Priorities

The crisis in continuity has been sudden, devastating and unexpected. Intermarriage rates in America have risen almost ten times in twenty-five years. All the available evidence points to a similar erosion in Anglo-Jewry. The Jewish family, the crucible of Jewish continuity, is disintegrating before our eyes. This has happened in the space of one generation. Why?

The answer is complex. My concern in this book, however, is with one dimension only: our collective response and responsibility as a community. From this perspective, the answer is clear. It has happened because for decades we have supported every Jewish cause except one: the Jewish future of our own children.

Communally, we have given too little attention and too few resources to creating new generations of committed Jews. We have allocated too slender a share of our funds to Jewish education. Only belatedly have we recognised the need for Jewish schools. We have failed to recruit and train rabbis, educators and youth leaders. To those we have found, we have given too little reward, recognition and prestige. Jewish youth groups have limped for lack of funds. University chaplaincy has struggled to survive. Education has been the lowest of our priorities. We have lacked a strategy for Jewish continuity.

This has not been because we are uncharitable as a community. On the contrary, we have given voluntarily out of all proportion to our numbers. One of the most striking characteristics of the children of Israel was that, whenever they were asked, they gave. In the wilderness, when asked to contribute to the Golden Calf, they gave without demur. When asked to make a donation to the building of the Sanctuary they did likewise. The Golden Calf was an idol. The Sanctuary was the home of the Divine presence. There was nothing in common between them except this, that they both came into being through voluntary donations. The Talmud Yerushalmi expresses amazement: “One cannot understand the nature of this people: if appealed to for the Calf they give; if appealed to for the Sanctuary they give.” Jewishly, to live was to give. It still is.

However, what has attracted our philanthropy for the past thirty years has been other places and other times. Our minds have been dominated by the Shoah and the State of Israel. We have monitored antisemitism and funded Holocaust studies. We have scanned the horizons of Central and Eastern Europe for danger signals of resurgent hatred. We have lived vicariously in Israel’s pain and glory. We have helped Israel build universities and engage in urban renewal. We have watched the miraculous rescue of Ethiopian Jewry. We have campaigned for and finally witnessed the liberation and exodus of the Jews of Russia. These were urgent, important, necessary endeavours. But in the meantime we neglected our own future: our children. The Holocaust, Israel, Russia, Ethiopia, are sometime or somewhere else. But to be able to remember the past we must also have a future. To be of lasting help to others, we must first ensure our own survival.

Why then has the crisis of continuity happened? It is because as a community, and without intending to, we have let it happen. The evidence is presented below. But first I want to consider two principles of Jewish law. They tell us much about how Jews lived and what they valued. They tell us more about how they succeeded in raising new generations of Jews. They tell us, in short, what our priorities should be today.

A MEETING Twenty-five years ago I had an encounter which has stayed in my mind ever since. The year was 1968. I was then a philosophy student at Cambridge University. It was not an environment conducive to religious belief. Scepticism or atheism were the order of the day. But the Six-Day War had awakened my interest in Jewish identity, and I decided to travel to America, the home of Jewry’s leading philosophers and thinkers, to find out for myself whether a cogent case could be made for Jewish faith in the modern age. It was there that I met a famous Hasidic Rebbe and heard for the first time a great principle of Jewish law.

Ushered in to the Rebbe’s study, I bombarded him with a series of questions about Judaism. His answers were courteous, brief, to the point and unemotional. It was a stylised encounter, a debate rather than a meeting of minds. My questions were predictable, the Rebbe’s answers conventional. Then suddenly the atmosphere changed. I suggested that the Rebbe’s kind of faith was too parochial. It was concerned only with Judaism and Jews. Surely there was a world outside with which we, as Jews, had to be engaged. There was global overpopulation. There was famine in Africa. There were political conflicts which had nothing to do with Jews, but in which we were nonetheless implicated as citizens of the world.

The Rebbe smiled, leaned forward and looked up for the first time. Staring straight into my eyes, he said: “Aniyei irkha kodmim, the poor of your own town take precedence. You are right,” he continued. “We have many duties. But there are priorities among them. According to Jewish law, our first priority is to ensure the well-being of those closest to us. We cannot save the world without first saving ourselves.”

