A Personal Journey

The intellectual journey I have taken in this essay has been for me a personal one as well. I did not grow up in the United Synagogue and it was many years before I became convinced of its importance. In fact, the first time I was a regular participant of a United Synagogue, I had become its rabbi.

The first two years of my life were spent in an extended family. My grandparents on my mother’s side lived not far from Stamford Hill, a centre of traditional Jewish life. The house was large, and we lived together with them and what I recall as a whole entourage of uncles and aunts, cousins and assorted visitors. My grandfather, an other-worldly figure always immersed in books, owned a little shul a few doors away, and it was there that I developed a taste that has never diminished for small houses of prayer, in which physical proximity seemed to create a mood of spiritual intimacy, a kind of closeness to God that made prayer seem natural and unforced. I loved especially the mournful tunes of the prayers, always in the minor key. Even as a young child I could sense the bitter-sweet quality of Jewish life in those melodies from Eastern Europe which spoke of places and experiences far away and mysterious.

We moved, when I was two, to the suburbs of north-west London. The nearest congregation was a United Synagogue, and my father duly took me along. I refused to go in. The building seemed too forbidding, the people too prosperous and self-preoccupied. This was not a beit knesset as I knew it. Shuls in my experience were small, and the people who went there were not affluent or acculturated. They were poor, usually immigrants, and they carried with them a burden of sadness. They were nothing like the people here. If this was the United Synagogue, I wanted nothing to do with it. Only many years later did I realise that it was just such a feeling that had led to the formation of the Federation of Synagogues in London’s East End in the 1880s, on the part of working-class Jews who felt that the anglicised United Synagogue was not for them.

My father made enquiries and discovered that a mile or so further away there was a shteibel, a little synagogue in the house of a rabbi. Even for an adult it was a long walk, and for a young child something of a marathon. But I loved it. It had room for at most twenty or thirty worshippers. The rabbi was a silent, austere figure, but he instantly won me over by giving me sweets to eat during the service. Over the next twenty years I had occasion to pray in many synagogues, but they were all of this kind, small, unpretentious and without formality.

Once in a while I went to a United Synagogue, without finding spiritual satisfaction. The synagogues were too large, the atmosphere too anonymous, and the services less a participative activity than a performance in which the rabbi and chazan played the major roles and we, the congregation, were often reduced to spectators. No one welcomed us, we felt like outsiders, and we risked constant embarrassment by finding that we were sitting on someone else’s seat. In short, I did not like the United Synagogue. Its synagogues were more like the Temple than the Tabernacle, and its services more like “praying” than davenning. I felt that in its pursuit of Englishness it had lost some of the essential qualities of Jewish spirituality.

The change came in the course of the momentous weeks of May and June 1967. On 15 May, Gamal Abdel Nasser placed the Egyptian army on a state of maximum alert. Troops moved in force into Sinai. On 18 May, at his request, United Nations forces withdrew from the area. Four days later the Gulf of Aqaba was closed to Israeli shipping. War was imminent and its aim was the destruction of Israel. Conor Cruise O’Brien writes that “the mood of the people of Israel came as near to despair as it had ever come.” It was a feeling that swept across the Jewish world. There were fears of a second Holocaust. I had begun my studies at university, and in Cambridge during those weeks of waiting the little synagogue was full of students who had not been there before, praying for a miracle. For many of us those days evoked feelings we did not know we had. As the Holocaust had been for a previous generation, so the Six-Day War was to ours: the birth of the realisation that Jews are an am, a community of fate. As Shimon bar Yohai had said, “When one is afflicted, all feel pain.”

The war came and ended, and there was exhilaration at its outcome. But for me it started a train of thought which has not yet ended, twenty-eight years later. What linked me to Jews I had never met, and with whom I had little in common, several thousand miles away? Whatever it was, it also linked me – I now realised – to the many Jews at Cambridge whom I had never seen at the student Jewish Society until then. I began to be aware how few of them, perhaps no more than one in five, identified with Jewish activities in the town. I was struck by the sheer numbers of my fellow Jewish students who were simply drifting away. If I was joined by a bond of fate with Jews in Israel, was I not also joined with them? It was a question that came back to haunt me over the next few years and was eventually to change the direction of my life.

