The Movement for Reform Judaism

The Blue Guide to Southern Italy, page 490:
“Far and away the most interesting place west of Lecce is Manduria (population 33,000). One of the chief centres of Messapian civilisation, it was known even in ancient times for its heroic opposition to the Tarentines, whose mercenary general, Archidamus of Sparta, was killed beneath its walls in a fruitless siege in 338 BC. Now known primarily for its vineyards, it conserves several interesting monuments including a Messapian necropolis and a fine stretch of the ancient walls.”

“Cool”, I said to Francesca, who’s 4½ and Oliver, who’s 20 months. “A Messapian necropolis. Right up your street, kids”. So we forsook our villa with its mini zoo at the bottom of the garden and Olympic size swimming pool. And I instructed my son-in-law to drive us to Manduria and the children’s introduction to Messapian civilisation.

Even I had to admit that Manduria didn’t look much and the sign posting was clearly designed to dissuade all visitors. But as we rounded a bend, to be confronted by yet another dusty, under-populated square or rather oblong, I thought I noticed a sign with the word ‘ghetto’. So we parked and followed the signpost which did indeed indicate the way to ‘the ghetto’.

Of course there were no further signs of any kind but we soon came to the duomo , the cathedral, situated midway between the undistinguished oblong and peeling, mouldering warehouses. “It must be here, by the cathedral”, I said, “because that’s where ghettos always were”. So, after some unenlightening conversations with local residents, we walked down a couple of narrow streets with ancient, terraced houses, seemingly untouched for centuries. At the end of the second alley, faintly painted on the wall was the street sign, “ Vicolo degli Hebrei ”, Jews’ Alley. We paused for a team photograph. I gave a stunning lecture on the ghetto in 16th and 17th century Italy to Francesca and Oliver who were deeply impressed and we walked back, noticing that the houses had once had extra storeys which had fallen into disuse and been removed.

Being early afternoon, everything was closed – not even drinks and ice cream were available. No matter, I’d had a really good time and got my Rosh Hashanah sermon for Finchley.

What I told Francesca and Oliver was that the ghetto originated with the Borghetto district of Venice in the early 16th century and was the place where the Jews of a town were forced to live. As the Jewish population increased, we built upwards because we couldn’t move outwards – thankfully there were fewer planning restrictions on loft conversions then, than there are in Hampstead Garden Suburb today. The ghetto was almost always right by the cathedral.

Right by the cathedral. How characteristically ambiguous. Right by the cathedral because the Bishop saw value in his Jews, theological as well as financial. He was keen to protect us. Protect us from whom? From his own flock, from the monastic orders, from all those Christians who had absorbed centuries of anti-Judaism in Christian preaching and teaching.

Hold that picture in your mind’s eye: the cathedral in its power and glory and the narrow, ignominious ghetto, deep in its protective shadow. Don’t just think anti-Semitism. Think sibling ambiguity as well.

In its early days in the 1950s and 60s, British Reform Judaism opted for one-day Rosh Hashanah along with one-day for all the other chagim . We were keen to avoid all the different kinds of repetition that had developed within Judaism and gave the eradication of repetition precedence over the subtly different reason for two-days Rosh Hashanah as opposed to, say, two-days Shavuot. As we matured and decided to follow practice in Israel, the second day of Rosh Hashanah came back and posed a very interesting question with regard to the Torah readings.

We had chosen as the reading for Rosh Hashanah when it was only one day the Akedah , the story of the binding of Isaac. We had omitted from Rosh Hashanah another, equally challenging story, that of the expulsion by Abraham – on the urging of Sarah and with the supposed support of God – of Hagar, Abraham’s slave girl, and their son, Abraham’s older son, Ishmael. Actually, Jewish tradition had long assigned the binding of Isaac to the second day and Hagar and Ishmael to the first day.

As so often, I find the Almighty’s sense of humour even more dangerous and perverse than my own. For no sooner do Abraham, Sarah, Hagar and Ishmael make a comeback, than contemporary events show it to be as problematic and as painful a story as even the Torah can offer.

So here, on Rosh Hashanah, we play to packed houses – men, women and children come to celebrate their Jewish identity, our group survival and our hopes for Jewish renewal, and we read a tale of deep ambiguity and vicious rivalry which is being acted out again on our plasma screens.

In fact, there is a constant theme of sibling jealousy and competition – of favouritism and preference shown to the younger, smaller, weaker child – which runs through the whole of Genesis.

Abraham expels Ishmael his elder son so that Isaac, the younger, will continue God’s chosen line. Ishmael will be alright; he too will succeed and father a nation but it’s Isaac who matters most. So it is with Jacob and Esau, the elder twin. So it is with Joseph and his older brothers.

There are those who say that by the time we became a nation, the issue had been worked through and we had moved beyond this early, neurotic stage. But I wonder. Just occasionally, the tensions between Moses, Aaron and Miriam are revealed. And, of course, Miriam is the oldest, Aaron the middle child and Moses the youngest - the youngest yet the chosen leader. Maybe Linda and I should have called Miriam Moses but I don’t think a beard would suit her nearly as well as a tambourine!

In any event, what is, I believe, a description of the archetypal emotional realities that families experience and how the children often interpret them – became something that post-biblical Judaism found a need to take at face value and justify.

Both classical and medieval rabbinic commentators identified Esau with the Edomites, with those who attack Jews, with our persecutors and with Christianity. They identified Christians as the displaced, unfavoured, unblessed sibling.

