The Movement for Reform Judaism

Yom Kippur Sermon 22nd September 2007/10th Tishri 5768

I was sitting in the foyer of the Hotel Juana in Juan les Pins, otherwise known as North West London on Sea, waiting for my grandchildren Francesca and Oliver to come down.  There was no immediate sign of life from the old fashioned, double-door lift.  So, I picked up a magazine, flicked, stared and began to wonder just how many people there must be who already have a yacht and a villa but whose life will not be complete until they own a watch more expensive than the yacht and the villa put together.

I was impressed by the number of watches where the case was exposed so that the workings are permanently on display – all those little cogs, wheels and tiny screws which are the trademark of a desirable timepiece.

And I thought of this morning.  I really did.  Sad, isn’t it!

I love thinking about sermons.  I honestly do.  But the sermon is under pressure these days.  There are lots more interesting people that you can go and hear now – in town, on the television, on the radio – than there were in the shtetl.  Talking at people for 20-25 minutes is, educationally, completely passé – dialogue, engagement is what is called for.  So there’s a never-ending, collusive relationship whereby I get in before you and remind you of the old joke about the warden who goes up to the rabbi whilst he’s in full flow, hands him the keys to the shul and says ‘Lock up when you’re finished’.  But something - I hope more than just personal vanity – prevents me from giving up on the sermon. 

Sitting in the foyer, I wondered whether showing the construction, the cogs, wheels and screws beneath the surface of the masterpiece would help.  So here goes.

This sermon doesn’t really begin in North West London on Sea – though the magazine in the Hotel Juana provides a useful introduction.  It actually begins with a very demanding episode in my professional life earlier this year.  Mark and Laura know that I got really anxious about our new prayer book – out next spring, promise – because the prayers appeared to articulate beliefs that many of us don’t have; because the liturgy doesn’t fully acknowledge that an awful lot has happened in the last two centuries that religion, to have any integrity, has to address and respond to.

To a limited extent I won my battle.  There will be a whole section of what has euphemistically been called ‘reflective material’ in the Siddur.  But I gave a lecture to the Movement’s leadership group in which I talked about the deliberately unacknowledged elephant in the sanctuary – all those questions about belief in the modern world which the liturgy ignores.  All I succeeded in doing was making most people very uncomfortable.  Coming to terms with and understanding my mistake is where this sermon actually begins. 

Another of the wheels or cogs is the influence of a friend and teacher whom I miss very much, Rabbi Albert Friedlander z”l.  Albert, early in his career, compiled a magnificent anthology of holocaust literature called ‘Out of the Whirlwind’.  Albert himself only survived Kristallnacht as a child by remarkable good fortune.  In that anthology there’s an essay, ‘The Face of God after Auschwitz’ by a man called Hans Jonas.  That essay means a very great deal to me in forming my personal theodicy, the theological explanation of why a good God allows human beings to suffer.  But it’s the only place where I’d ever encountered Hans Jonas.  So when, two months ago, I saw a book in a publisher’s catalogue entitled: ‘The Life and Thought of Hans Jonas: Jewish Dimensions’ I sent away for it and read it and it too is one of the wheels or screws of this sermon. 

As – I must admit – is the complaint that my last year’s sermon – about the compatibility of science and religion – wasn’t Yom Kippur-ish enough. 

All of which makes for a very long introduction – but the Strudel Cafe’s closed and we’ve got till 7.46.  Whether it’s a helpful introduction – you will judge.

In the autumn of 1934 Hans Jonas and Leo Strauss went for a walk in Hyde Park.  “They walked side by side in silence for a while.  Suddenly Leo turned to Hans and said, ‘I feel awful’.  ‘Me too’, Jonas replied.  “And why was this”?  Jonas asks,   “It was Yom Kippur and we both weren’t in synagogue but were taking a walk in Hyde Park.”

In a way, we should be grateful that neither of them dropped into Upper Berkeley Street because it might have changed the course of Jewish intellectual history.  Why neither of them went to shul – particularly Leo Strauss, who came from an orthodox background and felt very guilty – is a complex subject.  But the reason that Jonas gives is stunning.  Jonas writes that the freedom to think about the big questions, the ultimate questions, the freedom to do philosophy is incompatible with belief in any specific religion or revelation or in any God at all.  To be a philosopher makes it intellectually necessary to be an atheist.  Wow.

A little bit of biography.  Leo Strauss went to America where he became one of the foremost political philosophers of his generation.  He’s generally acknowledged to be the intellectual father of the present generation of Neo-Cons, the thinkers and strategists, many of them Jews, who’ve provided the intellectual basis for the Bush Presidency.  As an aside, I’ve just ordered a copy of Leo Strauss’ ‘Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity’, but I don’t think I’ll read it until somebody invites me to preach on Sidrah Shemot, the parashah which contains the account of the burning bush (that’s one of the jewels in the watch – pay attention). 