What about the Jews who don’t belong? The Judaism of the shteibel was ideal for those who went there. But what about those who did not? The shteibel was not an environment acutely conscious of the wider Jewish world. Where was the community that would connect those who were observant with those who were not, which was motivated by a sense of responsibility toward Jewry as a whole and which might address those who felt left out, excluded, uncomprehending, unwelcome and ill-at-ease? It was this that led me, slowly but inexorably, to the United Synagogue. For all its imperfections, it did care about the total community. It supported university chaplaincy, then in its infancy. It sustained the Chief Rabbinate, one of the few institutions to take a global view of Anglo-Jewry and its development. It did try to offer a spiritual home to the least and most observant alike. It strove to be both edah and am, an inclusive community of faith. Despite its occasional coldness, it took seriously the principle of responsibility, of being open to all and caring for all. It was the closest embodiment I could discover of the idea that had been so powerful at the time of the Six-Day War, that Jews form a single extended family.

Eventually, after many detours, I entered the United Synagogue as a rabbi, and I was not disappointed. The communities I encountered were remarkable in their range and breadth. In few other places in the world would Jews so different in their background and levels of observance have gathered in a single congregation to pray together and relate to one another. The social and educational programmes we organised drew on an even wider circle, some to the right of the United Synagogue, others to the left. When, later, I became the rabbi of a congregation in the West End we would be joined by many tourists staying at hotels nearby. They came from a broad religious spectrum, from Hasidim to American Conservative and Reform Jews, and from across the world: Texans in cowboy boots, black Jews from Ethiopia, Indians, Russians, Scandinavians and Israelis in their dozens. I used to feel a thrill when we came to the line in the Amidah, “And gather us together from the four corners of the world,” realising that Judaism was still a great overarching canopy of faith under which Jews from different lands and cultures could find shelter together, a few moments earlier strangers to one another, but now participants in a single community. More than most other Orthodox bodies, the United Synagogue extended the boundaries of belonging.

Much in its future depends on quite practical questions. Will it succeed in revitalising its communities? Will it attract outstanding rabbis and be more concerned than in the past with their training? Will it recruit lay leadership with the vision and will to think about the young, and the long-term? Will it develop a serious strategy for Jewish education, as it had begun to do before financial pressures forced its curtailment? Will it develop a more outgoing personality and be more welcoming to those who find it aloof? Will it learn actively to recruit members instead of waiting for them to arrive? In many areas, the signs are that it will. A new generation of rabbis and lay leaders has brought an altogether more extrovert and innovative mood to what was once a staid organisation, and this is what the moment needs.

But much too will depend on the continuing power of an idea, that of Knesset Yisrael itself. Will Jews still be moved by the only idea capable of explaining our history and collective identity – that of the Jewish people as a single entity standing before God? Here the signs are much harder to read, especially as we survey the wider Jewish world. Israel, a secular state, has become an increasingly secular society. By the mid-1980s President Chaim Herzog had already warned of the growing rift between the detraditionalised majority and the religious minority. The peace process has intensified it to what sometimes seems like breaking-point. American Jewry, preoccupied with its own problems of continuity, has itself become aware of the sharp division between its strong and growing Orthodox community, some 10 percent of the total, and the remainder, beset by intermarriage and disaffiliation. Three years ago I published a book with the title, One People? Readers in America wrote to tell me that within their community the question was no longer alive. It was too late to speak of Jews as one people. The gap was already too wide to be bridged.

I have deliberately set this account of the United Synagogue against the backdrop of large ideas, because that is where its significance lies. Commonwealth Jewry is one of the last areas of the Ashkenazi world to preserve a tolerant, inclusive Orthodoxy willing to take a leadership role within the total Jewish environment. If it declines, something of great significance will be lost to Jewry as a whole. For this to be avoided, these communities must keep alive the value which has sustained them until now. It is possible that young Jews will no longer be moved by the concept of Knesset Yisrael. The more committed will make their way to small, independent congregations of the kind I grew up in as a child. The less committed will join liberal denominations or simply disaffiliate. If this happens Anglo-Jewry will replicate the developments that have caused such anguish elsewhere.