The Rebbe was quoting from talmudic tractate of Baba Metzia which states that if there is a choice between assisting the members of your family and helping citizens of your town, your family takes precedence. If the choice is between your town and another city, your town takes precedence. The principle is echoed in many other places in Jewish law.

The ultimate aim of charity, according to halakha is to promote neither generosity on the part of the giver nor gratitude on the part of the recipient, important though these principles are. It is to create independence. So we find, according to Maimonides, that the highest form of tzedakah is “that of the person who assists a poor Jew by providing him with a gift or a loan or by accepting him into a business partnership or by helping him find employment – in a word, by putting him where he can dispense with other people’s aid.”

So an individual or a town may not impoverish themselves by giving their possessions away, for this solves one problem at the cost of creating another. An individual or a community must first ensure that they are self-sufficient. They are then in a position to help others, now and in the long run.

It is this idea that lies behind Hillel’s famous aphorism: “If I am not for myself, who will be? But if I am only for myself, what am I?” We believe in collective responsibility, in giving to others. Tzedakah is a cardinal Jewish virtue. But first we believe in personal responsibility, in creating our own independence and viability. And what applies to individuals also applies to communities. Domestic causes take priority over others. Not exclusive priority, for we must help other communities in need. But priority nonetheless. For if we fail to secure our own viability as a Jewish community we will eventually be in no position to help others, and the roles will be reversed. Instead of giving assistance, we will need to receive it.

A QUESTION OF PRECEDENCE That is the first axiom. The second was brought home to me in a most curious way. About a year ago I received an invitation to lunch with the Prime Minister at Chequers. At the same time I received an invitation to take part in the opening ceremony of a new Jewish school in London. Both events were on the same day, at roughly the same time. I could not attend both. Which took precedence?

A famous Mishna states:

Rabbi Hanina, the deputy High Priest, said: Pray for the welfare of the government, since were it not that they feared it, people would swallow one another alive.

Since the days of the prophet Jeremiah, we have “sought the welfare of the city” in which we live. We value the rule of law, the duties of citizenship, and maintaining good relationships with our neighbours and with the government. But there is another rabbinic teaching in Maimonides’ law code, the Mishneh Torah, which states:

If a town has made no provision for the Jewish education of its children, then its inhabitants are to be excommunicated until teachers have been appointed…for the world only exists in virtue of the sound of children at their studies.

Nothing could more vividly illustrate Judaism’s scale of priorities. Governments sustain society, but education sustains the world. On that occasion I regretfully declined the Prime Minister’s invitation and opened the school.

Consistently throughout our history, we have placed education at the very top of our priorities, not just in theory but in practice, and not only as individuals but as a community. In his Outline of History, H.G. Wells noted that “the Jewish religion, because it was a literature-sustained religion, led to the first efforts to provide elementary education for all children in the community.”

Nearly two thousand years before Europe, Jews had created a system of universal, free, compulsory education. Tuition for teenagers was begun by Shimon ben Shetach in the first century BCE. Before the destruction of the second Temple, Joshua ben Gamla had established a comprehensive network of primary schools throughout Judea. Towards the end of the first century CE, Josephus could write that “should any one of our nation be asked about our laws, he will repeat them as readily as his own name. The result of our thorough education in our laws from the very dawn of intelligence is that they are, as it were, engraved on our souls.”

By the fourth century CE educational policy had become so thorough that Rava was able to introduce a rule limiting the maximum class size to 25 (or 40 if there was both a teacher and an assistant), the first such regulation in history. Higher and adult education – in the form of the yeshivah and bet midrash – are even older Jewish traditions, and it would be difficult to find a counterpart, even today, to the Jewish ideal of lifelong learning.

Sustaining such an infrastructure was costly, and as a matter of principle, the burden of funding was placed not only on parents but also on the community as a whole. In fifteenth-century Spain, for example, the Jewish community established a series of ordinances to ensure that every child received a Jewish education. The revenue was obtained from taxes on meat and wine, circumcisions, weddings and funerals. The Valladolid synod of 1432 ordered “that every community of fifteen householders (or more) shall be obliged to maintain a qualified elementary teacher to instruct their children in Scripture.… The parents shall be obliged to send their children to that teacher, and each shall pay him in accordance with their means. If this revenue should prove inadequate, the community shall be obliged to supplement it.” Every community of forty or more households was instructed to provide advanced as well as elementary schooling. The Chief Rabbi of Castile was authorised to divert money from wealthier to impoverished communities to subsidise struggling schools.

