The Movement for Reform Judaism

Ten minutes. Maximum. After all, 90% of the congregation are probably already tucking in to that life-saving meal which wards off the annual North London autumn famine. So why should we faithful few have to wait for the first round of our Yontef digestive 10,000 metres? Ten minutes. Two stories.

First story. David Coffey’s a friend of mine. The Reverend David is the Head of the Baptist Union and the nonconformist Christian President of the Council of Christians and Jews. We reckoned that as Nonconformists and nice guys, we might be able to talk the right language to Jonathan Sacks’ fellow knight, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, Head of the Muslim Council of Britain. So we invited him to a tête à tête à tête at Maroush, West London Synagogue’s Lebanese café. It was the day after that pointed Panorama programme about British Muslims and Iqbal stood us up. “Out of the country”, they said.

So there we were, talking and eating, and David mentioned that he was about to become head of the worldwide Baptist Union. “How many Baptists are there in the world?”, I asked — knowing that they were one of the smaller Christian denominations. “100 million”, he replied. 100 million out of two billion. Iqbal’s fellow Muslims run to 1.2 billion. There are just fourteen million Jews in the world, somewhat less than the population of Afghanistan or Mexico City. Now you know why most Jews are small and over-compensate for it!

Second story. I get an email from the daughter of my ophthalmic surgeon. She lives in Switzerland but wants me to officiate at her wedding in London. She is marrying another British Jew, also living in Switzerland, with the surname Arwas. My secretary took one look at the surname and said: “Good grief, that was my surname before I got married. We must be related — the Arwas’s are just one family, originally from Egypt”. Daniella is always right — but then she lives in Southgate. The fiancé’s family did indeed originate from Egypt. And that’s how I will come to be related to my secretary by a marriage!

When it comes to Torah readings, the coming 48 hours will be dominated by Abraham and Isaac. Our rabbinic predecessors selected adjoining stories from within the Genesis narrative — beginning with the choice of Isaac over Ishmael as Abraham’s successor and moving on to that awesome and awful moment when Abraham so nearly sacrifices Isaac and snuffs out the Jewish story before it has started. “I will multiply you”; “I will make you the father of a multitude of nations”; “I will make your descendants as many as the stars in the sky, more numerous than the grains of sand on the seashore”. “Then Abraham took the knife to slaughter his son”.

I would guess that the rabbis chose this theme for Rosh Hashanah to emphasise just how much was at stake and just how great was Abraham’s faith for putting his future, in the shape of Isaac, on the line — or rather on the altar. But what strikes me this Rosh Hashanah is that I have always misread the promise in Genesis. I had assumed that the promise — of descendants as many as the stars in the sky, as numerous as the grains of sand on the seashore referred to us, the Jewish people. But of course it doesn’t. It refers to the nations descended from Abraham — who turn out, through Divine irony, to be the two billion Christians and the 1.2 billion Muslims, David Coffey’s and Iqbal Sacranie’s respective flocks. A mere fourteen million Jews doesn’t make much of a beach or even a starry, starry night.

In fact, the Torah goes on to emphasise the relative smallness of the Jewish people — “few in number”, “the least of nations” — even by biblical standards, even in the context of biblical demography. We are, it seems, destined forever to try to disguise the dropping of our jaw as we discover the number of Baptists worldwide and to experience perpetual feelings of anxiety as we reflect on the fact that we may be 20% of the population of Barnet but we are less than one half a percent — nearer a quarter a percent — of the population of Britain.

It’s here that my personal and professional neuroses come together. I have never forgiven my parents for my lack of stature and frequently reflect on how short people like me — Napoleon, for instance, Stalin — behave. I’m sure that I preach more about Jewish demography, about Jewish numbers than about any other subject.

However, there is another side to the coin, an alternative possibility which has been staring me in the face but to which envy of Sir Iqbal and Reverend Coffey have blinded me.

The Jewish story begins with family. Abraham doesn’t leave his father’s house on his own, he shlepps his wife, Sarah, with him and his nephew Lot as well. The Jewish story doesn’t begin with a remarkable but solitary religious figure —with a Jesus or a Mohammed or a Buddha — it begins with a family. Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob, Rachel and Leah; add Bilhah and Zilpah, for correctness, and their extended families. For reasons that are probably beyond sober historical explanation that has been our continuing motif. We are this small group of related people, a family of families, which accounts for so many of our endearing and less endearing characteristics, our Friday nights and our broigeses . Our small world.

For wasn’t that my second story, the one about my secretary finding herself related to a couple I’m marrying? It’s a small world. We say it again and again. Because it is — a small world with many family characteristics which account for many of the differences between us and our Christian and Muslim siblings, even though we have so much in common.

I don’t know whether small is beautiful, but it is what we are and what we have to live with. So here’s a thought on which you might like to ponder during the next ten days. What we can offer that is much more difficult for religious groupings who number billions, is intimacy, is valuing every single Jew.

We may snipe at members of the family for not doing as we do and coming to shul on Erev Rosh Hashanah before feeding their faces, but we can also value each individual and try to find out, to use contemporary jargon, ‘where they are’, what ‘moves them’, and what ‘touches them’. We have some chance of reaching out and listening to their individual accounts of their Jewish journey and accepting that though their journey may not be the same as ours, may seem very different — it is still a Jewish journey to be encouraged and supported and they are still valued members of the Jewish family.

“What. Love and respect every member of my family? You’re ‘avin a larf”. No I’m not, though I think I may have taken 11 minutes to say so. For that alone, I repent!
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