The Movement for Reform Judaism

2nd 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

An apology.  Here we are, celebrating the birthday of the world, ha'yom harat olam, on the first day of the year 5767 and I've blown it.  Not the 5767 birthday candles; not the shofar but the tradition that I always begin with my summer holiday.  I preached my holiday sermon last night.  It was called ‘May we eat puffin?' - which, along with whale meat, dolphin and guillemot figured on the menus of Reykjavik restaurants.

I had nine days with my son Daniel and my daughter-in-law-to-be Lisa driving around a country the area of England with a population the size of the British Jewish community, less than 300,000.  We had a brilliant time though I ought to acknowledge that Lisa was constantly at work on her Blackberry and we had reason to say very uncomplimentary things about American law firms and the excellence of network coverage in Iceland. 

I was also not entirely carefree.  I was worrying about an assignment that I'd taken on - giving a lecture on religion and science.  The lecture - three weeks ago - was to the heads of department, lecturers and post-graduate research scientists of the Randall Division of King's College London.  They turned out to be an interdisciplinary group - ninety-five of them - mathematicians, physicists and biologists working in the area of cell and molecular biophysics out of a campus by Guy's Hospital.

It's interesting that I was so anxious.  Some of it is a reflection of my neuroticism - I'm always intimidated by academic groups.  But my anxiety predominantly reflected how very little work I've done in the area of science and religion in the last thirty years.  And I know why.  First, it takes a lot of effort to understand a language that I ran away from after O Levels.  But, much more importantly, I've lived with the notion that science undermines religion, discredits religion and I didn't want to go there.  I wanted to continue to duck the challenge.

I've a friend called John Bowden.  Until a couple of years ago John - who's an ordained Anglican priest and a theologian in his own right - ran SCM Press, the leading Christian publishing house in this country.  John's read everything and translated most of it from German, Dutch and Italian.  I asked him for a reading list.  He smiled and said: ‘I'm just in the process of translating Hans Küng's latest book on religion and science.  Would you like me to send it to you on disk?'  Küng, I should add, is probably the greatest living theologian of any faith, a radical Catholic and John is his ‘official' translator.  I couldn't believe my luck and when the manuscript turned out to be 200 pages rather than Küng's usual 700, I knew that the God whom science has disproved was smiling on me.

The manuscript sat in my study, waiting for my return from Iceland.  This morning, I'm not going to talk about the lecture, its reception by the ninety women and men of King's College London's Randall Division and whether the God who has been prompting me these last few decades survived the experience.  That's for Yom Kippur.  It will be on the website along with the challenge of the puffin for anyone who's interested. 

But I do want to tell you a little bit about the reading I did.

As you might expect, Hans Küng begins his as-yet-to-be-published book with the Copernican revolution.  For the person sitting next to you, Nicolaus Copernicus, a 16^th Century Canon of the Catholic Church, deduced that the earth moves round the sun not the other way round.  His theory was confirmed and corrected about a century later by another Catholic called Kepler and not long afterwards Galileo demonstrated it by observation.  The Catholic Church went ape - we'll come on to Darwin in a moment - declared Galileo to be in error and Küng points out that the last Pope, John Paul II set up a commission to rehabilitate him and was still not able to do so wholeheartedly. 

It's pretty remarkable when you think about it.  As Küng says, all the Catholic Church had to do was to reinterpret the first chapter of Genesis.  Why should religion be shaken by the notion that we live in a heliocentric rather than a geocentric universe?  But it was.  It felt that its power base was threatened.  It felt that the scriptures were threatened. 

I wondered how the Jewish world of Galileo's time had responded.  Another bit of good fortune pointed me in the direction of an essay by Louis Jacobs, of blessed memory.  This is what Louis wrote:  "When the Ptolemaic system was compelled to yield to the Copernican, only a few Jewish diehards assisted in defence of the older view on the grounds, also behind the church's opposition to Galileo, that revealed religion depended on a geocentric universe".  Louis goes on to say that there has never been a Jewish cosmology, an official Jewish view of what the universe looks like.  Jews borrowed their cosmology and adapted it from the land in which they happened to be living.  So Jewish biblical cosmology reflects Babylonian cosmology and medieval Jewish cosmology reflects Greek cosmology as expressed in an Arabic guise.  Why?  Because, says Jacobs, Jews were preoccupied with the God of the cosmos not with the cosmos itself.  Genesis was and is about that which, in metaphorical language Ruach Elohim, hovered over the face of the deep; with what it means to say ki tov, that creation is good; with the distinction between good and evil; with the birth of humanity out of Eden into the real world with its joys and trials.  The language of Genesis, the language of the Bible, is a different language to that of science - not conflicting, at least not in the main, but complementary, at least to a significant extent.  So, when the Catholic world got its birettas in a twist over Galileo, the Jewish world didn't bat an eyelid.

A couple of hundred years later, along came Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution.  Once again, the Christian world felt itself deeply threatened and the sense of threat has not gone away.  Many of you will have heard of the so called ‘monkey trials' in the United States in the 1920s and the widespread attempt to prevent the teaching of evolution in schools.  Did you know - I didn't until I read Küng - that even today there are arguments supporting creationism against evolution in thirty-five of the fifty States of America?

What about Judaism?  Judaism found Darwin a harder challenge than Galileo.  The theory of evolution seemed to question the need for a Creator God and it would be true to say that even today, post-Watson and Crick and the discovery of DNA and the double helix, there are real questions about whether God is necessary to the process of evolution and how one interprets the notion of God as Creator. 

