The Faith of a United Synagogue

There is no “United Synagogue Judaism.” There is Judaism and there are Jews: one Judaism and an infinite variety of Jews. Indeed it is only the unity of the former that is capable of shaping a single people out of the latter. Without Judaism – one Judaism – there is only a multiplicity of groups, sects and ideologies which divide Jews and render them a set of subcommunities with less in common with one another with every passing year. That is why the United Synagogue has never formulated an ideology of its own. As a matter of principle it is open to the whole Torah, not just part of it, and to the whole Jewish people, not just part of it, and it refuses to compromise on either fundamental. It has sought to create not a philosophy but a community, a living community built on the principles of Torah and potentially inclusive of every Jew.

But the very process of maintaining an inclusive Torah community in a divisive age means that the United Synagogue has emphasised certain aspects of Judaism that are not always to the fore today, and these are worth spelling out.

Firstly it is a community of faith, loyal to the principles of Jewish belief as these have been articulated through the ages. This has not always been easy. Since the beginning of the twentieth century Chief Rabbis – especially Hermann Adler, Joseph Hertz and Israel Brodie – have come under pressure to admit more liberal doctrines, particularly in respect of Torah min hashamayim, “Torah from heaven.” Hertz was eloquent in his refusal, saying to those who denied it:

You have dethroned God; and you have put your own reason in His place. You pick and you choose among His precepts, retaining only those which suit your inclination or expediency. Though you play with words and still speak of divine Revelation, there is no longer a “Thou shalt” or “Thou shalt not,” no longer a Moral Law that stands eternal and immovable in a fluctuating world of relativity. Man becomes the measure of all things, human and divine. We are back in the Iron Age of the Judges... There is no King in Israel; every man doeth that which is right in his own eyes.

Instinctively they knew – and everything in the biblical and rabbinic literature confirms it – that this was not a but the fundamental of Judaism. Alone among the peoples of the ancient world, Israel did not identify God with the sun or the rain or death or fertility, the great forces of nature. They understood that nature is often random, brutal and cruel. It has no moral purpose. Instead they discovered God in things not found in nature: righteousness and justice, moral responsibility and care for the weak and underprivileged. These values cannot be seen, they can only be heard; and therefore it is through words that God communicates with humanity. These words, contained in the Torah and forming the constitution of the covenant between Israel and God, are holy, which is to say something other than the words of man. For if the Torah were a merely human document it could be overridden by other human beings and we would have lost the greatest protection God has bestowed on mankind against our capacity, never more evident than in the present century, for error and ultimately evil.

The belief in revelation has come under massive assault in the past three centuries from several different directions. One, critical for Spinoza, was deism, the denial of a personal God who communicates with human beings. Another was the concept of history as evolution. Truth cannot have been revealed once and for all time, for human history is a form of progress from lower to higher forms. A third is secularism in one or other guise. The Torah must be a human document, the collective product of “the Jewish people in search of God,” since by definition all documents are human. Against these views, we believe that in Torah God has communicated His moral vision to humanity and His specific call to Israel. In it the Jewish people does not speak but is spoken to, by something greater than itself.

We are not fundamentalists, believing that the Torah is always to be understood literally, or that it yields its meanings without interpretation, or that faith demands the abandonment of intelligence. To the contrary, faith without reason is as tragic as reason without faith. In every generation there will be aspects of Torah out of harmony with the spirit of the age. In the early nineteenth century it was the return to Zion, which conflicted with the liberal Jewish understanding of citizenship in a European state. Precisely this example suggests that what one generation does not understand, the next generation may find the most inspirational of all. That is why emunah, faithfulness, requires humility, the willingness to stay open even to that which we do not yet understand, in the hope that one day we or our children will understand. The United Synagogue did not require faith from any of its members, knowing that for individuals it is achieved only after a long and perhaps never fully completed search. But it did preserve faithfulness to the great Judaic vision at the centre of its public life.

It is a community of halakhah, recognising the authority of Jewish law. Halakhah is Judaism’s unique “way” to God, turning abstract ideals into concrete acts and relationships, and making daily life a home for the Divine presence. A community of faith does not compromise the transcendent authority of halakhah by seeing it, as do liberal Jews, as subject to “the autonomous self” (Eugene Borowitz) or “communal consent” (Ismar Schorsch). To do so, as I showed in chapter seven, is to embark, however slowly, on the secularisation of Judaism, the path that leads from Solomon Schechter to Mordechai Kaplan and to an ever-widening breach with Jewish tradition. Jewish law has never been an expression of what Jews do, but of what we are called on to do, and it is as important to be able to hear the Divine “No” as the Divine “Yes.”

