The Movement for Reform Judaism

Diamond Jubilees make me reflective.  My parents, please God, will be celebrating their Diamond Wedding at the beginning of March.  A sweet-bitter time when joy combines with memories of all that has changed and been lost - their parents, for instance, my grandparents, the founding figures, as it were, of our family in this country. 

All four of my grandparents were born in Britain – actually my mother’s father was brought here when he was eighteen months old from Galicia but that doesn’t really change the point.  My mother’s family name was Mann and whenever the inquisitors on my telephone banking system ask for my mother’s maiden name I tell them that my mother was a man before she got married.  They never laugh! 

All four of my grandparents were committed Jews – at one time they were all members of the same orthodox synagogue in Barking.  Yet my memory of them is that their drive to make a decent living, to see that their children had a good English education and that they fitted in to this new country was paramount.  For my mother’s parents especially Judaism was a synagogue activity – they were minor macharei – but it seemed to have very little impact on the home or on the daily round.  My parents therefore inherited relatively little and it was only the foundation of a Reform Synagogue, in their case South West Essex in Ilford in North East London, that gave them anything to latch on to.  What turned them and me on, was the intellectual brilliance and integrity of two Reform rabbis and the Reform Judaism that they taught.  Henry and Sheila will know to whom I am referring!
It isn’t, of course, everybody’s story but there is a common core.  For so many Jews the mass migrations of the period from 1881-1905, the surge of refugees from 1933 on, the impact of the Enlightenment and the impact of the Shoah exploded traditional Judaism into a myriad of fragments.  For those of us who cannot deny the experience and cannot even imagine the pieces credibly restored to their former shape and pattern, we can only grapple with these fragments of the past, examine them in the light of the present and carry on the process of building a new and enriching Judaism which will take us on the next stage of the millennial Jewish journey. 

I have recently become a single parent and I made a special effort this year to be with my elder daughter and granddaughter for the lighting of the Hanukkah candles each night of Hanukkah.  Once again, it was a bitter-sweet experience because we were all aware of change and loss.  But it was also remarkable.  The Chanukkah candlestick stood where it has stood for centuries, in the window, and was lit in the traditional way – candles from the right, lighting from the left.  But we weren’t over fussed about the precise time.  We sang the blessings with the familiar melody and then sang haneirot halalu.  But instead of the long, formulaic prayer, I told and retold the story of Chanukkah and Francesca, who was three a few days later, joined in.  We only sang one verse of Maoz Tsur and, as a quid pro quo, she waited knowing that the ritual was important even though there were presents waiting for her to open on each of the eight nights.  We, as a family, respond to the time of the year by exchanging presents eight times over in a blatant show of Jewish one-upmanship! 

Sitting on the settee in my daughter’s house watching Francesca take charge of the ‘fiery bit’, I realised here was one tiny example of the reassembling of the fragments, the creative redevelopment of the fragments, that Reform Judaism is about, that this synagogue is about.

Francesca loves books – she always has.  One night she opened her daily present from Uncle Dan and Lis Lis (my son Daniel’s girlfriend is a solicitor and we think that Francesca’s choice of Lis Lis rather than Lisa shows an early ability to make awful puns like her grandfather).  Dan and Lis Lis had chosen a story book for children by Madonna and Cessie said, “Gramps read it to me – now”.  Now you may think that a book by Madonna is hardly an appropriate choice for a refined Jewish Princess from Hampstead Garden Suburb and I was shocked by the extortionate price which Daniel and Lisa had pointedly left on the book.  But actually, it was really rather good. In fact, it read like an Americanised version of a familiar Hassidic story.  And after I had finished reading it to Francesca I looked on the cover and saw that it was indeed based upon a story by the Ba’al Shem Tov and was clearly a product of Madonna’s exposure to the Jewish Kabbalistic tradition. 

