## Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith

###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 1
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 1](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/1)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
***Community of Faith***


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 2
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 2](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/2)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
At the heart of any institution is an idea. Marriage, parenthood, friendship, citizenship, each embody a certain way of life with its attendant obligations and expectations. There is nothing natural about institutions. They are the order we impose on the potential chaos of human relationships. At their best, they are complex works of art, continually rehearsed and reenacted, through which we give living expression to some of humanity’s highest moral and spiritual ideals. I want now to understand what idea lies at the core of the United Synagogue.


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 3
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 3](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/3)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
There was a time when all synagogues expressed essentially the same idea, that even in dispersion, wherever Jews gathered as a community and dedicated themselves to the service of God, the Divine presence was with them. It and they were in exile but they were not parted. The synagogue was both a memory and a hope, a memory of the Temple and a hope of future restoration, but between the two Jews could still live and pray and carry out their ancient role as a holy nation.


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 4
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 4](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/4)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Under the impact of dramatic events, however, communities began to reflect on their experience and their relationship to the Jewish past, and not all of them came to the same conclusion. There were different kinds of Jewish community, each with its own sense of where it came from, where it was going to, and what its particular role was. Jews built their communities around synagogues – whenever they arrived in a new country their first collective request was for permission to build a house of worship – and it is in the names they gave their synagogues that we can best understand how they saw themselves. The name is daughter of the idea.


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 5
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 5](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/5)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The first synagogue in America was called Shearith Israel, “the remnant of Israel.” It is a name full of pathos. Its builders were Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had arrived in America through circuitous routes, but who were all members of families who had experienced the tragic events of the Spanish persecution and expulsion. Many of them had ancestors who had been forced to live as *marranos,* Jews-in-secret, and their families had spent the previous century and a half wandering in search of a place where they could practise their faith openly without fear of persecution. The name Shearith Israel speaks of a community which saw itself as the survivors of a catastrophe. They were the vestige, the faithful “remnant” of which the prophets spoke, who would endure the sufferings of exile and eventually return to the land of Israel.


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 6
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 6](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/6)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Two centuries later, when the Reform leader Isaac Mayer Wise moved to Cincinnati, an entirely different mood prevailed. Following the lead of the first Reform congregation, in Hamburg, he proposed to call his place of worship not a synagogue but a Temple. This was a deliberate revolution. In his dedicatory address in 1865 Wise explained that the traditional synagogue embodied a longing and a sense of loss for the Temple that had been destroyed and would one day be rebuilt. Jews in America, he argued, had no place for such sentiments. This was now their home and they wanted no other. They neither mourned the Temple nor sought to remember Jerusalem. Changing the name from synagogue to Temple was a deliberate rejection of traditional Jewish belief in exile and the return to Zion.


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 7
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 7](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/7)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Yet another pattern began to emerge in the 1880s as East European immigrants arrived in their hundreds of thousands. Driven by a stronger sense of solidarity and ethnicity than the German Jews who preceded them, they created *hevrot,* “fellowships,” centred on the three classic principles of Jewish community: study, collective worship, and mutual welfare. Organised on the *Landsmannschaft* principle, they brought together immigrants from the same place of origin, and to emphasise this they were usually known as *Anshei,* “Men of,” followed by the name of the European town or region from which they came. Thousands of these *hevrot* grew up in New York between 1880 and 1920, and they formed a rich network of meeting places and support groups through which the new arrivals could share memories of *di alte heym,* the old home, and create friendly societies which offered help in times of need – sickness, unemployment, marriage and burial. Their names signalled that they were communities of people from such-and-such a place, strangers in a new land, and that they would stay together, help each other, and recreate the life they knew elsewhere. The *hevrot* represented a religion-saturated ethnicity.


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 8
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 8](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/8)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
At the same time, other communities saw their role as combatants in an ideological war. Those who defined themselves primarily in terms of their opposition to Reform gave their congregations names such as *Machzikei Hadath* or *Shomrei Hadath*, “Upholders” or “Guardians of the Faith.” A letter written in the 1890s by the leaders of the London *Machzikei Hadath* congregation at the height of their controversy with Chief Rabbi Hermann Adler gives us a sense of their mood: “We are therefore justly proud that this Holy idea came to us to take up the battle of the Lord of Hosts, so that the Faith of Israel shall not be forgotten by all.” Such communities saw themselves as lone guardians of Judaism in an age of assimilation and Reform.