So this morning, let’s concentrate on Hans Jonas.  Hans Jonas was born in 1903 in Monchengladbach, home of the famous soccer team Borussia Monchengladbach (least popular supporter: give us a b – another jewel, do keep up).  Jonas belonged to what historians have described as the post-integrationist generation – in other words the generation that saw themselves as manifestly equal German citizens, Jews by religion, German by citizenship.

Yet Jonas didn’t read the upsurge of anti-Semitism which greeted the end of the First World War – in which so many German Jews had fought – as just a passing phase.  From very early on, he was a dissenter from the widely held, post-integrationist view and very cynical about the chances of long-term Jewish acceptance in Germany. He became a fervent Zionist.  He graduated from Marburg University in philosophy. Ironically his teacher was a man called Martin Heidegger who attracted many Jewish students and then fervently embraced Hitler and national socialism in 1933.  That’s why Jonas was wandering about Hyde Park rather than Monchengladbach Park on Yom Kippur 1934.  He ended up in Jerusalem where he married.

He publicly and forcefully advocated joining the allied forces in Europe to oppose Hitler.  He himself enlisted, fought for five years, eventually in the Jewish Brigade, and then returned to Palestine.  He fought again in the War of Independence but couldn’t get a permanent post at the Hebrew University – too little money, too few jobs.  So he went off to Canada to pursue his career as a philosopher there and ended up with a Chair in philosophy in New York.

And here we come to a major cog in the watch.

In 1979 Jonas published his masterpiece ‘The Imperative of Responsibility.’ (correctly spelled!)  It’s a work of universal ethics.  It’s driving force is the twin features of the second half of the 20th century – our mindless, devastating cruelty to our fellow human beings all over the globe; and our selfish and dangerous misuse of technology so that we threaten the conditions of life for future generations and undermine humanity’s foundations within the natural world and the globe.  The Imperative of Responsibility propounds universal ethical principles to address our constant commission of genocide and our far reaching destruction of the environment.

The book is of immense importance for many reasons. 

Thirty years ago Hans Jonas was anticipating the impending environmental disaster which only now is becoming a matter of universal concern.  It is truly prophetic.

Second, his horrific experience of war – the bloody battle for Jerusalem, five years of the Second World War and the Shoah, particularly the murder of his mother in Auschwitz – focuses his concern on the danger that we are to each other.

Thirdly, the book is a clear and explicit rejection of contemporary nihilism and despair – the view which goes back to his teacher Heidegger and before him to Nietzche that we are hopeless, helpless victims of fate in a senseless, meaningless world.  Jonas consciously, deliberately refuses to root his ethics in a particular faith or in belief in God but in the positive responsibility of humanity to respond to its own humanity.  As a philosopher, true to that absence from synagogue on Yom Kippur in 1934, he advances universal, human values and responsibilities, binding on every human being whether Jew or gentile, theist or atheist.

But actually, Jonas did believe in God.  Not in the interventionist God of the Bible who rewards the righteous and zaps the wicked but in a God whose very face, as it were, is marked by our ethical deeds and misdeeds.  He was a deeply committed Jew, who didn’t go to shul much, but the people whom he loved and argued with were Jews and the language of the Imperative of Responsibility both conceptually and in vocabulary is profoundly Jewish:  Our absolute responsibility to our fellow human beings and the globe; our creation in the image of God.  He openly and explicitly uses again and again the ‘metaphor’ he calls it, the insight that comes from religion, from Judaism, that we are created b’tzelem elohim in the image of God.

Hans Jonas died in 1993 – having married into a family called Weiner (W-E-I-N-E-R) and his memoirs will be published in English shortly.

For many years, I’ve been trying to establish an institution to promote social action, social justice, on behalf of the British Jewish community.  My most recent attempt began when the Jewish Association of Business Ethics refused to allow Reform rabbis to teach under its auspices and many of the Trustees resigned.  My conception was of something broader than business ethics but I was making only desultory progress.  Then, about six months ago, the pace of development quickened and some of you will have read in the Jewish Chronicle that ResponsAbility has been born and will be formally launched next spring.

ResponsAbility will be a totally cross-communal organisation – with Trustees and an Advisory Board who are members of Reform, Liberal, Masorti, and Orthodox communities and even some who are unaffiliated.  The list is amazing, a roll call of the contribution Jews are making in every field of endeavour – business, medicine, law, science.  In order that it should remain cross-communal, I will have no formal association with it but I will have the satisfaction of knowing that I was one of the midwives.   (Those of you who know the names of the two midwives in the book of Exodus should keep your comments to yourselves).