This sermon is beginning to sound more like a third rate ‘Letter from America by Alastair Cook’ than it is a sermon, but note the neat segue into the next section of this ‘Letter from the Headquarters of the Reform Movement’.  Kabbalah is the name given to a significant body of largely medieval Jewish philosophical thought and biblical interpretation which is generally termed ‘the Jewish mystical tradition’.  Perhaps its greatest figure is a rabbi called Isaac Luria who lived and taught in Tsfat overlooking Lake Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee in the 16th Century.  Lurianic Kabbalah as it is called wrestled with a whole range of very profound theological issues about what connects God to human beings and how there can be a place for each and how we can communicate.  Now being by upbringing and inclination a rather prosaic and dull middle-class English rationalist, I tend not to get nearly as excited or moved by Kabbalah as Madonna.

But there is one Kabbalistic idea that has buzzed around in my head and keeps cropping up in my thinking and writing.  One of the big questions that bothered medieval thinkers of both Christian and Jewish persuasion and the Kabbalists in particular was this.  If God is so great and so powerful and so overwhelming and so everywhere, how can the world and humanity possibly exist?  Where is the space for us?   Where is the space in which we can exist and not be God or be utterly overwhelmed by God?  It is an interesting question but it isn’t one that moves me – or perhaps you – as much as it did Madonna’s friends, the Kabbalists.  I have other issues with God and maybe you do too.  But the answer, their answer, that I found and find electrifying. 

For the Kabbalists used the Hebrew term, tsimtsum, which means contraction.  Not contraction in the sense that I hope my daughter will be experiencing for the second time in a couple of weeks but contraction in the sense of making space.  God contracted into God’s self as it were.  God contracted in order to make space for the world.  God contracted to expand!

I was reading a short article by an American rabbi the other day on the relationship between rabbis and community.  And this American rabbi said that every congregational rabbi has to contract into him or herself in order to make space for the community.  And every community has to contract a little to make space for their rabbi.  What a stunning idea and what an insight.  The need to create space for the other so that the other can exist and live and breathe and be themselves without being overwhelmed, obliterated, reduced to being the wearer of a uniform through and through. 

And then I thought:  This goes one stage further still.  A synagogue should aspire to be a community.  Not a club.  Not a service provider.  But a community.  And surely the essence of community is that we each have to make tsimtsum, we each have to contract into ourselves, we each have to make space for the other, recognising that the other, too, has a place and is not, thankfully, exactly the same as us. 

You may not think that you have the foggiest notion of what I am talking about but of all the communities of the 43 which make up our Reform Movement, this community has intuitively understood exactly what I am talking about and acted upon it. 

You have really grasped that simply being a provider of Jewish services – we offer Bar-Mitzvahs, weddings and a very nice line in funerals - is not enough to sustain an enriching Jewish life.  You have grasped the fact that being a Jewish Golf Club with the rabbi as Club Secretary where members can come for a limited number of set facilities organised in a set way, has long since failed to pull them in in their droves – if it ever did.  You grasped that you had to become a living community, a community which makes space for each member and recognises the individuality of each member – the individuality of background, the individuality of taste, the individuality of needs and the individuality of the ability to contribute.  And you have been prepared to engage in the process of tsimtsum of contraction, of recognising that everyone needs their space, that your way may not be his way and her way may not be your way but both are valid paths through Jewish life.  Recognising that through relaxing a little and contracting and making space and catering for a multiplicity of needs and ways, a living, expanding Jewish community can be created. 

And, in this way, the fragments of Jewish life, some brought with them by your founding members and some long discarded and forgotten are being recovered, re-examined, reconstructed, rearranged, revitalised in a way that gives one real confidence that this Diamond Jubilee is not something merely venerable and smelling of old age and moth balls but something that reminds us that 60 years is a tiny, tiny span in the history of Judaism but because of you and people like you there will be many more such spans to look forward to.

Diamond Jubilees are bitter-sweet experiences.  Because you cannot but be aware of change and loss.  But my parents have me and my children and Francesca and you have discovered how to work with the fragments and with the secret of tsimtsum, making the space for parents and children and grandchildren to flourish and grow in the community for many, many generations to come. 

Ken yehi ratzon, may that be God’s will.  AMEN.

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