The Movement for Reform Judaism

Which brings me to the aforementioned Rabbi Dow Marmur at whose feet Jackie and I sat as young teenagers and still do sit – though metaphorically – since he now divides his time between Jerusalem and Toronto.  Not so long ago Marmur published his autobiography which is entitled ‘Six Lives ’.  I told him that he would sell many more copies if he changed one letter of the title; but he’s a man who’s always maintained standards!  Why six lives?  Because he was born in Poland, fled before the advancing Nazis when he was four and ended up in Uzbekistan.  The family later trekked to Sweden where he was educated.  He came to Britain, studied at the Leo Baeck College when it was but a rented classroom at West London Synagogue and served here for more than twenty years.  Then he was head-hunted by a congregation in Toronto with the unlikely name of The Holy Blossom Temple and, a few years ago, retired to Jerusalem.  Poland, Uzbekistan, Sweden, England, Canada and Israel – six lives.   Which is not just amazing but symbolic, emblematic, providing a perspective on Jewish life itself over the last seventy years. 

For me the perspective is at its most revealing in a book that he published back in 1991 called ‘The Star of Return ’. The title consciously reflects Franz Rosenzweig’s great work ‘The Star of Redemption ’ and, like Rosenzweig, Marmur has a penchant for triangles as a device with which to order his theology, ‘triangles’ being the two triangles which make up the Star of David.  Rosenzweig has as the points of his first star God; the universe; and mankind (with creation; renewal; and redemption as the points of the second star). Marmur, writing in the context of the renewal of the State of Israel, has as the points of his first star God; the Jewish people; and Israel with hope for a better life; the challenge of power; and righteousness in relationship to the Arab population as the second triangle.

Marmur argues, drawing on the work of Thomas Kuhn and Marilyn Ferguson , that a paradigm shift has taken place.  The Shoah represented the last episode of an old paradigm of Jewish homelessness and powerlessness.  The establishment of the state of Israel represents the beginning of a new paradigm.  Judaism, argues Marmur, has a geography as well as a history.  He follows the American Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, (a member of the United Church of Christ – like Barack Obama).  Brueggeman writes: ‘Few things have contributed more to our wrong understandings of theology than our false spiritual interpretation of Scripture which has made landlessness a virtue instead of a condition for receiving land’. Marmur moves away from Rosenzweig’s dominant universalism to re-assert a balancing particularism expressed in land, Israel. He doesn’t deny Jewish universalism but says: ‘By returning to the old, pre-exilic pattern of Jewish existence the new paradigm is discovered in the old; what had been forgotten has been brought back to our consciousness’. He continues: ‘The Jewish covenant is rooted not solely in Jewish time but in Jewish place as well, a place which has historical meanings where things which happened are remembered and which provides continuity and identity across the generations’.

There’s an irony here.  Marmur has made a profound contribution to Jewish self-understanding in seeing so clearly the paradigm shift which the return, the re-establishment of Israel signifies.  Jewish existence is not the same as it was before 1948.  Yet Marmur, more at the time of the writing of ‘The Star of Return’, less in recent years, downplays the importance of interfaith dialogue.  Understandably.  He was focused on the rebuilding of Jewish life in response to the catastrophe he witnessed as a child and in the light of an extraordinary new reality which restored the centrality of land to Judaism after 2000 years.  But, and here’s the irony, the paradigm shift has not been a shift in Jewish life alone. A paradigm shift has taken place in Jewish, Christian and Muslim relations.

That’s what I meant when I said that God moves in mysterious ways.  God – though profoundly differently from the gods in King Lear – toys with us, challenges us, moves the agenda on in perplexing ways.  Which is not to say that the Shoah is not still with us – affecting my psyche, my narrow perceptions, the neurotic lenses through which I view the world and life itself – but the establishment or re-establishment of the State of Israel has shifted the agenda paradigmatically.  Though it makes dialogue even more difficult, it’s the challenge to which not just Judaism, but Judaism, Christianity and Islam must all respond or die.

ENDNOTES
1    Dow Marmur, Six Lives, Key Porter Books, Toronto, 2004.   
2    Dow Marmur, The Star of Return, Greenwood, New York, 1991.
3    Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, Routledge, 1971.
4    Thomas S Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1970.
5    Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, Granada, London, 1982.
6    Walter Brueggemann, The Land, Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1982, p.193.
7    Marmur op cit p.47.
8    ibid.