A writer on Jewish themes knows not to predict. Too much that was unpredictable has happened in our history, and doubtless will continue to do so. But he can say what is at stake. Jewry today faces a spiritual crisis. It has done so for some time.

Israel cannot continue on its present route of secularisation without deep internal problems. Those who built the land in the early part of the century had a strong series of visions. They were constructed around the themes of socialism, a return to the soil, and the kibbutz as the model of a new kind of society. They owed as much to Russia as to Israel, to Tolstoy as to Isaiah. But they were coherent and sustained a generation of pioneers.

Today Israel is fast on its way to becoming an affluent liberal democracy on the model of the West, and Soviet communism is no more. For the last few years the most thoughtful politicians in the West have spoken about the need to renew their own moral and spiritual traditions. They have asked whether liberal democracies can survive the breakdown of the family, community and moral consensus. What they ask today, Israel will ask tomorrow.

Israel has an unrivalled resource in facing these issues. It is called Judaism, perhaps the most powerful framework of family, community and morality that exists. Sadly, many Israeli children within the main educational system of the state know little about this tradition, and are either hostile or indifferent to it. The religious minority in Israel, meanwhile, is growing stronger and more extreme. The two groups have become increasingly confrontational in their relationships with one another, and the peace process has highlighted a profound conflict between religious and secular visions of Zion.

The proper context in which to understand contemporary Israel, as Ben-Gurion knew, is against the backdrop of ancient Jewish history. Israel is not the Diaspora. It is the resumption of a story that broke off nineteen hundred years ago with the Roman conquest of Jerusalem, the story of a people in its land. If there is one theme which dominates all others in the biblical literature it is that Israel’s greatest danger is the loss of its cohesiveness and sense of purpose. An ancient drama of prophets against idolaters, and pietists against Hellenists, is being replayed between haredim and hilonim, religious and secular Israelis today. The old prophetic warning was that when Israel abandons its religious vocation a process is set in motion which damages the fabric of its society to the point where it becomes divided and weak. Were a prophet to step out of the pages of the Bible into the streets of Tel Aviv he would repeat the warning, and with reason. Though the prophets were imbued with the spirit of God they were also political realists, and that is what gave their message power.

A different scenario is being enacted in the Diaspora, but it is not unrelated. Having reconceptualised themselves as an ethnic group, Jews in America are discovering that ethnicity has little chance of survival in an individualistic culture unless it carries religious weight. That is why black Americans are turning towards Islam. In the long run, belonging is sustained only by believing, and many American Jews have lost touch with their beliefs.

For more than a century, Jewish attention was focused on the outside world. The problem was antisemitism and the task was physical survival. Today the peace process in Israel and the problem of Jewish continuity in the Diaspora have turned Jewish reflection inward, and we are troubled by what we see. Several generations ago a deep transformation took place in what one can only call the collective Jewish soul. Consciously or otherwise, many Jews stopped seeing themselves as “a people loved by God” and began defining themselves as “a people hated by gentiles.” The psychological cost has been immense, and we are beginning to be presented with the bill. There is no safe destination at the end of this road. Jews will learn to be at peace with the world only when they have first learned to be at peace with themselves. They will be at peace with themselves only when they have learned to make their peace with God.

One group has remained psychologically intact during these traumatic times: the most committed Orthodox Jews. Today, some within its ranks are in triumphalist mood. They know that, alone among Diaspora Jews, they face no problem of continuity. Their identity is strong, their families secure, their education networks are burgeoning and their future is assured. The more thoughtful among them know, however, that triumphalism is utterly misplaced. No one who cares for the Jewish people can be content if his family is safe but others are not.

