The Movement for Reform Judaism

There has been a globalisation of that culture which is variously defined as enlightenment, post-enlightenment, western, post-Christian, modern, post-modern, secular.  All of the terms refer to a varied, evolving way of understanding human existence and living life which all three faiths regard with ambiguity.  Unsurprisingly since this modern culture has challenged us in many ways, shaking the very foundations of our former beliefs and questioning long cherished values.  But it’s a culture that is not foreign to any of our faiths.  It’s one to which we have each contributed.  Furthermore, it has enabled us to recognise – revealed to us – some very important truths.

First, it should have forced us to look at our respective scriptures with new eyes.  It is clear that in the Torah, in the New Testament and in the Koran there are ‘dark passages’, passages in which human beings are present but God is not.  Passages which, however we interpret them, are dangerous, open to misuse and sometimes deeply offensive to our siblings. Second, we have been forced to recognise something of the nature of truth.  It has become apparent that the ultimate hubris is to assume that God would entrust the whole of God’s truth to any one group of people.  Equally, it is total folly to suppose that any one group of people could grasp more than a fragmentary notion of God.  The light of modernity makes it glaringly obvious that Truth belongs to God alone and fragments of truth are grasped and encountered in different experiences, at different times, by different groups.

Third, and I direct this particularly at Judaism, we’ve played with fire by playing with the notion of favouritism.  Ironically, the favouritism theme in the Hebrew bible is expressed through a favouring of the younger son over the older son, the youngest sibling over the older sibling.  God seems to take delight in ironies but of one thing we can be absolutely certain:  The new paradigm teaches us that God does not have favourites.  God may single out for particular purposes, God may choose peoples for different tasks but the Parent of all humanity doesn’t make the mistake that is totally unacceptable, even in human parents, of having favourites.

The fourth and, for these purposes, final revelation of modernity is perhaps the most important of them all. 

I find the narrative of Jacob and Esau both moving and disturbing.  Jacob behaves extraordinarily badly towards Esau (something made doubly disturbing by the rabbinic tradition of identifying Esau with the non-Jew, with the Christian, and then justifying Jacob’s inexcusable behaviour).  After 20 years apart the two brothers are about to meet.  Jacob wrestles with the mysterious being at the ford Jabbok and then crosses over to encounter his estranged twin.  They meet.  They embrace and kiss.  Some Rabbinic commentators are so sceptical that, with a play on similar words, they have Esau bite rather than kiss Jacob. But the two do appear to be reconciled and all seems good and peaceful before they go their separate ways again.

For me, the most thought-provoking and demanding aspect of the story is the ‘reconciliation’.  I put quotation marks around reconciliation to point out that it is not, in fact, reconciliation in the fullest sense.  Why?  Because soon after, they go their separate ways never, according to the Bible, to meet again.

That was possible in the Biblical world, in a former paradigm.  In our globalised world Jews, Christians and Muslims can no longer live in geographical isolation from each other.  That has long been a reality to some extent but, with the 20th century as the century of the refugee and the 21st century as the century of mass population movements in search of improved economic conditions and security, the previously Christian – or post-Christian – west has acquired a very significant Muslim presence.

ENDNOTES

12    Genesis Ch 324 – 3311.
13    The play on similar Hebrew verbs is indicated in the Masoretic text by diacritical dots over the Hebrew word ‘kissed him’. Gen 334.
14    Except to bury their father.  See Gen 33 v v12.  And Ch 36 v v6-8.
15    The formulation of the British rabbi Hugo Gryn.