The Movement for Reform Judaism

1st of a trilogy of related sermons for the High Holydays this year.  All three call on Reform Judaism to face up to cutting edge issues of our time - however challenging or painful. 
All three sermons refer to a lecture which Rabbi Bayfield gave to the Randall Division of Cell & Molecular Biophysics, King's College London entitled 'Science & Religion in the Age of Uncertainty' available here.

Rabbi Tony Bayfield

All the guidebooks to Iceland mention rotten shark.  They bury shark meat in the ground, dig it up some months later and eat it with a glass of the local schnaps to mask the taste.  Since I'm an ex-lawyer, my son Daniel is a barrister and my future daughter-in-law is a solicitor, I thought that rotten shark was quite appropriate.

We flew in a very small plane from Reykjavik to the Westman Islands - to the volcanic island of Heimaey, famous for its puffins.  According once again to the guidebooks, in the summer, the baby puffins, called pufflings, glide down from the cliffs to the little town, attracted by the lights.  There the local children go out at night with torches and gently take the tiny birds out of town and return them to their anxious parents.  We saw puffins on the rocks and on the cliffs and flew back to Reykjavik.

In the very stylish restaurant that night we scanned the menu for rotten shark but it was not to be seen.  However, the starters included smoked puffin.

‘May we eat puffin?' asked Daniel and Lisa in a pre-marital chorus that bodes well for the future.  And that began a conversation which continued sporadically for the rest of the week and ranged over such other staples of the Icelandic diet as whale meat and guillemot. 

Daniel is every inch a barrister and wanted a cogently reasoned answer based upon a liberal but traditional statement of forbidden foods - chicken ‘yes', pork ‘no', turbot ‘questionable', since the orthodox authorities in Britain today rule against it but it's closely related to brill which they permit.  I tried a broader version of that approach.  There's a list of prohibited birds in the Torah.  The Babylonian Talmud - Tractate Hullin - rules that there are twenty-four forbidden species.  The implication is that any bird that doesn't fall within the list is permitted.  Since the identification of the birds from their ancient Hebrew names is quite difficult and it would be reasonable to suppose that the list is restricted to birds found in the Middle East 3,500 years ago, that should make the  kosher status of the puffin reasonably clear.  Always assuming that the puffin on the menu has been caught by a black-hatted, bearded gentleman and despatched in the traditional manner.

But the rabbis were never ones for an easy life and wanted to seek a rationale behind the prohibited twenty-four.  So they deduced four distinguishing marks of birds that are permitted - it has to have a crop; the sac in the gizzard has to be pealed off; it has to have an extra toe in addition to three front toes; and it mustn't be a bird of prey.

Yet despite those positive identifying marks, orthodoxy has now reached the point of accepting only those birds that have traditionally been accepted as permitted i.e. chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese and pigeons.  Which is why, the London Beth Din has a problem with quail even though manna and quail were what our ancestors ate in the wilderness.

‘So', I explained, ‘you can see the consistently more restrictive line taken by orthodoxy.  Since the three of us eat non-shechitah-ed poultry out' (we all shop at Greenspans in the Market Place for our home requirements and Lawrence hasn't yet stocked puffin so the question hadn't hitherto arisen) ‘you could argue that the smoked puffin starter is permitted'.

Daniel was unconvinced.  Lisa was extremely unhappy.  She has deep ethical convictions and concerns over the environment and over the way in which we deal with the natural world.  Life for her would be a whole lot easier if she was a vegetarian - like, interestingly, the great Chief Rabbi of the Yishuv of Palestine, Rav Kook - but giving up roast chicken or chicken liver pâté on Friday night wouldn't feel right.  She was deeply affronted by the whale meat and the Icelandic disregard of international concern for this awesome mammal.  Indeed, we got into discussing whether or not it was ethically right to disturb the creatures by going whale watching.  The presence of dolphin on one menu rendered us all speechless.  I suspected that the endearing nature of the puffin was also a factor.  In the end we focused on a particular domestic conundrum.

