The Movement for Reform Judaism

Rabbi Tony Bayfield

It was about three years ago and the leadership of the Reform Movement was demanding a higher profile. ‘Get yourself into the newspapers more, Tony,’ they said. ‘”We want you to start getting more coverage’. So I had a word. ‘I think I ought to start writing regularly for one of the dailies,’ I said to Him. ‘Fine,’ She said. ‘Which one do you fancy?’ ‘The Times, of course,’ I replied. ‘And what subjects are you going to treat the nation to?’ He said. I thought about that for a few moments and then replied: ‘Social justice – you know, Tikkun olam; prejudice and anti-Semitism; soccer’. ‘No chance,’ was the Magisterial reply. ‘They’ve already got Sacks to do the national moral values stuff; Michael Gove is big on prejudice and anti-Semitism (always better to have a non-Jew do that, especially a future Tory MP); and Danny Finkelstein does the football – isn’t he a member of Hendon Reform?’

‘Ok’ I said, ‘You tell me for whom I should write?’ ‘The Guardian,’ the Almighty replied. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘that sounds interesting. Social policy, environmental issues, perhaps an assessment of slender Glenda – I live in Hampstead. Well Hampstead Garden Suburb’. ‘Maybe’, She said, ‘but to be brutally honest it’s Israel and Zionism you need to defend to Guardian readers. Give Jonathan Freedland a bit of a hand’. ‘Oh, thanks a bunch,’ I said, ‘Have you got any other bright ideas?’ ‘Well you could offer them a positive appraisal of George Galloway. They’d take that’.

Defend Israel and Zionism in The Guardian – you see what I mean by perverse, sorry – challenging, difficult.

Apprehensively, I toddled off to meet the Editor, Alan Rusbridger and offered myself as the reasonable, liberal Jewish view on the left. I ended up getting to write fairly regularly but the funny thing is that whatever I suggest – a lament for the passing of the old Jewish socialist tradition of Manny Shinwell and Ian Mikardo, a rant about the AUT – they almost always go for Israel. So it was that a few weeks back I submitted a piece defending a contemporary Zionism, arguing that Jews should be allowed to be themselves, a people with a geography as well as a history.

I was thinking about this attachment to land, the Promised Land, as Hannah read the 2nd Scroll. ‘A land flowing with milk and honey’. ‘A land of hills and valleys, soaking up its water from the rains of heaven’. ‘A land of wheat and barley, of vines, figs and pomegranates; a land of olive trees and honey; a land where you may eat food without stint, where you will lack nothing; a land whose very rocks are iron and from whose hills you can mine copper’. Oh come on. If we’d taken that description seriously, we wouldn’t exactly have needed a top QC to sue Him for misrepresentation. The Promised Land’s not exactly Cape Town, not even Devon.

But it’s a land that we have struggled with and called ours for more than 3,000 years. It’s the place where so many of the formative ideas of Judaism evolved, which moulded the lives and language of the founders of one of the great faiths of the world, a place that we have fought for against overwhelming imperial odds, a place that Jews have clung on to against all adversity, returned to physically whenever they could and focused on in our prayers and poetry in every generation down the ages.

‘Yes’, I said to my fellow Guardian readers, ‘traditional Zionism owed much to 19th century European life and thought. It was fuelled by persecution, by an enduring and increasingly violent refusal to allow Jews to be. It also reflected 19th century nationalism. It was even marked by the fingerprints of colonialism…. But that isn’t the whole story’.

‘Judaism is a religion with a geography as well as a history’. This particular piece of land – milk and honey or no milk and honey; valleys bathed in the rain of heaven or parched dry – has always formed part of Judaism. You can’t escape it in the Bible. You can’t avoid it in Jewish prayer books. Judaism has always been about both a people in a land as well as a people in Diaspora. That’s how Judaism is. Religions are not all the same. Setting them out as identical chapters with identical headings in a text book fuels the illusion. A religion of fourteen million adherents, 50% of whom will live in Israel by 2020 and religions of 1.6 or 1.2 billion – Christianity and Islam – which are hell bent on missionising the third world are very different. ‘What we ask is that you accept us on our terms and do not simply impose your view of religion – or anti-religion – on us. It is very important to us to be allowed to be ourselves’.

One of the down sides of writing for national newspapers today is that they insist on giving your email address. You can’t just send off your article, wait for it to be published and then bask in your parent’s objective assessment of it as brilliant. But, if you’re lucky, at least you get so many emails that you can’t possibly reply to them and won’t have time to read all the painful demolitions of your carefully crafted words.

