Judaism features

How Orthodox women can be liberated in shul

Simon Rocker — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 14:53:39 +0100

It was a problem few synagogues face but most would be delighted to have. On Sunday so many people turned up for a Rosh Chodesh service in London that some had to be turned away.

This was no ordinary service. It was an Orthodox partnership minyan, where prayers were led by women as well as men and both read from the Torah. While it may not have been the first in the UK — partnership minyans have taken place in private homes — this is believed to have been the first openly held here.

Over the past decade, more than 20 partnership communities have been established elsewhere in the Jewish world, the best-known being Darchei Noam in New York and Shira Hadasha in Jerusalem, which were both founded in 2002.

“The basic move towards partnership minyanim was the feeling on the part of women that they have been up till now disenfranchised, they weren’t given any opportunity to have any sort of activity within the ritual field in synagogue,” said Rabbi Daniel Sperber, one of the foremost Orthodox voices in support of the innovation.

“They couldn’t daven, they couldn’t be chazanim or chazaniot, they couldn’t read from the Torah, they couldn’t get aliyot, they weren’t allowed to say Kaddish. They were relegated to the ezrat nashim (women’s section) to some sort of balcony where if the acoustics were not good, they couldn’t even hear what was going on…
“Boys have sumptuous barmitzvahs and girls were not allowed to have a batmitzvah in shul. This type of thing was deeply disturbing to me.”

The British-born professor of Talmud at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University — who was a guest speaker at last weekend’s inaugural conference of the Jewish Orthodox Alliance UK — is a recognised authority on Jewish custom and practice. Although not a member of a participant minyan himself, he was angered by the stand taken by some of its opponents: in particular by those who, while they conceded the halachic legitimacy of such minyans in theory, nevertheless regarded them as out of order. And so he entered the fray, finding precedents in halachah which might enable women to take a greater role within an Orthodox service.

“There are many areas in the synagogue service which are permissible to women,” he said, “If they are qualified and capable and know how to read Hebrew, and read the Torah with the right trop [cantillation], there is no reason they shouldn’t, provided that their congregation is accepting of this.”

For the 72-year-old academic, whose scholarship has demonstrated the dynamic evolution of Jewish observance over time, it was “a halachic issue”, he explained. “I don’t consider myself a feminist, I consider myself an ish halachah, a halachist.”

The attitude to women in classical Jewish sources reflected their social status in antiquity when they rarely occupied public roles. Now women can be “supreme courts, presidents or prime ministers of countries, ceo’s of huge multinational companies”, he observed.

Traditionally, one of the obstacles to women reading publicly from the Sefer Torah was the belief that it might offend the dignity of the congregation, kevod hatzibbur. The rabbis believed that if a woman read from the Torah, it would suggest that there were not enough men literate to do so and the men would feel disgraced.

“That is irrelevant nowadays,” he said, “where everybody is literate and no one feels offended by the fact that they go to a woman judge, rather than a man judge.”

So women can read from the Sefer Torah and be called up for an aliyah (except those aliyot designated for a Cohen and a Levi).

As for leading prayers, there is no bar to a woman taking certain parts of the service, such as the opening morning Psalms, the Pesukei d’Zimra.

But there is a halachic issue with prayers which a man is obligated to say but a woman is not obligated — prayers that require a minyan such as Barechu or the Kedushah. A person who is not obligated to say them cannot say them on behalf of someone who is obligated; therefore a woman cannot act as a shaliach tzibbur, a communal prayer leader, for these parts of the service.

As for the prohibition against a man hearing a woman sing lest she arouse amorous thoughts, he explained, “that has already been dealt with in medieval times, when they said that within a spiritual atmosphere, it is not applicable, because people are not thinking about sexual arousal.”

In a partnership minyan, the mechitzah which separates seating for men from women runs down the middle right up to the bimah. “So when a woman gets called up, she stands on her side of the mechitzah,” he explained. “When a man gets called up, he stands on his side of the mechitzah. So the mechitzah problem has been got over.”

Some issues are still being worked through as part of an “evolving process”. For example, on Rosh Hashanah, in many Orthodox congregations it is common to sound 100 shofar notes. The requirement is only for 40: so in a partnership minyan the 40 mandatory notes can be blown by men, the remaining 60 by women.

“The sum total of all these changes,” he said, “has created an alternative model. For many women, it is extremely satisfying spiritually. They don’t feel marginalised. Even though they don’t have complete equality, nonetheless they feel they have moved forward and they have done this within an Orthodox halachic framework.”

It’s not over until the last chazan sings

Simon Rocker — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 14:07:26 +0100

It’s a summer evening and the congregation is getting ready for the Kabbalat Shabbat service, the welcoming of the Sabbath, on Friday. Someone taps out a beat on a tabla drum, a guitarist tunes his strings, another person takes a flute from a case.

Using musical instruments has long been a feature of Progressive services. But could this be a scene one day in an Orthodox synagogue here, too? It will if Steven Leas, cantor of the Central (United) Synagogue in London, has his way.

While Orthodox synagogues prohibit instrumentation on Shabbat, Shabbat does not actually start until Mizmor Shir, the Psalm for the Shabbat Day, he points out. So there is no reason not to allow instruments for the Kabbalat Shabbat service, especially since many UK congregations in summer daven well before the onset of Shabbat.

“I’ve seen it done in religious communities in America and Israel”, he said, and the United Synagogue’s youth organisation, Tribe, also thinks it “a great idea”. He has no doubt it will eventually catch on.

