In medieval times, Jews were often uprooted by religious persecution. But when, the 13th-century scholar Rabbi Yaakov Anatoli, who translated works of philosophy and logic from Arabic into Hebrew, left Provence for Naples, it may have been because of trouble from his fellow-Jews.
The influential Rashba, Rabbi Shlomo ben Avraham refers to “having expunged him from our borders”, denouncing his book Malmad Hatalmidim as “wormwood and gall”.
At the heart of their dispute was the attitude to science and philosophy. Maimonideans like Rabbi Anatoli saw these as vital tools to their rationalistic interpretation of Torah. The Rashba, however, was against exposing the Jewish masses to such external sources of wisdom.
When Sina Kahen first came across this machloket, conflict, he found it “shocking”. But it triggered an intellectual journey which has now led to him publish the first of a collection of essays on the Torah portion that champions Rabbi Anatoli and other exponents of what he calls the “Western Sephardi” or “classical Sephardi” approach.
Now 30, he came to London from Tehran when he was three and grew up in Od Yosef Hai, the community run by the Gateshead-educated head of the Sephardi Beth Din, Dayan Avraham David. Educated at Hasmonean with an MBA from Imperial College, he works as an innovation manager in surgical robotics.
The elements of Sephardi Judaism are often “reduced to food, music” or variations in liturgy, he says. But what he believes has been too often ignored, and what he wasn’t taught about in his youth, was its intellectual heritage.
In Ideas — Bereshit, he offers a compact discussions of a point in the parashah — such as the significance of speech in Bereshit or the appearance of the rainbow in Noah — buttressed by a wide selection of sources. He quotes not only from classical Sephardi hachamim but also contemporary writers such as Lord Sacks or the Sephardi scholar Yosef Faur, as well as thinkers outside the field of religion such as the Israelis Daniel Kahneman or Yuval Harari.
The book comes with endorsements from a number of rabbis including the leading American Jewish studies professor Marc Shapiro and the Emeritus Rabbi of New York’s Spanish and Portuguese congregation, Marc Angel. He wrote it as a lockdown project over three months and is two essays away from completing the next volume on Shemot.
In the UK, there were “no educational frameworks that represent the Golden Age” for his generation. It was when Rabbi Joseph Dweck arrived as Senior Rabbi of the S & P Sephardi Community six years ago that he found a mentor.
“I starting learning more and more with him and being exposed to the books that have been coming out recently about the classical Sephardi approach,” he says.
While some disparaged Rabbi Dweck’s approach as too novel as if it were “some New Age, postmodern interpretation of Judaism,” Kahen instead views him as “another link in the chain, if you like, of this classical Sephardi approach. The reason he seems so new and innovative is because this classical Sephardi approach was — I wouldn’t say silenced — but kept in the sidelines for such a long time.”
That happened, he believes, because while the great Sephardi rabbis exemplified Judaism in “thrive mode”, intellectually curious and willing to integrate insights from other studies into their Torah worldview, a Judaism in “survive mode” has often since predominated, more insular and defensive in response to external threats.
An outcrop of survivalism has been a kind of “pop religion” , a “superstitious, hyper-literal, anti-intellectual stream that’s become very loud in Judaism today.”
Speaking to contemporaries, he finds a cognitive dissonance among those who may be intellectually advanced in their professional discipline but who when it comes to Judaism, “it’s almost like you hang your cloak of reality at the door before you speak to a rabbi or open up a religious text”.
In contrast, the architects of the classical Sephardi mesorah, tradition, wrote “treatises on logic, the latest books on medicine, on natural science”.
If that Sephardi tradition is starting to “move from the sidelines,” he believes it is because it can better meet the challenges of today than a Judaism which turns its back on science.
“A lot of my friends from Hasmo and beyond are starting to see that there are many questions out there but we are not equipped to answer them. The world we are living in is developing at such a rate that to ignore the realities outside can only so last so long.”
It is a mesorah which “is intellectually honest, while being spiritually fulfilling, and I think is very much a solution to a lot of the problems we are facing in a post-religious world where Judaism is just seen as something you do on a Friday night rather than being a lens through which you engage with the world around you.”
In June, he and other like-minded peers set up a Sephardi Chavurah, where every week they study the legacy of classical Sepharad, joined via technology by others from North America and Jerusalem.
It’s a traditon that teaches that “the Author of the Torah and the Author of the world are one and the same. But we forget about the Author of the world, whose fingerprints are in the elements of the world, whether it’s science, nature, art. If you really love God, how can you ignore His fingerprints?”
Ideas – Bereshit, Sina Kahen, is available from Amazon at £10.99
