The Movement for Reform Judaism

There are a wide variety of noses within the Reform Movement in this country. Bromley noses are renowned for their thoughtfulness and intellectual honesty. Which is why I am taking an enormous risk in giving an address which is guaranteed to get up the noses of almost everyone here. At least Yom Kippur is close at hand and I will at last have something for which to repent.

My father was, until he retired, the head teacher of a huge, grossly under-resourced, comprehensive school in Hackney. My late wife was the head teacher of a Jewish primary school with a relatively small number of pupils but with an amazing number of profoundly knowledgeable (self-defined) Jewish parents, each accompanied by a highly qualified educational psychologist. My elder daughter followed her mother into the challenges of Jewish education and her husband is the investment director of a public property company and has responsibility for hundreds of millions of pounds worth of office blocks, shopping centres and a football ground. My son is a barrister in one of the most prestigious and demanding chambers in the country. His girlfriend is a commercial litigator in the London office of an American law firm which doesn’t believe in holidays. My younger daughter — as Tony will confirm — is both insane and insightful and will, please God, formally enter the core family business in two years’ time.

The rabbinate is the most difficult and the most rewarding profession in the world. I’ve just tried to give you my credentials for making that assertion and you now know why I told you in advance that you would be really upset.

Now let me explain.

A few weeks ago a close friend of mine lost his father after quite a long and distressing illness. I drove half way across the country to the deeply provincial town outside of which the burial took place. After the funeral, I navigated the entire conurbation to ‘go back to the house’, as is the conventional expression.

My friend put his arms round me and wept tears of indescribable pain, the pain of loss and utter bewilderment at death. I held him and then stepped aside to have what I thought was a well-earned cup of tea and sandwich. There weren’t many people ‘back at the house’ and I was caught quite unawares. A couple came up to me and reminded me that, of course, I recognised them and that they were former members of our Leeds community, now members of Bournemouth and wanted to hold me personally responsible for the shortcomings of the draft Siddur. No, Bromley, you are not alone. We talked and what spilled out were questions about change, questions about the purpose of liturgy and questions about the meaning — or meaninglessness - of prayer. Time flashed by.

Eventually, they were — how shall I put it — ‘displaced’ by another, even more passionate, inquisitor. Who announced himself as a member of Bromley Reform Synagogue. He overwhelmed me with his deep, deep conviction that Tony — your Tony, that is — will only succeed if he gives the highest priority to adult study, to adult learning. His great fear was that Bromley would not play to Tony’s strength and make it “education, education, education”. I repeat the Tony herein referred to is your Tony, not Tony B, not either of us. I deeply appreciated what I was being told, but repeatedly asked what responsibility my passionate inquisitor was going to take for his own message to his own community?

I went to spend a little time with the widow, my friend’s mother and then departed to make the long journey back to civilisation, London and the NW11 ghetto.

In many ways it was a sadly mundane experience — death and the rituals of death are part of the everyday life of the rabbi — as, thankfully, are the hatch’em and match’em parts of the trilogy too. But it didn’t feel simply mundane and the coincidence of the Bournemouth and Bromley conversations were, I know, examples of what my colleague Rabbi Jeffrey Newman annoyingly insists are not coincidence at all but synchronicity.

I was sitting, talking to a group of my colleagues last week who were sharing some deeply difficult personal issues and suddenly I was back in that room with my sorrowing friend, with the congregants with problems not just with liturgy but with prayer, with the delightful member of Bromley for whom Jewish learning is the key. The key to what?

That room, as I now realise, was filled with exactly what you would expect after a funeral — though I have never seen it in these terms before — that room was full of the deepest questions about the meaning and purpose of life. “What’s it all about, Alfie?” without the sugary tune and the Christological response. Naked. Brutal. Painful. “What’s it all about, Tony?” This suffering. This loss. These remorseless demands of change. The challenge of prayer and the words of prayer. The passionate hope that the Jewish text, taught by the rabbi, may provide some clues, some answers.

The rabbi — and his clerical counterparts — is the only person who is paid to answer that most desperate question of the 21st century in the modern western world, What’s it all about? What’s it for, this life of ours? Why is it so often so difficult, so painful, so unfair, so hard? Where else do you take those questions if not to the synagogue? To the Head Teacher? To the property developer? To the insolvency barrister? No. They also ask the rabbi.

And on that, Milud, do I rest my case. The privilege and honour of perpetually engaging with what really matters. The pain of never, ever being adequate to respond to the questions let alone provide answers.

But wasn’t it ever thus, you say? No I don’t think it was. I think till recently even Reform rabbis had some vestigial rituals to cling on to — rituals of practice and rituals of response; formulas of behaviour and formulas of word, of language — that deflected a little of the agonising immediacy, that appeared to offer answers. But for many of us — lay and rabbinic — they don’t work any more and the question of meaning and purpose stands as the naked, excruciating, unavoidable challenge. “If religion has nothing of worth to say, then why the heck should we cling to its comforts and familiarities any more?” That’s the sociological reality. And who stands slimly at the wide exit door? The rabbi.

It’s more than coincidence and not just my pressing personal story that prompts me and permits me to give this address here. There is something about this community — about its thoughtfulness, its reflectiveness, its ability to cut through cant and comfort blankets — muzzies my 3½ year old granddaughter calls them — and face up to the real issues.

And there is something about you, Tony. Your intellect, your huge educational strengths that at least one congregant recognises, and your soul that equips you to be here and allows me to say what I am saying without fear of mugging someone inadequate or unprepared.

There are burning questions of meaning and purpose which challenge religion today and this is a community where the false answers which so often seduce religion and the religious today — the answers of fundamentalism and born again faith and mindless escape into spurious authenticity — will never do.

Your first High Holydays as rabbi and congregation are almost upon you, raising all of the questions with clarity and intensity. I wish you well on the most rewarding and the most challenging of journeys together, the journey of the High Holydays, the journey of many years — please God — together.

And just let me add this. Be kind to Tony (kindness may actually be the highest value) and above all be realistic. It is the most rewarding job in the world. As Rabbi Tarfon said nearly 2,000 years ago: “The day is short and the work is great and the labourers are sluggish and the wages are high [he was a great ironist, Rabbi Tarfon!] and the Owner of the house is insistent”. It’s a great job. It is also the most demanding.

I put it to the vote and hope the ‘ayes’ and not the ‘noses’ have it!

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