The Movement for Reform Judaism

I’ve been working quite intensively this year on a 2020 Vision for the Reform Movement. It’s a big project and I decided from the outset that I needed a work consultant.

Since Julian Levy has now retired, I realised that I’d have to make do with second best and I’ve been working with a man called Philip Boxer. Philip is fascinating because, not only does he have the conventional training and background of a management consultant but, he is also psychoanalytically trained, a disciple of the French analyst Lacan.

Lacan is totally and completely incomprehensible even by the standards of psychoanalysts but he has an extraordinary affect on Philip and is probably even responsible for the title of this lecture.

As part of what is termed ‘reflexive consultation’, I keep an electronic journal and Philip responds with e-boxes in the manner of a state-of-the-art Management consultant. He reveals his analyst's training by providing e-boxes which unerringly pick up on the things that I thought least important and makes a real meal if I attempt a throw-away line. Months ago, I ventured a little joke and ended a paragraph in my weekly journal with the line ‘What’s it all about, Alfie?’. Within five minutes, Philip had emailed me the full text of the song!

INTRODUCING LISA — AND ALFIE
It’s at this point that I want to introduce you to my son’s girlfriend, whose grandfather was a survivor of Terezin and Auschwitz, a Jew who went back to Prague after the war and became Czech television’s Barry Norman, full of arcane knowledge about film that Lisa has clearly inherited. I mentioned the song episode over the Friday night table and Lisa responded immediately: “Alfie, a 1966 film, based on Bill Naughton’s stage play, starring Michael Caine as an amoral exploiter of women who meanders meaninglessly through life. ‘What’s it all about, Alfie?’, a number one hit, sung by Cilla Black, which only featured in the credits of the film”.

And that was months before the release of the appalling remake, sanitised, I gather from Belinda, in Manchester masquerading as New York. In any event, the remake is a total cop out.

At which point you might well be asking two questions. First, what’s all this to do with the 2020 Vision? And, more pointedly, what’s all this to do with human rights which is what Bayfield is supposed to be talking about? Let me deal with the first question briefly and the second question will then become the lecture.

WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT? WHAT’S IT ALL FOR?
The 2020 Vision is of a Reform Movement which focuses on individuals and addresses their Jewish needs so insightfully and effectively that we become the mainstream of the community in a generation. Not out of empty political ambition but because we touch people in a way that they haven’t been touched Jewishly before.

The assumption is that somewhere beneath the persistent sense of Jewish identity lies an itch, a maggot, a gnawing, persistent unease which has to do with the quest for meaning and purpose. Religion can, perhaps, exist for a while on a diet of ethnicity and the warmth of belonging but, if it’s to endure, those valuable, reassuring qualities — peoplehood and belonging — have also to serve as a framework within which to meet the challenges that most people cannot avoid at some point in their life — What’s it all about, Almighty? What’s it all for, Almighty?

It’s at this point that the lecture could go in one of two directions. It could address ‘what’s it all about’ in the sense of what’s the meaning of life, why is life as it is, so enigmatic and challenging, so full of pain and apparent injustice? That’s certainly one of the key questions that religion needs to address and I’m by no means sure how effectively it is addressed in Reform synagogues and Reform Judaism — if at all — but that’s another lecture.

Alternatively, it could — and will — address ‘what’s it all about?’ in the sense of what’s life for, how should life be lived, what are the values by which we respond to the inescapable fact of our existence?

Which takes us back to 1966 and dear old Cilla splitting our skulls with that remorseless, penetrating voice of hers. Let me read you the words that Philip Boxer found on the net — at least I assume that’s where he found them, maybe Lacan is into 1960s Liverpool pop — and sent me in an e-box, in response to what I really did think was just a throw-away line!

What’s it all about, Alfie?
Is it just for the moment we live?
What’s it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?
Are we meant to take more than we give
or are we meant to be kind?
And if only fools are kind, Alfie,
then I guess it’s wise to be cruel.
And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie,
what will you lend on an old golden rule?
As sure as I believe there’s a heaven above, Alfie,
I know there’s something much more,
something even non-believers can believe in.
I believe in love, Alfie
Without true love we just exist, Alfie.
Until you find the love you’ve missed you’re nothing, Alfie.
When you walk let your heart lead the way
and you’ll find love any day, Alfie, Alfie.

