Why does this matter and why now?
Following the horror of the Golders Green stabbings at the end of April, I found myself in conversation after conversation with Anglo-Jewish leadership, all of us searching for ways to support our community through a frightening time.
In one such exchange, I turned to an esteemed colleague and said: “Our people are reeling. We must do something to help them bounce back.” He looked at me and replied, with the wisdom of one who has been around the block a few times: “Don't you think if it were that easy, we'd have done it already?”
It was, of course, a complicated picture. But one thing was certain. In the very community where the attack took place, no bouncing back was needed. Within 48 hours, Golders Green Road’s bustling religious heartland was back open for business, its shops full again, its streets, quite possibly still marked by what had happened there, alive once more with the glorious, chaotic double-parking so ubiquitous to the area.
The pulse of Jewish life there may have slowed, briefly, painfully, but an inspiring fortitude and resilience was at work and no act of terror could thwart it.
Here, then, is the sentence I want to place at the centre of everything that follows: to bounce back, you need something to bounce back to.
"Most of us are scared. Some are angry. Many are tired. Tired of being asked to rally around a Jewish identity that, for many, has thinned to a surname and a grandparent.
My friend and fellow Sacks Scholar, Rabbi Matt Marks, director of Tribe, the United Synagogue's youth movement, reflecting on the state of Anglo-Jewry put it more eloquently than I could, writing at the time: "Most of us are scared. Some are angry. Many are tired. Tired of being asked to rally around a Jewish identity that, for many, has thinned to a surname and a grandparent. We have spent a lifetime being told that being Jewish is incidental, a private flavouring in an otherwise universal British self. Now we are asked to be Jews in public at the moment many of us have the least Jewish vocabulary to draw on."
He continues: "The temptation, in that vacuum, is to let the fight become the identity. To be a Jew because you stand against antisemitism. But what would any of us be if there were no antisemitism to fight? Would we still stand and declare ourselves proud? And if so, proud of what?"
Rav Soloveitchik gave us the vocabulary for exactly this dilemma decades before we’ve had to lean on it. In Kol Dodi Dofek, he describes two covenants binding the Jewish people to one another and to God.
The first, the brit goral, the covenant of fate, is the Judaism forged in shared history and shared suffering. We did not choose our enemies, our exile, or the events of this past year. Yet we are bound together by having endured them, involuntarily, reflexively, completely. It is why a Jew in South Hertfordshire feels the ground shift at news of a shooting attack at a Chanukah celebration a world away.
But Soloveitchik insists there is a second covenant fate alone cannot supply: the brit ye'ud, the covenant of destiny. This is not the Judaism that happens to us, but the Judaism we choose, on purpose, again and again: candles lit not because a grandmother once lit them, but because we have decided to, a page of Talmud opened, a kosher kitchen kept, a shul attended not only in grief but simply because it is Shabbat and Shabbat means coming to shul. Fate is what we share by birth. Destiny is what we build by decision.
So here is what I have come to understand. We are, as a community, magnificent at the covenant of fate. Nobody rallies faster, mourns more fully, or shows up more fiercely for one another than Anglo-Jewry in a crisis. But a Judaism built only on fate, only in response to what is done to us, is, in the end, a Judaism of fear. And we deserve something far greater than that. We deserve a Judaism of destiny. A Judaism of awe.
The Talmud tells us that on Rosh Hashanah, God declares: "Make Me your King." Sound the shofar and crown Me. Read carelessly, this sounds almost like a demand, does the Creator of the universe truly require our endorsement? The Chasidic masters read it entirely differently. God's words are not a demand at all. They are an invitation. You decide, He is saying. My kingship rests in your hands.
Sit with that for a moment. On the day we believe all life is being weighed, the Creator/Author of the universe asks not for our compliance, not merely our attendance, but our genuine, freely chosen buy-in.
Silhouette of a Jewish man blowing a long shofar made from the horn of a kudu antelope at sunrise in Israel.Getty Images
This is what the shofar sounds like when you truly listen: a question, in its most primal form, aimed at each of us. Do you believe there is a compelling Jewish story? And will you choose to play your part in it?
Because the alternative is to live as victims of fate. Events happen, the world lurches, we react, we survive. That is no way to live and too many of us are living it now, with nothing to show for it beyond anxiety and exhaustion.
The Rosh Hashanah way is to step into this moment as a conscious actor with a part to play, to move, deliberately, from the covenant of fate towards the covenant of destiny. Not abandoning the first, we should never stop showing up for one another or standing up against those who would wish us harm, but building the second alongside it, brick by chosen brick, mitzvah by mitzvah, until it can bear the weight our children will need it to carry.
That is what would make this a true year of Jewish awesomeness, not because nothing frightening happened, but because something wonderful was decided.
It is why the United Synagogue is launching a movement this year built on this invitation: to help our community move from fate to destiny, one chosen mitzvah at a time, not as a response to hostility, but a step towards the proud and engaged Jewish life we want to live by and of course bequeath to our children.
This Rosh Hashanah, my invitation to our community across Britain and the world therefore is simple. Let this be the year we ask not only how we survive as Jews, but what we are choosing to become. Let every Shabbat table that lights candles it didn't light last year, every new hour of Torah study, every hour dedicated to charitable volunteering, be its own small coronation, our answer to the question God asks each of us on this day: will this year be truly awesome?
May we all be blessed with a Shanah Tovah Umetukah and may we be inscribed for a year of sweetness, meaning and Jewish awesomeness.
Rabbi Elchonon Feldman is Senior Rabbi of Bushey Synagogue amd chairman of the Rabbinical Council of the United Synagogue
