Wrestling with the moral dilemmas of Gaza: Martin Buber’s ‘Hebrew Humanism’

I’ve argued in a previous post that our challenge during Israel’s war in Gaza is to sustain our solidarity with the Jewish people while simultaneously expressing our commitment to the Jewish value of human life and the idea of universal human rights.  Now I want to explain why this challenge is so difficult, and – perhaps – to suggest a way through the dilemma.

The problem is harder to negotiate than many of Israel’s advocates would have us believe.  Let’s assume for a moment (and I think this is a correct assumption) that it’s legitimate for Israel to defend its citizens by attacking Hamas’s rocket launch sites and tunnels in the Gaza Strip, even when Hamas intentionally locates these in densely populated areas.  Let’s also assume that Israel does its best to comply with international humanitarian law by not targeting civilians, giving warnings before each attack, and trying to minimise civilian casualties. 

None of this means that a Palestinian civilian whose home is destroyed or who is killed or injured has not had her human rights infringed.  This is true even if we argue that Israel’s actions are legitimate specifically because their aim is to protect the human rights of Israeli civilians.  And if Palestinian human rights are being infringed as the result of Israeli actions, then Israel has to take responsibility for this, even if every act carried out by the IDF is morally and legally justifiable. 

(The same goes for Hamas, of course, the difference being that no-one could argue that Hamas makes any effort to avoid civilian casualties of Israelis – or of their own people).

The internet is awash with one-sided, simplistic responses to this dilemma.  Half the responses justify Israel’s behaviour and, as a logical next step, either deny Palestinian suffering or blame it on Hamas.  The other half bewail the abuse of Palestinian rights and draw the conclusion that Israel’s actions are therefore morally illegitimate.

To me it’s clear that both sides only have it half right: it’s entirely possible for legitimate actions to lead to terrible suffering.  This is the paradox: the fact that Israel’s actions may be defensible does not absolve us from responsibility for their indefensible results. (Disclaimer: I’m not making a moral judgement about specific Israeli actions as I don’t have the necessary military or legal expertise to do so.)

So how should we respond?

The religious philosopher, Zionist and peace activist, Martin Buber, has profound advice to offer on this difficult topic.  In his essay ‘Hebrew Humanism,’ published in 1942, Buber argued that the Bible is the most important moral and spiritual resource for the Jewish national movement.  But the function of the Bible is not (as most Zionists had it) only to teach us about our history and our right to the Land.  Rather:

“What it does have to tell us, and what no other voice in the world can teach us with such simple power, is that there is truth and there are lies, and that human life cannot persist or have meaning save in the decision in behalf of truth and against lies; that there is right and wrong, and that the salvation of man depends on choosing what is right and rejecting what is wrong; and that it spells the destruction of our existence to divide our life up into areas where the discrimination between truth and lies, right and wrong, holds, and others where it does not hold, so that in private life, for example, we feel obligated to be truthful, but can permit ourselves lies in public, or that we act justly in man-to-man relationships, but can and even should practice injustice in national relationships.”

For Buber, Judaism teaches that morality is absolute.  There is a difference between right and wrong, and this difference holds in every area of life, the political and the military no less than the private and the interpersonal.  But Buber is not naïve about the difficulties of this position.

“It is true that we are not able to live in perfect justice, and in order to preserve the community of man, we are often compelled to accept wrongs in decisions concerning the community.  But what matters is that in every hour of decision we are aware of our responsibility and summon our conscience to weigh exactly how much is necessary to preserve the community, and accept just so much and no more; that we do not interpret the demands of a will-to-power as a demand made by life itself; that we do not make a practice of setting aside a certain sphere in which God’s command does not hold, but regard those actions as against his command, forced on us by the exigencies of the hour as painful sacrifices; that we do not salve, or let others salve, our conscience when we make decisions concerning public life, but struggle with destiny in fear and trembling lest it burden us with greater guilt than we are compelled to assume” (my emphasis).

Statehood means we’re not always able to live up to the demands of justice.  Sometimes we have to act for the good of the community in ways which do not accord with textbook ethics.  Shelling rocket launchers in civilian areas of Gaza would seem to be one of those times.  Buber makes two requirements of us in such situations.  First, that we do what is needed to preserve the community and save life, and no more.  We must never allow ourselves to be guided by the desire for power and certainly not by the need for revenge. 

Second, when self-preservation leads us to use force, we must retain absolute clarity about the moral status of our acts.  When we’re forced to do something wrong, under no circumstances must we convince ourselves that we’re in the right.  Morality, or God’s command, is absolute and universal.  We have to look our existentially necessary but immoral acts in the face. 

The recent controversy over the publication of the names of Palestinian casualties of Israeli shelling is a case in point.  Buber would argue that while the IDF’s actions may be justified in terms of national survival, there’s an accompanying moral imperative to recognise the harm that we’ve done and the people we’ve hurt.  Refusing to publish the names of the victims is the start of a spiral towards redefining morality in a narrow, chauvinistic way.