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 9
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 9](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/9)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The two most significant names, as we have already noted, were those associated with Samson Raphael Hirsch in Germany and Mordechai Kaplan in America. More than any other they illustrate the rift which developed in Jewry in the nineteenth century and which still divides it today. Hirsch’s community, in common with other secessionist congregations, was known as *Adath Yisrael.* It was explicitly an *edah,* a congregation that had separated itself from the wider community or *kehillah.* As Hirsch himself wrote, “Religious unity has not existed for some time and wherever it is missing, the enforced unity of the community...is nothing but an empty, meaningless form.”


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 10
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 10](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/10)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Kaplan’s decision – the polar opposite of Hirsch’s – to call his Jewish centre a *Beit Am,* a “house of the people,” was perhaps the first time in Jewish history that a diaspora Jewish community had proposed organising itself on secular ethnic lines, with religious observance transmuted into “folkways” serving no higher purpose than group survival for its own sake.


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 11
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 11](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/11)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Each of these names bears witness to a period of intense and destabilising change. Jews had been exposed to social and political upheaval in an age of revolutions, and they were often its direct target. Caught between the twin forces of liberalisation and antisemitism, they faced pressures for which they were unprepared, and the synagogue became the arena in which dramas of adjustment and resistance were enacted. The names they bore signalled the paths their members wished to take. This is the context against which we must understand the significance of the name chosen by the founders of the United Synagogue. It was to be *Kehillah Kedoshah Knesset Yisrael,* the “holy community of the congregation of Israel.”


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 12
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 12](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/12)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
There are many names for community in Judaism. In addition to the biblical terms *am,* “people,” *edah,* “congregation,” and *kahal “*assembly,” there is the rabbinic *tzibbur,* a legally constituted collectivity as opposed to an individual. When speaking of communal governance, the rabbis used the phrase *bnei ha’ir,* “people of the city,” or community council. In post-talmudic times the word *kehillah* was used to signify both an individual congregation and a larger regional assembly. But when the rabbis sought a term to describe the Jewish people as a whole, particularly when they wished to emphasise its character as a totality united across space and time, they used the phrase *Knesset Yisrael,* “the congregation of Israel.”


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 13
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 13](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/13)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The phrase is rabbinic, and does not appear in the Hebrew Bible. It occurs twenty-four times in the Babylonian Talmud, 248 times in aggadic midrash and thirty-one times in Rashi’s commentary to *Tanakh.* It is not employed in legal contexts, but only in those passages where the sages charted the landscape of Jewish thought. It is the phrase in which they expressed the idea that the Jewish people is a mystical entity whose essential unity survives despite the fact that they appear to be no more than groups of individuals scattered across the globe. Specifically, it was the term they used to describe the Jewish people in its relationship with God.


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 14
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 14](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/14)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
[During creation] the Sabbath day pleaded with the Holy One, blessed be He. “All the other days have a partner, but I have no partner.” God replied*, “Knesset Yisrael* will be your partner.”
“I am black but comely” (Song of Songs 1:5). It was *Knesset Yisrael* who said this. “I am black on account of my own deeds, but I am comely on account of the deeds of my ancestors.” “I am black in my own sight but comely before my Creator.”
*Knesset Yisrael* said to the Holy One, blessed be He, “Even when You distress me, when You cause me pain, still You are my beloved.”
“Out of the depths I have called You, O Lord” (Psalm 130:1). The rabbis said that this verse was uttered by *Knesset Yisrael* who said, “I am she and beloved am I. For though I am plunged into the depths of Gehinnom, when the Holy One, blessed be He, delivers me from its depths, I shall blossom forth in good deeds and sing a song before Him.”


