A prevailing anxiety runs through the volume. Finchley Progressive Synagogue’s Rabbi Rebecca Birk writes of a “time of profound Jewish unease”. Words like “crisis”, “fissure”, “fracture” frame the discussion.
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For its third editor, the movement’s chair Dr Ed Kessler, the publication was prompted by a wish to show that unification of the two movements meant more than administrative efficiency. He wants to show that MPJ has “great thought leadership”. As the founder of the Woolf Institute in Cambridge for the study of Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations and as the author of an academic study of the Akedah, intellectual inquiry lies close to his heart.
Occupied by pastoral affairs and the day-to-day running of a congregation, rabbis may have little time to collect their thoughts, he says, so he wanted to “nudge” them. On the spine of the book appears the number one – a declaration that this is intended to be the first of an annual series tackling different issues. “We must have time to think.”
Secondly, it shows “we are not afraid. We could have taken on a safe subject but we wanted to take on a subject that is the cause of such a lot of division and to show that within the Progressive movement there are a multitude of voices and we embrace that multitude.”
But if multi-vocality, to use a vogue word, is desirable, the result could be cacophony.
“I’d say the consensus is that we are a Progressive Zionist movement,” he says. (The book carries the imprint of the international Progressive Zionist organisation Arzenu).
“But there are people within the Progressive movement who would not associate themselves, they may call themselves non-Zionist, as much as there would be others who would be much more hardline in their Zionism…
“We have to create the space to think, to argue, to debate. We reject the binary position.”
While at the end of the day one may have to arrive at a view, “you’re much more likely to come to an appropriate viewpoint, having listened to different arguments”.
Thoughtful: Movement for Progressive Judaism chair Ed Kessler[Missing Credit]
There is "a lot” about covenant in the book, he says, and what it means in connection with the land. Rabbi Levy, for example, argues for reclaiming the notion of a conditional covenant –that the title deeds to it are not absolute but depend on how the people behave. In support of conditionality, Rabbi Levy enlists Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits, suggesting that his is a voice “largely lost in the Zionism of the modern state of Israel”, where the messianic strand of Religious Zionism sanctifying settlement of the land has become dominant.
Summarising his view, Rabbi Levy explained this week: "A Zionism which only sees the relationship with the land in terms of ownership ignores a strong Jewish theme of this relationship also bringing with it obligation – both moral and ritual."
For Kessler, MPJ’s focus is on promoting “what it considers its values of social justice, prophetic critique” rather than opposing other movements. But he adds, “Of course, those who promote a sort of ethno-Jewish nationalism at the expense of others – whether it’s within, or outside, the Jewish world – we wholly reject.”
When asked what he meant by “ethno-nationalism” – a term used by some to delegitimise the very existence of the state – he said he was referring to “Jewish religious extremism”.
The question of Judaism and its relationship to the land and state of Israel has become, he believes, “the challenge of our time. And I think it is probably as divisive as it was in the early stages of Zionism. When you think about Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann running around central and east Europe, western Europe and the United States banging the drum, the whole Jewish world, Orthodox, Progressive, secular, religious, was divided over it. I think we are at that point again.”
Denial of debate leads to “self-censorship… and eventually to withering and death”, he says. Grappling with difficult questions, conversely, signals “vitality”.
Research conducted recently by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, he says, “shows significant questions being asked across the generations and an increasing number of young people are asking more difficult questions than perhaps their parents are. That is true across Jewish denominations, including the Progressive movement, and we are responding to that.”
Progressive Judaism, Zionism and the State of Israel is available from progressivejudaism.org.uk