But two of my, whatever the reverse is of, fan club struck me as particularly interesting. One was a Palestinian. ‘Tony’, he began, “first I wish to congratulate you on your article in The Guardian entitled ‘We Need a New Kind of Zionism”. He went on: “You mention some very good points and one outstanding one is that Zionism should change. Indeed you are correct in making this assertion and I applaud you for your honesty. However, other than that point, I would say that the article is poor and hypocritical in its message. You fail to understand many things and as a Rabbi, you should be disappointed in your effort.” He went on to dismiss Zionism as just “land grabbing and theft” and he concluded: “When writing and putting your reputation on the line, always try your best to tell the truth. Why do you defend Zionism? Get rid of it…. It is not attached to your religion. Jews should refer back to the Torah for true guidance. I am sure that whatever kind of God you believe in, he will not like the idea of a racist and tyrannical ideology”.

Actually, I’m not angry or mystified at such an attack from a Palestinian. Palestinians have suffered a great deal and not just, not even predominantly, at the hands of Jews. But what disturbed me was, beneath the anger, the denial that Judaism and attachment to land are connected. ‘That isn’t what the Torah teaches, it isn’t part of Judaism’ – that’s what he said. The solution he offered to one of the most intractable moral and political problems of our day is to deny us, the Jews, the right to be ourselves and to hold core beliefs that we have held for more than 3,000 years.

Less understandable was an email from a Christian gentleman from Surrey. ‘Good article’, he wrote, ‘but wrong’. ‘Religions are only superficially different. The essence of all religions is the same. All religions are about getting closer to God’. You, Rabbi Bayfield, “are asserting that Judaism is merely a cultural thing and the culture demands a slice of land to keep itself going. If we applied the same logic to say Druidism, then the Welsh could lay claim to the whole of England”. [I thought Michael Howard had]. “In fact”, my correspondent wrote, “the followers of Judaism would find it easier to get closer to God if they realised that any location will do. If one believes that becoming closer to God requires being in a special place then you end up focused on externalities. We have to regard the claims of any religion to have special rights over a particular piece of land in the same way as we would regard someone who woke up one morning and decided to start a new religion based around owning the whole of Surrey”.

Once again, Jews may not be as Jews are and have always been. They may only be as I am prepared to permit them to be.

A little story. Judah Halevi was one of the great Jewish figures of the middle ages. Born in Spain he was a philosopher and poet. The whole of his life he yearned for Zion. He lived, in his own words, in the West but his heart was in the East. Finally, in his late fifties, he set off for Eretz Yisrael. We know he made it as far as Egypt – a colossal and hazardous journey at the time. Then legend takes over and legend has it that he actually reached Jerusalem and died, kissing the stones and reciting a poem of yearning for Zion, trampled underfoot by an Arab horseman. What is puzzling about the legend is that, although Islam had long since launched itself from the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and carved out a huge empire, at the time of Judah Halevi’s death the Islamic Empire had temporarily lost control of Israel, Judea, Palestine, the Holy Land to the crusaders of Western Europe who had established their own kingdom there.

What is it, this incredulity, this denial that a faith may have a geography as well as a history?

Faiths must be true to themselves and their essential identity and, even if attachment to land were uniquely Jewish, it would be our right.

Does that mean that faiths may believe whatever they like and, more importantly, do whatever they like? The answer is emphatically no. Faiths are, today, obliged to enter into a contract with the modern world. That contract demands that we live relationally. We may no longer say: ‘Here I am in my self-confident and self-sufficient glory’. We are obliged to say: ‘Here I am in my partiality, amongst others’. We are obliged to be self-critical, to respect, to compromise, to relate, to cooperate for the good of humanity and the world. That is why I enshrined at the heart of my notion of Zionism for the 21st century the pursuit of peace, the centrality of democracy and social justice for all. We must be ourselves but we must live in relationship with others. That is just one of the ways in which God’s will for all of us is complex and challenging.

The duty to be oneself yet live with sensitivity to others; to be true to oneself yet to relate with genuine respect for difference shines through today – the perfect motif for an Emanuel-Langsford Bat Mitzvah. I say Emanuel-Langsford rather than the other way round, not to show preference but because Langsford Emanuel sounds like a West Indian fast bowler and, whilst that would have been a compliment ten years ago, it no longer is.

I’ve worked with Paul within the Reform Jewish world for a long time and one of the many things that I’ve always admired about him is that he is utterly clear about who he is and what he stands for. And at the heart of that identity is his Jewishness and his passionate Zionist commitment. He and Sarah have so clearly passed that on to you Hannah. Watching you, listening to you, reflecting on your d’var Torah it is absolutely clear that you know who you are and will always be true to who you are whatever the challenges, difficulties and even perversity you may have to face.

Jews have always presented the world with uncomfortable claim and assertion. That Judaism has a geography as well as a history is one of the more provocative challenges that She will not let us evade. Do you suppose that is why one of the most famous descriptions of God in the Psalms is ‘Shomer Yisrael’, the Guardian of Israel?

Rabbi Tony Bayfield

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