The Movement for Reform Judaism

Ten long days ago, a colleague of mine, an attractive final year rabbinic student said to me: “Dad, I’m giving the sermon at Finchley on the 14th. I know I’m going to have to talk about Ariel Sharon – that’s what people will expect – how do I deal with the situation and what do I say?” “What’s the sidrah ”, I said (shows you I’m no longer a congregational rabbi!). “It’s the end of the Joseph cycle”, said Miriam, skipping a step out of respect and sensitivity. “Oh, connect him to Joseph”, I muttered. A few days later, I remembered that I was also giving a sermon today and I’ve been wrestling with Miriam’s question – and with Joseph – ever since.

Some of you may have heard of my mentor, Rabbi Dow Marmur. Dow delivers short email ‘letters from Jerusalem’ to a select circle. As you would expect, they’re always worthwhile. It’s only a fortnight ago that Dow wrote a characteristically davka piece saying that in March he was going to vote for Amir Peretz, the new leader of the Labour Party, because social injustice is rife in Israel, the gap between rich and poor is growing and Peretz is the only person prepared to address these issues which go to the heart of Judaism.

In the fortnight since, Dow has contributed a flurry of pieces and I’d like to quote from the most recent. “This time I’m writing to express my admiration for the maturity of the Israeli public, even its politicians.… Except for some fringe groups, the population is showing great empathy for the family of Ariel Sharon.… The reaction by public figures has been responsible and measured. People show great respect for Sharon’s leadership skills without necessarily recanting their opposition to his actions, past and present. Many see him as a kind of incarnation of Ben Gurion…. Others speak of him as Israel’s De Gaulle, the man who changed his views dramatically because he deemed it to be in the best interests of his country …. This very bad time for the country has also shown up Israel at its best. Even when I’m critical, I feel hugely privileged to be here. How much more so now”.

Within 24 hours of the news of Sharon’s stroke, we faxed a letter to the Israeli Ambassador expressing our shock and extending hopes and prayers for refuah shleimah – and asking the Ambassador to pass this on to the Government and to the Sharon family. We copy our press releases to all rabbis and synagogue chairs and not long afterwards I got an email from a colleague – not the attractive one – saying that he supposed we had to go through these motions but not to forget Sabra and Shatila. Of course we won’t, can’t. There is a time and a place, as Dow made clear. But I’ve been puzzling away at something else as well.

Something else as well as timing. Joseph.

I have enormous affection for ‘Joseph and his Technicolour Dreamcoat’. Instant happy memories of cheder productions and of the aforementioned attractive rabbinic student playing Elvis Presley aka Pharaoh. But, to tell you the truth, I’ve never found the Joseph story the most rewarding part of the Torah. OK, it beats leprosy and the construction of the tabernacle but it’s still not my cup of tea. I sat here a fortnight ago listening to the marvellous Nicola apologising for the extraordinary length of the Torah reading but, however much she tried to enliven it, it only confirmed to me that I find the Joseph narrative doesn’t bear repetition in the same way that the preceding chapters and sidrot of Genesis do. It feels different and I need to put my finger on why I react that way.

So I started with today’s sidrah which Miriam had so tactfully reminded me is the last sidrah of the Joseph story. And, of course, it is. But actually it has quite a lot to do with Jacob.

Genesis begins with eleven chapters setting the universal background to our story – the creation of the world by the God of the whole world, the prehistory of all humanity. It then launches into our story, into the patriarchal – and matriarchal – narratives. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob ; Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah. And then comes the Joseph story – occupying four sidrot , many, many verses, great detail. Yet Joseph isn’t one of the patriarchs and his wife certainly isn’t one of the matriarchs. There is a clear change of ‘something’ after Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, within the Joseph narrative, before the return to Jacob with which Genesis ends. But I still couldn’t put my finger on precisely what was going on so I did what every rabbi is supposed to do and turned to the commentaries.

Clearly, I couldn’t read the entire corpus of commentary on Joseph so I took a sample. I started with Ibn Ezra and what did I find? That, actually, Ibn Ezra has relatively little to say. He offers a few characteristic grammatical comments, gets more involved whenever Jacob crops up but the detail and content of the narrative don’t stimulate him to his usual heights. I then looked at that classic of late 20th century biblical scholarship, Speiser. Speiser introduces this section of Genesis as follows: “The last major division of Genesis concentrates with but a few exceptions on the eventful story of Joseph. It is at once the most intricately constructed and the best integrated of all the patriarchal histories. For sustained dramatic effect the narrative is unsurpassed in the whole Pentateuch. The theme is essentially personal and secular”.
“… and secular”. The penny begins to drop.

I turned to Plaut.

“The last part of Genesis begins with the line of Jacob for, with Isaac dead, Jacob is now, technically, the leading figure. In effect, however, the patriarch at once fades into the background. His life provides the framework for the Joseph saga, which is distinguished from the preceding chapters of Genesis in a number of ways: its length as a continuing account [‘Amen’, says Nicola] and the absence ... of divine revelation”. Ah!