The United Synagogue has always adhered firmly to halakhah, permitting what can be permitted and forbidding what cannot be other than forbidden. It recognises that some of its members may not be personally observant, while others may practise greater stringencies than are required by the majority of authorities. It has striven to set a community standard, a framework faithful to Jewish law within which Jews, in all their diversity, can belong.

It is an inclusive community, welcoming every Jew, learned or otherwise, observant or otherwise, believing or otherwise, and seeing in each a valued member of Judaism’s extended family. Few things are more central to what the United Synagogue is than this. Maimonides once wrote, “It is not right to alienate, scorn and hate people who desecrate the Sabbath. It is our duty to befriend them and encourage them to fulfil the commandments. The rabbis regulate explicitly that when an evildoer who sinned by choice comes to the synagogue, he is to be welcomed, not insulted.” He was writing about Jews who had been forcibly converted to Islam, the conversos or as they were later called, the marranos. How much more so does this apply to those who publicly identify as Jews.

I have set out the foundations of inclusivism in my book, One People? Here I would only re-emphasise its centrality to the Judaic vision. It is the way of Abraham who, old and ailing, ran to bring strangers into his tent; of Hillel about whom the Talmud says, “Shammai’s impatience sought to drive us from the world but Hillel’s gentleness brought us under the wings of the Divine presence”; of Maimonides who ruled that one should behave respectfully towards Karaites, drawing them close with “bonds of love”; and of the late Rav Kook, Rabbi Soloveitchik and the Lubavitcher Rebbe, each of whom sought to bridge the gap between religious and non-religious Jews. As I put it in that earlier work, the inclusivist believes that “Even if we must sometimes reject the beliefs and deeds of an individual Jew, nonetheless he or she is a fragment of the Shekhinah, the Divine presence which dwells in the midst of Jews wherever and whatever they are.” The sages pointed out the immense harm caused at various points in Jewish history when transgressors were driven away. “Even if your left hand must sometimes repulse,” they taught, “your right hand should always invite back.”

It follows that it will also be a tolerant community, respectful of differences, defending its principles with reason and compassion, and seeking the best, not the worst, in all. This would not need saying, were it not that the Jewish world has tended at times to succumb to its opposite. We should therefore recall that the school of Hillel always taught the views of their opponents before their own. Ben Zoma defined wisdom as the ability to learn from all people. Maimonides told us to “accept the truth from whichever source it comes.” The sages taught that, when the prophets criticised Israel they were rebuked by God. The Rebbe of Kotzk, explaining why Joshua, not Pinhas, was chosen as Moses’ successor wrote that a zealot cannot be the leader of a community. One who follows the path of the sages, said Maimonides, may be humiliated but does not humiliate others; attacked, he does not reply in kind. His manner is gentle, he is the first to greet others, he speaks well of people, administers reprimands only when he knows they will be heeded, and seeks peace wherever possible. These are, or should be, communal norms.

It is a community of personal growth. In a passage which inspired the [original] cover illustration of this book, I once defined it in the following terms: “It is not the middle of the road. It is a moving escalator. The United Synagogue should not think in terms of static commitments. ‘He who does not increase his learning diminishes it,’ said Hillel. The United Synagogue’s task is to move Jews from one level of commitment to another and higher level... Its theme should be Shir Hamaalot, a song of rising steps.” To be a Jew is by definition to be part of a journey, sometimes geographical, always spiritual, begun by Abraham and Sarah and not complete until the messianic age. To live is to grow, intellectually and emotionally, and the best way to do so is to be part of a community which continually poses challenges as well as offering the resources through which they can be met.

It is a community that recognises the centrality of the land and State of Israel. It prays for the welfare of the state, and observes the festivals of Yom HaAtzma’ut and Yom Yerushalayim, recognising in Israel’s birth and Jerusalem’s reunification events which call for religious celebration. Successive Chief Rabbis, in the prayers they have written for the state, have held back from describing it as reishit tzemihat geulatenu, “the beginning of the flowering of our redemption.” Perhaps this was because they felt that, no longer having the gift of prophecy, we cannot say in advance whether Israel is or is not the beginning of a messianic fulfillment. Only in retrospect can we say what an event was the beginning of. But that is not to deny the central religious significance of what Israel already represents, the ingathering of exiles and the restoration of national Jewish sovereignty, two things for which we have prayed daily for almost two thousand years.

It is a community which is actively involved in the wider society and its culture. The first promise to Abraham, “You shall be a blessing...and through you all the families of the earth shall be blessed,” already emphasises the dual nature of the Jewish task, to be faithful to our own calling whilst being a blessing to others. Whenever free to do so, Jews have played a creative role in wider society, contributing to its economy, its professions, its sciences and arts. As Jeremiah told his contemporaries in the Diaspora, “Seek the welfare of the city to which I have carried you into exile; pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its prosperity you too will prosper.” Nor was this mere pragmatism. To be actively involved in the development of society is to contribute to the great Judaic vision of “perfecting the world under the sovereignty of God.” To do so with integrity as a faithful Jew is to fulfil the command of kiddush Hashem, “sanctifying God’s name,” by enhancing the respect in which Judaic values are held and leading others to say, in the biblical phrase, “Surely this is a wise and understanding people.”

