The Movement for Reform Judaism

Let me make a couple of points very briefly because they’re points I’ve made elsewhere at considerable length and I want to give you the illusion that I’ve actually taken this lecture seriously and not just re-hashed my slender volume of wit and wisdom.

First, in recent years it has become the convention to refer to Judaism, Christianity and Islam as the three Abrahamic faiths.  There are those who have reservations about the term but what it signals, which is undeniable, is that there is a unique relationship between Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  That isn’t to belittle or disparage other faiths in any way but simply to point to the fact that Christianity emerged from Judaism, that we share the Hebrew bible, that Jesus was a Jew and it was Jews who first experienced the revelation of Christianity.  Islam emerged in an area where there were both Jewish and Christian tribes, the Koran draws extensively from material from the Hebrew bible and to a lesser degree from the New Testament.  All three religions are monotheistic.  All three speak of God as Creator.  All three demand ethical behaviour.

Twenty years ago the American scholar Alan Segal described Judaism and Christianity as siblings and I’ve frequently described Judaism, Christianity and Islam as three siblings.  There are those who are hesitant about the metaphor – I appreciate Alan Race’s reservations – but I repeat again what I said in my Younghusband lecture of six years ago, Judaism, Christianity and Islam constitute the  most dysfunctional family in the world.  We are doing everything that we can to destroy the good name of religion.  It’s no wonder that secular fundamentalists are gaining ground wherever you go because religious fundamentalists, Islamic fundamentalists, Christian fundamentalists and Jewish fundamentalists are traducing, denying, destroying the values for which the three Abrahamic faiths, along with other faiths, actually stand for.  Not for them dialogue or openness of heart.

As a consequence they’re ignoring the revelation of the present, denying the imperatives of the new paradigm.

Many years ago, Marcus and I were members of a Christian-Jewish dialogue group.  The group worked together for a decade and then produced a book, ‘Dialogue With A Difference’. The last chapter of the book was written by an Orthodox Rabbi, Norman Solomon. Solomon observed that the members of the group had come together on the pretext of participating in a bilateral dialogue, of Jews and Christians. But, he went on:

‘The first circumstance that might have alerted us to the presence of an invisible guest was that we were all speaking English, our common native tongue. Now, English is not the language in which either Judaism or Christianity was formed, and the group was sufficiently aware and expert that we scurried back to our Hebrew and Greek texts whenever some sensitive scriptural text was cited.  But if we were talking and thinking in English, then we were mediating our Hebrew and Greek traditions through another culture. It was this shared culture that made the dialogue possible. But it did not – could not – provide a neutral medium. Rather, it was the ‘third presence’ in the dialogue, a presence whose profound influence was so all-pervasive that it was in danger of not being noticed. Three cultures – even three civilizations – met. A Christian civilization, a Jewish civilization, and the third civilization, in which all of us Jews and Christians live and find our identity, and which was mediated through the English language. The third was the civilization of modernity, or of enlightenment’.

When I first read those words of Norman Solomon, I was instantly stirred by the observation.  Today, I realise the point he makes is profound in the extreme.  Furthermore, it applies not just to Jews and Christians but to all three siblings.  We all live within the context of modernity and that identifies the paradigm shift which affects us, not only in our individuality but in our family relationships as well.

ENDNOTES

9    Alan F Segal.  Rebecca’s Children, Harvard UP, 1986.
10    Dialogue With a Difference, eds Bayfield and Braybrooke, SCM, London, 1992.
11    op cit pp.147-8.