"We were at the point of annihilation. You should be loyal to our country and defend our country because we have managed to achieve an independence and a pride and a self-assertion which we never had before."
September 30, 2009 11:03
Continued from page three
JC: I always marvel, at every Seder night, that, 2,000 years ago, before the real spiral of ongoing persecution, destruction and Holocaust, some rabbi had the understanding of what would be the Jewish fate to say that “in every generation they stand up to destroy us”. They hadn’t at that point.
NG: Where a young person doesn’t have any input, other than the external of negative stereotypes, what does that ingrain in them?
JC: It is very sad, isn’t it? If Judaism is based on negativity and vulnerability, that is not a recipe for a Jewish commitment. But there is not this negative fear in Israel.
NG: So when you see those crowds of trainee soldiers being taken around Yad Vashem and told: “This is why you are in the army”…
The love of 'Go learn' - that is what it means to be a Jew Howard Jacobson
JC: It is a pride in what we have achieved. We were at the point of annihilation. You should be loyal to our country and defend our country because we have managed to achieve an independence and a pride and a self-assertion which we never had before.
JF: It is interesting that it has taken us until now to get to Israel. What does it mean to an exiled people to return? A people that has raised itself on powerlessness now has a sovereign country dealing with a minority of up to a 25 per cent. The idea that ethical conduct is definitive of what it is to be a Jew is challenged at the very least by the power achieved out of powerlessness, and by Jews now having an army and the means to be like other peoples.
HJ: And I think, for many Jews, that is hard to bear and explains some of the extreme, antagonistic positions which they take towards Israel. It is beyond their ken that we should not be a scattered people clinging on.
NG: When you see triumphalist Jews wearing kippot, wearing sheitls, standing on hill-top settlements in the territories, that also does terrible things to one’s sense of identity. I don’t want to be identified with those people.
JC: It is going to take another 100 years for Israel to find its religious identity. The strictly-Orthodox Jews living in Bnei Brak could be living in a Polish ghetto. So many of the “halachists” — whose decisions we are touched by — are people who have no concept whatsoever of what it is to have a child coming who is, for example, converted by a Reform Beth Din. What do they know about a Reform Beth Din? Or interaction with the non-Jewish world? The things that we struggle with on a daily basis.
JF: I don’t know how you could ever bring in the Charedi and strictly-Orthodox, and yet theirs are now the majority of Jewish births.
JC: About 15 years ago I went to America and I saw women’s tefillah groups and other experimental services. I came back and I spoke to my community about how wonderful this was. Lord Jakobovits [the former Chief Rabbi], to whom I was extremely close, said to me: “Jeffrey, I am going to advise you as a friend. Don’t try to found a Modern Orthodox movement in Britain because you will fail. Why? Because the Charedim are in the ascendancy. They are getting numerically stronger, they have the passion and they are going to take over. I can only hope that, once they are in a seat of power, they will moderate their position.” He was right — but we have yet to see any evidence of them moderating their position.
But I still entertain the hope that Modern Orthodoxy will get a bit more confidence. That rabbis in this country and America will not be looking over their right shoulder all the time but will provide a modern approach to Jewish life.
NG: Going back to 1996, when my father died and there was this bizarre rift in the community, I took shelter in Israel. Every now and then, when I was told there was something particularly ugly about the so-called “Sacks affair”, I would go and buy a copy of the Jewish Chronicle. One Shabbat, I was carrying under my arm a JC with the whole story about the letter having been leaked to Dayan Padwa. I was sitting in the car that afternoon with two friends of mine, two women who run a women’s theatre company, one of whom is called Rena Padwa. So I said to her “Rena” — who was a single mother and an actress — “do you know anything about this chap?” And she said: “Yes, he is my uncle”.
It turns out the dayan’s brother, the father of this woman with whom I was about to go to the beach for the afternoon, had at one point shaved off his beard, become a communist and gone to live in Israel. This helped ameliorate for me the pain of the insult that was being thrown at my father’s memory.
JC: In Lord Jakobovits’s time, there was a committee called the consultative committee, which met in his home every three months. It contained representatives of the Orthodox community and the Reform and the Liberals, the Sephardim and the Board of Deputies. And this is a measure of Lord Jakobovits – the chairman of the consultative committee was always one of the Progressive, Liberal or Reform rabbis. Rabbi Hugo Gryn occupied the chairmanship for many years.
This Rosh Hashanah there is an opportunity for us to reflect on and take great pride in the Jewish schools that we have in this country. We have schools catering for the right wing and we have JCoss. JFS is a communal gem. I am the rabbi of Immanuel College and I wish that there had been a school like that when I was a child.
The conversion process should be made easier. There should be halachic solutions to enable these children to be regarded as full Jews. It is vital that our schools should be open to every child who wants a Jewish education.