My immediate response was to sneer back at Philip that the question was a good one but the answer is much too Christian for Hampstead Garden Suburb, Didsbury or Alwoodley. Not, I should add, without some justification. It’s absolutely true that Leviticus 19:18, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’ or ‘who is like you, because I am God’ is a core verse from one of the central sidrot of the Torah. But Jews have tended not to enshrine loving and being loved as their natural response to the question, what’s it all about, what is life for?

JUDAISM: PURSUING THE GOOD
It’s always dangerous to try to sum up a tradition — which is the best part of 4,000 years old, which has flourished in most countries of the world and encompassed a huge number of people — in a simple and definitive statement. But I feel reasonably confident in saying that the main thrust of Jewish tradition has not been to focus on the self — life is for self-realisation. It has not been simply hedonistic — the important thing is to maximise pleasure. Nor has it been about the exclusive cultivation of a relationship with God — mainstream Judaism hasn’t focused on the centrality of the contemplative, the solitary or collective regime of withdrawal from society in order to pray to and praise God. All of those things have their place but I feel reasonably confident in saying that Judaism is neither love-focused, nor self-focused, nor pleasure-focused, nor contemplation-focused. It seems to me that Judaism has, at its heart, the pursuit of the good.

What’s it all about, Almighty? We have heard Her say: ‘It’s about ethics, it’s about justice, it’s about releasing sparks of goodness, it’s about the repair of the world’. And now, I hope, you can begin to see where this lecture is leading. The 2020 Vision demands that we touch people and when they ask — either implicitly or in so many words — what is life about, what are we here for, what are the values that we take with us into society? our response is to support them on a quintessentially Jewish journey. A journey that takes them into the world around, determined to pursue the good, armed with a passion for justice and a determination to engage in tikkun, repair. A journey which takes them out of exclusively parochial concerns to forge partnerships with others wherever there is suffering and injustice in the world, determined to engage in the struggle.

THE STRUGGLE
I want at this point to close in on that word ‘struggle’ — not struggle in the external sense of armed or moral struggle with negative forces around us1 but the inner struggle for meaning and purpose.

It seems to me that the task of the Reform rabbi today is to minister to the struggle. I appreciate that the verb ‘to minister’ feels pretty uncomfortable to many Jews with its overtly Christian overtones. Though I have to say that it’s the standard translation of the Hebrew root shin-resh-tav and is what the priests of old did all the time. To minister, to serve — ‘to rabbi to’ doesn’t yet exist, though maybe it will one day. The point, anyway, is not the ‘ministering to’ but the struggle — the focus of the work. In the lecture that I’m not giving, it’s the struggle amidst all the chaos and darkness of the world to find meaning. In the lecture I am giving, it’s the struggle, amidst all the barbarity and inhumanity of the world, to find values and apply them.

Let’s go one step further before we get into the specifics of mitzvot, duties and human rights.

Let’s go back to the Chapter from Torah I mentioned earlier, Leviticus Chapter 19 which is, near enough, the middle sidra of the middle book of the Torah — its centre point. It’s the chapter which contains the ‘love your neighbour’ verse but it’s the chapter which begins: “Kedoshim tihyu, you shall be holy, because I, the Eternal your God, am Holy”.

In later, rabbinic literature the term ‘holy’ acquires an important and distinctive meaning. Holy, in rabbinic thought, means set apart for a special purpose, namely God’s purpose. The k-d-sh, kadosh, holy root gives us the term hekdesh, which is something ordinary, mundane but set aside for use in the temple, a sacrificial animal for example. When we make kiddush — the same k-d-sh, holy root — on Friday night we are taking something ordinary, 25 hours out of time and setting it aside for a special purpose, the special purpose that Shabbat serves. So, ‘holy’ in rabbinic literature is a setting apart for a special purpose which renders the ordinary — an animal, a period of time — holy

But that’s already a development and it isn’t what kadosh, holy means in Leviticus. “You shall be holy because I, the Eternal your God, am holy”, says the text and then defines holiness by what follows — verse after verse after verse setting out in an extensive series of detailed snapshots the ethical, the good, the righteous, the just way to behave. You must provide for the poor, you must observe the highest standards of justice, you must treat the immigrant with equity and perform loving acts towards your neighbour and the stranger, both of whom are like you, because I am God.