Our job is to understand the complexity of Israeli military actions, defend them when we believe they are necessary to protect Israeli lives while squarely acknowledging the suffering and the immoral results that flow from them, and to work for the realisation of the Judaism’s – and the State of Israel’s – values of peace, justice and human dignity.

Why is this important?  Buber believes that without a moral, spiritual vision at its core, the Jewish state will not survive:

“By opposing Hebrew humanism to a nationalism which is nothing but empty self-assertion, I wish to indicate that, at this juncture, the Zionist movement must decide either for national egoism or national humanism.  If it decides in favour of national egoism, it too will suffer the fate which will soon befall all shallow nationalism, i.e. nationalism which does not set the nation a true supernational task.  If it decides in favour of Hebrew humanism, it will be strong and effective long after shallow nationalism has lost all meaning and justification, for it will have something to say and to bring to mankind.”

All quotes from Martin Buber, ‘Hebrew Humanism’ (1942), reproduced in Arthur Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea, pp 457-459.

Israel, Gaza and Masorti

For anyone who has a relationship with Israel, the past three weeks have been a time of anxiety, depression, and maybe even despair.  How should we respond and what can we do to help?

I was in Israel two weeks ago, participating in a conference on Israel education, when I observed a interaction between a Jewish educator from France and Hagai El-Ad, the director of B’tselem, the Israeli human rights organisation.  El-Ad described B’tselem’s work in monitoring and documenting human rights violations in the West Bank and Gaza – the majority of which are inflicted on Palestinians by the Israeli authorities – and explained his belief that we have a responsibility as Israelis and Jews to look this harsh reality in the face and call our government to account.  My French colleague responded by accusing him of peddling disinformation but, once El-Ad had refuted this idea, went on to her main point: that by making this material public, B’tselem are whipping up antisemitism and endangering the security of French Jews.  ‘You are killing Jews in France,’ she told him.  The interaction ostensibly presented a clear dilemma – should we campaign for human rights or should we stand up for Jews?

There are some Jewish organisations which feel able to take a clear position on this dilemma.  In this time of war, some choose solidarity, backing the decisions of the Israeli government, defending Israel’s unconditional right to self-defence, explaining the humanitarian nature of the IDF’s actions in Gaza, and fighting against antisemitism in the Diaspora.  Others (I’m talking about mainstream Jewish organisations, not anti-Zionist ones) call for ceasefires, advocate for the resumption of negotiations and hold Israel at least partly responsible for the failure of the political process, recognise the truth in some of the criticisms of Israeli actions, and condemn the rise of anti-democratic trends within Israel.

I’m proud to be an Israeli citizen, having made aliyah and lived in Israel for over ten years.  But this dilemma, accompanied by growing feeling of despair at the situation, is where I’ve found myself over the last two weeks.  I also believe a similar dilemma affects Masorti Judaism as a whole.  The diversity of our members’ views means we can’t respond to the conflict in a one-sided way.  What, then, can we say about it?

I believe there are three vital ideas, deeply rooted in the ethos of Masorti Judaism, all of which we need to hold in our minds if we are to respond to the situation in an authentic way.

1. The value of nuance and complexity.  The situation in the middle-east is extraordinarily complex and cannot be reduced to right and wrong.  Any interpretation of events which seeks to put all the blame on one side or attribute it to one single cause can always be challenged by taking a different perspective, changing context or bringing in a different historical frame of reference.  Not only Israelis and Palestinians disagree over the causes of the violence and what path might lead to its resolution.  Even within the Jewish-Zionist community, there’s no consensus.  I believe we need to look reality in the face and do our best to understand the complexity of the situation, even when this is difficult or painful.  And this should lead us to be cautious about advocating simplistic, one-sided diagnoses and solutions, as if the situation could be resolved easily if only we were in charge.

2. The value of Jewish peoplehood.  I see the Jewish people as an extended family.  It causes us pain when other Jews are killed or injured, and it troubles us when we see Jews doing things we disapprove of.  When I hear news of Israeli casualties or rocket attacks on Israeli communities, it touches me more deeply than similar news from elsewhere in the world – and that’s okay.  Israelis are part of my family and siding with my family is natural and good.  But that doesn’t mean I agree with everything my family members do.  The challenge I experience is finding a way to express this love and solidarity with the people of Israel, while avoiding one-sided statements which don’t reflect my values or my understanding of the conflict in all its complexity.

