Yom Kippur Sermon 2008/5769
Written by Rabbi Dr. Tony Bayfield Wednesday, 08 October 2008
Cross-Communal Judaism is Mainstream Judaism
A couple of weeks ago I switched on the car radio and caught the end of an item on Radio 4. Two professors of science were debating whether or not someone should have felt compelled to resign for, as far as I could gather, suggesting that science teachers in schools should engage with pupils who said that their religion taught them creationism not evolution. I couldn’t quite get why the second professor was in favour of the resignation. Then, right at the end, he said that the man had brought the good name of science into disrespect and science should have no truck with “complete rubbish”. The interviewer seemed a bit staggered and remarked that the first professor, who was defending the resigned colleague, had raised his hands in the air in a gesture of frustration and disbelief.
I was intrigued. So, when I got in, I checked the story out on the internet. It goes as follows. The Education Director of the Royal Society, interestingly the Rev Professor Michael Reiss, had felt obliged to resign from his post at the Royal Society for saying, quote: “Just because something lacks scientific support doesn’t seem to me to be a sufficient reason to omit it from the science lesson. There is much to be said for allowing students to raise any doubts that they have – hardly a revolutionary idea in science teaching – and doing one’s best to have a genuine discussion”. End quote.
I must say that my flabber was completely gasted! I think creationism is bonkers. I had thought that it was the bizarre belief of right-wing Christian fundamentalists in the land of sub-prime mortgage lending across the Atlantic. I had no idea that this literal adherence to scriptures was raising its head amongst other faiths in the British classroom. But my total shock, disbelief, incredulity was that the Education Director of the Royal Society had been forced to resign for saying that if you’re teaching evolution and a pupil challenges the teaching, you should engage with the pupil and have a rational discussion.
The professor on the radio who said that the good name of science was damaged even by engaging with, even by discussing “complete rubbish” – I wasn’t clear whether he actually meant creationist doctrine specifically or religion in general – obviously represented a majority view within the Royal Society. The Rev Professor Michael Reiss MA, PhD, PGCE, MBA, Fellow of the Institute of Biology, Professor of Science Education, Institute of Education, London University, has been hounded out of the UK’s 350 year old national academy of science for suggesting that scientists should be prepared to engage with those who hold to conflicting creeds.
I still couldn’t quite believe it. I came across a piece by George Pitcher in The Telegraph. I followed up Pitcher’s blog and found the first comment posted on the blog referred to “Billions of stupid people willing to believe the garbage in the bible” and “Religion is a mental illness and there is no God”. If you think that’s extreme, you should look at some of the blogs on The Guardian blogsite.
What we have is a graphic illustration of the rise and rise of secular fundamentalism in our society. One of the high priests is Richard Dawkins but there are many others and millions of followers. It is classic fundamentalism – ruthlessly intolerant, convinced that it has a monopoly on truth, missionary, power seeking and as dangerous as it is outrageous.
Secular fundamentalism can even manifest in blackmail and violence – think Huntingdon Life Sciences, SHAC and the Animal Rights Militia. But it’s also a reaction. It is, significantly, a reaction against religious fundamentalism which has defaced the globe over the last twenty or thirty years.
Creationism is bizarre. The idea that God planted dinosaur fossils in the earth when he created the world just under 6,000 years ago would be very funny – flat-earthers ride again – were this belief not placed by its adherents in the same category of scriptural truth as “You shall love one other” or “Justice, justice shall you pursue”.
I am – you will gather – a regular listener to Radio 4 (5 Live Sport is too upsetting these days) and was horrified by an interview with a woman politician in North Dakota who is leading a campaign to make North Dakota the first American state to prohibit abortion completely. When asked whether politicians should be chosen according to their view on abortion, she replied: “Yes, we can tell from a person’s view on abortion whether they hold the correct views on a wide range of subjects.” She added, “This holocaust of babies in America has to be ended.”