Suddenly, a familiar cluster of Jewish ideas begin to form a stunning sequence. God is holy. We are created in the image of God. We have been created to, as it were, imitate God, behave like God in God’s holiness. Maimonides says that our nature is radically different from God’s so we cannot actually be like God but we can act like God2. Acting as God, imitating God, doing what is holy means pursuing the ethical, the good, the righteous, the just. And that, in Leviticus, is clearly synonymous with all of the legislation that follows.

There’s another piece of characteristic Jewish thought. When, 2800 years ago the prophet Amos wrote that thundering couplet: “Let justice run down like waters and righteousness as a never ending torrent3” he used the Hebrew word mishpat for justice and Tzedakah for righteousness and the two, for him, are synonyms. Justice is synonymous with righteousness and the word mishpat, justice can equally be translated as law. So law is justice, is righteousness, is the good, is the ethical, is holiness, is God.

There’s no sleight of hand in there, no artificial play on words, just a fundamental sequence. So, what lies between the holiness of Leviticus 19 v 1 — you shall be holy because I, the Eternal, your God am holy — and the many laws in the verses which follow, is a sequence that is assumed, implicit. Holiness equals the ethical, the ethical equals the good, the good equals the righteous, the righteous equals the just and the just is expressed in law, in halakhah, in mitzvot.

That’s the point at which we Reform Jews are obliged, as it were, to intervene.

We don’t believe that the Torah came whistling through space from God and landed in Moses’ lap without human involvement and mediation. I hope that doesn’t come as a shock to anyone here. So, I also hope it isn’t unreasonable to assume that between the verse — “You shall be holy because I, the Eternal your God, am holy” — and its articulation in subsequent verses about providing for the poor, observing high standards of justice and treating immigrants with equity, there must have been some kind of process. Some praying, some soul-searching, some thinking, some agonising, some discussion and debate by which the components of holiness were concretised into the specific details of legislation.

Exactly the same will have been true in the development of rabbinic law, halakhah. Between the biblical text calling for the stoning of adulteresses or of stubborn and rebellious sons and the rabbinic decision, effectively, to rule out the punishment there must have been a process of praying, soul searching, thinking, debate. The entire rabbinic enterprise was governed by a passion to tease out the holiness of God, the will of God and therefore the ethical, the righteous, the just and turn it into a code of practice, into law, into halakhah. But it didn’t happen by magic. It didn’t descend upon them as a revealed blueprint. They had to work at it. They had to sweat at it. They had to struggle with it.

Key word. Struggle. In this case the struggle for the purpose of life, for how to live life, for how to realise the good.

We are in much the same position as our biblical and rabbinic ancestors except that we have an enormous advantage. We have their answers, their responses, the fruits of their struggle and it’s a unique and invaluable heritage. But the process is ongoing not complete. The answers are always provisional and time-bound, and cannot be followed without thought, or debate, or more struggle. It’s our job to revisit again and again and again the middle of the sequence, that which connects God and the holy with the halakhah, the mitzvot. It’s our obligation to roll up our sleeves and wade in to the discussion about the ethical, the good, the righteous, the just and make sure that the mitzvot, the acts that we perform flow seamlessly and follow naturally, ethically.

So, the Jewish sense of purpose — what’s life for, Alfie? — has everything to do with imitating God, pursuing the ethical, the just, the righteous and struggling with what that means in the specific, concrete duties we call mitzvot.

FOR WHOSE BENEFIT?
Next question: Duties towards whom?

I need to read you three texts. It isn’t very good practice in a lecture but it isn’t a very Jewish lecture if you don’t use texts so I’ve printed the lecture out for you because I know that having them in front of you helps. Page 5. Here we go:

Text number one.

Scripture tells us that whosoever spills blood, scripture imputes it of them as if they had diminished the image of the Divine Ruler. The matter is comparable to a ruler of flesh and blood who entered a city and erected icons and images and stamped coins with the ruler’s image on them. After a time, they pushed down the icons, smashed the images and destroyed the coins, and thereby diminished the image of the ruler. Therefore whosoever spills blood Scripture imputes it to them as if they had diminished the image of the Divine Ruler, as it is written, whosoever sheds human blood ...[commits the most heinous crime]... for in the image of God are all human beings made4.

And:

A person should imitate the righteous ways of God. Just as God clothes the naked, so too must you supply clothes for the naked. Just as God visits the sick, so you must visit the sick. Just as God buries the dead, so you must bury the dead. Just as God comforts mourners, so you must comfort mourners [without religious or ethnic distinction]5.

