The Movement for Reform Judaism

The Reform Movement Biennial Conference took place over the first weekend of July at Leicester. Here is the Conference Sermon given by Rabbi Dr. Tony Bayfield on Shabbat, 2nd Tammuz 5768.

We Are All Partners In The Repair Of Your World

Shuttafim Kullanu B’tikkun Olamecha

When Rabbi Miriam Berger (1) first became Associate Rabbi of Finchley Reform Synagogue and her brother, Daniel Bayfield, went to a service there, Daniel was heard to say that members of Finchley Reform Synagogue now have a choice on Saturday morning.  They can either have a lie in or a lai lai in! (2)

Daniel is an extreme Reform traditionalist, wanting all services to be like the services his parents forced him to go to.  Mind you, things have changed since the arrival of Zachary eight months ago.  Daniel now rushes to Tiny Tots at Alyth with genuine enthusiasm. 

I’m also a shul goer.  That doesn’t mean that I always leap out of bed shouting ‘Whoopee it’s Shabbos; let’s davven’  but I go.  I’d like to take this opportunity to say to members of Alyth here that if you don’t see me on a Friday night or a Saturday morning it doesn’t mean that I’m playing hookey from shul.  There are forty-one other communities within the British Reform Movement and many of them feel obliged to invite me for inductions, anniversary services, celebratory events and chagim.  Only very occasionally does complete exhaustion win the day.

I’ve often wondered whether I go to shul because, as a rabbi, I feel a responsibility towards community or whether it was my feeling of responsibility towards community that led me into the rabbinate.  In any event, I don’t think the motivation matters; it’s the action that counts.(3) But I’m a moody so and so and it shows in my behaviour and on my face.  I love being with my family and friends and there are times when, on the surface at least, that’s the dominating part of the shul experience. 

Over the last eighteen months, my Friday night at Alyth has been transformed by the unbelievable pleasure of hearing my seven year old granddaughter sing solo in the choir.  It’s not just about naches – though it’s definitely naches people can see on my face – because it isn’t the same watching her in the Akiva School production of “Florence Nightingale, A Religious Feminist Extravaganza”.(4)

But when I’m not with family – and sometimes even when I am – I want to be alone.  I’m not very good at joining in with the service (even though I get very irritated when I’m leading services and people don’t join in).  Sometimes stress, tiredness, irritability, lack of inner energy take their toll.  But quite often – believe it or not – I engage with religious issues; heart and head, with my deepest feelings and my personal theology.  I guess you can read the gamut of emotions from my face.  There are times when my eyes are closed and I’m not asleep.  And times when I look distracted because I’m ‘elsewhere’, inside myself.

One Friday night about eight weeks ago I was feel-think praying during the Amidah, just holding the draft Siddur.  A train of thought and feeling prompted me turn to the alternative second paragraph of the Aleinu and the phrase “shuttafim kullanu b’tikkun olamecha”, “we are all partners in the work of repairing Your world”.(5)

If I wasn’t such a wearisome 1960s rationalist and know-it-all accredited counsellor, I’d have called it a revelatory moment.  Prayer in action.  With me as a beneficiary both of the opaque, mysterious inner world of faith and of the genius that is Rabbi Professor Jonathan Magonet.  I knew that the phrase connected to Miriam, to Isaac Luria and to this Conference.  I didn’t know how but I hope I do now.  We’ll see!

A few weeks later I emailed Jonathan Magonet and asked him where the phrase “we are all partners in the repair of Your world” had come from.  He said that he thought he had lifted it from the prayer book of the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism.  I contacted Rabbi Michael Marmur, Dean of Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem.  Michael Marmur contacted Rabbi Levi Kelman of Kol HaNeshama (6) and Levi emailed me saying, ‘It was I what wrote it’.  He’d been working on the traditional second paragraph of the Aleinu with its emphasis on others coming to acknowledge our God and its negativity towards the gentile world and collaborating with other faiths.  So he’d worked in this radical counter-statement, affirming relationship, partnership with others (7); shuttafim kullanu b’tikkun olamekha, we are all partners, not just Jews. 

Partnership.  Miriam wrote her rabbinic thesis in the shadow of her mother’s death.  In particular, in response to that recent American import into our services, the prayer for healing – with names called out, the music of Debbie Friedman and an insistent voice, hissing in her ear saying, “It doesn’t work”.  She found a midrash in a lesser known collection called Midrash Shmuel.(8)  This is what it says:

It once happened that Rabbi Ishmael and Rabbi Akiva were walking in the streets of Jerusalem.  There was a third man with them.  A fourth man, who was ill, met up with them and said to them, “Rabbis, tell me with what I can be cured”.  They said to him: “Take such and such until you are cured” [and off he went].  The man who was with them, [the third man], then turned to the two Rabbis, “Who struck him down with illness?”  They said to him, “The Holy One Blessed Be He”.  He said to them, “Aren’t you involving yourselves in a thing which is not your concern, God strikes a person and you presume to cure him?”  They said to him, “What’s your profession?”  He said to them, “I’m a farmer, look there’s a sickle in my hand”.  The Rabbis said to him, “Who created the land?  Who created the vineyard?”  He said to them, “The Holy One Blessed Be He”.  They said to him, “You involve yourself in a thing which is not your concern, God creates it and you eat God’s fruit?”  [He said to them], “Can’t you see this sickle in my hand?  Unless I go out to my plot to plough it, clear and fertilize it and weed it then nothing will grow”.  They said to him, “You’re a great fool!  Just as the tree, if it’s not fertilised and if it’s not pruned, it won't grow – and if it grows but is not brought water and fed it won’t live, it will die – so the tree is like a body, the fertiliser is like its medicine, and the farmer he’s the equivalent of the doctor”.