Secular fundamentalism is undoubtedly and to a significant extent a reaction against religious fundamentalism. Yet, it also shares a common reactionary origin. Disturbed by all of this, I comforted myself that whilst there are Jewish fundamentalists, at least on subjects like creationism and evolution we’re not in the same league of nut-casery or traumatised reaction to modernity as others.
Alyth is a synagogue which shows its tolerance by having a number of different chumashim – book versions of the Torah – including the Hertz Chumash which was first published back in 1930. Hertz, for the person sitting next to you, was not the founder of a car hire company but one of the most learned of orthodox chief rabbis back in the days when the United Synagogue was the Jewish equivalent of the Church of England and represented the mainstream, the overwhelming majority of the community.
If you turn to page 194 of the Hertz Chumash – I’m sorry you can’t actually do it at this moment because Alyth were not prepared to buy another 2,000 copies of the Hertz just for today, so you’ll have to take my word for it – Hertz has quite a long section on evolution. The late Chief Rabbi writes: “There is nothing inherently un-Jewish in the evolutionary conception of the origin and growth of forms of existence from the simple to the complex, and from the lowest to the highest. The biblical account itself gives expression to the same general truth of gradual ascent from amorphous chaos to order …. evolution far from destroying the religious teaching of Genesis I, is its profound confirmation”. He continues, “Monera begat Amoeba, Amoeba begat Synamoebae … [and ends] Pouched Animals begat Semi-Apes, Semi-Apes begat Tailed Apes, Tailed Apes begat Man-like Apes, Man-like Apes begat Ape-like Men, Ape-like Men begat Men”. (Quite right, only men are descended from Apes). Thank God, I said to myself, that Judaism is so enlightened.
But I remembered a passage in one of Louis Jacobs’ books from the 1990s, sixty years after Hertz, suggesting that whilst the great Chief Rabbi of the yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine pre-1948, Rav Kook had been enthusiastic about the compatibility of evolutionary theory and the not-to-be-read literally account of creation in Genesis I, by the 1990s there were rabbis who’d been afflicted by fundamentalist fears and very-unJewish literalism.
And then I thought of something else. Many of you will remember that Hertz greatest and most scholarly successor, the present orthodox chief rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, undoubtedly the finest philosopher ever to fill that distinguished post, had a spot of bother over a book called ‘The Dignity of Difference’, first published six years ago. He’d suggested that we should respect the differences between faiths because we can find God and God’s teaching in the Other; other religions transmit truths and insights; and Judaism doesn’t have a monopoly on truth. You’ll also remember that he felt compelled to withdraw the book and make a number of changes because his rabbis were concerned at the implication that the Torah was not the best, fullest, only disclosure of God’s complete truth. I had an inkling that other changes were made as well. I nipped down to see whether John Trotter, who runs the book shop here at the Sternberg Centre, had a second edition of ‘The Dignity of Difference’ which I could compare with my signed first edition. John only had copies of the first edition which suggests that Sacks doesn’t sell as well at the Sternberg Centre as he does at W H Smith in Brent Cross. I’m not proud of that. I was forced to schlep to Josephs in Temple Fortune where I had to pay for a second edition.
On page 69 of the first edition, writing about the pace of change in the world and the imperative of responsibility in such circumstances, Sacks has a long paragraph – more than twenty lines – which begins: “The pace of change continues to accelerate. Barring catastrophes like the meteorite which crashed into the planet 65 million years ago, bringing the age of dinosaurs to an end, the process of evolution is, in human terms, achingly slow, a matter of tens of millions of years.” After a trot through the singling out of homo sapiens and references to the middle and upper Paleolithic, the paragraph ends: “The significance of this prehistory is that it is when many of our instinctual behaviour patterns were formed. Adaptive we may be, but we are not made for constant, relentless alterations in our living conditions.”
If you compare page 69 of the revised edition with page 69 of the first edition, part of which I’ve just read out, you’ll find that the entire paragraph acknowledging evolution has been omitted. The changes that Sacks felt compelled to make to ‘The Dignity of Difference’ not only related to the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth of Torah, they also related to the doctrine of evolution.