It is, in other words, not a segregated community. To be sure, Maimonides mentions that there are times (“like ours”) when Jews may have to withdraw into their own enclaves: “If there are evil men and sinners who do not let him live in the country unless he mingles with them and follows their evil customs, he shall go off to the caves, the briers or the desert, and not accustom himself to the way of sinners.” He was referring to ages such as his own when entire Jewish communities were faced with forcible conversion, the threat of which forced his family to leave Spain and go to Egypt. It does not apply to societies which practise religious freedom, and Maimonides’ own role in Egypt, as physician to the local sultan and his court, is the proof. To be sure, in a society such as ours, whose values are often deeply at odds with the Judaic ethic, this requires that we intensify Jewish education and the institutions of Jewish life. But as Rashi points out in his Torah commentary, Moses told the spies that if they saw the inhabitants of Canaan living in fortified cities, behind walls, this was a sign that they were weak; if they lived in open cities, they were strong. It is a sign of strength that Jews engage with the wider world, contributing to its development, adding their voice to its ethical debates, helping to shape a larger society in accord with the universal laws of the Noahide covenant.

It is a community of communities, working together to do collectively what cannot be done alone. It is opposed in principle to communal separatism or secession. The sages interpreted the command, “Do not cut yourselves” (Deuteronomy 14:1) to mean “Do not split yourselves into factions.” Rabbi Naftali Zvi Berlin spoke about the fragmentation of the community into separatist congregations as a “dagger in the heart of the nation.” It is often forgotten today that separatism only came to be regarded as a virtue in the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, even those who fought for it did so as a last resort. Samson Raphael Hirsch, its most powerful advocate, stated explicitly that his action was the result of decades of provocation by the Reform-led community in Frankfurt, and that had he lived in Hamburg, where Reform was a minority, he would not have left the general community. In the Machzikei Hadath controversy which raised the issue of secession in Anglo-Jewry, the Hafetz Hayyim (Rabbi Israel Meir Hacohen) urged the congregation to make its peace with the Chief Rabbinate and the United Synagogue, as did Rav Kook who served as its rabbi in the years 1916–19. It is a source of great sadness that in many countries Torah communities dissipated their energies in fighting one another instead of working together to strengthen the community as a whole.

It is a community which accepts responsibilities to Jewry as a whole. The United Synagogue has supported facilities, among them the Chief Rabbinate, the London Beth Din, university chaplaincy, and hospital and prison visitation, which serve the whole of Anglo-Jewry. It has helped to inculcate the sense of kehillah, overarching community, which still characterises Anglo-Jewry at its best, and which is essential if it is to remain a single community of faith. It knows that there are many congregations not under its aegis and many Jews who do not share its principles, but it believes that “all Israel are responsible for one another” and that a synagogue body cannot confine itself only to its own members. There is an old Jewish saying that the hasidah, the stork, is an unclean animal despite the fact that its name means “the compassionate one” because it shows compassion only to its own kind. A responsible community plays its part in the welfare of all.

If I were to summarise these nine principles in a tenth it would be that the United Synagogue is, above all, an open community: open to the whole Torah, the whole Jewish people, and all sources of Jewish endeavour and passion. Just as there are open and closed personalities, so there are open and closed institutions. Those that are closed may be invulnerable, but they lack that conversation with otherness which is ultimately necessary to spiritual renewal and growth. There are times when institutions, like personalities, must insulate themselves in order to survive, but they are rare. Under the onslaught of secularism or aggressive reform, the defenders of Jewish tradition elsewhere chose this route, and emerged generations later intact and strong. It was Anglo-Jewry’s good fortune that this was not necessary. Tradition survived in a position of leadership within the community as a whole, without having to retreat behind protective barriers. Today, as Jews are returning to more compelling forms of spirituality, the United Synagogue must not lose its openness, the result of a century and a quarter of wise decisions. Precisely because of it, it will find itself able to discover new, even unpredictable, sources of inspiration.

When the Israelites completed the sanctuary in the desert, Moses blessed them. According to tradition he said, “May the Divine presence rest in the work of your hands.” That has always been the role of the synagogue, to bring the entire community together, old and young, rich and poor, righteous and not-yet-righteous, and create in their midst an openness filled by the Shekhinah. That defines the United Synagogue’s challenge and its faith.