Miriam’s research drew her to the conclusion, with which her supervisor strongly agreed, that although the story, featuring two famous 2nd century rabbis, Akiva and Ishmael, is authentic, it was included in a midrashic collection that was compiled and edited much later.  And also, it’s only part of a longer midrash which appears more equivocal because the farmer carries on arguing.(9)  But it was included at the point in the collection that it was and in the form that it takes – ending where it does – so that the compiler, the editor could make a very clear theological point.  Whatever the source of illness, we don’t respond by passive acceptance, saying that it’s God’s will and we don’t interfere.  We don’t respond to notions of illness as divine punishment.  Nor do we retreat into blaming demons or, and Miriam cites a contrary passage from the Gospels,(10) look for religious miracle workers.  Instead, we say, we declare, we affirm that there is a partnership between human beings and God with human beings striving to cure and God providing the source of healing.  Which is not the same as cure.

When I first read Miriam’s thesis, I was very moved – to find one’s own daughter wrestling with the same issues as oneself and finding insight and support in the classical sources – was wonderful. 

But by the time I was grabbed by Jonathan Magonet’s Aleinu and Levi Kelman’s phrase, it was Miriam’s use of the term ‘partnership’ (between God and human beings) and Levi Kelman’s use of the word ‘partnership’ (between the faiths) that really hit home.  The concept of God and humanity in mutually dependent partnership is an old one in Judaism and is frequently explored in progressive Jewish theology.  But suddenly what I’d known in my head, I felt in my kishkes, and in my soul.

Partners in Tikkun olam, the repair of God’s world. 

As you would expect from someone hopelessly scarred by his 1960s rationalist education – I’m a lawyer by training God help me – I’ve never been drawn to Kabbalah.(11)  I associate Kabbalah with mysterious diagrams, secret meanings and Madonna and only one of those dimensions has any affect on me.  But there is another dimension of kabbalistic thought that I find absolutely riveting, which has become more and more important to me in recent years. 

We need to go back to a man called Isaac Luria who lived in the 16th century in a world in turmoil.  Luria was a Sephardi Jew.  The shock and desolation of expulsion and exile hung heavily over him.  Disease, violence, hunger and sorrow were all around.(12) Death out of season was a constant reality.13  The world, if you will forgive the anachronism was, as it still is, a very narrow bridge.(14)  How do you connect a good God, a perfect God with such an obviously imperfect, painful, distressing world? 

Luria develops an amazing myth.(15)  The Ein Sof, the limitless God, (16) poured out some of God’s light into vessels which were to produce the sefirot, the potencies, the connectors between God and the world.  But the light was too strong and the vessels broke.  Some of the light returned to God but some stuck to the broken shards.  These sparks of light, these holy sparks entered our world.  Every evil deed imprisons the holy sparks more securely (17) and every good deed assists their release and reclamation.  At first it was intended that Adam would reclaim the sparks but he disobeyed, his soul became fragmented and each of his descendents – each of us – has a tiny spark of his mighty soul.

So there are actually two kinds of sparks.  The first are those which fell when the vessels were shattered.  The second are the sparks of Adam’s soul.  It’s not only the sparks from creation that require reclamation, but, in addition, every soul has its own task, the redemption of that particular spark of Adam’s soul which is uniquely in them.  A vast cosmic drama is being played out with us in the central role.  Each human being has his or her own holy spark, an inheritance from Adam, and each has to share in the task of reclaiming the holy sparks in creation.  All this is done by observing the Torah, by performing mitzvot, by fulfilling our ethical obligation to participate in tikkun olam, the repair of God’s world.(18)

The Lurianic system – with its demonic forces and pursuit of cosmic harmony – is largely obscure to people like me.  But it’s acceptance of an unarguable reality, of a perfect God who created an imperfect world is wonderfully honest and lacking in self-delusion.  Its conclusion which emphasises the task of human beings in releasing the sparks of goodness; which stresses our collective responsibility to repair the world as the very meaning of our being; the recognition that each individual has his or her particular task – that, for me, crosses the centuries and touches my soul.

Shuttafim kullanu b’tikkun olamecha.  We are all partners in the repair of Your world.  Partners with You.  Partners with all others of faith and of no faith.