3. The Jewish value of human life.  Jews of all political persuasions like to invoke values drawn from the tradition to defend their position.  In the UK, universal values of peace and human life tend to dominate our discourse, but Judaism just as often emphasises the values of military force and the right to the Land.  Jewish tradition is no less complex than contemporary political reality and, in a way, can be seen as an ongoing argument between welcoming, egalitarian, universal attitudes, and discriminatory, exclusive ones.  Once we understand this, we have a choice as to how we want to interpret our tradition and which of its values we want to promote.  I choose (and I believe that Masorti Judaism should choose) openness and universalism over insularity and hostility to the Other.  We should draw on Jewish tradition to teach the values of compromise, reconciliation and, most importantly, the idea that all human beings are created in the image of God and that all human life is infinitely and equally valuable.

To rephrase in a different order and, perhaps, with a different emphasis.  I believe our role is to live out the fundamental human values which Judaism teaches: human life is sacred as we are all created in the image of God.  We should do our best to comprehend the historical, political, social and military reality of the situation, no matter how complicated or difficult it is, and make sure our speech and actions adequately reflect this complexity.  And, against the background of these two principles, we should remember that we have an additional, profound obligation at this time of crisis: to demonstrate love and support for our extended family – the people of Israel.

Marketing Masorti

Masorti is the smallest stream of Judaism in the UK with the potential, many of us believe, to be one of the biggest.  The challenge is how to get the message out to people who might want to join us. 

Challenge number one is to define our message.  We’ve got quite good at that over the last three years: Masorti Judaism has a genuine, soundly anchored ethos and set of values which generates amazing levels of unanimity among our rabbis, professionals and lay leaders.  They’re about the synthesis of tradition and modernity (‘traditional Judaism for modern Jews’ as we put it), warm, welcoming communities, and intellectual openness.  As these values are embodied primarily in the experience of our communities (rather than in intellectual or ideological statements) we’ve come to the conclusion that the best way to communicate them is by sharing Masorti people’s personal stories and journeys.

But even if we’ve made progress towards honing our message, there’s a second challenge which has so far left us stumped.  It involves a chicken and egg situation – how to communicate with people who by definition are not on our membership database and who we therefore have no way of contacting directly.  We can’t advertise on television (not only because of the expense – even if we had unlimited budgets, we’re trying to reach such a specific demographic that mass advertising would be 99.9% useless).  And social media, often touted as a marketing panacea, can only connect you to people with whom you already have some kind of… connection.

Last week I participated in a training session on marketing for charity chief executives (it was organised by Ella forums – recommended for charity leadership training and coaching).  The trainer said that modern marketing is not about getting your message to your intended audience.  Instead, it builds on the idea that the most convincing way of getting someone to buy a product or a service is through personal advice from someone they know.  I’ve just been decorating my house so I know this is true – I want my friends to recommend good builders they’ve used and I talk to them at any opportunity about this in order to get their advice.

A colleague from the United Synagogue once told me that they’re jealous of Masorti for this reason: our members always talk in a positive way about their shuls.  Masorti Judaism has lots of potential ‘recommenders’ – our challenge is how to enable them to get into conversations about their positive experiences in our communities with their non-Masorti friends who might be interested in trying us out.

At the training session, we learnt a good model for working this out.  It involves answering five questions: who are our potential influencers?  What is the ‘conversation moment’ – ie. who will the influencers be talking to, where and when?  What is the desired conversation – what will they be talking about?  What is the content we want them to be dropping into these conversations?  And finally, what are the accelerators – what means do we have at our disposal for making more of these conversations happen, faster and more effectively?

Here’s how I provisionally answered the questions.  My thoughts are based on anecdotal evidence at best, we’ve done no research on this, and I’m happy for people to disagree, suggest alternatives and prove me wrong.  Please let me know if the following rings But this is my starting point.

Influencers.  It seems to me that our most important target audience is young adults who are forming relationships, getting married and having children, who want to join a synagogue (or find one to get married in, or study for conversion, or where their kids can go to playgroup or nursery), but haven’t decided which one.  (By the way, I don’t mean to ignore the many people who are not in relationships and are also looking for community life.  Jewish communities often fail to cater to them and we need to try harder.  For the purposes of this article, I’ve simply chosen to focus a demographic which seems to reflect our main source of new members).  They might have grown up in Orthodox or Reform congregations and been dissatisfied there, or they might simply have moved to a new city and be shul-shopping with no particular agenda.  The influencers for this group are their friends who do happen to be members of our communities – maybe people who’ve grown up in Masorti and who have non-Masorti friends, or maybe those who are a few years (or months) ahead in the shul-shopping process.

Conversation moment.  I’m imagining a group of friends having dinner together, either at home or in a restaurant, maybe at a wedding or another event.  The conversation could also be happening between colleagues at the office.