ResponsAbility will tackle the cutting edge ethical issues of the 21st century – in six areas in particular: the environment, development, poverty, human rights, medical ethics and business ethics.  It will research questions put to it, learn from our tradition but also from members of today’s Jewish community who are experts – doctors in the medical ethics area; lawyers and activists in the human rights area.  We will also learn from other faiths and from secular ethical traditions.  In fact ResponsAbility will try to engage the entire community in discussing the ethics, the values by which we need to live in order to save humanity and the planet from the violence and greed with which we threaten our world and each other.  ResponsAbility will publish reports and educational material and encourage their teaching and their study.  And it will always work with others, network and partner others in order to advocate, campaign and practice what we preach.  The Regius Professor of Divinity and the Lecturer in Islam at Cambridge; the Director of Oxfam; Cherie Blair are all on the Advisory Board.

As I was actually writing this sermon, words from the Tanach kept going through my head.  That stunning passage from Isaiah which turned me on to Judaism when I was a teenager and is probably more responsible than any other textual source for my being a rabbi – today’s Haftarah:  ‘Is not this the fast that I have chosen; to loose the fetters of evil, to untie the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free?  …Is it not sharing your food with the hungry and bringing the homeless into your home?’

And then, all of a sudden, the shekel dropped and I realised that the pace of progress in establishing ResponsAbility quickened considerably after my outburst about the prayer book and the need to be more honest about our theology.  I still believe that there is a place for our liturgy to be more frank, more questioning.  It could even have included a passage or two from Hans Jonas’s solitary theological essay in Albert Friedlander’s Anthology ‘Out on the Whirlwind’.  But I’m profoundly moved by Jonas’ insight – an insight which grew out of the proposition that one can only do universalist philosophy from the point of view of a committed, intellectual atheist – that what the world desperately needs today is an ethic that does not appeal to anyone’s God for endorsement, but appeals to, is founded on the innate humanity of all humanity.

Leave aside, for the moment, whether or not we are believers and in Whom, or What we believe, and focus on the need for values, for ethics which help us with the terrifying issues of our time and the unbearable challenges of our individual lives – obscene poverty, environmental collapse, conflicting human rights, the most testing conundrums of genetic research; our unyielding pettiness and pretension, our unrecognised cruelty and deception, the unconscious drives which overtake us again and again despite the confessions of the liturgy and the insights which began with Freud.

Back to Hyde Park and Yom Kippur 1934.  Did Leo Strauss and Hans Jonas make the right decision not to go to Upper Berkeley Street?  I think not.  I think they got it wrong.  Though I more than understand how the world of 1934 could make two very young, supremely intelligent Jews believe that being explicit about their Jewish commitment could impair their chances of contributing to the world of universal ideas and values.  There is something that Judaism has to teach in this regard and that is that the general, the universal emerges from the particular, the specific and not the other way round.  The insights and teachings of our particular tradition are far from the last word but they provide a vocabulary for saying important things and the world would be far poorer without them.  Any universal ethical language will be formed out of the vocabularies of different, specific traditions.  And I can’t help smiling at the “metaphors” as Jonas calls them which are to be found throughout the text of his great, universal work, The Imperative of Responsibility, which include such concepts as the brotherhood of man (Cain and Abel) and of human beings being created in the image of God (b’tzelem elohim).

Back to six months ago.  Did I make the right call in getting exceedingly anxious with our leadership and my colleagues for failing to expose the elephant in the sanctuary, for our lack of theological honesty?  No I didn’t.  I got it wrong.  At a time when religious fundamentalism explicitly denies the ethical and asserts that the murder of human beings is perfectly justifiable as the command of God, it’s much more important to re-assert the primacy of what is human, what is ethical, what is good and to affirm that as precisely what unites us and brings us together here today.

But it is uncanny, isn’t it, that my outburst against a lack of theological integrity led me to Hans Jonas, who seventy-three years ago on Yom Kippur opted for the ethical rather than the ritual; who thirty years ago identified the ethical agenda in the Imperative of Responsibility (same word) – the threat to each other and to the globe that we human beings pose; and yet whose single, theological jewel in Albert’s anthology helps me to hold together my faith and my values.

It’s as if God is saying, don’t spend so much precious time on those questions about Me.  The one thing you haven’t done this morning Tony, is to look at the face of the watch and notice the time.  Forgive the platitude, says God, but it is indeed far later than you think.

Rabbi Tony Bayfield

This sermon was given at North Western Reform Synagogue - Alyth on Yom Kippur, 22nd September 2007/10th Tishri 5768

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