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 15
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 15](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/15)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
In these and many other statements in a similar vein the sages gave voice to their deepest feelings about the Jewish people and the unbreakable bonds of love between it and God. Though they had sinned, they were not forsaken. Though they were in exile, the covenant remained. At times they came close to despair, but they knew that the Guardian of Israel neither slumbered nor slept and would honour His promise to redeem them at the end of days. *Knesset Yisrael* was more than the name of a people. It was the faith of a people, that their loyalty would awaken an answering response from Heaven. Though they had been driven from their land, they were not alone. In exile, the Divine presence was with them.


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 16
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 16](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/16)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Above all, the phrase *Knesset Yisrael* signalled the rabbinic faith that despite their dispersion Jews were still one people. In the second century of the Common Era Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai taught that Israel was a nation “like a single body with a single soul – when one sins all are punished, and when one is afflicted all feel pain.” His proof-text was the phrase in Jeremiah (50:17), “Israel is a scattered sheep.” They are not a scattered flock but a scattered sheep, meaning that even in their dispersion they remain like a single individual. A remarkable talmudic homily states that just as Israel binds itself to God by wearing *tefillin,* so God as it were binds Himself to Israel. In Israel’s *tefillin* is inscribed the unity of God. In God’s *tefillin* is inscribed the unity of Israel: “Who is like your people Israel, a nation one on earth?” (I Chronicles 17:21). “The Holy One, blessed be He, says to Israel: Just as you have made me a single entity in the world, so I will make you a single entity in the world.”


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 17
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 17](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/17)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
This idea is so familiar that only with difficulty can we understand how remarkable it was. Prior to the destruction of the Second Temple no one doubted that Jews were a people. They were a nation in their land, and they were held together, as is every people, by bonds of politics, geography and history. Even when a section of the nation was sent into exile in Babylon, others remained in Israel and the exiles, sustained by the vision of the prophets, never lost hope of return. Within seventy years the hope was fulfilled. But by the second century of the Common Era, with Jerusalem in ruins and the Bar Kochba rebellion brutally suppressed, Jews had no realistic expectation of imminent return. The last days of the Second Temple produced no prophets of consolation, no Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel, to keep hope alive. The most farsighted of them knew that Jews faced an unprecedented period of dispersion. There were already Jewish communities scattered across the world, but now or soon there would be no centre to hold them together. In what sense therefore were they still a people?


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 18
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 18](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/18)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Imagine this, that at some time in the seventeenth century England had been conquered, its population transplanted across Europe, its main buildings and institutions destroyed, and the country and its capital renamed. For how long would English identity survive? For several generations, but not longer. There might be initial, abortive attempts at reconquest. There would be local gatherings of Englishmen abroad. They would share memories, think of old times, and keep the language alive. But their children or grandchildren would adjust to the new reality, learn the local language, adapt to the surrounding culture, dismiss their parents’ longings as mere sentimentality, and Englishness would fade away. That was the prospect faced by Jews in the second century, and it allows us to understand the fateful significance of the idea of *Knesset Yisrael.*


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 19
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 19](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/19)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
It declared that Jews were still a people. They had none of the normal prerequisites of a people. They were not united by race or ethnic origin or geographical proximity or political association. They spoke different languages, had different customs, and dressed differently from one another. Nonetheless they were still *Knesset Yisrael,* the Jewish people as a single entity before God. They were not merely a religion. Religions are not peoples. The Christian states of medieval Europe were a multiplicity of peoples and nations capable of waging war against one another. Religions unite individuals with God, not necessarily with one another. Jews constituted more than a religion, a set of “churches,” sects or denominations. They were a single cohesive unit bound by the covenant through which “All Israel are responsible for one another.” Their dispersion was not the end of their collective life, because they still prayed and performed *mitzvot* and studied Torah, and when they did so they felt joined as in ancient times to God, the land of Israel and the totality of all Jews. Uniquely it was a peoplehood sustained by faith alone. Because they were an *edah* they were still an *am.* Because they were still a religious community – one community, not a collection of them – they were still a nation. As love and fidelity come together in the concept of marriage, so *am* and *edah* came together in the idea of *Knesset Yisrael.* It is not an exaggeration to say that without this idea the Jewish people would not have survived.