Desired conversation.  The influencers and their friends are all at a similar stage of life – maybe approaching marriage, perhaps thinking about having babies, maybe already pregnant.  The desired conversation they’re having might start from these topics (I remember talking about them a lot when I was at that stage) – how’s the wedding planning going?  Where are you thinking about getting married?  Do you know of any good rabbis – I’m not so happy with the one from my parents’ shul?  Have you started thinking about nurseries and schools?  Which ones are good?  How can we get into the nearby Jewish preschool or primary?  A sub-species of desired conversation might be relevant to people in mixed-faith relationships.  How’s it going, what do your family think about it?  What are you planning to do about the wedding – have you thought about conversion?  What experiences with shuls, rabbis etc. have you had so far?  Are they friendly to non-Jewish partners?

Content.  What do want our influencers to be feeding into the conversation?  Here are some potentially important messages.  My (Masorti shul) is really welcoming, friendly, non-judgemental.  We were made to feel really welcome when we showed up.  My (or my friends’) kids love it – the children’s services/playgroup are really fun.  The rabbi seems nice – really approachable and interesting, not the kind of judgemental old man I remember from my shul growing up.  A second set of messages might be about addressing people’s concerns: it feels like a proper, familiar shul, but more open-minded.  If you get married there, your children will still be recognised as Jewish.  No, most Orthodox rabbis won’t recognise a Masorti conversion, but we decided the Orthodox process was too hard to go through, and this way we’ll still be able to have a proper Jewish wedding.  And so on.  The goal here is less about messages, but about having people give honest advice which comes out of their own experience.

Accelerators.  Whether or not I’ve got it right about the identity of our potential influencers and the content of the conversations we want them to be having, there’s one final question we have to address: how can we encourage more of these conversations to take place?  This means both ensuring the influencers know what to say, and to create a culture within which they’re prepared to have the conversations.  This is something of a challenge, since many of us naturally recoil from anything that smacks of missionising.  It also means letting go of any idea that we can tightly control the process or the message: encouraging people to talk means trusting them to talk about the right, relevant thing.  I want to suggest five ideas (none of which might be any good) which might accelerate the process:

1.       Most fundamentally, we need to put the idea into our members’ heads that they can and should talk about their positive community experience with their friends.  I think this should come from the rabbis and leaders of our communities, as they have direct relationships with their congregants.  If we can get our rabbis to become ‘influencers of influencers,’ creating the expectation that members reach out to their friends, it could be very powerful.  The networks of relationships already exist – the question is how to motivate people to get involved.  It strikes me that there are two potential motivators – and neither are about religious evangelising: one is a desire to help your friends by giving them good advice; the other is the desire to help your community by getting good people involved. 

2.       Giving potential influencers the confidence they need by providing information and messaging – via direct marketing.  Since they’re already on our membership database, it’s easy to reach them.  The trick here is getting the content right – but that’s a solvable problem with the right combination of research, hard work and creativity.

3.       Stimulating conversation at events – lots of guests come into our communities for weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs and the like.  Often the experience acts as a trigger for conversation.  What can we do to stimulate and focus these conversations?  One idea is to have effective, thought-provoking marketing materials available at events.  Another is to encourage community leaders as part of their sermons or announcements to explicitly invite these conversations to take place.  Maybe we could even follow up with event hosts afterwards, providing information and encouragement to continue the conversation with any guests who expressed interest.

4.       In the same spirit, perhaps we need to gather some data – who recently joined our shuls, got married, converted, had a baby.  These people are likely to have friends in the same situation.  We can then nurture them as potential influencers by targeting them with information and marketing which is relevant to their stage in life.

5.       Since conversations are about sharing personal stories, could we stimulate this by encouraging people to share personal experiences of our communities in an organised way?  This needs a bit of creative thinking, but maybe through an effective social media-based competition, backed up by some more traditional marketing.  This is about strengthening the positive culture we already have of people talking about their communities.

This time more than ever, I really welcome feedback.  Please tweet @MattPlen, tag me in a Facebook comment, or email me – matt@masorti.org.uk – with your ideas and especially if you think I’m wrong.

Keeping politics out of the pulpit – can we do it and should we even try?

When should religious leaders talk about politics – and when should they keep their opinions to themselves?

Three recent debates have grabbed my attention.  The first one is the campaign to get Jewish organisations to ‘sign on the Green Line’ – to commit to only using maps of Israel which show the border between the State of Israel and the occupied (or liberated?) territories.  Masorti Judaism was asked to sign up and – unlike the Reform and Liberal movements – we decided to refuse.  The initial feeling was this was a controversial party-political issue we didn’t want to take a stand on. 

But then a member of our Executive made the argument that in some parts of the world it’s illegal to use the wrong kind of map and he doesn’t want to live in a society like that.  So our ‘apolitical’ position, while not changing its substance, suddenly found a connection with an explicitly political, liberal conception of human rights.  In contrast, earlier in the year, we had called on the Zionist Federation to grant membership to Yachad, an organisation which brands itself ‘pro-Israel, pro-peace’ and which is commonly perceived as provocatively left-wing.  This was on the basis of our commitment to pluralism and diversity in the Jewish community; on reflection, these values are drawn from a Masorti conception of the Jewish religious tradition, also have unmistakeable political connotations.

