution. The census in the Book of Numbers uses the word eleph, translating it as it would still be translated today as a thousand. However, the word eleph is also frequently used in the Torah to mean a troop, a relatively small group of men. If you take eleph in the census to mean not a thousand but a small group of men, ten or so, the total number of Jews leaving Egypt comes down from 2 million to about twenty thousand.

These things are ultimately a matter of taste and faith but I go for the twenty thousand, for the always having been the smallest. It fits in with the 13 million Jews today as against 2 billion Christians and 1.2 billion Muslims; the 267,000 British Jews out of 60 million; the 190 Jews of Harlow – 190 is still probably more than you thought. We are and always have been a numerically challenged people.

Rabbi Shillor, Irit, really understands that. She’s come from working in Germany where something truly miraculous has happened. 100,000 Russian Jews have come to Germany and brought about a revival of Jews in Germany that no one could have imagined. It’s yet another of the amazing and unpredictable stories of our time. But the fact is that there are still less than half the number of Jews in Germany than there are in Britain – once again a fraction of one percent of the population.

So what are we to make of it – this smallness, this poverty of numbers, this status as a permanently endangered species? Well, let’s first acknowledge that it’s a huge challenge. Leave aside all the obvious problems of how you sustain and meet the needs of a nationwide community that small – where do the resources, where does the energy, where does the critical mass come from – leave that aside and let me explain to you the challenge in terms that I explained a fortnight ago to our community in Milton Keynes, Jewish population a stonking 466 but no equivalent of Epping or Loughton to draw on.

I told them a story that a Muslim friend of mine had told having just got back from an extended trip to India. Whilst he’d been in India, he witnessed protests over those Danish cartoons and really angry marches blaming them on us Jews. He confronted people saying: ‘Why are you blaming the Jews? Have you ever met a Jew?’ and none of them had ever met a single Jew. Of course they hadn’t, there are only 5,600 Jews on the whole of the Indian sub-Continent. How do you engage with people, how do you dialogue with people, how do you dispel wicked stereotypes if there are huge swathes of the world without a single Jew and whole areas of Britain where the same is true. I don’t know the answer to that negative but it’s a question that the Jewish world today has not addressed and it needs to.

But I want to stay with the positive. After all, if a handful of people can sustain Jewish life in Harlow for fifty years, if they can build a synagogue and expand it and support a talented and energetic rabbi, there is every reason to maintain the unquenchable optimism and determination of those exemplified by Charles Jackson and Manny Clayman alav ha’shalom and their successors.

So let’s focus on two positives. First, that biblical census contains not just an awful lot of numbers but an awful lot of names. Echoes of my football memory, they don’t name the team, they name the supporters. Not only does every single supporter, not only does every single individual matter, not only do we desperately need every single member of our community – however difficult, prickly or ambivalent about being Jewish – but we’re obliged to pay special attention to each and every one of them. You’re much more used to that than those of us who live in the North West London ghetto – but it’s the challenge to all of us. To know every single member of the community, to know every single Jew in Harlow and beyond and be prepared to listen to them with patience and humility and find out what they really need and how they can really be supported and deepen their Jewish identity. That’s both a challenge and an opportunity – an opportunity only really open to the numerically challenged – and one where I know Rabbi Shillor will lead the way.

There’s a second positive dimension – from which you will deduce that the guy with the same initials as me has nothing on me when it comes to spin. We Jews are commanded from the very, very outset of our existence, when we are but a single family, to be a blessing to all the families on earth and, later, to help repair the world. If there are 13 million Jews and 2 billion Christians, if there are only 5,600 Jews in the whole of the Indian sub-Continent and fewer still in China and only 190 in Harlow, it makes no sense to think that we can do it all ourselves. We can only do it with others.

Now maybe that piece of typical Jewish pragmatism actually discloses a contemporary religious truth. We live in a world in which the faiths are at war with each other and the globe is rapidly being destroyed. Perhaps the greatest religious truth of our times is that only if the faiths of the world – big and small – are prepared to work together, can the world be repaired; only if the faith communities in places like Harlow really work together, can Harlow become a kinder, fairer, more compassionate – better – place in which to live.

So that’s the message of the Movement for Reform Judaism to this small but perfectly formed and much loved constituent: Mazal tov on the shidduch. By reaching out to every Jew and by working in partnership with other faiths you can still be a blessing to the whole world. Maybe you can even blow bubbles that reach the sky, never fade and die and – with Rabbi Shillor – win on penalties."

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