The aforementioned Lawrence Greenspan, purveyor of fine kosher meat and poultry to the residents of Hampstead Garden Suburb and beyond, used to stock organic, free range chickens.  That's what I used to enjoy when the family Friday night is at Daniel and Lisa's flat in Hampstead.  But, all of a sudden, a few months ago Lawrence stopped stocking them.  One of the regulatory bodies, the Soil Association, I believe, threatened to withdraw its organic certification from the poultry supplier if he sent it for shechitah even though it was clearly organic.  So Lawrence lost his supplier and Lisa posed the dilemma:  I want to do what is ethically right, avoid anything that isn't organic and free range but I also want to keep kosher.  I want to respond to the urgent environmental issues of our time with which food production is crucially involved and I want kashrut to reflect that.  What do I do?

In response to your question, none of us ate puffin but you may well now be wondering what on earth all this has to do with the price of fish and is it a suitable subject for Erev Rosh Hashanah?

Let me explain. 

These are exciting and challenging times for the British Reform Movement.  We've set out our stall - as the great Alan Pardew would say - and declared our intention of becoming the majority, the mainstream of British Jewry by 2020.  We have a strategy - shifting focus from institutional preoccupations and programmatic repetition to reaching out, engaging with people where they are and responding to their deepest Jewish needs.  We believe that we can reach the parts that other sections of the community cannot reach.  Recent demographic research shows that the Reform Movement - along with the Liberals and Masorti - now account for more than 30% of synagogue affiliations in Britain - with mainstream orthodoxy down to 55%.  I think we will make it by 2020 but it may be what they call a pyrrhic victory since the rate of decline is so alarming that we may end up with 51% of nothing.

So it's all the more important, if we are to be 51% of something, that people know what Reform Judaism is and stands for and yet I continually hear that they don't.  I get very defensive about that since I write and talk about nothing else and think this sermon is a very good example of Reform Judaism.  But I and we have to move beyond defensiveness and listen to what people are really saying.

The opening lecture of the Leo Baeck College's 50^th Anniversary Convention in July was given by a Paris-based American scholar called Diane Pinto.  Pinto argued that the European Jewish Community - Britain included - is still so close to the Shoah, has such a strong sense of being victim that it's quite unable to fulfil its function as a contributing part of European society.  So concerned is it about survival and external threats, that it fails to face up to the challenge presented by the cutting edge issues of our day - turning Europe into a cohesive, multi-faith society; the huge disparities in standards of living around the world; urgent environmental questions. 

Besides all that, kashrut is apparently trivial and it's another example of what Diane Pinto is talking about.  Many in our Movement share British Jewry's obsession that Judaism is really only about kashrut and Sabbath observance.  And here, once again, we're still in a defensive mode.

Of course I wouldn't dream of saying this of you but I suspect that many of those of our members who haven't availed themselves of this once in a lifetime opportunity to hear my pearls of wisdom would be reflecting that they're really rather glad that the Head of the Reform Movement buys his meat from Greenspans and might mention to some of their orthodox friends that not only does Rabbi Bayfield keep kosher but so do his three children.  My hunch is that they would be marginally less enthusiastic about it being known that we eat non-kosher meat out (though not, you will have gathered, whale, dolphin or puffin - and certainly not rotten shark).  They'll probably not be interested in the rationale nor even in noticing that such a take on kashrut can be effectively transmitted.

And none of us - or very few of us - want seriously to engage with the cutting edge environmental and ethical issues that our puffin discussion actually raises - about the relationship between human beings and animals, about the ethics and economics of food production, about kashrut becoming a symbolic response by Judaism to the burning or perhaps melting issues of our day.

I understand our fears for the future and our desire to remain authentic, not to wander too far from our threatened and diminishing people.  But maybe we're at our most authentic, most likely to contribute to the survival of British Jewry if we do face up to the huge challenges of our time, the cutting edge ethical challenges about which society at large is so thirsty for guidance.  If you get a moment to reflect over the High Holydays, you could do worse than ask yourself:  should I eat puffin?  I do hope you all enjoy your Erev Rosh Hashanah meal.  B'teyavon.

Rabbi Tony Bayfield

_{EREV ROSH HASHANAH 5767
FRIDAY 22ND SEPTEMBER 2006}

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written by a guest , October 02, 2006

Isn't this a lot of huffin' and PUFFIN' about nuffin?' Sorry, joke. Point well made. Reform must continue to stand up for itself,which under Rabbi Bayfield's leadership it is doing expertly.