Issue number two was the criticism levelled by 27 bishops at the government’s welfare reforms, which they say have forced people into food and fuel poverty.  When asked in an interview what policy the bishops would recommend, a spokesman replied that policy is the government’s job: the Church’s role is to speak about morality.  But the line between morality and politics is hard to maintain, especially when this government likes to promote its welfare policies in explicitly moral terms.

Final issue: gay marriage. It’s clear that this is an issue where religion, politics and morality all overlap.  Religious organisations can’t help taking a position on this and, in so doing, getting involved with one of the more controversial political debates of our day.

It turns out religion and politics cannot be easily disentangled.  The Torah constantly hints at this.  In dozens of texts, moral, ritual and social-political commandments are interwoven with no clear distinction between them.

So if there’s no way of separating religion and politics, how do we decide what political issues it is legitimate for Judaism to speak about?

As Masorti Jews who are committed to modern values but also to bringing Judaism into the modern world, this is even more complex: after all, alongside progressive social values the Torah contains terrible political models – slavery, patriarchy, even genocide.  How are we to decide which to learn from for modern politics and which to abandon because they don’t gel with our values?

In a fascinating but sometimes infuriating article, ‘The Social Order as a Religious Problem,’ Israeli thinker Yeshayahu Leibowitz asks whether Judaism seeks to create a particular social and political system, or whether it consists of laws which are to be obeyed in whatever system happens to exist.  In essence, is Judaism in favour of capitalism, socialism or some other alternative, or is it simply not interested?  He lists three possibilities:

“In the first, it is our religious duty, the religious duty of those who accept the yoke of Torah and Mitzvoth, to strive to create the kind of system in which the sociopolitical legislation of the existing Halakhah may be applied.

“We may, in the second alternative, surmise that the relevant parts of the Halakhah were only used by the Torah as a paradigm to exemplify realization of its social goal within an histor­ically given situation. Our task is to clarify the nature of this goal and seek a social order most adapted to its attainment in our situation as we understand it.

“The third possible view is that the sociopolitical leg­islation of the Torah was intended only for the specific sociopolitical reality that existed then. With its passing, social and political life and the Torah were sundered, and we are free today to choose a social order as we please. All that is required of us is the realization of "justice and righteousness" in a form applicable to the framework we have chosen....”

Which alternative does Leibowitz advocate? It’s not at all clear.  The first is clearly not the intention of the Torah, as witnessed by the absurdity of the claim that the prohibition of ploughing with an ox and an ass yoked together obliges us to return to primitive agriculture in order to observe the commandment.  Both this and the third option, according to Leibowitz, exempt Jews from any religious duty regarding social and political questions in the contemporary world.  He goes on to imply that a position which cares about kosher and non-kosher food but not about Zionism and anti-Zionism or war and peace cannot be reconciled with the spirit of the Torah.

But the second position is also unacceptable to Leibowitz, as it makes Judaism dependent on our subjective opinions on the shape of the idea society and as such deviates from the normative, rule-bound, halachic framework.

Leibowitz’s conclusion, then, is resolutely unclear.  Torah Jews can’t ignore political questions, but neither is there any straightforward way of answering these questions within the halachic framework.  To reframe the conundrum, we have to choose: we can either step outside halacha and address politics, or refrain from talking politics, paradoxically one of the central concerns of Torah, altogether.

But it seems to me that Leibowitz’s position reflects a particular, Orthodox, conception of halacha, in which Jewish law is inferred deductively from objective first principles contained in the Torah.  A more nuanced, historical understanding of Judaism would recognise that in every generation people’s subjective views, conditioned by their social and historical context, come into dialogue with legal precedents handed down from the past, and that halachic ruling are what emerges from this encounter.  This is very clear when we look at the legal radicalism of the early Talmudic rabbis who on many occasions effectively reversed laws they found in the written Torah, but became less pronounced as Jewish law evolved.

This openness is what enables Judaism – in its halachic form – to meet new challenges and unprecedented situations (even ultra-Orthodox rabbis recognise Jewish law’s capacity to meet entirely novel challenges in the area of medical ethics, for example).  Today, this is the insight which allows people in the Masorti/Conservative and liberal Orthodox communities to grapple creatively with issues like homosexuality.  As a result, we can find ourselves coming to halachic positions which deviate wildly from what came before.

But the view that genuine, sometimes radical, halachic innovation is born out of open, subjective intergenerational dialogue, also implies a challenging responsibility: when taking positions on pressing social, political and moral questions, we have no Archimedean point on which to stand.  We have no choice but to go back to basics and to deliberate from first principles.