Nevertheless, the Jewish approach to the text - interpretive, a particular kind of language - enabled such towering figures of the orthodox Jewish world as Rav Kook, the Chief Rabbi of the Yishuv, the Jewish community of Palestine before 1948, to embrace evolution enthusiastically and see it in kabbalistic terms.

But something else was happening in the middle of the 19^th Century which was to have a profound effect on Judaism, much more profound than Galileo and even Darwin.  In Germany, Judaism was subjected to wissenschaft (which means science), Wissenschaft des Judentums, the scientific study of Jewish history and Jewish literature, the modern academic study of Judaism by modern Jewish academics.  They latched on to what was called the documentary hypothesis which argued that the Torah had not come whistling through outer space to Moses, was not ‘extra-historical' or ‘other' or ‘inerrant' (the terms favoured by Chief Rabbis Sacks and Jakobovits).  It had begun as a set of oral traditions; these had been written down; and they had then been edited or redacted with the different stories and traditions from different oral sources carefully sewn together.  The Torah was not God's word but human beings' perception of God's word.

That was a bombshell.  It split the Jewish world asunder and it still divides us today.

It's not very long ago that Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks published a book about Judaism and its relationship to other religions and felt compelled to withdraw the first edition and make changes in response to right wing Orthodox rabbinic criticism.  Although most of the changes had to do with Jewish truth claims, one of them was the withdrawal of a reference to Darwin and evolution.  Orthodox Judaism still maintains that the fossils were placed in the rocks by God during the six days of creation, 5767 years ago.  No, I don't know how so many liberally educated people can live with that but they do. 

But now turn it around.  Back in the 1920s a young Orthodox rabbi resigned from his pulpit in New York because he could no longer say:  V'zot haTorah asher sum Moshe lifnei b'nei Yisrael, this is the self-same Torah which Moses put before the children of Israel at Sinai.  The rabbi was Mordechai Kaplan and he became the founder of Reconstructionism, American Jewry's non-theistic Judaism. 

We still sing v'zot haTorah every Shabbat morning.  I'm not saying that we shouldn't, but I do wonder what we mean by it and what people think we mean by it.  Hayom harat olam, today is the birthday of the world.  Once again, what do we mean?  Yes, Judaism, unlike other religions, counts not from the life of a human-being but from the creation of the world.  Nice midrash.  Good sermon.  But how was the world created?  Is the Big Bang compatible with a belief in God?  In today's Torah reading we heard that God told Abraham explicitly that Sarah was right to expel Hagar and displace his first born son Ishmael by Isaac.   What do you think in your head and in your heart about that?  Isn't it a moral outrage, incompatible with the just God of all humanity?  What would you say to your Muslim neighbours about the treatment of their ancestor Ishmael and his mother?

A few weeks ago, I woke up early one Sunday morning, determined to get on with my reading for that Religion and Science Lecture.  In the shower I switched on the radio and heard the distinctive tones of Rabbi Jonathan Romain in a rather scrappy debate with a very defensive Christian academic.  Jonathan, in his attention-grabbing way, had written somewhere that Christians, Muslims and Jews needed to re-write their sacred Scriptures.  What Jonathan actually meant was that there are some pretty appalling passages in all of our sacred Scriptures - the Torah included.  We need to take advantage of the insight - a mere 150 years old.  To feel liberated by it.  We are not dealing with God's literal word, but with sacred documents of huge importance containing our ancestors' perception of God's words.  We now have to face up to the challenge and go beyond the traditional Jewish way of dealing with them which was to reinterpret the difficult bits.  We have to acknowledge that that which is so open to abuse and misuse in our time is no longer what we understand to be the word of God.  The Christian academic phaffed indignantly and ducked Jonathan Romain's perceptive challenge.

One of the great features of this year is the 50^th Anniversary of the foundation of the Leo Baeck College and the most amazing rabbinic gathering back in July.  I listened to a lecture, a very hard-hitting lecture by an American academic now living and teaching in Paris called Diane Pinto  To put it baldly, she argued that European Jewry  is still influenced and damaged by the Shoah.  We still see ourselves as victims and are unable to move beyond our fearful, defended, self-focused perception of the world.  Though, she said, this is very understandable, it prevents us from playing the role that the world desperately needs us to play in the building of a new European society and it stops us engaging with the intellectual and political issues out there which, however frightening, living Judaism has to deal with.

She had in mind primarily issues of immigration, multi-culturalism, creating a tolerant, democratic, pan-European society but she could equally have added the issues raised by science and by the scientific study of Judaism - the relationship between us, the text and God.

The British Jewish community - as you will have heard me say many times - is a very conservative community, obsessed by authenticity, clinging for the reasons suggested by Diane Pinto to the world of the sages who compelled Jonathan Sacks to withdraw his book.  If we are to lead the British Jewish community forward, we have to be very careful not to frighten the horses or send them terrified further back into their intellectual ghettoes.  But it seems to me that sooner or later - for their good and for ours - we need to face-up to the big issues - of whether or not kashrut can help us address the great environmental issues of our time; of how we deal with texts which are religiously and morally repugnant; and whether or not cosmology, quantum physics, the double helix and brain cell research have really rendered God and religion dead and buried.

On this, the birthday of the world, I wish us all courage and faith and I'll end with this:  the fat lady hasn't even started singing and she never will.

Rabbi Tony Bayfield

Rosh Hashanah 5767
SATURDAY 23RD SEPTEMBER 2006

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