The Movement for Reform Judaism

I’ve known Rabbi Jackie Tabick and Reverend Marcus Braybrooke for a very long time.  I’ve known Jackie since she was a little girl and I wasn’t much older and we both sat at the feet of an extraordinary rabbi called Dow Marmur – of whom more, as they say, anon.  Marcus and I are both graduates of the same unlikely Cambridge College but we didn’t know each other then because he’s much, much older than me.  But we did meet very early on in my interfaith dialogue career – in fact Marcus was my inspiration and mentor who taught me the importance of a rigorous but open-hearted and empathetic theology of interfaith relations.

Over all the years, I can’t remember us having a single disagreement.

Until this year’s Younghusband lecture.  Where a disagreement so far-reaching as to shake the very foundations of the interfaith world shattered our harmony.  We couldn’t agree on the title.  I am joking but I want to tell you the story of the title and extrapolate from it in a totally unfair and cavalier way because it happens to suit me and this lecture.

Jackie asked me to speak.  I exhibited just the right amount of insincere diffidence before accepting with alacrity.  Rabbis and speaking are like bread and butter – we like lots of bread and lots of butter.  I suggested that, since this is the 60th anniversary of the re-establishment of the State of Israel, I should talk about Israel.  Jackie wasn’t sure.  Marcus sounded sceptical.  Characteristically, I didn’t listen and pushed ahead.  I wrote a long, pseudo-academic paper for an obscure German theological journal, sent Marcus a copy and said:  ‘This is what I want to talk about’.  Marcus said, 'OK’.  Jackie said, ‘OK, now how about a title’.  I suggested ‘Israel at 60, is it a happy birthday?’ and they said, ‘No way’.  More politely, of course, but that’s what they meant.  I offered some facetious titles.  Marcus didn’t think they were very funny.  We ended up with ‘The Delusion of Favouritism: a dialogue about how to balance commitment in faith with openness of heart’.

It’s a very, very nice title.  But it’s not what I thought my obscure German paper was about and I don’t think it’s what I’m going to talk about.  But the reluctance over Israel is interesting – and we’ll get on to my outrageous extrapolation in just a moment.

Jewish-Christian dialogue in this country has been dominated, since the days of James Parkes, by anti-Semitism and the Holocaust.  No surprise there.  Jews have spent the last half century seeking to pin the blame for the Shoah on Christianity.  We’ve taken every opportunity to seize Christians by the throat, shake them and say: “Do you take full responsibility for the suffering of the Jews of Europe for more than 1,000 years?  What are you going to do about your part in the murder of not only six million Jews but also of their never-to-be-born children and children’s children and our future?  Do you acknowledge your sins?  Do you repent?  What are you going to do to relieve us of our extraordinary pain and burning anger?”

Now, since I am no longer a young husband but an old widower with nothing much to lose, I have to say to the Christians present, that annoying though neurotic Jews maddened by pain and obsessed with survival are, it’s not totally unreasonable; the pain is more intense than you can ever imagine and the anger won’t go away.  A few weeks ago I was in Vienna at a gathering of rabbis and lay leaders from European Progressive Jewish congregations.  The Shoah is not over and done with.  The survivors and the children of survivors and the grandchildren of survivors are deeply damaged, still struggling, still living under the shadow of the Holocaust.  In many, many places, Judaism isn’t going to survive, despite the flickering of new life.

But God – the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah; Christ; Allah – works in mysterious ways.  She really does.