The Movement for Reform Judaism

A man falls over a cliff.  Half-way down he catches hold of a branch and hangs on for dear life.  He cannot get up or down.  Desperately, he calls out “Help me! God, help me! If there's anyone up there, help me, please!”  Silence.  Then a voice comes from heaven “Just let go of the branch and you will float gently down to the ground.”  The man thinks for a moment.  Then he shouts out “Is there anyone else up there?”

The man in the story was (I think) a modern man, not an ancient one. In ancient times God was God and people were people and that was that.  Ancient man would have listened to the voice, let go, and no doubt been killed on the rocks below.  If he was an ancient pagan, he would have resigned himself to his fate.  If he was an ancient Israelite, he might have argued with God, using his free will. He wouldn't have said “is there anyone else up there?” He would have said “Can't you suggest something more practical?”  Imagine God's response  (Deut 30:19) “On this day I call heaven and earth to witness against you that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse.  Choose life.  Then you and your descendants will live.”  It's there in our Yom Kippur Torah reading.  Free will is a basic doctrine of Judaism.  But what kind of choice is that?  Asked to choose between life and death, blessing and curse, we would all choose life and blessing.  So on another level the choice is no choice at all.  Hang one or let go. Life was simple in those days, but hard.

Historically speaking, this simple, if hard, life began to get shaken up with the Renaissance around five hundred years ago. At that time, people started to see humanity as the centre of the universe, instead of God. In other words, we didn't just look to religion any more. Then came democratic revolutions such as the American and the French revolutions. Now all of a sudden we were supposed to govern ourselves! And then came the industrial revolution, and instead of tilling the soil or making things with our hands, we had to sell our time in exchange for money. We became employees and consumers. Then came socialist revolutions such as the Russian and the Chinese, which introduced the idea of participatory economics. You were no longer responsible only for your own well-being, but for fellow workers as well!

So, over a mere 500 years, the idea of the individual, with individual thoughts, feelings, moral conscience, freedom, and responsibility, came into being. That's why I say the man half-way down the cliff is a modern man.  He wants to exercise choice. But with modern choice has come isolation, alienation, and bewilderment. Freedom is a difficult  thing to handle, and when we can we tend to flee from it.

I’ve been reading the philosopher Erich Fromm, who explores these dilemmas in his classic book Escape from Freedom (1941) . Fromm came from a Rabbinic family in Germany, born in 1900 died in 1980. He emigrated to the US in 1933, and became a psychoanalyst and social philosopher.  Fromm believed everyone has a religious need, and that freedom is the aim of life.  But his book shows the difficulties of being free. After centuries of struggle, the foundations of modern democracy were laid in the eighteenth century.  But what do people do given that opportunity to elect a democratic government? They repeatedly choose dictators. Fromm had before him as he wrote the worst example of all  - in Germany where the Fuhrer had been elected by the German people. Freedom is a difficult thing to have, and when we can we tend to flee from it.

And so he writes that freedom is an ambiguous gift.  Children are dependent on their parents for a longer time than the young of any animal.  Therefore we go through so much helplessness and fear.  And yet our biological weakness is the condition of human culture, because from the start of our lives we are confronted with choice, and choice makes us think: we are part of nature, and yet we transcend it.  Adam and Eve live in the Garden of Eden in complete harmony with each other and with nature.  There is no choice, no freedom, no thinking either. Adam and Eve's sin, their expulsion from the garden, is the beginning of human freedom. Freedom only comes when we are able to chose forbidden fruit.  But from now on there will be no harmony between people and nature, we have to earn our bread by the sweat of our brow.  We are free but yet enslaved. Freedom is always a ambiguous gift.

Many religions teach that freedom must be constrained. For Muslims what counts is not freedom, but submission to the will of God.  Roman Catholic doctrine teaches the primary wickedness of the individual, which they call “original sin”. But Judaism teaches not only our smallness but also our greatness, not only our weakness but also our strength. 

One of my very favourite High Holyday sayings is the one about a man or woman having two pockets, in each of which he places a slip of paper.  On one slip he should write the words of the Mishnah “For my sake was the world created” and on the other the words of Abraham (Genesis 18:27) “I am but dust and ashes”.  In times when we are low, we have to remind ourselves how special we are, how unique each one of us is: but at times when we think too much of ourselves we have to remember how small and insignificant we are: even Abraham realised he was but dust and ashes in God's eyes.

Rabbi Felix Carlebach tells a story about a rabbi who had forgotten to have his tallit washed in time for Rosh Hashanah. There wasn't time to wash it, so he took it to the cleaners. I must have it back tomorrow morning, Friday he said.   “please give it priority.”  When he returned on Friday morning, there it was, ready for him.  “That'll  be £40” said the manager. “It took all day to untie all those knots.”

Well may we laugh: and yet we have become a people who never untie the knots in our lives: never get round to repairing what can still be repaired, to putting right that which can be put right.  Do you know what the hardest thing in Jewish life is?  No not Yom Kippur, not Barmitzvah, not kashrut.  The hardest thing in Jewish life is getting the Table plan right for your family simcha.  It's true.  Some call it the breugus plan.  We can't even put right the hurts and the upsets in our own families.  Least of all, we can put right the hurts and the upsets in our own families.

And yet Judaism constantly brings us its message of hope, that in the life our people, in the flow of history, in the end things will come right.  And that every individual action of ours can make a difference.  It is truly a modern religion from ancient times.

On Yom Kippur each and every one of us is like the man caught half-way down a cliff.  On no other day of the year do we have such a sense of our own helplessness.  But as the day works its magic, it as if the miracle happened, as if we really have let go and floated gently and safely to earth. Because Judaism teaches that there is an answer to  our helplessness, our sense of unworthiness, that we really do matter, that freedom is our true nature, and we should not try to keep running away from it.  What are we running from? Only our own fears, only our selves.  But today of all days, we can stop running and start thinking.  Martin Luther King used to pray “Speak to us, dear God, so that we can hear you, and thereby ourselves.” We spend our time, like the man in the story, looking for a different answer if we don’t like the first one.  But it’s no magic voice from heaven we are going to hear.  When we pray the best we can do is to put us in touch with ourselves.  And perhaps, just perhaps, we will realise that the cliff we thought we were stuck on is just an illusion, that we have real inner resources with which we can cope. And this is true freedom.  Truly it is said that we are born free, but everywhere we are in chains.  Today we have a chance to break the chains.

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