The South African-born cantor — a term he prefers to chazan — is leading a campaign to reinvigorate shul music as an executive member of the European Cantors Association. And part of that is to preserve what some fear is the dying art of chazanut.

Not a single full-time chazan remains in the United Synagogue and two of its rabbis who are recognised chazans, Lionel Rosenfeld, and Geoffrey Shisler, are due to retire over the next year or so.

Like his other eight US colleagues, Cantor Leas is part-time, although he also been able to sustain a musical career outside the synagogue. Whereas a full-time chazan was once the norm as a second minister in Anglo-Orthodox synagogues, now the US prefers to hire a youth rabbi.

He wants cantors to go to Jewish schools and youth camps to teach tunes to the young. “This isn’t just some old relic, it has got legs,” he said. “We are trying to change the perception that chazanut is only for the old, not for the new.”

While modern congregations may favour tunes to join in with rather operatic-performances, that does not spell the end of chazanut. A good chazan will respond to the tastes of his community and not expect them to “wait for an hour of acrobatics before you get the melody”, he explained.

“I’ve gone to a service where I’ve seen another chazan sing four or five pieces of proper big chazanut on a Shabbos morning,” he said. “To me, that’s crazy. I sing one piece of chazanut on a Shabbos morning. And the rest is ‘join in if you know the tune’.”

It’s wrong to think that the young cannot appreciate traditional chazanut, he believes. Central Synagogue often has students on a Friday night and when he does a piece of chazanut, “they come to me afterwards and say that was amazing”.

The ECA wants to improve training and set standards for cantors. There is concern that those leading services have only partial knowledge of nusach — the traditional style of melody which is appropriate to particular prayers.

Rabbi Shisler, of the New West End Synagogue, who is the composer of two books of synagogue music, spent three-years training as a chazan at the old Jews’ College. “My biggest regret is there is nowhere in this country for people to learn to study chazanut,” he said. “In days gone by, the wardens knew the melodies and would not tolerate a chazan who didn’t know the right melody. But now the laymen and most of the rabbis don’t know.”

When he asks some of those who sing in synagogue where they trained, “they say ‘We picked it up’. I say, ‘People pick up measles too.’

”Cantor Leas said: “We’ve had a lost generation almost. Let’s not worry about that, but about the next generation of kids, so in 30 to 40 years, we’ve got people who appreciate it. I admit that’s ambitious, but we’ve got to try it.”

The ECA, which holds its international convention in London this month, will be putting on a concert of cantorial music on Wednesday week at Central Synagogue as part of its promotional efforts.

“As cantors, we are able to do what the rabbis can’t necessarily do,” said Cantor Leas. “We can touch people’s souls.”

IN CONCERT

Steven Leas will be singing with two guest cantors, Sol Zim from the USA and Israel’s Yechezkel Klang, at a concert at London’s Central Synagogue on Wednesday evening, June 19.

Also taking part will be choristers from four choirs as well as a children’s choir.

Tickets are available from £17.50 from 0207-580 1355.

Can Jewish life flourish if God is on the sidelines

Simon Rocker — Sun, 02 Jun 2013 17:25:06 +0100

I once heard a rabbi say in his Shabbat morning sermon : “Without God, Judaism falls down like a pack of cards.” There was a time when such a comment would seem so self-evident that you would wonder why anyone would make it.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, however, a succession of Jewish movements have challenged the notion that religious belief is central to Jewish existence: Jewish socialism, for example, or secular Zionism, or secular-humanistic Judaism.

Although we may be living in a less ideological time, a strong current of secularism continues to run through contemporary Jewry. You could find no livelier manifesto for Jewish secular culture than Amos Oz and his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger’s recent book Jewish Words.

In his book, This Is Not The Way, published last year, Rabbi David Goldberg called for accepting the reality that most Jews today are “cultural”, rather than religious. Even those who claimed belief in God, he argued, were vague about the definition — “a sense of wonder at Nature, the ‘still, small voice’ of conscience, the divinely inspired music of Mozart, a universe too intricately intermeshed not to have had a guiding hand behind it”. What had largely gone was the concept of a personal God who intervened in history and gave the commandments.

Research lends statistical weight to the argument. The 1992 Kalms report found that only two out of five United Synagogue members disputed the idea that “belief in God is not central to being a good Jew”. More than half of British Jews thought that the Torah was written by man, according to the 1995 Institute for Jewish Policy Research survey. And nearly 60 per cent of London Jews identified as “secular” or “somewhat secular”, in another JPR survey in 2002.

I was reminded of this when I read a more recent report into “community vitality”, commissioned by the Jewish Leadership Council. “Vitality” seems the new buzzword after the preoccupation with “continuity” in the 1990s. In a nutshell, the report asks what constitutes a flourishing Jewish community and what does it take to sustain one. It was based on 14 focus groups with 140 activists from UK Jewish organisations.

What struck me most was something that the author Dr Keith Kahn-Harris found conspicuously absent in his conversations. Talk of belief in God or observance of mitzvot rarely cropped up and only one out of 14 groups discussed “Jewish values” at length.

It could be, he suggested, that participants simply thought the vitality agenda was about the practicalities of running community organisations — and not about deeper questions of motivation and belief. Alternatively, they may have avoided religion and ideology because they saw these as “divisive issues” which threaten communal cohesion.

But other interpretations, which he did not venture, are possible: that the lack of discussion about religion itself reflects a weak state of belief. Or that people are reticent about grappling with it. Or they do not see it as a problem.