About a year ago, long before the phrase had become particularly important to me or I’d any notion of what it really meant to me, I lifted those four words as the strapline for ResponsAbility, (19) the cross-communal, ethical initiative that the Reform, Liberal and Masorti movements, together with orthodox and secular Jews, have brought about.  The Director of ResponsAbility has just been appointed.  Her name is Abigail Morris.  She’s here with us today.  And we will be celebrating the formal launch of ResponsAbility in a matter of months. 

Let me just remind the person sitting next to you what ResponsAbility is about.  It’s about the formulation of a contemporary Jewish ethical response to the cutting edge issues of our day – particularly in the areas of the environment, medical ethics, business ethics, third world development, poverty and human rights.  It will stress that there is a distinctive contemporary Jewish contribution to be made – over and above the standard, secular, liberal response – that engaging with our sources, with contemporary Jewish experts and with the insights of other faiths and traditions will produce.  It will enable us to enrich our own identity and sense of meaning and purpose, whilst providing us with the inspiration and backing to go out and fulfil the injunction to repair the world.  And it will recognise that in a world where there are 2 billion Christians, 1.2 billion Muslims and barely 14 million Jews we can only repair the world in partnership with others. 

We cannot sit back and leave it to God.  God is the source of healing but we have to get on with the cure.  The world is often a harsh and fractured place but we are called upon to repair it.  Each group has something distinctive to contribute, born of its particular story and its particular experience, but the imperative is that we are all partners in the repair of God’s world.

I’m a shul goer and, like all the most worthwhile things in life, it’s a challenge and it demands effort.  But with our creative, innovative new prayer book anything is possible.  And if you see me in Alyth or Finchley, Sinai or Southport with my eyes closed or pulling faces, there’s a chance that I may not be asleep or in emotional turmoil.  I may just be praying from our new siddur.

ENDNOTES

1. My younger daughter, formerly Rabbi Miriam Bayfield.
2. I’d always thought it was a jibe against politicians!
3. Of course this is an overstatement and simplification, but one could argue that, in general, motivation is less important in Judaism than in, say, Christianity.
4. Probably sour grapes because she didn’t get the lead part.
5. New Edition of Forms of Prayer, p.313.
6. The much loved Reform Synagogue in Jerusalem.
7. If there was any doubt about who the ‘we’ is in ‘we are all partners’, Levi’s explanation confirms that it is all faiths and not just all Jews.
8. Midrash Sh’muel or Midrash Samuel is the only Midrash to a book of the early Prophets.  It contains authentic early material (tannaitic, from the 1st and 2nd centuries) but its final redaction or editing is certainly no earlier than the 11th century and is probably 12th century.  Both the conditions reflected by the midrashim and the problems dealt with point to its compilation in Palestine.
9. Midrash Temurah is an aggadic work, attributed to Rabbi Ishmael and Rabbi Akiva, dealing with the changes (temurot) in the world and in the life of human beings.  The author was familiar with Abraham Ibn Ezra’s Torah commentary and it is probably 12th century.
10. The passage is from Mark’s Gospel Chapter 2 in which Jesus tells the paralytic to take up his mat and walk.  Our midrash is almost certainly being used as a polemic against this Christian story of a miraculous cure.
11. Kabbalah is the mystical, theosophical system developed in the 11th and 12th centuries, culminating in the Zohar and re-cast by Isaac Luria, the Ari, in 16th century Safed.
12. I can’t forget the 1975 edition completely! See p.37.1
13. Ecclesiastes Ch 3: “To everything there is a season … a time to live and a time to die”.  Indeed.  But death out of season is another story.  
14. The reference is, of course, to “Col ha’olam culo gesher tsar meod’.  “All the world is a very narrow bridge” which was formulated by Nachman of Bratslav (1772-1811).
15. Myth not in the sense of fairy story but myth as allegory, as a way of expressing otherwise inexpressible religious ideas.
16. Ein Sof means Without End and is the way in which God as God Ultimately Is can be referred to.  I often suggest that the Ein Sof  is that which the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Sarah, Rebekka, Rachel and Leah; Christ; Allah all refer to.
17. Lurianic Kabbalah speaks of ‘kelippot’, the ‘shells’ or ‘husks’, demonic forces which feed on the sacred realms while attacking them.  The ‘kelippot’ imprison the holy sparks.
18. My knowledge of Kabbalah is, shall we say, far from extensive!  What little I know and understand is entirely due to my teacher Louis Jacobs z”l.  The various entries in his book, The Jewish Religion: A Companion are a model of clarity and provide references for further reading.  The formulations in this sermon are directly from Rabbi Jacobs.
19. Blame for the name ResponsAbility should be laid at the door of Rabbi Jeffrey Newman.  It is a play on the term responsa which refers to the body of literature through which contemporary issues of Jewish law were/are addressed through a question and answer (responsum  or teshuvah) process.  So, ResponsAbility will provide a Jewish basis to strengthen our ability to respond to cutting edge, contemporary issues in an authentic way.  Our ability to respond and our actions in responding are fuelled by our depth of contemporary Jewish learning and the richness of our partnerships with others.