Since:

We heal the sick of the gentiles along with the sick of the Jews, feed the poor of the gentiles along with the poor of the Jews, and we bury the dead of the gentiles and we bury the dead of the Jews for the sake of peace6.

I am sorry for the long read but I think it helps to make the case — if you ever doubted it — that the sequence God, holy, ethical, righteous, just, law, mitzvah — and purpose in life, the mission to pursue the good, to release sparks of goodness, to repair the world — applies to the whole world and not just to the Jewish world.

If you followed the last of the three texts carefully you may have picked up the rabbinic justification implicit in the phrase mipnei darkhei shalom — we do all this for the sake of creating peace in the world. For rabbinic Judaism, no higher value exists than the creation of peace throughout the world.

So the struggle becomes a double struggle. First the struggle to grasp the values and understand how to apply them in concrete situations. And secondly the struggle out there, in society, in a world in which people suffer from denial of justice, denial of righteousness, denial of their right to be treated in the image of God. The struggle for their rights. Without which peace can never be created.

ON OUR OWN OR WITH OTHERS?
A further question. With whom?

Do we seek to do it on our own or do we work with others? That’s a subject for another lecture in its own right. But let me set out my stall in a couple of sentences. There are 35,000 Reform Jews in this country. We represent 0.05% of the population. Anyone who thinks that we can tackle the ills of British society, let alone repair the world, on our own must be completely barmy. We don’t have the resources to employ one single solitary social justice coordinator, let alone tackle single-handedly the problems of poverty in Africa. There are 1.6 billion Christians and 1.2 billion Muslims in the world and 14 million Jews. We can only be a blessing to all the families of the earth by working with them and maybe, a favourite theme of mine, the pragmatic discloses the theological, the revelation of our age. Faiths are meant to work together, are meant to see themselves as existing in relationship to each other or they cannot succeed and will destroy religion and the world, probably at the same time. We have to work with others — that is the revelation of our times.

DUTY OR RIGHT?
Which brings us to an interesting difference of nuance. We Jews have traditionally expressed our notions of the ethical in terms of mitzvah, obligation, duty. It’s your duty to clothe the naked, it’s your duty to visit the sick and so on. The modern western world — if you like, the Christian or post-Christian world — has relatively recently begun to articulate the ethical in terms not of duties but of rights, human rights.

There is no doubt that there is a difference of nuance — duties and rights — but I don’t see that as problematic at all. Far from it. It brings a richness to the party which would otherwise be missing.

There is something of enormous value in the idea of the small, concrete duty; the insistence that though you aren’t obliged to finish the work, neither may you desist from making a start; the very concept of mending, of repairing. Over against the more overtly messianic vision of towering, universal human rights which must be enthroned everywhere and immediately. It actually makes for a creative partnership.

Let me throw in another distinctive Jewish contribution along with the little concrete duties and along with the obligation to make a start even if you can’t be consistent and complete everything everywhere — lo alekha ham’lakhah ligmor 7 — and along with the patch and mend inference from tikkun, repair. Deuteronomy contains a famous exhortation: Justice, justice shall you pursue, tzedek, tzedek tirdof.8 A classic commentary asks why the repetition? Why tzedek, tzedek? And it answers: the text repeats the word tzedek, justice to tell you that you can’t have justice without compromise9. There is no such thing as an absolute human right that one side to a dispute can seize triumphantly. Only conflicting rights and justice manifested in the compromise.

RIGHTS OR DUTIES?
For the sake of completeness and to satisfy my personal conviction that the contrast between the Jewish duty-based approach and the modern western rights-based approach isn’t as extreme as it might appear, I remember a fundamental principle of what, when I was a would-be lawyer, I was taught to call jurisprudence. The principle was that for every duty there is a correlative right and for every right there is a correlative duty.

So, the duty to leave a corner of the field unharvested, gives rise to a right, if you are poor, to glean. The duty to provide honest weights and measures, gives rise to the right to the use of honest weights and measures when you buy. Furthermore, the Hebrew word for justice is tsedek and gives rise to the verb l’hatsdik, to vindicate the right, not of oneself but the other. Your duty is not a matter of charity, not a matter of how you feel, a matter of the heart that can be turned on and off, but a right which can be asserted in a court of law.