Nonetheless, the report recognises that, for most, synagogues remain a key institution within British Jewry, “an essential space for mobilising participation and activism”. As one participant said, “I think that synagogues do need to be central to what we do because I think the religion is actually the core thing that keeps us together.”

This still begs the question: what did the speaker mean by “religion” — faith in the fullest sense of word or the practice of traditions? For people may take part in religious ritual for all sorts of reasons without believing in its divine origins.

Ritual has a tribal aspect, binding us to our fellow Jews and to the memory of our ancestors. It has an ethical aspect, consecrating the values we hold dear: the eating of matzah, for example, is accompanied by the exhortation, “Let all who are hungry come and eat”. It can aid psychological wellbeing, too: sitting shivah and saying Kaddish may help us deal with grief. And it can also have a spiritual dimension, even for those do not hold conventional religious beliefs — a sense of reaching beyond the everyday self to a deeper core of being.

The JLC report wants to see synagogues used as “wider communal resources”, venues for all sorts of activity. They need not be “boring old places”, remarked one focus group member.

Many synagogues, it should be said, already have a busy weekly calendar, hosting a variety of clubs and classes from toddler groups to lunch talks for senior citizens, from bridge to Zumba. But it would be a mistake to measure the vitality of a synagogue only by its recreational or social use.

Synagogues are there to articulate Jewish values for our times and to provide a source of meaning and purpose for Jewish living. They should also be places of spiritual exploration where people can encounter different approaches to text and tradition. In this they could be bolder. Established prayer formats don’t do it for everybody and alternative minyans often aren’t all that alternative. They could try more experimental services, using song, dance, poetry, meditation and study.

For if a sense of spiritual quest is not at the heart of synagogue life, where will it be?

Do Jewish schools create empty shuls?

Rabbi Pete Tobias — Sun, 26 May 2013 17:04:35 +0100

We are now in May, the arbitrary date that signals the start of attendance at Shabbat services which count towards the gaining of priority points for admission to local Jewish schools. It continues until the end of October, or until the requisite eight synagogue visits that are deemed to demonstrate commitment to Jewish practice have been made.

There is an irony in this very temporary swelling of Shabbat congregations in many synagogues. Jewish schools, I have been led to believe, exist in order to ensure that children remain attached to and involved in the Jewish community. In order to gain access to these Jewish schools, children have to demonstrate that attachment and involvement by attending synagogue services.

Once in those Jewish schools, they are educated about Judaism’s beliefs and practices and the place of their ancient heritage in their lives. Part of that heritage is the celebration of festivals during the Jewish year. Jewish schools are closed for those festivals, and presumably the expectation is that the children will attend their synagogues to celebrate them.

In my experience, however, many families, when they find their children off school at times when most British schoolchildren are still learning, take cheap, off-season breaks to theme parks or sunnier foreign climes. Little wonder that I was moved to remark on Facebook: “Why do we pray for rain during Succot? So that it falls on Jewish parents and their children at Alton Towers.”

So the irony is complete. Children and their families are required to attend synagogue services to procure places at schools that provide them with the opportunity to continue that attendance at Jewish festivals — and that opportunity is often declined.

Let me be clear. I have no complaint about the academic excellence of Jewish schools, and I applaud the manner in which their pupils acquire qualifications enabling them to take their place in society.

My concern is that the synagogue attendance which was a requirement to gain entry to these schools diminishes or disappears once school admission is obtained.

Of course, there are occasions when some children from some Jewish schools do attend synagogue services, usually for friends’ bar- or batmitzvah ceremonies. These do not, however, seem to provide an opportunity for them to demonstrate the Jewish knowledge imparted to them, unless, in the case of some, that knowledge involves the ability to text, chew and converse loudly during religious services.

On the other hand, when a bar- or batmitzvah celebrant who attends a general state school invites his or her friends to my synagogue, the visitors, many of them not Jewish, are polite, attentive and appreciative of the opportunity to witness a Jewish ceremony.

The children celebrating such occasions may not have enjoyed the benefits of a full-time Jewish education, but they, their families and their friends often show greater respect for the community and the heritage it represents. Of course, there are many children in Jewish schools who do show respect and whose behaviour is exemplary, but in many cases it is easy to distinguish between those children who attend Jewish schools and those who do not.

Then take the recent festival of Shavuot, which falls more often than not on a weekday. Pupils at Jewish schools have no school to attend but it is unlikely that many of them will be seen in synagogue. Nor, of course, will Jewish children at non-Jewish schools — but at least they are engaged in education rather than recreation.

Last year Shavuot fell on a Sunday. Even though it was a bank holiday weekend, I invited the children and parents of the religion school to take part in our festival service. Over 90 people came: children from Jewish schools made up less than 10 per cent of the total — a significantly greater number than the weekday attendance in previous years (and better than the zero children for Shavuot last week).

So the children who briefly swell the numbers on Shabbat over the coming months will soon be gone, having achieved the necessary points to receive a daily Jewish education that apparently renders future attendance at synagogue services obsolete. The existence of Jewish schools remains for me a conundrum about the relationship between the Jewish community and the rest of society, and, particularly, between the families of children attending Jewish schools and their synagogue communities.

It leads me to paraphrase the conclusion reached by the schools of Hillel and Shammai about the existence of humankind (Talmud Eruvin 13b) in the following way: It would have been better had Jewish schools not been invented, but since they have, let us look to their deeds and take note of them.

The Women of the Wall: should they be bothered?