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 20
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 20](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/20)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
In it the sages reasserted, in an age of crisis, the concept which drives the Torah itself, namely that it was the covenant at Sinai which turned Israel into a nation. It was neither the ethnic fact of common descent from Jacob, nor the political fact of sovereignty in a land, but the religious fact that all Israel had joined together to accept a constitution, the Torah, which would set God at the centre of their lives. The covenant included all Jews, men and women, young and old, pious and wayward, and all their future generations. It was not the code of an elite, of prophets or priests or princes. It was the text and context of an entire people.


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 21
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 21](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/21)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Time and again the rabbis emphasised the inclusiveness of the covenant. “Even the emptiest of Israel is as full of good deeds as a pomegranate is of seeds.” “Whether they act as children of God or they do not so act, they are still called the children of God.” “Any fast which does not include the transgressors of Israel is not a fast.” The “four kinds” on the festival of Sukkot represent the four kinds of Jew – those with and without learning, with and without good deeds. Only when they are bound together do they secure atonement. “Moses commanded us a Torah as the inheritance of the congregation of Jacob” (Deuteronomy 33:4) was interpreted to mean that Torah was the inheritance of all Israel, not merely of scholars. The crown of kingship may have belonged to David and his heirs, and the crown of priesthood to Aaron and his sons, but the crown of Torah was the inalienable right of every Jew.


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 22
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 22](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/22)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The sages were familiar with the notion of a spiritual elite within Judaism. There had been the biblical priesthood. There were the pietist groupings in the late Second Temple period, *perushim* (separatists), and *haverim* (fellowships practising self-imposed ritual stringencies). There were sects outside the mainstream rabbinic tradition such as the Essenes and the Qumran sect known to us through the Dead Sea Scrolls. The rabbis themselves were a scholarly elite, sometimes at odds with the *am haaretz,* the unlearned. It is therefore all the more striking that the sages strove to avoid elitism, emphasising instead the solidarity and indivisibility of Israel. *Knesset Yisrael,* God’s covenantal partner, was the community of all Jews past, present and future, united as they stood before God in their houses of study and prayer as they had once before stood at the foot of Mount Sinai. It was the concept of Jewry as a single community of faith.


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 23
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 23](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/23)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
This is the profound significance of the synagogue as a *bet knesset.* The key text here is the phrase, “And I shall be sanctified in the midst of the children of Israel” (Leviticus 22:32). In its original context it meant what it said: God would be sanctified through the service of an entire people living in, or journeying to, its land. The oral tradition, however, took “in the midst of” to mean ten people, a *minyan,* any public gathering of Jews for prayer. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik explains this quorum for public prayer in terms of the concept of *shelihut,* agency. Just as an agent acts on behalf of and represents the person who has empowered him, so whenever ten Jews assemble for holy purposes they represent not merely a congregation of worshippers but the Jewish people in its totality. They become “the embodiment of the entire *Knesset Yisrael*:”


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 24
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 24](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/24)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
*Knesset Yisrael* is not just a collectivity, a crowd, a herd or a multitude. It is a separate entity, a living individuality. It embraces not only contemporary Jews but also the entire history of those people who have lived and died with *Shema Yisrael* on their lips. It includes the heroes and the cowards, the great and the small, the well-known historical figures as well as the anonymous people who are buried in unmarked graves. All are part of *Knesset Yisrael*. All are personified by ten ordinary Jews who gather together to pray as a *tzibbur* (congregation)... There is only one *Knesset Yisrael* and it prays with every *minyan* of ten.


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 25
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 25](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/25)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
The synagogue was therefore not merely what it had been in Ezekiel’s day, an echo of Jerusalem. It was also the recreation of the Jewish people. Those who gathered there were more than *a* congregation. In a halakhic and mystical sense they were *the* congregation, the re-embodiment here-and-now of the Jewish people as it had stood at Sinai and pledged itself to God. In the synagogue Jews anticipated not only the rebuilding of Jerusalem but also the physical and spiritual reunification of the Jewish nation. This is a deep and metaphysical idea, but it has been Judaism’s genius to translate such ideas into living institutions, never more so than in the case of the synagogue.