THE ‘STORY’ TO DATE
So let me recap. What’s it all about, Alfie? It’s about doing the good, engaging in the struggle to connect holy values to everyday behaviour; it’s about engaging with others in the struggle for a better society and the repair of the world. It’s about marshalling our limited resources and bringing our distinctive Jewish contribution to the party in which all faiths must play a part.

Which brings me, you will be relieved to hear, not just to the closing section of this lecture but to what you thought I was going to talk about in the first place.

SIX RIGHTS
In preparation for a Judaism and Human Rights seminar back in February I took a passage from the book of Isaiah, a passage with which you will be very familiar because it dominates Yom Kippur:

Is not this the fast that I have chosen?
To loosen the fetters of evil,
To untie the straps of the yoke,
To let the oppressed go free,
And wherever the yoke, to break it?
Is it not sharing your food with the hungry
And bringing the homeless into your home;
When you see the naked, to clothe them
Never hiding from your own flesh and blood?10

I think the passage can legitimately be read to yield six duties, six obligations, six mitzvot: to loosen the fetters of evil, to untie the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, to share our food with the hungry, to bring the homeless into our home and to clothe the naked.

I then asked myself what rights flow from those six duties, which areas of human rights correspond to Isaiah’s six duties. And what emerged was this.

One, the duty to loosen the fetters of evil yields the right to justice. To justice itself, to courts, to judicial systems and penal systems which deliver justice equally and to all. There can be no doubt about the centrality of justice in the Jewish tradition, just as there is no doubt about the attraction of judicial systems to Jews.

Two, the duty to untie the straps of the yoke yields the right to freedom from fear and oppression. The right to live in freedom released from the yoke of totalitarian bondage and the corrosive effects of fear, symbolised for the whole of humanity in the image of the Exodus from Egypt.

Three, the duty to let the oppressed go free yields the right of freedom of expression and belief which Jews have never been prepared to compromise for themselves and which Jews have recognised as a right for others too, since biblical times.

Four, the duty to share your food with the hungry yields the right to an equitable standard of living. The right to live as human beings are meant to live, at that standard of living — with the food and the housing, the clothing, the medical care and the social security — that enables human beings to fulfil their potential and which is implicit in the restorative vision of the Jubilee11.

Five, the duty to bring the homeless into your home yields the right to asylum. A right which touches the very heart of the Jewish experience and raises so starkly our obligation to know the heart of the stranger for we have been strangers many times and which goes to the heart of one of the greatest issue of our time, a time in which there are millions of refugees rendered as such by war, oppression, disease, famine and poverty.

And six, the duty to clothe the naked which, taken metaphorically, yields the right to education. Why? Why does Judaism see learning as central? Because without it a minority group can never retain its distinctive culture and because education is the key beyond all others to minimising vulnerability to political manipulation and exploitation by extremism and fundamentalism.

So what we have is a Magen David, a six pointed star of duties and rights — our duties which vindicate the rights of others — the right to justice, the right to freedom from fear and oppression, the right to freedom of expression and belief, the right to an equitable standard of living, the right to asylum and the right to education. Of course it isn’t an exclusive list, just a suggested starting point, a focus with which we Reform Jews can make a distinctive contribution.

A FINAL RECAP
It’s been a long but, I hope not too tortuous or forced a journey. From my work consultant and Cilla Black to the question ‘what’s it all about, Almighty?’ From pursuing the good to the struggle to make sure that God and holiness actually connect to ethical practice, to mitzvot that embody righteousness. From the struggle to understand what is just to the struggle in partnership with others to enthrone justice in the world. From duties to human rights. And to six Jewish duties corresponding to six areas of human rights which you will have the opportunity to work on in workshops later today and tomorrow.

What’s it all about, Alfie? I guess the Jewish answer is a bit less musical and a bit more of a struggle. But that’s Judaism for you.

1 The standard definition of jihad!
2 Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, Pines, I 52-3
3 Amos 5:24
4 Mekhilta d’Rabbi Yishmael, Yitro 233 on Exodus 20:16
5 Babylonian Talmud Sotah 14a
6 Babylonian Talmud Gittin 61a
7 Pirkei Avot 2:21
8 Deuteronomy 16:20
9 Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 32b
10 Isaiah 57:6-7
11 Leviticus 25

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