Simon Rocker — Fri, 17 May 2013 09:04:00 +0100

The Western Wall has lately become a battleground in the struggle for egalitarianism. The arrest of women for praying in a tallit at the sacred site has sparked anger across the Jewish world and fuelled demands from non-Orthodox Jews in particular for equal religious rights.

It looks now as if Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky has brokered a deal which should be put an end to the unseemly squabbling. Under his compromise plan, the plaza at the Kotel would be extended to include the area known as Robinson’s Arch where egalitarian services are already allowed.

Some commentators, not unreasonably, have wondered why Progressive Jews have taken such an interest in the site when the restoration of the Temple has never been part of Reform theology. The Kotel has been embraced as a national shrine, whereas a more radical Progressive response might have viewed it with more critical distance on account of its origins.

We usually speak of there having been two Temples. But as Professor Simon Goldhill points out in his book The Temple of Jerusalem, there were actually three buildings: the Temple of Solomon, of Zerubbabel, who rebuilt it after the return of the exiles from Babylon, and Herod the Great in the latter end of the first century BCE.

Herod did more than the ancient equivalent of adding on a conservatory and loft extension: he completely rebuilt the Temple, enhancing its splendour. The Western Wall was one of the retaining walls built to support the platform on which Herod raised his brilliant edifice. According to Goldhill, “the construction of the Temple was the most grandiose act of self-promotion, the capstone of a building programme throughout the kingdom, designed to proclaim Herod a famous and popular man of power for future generations to admire.”

Whatever its motivation, the Herodian enterprise was rather different in spirit from the biblical Temple. Unlike the Tabernacle, the First Temple was not commanded. King David, having built himself a “house of cedar”, is troubled that the ark of God dwells only “within curtains” and thinks it should be housed in something grander.

After a seemingly lukewarm reception to the idea, God promises that David’s son will build a “house for My name”. When Solomon gets down to the task, he notes that his father could not “because of the wars which were about him on every side” (I Kings 5:3). One possible interpretation is that David was simply too busy with the conquest of his kingdom to have time for such an ambitious project.

Only in the First Book of Chronicles comes the now familiar, and more spiritually elevated, reason for David being denied the honour of building the Temple. “But the word of the Lord came to me, saying… ‘You shall not build a house to My name because you have shed much blood on the earth in My sight’” (22:7).

The purity and spiritual integrity of the Temple is emphasised elsewhere. When the prophet Ezekiel later imagines its reconstruction, the divine message is that the house of Israel shall no more defile it, “neither they, nor their kings”.

When King Cyrus allows the Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem to build the Second Temple, he attributes it to divine inspiration (Ezra 1-2). The leaders of the Jews, Ezra, Nehemiah and Zerubbabel, were all religious heroes who variously sought to institute the regular reading of the Torah or protect Shabbat observance.

Under no stretch of the imagination could Herod be thought a spiritual role model. He seized the throne by force with the aid of Rome in 37 BCE and in the course of his 40 year-reign, put to death most of the Sanhedrin (the rabbinic court), his wife, two of his sons and his mother-in-law. His substantial building work also included a Greek theatre and a hippodrome — not exactly the rabbis’ favourite places.

If David was unable to erect the Temple because of blood on his hands, that did not stop Herod.

According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, Herod “destroyed in the full eastern hellensistic tradition, all members of the Hasmonean House whose existence seemed to him to endanger his position”. While the Temple may have been an attempt to win the hearts of his subjects, he was nonetheless regarded as “the destroyer of their traditional institutions, the murderer of their kings and leaders and the agent of a foreign government”.

As Goldhill notes, the Western Wall had “no religious significance” in Herod’s own day: it was an outer supporting wall of the Temple compound, not part of the religious structure.

Over time the Kotel has become hallowed as a focus of Jewish messianic yearnings. But as the forthcoming festival of Shavuot reminds us, revelation did not take place in the city or the gilded monuments of kings but in the barren, empty space of the wilderness.

The spiritual genius of eating cheesecake

Thu, 09 May 2013 12:00:31 +0100

Early leaders of Reform Judaism thought that men and women had moved past ritual and ceremony. In the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in London and classical Reform temples in the United States the service was reduced to hymn singing, responsive prayers and a sermon. It soon became clear that this was leaving congregations cold.

In the past half-century, Progressive Judaism has returned to practical mitzvot. It does not generally regard them as binding, but important and meaningful nevertheless. There has been a realisation that we need tangible symbols and representations of the values we cherish and want to transmit.

Traditional Judaism has much the same attitude towards minhag — the established customs of the Jewish people. It is true that in some cases they carry the force of law; minhag Yisrael Torah hi is an ancient principle and the Talmud tells us that we should safeguard the customs of our ancestors. When Jews in the diaspora asked whether they needed to keep two days of Yomtov even after the fixing of the calendar, they were told to maintain their ancestral practice; minhag avotechem beyadechem, “your fathers’ customs are in your hands”.

In other cases, minhagim have no binding authority. Eating apples and honey on Rosh Hashanah or wearing a kittel on Yom Kippur are common and beautiful but not essential. We are about to enter a blaze of this type of more optional minhag.

Shavuot is crowded with customs: decorating the synagogue with flowers, staying up all night learning Torah (Tikkun Leil Shavuot) and eating milky foods. They are beloved traditions, and they have all been connected to the giving of the Torah. Mount Sinai burst into flower when the Torah was given. The night before the revelation the Jews overslept and we make a correction (tikkun) for that by learning until dawn. The first Shavuot fell on Shabbat. The Jews were unable to slaughter animals, and the meat they had in stock had not been produced according to the rules of kashrut, which had not yet been given. They therefore had to eat foods made from milk.