Vayomer Adonai el Avram; vayomer Adonai el Avraham; vayomer Adonai el Yitzchak; vayomer Adonai el Yaakov . God spoke to Abram; God spoke to Abraham; God spoke to Isaac; God spoke to Jacob. I worked through my Chumash . Yayomer Adonai el Yosef . Couldn’t find it. Yes, Joseph invokes God when interpreting Pharaoh’s dreams but unlike the patriarchs and President Bush, God does not speak to Joseph. As Speiser says, it’s a secular narrative. As Plaut says, there is an absence of divine revelation.

Now let’s get my personal, subjective bit out of the way. I became a rabbi because I’m obsessed with questions of meaning, with the struggle for belief, with a deep need to try to understand what this word God means, with a disconcerting sense that She will not let go of me. And I became a rabbi because I’m obsessed with the ethical values that flow from God, whoever God is, the fulfilment of which provide life with purpose. So I find the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the endless commentaries on them endlessly fascinating because they address my obsession. Joseph doesn’t.

Joseph inhabits a different world from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He doesn’t inhabit the world of the call to leave the present and journey in search of God. He doesn’t inhabit the world of challenging God over the righteous in Sodom. He doesn’t go obediently to be sacrificed. He doesn’t inhabit the world of wrestling with the strange being and coming to terms with your own duplicity. He lives in the world of palaces, of power, of economics, of real politik .

Now I’m really getting into dangerous waters: in certain respects, Joseph – who inhabits a different world from the patriarchs and matriarchs – is dealt with differently by the text. Let me take two instances. Whereas elsewhere the text of the patriarchal/matriarchal narratives go into great detail about who they marry and offers lots of hints about the nature of the relationship, we are simply told, in a matter of fact way, that Joseph married Asnat, daughter of Potiphera, priest of On, an Egyptian woman. No comment. No vestige of judgement. Silence. Of course, the nub of the Joseph story is his astute interpretation of Pharaoh’s fat cows/thin cows dream (a very different kind of dream from Jacob’s dream of the ladder) and his elevation, as a result, to supervise Egyptian economic policy. I find it absolutely fascinating, now that I have been set thinking about it, that there doesn’t appear to be any ethical content to the policy or any indication of the principles by which Joseph led Egypt. All we have is an astute bit of planning, much silence and the family saga of sibling rivalry, something I and my family know nothing about.

Do you see what Speiser means by secular? Do you see what Plaut means by no divine revelation? Do you see why Ibn Ezra is thin on commentary? Do you see why, given my interests, I feel both less moved by the narrative and also why it feels as though it belongs to a different world where unexpected things are emphasised, others ignored and where silence reigns just where I begin to get interested.

And so to Arik whose fate is sadly common but which shouldn’t happen to anyone.

Is Tony comparing Ariel Sharon to Joseph? Absolutely, emphatically, no and if that’s what appears in Jewish News, I’ll know who to blame. What I’m saying is that re-reading the patriarchal narrative and the Joseph story in the light of what has befallen Prime Minister Sharon has prompted three thoughts.

First is that observation that Joseph inhabits a secular world devoid of religious revelation. Sharon is a secular Jew and the world of government and international politics today is essentially secular. In fact, I would argue that Ariel Sharon’s greatest achievement is that he stood up against fundamentalist religious Zionism and saw it off – for now. Nobody had dared do that before and my only regret is that I’m not convinced that the rest of the world will see the importance of the example we set to them. The need for America to see off its religious fundamentalists. The need for the Islamic world to see off its fundamentalists. There is no place in public life for that most dangerous of beliefs, namely a belief that you possess a monopoly on truth and are determined to impose it on others – Abu Hamza. Indeed, there is no place in public life for religious leaders to exercise state power. The role of religious leaders is not to exercise state power, it is their task to challenge the abuse of power. That’s prophetic Judaism.
Second, Sharon provided leadership. There is no doubt that Israel needs effective leadership. Indeed, the present scary vacuum in Israel shows how rare true leadership qualities are. I never thought to hear Dow say and I never thought I would quote him with complete agreement: “People show great respect for Sharon’s leadership skills without necessarily recanting their opposition to his actions, past and present”.

And so to those actions and to the silence of the Joseph text on his. Does that mean that the ethical standards which Judaism has given so richly to the world don’t apply to secular leadership? No, of course not.

But it does remind us that the exercise of state power is very difficult. It drives me to distraction listening to Christians and Muslims criticising so self-righteously the Jewish attempt to wield power in the secular world for the first time in 1900 years when they, Christians and Muslims, have not exactly coped effortlessly themselves in the past or in the present.

And it does remind us that in our role of relentlessly and remorselessly challenging the abuse of power by the state – its turning a blind eye, its pacts with the devil, its riding roughshod over the weak and abuse of human rights, its tendency to allow ends to justify the means – we should perhaps be unrelenting when it comes to the crime but have some compassion for the perpetrator who may be neither total villain nor complete saint. And we should recognise that individuals – like Joseph’s father Jacob – can change.

Maybe I should think a little more about Joseph in the future. Maybe my lack of sympathy for his world got the better of me. Maybe silences can also be interesting. Maybe God who is kinder to Joseph than me will also be kinder to Ariel Sharon than me.
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