Get to the chicken without breaking eggs: how to grow Masorti Judaism without being Chabad

Lately the press has been full of stories about the demise of Conservative (Masorti) Judaism in the USA.  I suspect the reports are premature: Conservative Judaism is still very much alive and kicking.  But whereas the American movement - once the largest synagogue body in the world - is wrestling with shrinkage and the search for a new mission, here in the UK Masorti has a different challenge.

We’re the youngest stream of Judaism in this country and, despite rapid growth over the past twenty years, still the smallest by far.  I believe our unique approach to Judaism has the power to inspire people, connect them with other Jews, give their lives meaning and, in the process, counter the dominant trends of social atomisation, consumerism and assimilation which concern us all.

But we’re stuck in a chicken and egg situation: in order to reach out, we have to grow.  We need to found more communities to accommodate additional Jews in new areas, and we need to use the resulting growth in membership to gather the resources needed for further outreach and growth.  In an ideal world, this would form a virtuous circle where the flood of dues-paying members to our movement would enable us to train and recruit the rabbis, educators and community leaders we need to achieve our goals.

But the strategy has one major problem: it’s very difficult to found new communities. 

One organisation in the Jewish world seems to have hit upon a solution to this problem: Chabad/Lubavitch.  The Chabad model is to send ‘shluchim’ – rabbinic emissaries – into the farthest reaches of the world (anywhere from Manila to Birmingham) to set up institutions, draw people in and create community life.  And Chabad are amazingly successful: according to Wikipedia they are the largest Jewish religious organization in the world today, maintaining 3600 institutions in over 1000 cities across 70 countries, with tens or even hundreds of thousands of adherents.

But this model can’t work for Masorti – and not because as religious liberals we don’t have the religious passion to attract the masses (for a comment on this from the Christian world see http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2014/jan/18/church-growth-theology-evangelical-lesson-liberals).  Our problem is twofold and very practical: 1. We don’t have the financial or human resources to rapidly deploy enough new rabbis; 2. We are ideologically committed to a bottom-up, grassroots, lay-led model of community development.  We can’t afford to plonk down rabbis and, even if we could, we probably wouldn’t want to.

Our strategy has been different: find groups of people who are attracted to Masorti Judaism, identify potential leaders among them, and then support them to begin creating community life.  When they’re ready, they’ll grow, attract members, develop financial resources and become ready to employ a rabbi, rent a building and then embark on more serious growth.  At the same time it’s the movement’s job to identify candidates and train rabbis, and to develop the community development expertise that will enable us to support these nascent groups. 

Here are three recent, real-life examples.

1. Muswell Hill – I’m a member of New North London Synagogue (NNLS), a fantastically successful community which now has close to 2000 adult members.  But this success breeds problems of its own – it becomes harder for some people to find the kind of intimate community life which the shul once provided.  About two miles down the road is Muswell Hill, a neighbourhood with only one (Orthodox) synagogue, a cross-communal Jewish school, and lots of Jews – including many who are unaffiliated or in mixed families (my evidence for this is anecdotal but Haringey, Muswell Hill’s local authority, does have over 7000 Jews according to the 2011 census).  Informal conversations with NNLS members who live in the area revealed lots of enthusiasm for some more local, intimate Jewish activities.  So we identified some potential leaders, advertised in the shul newsletter, held an initial planning meeting with a handful of local people, and are now planning a launch activity for Saturday night, April 8^th (contact me for details).  

The initiative was started by Laurence Jacobs, Masorti’s small community fieldworker, but almost immediately other volunteers stepped forward to take on leadership roles.  The plan is to build on a core of Masorti members to draw in other people from the neighbourhood and to go from there.  This group might end up as a minyan or chavurah (informal prayer or community group) affiliated to New North London Synagogue, paying membership to the shul and using its facilities but holding its own, local activities; or it might take a different, more independent path.  Less than one meeting in, the time is not yet ripe for mapping out the future.

2. Noam and Marom graduates – Noam and Marom are, respectively, Masorti’s youth movement and young adult organisation.  Over the years Noam has been phenomenally successful at inspiring young people and connecting them with Judaism, but has not necessarily had the effect of building a relationship between them and synagogue life.  Marom’s aim is to continue to engage young adults with Jewish communal life when they’re done with Noam but are at a stage of life where synagogue does not yet appeal.  

Recently, the first groups of Noam graduates / Marom members have reached an age where regular Jewish involvement has become an issue.  Some of these people (again, despite our commitment to volunteerism, led by a professional – this time Naomi Magnus, our Marom director) have initiated a series of regular, monthly Friday night dinners, sometimes preceded by a kabbalat Shabbat service.  The events are hosted by members, in their homes.  As some of these people begin to get married and have children, we wait to see which direction this group will take – will some of them join other local Masorti shuls?  Will they want to sustain their own, independent group existence and grow into a more permanent community?  Or will some other path emerge?