These are just three of many reasons; for example, the Zohar observes that the Hebrew word for milk, chalav, has the numerical value of 40 — the number of days Moses spent on Mount Sinai. The Imrei Noam (Rabbi Meir Horowitz of Dzikov) explained that Torah for the Jewish people is like mother’s milk to a baby, nourishing and the sign of love and care.

If a practice has many explanations, they are usually all inaccurate, at least in a strictly historical sense. The reason we have milky foods on Shavuot is probably because the festival falls in the calving season when there is a large amount of surplus milk.

We took advantage of this abundance by enjoying the festival with cheesecake, blintzes and the like. This is profoundly in keeping with the spirit of Shavuot. It is the only festival on which all the rabbis agree we have to enjoy ourselves physically as well as spending time in spiritual pursuits.

But why did we have to attach a more direct connection between Shavuot and cheesecake? One reason is that, without minhag, Shavuot would feel like rather a bare festival. The other Yomtovim have a distinctive mitzvah, whether it is matzah on Pesach, lulav on Succot or shofar on Rosh Hashanah.

Shavuot had bikkurim, the bringing of the first fruits, but that has not taken place since the destruction of the Temple. Jews did not want to go through a festival without performing some symbolic practice and so they produced new minhag and attached meaning to existing practices, like eating milk. This may be why there is so much minhag associated with Shavuot; it is compensating for the lack of mitzvot.

However, there is more to it than that. The Jews are a religious people. We seek spiritual meaning wherever it can be found and we display a wonderful creativity to generate it. It is anything put trivial to turn eating cheesecake into a religious experience, it is an example of the Jewish genius. The origins of the practice of eating milky foods has become irrelevant. We have imbued it with meaning, we have sanctified it, we have enabled ourselves to connect with the message of Shavuot, even while we are eating dessert.

Rabbi Shlomo Ephraim Luntschitz, a leading rabbi in 17th- century Prague, discusses the famous question as to why the Torah is not explicit that the revelation took place on Shavuot, in his commentary Kli Yakar. He finds a hint to the giving of the Torah in the instruction to bring a minchah chadashah, a “new offering” on Shavuot.

Rabbi Luntschitz tells us that this new offering is the Torah itself. The essence of Torah is chiddush, the new insights and meanings we have to develop to keep Torah relevant and powerful. If we can do that with cheesecake, we can do it with anything, and that is the key to our spiritual endurance.

We must take a stand against settler violence

Simon Rocker — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 11:43:37 +0100

Acouple of months ago a young Arab woman from Qalansuwa in central Israel set off to do what we would consider a mitzvah. She was a teacher of Arabic in a Jewish school and she went with a Jewish friend to go to the shivah of a colleague in Jerusalem.

But when they left the shivah, they were confronted by a gang of local yeshivah students. “They cursed her, they spat on her, they threw oranges at her,” said Israeli religious activist Dr Gadi Gvaryahu. “They said to her friend ‘How dare you come with an Arab woman to our neighbourhood’. And then they damaged her car, broke the window, let down her tyres.”

When Dr Gvaryahu and his friends heard about the incident, their response was to organise a delegation to see the woman to apologise for what had happened. They also asked new Education Minister Rabbi Shai Piron to join them.

“He said he could not come but that he’d surprise us,” Dr Gvaryahu said. “The day before we came to Qalansuwa, he took his team to her class in her school and he, the minister of education, gave a lesson to her students on how Jews and Arabs can live together in the land of Israel. She was touched.”

Such acts of reconciliation have become a sad necessity for Dr Gvaryahu, a leading Orthodox campaigner against Jewish extremism. A year and a half ago he helped to set up an organisation to counter the “price taggers”, militant young settlers who carry out revenge raids for Palestinian attacks or government attempts to uproot West Bank outposts.

Sometimes the price taggers may be content with spraying graffiti. But they have also engaged in physical asssaults and arson. And whenever they strike, members of Dr Gvaryahu’s organisation will go to the place to talk to the victims and offer help, sympathy and sometimes compensation. “In a [Palestinian] village called Jabba, where extremists tried to burn down the mosque, we met many children,” he said. “One father said he was happy that we’d come because his child had started saying that all Jews are evil.”

His group is called Tag Meir,“tag of light”, a punning riposte to “price tag” in Hebrew, tag mechir. “They want to create damage, we want to create light,” he said.

Although most religious Zionists and most settlers oppose price tag attacks, he notes, enough extremists exist to cause trouble. “One person can create an enormous amount of damage,” he said. “You just need one Yigal Amir to kill a prime minister, and one Baruch Goldstein to kill 29 innocent Muslims at prayer.”

An eighth-generation Jerusalemite on his mother’s side — who has a doctorate in animal behaviour — he was inspired by the religious values of his father, a Holocaust survivor. “For him, anything that sounded like racism or hate crime was a sin,” he said.

Tag Meir is not his first venture into activism. He is also a founder of the Yud Bet Cheshvan Foundation, named after the yahrzeit of assassinated Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. “Yigal Amir was unfortunately a religious Zionist. And we feel a kind of responsibility for what he did. He received our education,” he said.
Amir was thought a model student at Bar Ilan University and also studied at the respected Keren B’Yavneh Yeshivah. “You cannot say he was not part of us, that he was crazy,” Dr Gvaryahu said.

The foundation has established a number of schools and also a youth movement. “We decided we need to bring more values of tolerance and open-minded pluralism. As we say in Hebrew, derech eretz kadma l’Torah, you need to be a human being before you practise your religious obligations.”

