Introduction

This book, the first I have written since becoming Chief Rabbi, is written with a sense of grave urgency.

In my most recently published book, One People?, I spoke about the three conflicts that currently divide the Jewish people, threatening to split it apart. One is the war of cultures between religious and secular Jews, which rages in Israel and flares up sporadically in Jewries elsewhere. Another is the slow separation of Israel and the diaspora, something we will notice increasingly in the coming years. The third, and the one which dominated the book, was the intractable schism between Orthodoxy and liberal interpretations of Judaism.

These were the conflicts which dominated the Jewish landscape when I wrote the book at the end of 1988. They were still there when I redrafted it shortly before my installation in 1991. They remain, and have not diminished since. But there is an ancient parable of the rabbis about Jewish history:

To what is it like? It is like a man who was travelling on the road when he encountered a wolf and escaped from it, and he went along relating the affair of the wolf. He then encountered a lion and escaped from it, and went along relating the affair of the lion. He then encountered a snake and escaped from it, whereupon he forgot the two previous incidents and went along relating the affair of the snake. So it is with Israel. The latter troubles make them forget the earlier ones.

A fourth problem has arisen which threatens to overwhelm all else and make other conflicts marginal by comparison. The great divide in the future will not be between secular and religious Jews, or between Israel and the diaspora, or between Orthodoxy and Reform. It will be between those who will remain Jews and those who will not.

Shimon Peres, Israel’s Foreign Minister, put it simply on a recent visit to London. A few years ago, he said, Jews throughout the world were split over the question of “Who is a Jew?” Is a Jew one who has a Jewish mother, as halakha insists? Or is a Jew also one who has a Jewish father, as American Reform maintains? In the future, he said, we will have to adopt a third definition. A Jew will not be one who has a Jewish mother or father. A Jew will be one who has Jewish children.

He was referring to the dramatic rise of intermarriage in the diaspora. Within a generation, mixed marriage has escalated with a speed that has taken observers by surprise and it now threatens the very basis of Jewish survival in one community after another throughout the world. The Jewish family – two Jews who decide to marry, have Jewish children, and thus continue the Jewish heritage – has suddenly become fragile. As a result, the great chain of Jewish tradition, stretching across three-quarters of the history of human civilisation, is in danger of breaking. The future of diaspora Jewry is at risk.

This is not an overstatement. Anglo-Jewry, estimated at 450,000 Jews in the 1950s, now numbers barely 300,000. That means we have lost more than ten Jews a day, every day, for the last forty years. The significance of this is more than demographic. Certainly, it means that our community is shrinking, ageing and declining, but it means more than that. It means that young Jews are disengaging, disaffiliating and drifting away from Judaism. This is something that touches our very soul. Paul Johnson begins his monumental A History of the Jews with the sentence, “The Jews are the most tenacious people in history.” That is true no longer. We are losing the collective will to live as Jews.

Fortunately, however, the Jewish people has never been led by behavioural scientists. We are a kingdom of priests, not an assembly of sociologists. We have never taken trends as inevitable, nor have we mistaken facts for commandments. We can, I believe, reverse the decline, but on two conditions. The first is that we understand our present situation. We must look at what is happening to young Jews and ask why. The second is that we summon the collective will to make good the shortcomings of contemporary Jewish life. They are many and deep.

Fortunately too, though we are a fractious people, crisis unites us. As the rabbis said: when it comes to the history of Jewish suffering, “The latter troubles make us forget the earlier ones.” The entire book of Genesis is taken up with arguments within the family, between husbands and wives, parents and children, and between siblings. But as soon as the book of Exodus begins, the Israelites are faced with exile and slavery, and for the first time we hear the phrase am bnei Yisrael, “the people of the children of Israel.” Earlier rivalries have been forgotten, and a divided family has become a united people.

We face crisis, a crisis of continuity. It can be defined by a simple question and a far from simple answer. The question is: Will we have Jewish grandchildren? The answer is: Yes – if. This book, and others I hope to write on the subject, are about the if of continuity.