3. Shenley (Hertfordshire): we know that Hertsmere has one of the fastest growing Jewish populations in the country (over 14,000 Jews live there according to the 2011 census).  It was a no brainer to supplement what at the time was a fortnightly service held by the Elstree and Borehamwood Masorti community.  The fact that Laurence, our small community fieldworker, had recently moved to Shenley provided an ideal opportunity.  He decided to hold a Friday night Kabbalat Shabbat service and pot luck dinner in his home.  He leafleted his entire neighbourhood and advertised in local shops, cafes and online, as well as inviting his own personal contacts from the area.  

20 people showed up for the first event and future meetings are planned, with participants offering to host in their homes.  We’ve been careful to make everyone aware that there are two Masorti shuls in the area – Elstree and Borehamwood (which has now made a successful transition to weekly services) and St Albans – and for the foreseeable future we see the Shenley group as a recruiting ground for these fully-fledged communities.

So the model clearly works – at least in terms of seeding new initiatives.  And potential exists in additional areas: Manchester, Mill Hill and Primrose Hill are all in our sights.  Whether all these groups are sustainable remains to be seen.

But our approach faces one other challenge: while the movement wants to form new communities as part of our growth agenda, local synagogues are often – legitimately – focused on their own needs.  In particular, local shul leaders need to sustain or grow their membership in order to achieve financial stability and fund their important programmes, and are wary of new groups cannibalising their membership.  The last thing we want to do as an organisation is to damage our existing communities, but as the Jewish population becomes ever more concentrated, it’s harder to find areas with lots of Jews that aren’t perceived to be too close to an existing synagogue.  As a halachic movement, we’re also committed to setting up local shuls so people don’t feel they have to drive on Shabbat. 

To solve this problem, we’ve decided to go down the route of satellite communities: partnering with existing synagogues to set up new groups which will hold their own local services, learning and social activities but will continue to use the cheder, burial society, rabbinic services of the existing community and – just as importantly – paying it membership dues.  The model is an extension of what already happens at, for example, New North London Synagogue, where three minyanim share a synagogue and everyone is a member of one large community.  The only difference is that we want to enable new groups to operate off-site so as to draw in new, previously non-Masorti people.  And perhaps the model is sustainable into the more distant future as a new way of organising our community life – rather than basing ourselves around individual, self-reliant synagogues, a better structure could be clusters of small to medium-sized communities all sharing administrative, rabbinic and educational infrastructure.

It’s an exciting experiment and we’re confident in its chances of success – even if we don’t know for certain if it’s going to work  I look forward to reporting back on progress. 

Can Orthodoxy succeed where Conservative/Masorti Judaism has failed? Comments on Daniel Gordis's 'Cognitive Dissonance'

Daniel Gordis just published a fascinating follow-up to his critique of Conservative/Masorti Judaism in light of the Pew Report - http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/673/cognitive-dissonance/

Here are my comments (also posted on the site):

It seems to me that there's a disconnect between Gordis's diagnosis and his solution.  The solution - a cross-denominational, counter-cultural Judaism grounded in obligation and Jewish literacy - is something I can wholeheartedly agree with, and reflects the vision we are trying to work towards at Masorti Judaism in the UK.  But the diagnosis which leads to this remedy - the idea that Conservative Judaism fell apart because of lowering of standards - is deeply flawed.

If Conservative Judaism failed because Jews are looking for authority and commitment, how does Gordis explain that only 1% of young people (according to Pew) identify with modern Orthodoxy, as opposed to the 11% who still identify as Conservative?  The numbers don't back up his arguments.  Moreover, there's a strong case to be made that the relative vibrancy of certain Orthodox congregations is a result of their exclusivity - ideological commitment is much easier to sustain when anyone who does not identify simply leaves (or does not come in to begin with). Clearly this kind of exclusivity is not a recipe for mass Jewish engagement.  And where Orthodox communities are inclusive - for example in the UK - we see that they suffer from exactly the same kinds of problems that face Conservative communities in the US.

The flip side of this critique is the real elephant in the room missing from Gordis's analysis: the deep commitment of Conservative/Masorti Jews (and many other members of the liberal Jewish world) to diversity and pluralism as matters of principle.  The real challenge is not simply how to sustain a committed, literate Jewish community (which is hard enough) but how to do so in such a way that Jews of different beliefs, styles of practice, philosophical and political orientations, not to mention genders and sexual preferences will choose to join and be part of the conversation.  I would like to hear some intelligent views from contemporary Jewish leaders on this pressing problem.

“A misbegotten shambles perpetrated by an out of touch elite” – why is Michael Gove so sensitive to criticisms of first world war leaders? Some thoughts on history, ideology and politics.

The catfight – I prefer not to dignify it by calling it a debate – between Michael Gove, Tristram Hunt, Boris Johnson, Nick Clegg et al about the history of the first world war is truly fascinating: who’d have thought that (mis)interpreting a complex, controversial historical event could be enough of a reason to demand the resignation of a shadow cabinet minister? 

