New Year Message from Ben Rich
Written by Ben Rich Tuesday, 27 September 2011
For fifty years, my family’s Rosh Hashanah ritual included lunch at a quaint, old-fashioned Italian restaurant on St John’s Wood High Street, now sadly closed.When my grandfather started the tradition, the restaurateur was incapable of coping with his Sephardi surname, Benedictus, so the table was booked in the name of Bennett.
Another family, another name: for years, I have told this story – sadly untrue - about Rabbi Lionel Blue’s family. Determined to fit in, his father had supposedly scanned the equivalent of the phone directory and quickly divined a pattern: there were Blacks, Greens, Browns and Whites, so he too chose a colour as his new family name.
What certainly is true is that that my university friend, Susie Albert’s great-grandfather – anxious to shake off the dust of Eastern Europe - ‘borrowed’ his surname off an immigration official on Ellis Island.
And while my own family folklore dictates that the Bennett name was chosen out of simplicity, I suspect that, like the Blues (an abbreviation from Bluestone) and the Alberts, it may also have reflected a desire to ‘blend in’.
But New Year is a time when Jews do not blend in: while tumbleweed may blow down the corridors of Goldman Sachs, most of us who ‘go missing’ for Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur are the exception, not the rule.
And for us, we have a choice: do we post a cheery “l'shanah tovah” on our ‘out of office’ assistants and wish our non-Jewish colleagues the happiest of New Years? Or do we quietly slip away? Bennetts and Blues and Alberts: ‘ill’ or taking ‘annual leave’?
All too often, we Reform Jews choose the latter route (metaphorically), lacking the self-confidence and maybe the learning to make the positive case for the choices we make.
But we should be confident, and indeed proud: Judaism is progressive and our values of egalitarianism, inclusion and social justice are firmly rooted in centuries of tradition understood through modern eyes and ears.
As I approach my first Rosh Hashannah as the Movement for Reform Judaism’s Chief Executive I set for myself and the Movement this challenge: to make the positive case for Reform Judaism , to be a powerful voice for our values and beliefs, to prioritise learning so our choices are informed, to give our children confidence in what they do through our youth work and RSY-Netzer, and to support our synagogues to deliver the same locally.
This New Year let us all pledge to learn more about progressive halachah; make positive, informed choices about our practices and rituals; flaunt our living Judaism and demonstrate our values through charity and social action.
I wish us all a very happy, proud, New Year. L'shanah tovah.
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