Whereas Orthodox Zionism was once a liberal, even left-leaning movement politically, he noted, it swung right after the 1967 War, gripped by messianic idealism which viewed settlement in Judea and Samaria as holy work. But that sense of divine mission has also spawned among a small, but dangerous, minority, a disregard for democratic norms.

The struggle against extremism is not just for Israelis. “Our religion is under attack and not only in Israel. If you let extremists burn mosques and churches all over Israel, tomorrow someone will do it with a synagogue,” he said.

Which is why his just he paid his first visit to London, as a guest of the New Israel Fund, which supports his work in Israel. He addressed a Yom Ha’atzmaut lunch at Golders Green Synagogue and spoke to groups from two other United Synagogue communities, Muswell Hill and South Hampstead.

If the religious Zionist sector were slide to the extreme right, it could spell disaster for Israel. “Because they serve in the army, they know how to use guns. They can destroy the country,” he said.

Instead, if it regained a more moderate voice, it could play a major bridge-building role in Israeli society, he believes. “I think at the end of the tunnel, we’ll win the battle. But there is a long way.”

Why a 'divine' messiah was not beyond belief

Simon Rocker — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 12:54:47 +0100

One of the more intriguing trends in Jewish circles is growing interest in Jesus. The work of scholars such as Geza Vermes who have explored the Jewish background of the Christian messiah has filtered into the mainstream. Shmuley Boteach published his book Kosher Jesus last year; Naomi Alderman’s recent novel The Liar’s Gospel was an alternative version of the Jesus story. The American academic Amy-Jill Levine, author of the Jewish Annotated New Testament, found a ready audience at the Limmud conference in Warwick last winter.

There is now a greater willingness to reclaim Jesus as a radical rabbi who preached Jewish teachings to Jews. Christianity is explained as the creation of his followers who introduced into it pagan notions such as the rebirth of a dying god.

But a daring new book by one of the world’s leading Jewish scholars challenges this simple contrast. The Jewish Gospels is a short work aimed at general readers by Daniel Boyarin, a professor of Talmud at the University of California in Berkeley. In ancient times, the borders between what Judaism and Christianity were far more porous than we conceive today, he argues: it was not until the fourth century that the doctrinal differences were clarified, not least because of the desire of the Roman-backed church to put clear water between the spreading new faith and those it considered Jews.

His most explosive contention is that the concept of a divine messiah was not an alien import but part of the cauldron of ideas that bubbled in the volatile world of classical Judaism. “The basic underlying thoughts from which both the Trinity and the incarnation grew are there in the very world into which Jesus was born,” he writes.

Jesus could have plausibly claimed to be the “son of God”, or rather the “son of Man”, as was the more potent phrase, which goes back to the Book of Daniel. In his dreams, the prophet sees heavenly thrones — the plural is significant. On one sits the “Ancient of Days” whose hair is white as wool (Daniel 7:9): but emerging from the “clouds of heaven” is another apparition, who is likened to a “Son of Man”, whose “dominion is an everlasting dominion” and who is to be served by all peoples and nations (7:13-14).

Some interpreters may regard the Son of Man simply as the symbolic representation of a warrior-Messiah , who does not enjoy divine status, or of heroic Israel. But Boyarin suggests that Daniel’s vision reflected earlier traditions of a dual Father-Son godhead — which later rabbis successfully fought as heresy but which underlay the Gospels’ depiction of Jesus.

It is fair to say that the apocalyptic visions of Daniel are not familiar territory even to most shul-going Jews. Even less known are other texts on which Boyarin draws to bolster his argument that “Gospel Judaism” was a “Jewish messianic movement”.

The Similitudes of Enoch is an apocryphal work dated by scholars to the tumultuous first century CE — the same era as Jesus — and named after the mysterious character who appears briefly at the start of the Bible and is whisked to heaven.

In the Similitudes, the narrator Enoch recounts a heavenly vision of a figure with “a head of days” like “white wool”, accompanied by another “whose face was like the appearance of a man”. That “Son of Man” sits on “the throne of glory”: he will deliver judgment, vanquish the wicked and be worshipped on earth. Enoch comes to understand that the Son of Man is actually himself.

Another first century Jewish text, the Fourth Book of Ezra, depicts a redeemer “like the figure of a man”, flying with the clouds of heaven to initiate some kind of judgment day. “The forms of many people came to him, some of whom were joyful and some sorrowful; some of whom were bound and some were bringing others as offerings.”

Boyarin also shows how Daniel’s vision could be decoded to lend credence to the idea of suffering redeemer. The New Testament, he concludes, is “much more deeply embedded within Second Temple Jewish life and thought than many have imagined, even… in the very moments that we take to be most characteristically Christian as opposed to Jewish: the notion of a dual godhead with a Father and a Son, the notion of a Redeemer who himself will be both God and man, and the notion that this Redeemer would suffer and die as part of the salvational process.”

Of course, this is by no means a consensus view among scholars. PeterSchäfer, author of The Jewish Jesus, for example, believes that Boyarin overstates his case. But investigations of first-century Judaism are shaking old certainties. We all build our worldview on ideas about the past. The effect of works like Boyarin’s is to make the solid ground on which we think we stand seem more like ice that can melt into something more fluid.

The implications of such radicalism could extend beyond the halls of academia and theological exchange between Christians and Jews. If Boyarin is right, then messianic Jews whose belief in Jesus as messiah puts them currently beyond the Jewish pale might have more claim to be an offshoot of Judaism than we think.