Similar, if less detailed, provisions existed elsewhere in Europe. The fees of poorer children, and sometimes the salaries of teachers, were paid by the community. The funds were raised by taxes, or obligatory contributions on being called to the Torah, or house-to-house collections. In twelfth-century France, Rabbenu Tam ruled that when there was a shortage of funds for education, money designated for other purposes could be diverted to schools and teachers. The quality of education varied from country to country and from century to century, but there was one common factor. Until the modern era there was virtually no European Jewish community, however small, without a school and teachers. Benjamin of Tudela, travelling in Provence in 1165, could report that in Posquières, a town of some forty Jews, there was a great yeshivah. Marseilles, whose Jewish population was three hundred, was “a city of geonim [outstanding scholars] and sages.”

Documents have recently been published which shed vivid light on Jewish communal priorities. They come from Moravia (today’s Czech Republic) in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Jews in Central Europe had been devastated by the Thirty Years’ War, 1618–1648, and by the Chmielnicki massacres in Poland, 1648–1649. Community life came to a standstill. As normal conditions slowly returned, Jews began to rebuild their institutions. The documents date from that period and are the takanot or ordinances of various Jewish communities. They relate to the districts of Gaya (1650), Brody (1677), Kremsier (1681 and 1694), Goeding (1689) and Butschowitz (1707). Each of them is concerned with one thing: rebuilding yeshivot, academies of Jewish study. Every community was exhorted to establish a house of study and finance both it and its students, or incur fines.

The takanah of Kanitz (1713), having laid down provisions for the use of communal funds to establish five yeshivot, continues:

We have been taught by our ancient rabbis to be especially concerned with poor students, because it is from the poor students that the Torah will flow. Now, there are communities where the poor cannot support a teacher from their funds, while there are rich Jews who refuse to contribute to the support of teachers because they claim that they have no sons of their own, or they use some other excuse. In such cases the community council must hire teachers so that the students learn, each one according to his capacity, and help those parents who have sons, so that not one of them is without Torah learning. Each father, too, must learn with his son.…

The first thing these devastated townships were concerned to do, once peace returned, was to reconstruct their educational system. In the words of one of the documents: “Unless there are calves, there will be no oxen.” Without Jewishly educated children, there will be no Jewish future. There can be no more eloquent testimony to Jewish priorities than these records of communities piecing themselves together after catastrophe. While Europe built armies, Jews built schools.

So if the first principle of community is that domestic causes take priority, the second is that among these causes, education takes precedence. The logic of the second principle is the same as the first. Before anything else, a community must establish its viability, which means its continuity. It must secure the Jewish future of its children, which means their education. If these preconditions are satisfied, all else will follow. If they are lacking, all else will fail. Such are the teachings of Jewish law on communal priorities.

ANGLO-JEWISH GIVING In the light of these axioms, what are we to make of the following figures, published by the Charities Aid Foundation in Charity Trends 1992? They represent the amounts given to Jewish causes in 1991.

Charity \ *Total Voluntary Income

• \ (in thousands of pounds) Jewish Philanthropic Association \ \ 24,662 Society of Friends of Jewish Refugees \ 4,800 Jewish National Fund \ 3,535 Friends of the Hebrew University \ 2,232 Jerusalem Foundation \ 1,172 British Technion Society \ 1,096 Society of Friends of Federation of Women Zionists \ 1,048 CBF World Jewish Relief \ 2,019 Jewish Care \ 6,914 Nightingale House \ 2,371 Ravenswood Foundation \ 2,221 Norwood Child Care \ 1,218 Jewish Educational Development Trust \ 945 Friends of Zionist Federation Educational Trust \ 740

These figures tell us a number of things about Anglo-Jewry. First, they indicate that we are an exceptionally generous community. The Jewish tradition of tzedakah is alive and well. Second, they signal that Israel is at the heart of our lives. This too is an age-old Jewish tradition. For centuries when we prayed, we prayed towards Jerusalem. When we celebrated, we paused to remember Zion. Today when we give, we give to Israel. Third, the needs of welfare continue to move us to compassion. Gemilut chasadim (practical kindness), said the sages, is one of the three pillars on which the world stands. Jewishly, it still is. These are all achievements of which we should be proud. There are few if any other religious or ethnic groups who regularly show such generosity and collective practical concern.