It is not a single if because Jewish life has many dimensions. There is the community and its institutions and priorities. There is the Jewish home and the atmosphere of family life we construct. And there are the individuals who make up our families and communities. How they understand and live their Jewishness will have a bearing on how the next generation chooses to live theirs. Each of these dimensions is a crucial component of Jewish continuity and will affect whether it succeeds or fails. But they are different from one another and cannot be dealt with in the same language or frame of reference.

This book is about only one of these dimensions, the Jewish community. It asks what we must do as a collective body – as Anglo-Jewry – to ensure that our children will choose to live, marry and have children as Jews. It is less about identity and faith – things that concern us as families and individuals – than about communal strategy and priorities. I hope to write about these other perspectives, but not here.

My argument is simple. We are entering a new era in modern Jewish history. The past two hundred years have been dominated, for Jews, by two concerns: integration into the societies of Europe and America, and survival against the onslaughts of antisemitism and the Holocaust. The 1990s will be seen in retrospect as the beginning of a new phase, one in which the predominant concern became the continuity of Jewish identity against the background of assimilation and intermarriage in the diaspora and secularisation in the State of Israel.

My belief is that just as Jews collectively succeeded in integrating and surviving, so we will succeed in renewing the bases of our continuity. But just as the first two challenges involved a profound struggle within the Jewish soul, so will the third. Am Yisrael, the Jewish people, derives its name from the moment when Jacob wrestled with an angel and was told that his name would henceforth be Israel, “for you have wrestled with God and with man and have prevailed.” Israel would be the people that had to engage in inner conflict before it could prevail. It still is.

The particular challenge facing us – in Anglo-Jewry, in the diaspora generally, and even in the State of Israel – is to determine whether or not Jewish identity can be sustained in an open, secular society. It can – but not without a determined effort to rebuild the vehicles, the transmitters, of Jewish continuity. For the past two hundred years, these have been neglected, because the battlefront was elsewhere. The greatest single danger is not that we do not know how to create continuity, but that we will fail to do so because we did not recognise that times have changed, and so too has the challenge. By continuing to fight yesterday’s battles, we risk losing the battle of today.

There must be a massive shift in our communal priorities and strategy. For this to happen, we must understand what is at stake, and what have been the transformations of Jewish life in our time. That is what this book seeks to explain. We must also understand what is old and what is new in the concept of continuity. In one sense, continuity is Judaism’s oldest challenge. Handing on a tradition, a way of life and an identity is what successive generations have done since the days of Abraham and Sarah, with a persistence that has no rival in the chronicles of human civilisation. But how to do so in an age in which Jewish identity has become weak, fragmented and confused is altogether more difficult. It is a predicament which we have faced only rarely in our past. It is this that marks our time as a new era in Jewish history.

The task before us is part intellectual, part practical. We must understand. But we must also act. The rabbis of old were devoted to study. They spent their days arguing and analysing our sacred texts, and most of their nights as well. But they also said: “Great is learning for it leads to doing.” Study is not an academic enterprise only. It is the preface to action, and therein lies its power.

If this is true of individuals, it is true of a community as well. Accordingly, though much in this book is taken up with reflection, it ends with a summons to collective action. It accompanies the launch of a new Anglo-Jewish organisation, Jewish Continuity, whose task will be to take the vision set forth in these pages and turn it into reality. This study is therefore more than a theoretical analysis. It is a prelude to a long and practical engagement with the greatest Jewish challenge of our time.

That challenge is defined by Alan Dershowitz at the end of his book Chutzpah:

We have survived – sometimes by the skin of our teeth – millennia of rape attempts against the Jewish body and soul by villains and monsters of every description. Efforts to convert us, assimilate us, and exterminate us by the sword have taken an enormous toll, but in the end they have failed. Now the dangers are more subtle: willing seduction, voluntary assimilation, deliberate abdication. We have learned – painfully and with difficulty – how to fight others. Can we develop Jewish techniques for defending against our own success?

That is the question. Jewish Continuity is our answer. Between the two, though, lies a journey, one that will force us to think about the very nature of Jewish existence now and against the backdrop of eternity. It begins with a mystery, perhaps even a miracle. What is Jewish continuity?