But that’s what Boris Johnson said this week in response to Tristram Hunt: “I can hardly believe that the author of this fatuous Observer article is proposing to oversee the teaching of history in our schools.  If Tristram Hunt seriously denies that German militarism was at the root of the First World War, then he is not fit to do his job, either in opposition or in government, and should resign.” 

The article by Hunt which provoked this reaction was in some ways no less partisan.  He said: ‘The reality is clear: the government is using what should be a moment for national reflection and respectful debate to rewrite the historical record and sow political division.  In the very paper that so grotesquely called into question Ralph Miliband's wartime service in the Royal Navy, the education secretary has sought to blame "leftwing academics" for misrepresenting the First World War.’

And Gove’s initial foray was also explicitly political: “Our understanding of the war has been overlaid by misunderstandings, and misrepresentations which reflect an, at best, ambiguous attitude to this country  and, at worst, an unhappy compulsion on the part of some to denigrate virtues such as patriotism, honour and courage. 

“The conflict has, for many, been seen through the fictional prism of dramas such as Oh! What a Lovely War, The Monocled Mutineer and Blackadder, as a misbegotten shambles – a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite. Even to this day there are Left-wing academics all too happy to feed those myths.”

It should be clear that there are actually two separate arguments.  One is an argument about history: what actually happened?  Who was to blame for the war, why did it break out, was Britain’s decision to enter the conflict correct, and how should we evaluate the conduct of the war? 

The second argument is one about politics and ideology, over ideas of patriotism, nationalism, militarism, imperialism, pacifism and democracy.  When political leaders argue about history, they’re really arguing about something else: contemporary debates over Europe, immigration, the welfare state, education policy.  But the same leaders are also convinced that it’s possible to separate between the ideological and the academic – hence the outrage each side experiences at the other’s ‘abuses’ of history.

This conviction reflects a distinction made by historian Bernard Lewis in his book, History: Remembered, Recovered, Invented.  Lewis defines three kinds of history.  Remembered history is essentially collective memory: past events which a particular community or nation chooses to remember, whether as reality or symbol.  Recovered history is the history which has been forgotten, in other words rejected by collective memory, and which is subsequently reconstructed by academic scholarship (for a brilliant discussion on the relationship between memory, history and identity see Zakhor by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi – Yerushalmi argues that critical, modern Jewish historiography arose in the 19^th century as an ultimately failed attempt to replace the traditional identity that had collapsed along pre-modern Jewish collective memory). Invented memory is designed for a new ideological purpose, whether this is conservative, radical, nationalist or multicultural. 

Lewis draws a clear line between recovered and invented history, claiming that whereas recovered history is characterised by an honest attempt to identify and neutralise the prejudices of the historian in pursuit of the truth, invented history reflects nothing but its authors’ ideological positions.  But aside from the fact that the current debate shows that it’s all too easy for one person’s recovered history to be dismissed as invention, the distinction itself is nowhere near this neat. 

In his classic book What is History?, E.H. Carr convincingly showed that ideology and scholarship can never be separated.  Our naïve faith that historical interpretations emerge in a straightforward way from the facts is disrupted by the insight – obvious once you consider it - that historians inevitably choose which facts to present – based on which are most relevant or important.  The problem is that relevance and importance assume a frame of reference, one that by definition cannot be derived from facts.  In other words, facts are a product of interpretation no less than interpretations are products of the facts.  While Carr refused to submit to relativism – the idea that any subjective historical narrative is as good as any other – he was clear that history is not objective in a simplistic sense, but consists of an interaction or dialogue between the historian and his or her facts.

But if the lines between history and ideology are inherently blurred, in another sense, the approaches of Gove, Hunt and the rest are all resolutely ideological.  Gove and Johnson are not only using the war to argue for their own political opinions.  Their underlying view is that there is one, objectively true version of history which has to be defended in the face of ideologically motivated mendacity. 

Hunt and Clegg understand, against this, that history is inherently pluralistic, with diverse interpretations vying for our attention.  Yet this nuanced approach is also a principled position which needs to be vigorously defended.

Thus the real debate is a philosophical one, between an objectivist, monistic epistemology (Gove and Johnson) and one which takes a more complex, sophisticated view of historical interpretation and knowledge in general.  And it’s no surprise that epistemological pluralism should go along with more accepting attitudes towards social and cultural diversity.

So when MPs argue about history, it’s not just a cover for a political debate.  Real historical and even philosophical positions are on the line – and debates over distant events, freed from the demands of political correctness when talking about more contemporary issues, are often where these views come into the open. 

A cynic might not be surprised, in this light, by a Tory politician’s sensitivity criticisms of the war as ‘a misbegotten shambles – a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite.’  It all sounds a bit too contemporary.  But this kind of unintentional honesty provides a rare opportunity for voters to judge politicians not by what they say, but by what they actually think.