However, the chart reveals a fourth fact, namely that Jewish education, the core of continuity, is the lowest of all our communal priorities. Dramatically so. In a year in which nearly £40 million was raised for Israel and £13 million for welfare, the two major educational fund-raising bodies, JEDT and ZFET, managed to elicit less than £1.7 million between them. Judged by this measure we allocated to education one-eighth of what we gave to welfare and less than one-twentieth of what we gave to Israel. Or, to put it differently, we gave more to one university in Israel than to the leading educational charities in Anglo-Jewry combined. This is not in accordance with Jewish tradition nor is it a fact in which we can take pride.

To be sure, 1991 was an exceptional year for fund-raising for Israel. It was a bad year for education. And the Charities Aid Foundation lists only the major charities, omitting smaller amounts raised for individual Jewish schools. Recently, however, the Board of Deputies released information about all Jewish charities in 1990. This showed that of the £47 million raised that year, 53.1 percent went to Israel, 35.2 percent to welfare and 10.1 percent to education and youth. This figure is hardly more encouraging. For it shows that even in a good year, the entire educational budget of Anglo-Jewry – capital and running costs, central and local charities, schools and youth groups – amounts to less than a third of what we spend on welfare and a fifth of what we send to Israel.

If 1990 was bad for Jewish education, 1991 was worse. The 1992 figures are not yet available, but in absolute terms they are bound to be worse still. As the impact of the recession on Anglo-Jewry has deepened, one Jewish educational body after another has faced financial crisis. A secondary school in North East London closed. A primary school in North West London warned parents that the same fate might be in store for it in a year’s time. The Association of Jewish Sixth Formers came to the brink of closure. The two largest providers of Jewish Day Schools, the United Synagogue and the Zionist Federation Educational Trust, both found themselves in financial difficulties. The United Synagogue’s Adult Education department was terminated. So was its provision of Jewish instruction at non-Jewish schools. The recession has had a devastating effect on all Jewish communal institutions, sustained as they are by voluntary contributions. But the first and worst casualty has been education.

Admittedly, these figures do not take into account what private individuals spend on Jewish tuition for their children. They refer only to charitable donations, to what we give to others and to the common good. My sole concern in this book, however, is our fate as a community. Traditionally, and according to Jewish law, education is not just a private duty. It is a collective, communal responsibility. Individuals can arrange tuition for their children. But they cannot build schools, devise curricula, recruit and train teachers, make provisions for smaller and less affluent communities and create a living Jewish environment outside the home. These things can only be done by the community as a whole, and by each of us contributing our share. That is what we are not doing, and that is why we are losing our children.

Patterns of giving reflect our scale of values. Communally, in Anglo-Jewry, we have broken the two fundamental rules of Jewish giving. We have not heeded the principle of aniyei irkha kodmim, that domestic causes take precedence over others. Nor have we followed the rule that, more than any other, has distinguished us from other peoples and faiths. We have not put education first.

GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS We should not exaggerate the bad news. Good things have happened in Anglo-Jewry in the past twenty-five years. In 1971, the then Chief Rabbi, Lord Jakobovits, launched the Jewish Educational Development Trust which raised the profile of Jewish education, built two schools and raised funds for a variety of educational projects, including some in the field of teacher-training. More recently, the United Synagogue has significantly enlarged its educational remit, culminating in the recent opening of two new schools, the Hillel Primary School in Southgate (1992) and the King Solomon High School in Redbridge (1993). In the past ten years adult education has flourished, and there has recently been great interest in the concept of family education.

The bad news should not be exaggerated, but it should not be underestimated either. We have raised capital sums to build schools, but not the funds to keep them going. We have concentrated on buildings rather than people (what the Americans call the Jewish “edifice complex”). We have focused, rightly, on day schools while, wrongly, neglecting the many other aspects of a continuity-creating environment such as youth groups and informal, adult and family education. More of our children receive intensive Jewish day school education than a generation ago, but many others are receiving little or no tuition at all. The JEDT Think Tank Report (Securing Our Future, 1992) showed that beyond the age of thirteen only half of our children continue in any form of Jewish instruction. By the age of sixteen this has dropped to one in six, and by the age of seventeen, to one in ten. It is this group – the half whose Jewish education is slight and growing ever less – who are most liable to leave the community through intermarriage or disaffiliation. Meanwhile, the recession has put even existing facilities at risk.

