Probably few rabbis today have experienced the reaction from the congregation that Rabbi Isaac M Wise did in 1851. He had publicly criticised one of the trustess of Beth El Synagogue in Albany, New York for keeping his business open on Shabbat. When the rabbi arrived on Rosh Hashanah, the president of the shul punched him in the face.
The incident is recorded in a new book by Brighton Progressive Synagogue’s Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber on the concept of freedom of the pulpit. The Pastor as Partisan explores the belief that clerics should be free to speak the truth according to their conscience, without fear of upsetting some of their flock.
His starting-point is Unitarian ministers in the19th century, especially those who championed the abolitionism of slavery. To those who decried pastors wading into politics, E. Winchester Reynolds thundered in 1861: “if a minister will be a faithful leader and not a ductile dough-face, he will be in advance of his people.”
Belief in rabbinic freedom took root in the growing Reform Jewish movement in the States. In 1905 one of its most influential 20th-century rabbis, Stephen M Wise, turned down a position at New York’s Temple Emanu-El because he refused to agree to lay leaders vetting his sermons. In 1933, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the movement’s rabbinic body, described freedom of the pulpit as a “basic” principle.
What constituted controversy naturally changed with the times. By Stephen Wise’s day, speaking up for workers’ rights against exploitative bosses had become a topical theme. And as Rabbi Kanter-Webber notes, much later in the UK in the 1990s a sermon about ceremonies for gay couples could rouse indignation within a Reform congregation but within a decade these had become officially accepted by the movement.
In 1931, one of the founders of Liberal Judaism, Claude Montefiore, had expressed reservations about politics in the pulpit in correspondence with the rabbi of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue, St John’s Wood, Isaac Mattuck, but ultimately was prepared “to leave it to the judgment of the minister”. A decade earlier, when LJS appointed an additional rabbi, Maurice Perlzweig, he insisted on his liberty in the job as he was an avid Zionist, whereas Mattuck was anti-Zionist.
But the outspoken rabbi did not always enjoy his congregation’s tolerance. As Dr Izak Goller, a somewhat maverick Orthodox rabbi in Britain, observed in 1921: “Who dared of old the Torah teach/ The Greek might flay, the Roman rack them./ If rabbis now plain truth dared preach,/ Their very flocks would rise and sack them.”
What is striking about many of the examples Rabbi Katner-Webber quotes is that they are in the tradition of rebuke – the castigation of social ills, even if it meant stepping on the toes of some of the audience. It is a tradition that takes it cue from the Prophets – “you troubler of Israel,” the miscreant King Ahab complained to Elijah in the Tanach.
However, that tone is far less common in sermons today. The rabbi is expected to uplift and encourage their congregation rather than tick them off. Rabbi Kanter-Webber explains that this reflects the changing role of the clergy. “Those tub-thumpers in the mid-19th century, their only job as clergy really was to give sermons. They didn’t have that pastoral role at all,” he says.
“Whereas these days the pastoral role is time wise by far the biggest proportion of what we do. And so it would be no good for me to tell my congregants that they’re all sinners and all awful people and then expect them to let me minister to them when they’re going through miscarriages or need funeral care or whatever it may be…
“As the more caring side of the rabbinate emerged, there needs to be a softer approach in the pulpit.”
He himself has the reputation of being a forthright speaker who is well to the left on the rabbinic spectrum. He has, for instance, supported the UK’s sanctions on Israel, which he has described on social media as a “rogue state” but he deplored the recent Green “Zionism is racism” motion as extremist. He would back the right, say, of an Orthodox rabbi who believed settlement of Judea and Samara to be a halachic duty to express his views.
When his opinions on Israel provoke an adverse reaction, it generally comes from beyond his synagogue, he says. “The most controversial sermon I have given I was genuinely not expecting and that was a trans rights sermon.”
He had criticised the 2025 Supreme Court ruling on biological sex. “There was an anonymous letter sent to the chair signed by numerous concerned congregants. Of course, [with] anonymous letters, you don’t know how numerous they are or whether in fact it’s one person. There were a couple of other people who went to the chair.
“But also what I thought was really important is someone came right to me and said, ‘I’d like to sit down and talk about this because I was very unhappy about what you said’.” Being able to sit down and discuss an issue with a congregant is the outcome he values.
While some congregations such as his own and LJS have a reputation for giving their rabbis free rein, in others colleagues have to tread more carefully. When asked how he considers the state of rabbinic freedom in the Progressive movement on a scale of one to ten, he gives Brighton Progressive a ten but “there are definitely communities that go as low as four or five”.
Some people may frown on rabbis stirring up any kind of controversy because they come to shul mostly for a Saturday morning schmooze and believe fireworks from the pulpit can disrupt the atmosphere.
Rabbis need to maintain balance, he agrees. “So Rosh Hashanah, for example, I know that a lot of my colleagues were hastily rewriting sermons after the sanctions announcement. I took a very deliberate, and maybe uncharacteristic, decision not to do that because it needs to be a time of togetherness. There are people who only come once or twice a year who are there and an oasis from the stresses the news imposes on you was something they needed.
“If it had been a normal Shabbat, I probably would have hastily rewritten my sermon and done something to explore the sanctions.”
Similarly, when we spoke, he was preparing for a bat mitzvah last Shabbat. “So I’m not going to do Green Party stuff because it’s her batmitzvah. She doesn’t deserve that and neither do her family.”
However, he observes, “the people who want the peace always, who say Shabbat is where I come to not to be disturbed at all, are maybe missing some elements of the Jewish tradition – that it’s supposed to be disturbing. The prophets were there to disturb people.”
The Partisan As Partisan – Freedom of the Pulpit in History and Theory, Wipf & Stock, is available now
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