But Christianity had already got in the first, crushing blow. Christianity called its holy scripture the New Testament with testament here meaning covenant. Its was the new covenant which had replaced the old one – hence Old Testament, old covenant, now broken – whilst, at the same time, laying claim to it and incorporating it as the precursor to the climactic events of the Gospels. Even the old ‘people of Israel’ were replaced, with Christians themselves becoming the new Israel. Christianity was the true, favoured child of Abraham. The technical term is supersessionism.

In a brilliant essay – which you can read in the next issue of MANNA (annual subscription for four quarterly editions £20 including postage – Circulation Manager Brian Humphreys; Advertising Manager, David Farbey) – the American scholar Reuven Firestone writes:

“During the Greco-Roman period when monotheism [one God] became known to many nations and peoples of the world, it was associated with a single organized religious community, the Jews… Judaism as monotheism stood in opposition to the countless differing expressions of polytheism [many Gods]. Conceptually, then, monotheism appeared in the minds of observers as being single, and unique. With only one God, there could only be one monotheism [Judaism].

When Christianity emerged, its adherents believed that it epitomized God’s will. Because the world, including those who would become Christian, had always observed monotheism as a single religious expression – that of Judaism – the early Christians naturally expected that there could only be one real monotheism. They believed that monotheism was a ‘zero sum game’. It was beyond their conceptual experience to consider the possibility of more than one expression of divine monotheistic truth. They believed, therefore, that if they were right, then everybody else – including the Jews – were wrong.

So when Christianity succeeded in becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century, it formally established the creed of supersessionism. Christianity was the one and only true religion. It had therefore superseded the old system of the Jews. The old covenant was no longer in force. Now the new covenant of Christianity would reign as the only true covenantal relationship with God.”

This, concludes Firestone, is the conceptual root of anti-Semitism: There is only one God. He has given the elder child the elbow and replaced the elder with the younger – Christianity.

But now back to Manduria, the cathedral and the ghetto. Nothing could change the sixteenth century fact that we were still around, that we were the people that the Old Testament was talking about, that – replaced, superseded and just plain wrong though we were – we were/are still the living, older sibling.

The ambiguity – the cathedral and the ghetto in its protective but dominating and restricting shadow – flow from the ambiguity of our unique family relationship. It isn’t the same in our relationships with other religions – like Buddhism or Hinduism.

Now let’s go back again to the Torah reading, to the displacement of Ishmael to make way for Isaac. Our ancestors heard God justify this by saying: “Whilst your name and posterity will be fulfilled through Isaac ….. your slave girl’s child will also father a nation.” The Koran says, in Sura II c48: “Abraham was a righteous man of God, a Muslim, and so were his children. Abraham and Ishmael built the Ka’ba as the house of God.” Abraham was a righteous man of God, a Muslim…. Abraham and Ishmael built … the house of God.

So the displaced son, Ishmael, turns the tables and displaces Isaac and Islam reaches back to Abraham the Muslim, through the favoured son Ishmael and claims preferential status. But there is what Reuven Firestone calls a conceptual difference. Whereas Christianity could only conceive of one monotheism and therefore superseded Judaism – sibling replacement, the Islamic response was subtly different. Listen to Firestone again:

“By the time Islam came around, the world was divided between a number of expressions of monotheism: varieties of Jewish monotheism and Orthodox, and non-Orthodox expressions of Christianity and so forth. All claimed that they had access to religious truth. Theologically, Islam developed its own claim of exclusive truth. But conceptually and experientially , the Muslims had come into contact with various expressions of monotheism from the very emergence of their belief system. The early Muslims observed them living together – not necessarily comfortably, but nonetheless. So Islam naturally adopted the theological as well as political policy of toleration. Not pluralism, mind you, but toleration.”

Not equality but dis placement rather than re placement.

Whilst Islam accorded to Judaism and Christianity a lesser status, anti-Semitism is absent from the Islamic world until the middle of the 19th century when it began to spill out of the Christian communities all over the Middle East. It was exploited and fanned by Hitler and is now viciously and ruthlessly used in the battle with Israel. It is raging all over the Islamic world but it isn’t endemic to Islam as it is to Christianity.

So! There is a terrible irony in the fact that the Torah, our beloved Torah, challenges us with a theme: That the younger, weaker sibling is preferred to the older, stronger one – Isaac to Ishmael, Jacob to Esau, Joseph to his ten older brothers, Moses to Miriam and Aaron. Yet we are revealed by history as the first born, as the oldest and in turn have been declared re placed by the younger Christianity and dis placed by the youngest, Islam.

There is irony and there is a paralysing childishness. I watch my grandson competing for solo spot on his mother’s lap – but he’s only 21 months. His 4½ year old sister has already stopped trying to get me to reassure her that I love her more than her brother. She’s already at least half realised that that isn’t the nature of parental and grand parental love. Yet we three children of the truest Parent have clung to that infantile notion not only that God has a favourite but that God replaces or displaces amongst God’s children. An arrested infantilism that moves beyond even the painful ambiguity of cathedral and ghetto to the racist ravings of some of our so called sages in Israel and, ultimately, to the death camps and the suicide bombers.

I don’t know how you organise family therapy for three billion people – especially as most family therapists are Jews! But that’s the enormity of the task that we face this coming year and if we cannot at least make a start on healing the Abrahamic family, its hubris and its neuroses, what hope is there for religion and for humanity?
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