The Movement for Reform Judaism

I love Cardiff. I adore Cardiff.

We leave North West London and cruise down the M4. Though it’s Bank Holiday Monday, there are no road works and not a traffic jam in sight. We toss a few little coins into the toll booth bucket and Wales welcomes us. We park in front of the St David’s Hotel – what a glorious building – and wander down to the docks. The sky is blue and the sun sparkles on the gentle waters. Back to the hotel, the most fabulous lunch and then a taxi to the city centre. The taxi driver says to us: “Why don’t you speak with the same accent as the others from London – their accent is so much stronger than yours”. Class, we say, sheer class. We walk down the magnificent pedestrianised streets, listening to those melodious London voices singing and chanting with all the élan and tunefulness of a Welsh male voice choir. Into the Millennium Stadium – what an awesome stadium. We watch the finest 97 minutes of soccer ever played and West Ham are triumphant. Back in the Premiership where we belong. We drive home – less than four hours stadium to front door – singing Bread of Heaven. Cardiff is pure premiership.

Which is more than one can say for Edinburgh – Hearts! The G8 Summit should be held here where Britain’s greatest triumphs take place.

It’s highly appropriate that the triumphant induction of your new rabbi should happen only days after Shavuot. I was at our Edgware Synagogue on Yom Tov morning and Rabbi Danny Smith pointed out that Shavuot, z’man matan torateinu , represented final agreement to, the acceptance ceremony of, the Jewish constitution.

According to rabbinic tradition, the constitution was only agreed after endless wrangles. It was hawked around the nations of the world but one nation objected to commandment number seven and demanded a rebate; other people queried the tenth commandment and refused to accept the implied common agricultural policy. So it was finally down to us and us alone. Even we argued the toss and balked at the terms and conditions until, according to one famous midrash , God suspended Mount Sinai over our ancestors’ heads and said: ‘Agree to the constitution or I will drop this on top of the lot of you’. If The Holy One Blessed Be He cares about the European constitution – which I doubt, but God’s ways are mysterious – She may well have to similarly threaten the French and the Dutch….. and the British, and the Germans, and the Poles…..

What is so fascinating and so utterly remarkable about the Jewish constitution, the Torah/torah – understood both as the Five Books of Moses and the whole of Jewish teaching – is that it is not simply a vindication of individual needs but the balancing of the needs of individuals; not simply a reflection of national self-interest but a balancing of national and global concerns. And although we are accustomed to torah speaking in the language of ancient, classical and medieval societies – it actually addresses precisely those issues which the G8 Summit will be addressing (less auspiciously and comfortably than it would have, had it been held here in Cardiff).

Let me give you three examples. The first is the issue of debt relief – Gordon Brown’s plan to lift the burden of debt from the poorest nations and ensure that the money saved is redirected into education, health care and sustainable development. The Reform Movement has been identified, since its beginning, with the Jubilee 2000 Campaign out of which the Chancellor’s proposals emanate. Biblical Judaism agonises about debt. In the institution of the Jubilee Year (the source of the name of the campaign ‘Jubilee 2000’) it provides for the release of impoverishing debt and the restoration to their patrimony of those whose land has been lost through economic pressures – every fifty years.

There is a deep sense of equilibrium and restorative justice at the heart of Torah. Not of eradicating all difference but of legislating against extremes, insisting on the right of the poor, the widow, the orphan and the immigrant to receive and introducing checks and balances such as the extinguishing of debt and the return of land to restore balance, equilibrium – in the case of debt, to such an extent that early rabbinic Judaism had to turn the plain meaning of the Torah on its head in order to permit continuation of the loans and credit required by a more sophisticated society and economic system. But the idea of restorative justice, of release from impoverishing shackles of debt is a major theme in Jewish economic thought.

Let’s take a second example – fair trade. The Fairtrade Movement has been growing in recent years and, once again, the Reform Movement is involved. At our AGM next Sunday RSY-Netzer will be urging the Movement and its constituent synagogues to buy Fairtrade produce. Fairtrade products are products for which the grower or producer has been paid a fair sum for his or her efforts and has not been exploited, had the price driven down, by the superior economic power of the developed world and its corporations. The rabbinic principle of ona’ah , overreaching has long forbidden both overcharging and underpaying and seeks an equal measure of justice, fairness for producer, importer and customer alike.