Why Zionism remains a spiritual imperative

Rabbi Gideon Sylvester — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 14:28:29 +0100

Should Israel’s hottest supermodel Bar Refaeli be the public face of the Zionism? Recently, Israel’s Foreign Ministry invited her to star in a video promoting the country. She’s an internationally recognised brand and a strong patriot, but some were offended by the choice.

Leading the attack was the Ministry of Defence, which was incensed that someone who had avoided the military draft should represent Israel. Equally appalled were religious Jews who condemned her lack of modesty, especially when photographed adorned in Christmas decor. In Israel and around the world, the choice of Bar Refaeli as an Israeli icon raised questions about what makes a model Zionist.

For purists, the sole measure of Zionism is willingness to settle in Israel. David Ben Gurion, who went on to become Israel’s first prime minister wrote to his father in 1909, “Settling the land –— that is the only real Zionism. The rest is just self-delusion, idle chatter and time-wasting”. Almost 50 years later, when Lord (Barnett) Janner hosted him for a speech in London, Ben Gurion still held fast to his views and while Janner attempted to introduce him, Ben Gurion heckled, chastising him for failing to make aliyah.

Living in Israel is the highest fulfilment of Zionism. Israeli citizens reap the rewards of living in a Jewish country and through taxes and army service contribute in ways which is hard for anyone outside the country to match. The rabbis too saw living in Israel as crucial. Sensing its intrinsic holiness and the religious value of living near our holiest sites of Judaism, they ruled that Israel should be the preferred home of every Jew.

But Zionism is not only about the past or mystical connections to spirituality. The most powerful definition of Zionism I know came from my teacher Rabbi Shlomo Riskin. He said that he made aliyah because although he was one of New York’s most successful Orthodox rabbis, the questions he dealt with rarely went beyond whether a particular brand of peanut butter was kosher or not.

Judaism, he argues should deal with bigger issues and in Israel we have an exciting opportunity to develop a Jewish state, building an infrastructure of schools, hospitals and defence along the ethical lines of our Torah.

Ben Gurion was also passionate that Zionism should reflect our highest ideals. When his own brother dreamt of aliyah with plans to sustain himself by opening a national lottery, the prime minister responded that such a project would corrupt the people and the land. It would be better for his brother to remain in Poland than to import such impurity to Israel.

Writing in deeply spiritual terms, Ben Gurion insisted, “The Land of Israel is not just a geographical concept. The Land of Israel must be a process of repairing and purifying our lives, changing our values in the loftiest sense of the term. If we merely bring the life of the ghetto into Israel, then what’s the difference if we live that life here or live it there?”

Ironically, today, the National Lottery plays an important role in building up the cultural and educational institutions of Israel, but the principle is clear. Israel must reflect our highest Jewish values.

As Israel’s Independence Day approaches with preparations for ceremonies, fireworks and barbecues, we have good reason to celebrate; but Jewish anniversaries are also a time for stocktaking. Religious and moral complacency are never an option.

A Jewish law professor, Albie Sachs, who authored the new South African Constitution, writes about the magnificent revolution that took place in his country and the challenges which still face it. “We are so good at doing the impossible,” he notes, “Now we must learn to do the ordinary.”

Israel has achieved the impossible; miraculously, from the ashes of the Holocaust a modern state has been built and despite numerous existential threats, it has succeeded in almost every field. Now it is time to work towards the ordinary. The days of draining swamps may be over and a strong army enables Israel to handle its immense security needs. Still, challenges remain.

The leaders of religious Zionist political parties who are now key players in the Israeli government largely reject the possibility of making peace and focus instead on retaining as much of the Land of Israel as possible. But Israeli politics moves fast and today it is the ultra-Orthodox questioning the wisdom of the settlements and speaking in favour of territorial compromise.

Britain’s Chief Rabbi Lord Jakobovits was among the first rabbis to point out that to meet the highest ethical standards, which should be the hallmark of a Jewish country, we must all play our part in renewing our search for peace with the Palestinians, strengthening Israeli democracy and ensuring the rights of minorities.

In this way, Israel can become a conduit for peace, justice, loving kindness and spirituality throughout the world so that “the Torah may go out from Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem” (Isaiah 2: 3).

A Pesach Love Story

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 14:04:02 +0000

Shir Hashirim, the Song of Songs, is the strangest book in the Hebrew Bible, one of the strangest ever to be included in a canon of sacred texts. It is written as a series of songs between two human lovers, candid, passionate, even erotic. It is one of only two books in Tanach that does not explicitly contain the name of God (Esther is the other) and it has no obvious religious content.

Yet Rabbi Akiva famously said: “The whole world is not as worthy as the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the [sacred] Writings are holy but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies” (Mishnah, Yadayim 3:5).

Rabbi Akiva’s insight is essential. Shir Hashirim, a duet scored for two young lovers, each delighting in the other, longing for one another’s presence, is one of the central books of Tanach and the key that unlocks the rest. It is about love as the holy of holies of human life. It is about the love of Israel for God and God for Israel, and the fact that it is written as the story of two young and human lovers is also fundamental, for it tells us that to separate human and divine love and to allocate one to the body, the other to the soul, is a false distinction.

Love is the energy God has planted in the human heart, redeeming us from narcissism and solipsism, making the human or divine Other no less real to me than I am to myself, thus grounding our being in that-which-is-not-me. One cannot love God without loving all that is good in the human situation.

