## Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community

###### Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 1
[Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 1](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20I%3B%20House%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%201%3B%20The%20Architecture%20of%20Community/r/1)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
***The Architecture of Community***


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Walk around the Old City of Jerusalem and you will come to a strange realisation. The Christian quarter is full of fine churches. On the Temple Mount stand two magnificent mosques, El Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock. But the Jewish quarter contains no synagogues of comparable grandeur. Those that were there were destroyed by the Jordanians in 1949. Most have since been rebuilt though some, like the Hurvah, have been preserved as ruins. The largest place of prayer is not a synagogue at all. It is the open space in front of the *Kotel Hamaaravi,* the Western Wall, symbol and vestige of the Temple that twice stood and was twice destroyed. Since then, for the most part, Jews have not tried to rival its splendour. They built synagogues, *battei knesset*, houses of worship. But often they were small, modest and unspectacular.


###### Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 3
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Go to Prague and you discover the same thing. There, close to the centre of this majestic city of castles and spires, you come across one of the most famous and oldest of Europe’s synagogues, the Altneushul, where the great Rabbi Judah Loewe, the Maharal, lived and where, so legend has it, he created the golem, the artificial being who defended Jews against their enemies. Perhaps its protection continued into the twentieth century, because while other Jewish buildings were systematically destroyed by the Nazis, the Altneushul survived. Entering it you are struck by its tiny dimensions. It is a deeply atmospheric place, and has the feel of the Middle Ages about it. The seat where the Maharal sat is still there, and you can imagine yourself back in the sixteenth century when Jewish life was still lit by the flame of a faith not yet blown by the winds of modernity. But there is nothing lavish or spacious about it. By the standards of Prague the Altneushul is the humblest of public places.


###### Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 4
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The Jewish contribution to civilisation did not lie in architecture. There were exceptions. But at most times, Jews built relatively modest places of worship, and one is led to wonder why. Was it that often they were simply poor and few in number? Or that neither Christians nor Muslims allowed them to build houses of worship that might rival their own? Was it simply that experience had taught them that, during the long night of exile, no place of residence was secure? Had they been expelled too often from too many countries to seek permanence in stone? There is a measure of truth in each of these suggestions, but I cannot help feeling that the larger truth lies elsewhere.


###### Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 5
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
After the destruction of the Second Temple Jews lived by an ancient and fundamental insight, that God does not live in buildings but in the human heart. When He commanded the Israelites to construct the tabernacle, He said, “They shall make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell in their midst” (Exodus 25:8) – in their midst, not its midst. The *Shekhinah,* God’s indwelling presence, was in a people not a place. The traces of His spirit are to be found in human lives. What in other faiths was achieved through architecture – visible symbols of the order and majesty of creation – was achieved in Judaism through the life of the holy community, constructed according to the plans of the Torah. The rabbis carved, polished and engraved its teachings as if they were the stones of a great edifice, and so they were, but it was a living one built out of words and deeds. A Jewish legend says that when the Temple was destroyed splinters from its stones entered the hearts of the Jewish people. When they gathered as *Knesset Yisrael*, the congregation of Israel united across space and time in the collective service of God, they became a kind of human Temple and in their lives the Divine presence found its earthly home. So, when they were not trying to imitate their neighbours, Jews rarely put their energies into buildings. They put them into study and worship and acts of social welfare. They constructed synagogues, but what they built was communities of faith.


###### Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 6
[Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 6](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20I%3B%20House%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%201%3B%20The%20Architecture%20of%20Community/r/6)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
This book is about one such community, the group of London congregations known as the United Synagogue. As I write, it is in the midst of its 125th anniversary, and it has much to celebrate. Throughout its existence it has attracted the allegiance of the majority of London’s Jews and has had an influence over the rest of Anglo-Jewry and beyond. When it came into being the British Empire was at its height, so that the Anglo-Jewish example set a pattern for other Jewries as distant as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada. Even today these communities are significantly different from Jewries elsewhere.


###### Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 7
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
But my subject goes beyond a conventional history of one particular organisation. Instead I have attempted an intellectual journey into what it is to form a Jewish community and to become part of one. Along the way, we will encounter many of the dilemmas confronted by Jews in the modern world, and the decisions they made by way of response. We will reflect on the concept of *kehillah,* community as the framework of Jewish belonging, and on the role of the synagogue as a collective expression of Jewish identity. We will be led to think about *emunah –* the Hebrew word usually translated as “faith” but which more properly means “fidelity” or “faithfulness” – and how we translate that faithfulness to God, the Jewish people and the covenant between them into the institutions of our shared life. And we will discover that in modern times Jews found themselves reconsidering the relationship between “congregation” and “people” and asking fundamental questions about the nature of the community for whom the synagogue is a spiritual home.


###### Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 8
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Jews cared about institutions. They rather than the buildings in which they are housed are the true vehicles of the Divine presence, and they have an architecture – a shape, balance and structure – of their own. Institutions are more than meets the eye. They embody values, principles and ways of life. Their day to day functioning can often be depressingly routine. But beneath the surface, they are our most powerful way of turning abstract ideals into tangible and living relationships. Through families, associations and communities, a civilisation passes on its values from one generation to the next in the most vivid and comprehensible way, through patterns of behaviour learned and internalised until they become, in Alexis de Tocqueville’s phrase, “habits of the heart.” If we seek to understand a faith or culture, it is to these institutions that we must turn, listening attentively to their spoken and unspoken language, their distinctive rhythms and nuances. It is here that we will learn what makes a group something more than the individuals who comprise it at any given moment – what makes it a community of memory and character, or in Hebrew a *kehillah.*


###### Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 9
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
It is in its institutions – the Jewish home, the house of study and place of prayer – that Judaism’s unique religious genius is best expressed. The Torah is a code of great ideals: freedom, responsibility, justice, compassion, family, community and the fellowship of man. But it is in everyday life that the dry bones of abstract ideas take on flesh and begin to live and breathe. In Judaism *emunah* is not faith contemplated but faith lived, in specific ways and particular relationships. It exists not in books of theology but in the deeds we do and the words we say, in actions, transactions and conversations. It is easy to find God in heaven, harder to make a space for Him on earth, but that is what Jews have been summoned to do, and our institutions are of the essence of that project.


###### Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 10
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the case of the synagogue. Robert Trevors Hertford, the English theologian, once wrote that “In all their long history, the Jewish people have done scarcely anything more wonderful than to create the synagogue. No human institution has a longer continuous history, and none has done more for the uplifting of the human race.” More than any other framework, the synagogue has served Diaspora Jewry through the centuries as the home of its collective existence, the place in which it rehearses and lives out its aspirations as a people dedicated to the ultimate values set forth in the Torah.


###### Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 11
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The history of the synagogue is therefore one of the best guides to the journey of the Jewish spirit through time, and the United Synagogue is no exception. What makes it worthy of particular attention is the fact that from the very outset it was built on a momentous if never explicitly stated proposition, namely that it is possible, even in the modern world, in a secular and open society, to continue the classic terms of Jewish existence. This was so, despite the fact that in many other places, modernity was experienced as a traumatic assault on Jewish tradition. How so?


###### Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 12
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
For centuries Jews built communities. As soon as they had arrived in a country in sufficient numbers, they built synagogues, established burial societies, constructed *mikvaot,* ritual baths, and made provisions for *shehitah* and circumcision. They employed rabbis, arranged for religious instruction, and built Jewish schools. Later, as they became more organised, they developed welfare and philanthropic enterprises. So they had done from ancient times until the nineteenth century, continuing the faith of their ancestors and giving it practical expression wherever they went.


###### Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 13
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
But in 1870, when the United Synagogue came into being, the Jewish world was being shaken by a series of monumental changes, and more were to come. The corporate state of the Middle Ages in which Jews lived in autonomous communities was giving way to the new nation-state in which all groups, at least in theory, had equal rights. Jews fought for emancipation, which meant in practice the right to attend university, join professions, enter the civil service and gain admission to the Houses of Parliament. Throughout Europe and America this carried a price even if it was never formally spelled out. John Murray Cuddihy has called it the “ordeal of civility.” Jews had to acquire the culture and manners of the wider society, and in many countries and individuals the experience of living in “two worlds” produced a crisis of identity.


###### Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 14
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
More ominously, in 1879 a new word entered the vocabulary of Europe: antisemitism. It was coined by a German journalist, Wilhelm Marr, to describe an old phenomenon that was mutating into a new and virulent disease. Jews had been disliked and persecuted in the past because they practised a different religion. In the new civil order, however, religion was no longer an adequate ground for discrimination. Jews were still disliked, and if this could not be justified in terms of faith it would find expression in terms of race. Within two years the word had become a frightening reality. Pogroms broke out in more than a hundred Russian towns, killing Jews and convincing many more that they had no place in Eastern Europe. Over the next thirty years some two and a half million of them emigrated to the West, radically changing the character of communities in Britain, America and elsewhere.


###### Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 15
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The cumulative impact of these developments led to a breakdown in the structures of Jewish life for which, even in our diverse and often troubled history, it is hard to find a parallel. Until the nineteenth century there were Jews and there was Judaism, or more simply, there was Torah. There were different communities and customs. There were Ashkenazim and Sephardim. There were Hasidim and their opponents, the Mitnagdim. But the differences between them were small even if, as Freud reminded us, small differences often generate large passions. By the end of the nineteenth century there were Orthodox, Positive-Historical (later Conservative) and Reform Jews. There were secular, cultural and religious Zionists and there were anti-Zionists of various shades. There were Jews who expressed their identity through Yiddish or Hebrew culture. And there were Jews whose deepest wish was to forget that they were Jews. The differences between them were not small but fundamental. It was as if a hammer blow had struck the rock of Israel, breaking it into a hundred fragments.


###### Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 16
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
In England, however, a significantly different pattern emerged. Elsewhere Jews saw themselves as being faced with an inescapable choice. Either they held firm to heritage of the past, in which case they had to place a distance between themselves and those who were integrated into contemporary culture, or they became part of that culture, in which case they felt bound to reject or reform aspects of Jewish life. The alternatives were the ghetto and the melting pot. Jews were being called on to segregate or assimilate, and there seemed to be no third option.


###### Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 17
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The Jews of Victorian England, however, held an altogether more robust optimism about the possibilities of modern society. They knew that there were risks. It is said that when Baron Nathaniel Rothschild won his long battle to allow Jews to be admitted to the House of Lords, he made his excuses to those who were congratulating him and made his way to a small synagogue in Whitechapel where he was found praying: “Would that this freedom shall not mean the diminution of our faith.” Religion has always prospered in adversity, and when we have most to thank God for we tend to think of Him least. But the great figures of Anglo-Jewry – men like Chief Rabbi Nathan Marcus Adler and Sir Moses Montefiore – believed that it was possible to guide Anglo-Jewry in such a way as to preserve the great principles of Jewish life without at the same time closing oneself off from the unfolding possibilities of an open society, and without separating oneself from the majority of the Jewish people. To a remarkable degree, they were proved right.


###### Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 18
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The values for which they fought – the unity of the Jewish people and its continuity with the principles of the past – found institutional expression in many ways, one of which (though not for Sir Moses Montefiore, who belonged to the Sephardic tradition) was the United Synagogue. Its history has been written. But surprisingly, very little has been written about its philosophy, its driving vision of Jewish life. Perhaps until now it was not necessary to do so. Its aims were self-understood, and respected not only by those who were its members, but by others also. But there comes a time in the life of any institution when it is necessary to take stock, to reflect on why it exists and what values it embodies. Unless this is done, the organisation and the people who belong to it lose a sense of purpose and can fail to adjust to changing times.


###### Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 19
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Let me therefore say why I think the United Synagogue and its many kindred congregations represent something unusual and of enduring value. Some see its significance in a particular style of Judaism sometimes described as *minhag Anglia,* or as a teacher of mine once called it, “Anglican Judaism.” I do not. Style is not the essence of Judaism. Fashions change. The United Synagogue came into existence in Victorian England, and mirrored its aesthetics. The great challenge to Jews in those days was social integration, and at times they emphasised their Englishness at the expense of their Jewishness. They built large and imposing synagogues and conducted services of fastidious decorum. They were magnificent, but have since somewhat lost their appeal for a generation more interested in compelling centres of community, places of personal spiritual growth. Synagogue styles have changed, and that is a sign not of decay but of vitality.


###### Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 20
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Others think of the United Synagogue in terms of a specific philosophy of Judaism, variously termed “neo-” or “modern” or “centrist” Orthodoxy, whose great exponent in the nineteenth century was Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. This is in fact a misconception. Jewry in Germany and the United States did give rise to a self-defined neo-Orthodoxy. Anglo-Jewry did not. The United Synagogue was not the projection of a particular school of thought. Instead it drew its inspiration from all aspects of Jewish tradition. It was neither forced by Jewish dissent, nor prompted by inclination, to create an ideology. It stood quite simply for Judaism and Jews, wherever possible without qualifying adjectives.


###### Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 21
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The United Synagogue’s great achievement lay in neither style nor ideology but in the undertaking it set itself in its Hebrew name, *Knesset Yisrael,* “the congregation of Israel.” As we will see, this was a bold and by no means inevitable choice. It meant in effect that it set itself as far as possible to sustain the traditional nature of the Jewish community as a collective body dedicated to the service of God and the continuation of the covenant. Before the nineteenth century, no Jewish community would have contemplated doing otherwise. But by 1870, this was already a brave undertaking, calling for responsive leadership of a high order. It meant declining two alternatives: turning Judaism into a sect self-consciously separated from the rest of the Jewish world, or breaking continuity with the past and ultimately seeing Jewry as an ethnic group which wrote the rules of its own civilisation. Anglo-Jews have reason to be grateful that their predecessors for the most part refused these options.


###### Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 22
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
As a result, the synagogues that predominated in Britain and throughout the Commonwealth remained open to the whole of Jewish tradition and not just part of it, and to the whole of the Jewish people and not just part of it. The individuals who made up these communities were not more observant, or more Jewishly learned, in their private lives than Jews elsewhere. But in their public expressions and institutional forms they preserved the great Judaic heritage more widely and successfully than communities in many other countries.


###### Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 23
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Elsewhere Orthodoxy was reduced to a small and until recently embattled minority in communities in which the majority of the Jewish population were estranged from tradition. In Anglo-Jewry and the Commonwealth Jewries over which it had an influence, this did not happen. Despite all the pressures of more than a century of stress and change, they have held together as communities. A relatively high percentage of their population are members of synagogues, and the majority – in Britain between two-thirds and four-fifths – of Orthodox congregations. This means that in them Orthodoxy has remained more tolerant, open and inclusive than elsewhere. It has developed a stance of responsibility towards the community as a whole, and not merely towards its own members. It has ensured that certain norms and standards – those which link us to the Jewish past and to Jews worldwide – have stood unshaken at the centre of our communal life. This means that, by and large, Jews in Britain can talk to one another in the shared language of our faith, and at a time when Jewish unity and continuity are at risk, this is an achievement as precious as it is rare. Like the Altneushul in Prague, Anglo-Jewry survives intact where so many other communities have fragmented.


###### Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 24
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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Today there are intense pressures for it to go the way of the world’s two largest Jewries, those of Israel and the United States. This would mean a minority Orthodoxy, divided within itself, and a large majority for whom the Jewish past is a foreign country and Jewish faith as it has been lived through the generations something alien and strange. Were Anglo-Jewry to follow this road it would be a grave error. Individuals would be alienated. The community would be split. Orthodoxy itself would lose its breadth, its engagement with the wider world and its sense of kinship with other Jews. The public life of Jewry would be secularised, because the only ground on which Jews could meet would be religiously neutral: defence, welfare and Israel shorn of their spiritual dimensions. Jewry here would be embarked on a course it has already taken elsewhere with deeply damaging consequences. It would be on its way to becoming a secular entity rather than a community of faith.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Against this, I believe that it matters that there are Jews who, faithful to the Judaism of the millennia, construct communities in which that faith lives and changes the lives of those who become part of them. It matters that those communities are built around the life of Torah, forming an axis of continuity between ourselves and the generations that preceded us. A Jewish community should build its standards around its aspirations, holding out to its members the challenge of eternal ideals rather than an ever-changing set of accommodations to passing fashion, moral, spiritual or intellectual. It therefore matters that it embodies an institutional expression of humility in the face of God and reverence for the traditions of its ancestors, never losing its sense of infinity in the midst of space or of eternity in the flux of time.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
It matters that there is a living example of Orthodoxy that is tolerant, accessible and open to all, with no other precondition than that in its public expressions it respects the faith and way of life that has been passed on by Jews from parents to children throughout the centuries. It matters that there be a Judaism which, without compromising its commitments, is fully open to the time, the culture and the society in which Jews live, and which has the courage to wrestle with contemporary life rather than avoid the confrontation. It matters that Jewish communities feel themselves part of, and accept responsibilities towards, *Knesset Yisrael,* the extended “congregation of Israel” which encompasses Jews of all times and places, overcoming the perennial temptations of parochialism, sectarianism and narrow loyalties.


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**Maggid Books, 2024:**
These values are not peculiar to any one community of Jews. But wherever they are taken seriously, they will lead to something like the United Synagogue. If it did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. But it would prove extraordinarily difficult to reinvent it, such are the powerful pressures in today’s Jewish world to fragment communities into separate and competing sects, each going its own way. What has made the United Synagogue so important a model of Jewish life is that it has resisted these centrifugal pressures and will continue to do so, because they do justice neither to the Jewish past nor to our collective future.


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[Community of Faith, PART I; House of Faith, Chapter 1; The Architecture of Community 28](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20I%3B%20House%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%201%3B%20The%20Architecture%20of%20Community/r/28)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The United Synagogue has been much criticised in recent years. But the time has come to reflect on its specific virtues, the attributes which make it, despite its many faults, one of the more remarkable religious institutions modern Jewry has created. Its ideals are still compelling. If anything they are more important now than they were a century and a quarter ago. Its synagogues are impressive, but their significance lies in their inner life, not their outer form. They are a brave translation into the contemporary world of the revolutionary ideal which Jews have pursued for most of their recorded history: *Knesset Yisrael,* the Jewish people as a living community of faith. It is this ideal whose history I now want to trace.