The Movement for Reform Judaism

I wonder whether anyone knows what this is?.... It’s a finial.  But not just any old finial.  It’s one of a pair I stole from the staircase at Finnart House.  Like all petty thieves, I’ve a glib rationalisation for my crime.   I’ve always felt that the Finnart House Trustees were less than generous to the North West Surrey Synagogue when they sold our Approved School, our incubator over our heads.  So I nicked them before the demolition gang moved in. 

It’s half a lifetime ago and I’ve never had the kind of memory necessary for autobiographies. My wife, Linda held the linear, narrative memory.  She remembered the sequence, the story of our lives.  My memory has erased a frightening amount, for reasons that I don’t understand at all.  But certain random episodes assert themselves repeatedly.  Often with a considerable, visual dimension. 

It was a Friday evening in the summer.  I remember saying to Linda that if she didn’t mind I’d pop down to Finnart House early, I fancied a stroll and a bit of space.  She could come on later after clearing up from dinner and putting Lucy and Daniel to bed.  Typically thoughtful of me.  I’m standing in the entrance hall of Finnart House, a matter of feet from the finials.  The old building is completely deserted. 

I experience…. reassurance.  The best I can manage is an arm round my shoulder but that’s too tangible and explicit. 

It is, of course, completely explicable, quite open to rational explanation.  I read law at Cambridge.  I had every intention of becoming a lawyer.  Judging by Daniel, I would have been a competent lawyer.  I would have enjoyed it.  And it would have flowed logically from my family biography and sociology.  It’s what my parents wanted and expected.  A year into Cambridge, I changed tack and decided to be an academic lawyer.  I’m less sure that I would have enjoyed it but it would have fitted at least as well with the aspirations of a third and fourth generation British Jewish family.  But that too, I rejected and chose the rabbinate. 

Now, given that unusual and psychologically complex decision, it makes complete sense for a young man, up to his neck in the mundane realities of full-time Jewish life, to want, to invent a religious experience.  Anyway, I’d been taught and influenced by one of the religious geniuses – or charlatans – of our time, Rabbi Lionel Blue.  It makes perfect sense for my subconscious to have constructed a kind of sub-Blue experience.  It was clearly the product of the pressure of needing to justify my off the wall choice of career.  And, come to think of it, it had antecedents.  I had form. 

I’ve no idea how long I stood there that early, warm Friday evening in the hallway of Finnart House.  Probably only seconds.  I walked to the end of the hallway and opened the heavy door into the little room that had been kitted out as a synagogue.  I can still see it. 

I stood on the threshold of the room, in the doorway and I could feel the prayers of my precious little congregation.  They weren’t bad prayers, trapped there as in a hasidic story that doesn’t work for me, waiting for a boy with a whistle.  They were something tangible and positive and happy.  I was moved to tears of love. 

More self-delusion.  More wish-fulfilment.  More vacuous bolstering of faith to ward off past incarnations of Richard Dawkins.

But She won’t go away and I drop into a pattern.  I’m aware, despite myself, of something elusive, uncontainable and uncatchable.  Then I backtrack because it reminds me of all those stupid, gullible programmes about ghosts that seem to frequent the obscure channels that you flick through in search of something watchable when it’s too late to phone anyone and too early to fall asleep.  Programmes filmed in the dark with special cameras so that peoples’ eyes look sinister.  I wheel out the twin battery of Feuerbach - religion is just projection and Freud – religion is neurosis.  But then He laughs ironically.  Or kicks me hard where it hurts.  Or even but rarely puts Her arm around my shoulder.