The Movement for Reform Judaism

A few nights ago I was flicking channels on the television – as men do.  My attention was caught by a film on Sky Indie which had only just started.  The name rang a bell and, as I watched, I vaguely remembered Colin telling me that he’d seen it in the cinema and that it was really good.  He was right – as he always is in his literary and cinematic judgements.  It riveted me to the screen.

It was called ‘Everything is Illuminated’ and told the story of a strange young American man who goes to the Ukraine in search of his grandfather’s shtetl and the woman who had saved his grandfather’s life in 1942.  It begins with humour and ends by delivering a sledgehammer blow exploding into themes of cruelty, betrayal and loss.

At the end, I just sat there.  Then I remembered the book on which the film is based coming out and I hadn’t read it because I thought I couldn’t take another book about the Holocaust.  I went to my study and Googled the author, Jonathan Safran Foer.

Immediately I discovered four things.  He wrote ‘Everything is Illuminated’ when he was twenty-five.  The critical acclaim was unbelievable.  He’s a Jew who thought little or nothing of his Jewish identity until he began to search for his roots, a search that’s clearly reflected in the book even thought it’s not an autobiography but a novel.  And, I read, he’s married to Nicole Krauss.

Nicole Krauss, I did know.  She wrote a novel called ‘The History of Love’, published two years ago when she was all of thirty-one.  It was also greeted with huge critical acclaim and I understand why.  It’s one of the best novels that I’ve read in a long time.  It also connects to the Shoah and tells the story of an elderly survivor.  It’s also about betrayal and loss.  She began it before she met Jonathan Safran Foer but they’re now, so the website says, the most celebrated literary couple in New York.  Two young Jews, each writing about identity, betrayal and loss.

It made me think about a number of things.  The unfairness that any one person – never mind two – should be so talented and so successful so young.  The extraordinary enigma that is Jewishness.  The grip that the Shoah holds on Jews, sixty-five years and two generations on.  The ever-recurring theme of loss. 

I want to introduce a third story – the story of a man who, like my grandfather, was born in Galicia in 1894, the son of an orthodox Jew, an innkeeper.  In World War I he fought as a soldier in the Austrian army on the Carpathian front and then became a manufacturer’s agent in the clothing business.  He built up connections with this country, with South Africa, Egypt and Palestine – even buying an orange grove in Beit Hakerem in the 1930s.  His sister set him up on a blind date with a girl from an assimilated family from Krakow.  They married in the Reform Temple in Krakow, honeymooned by driving from Alexandria to Damascus and ended up in South Africa.  They might have settled there but when the young woman became pregnant she wanted to be nearer her family in Poland, so they compromised on London.  Her parents visited them here in June/July 1939 but went back to be ‘in their own country’.  In all, some fifty-eight members of their two families were killed in the Shoah.

The couple, as many of you know, were Colin’s parents, Julius and Vera.

I remember when Julius, alav hashalom, died.  They read in the will that he wanted to be buried in Jerusalem.  It came as something of a surprise, despite the office in Haifa, the orange grove in Beit Hakerem, memories of his strong dislike of Ernest Bevin, a nephew in Ashkelon and a JNF box.  Israel hadn’t figured a great deal in family conversations.  But Israel was self-evidently, manifestly there.  So it didn’t, doesn’t seem strange.

The two episodes, epoch-shattering and epoch-making earthquakes, the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel are the defining events of Jewish history in the second half of the 20th century, in our present and in our foreseeable future. 

They’re the points of reference, the defining, dominating features, framing the rabbinate that faced young men and women coming out of the Leo Baeck College as Colin did in 1971 and as I did, many years later being much younger than Colin, in 1972.

I don’t know how much we realised it then or how much we would have articulated it.  But, with hindsight, it’s so obvious that I can’t even begin to understand why I certainly, have never put it quite in those terms before.