Both of which examples – debt release and fair trade – give us clear indication that Judaism does not advocate communist equality or unbridled free market economics but an ethical economics based upon restorative justice and the amelioration of extremes. It accepts that there will always be differences in wealth and power but imposes upon the rich an obligation to help those less wealthy and powerful and gives a right to the disadvantaged to expect assistance in moving out of their condition of impoverishment. The direction is always towards restoration; rebalancing and curbing the extremes – a rebalancing implicit in the call to Make Poverty History. Bob Geldof must be a closet Jew from Cardiff!

Debt relief, fair trade – let me offer you a third and final example. Meir Tamari, the father of contemporary Jewish business ethics, a former Chief Economist of the Bank of Israel and Director of Jerusalem’s Institute for Ethics in Economics (ethics in economics, axiomatic in Jewish thinking but far from axiomatic in today’s world of profit as the only determining factor in corporate behaviour), Tamari in his book Jewish Business Ethics1 devotes a whole chapter to environmental issues and cites source after source prohibiting wealth creation in ways in which the environment is significantly damaged to the detriment of other individuals, communities and the globe itself.

An ancient midrash asserts with incredible prescience:

In the hour when the Holy One, blessed be God, created the first human being,
God took him and let him pass before all the trees of the garden of Eden,
And said to him:
See my works, how fine and excellent they are!
Now all that I have created for you have I created.
Think upon this, and do not corrupt and desolate my world;
For if you corrupt it, there is no one to set it right after you. 2

In sober, practical legal terms Tamari says: “Natural resources are limited, so the sufferer cannot simply avail himself of other resources or remove himself from the proximity of the damage flowing from somebody else’s economic activity… The individual corporation has to consider the ecological costs suffered by the community, or by individuals, as part of its production of goods or services… The limitations [Jewish law places] on our ability to inflict such damage by the use of our property are a declaration that there are factors in the world over and above the right to property and the creation of economic wealth”. Tamari is a former Chief Economist of the Bank of Israel, a Lecturer at Bar Ilan, a guy with a Kippah and a long beard, not a sandal wearing lefty!

What’s Tony rabbiting on about, why is he giving us a lecture on economics and the G8? I’ll tell you why. Rabbi Dr Charles Middleburgh, Charles and I have been friends, close friends, for a long time. Significantly, our friendship wasn’t damaged, wasn’t even strained by being on either side of the Reform Liberal leadership divide, it was strengthened.

Because we care passionately about the same things. Because we both went into the rabbinate for the same reasons – because we care deeply about the world in which we live – its peoples, its wildlife, its environment. And we both knew that Judaism was the source of our values and has so much to teach the world about how to live and redeem itself. Yes, our ritual life is important. Yes, our deep allegiance is to the Jewish people but the particularist and universalist, the internally focused and the externally focused require a balance which some sections of the Jewish world do not even acknowledge, let alone achieve. In Charles you have someone who really understands that we Jews do not exist merely to perpetuate ourselves, we only exist to be partners with God and other faith communities in the repair of the world.

Cardiff New Synagogue is a wonderful place, a community to be proud of. But it’s also a very fortunate community. I don’t have to tell you how fortunate you were to have Elaina and Gerald. Sorry about this bit of name dropping but I was sitting with The Archbishop of Canterbury at dinner a few weeks ago and I asked him whether he was still glad he’d accepted the call to Lambeth. “Yes”, he said, “but I do miss Wales and Elaina”.

Your good fortune continues with Charles and Gilly – and Gilly is just as well connected as Elaina! Charles is a man of deep conviction and I look forward to working with him and with all of you – on our shared passions for the good of the Jewish people, the welfare of humanity and the future of our globe.

I still can’t get over the fact that the leaders of the G8 are going to Edinburgh but it’s their loss. Synagogue, rabbi, stadium – Cardiff is premiership and, unlike West Ham, destined to remain there for a long time to come. Ken y’hi ratzon . May it be God’s will.

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1 In the Market Place by Meir Tamari, Targum Press, Michigan, 1991
2 Ecclesiastes Rabbah VII.28

RABBI TONY BAYFIELD

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