Anglo-Jewry lacks an overall strategy for education, for continuity and for communal priorities as a whole. As a result, in common with America, we have done what no Jewish community did between the destruction of the second Temple and the nineteenth century. We have neglected our intellectual, spiritual and cultural environment and the concept of a “learning society.” Worst of all for a people that has always cared for its future, we have put the Jewish needs of our children last.

It is not that we are ungenerous to Jewish causes. On the contrary, as the figures show, we have given liberally to Israel, Jewish welfare and many other aspects of community life. Nor are we, as parents, ungenerous to our children. If anything we have been overindulgent parents. Certainly, when it comes to our children’s secular education we want the best and are prepared to pay for it. So we are willing to give to Jewish causes and we are willing to give to our children. What we seem unwilling to do is to give to a Jewish cause when the Jewish cause is our children.

THE MESSAGE FROM ISRAEL This is worse than untraditional. It is little less than suicidal. Whatever our commitments as Jews, they can only be sustained in the long run if there is going to be a next generation of Jews. If we care about Israel, how will this help us or Israel if our grandchildren no longer feel any ties with the Jewish people and its homeland? If we care about welfare, how will this help those in need fifty years from now, if our grandchildren are no longer part of a community that recognises the need for collective responsibility and care?

Whatever we value, we wish to see continued by our children and theirs. If we care about anything beyond ourselves, we do not wish to see it come to an end with ourselves and our generation. Our present patterns of Jewish giving, if continued into the future, are destined to end in the collapse of Jewish life in the diaspora for all but a minority of the most intensely religious. We will have given to Israel but not to our own community’s future. We will have given to the old but not the young. We will have given to Jewish defence against external enemies but not to Jewish defence against the most powerful enemy of all: internal Jewish ignorance and indifference.

Unprecedentedly, this message is now coming not only from religious leaders but from secular figures as well, and not only in the diaspora but even in Israel itself. In the past, Israel has been candid in its demands of the diaspora. It has called for support for Israel: political, financial and above all by way of aliyah. Never before have Israeli politicians called on Jewish communities abroad to start supporting themselves through Jewish education.

However, in the Knesset on 22 December 1992 Labour member Eli Dayan called on Israel to energise the diaspora to save itself from assimilation. He pleaded for a concerted Jewish effort to mobilise resources in a worldwide Jewish educational campaign. President Chaim Herzog expressed a similar sentiment in a letter to me in October 1992:

For many years I have insisted, at every conceivable opportunity, both privately and in public appearances, that Jewish education in the diaspora is paramount and must be accorded a very high priority in the activities of every Jewish community. This is not only in the interests of the communities abroad. It is also of vital interest to the State of Israel. Israel’s centrality in the Jewish world assumes the existence of a strong and vibrant Jewish community abroad and Jewish education in the diaspora is, therefore, of the greatest possible importance.

The inescapable logic is that Israel will still need the support of the diaspora in the future. The Jewish State needs there to be a diaspora in the future. If Jews assimilate, Israel is the loser. It loses friends. It loses funds. It loses potential olim. Until recently the needs of Israel were immediate. There were wars to fight, Jewries to be rescued, immigrants to be absorbed. But with the rescue of Russian and Ethiopian Jewry and the beginnings of a peace process, Israel has had a chance to draw breath and think long-term. Its most farsighted politicians have now realised that the diaspora, in its dedication to Israel, has neglected itself and that this poses a threat to the Jewish future as a whole.

THE FOURTH GENERATION The problems of Jewish continuity have arisen because we have broken the two great rules of Jewish giving. We have given to Israel at the expense of our own viability. And we have been generous to the old at the expense of the young. Israel and welfare need our undiminished support. But so and in equal measure does education. Had we acted on this earlier we would have saved ourselves and our children much grief. Why then did we not do so?