Let me start with the Shoah.  They told us again and again that the Leo Baeck College was the successor to the Hochschule in Berlin.  We were surrounded at the College by German Jewish refugees – Werner Van der Zyl, Ellen Littmann, Ignaz Maybaum, Fridolin Friedman, the Dorflers.  The very books in the library, the lingua franca of the place was German.  And yet I’m not sure how much – both in my head and in my kishkes – I realised.  Colin, you’ll have realised much more than me because of your background.  I’m more typical of your congregants – born in North London of parents born here, more concerned with the break from orthodoxy and defining Reform Judaism in contradistinction to minhag Anglia.  It’s only gradually that it’s dawned on me how much even insular British Jewry lives with the aftershocks – our sense of being victims, our insecurity, our nostalgia, our secularity, our inability to deal with so much loss.

And Israel too defines us.  In the questions that it asks us about identity – who are we?; in our hopeless inner conflict as to whether we want and expect Israel and Israelis to be just like everybody else or whether we want and expect Israel to embody those towering Jewish values that we’re so proud of and of which we constantly fall short ourselves.  And Israel too adds to our sense of loss.  Think of those heady days forty years ago, in 1967, when Colin went to Israel in optimism and fell in love with Hebrew, when even that soberest of liberal Jewish theologians Gene Borowitz declared that God was once more to be seen acting in history.  And now, forty years later, the community didn’t want, dare to hold a major, public celebration.  Loss.  Loss.  Loss. 
That’s the challenge that’s faced Colin since 1971 when he was ordained and since 1977 when he became rabbi of Southgate & District Reform Synagogue – when it was more Southgate than District!

Colin Eimer – rabbi to a community of Jews who’ve lost faith in the old ways but are far from sure as to what the new ways might be and are not all convinced they want to find out.  Rabbi to a community that has lost faith that Jews and their children will ever be safe anywhere.  Rabbi to a community of people, many of whom have lost the conviction that Jewish identity is inescapable and undiscardable.  Rabbi to a community, many of whom no longer believe in petitionary prayer or in God, certainly the God of our ancestors who was, we are told, a shield about us turning away every enemy, disease, violence, hunger and Einsatzgruppen bullet.  Rabbi to a community for whom Israel has gradually become the latest instrument with which the anti-Semites beat us.  And a refuge, the purpose of which many no longer understand.  As the great Austrian Jewish novelist Stefan Zweig wrote as early as 1940 – ‘a people who have lost much of the sense of commonality, of what binds us together, of the meaning and purpose of being Jewish’.

You think I’m wrong?  About loss of faith, loss of certainty, loss of shape, loss of self-understanding, loss of purpose, loss of meaning … loss?  Foer and Krauss.  Talented children in gilded, confident, Jewish New York writing about … loss.  Sadly, I’m not wrong.  But I’ve been laying it on with a trowel and being far too sombre. 

Of course there’s another side to the story – the rise and rise of SDRS – from small and humble beginnings to this terrific building, perhaps the most congenial sanctuary in the whole Reform Movement and, for me, consistently the best services.  To the flourishing of a community of lovely people who’ve responded to Colin’s understated scholarship and wisdom, distinctive humour and great warmth in the way that you’d hope people would respond to one of the nicest, one of the best human beings it’s ever been my privilege to know, let alone count as a friend.

But what I want to convey, what I want you to understand, is that men and women like Colin – no, let’s stick with Colin because there isn’t anybody quite like Colin – was born into a world that had been turned on its head, came out of the most profound loss – of life itself, of way of life (the Shoah); of hope rekindled and then spluttering into puzzle and ambiguity (Israel) – and has stood on the very front line and fought on the very front line for thirty years.

A rabbi trained in geography without a compass in a Jewish world which has no modern map.  A rabbi with a deep sense of the mystery of being Jewish in a Jewish world where the magic no longer works for so many.  A rabbi with a love of Hebrew in a country not known for its linguistic skills.  A rabbi who devours books in a country which labels anyone who’s read more than one a bloody intellectual.  A rabbi with a traditional Jewish love of food and eating in a society obsessed with looking like Kate Moss.

You’re a marvel Colin – unfailingly decent in an indescribably indecent world; unfailingly intelligent amidst so much stupidity; unfailingly optimistic in the face of so called humanity endlessly repeating the themes of cruelty, betrayal and loss.  Thank God this is just a milestone on a remarkable journey which gives us all the opportunity to say ‘thank you’ for being our guide, teacher and friend.

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