Let me make it absolutely clear that this sermon is not an attack on Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks. That would be inappropriate on Yom Kippur – or on any other day come to that. I assume he took the view that if 98% of his book could remain intact and be read and influence discussion in British society, then it was worth making a few changes which were not central to the argument. The point I am making is about the rise and rise of religious fundamentalism, including within Judaism. Just think. Jewish fundamentalists, the rabbinic leadership of and from the charedi community in Britain had the power to compel their chief rabbi to withdraw and alter a book in the full glare of public, national attention. That was six years ago and the rise and rise of charedi influence has continued apace.
Let me go back for a moment to George Pitcher and his exposure of secular, scientific fundamentalism within the Royal Society. Pitcher wrote: “Where did this intolerance come from? When the Royal Society was founded in the 17th century, scientists were up against the bigotry and intolerance of a religious hegemony. Now the ideological boot is on the other foot. Like all fundamentalism, scientific bigotry, I suspect, springs from insecurity. The postmodern secular experiment hasn’t carried all before it, as its leaders had hoped. That has made the extremists frustrated, angry and intolerant.” Insecurity.
That seems to me to be a very important observation.
Religious fundamentalism is something that I’ve been speaking and writing about for the last decade. I know that I run the danger of you misunderstanding this sermon as an attack on Jonathan Sacks. When I talk about the dangers of religious fundamentalism I take the much greater risk of being misunderstood as saying that there is a moral equivalence between manifestations of Jewish, Christian, and above all, Muslim fundamentalism. To which I can only say please, please, don’t misunderstand me as saying that. Of course there is no moral equivalence between suicide bombings and teaching creationism. God forbid. But the fact remains that what George Pitcher is saying about secular fundamentalism and the rise and rise of religious fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism since the 1960s, reveals much that is shared, particularly shared roots in insecurity.
Religious fundamentalism is characterised by a fearful reaction against the complexities of the modern world, the challenges that modernity poses to a whole range of beliefs and teachings – about God, about prayer and about the origins of scripture. Modernity has shaken the clarity and simplicity of the old truths about God’s saving power; about the zapping of the wicked and the rewarding of the righteous. Religious fundamentalism is, essentially, reactive and fearful, the product of deep insecurity. It leads to a reassertion of those old beliefs and truths in a very simplistic way. It prompts attempts to recreate an older world that never actually existed in quite that form. It’s usually characterised by a determination to impose those old truths on other people by the use of power in whatever way it can be exercised.
In the Jewish world in Britain we have our secular fundamentalists and you’ll find Jews amongst those who are militantly anti-religion. Jewish self-hatred takes various forms. But in far, far greater numbers we have religious fundamentalists who are increasingly influential within what was once mainstream orthodoxy and with whom the United Synagogue, once the home of mainstream orthodoxy, is increasingly preoccupied.
Which leads to the Statement of Collaboration between Reform, Masorti and Liberal Judaism which was published in the Jewish Chronicle last month. The Jewish Chronicle was generous in its coverage of the Statement. Only time will tell whether the space they gave us was merited. But there were two misleading dimensions to the multi-page spread.
First, it described the Masorti Movement as non-orthodox. That isn’t true. Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, who is leading services elsewhere on this amazing campus, though like me a graduate of Leo Baeck College, is a disciple of Rabbi Louis Jacobs and an orthodox rabbi. His orthodoxy owes almost everything to Rabbi Jacobs, the greatest orthodox chief rabbi this community never had, and is reflective of where orthodoxy would be now had it not been hijacked by the rising tide of fundamentalism.
Second, the JC suggested that what we were doing was challenging the United Synagogue. We aren’t. We’re holding out a hand to the United Synagogue. But moving ahead come what may. Urgently.