Love creates. Love reveals. Love redeems. Love is the connection between God and us. That is the faith of Judaism and if we do not understand this, we will not understand it at all. We will, for example, fail to realise that the demands God makes of His people through the prophets are expressions of love, that what Einstein called Judaism’s “almost fanatical love of justice” is about love no less than justice, that the Torah is God’s marriage-contract with the Jewish people and the mitzvot are all invitations to love: “I seek You with all my heart; do not let me stray from Your commands” (Psalms 119:10).

Sadly, one must emphasise this point because it has long been said by the enemies of Judaism that it is a religion of law not love, justice not forgiveness, retribution not compassion. Simon May in his Love: A History rightly calls this “one of the most extraordinary misunderstandings in all of Western history.”

If we seek to understand the nature of biblical love, the place to begin is the Exodus itself. One feature of the narrative from the beginning of Exodus to the end of the book of Numbers is unmistakable. The Israelites are portrayed as ungrateful recipients of divine redemption. At almost every stage of the way they complain: when Moses’s first intervention makes their situation momentarily worse, when they come up against the barrier of the Sea of Reeds, when they have no water, when they lack food, when Moses delays his return from the mountain, and when the spies return with a demoralising report about the Promised Land and its inhabitants.
They sin. They rebel. They make a golden calf. They engage in false nostalgia about Egypt. More than once they express the desire to return whence they came. God gets angry with them. At times Moses comes close to despair. So unlovely is the portrait painted of them in the Torah that it almost seems to invite the thought, “How odd / of God / To choose / the Jews.”

Yet as we proceed through Tanach, another picture emerges. We hear it in the eighth century BCE from one of the first literary prophets, Hosea. The story Hosea has to tell is extraordinary. God appears to him and tells him to marry a prostitute, a woman who will bear him children but will be unfaithful to him. God wants the prophet to know what it feels like to love and to be betrayed. The prophet, uncertain perhaps about whether the children are in fact his, is to call them “Unloved” and “Not my people.”

He will then discover the power and persistence of love. He will wait until his wife is abandoned by all her lovers, and he will take her back, despite her betrayal. He will love her children, whatever his doubts about their parentage. He will change their names to “My people” and “Beloved.” He will, in other words, know from his own experience what God feels about the Israelites.

It is an astonishing and daring narrative, suggesting as it does that God cannot, will not, cease to love His people. He has been hurt by them, wounded by their faithlessness, but His love is inextinguishable. Hosea then hears God say this:
“I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her. There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Trouble a door of hope. There she will sing as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt” (Hosea 2:16–17).

This is a retelling of the Exodus as a love story. In Hosea’s vision, it has become something other and more than the liberation of a people from slavery. Israel left Egypt like a bride leaving the place where she has lived to accompany her new husband, God, on a journey to the new home they will build together. That is how it was “in the days of her youth” and how it will be again. The desert is now no longer simply the space between Egypt and Israel, but the setting of a honeymoon in which the people and God were alone together, celebrating their company, their intimacy.

Two centuries after Hosea, the people are now in exile in Babylon. There the prophet Ezekiel retells the past in a different but related way. God had first seen Israel as a young girl, a child. He watched over her as she grew to adulthood:
“You grew and matured and came forth in all your glory, your breasts full and your hair grown, and you were naked and exposed. Later I passed by, and when I looked at you and saw that you were old enough for love, I spread the corner of My garment over you and covered your nakedness. I gave you My solemn oath and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Sovereign Lord, and you became Mine” (Ezekiel 16:7–8).

Again, a daring love story. God sees Israel as a young woman and cares for her. He “spreads the corner of His garment” over her, which as we recall from the book of Ruth (3:9) constitutes a promise to marry. The marriage itself takes the form of a solemn oath, a covenant. The giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai has been transformed by the prophet into a marriage ceremony.

Hosea and Ezekiel both envisage the Exodus as a kind of elopement between a groom — God — and His bride — Israel. However, in both cases it is God who loves and God who acts. It was left to Jeremiah, Ezekiel’s somewhat older contemporary, to deliver the decisive transformation in our picture of the Exodus, saying in the name of God:
“I remember of you the kindness of your youth, your love when you were a bride; how you walked after Me in the desert, through a land not sown” (Jeremiah 2:2).
Now it is not just God who calls, but Israel who responds — Israel who follows her husband faithfully into the no-man’s-land of the desert as a trusting bride, willing in the name of love, to take the risk of travelling to an unknown destination.

The message of Hosea, Ezekiel and Jeremiah is that the Exodus was more than a theological drama about the defeat of false gods by the true One, or a political narrative about slavery and freedom. It is a love story — troubled and tense, to be sure — yet an elopement by bride and groom to the desert where they can be alone together, far out of sight of prying eyes and the distractions of civilisation.

That is the theme of the Song of Songs. Like God summoning His people out of Egypt, the lover in the song calls on his beloved, “Come… let us leave” (2:10). The beloved herself says: “Come, draw me after you, let us run!” (1:4). Then in an image of extraordinary poignancy, we see the two of them emerging together from the wilderness: “Who is this, rising from the desert, leaning on her beloved?” (Song. 8:5).

Israel, leaning on God, emerging, flushed with love, from the wilderness: that is the Exodus as seen by the great prophets. Nor were they the first to develop this idea. It appears, fully fledged, in the book of Deuteronomy, where the word “love” appears twenty-three times as a description of the relationship between God and the people. When we read the Song of Songs on Pesach as a commentary to the Exodus, it spells out Jeremiah’s message. God chose Israel because Israel was willing to follow Him into the desert, leaving Egypt and all its glory behind for the insecurity of freedom, relying instead on the security of faith.