For several generations, indeed for more than a century, Jewish education was not at the forefront of our concerns for reasons which will be examined in the next chapter. Nevertheless, nothing devastating happened as a result. Jews continued to identify as Jews. They joined synagogues. They married other Jews. They had Jewish children and raised them as Jews. Jewish life continued on the basis of habit, memory and tradition regardless of the fact that little was being done to renew it by Jewish study. If it could continue in this way for a century, why not longer, even indefinitely? We have only belatedly discovered that this is an illusion. What has changed? Why is this generation different from all other generations? The answer lies in what I call the fourth-generation phenomenon.

My grandparents were not born in this country. Many, even most, of the Jews in Britain had grandparents who came here in the great wave of immigration from Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1914. We are Anglo-Jews of the third generation.

It is an almost universal law that inherited wealth lasts three generations, not more. The same applies to inherited Judaism. Ours is the last generation that can still remember booba and zeida from the heim, with their fluent Yiddish and undiminished Yiddishkeit. Ours is the last generation for whom Jewish identity can be sustained by memory alone.

The Rebbe of Ger once pointed out that the “four sons” of the Haggadah represent four generations. The wise son is the immigrant generation who still lives the traditions of the “home.” The rebellious son is the second generation, forsaking Judaism for social integration. The “simple” son is the third generation, confused by the mixed messages of religious grandparents and irreligious parents. But the child who cannot even ask the question is the fourth generation. For the child of the fourth generation no longer has memories of Jewish life in its full intensity.

Our children are children of the fourth generation. Already, it is clear that what we took for granted, they do not. They do not take it for granted that they will belong to an Orthodox synagogue or indeed any synagogue. They do not take it for granted that they will marry, or marry another Jew, or stay married. They do not take it for granted that they will have Jewish children or that it is important to do so. Nothing can be taken for granted in the fourth generation, least of all in a secular, open society in which even a common moral code is lacking.

The “fourth-generation phenomenon” explains what is otherwise inexplicable, namely that the crisis of Jewish continuity has occurred in a single generation. To repeat the statistic at the heart of our concern: the intermarriage rate among young Jews in the United States has risen from 6 percent in 1960 to 57 percent in 1985. The rise in mixed marriage, non-marriage and divorce, and the corresponding fall in religious observance and Jewish affiliation, have occurred suddenly and with astonishing speed. There is no obvious explanation. There have been no dramatic shifts in the diaspora in respect of tolerance on the one hand, antisemitism on the other. The environment in which Jews live has not significantly changed. Why then have Jews changed? The answer is that the Jews who have chosen not to remain Jews are the great-grandchildren of those who arrived in Britain and America to escape the pogroms of Eastern Europe in the 1880s. They are the Jews of the fourth generation.

In the absence of a determined effort to transmit our traditions to our children, Jewish identity persists for three generations, not longer. The fact that the erosion is gradual rather than sudden allows us to remain blind to the process for many decades. We can do so no more. We live with the symptoms, to the point where for most of us it has become an entirely open question as to whether we will have Jewish grandchildren. The trend can be reversed, but only by a clear reinstatement of classical Jewish priorities. If we are to have a future as a Jewish community we can no longer let our children be the last and least of our concerns, as we have done until now.

There is a wise aphorism which states: When all else fails, read the instructions. That surely applies in the case of Anglo-Jewry. Jewish law provides clear guidance as to how to allocate our charitable funds: to domestic causes first, and to education above all else. We have ignored those rules for several generations and it has cost us dearly. But mere exhortation is unlikely to make us change habits which have become so deeply ingrained.

We have now reached the heart of the argument. I have spoken about the miracle of Jewish continuity, stretching as it does across three-quarters of the history of human civilisation. I have documented the crisis we have reached in our time. I have argued that Jewish identity in the past was sustained through education, and I submitted that hypothesis to the test of history and recent research. In this chapter, I have shown how this hypothesis holds good in the present. We face a crisis of continuity because we have failed to invest in education.

An obvious question now arises. How, if education is the key to the perpetuation of Jewish identity, did we ever come to neglect it? If the solution to the problem of continuity is so clearly signalled by every lesson of Jewish history and every instinct of the Jewish imagination, how then did we miss it? How did we fail to read the instructions? Unless we find the answer to this question, we will not fully grasp what has changed in the terms and circumstances of Jewish life. We will fail to comprehend the most important thesis of this book: that we are entering a new era in modern Jewish history.