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 26
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 26](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/26)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
It takes courage to assert an ancient idea in an age of crisis and make it live again in an entirely new environment. It marks the difference between renewal and mere clinging to the past. In the last days of the Second Temple, there were those who did indeed cling to the past. They were known as Sadducees. They were attached to the Temple, and within a generation of its destruction they had disappeared. The Pharisees laboured to understand not just the surface of Judaism but its subterranean traditions and principles, and because of this they and their heirs, the rabbis, were able to renew Judaism and rescue it from collapse.


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 27
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 27](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/27)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
Nathan Marcus Adler lived at another time of crisis. The structures of tradition were shaking throughout Europe and America. Whether it was the good fortune of conditions in England or the wisdom of his leadership, he made the decision to create in Britain a Jewish community that would resist the twin temptations of being Orthodox but exclusive, or inclusive but non-Orthodox, but would instead be faithful to one of Judaism’s most majestic ideas, *Knesset Yisrael,* the community of all Jews standing before God. It took an unlikely combination of skills and circumstances for him to succeed, and naturally he did not do so completely. But he and Commonwealth Jewry did so more effectively than anywhere else, and their achievement has lasted for more than a hundred years.


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 28
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 28](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/28)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
It is sometimes believed that Anglo-Jewry made no original contribution to modern Jewish thought. It had no thinker of the stature of Hirsch or Rav Kook or Rabbi Soloveitchik. It produced no new synthesis, no ideology, no “Modern Orthodoxy.” In a sense, this is true. Modern Orthodoxy is the name given to a self-conscious encounter between Jewish faith and modern thought. It arises when the need is felt to prove their compatibility. Anglo-Jewry felt no such need. Figures like Chief Rabbis Nathan Adler, Joseph Hertz and Lord Jakobovits were obviously at home in both Jewish scholarship and the wider culture of their day, and they won the argument by personal example rather than in the realm of theory.


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 29
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 29](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/29)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
But Anglo-Jewry did yield something new. Elsewhere I have called it Inclusive Orthodoxy. The difference is this. Modern Orthodoxy is concerned with ideas, Inclusivism with people. Modern Orthodoxy seeks to show that Jewish faith can be expressed in the language of contemporary thought. Inclusive Orthodoxy seeks to keep Jewish faith at the heart of the collective life of Jews. Modern Orthodoxy is about content, Inclusivism about constituency. Modern Orthodoxy, like Maimonides’ *Guide for the Perplexed,* is an answer to the problems of an intellectual elite. Inclusivism is concerned with Jews as a whole, learned and unlearned alike. When Modern Orthodoxy succeeds it creates a philosophy. When Inclusivism succeeds, it creates a community. That is what Nathan Marcus Adler did, and it makes his contribution to modern Jewry no less significant than that of Hirsch.


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 30
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 30](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/30)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
I return to the question with which I began: what idea lies at the core of the United Synagogue? It is an idea quite different from that which governed most other congregations in modern times. It was a bold statement that even at a time when Jewish communities were fragmenting elsewhere, Anglo-Jewry would reaffirm the classic concept of Jewish religious peoplehood, *Knesset Yisrael,* the Jewish people as a single community of faith. This would require congregations to work together for the interests of the whole community. It would mean that they would on principle be open to all Jews, holding each of them to be precious whether they were observant or not, learned or not, committed or not. It would mean that Jewish leadership would have to be exercised in a way that was faithful and yet open, tolerant without ceasing to be firm. It meant that the United Synagogue could never rid itself of the tension between *am* and *edah,* peoplehood and faith, for that is what we are and in that endless wrestling match the congregation of Jacob has its destiny. It would never be as lucid as an ideological system. It would never be as pious as a separatist group. It would not be a community of saints or a gathering of scholars. But it would be what the Jewish people is called on to be wherever it is, *Knesset Yisrael,* the inclusive congregation joined by Torah to God.


###### Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 31
[Community of Faith, PART II; People of Faith, Chapter 10; Community of Faith 31](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Community%20of%20Faith/s/PART%20II%3B%20People%20of%20Faith,_Chapter%2010%3B%20Community%20of%20Faith/r/31)

**Maggid Books, 2024:**
That is not an insignificant task. That it was undertaken is impressive, that it was largely achieved, still more so. In an age of Jewish discontinuity, the idea of *Knesset Yisrael,* the community of faith, was somewhere kept alive.