Is there a raison d’etre to diaspora life?

“When I first arrived, men and women were sitting together on Simchat Torah evening service. We had no repetition of the Musaph Amidah, that was the last of the historic compromises from 1892 that were still left – the mixed choir went long before I came. There was no bimah in the middle – which is a halachic requirement.

“Great credit to Hampstead, all these things were resolved amicably, but they didn’t all happen quickly.”

Generally, he believes halachic standards in mainstream Orthodoxy today “are higher. I think there is a very good young rabbinate in the US and people hold themselves to higher standards, certainly more than a couple of generations ago, which is very positive.”

Another change for the better is progress for women. “Not just in the United Synagogue but more widely, you see women giving shiurim to a mixed audience – no one in a broadly modern Orthodox community bats an eyelid.”

The now common practice of synagogues appointing a rabbinic couple rather than just a rabbi has proved “revolutionary”, he said – accepted in the United Synagogue “without any kind of controversy. If you look back at the heim, I guess some rebbetzins would have been hugely powerful figures behind the scenes and very occasionally outstanding scholars in their own right. But the idea that the community is led by a rabbinic couple – a rabbi and a rebbetzin – at some level, it’s feminism with a hechsher, it’s a way of getting women in spiritual leadership positions in a way that doesn’t draw fire.”

He himself finds partnership minyans, where women can lead some prayers and leyn from the Torah, but which are not permitted within the United Synagogue, “halachically problematic. But I would still have one in my shul.” Better, he believes, to have United Synagogue members attending one on its premises rather than going elsewhere.

He also believes women rabbis are “on the way. As always the UK is going to be a bit behind. Israel’s first, then America. Undoubtedly, it will happen. I don’t think it is something to be frightened of because every rabbi knows in the kind of communal rabbinate we have in the UK 90 per cent of what we do can be done by a woman without raising any halachic issues – teaching Torah, pastoral, counselling, fundraising.”

As a “Rabbi Dr”, he harks back to an older rabbinical model when rabbis might also have an academic role. In Israel, he will be taking up the post of research fellow in the philosophy department of Haifa (where another Anglo, Rabbi Dr Samuel Lebens is ensconced as associate professor). He has just completed the manuscipt of his latest book, Encountering Evil, which will explore the problem of suffering.

But he believes that intellectual engagement with secular thought is less visible now among the rabbinate. “There is huge admiration for Rabbi Sacks and everyone quotes him but they are not following his lead in engaging with the primary classics of Western literature like he was.”
Last year he became a qualified dayan in Jewish family law, one of the first US rabbis to graduate from the independent Montefiore Endowment/Eretz Hemdah course in the UK. But despite that, he has never been asked to serve on a judicial panel by the London Beth Din and he generally believes there needs to be more scope for professional development within the US if it is to retain rabbis.

Having gained semichah in Israel, he had always planned to return there to live. But it was a condition of his rabbinic studies as a Kalms fellow that he would first have to come back to the UK to serve the community for five years. His younger son Tal, who has just finished his A-levels, was planning a gap year in Israel this year; his elder son Yoni has already done several tours of duty in Gaza.

He had once been involved with the now defunct dovish religious Zionist party Meimad but in the wake of October 7 his views have shifted and he no longer believes a two-state solution feasible – at least not now. “Maybe in 50 years.” But the rise of the religious hard right in Israel has been “an unwelcome development. I sense that because we have been in an existential crisis for the last few years, [the more universal aspect of Judaism] been overshadowed and we have been concentrating on survival. But please God, with a more peaceful future, there will be a chance for moderate religious Zionism to reassert itself, no doubt in a different form which is suitable to the current challenges facing us. There must be a compelling ideological alternative to Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.”

But he worries that the kind of middle-of-the-road traditionalism that brought previous generations into an Orthodox community even if they weren’t particularly pious is no longer strong enough to secure the allegiance of the young. “How is that going to play out in future?”

And while Israel’s centrality to the Jewish world was “wonderful”, he said, it “raises the question of the raison d-être of Jewish life outside Israel. Can the diaspora as a whole compete with the draw of Israel, which is being part of the greatest Jewish project in 2,000 years? For many committed Jews, [the diaspora] is a derivative existence.

“I don’t mean that Jews outside Israel should not live Jewish lives or question that Jewish religious and communal infrastructure are indispensable anywhere where there is a Jewish community. What I question is whether Jewish life outside Israel in our day is anything more than, in halachic parlance, a bed’ieved, a sub-optimal state of affairs. Maybe no one is articulating a raison d’être for it because there isn’t one.”
 

Image: Rabbi Dr Michael Harris and his wife Judith