Orthodoxy holds a message for all Jews. But in many parts of the world it no longer speaks to other Jews. It exists behind protective walls in an antagonistic stance towards the wider Jewish community. This, as we have seen, was born in the 1870s in Hungarian and German Orthodox secession, and it has continued and deepened ever since. There are exceptions. Led by the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, first Hasidim and then the yeshivah community developed programmes of outreach to the unaffiliated. They changed lives and led to a generation of baalei teshuvah, religious returnees. But their effect was on individuals, not communities. The divisions which began in the nineteenth century have become institutionalised in the form of religious denominations which no longer speak a shared language with tradition. They must oppose Orthodoxy in order to exist. So whole communities embody closed, not open attitudes, and a continuity strategy based on a shared religious vision becomes difficult, perhaps impossible.

If we were to propose one thing which might begin to “mend the Jewish world” it would surely be this: the creation of communities where Jews of all kinds could meet and encounter, in a reasoned, tolerant, inclusive way, the classic patterns of Jewish life and faith. They would not be instantly transformed. Some would continue to be non-observant, others would continue to be non-believing. But a series of possibilities would have been opened up. Jews would meet with Jews unlike themselves and learn to form a common life built on lasting relationships. The more learned might share their knowledge with others less knowledgeable. The more observant might become role models for other individuals and families. Jewish tradition might speak in accents less strident, addressed as it would be to a wider and more diverse constituency. Those who joined would have made a serious commitment, not a personal and temporary one only, but one that would affect their families over the years: a commitment to stay open and related to the Judaism that once united and sustained a scattered people over centuries of dispersion. Such communities need not be invented. They exist, and this essay has told how and why.

Most of us, in this uncertain age, have thought long and hard about Jewish identity. Since those days in the summer of 1967 I have tried to pursue such thoughts through whatever evidence was available to me: Jewish literature, history, and sociology. As a student, I made extended visits to Israel and America and in both places met with the leading exponents of Jewish thought. I can claim no authority for my conclusions other than that they have been tested and counter-tested as rigorously as I know how. Until the nineteenth century the Jewish people defined itself as a nation brought into existence by a covenant with God, an am which was an edah and an edah that was an am. Uniquely as a people, its very existence depended on a religious vocation: to bring God from heaven to earth in the form of a society that would be a home for the Divine presence. Not only they, but others, would sense that there was something unusual about Jews, their way of life, their persistence, their loyalty to an ideal through difficult times; in a word, their emunah. They would be, in a strange but unmistakable way, witnesses to the capacity of God’s presence to change lives, even the life of an entire people.

Through the Torah and the teachings of the prophets Jews were the first to bring great truths into the vocabulary of mankind: the oneness of God, the sanctity of life, the priority of right over might, and the importance of freedom, justice and a striving for peace. Albert Einstein once said, “The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice and the desire for personal independence – these are the features of the Jewish tradition which make me thank my stars that I belong to it,” and most Jews at most times have agreed. They staked their lives and the lives of their children on the proposition that they were the people of the covenant, moral heirs to those who stood at Sinai, observers of God’s law, witnesses to His presence, in some mysterious but unmistakable way, participants in a vast drama of Providence and redemption. They did not negate the value of other faiths, nor did they close themselves off from other cultures. They taught that “the righteous of the nations of the world have a share in the world to come” and they pronounced a blessing over gentile as well as Jewish scholars. But they knew that as Jews they had been born into a unique heritage of which they were the guardians. Unless it had inspired successive generations, Judaism would not have survived.

A secular state like any other, an ethnic group remarkable only for its lack of coherent identity – these are not values likely to inspire. And Jews – throughout their history small in number and always a minority, whether in a region like the Middle East or a country like Britain or the United States – have needed inspiration. Their strength, as the prophet Zechariah said, lay “not in might nor in numbers but in My spirit.” That spirit now needs to be revived.

Jewish faith is not mysterious. It is born neither in private experiences nor abstract theologies but in institutions: the Jewish home, the Jewish school and above all the Jewish community, the place where we assemble as a microcosm of an entire people in the presence of God. In this story of Jewish identity, the United Synagogue holds an honourable place. It did so in the past. I pray that it does so long into the future.