The imagery of that unforgettable medieval Unetane Tokef prayer, which awaits us in Musaf, reminds us that Yom Kippur is a day of judgement. It’s a day of judgement for the individual and for the community. The British Jewish community is under profound threat. It’s melting away even more rapidly than the ice caps. Reform, Liberal and Masorti are currently a third of all synagogue affiliations in the UK. By 2020 we will undoubtedly be more than 50%. But the question is, will we be more than 50% of anything sustainable? Will British Jewry consist of much more than a fundamentalist, charedi rump in a generation’s time? It’s clear to everyone that the United Synagogue is preoccupied with that fundamentalist charedi rump. But the truth is inescapable. Namely that fundamentalist, charedi Judaism is very, very unlikely to appeal to more than 20% of the present community at most. Our secular fundamentalists are relatively few in number. Which leaves more than three-quarters of the community for whom we offer the best chance, the best hope for a future.
What the Statement says is that whether we are Liberal, Reform or Masorti-orthodox, believers or agnostics, religious or secular, we all know that we don’t have a monopoly on truth. We know that ours is not the only way. We bring to the table deep respect for difference and a profound understanding that what we share is much, much greater than our differences.
We bring something else as well. An overriding concern for every single Jew. A conviction that no one must be written out of the Jewish people or regarded as dispensable. A realisation and acceptance of the fact that no one way works for everyone. No one size fits all. There are many ways of walking the Jewish walk. Whilst our respective synagogues meet the needs of many, they need to be still more outreaching and responsive to the very diverse beliefs and needs of their membership. And together our three Movements need to offer programmes for those who are not attracted to synagogues at all and need to be encountered in other places, engaged with ‘where they are’ and encouraged to walk the Jewish walk that works for them.
What drives us is a shared sense that somewhere between the literally incredible God who supposedly planted the dinosaurs and the fossils when he created the earth 5,769 years ago and the arrogant idolatry of the secular fundamentalists who won’t be sullied by engaging with ‘complete rubbish’; between those margins lie – the overwhelming majority of us. The overwhelming majority, the mainstream who in a host of different ways recognise that there is meaning and purpose to creation, to being alive; that there is meaning and purpose to Jewish identity; and want to express that profound awareness in our own individual Jewish fashion.
Yom Kippur has an urgency about it. So does the Statement in the Jewish Chronicle. But whether there is an effective response to the urgency of the situation depends upon you and the person sitting next to you; and you and the person sitting next to you; and Rabbi Mark and Rabbi Laura and me. We are not, any of us, fundamentalists, either of the religious or the secular variety. We are the broad, mainstream of the Jewish community.
So: Are we up for playing a part in the development of a community-wide pluralist expression of Judaism which will reach out and engage with and respect each and every Jew who has the sense, the awareness that there is meaning and purpose in Judaism and meaning and purpose in Jewish identity?
So: Will we step up to the plate and provide pluralist leadership that takes far greater responsibility for the main institutions of the community – the Board of Deputies, Jewish Care, UJIA – than we do at the moment? Will we ensure that the new cross-communal initiatives of the community – our secondary school, our ethical initiative ResponsAbility – are fully supported?
So: Will each of us resolve to walk the Jewish walk, deepen our Jewish identity, find fuller meaning and purpose in our Judaism in the way that speaks to us and works for the community at large?
Non-fundamentalists of British Jewry unite! Collaborate in mutual respect and concerted action. We are the mainstream and the future of the mainstream depends on us.
A footnote. I finished the first draft of this sermon and had to go out. I switched on the car radio which was tuned to Classic FM – my escape from Radio 4 and the banking crisis. Last Movement Beethoven’s Ninth. The Ode to Joy. Alle Menschen Werden Brüder . All men are brothers. Absolutely. We taught it to the world. Genesis Chapter 4.
The Jewish journey, with all its heartache, really is worth continuing. Don’t run away from it. Talk it and walk it. Live it. But don’t let anyone try to freeze-frame it or wind it back for you. And don’t try to freeze-frame it or wind it back for anyone else.
Chatimah Tovah.
| Next > |
|---|
