Why charities can't stay out of politics

The recent article by the chair of the Charity Commission calling on charities to steer clear of politics has met with the predictable waves of criticism from charity leaders. However, it’s important to understand the ideological and historical roots of this kind of argument if we want to safeguard the future of the social sector.

Baroness Stowell’s claim boils down to a simple idea. Apolitical work is legitimate, politics is not. But deciding what’s political and what isn’t is itself a deeply political question. 

The idea that politics is suspect is associated largely (but not exclusively) with the conservative Right who like to advance their agenda while pretending their views are no more than common-sense. A classic example was the coalition government’s success in framing a politically-driven programme of austerity as nothing more than the obvious response to the state of the public finances. Anyone who disagreed was condemned as having been blinded by their own partisan agenda. 

It’s no surprise that being non-political usually means accepting the status quo. A charity that chooses to leave in place statues of imperialists and slave-owners? Apolitical. One that chooses to take them down? Political. In the frequently quoted words of Brazilian archbishop and liberation theologian Helder Camara: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist”. 

The fact that government and sector leaders are at cross-purposes over the legitimacy of charities acting politically stems from the ambiguity of the concept ‘charity’ itself. The word is actually a homonym and is currently used in two totally different ways.

The first echoes the Victorian roots of the charity sector – a network of institutions whose role was to help the poor. The assumption was that poverty was an unavoidable human condition. All decent people could do was to ameliorate the conditions of the most vulnerable members of society. Going slightly hungry was better than starving to death. Charity was about enabling people to survive the status quo, not about changing it. This view underlies the role government tends to ascribe to charities to this day. They are seen as a way of outsourcing services while saving money in the process. 

While many donors no doubt implicitly share this view, most people on the front line of charity work realise that it’s unsustainable. For them, poverty and the other problems they combat every day are the results of political decisions and the way we’ve chosen to structure our society. If they want to help their beneficiaries, they have no choice but to address themselves to social change. It’s no surprise that service delivery organisations almost always branch out into campaigning. Charity in this view is the opposite of accepting the world as it is – it’s about creating the world as we want it to be.

It should be clear by this point that we’re not talking about a clash between ‘political’ and ‘apolitical’ views of charity. This is a conflict between two equally political, ideological conceptions of the voluntary sector’s role. The dilemma for social sector leaders who adhere to the more progressive view is how to drum up support from a government – and possibly a public – who not only take a more conservative line, but who see their views as apolitical common-sense.

A final word from my own, faith-based, perspective. The word ‘charity’ comes via the Latin caritas from the Greek agape – meaning love. In Christian tradition, charity is a voluntary act motivated by love of God and neighbour. In Judaism, the word usually translated as charity, tzedaka, comes from the same root as tzedek – justice. Tzedaka is a legal and moral obligation, not a voluntary act. For many Jews, the term’s etymology gives it a radical complexion. Tzedakah, charity, is the obligation to pursue a world built on justice. It’s hard to see how that can be separated from politics.

Fighting for the Jewish people’s soul: Masorti Judaism at the 2020 World Zionist Congress

It’s natural to be preoccupied with local events – what’s going on in our own family, community, country. When we poke our heads up we tend to notice only the most dramatic international events (the US elections spring to mind). But it’s also important to be less parochial about our Jewish lives and realise we’re not only part of our synagogue or even the UK Jewish community, but members of the worldwide Jewish people.

And for the Jewish people, last week saw an important, if generally overlooked, event: the World Zionist Congress.

The Congress was established by Theodor Herzl in 1897 and led indirectly to the founding of the State of Israel just over 50 years later. Today, Congress meets every five years and is the ruling body of what are known as the ‘National Institutions’ – semi-governmental bodies governed by representatives of Israeli political parties and Diaspora Jewish organisations. They include the World Zionist Organisation (WZO), the Jewish Agency for Israel and the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet L’Israel or KKL). They have responsibility for settlement and environmental activity in Israel (KKL is Israel’s biggest non-governmental landowner), promoting aliyah (Jewish immigration to Israel), combatting antisemitism and Jewish education in the Diaspora. Between them they have an annual budget of around $4 billion.

This matters directly to us. Israel has always been central to Masorti Jewish life. However, as the modern State of Israel developed, the Israeli government refused to recognise Masorti and other non-Orthodox forms of Judaism. Masorti rabbis in Israel cannot conduct weddings or funerals, Masorti communities receive no public money, and the Israeli government has gone back on its promise to create an egalitarian prayer space at the Western Wall.

The WZO provides crucial funding for Jewish education all over the world and, since the Israeli government only funds Orthodox institutions, it’s the only source of support for Masorti synagogues, schools, youth programs and teachers. Dozens of Masorti communities around the world, and especially in Europe, are dependent on WZO funding for their existence. Moreover, the fact that Israeli and Diaspora Jews work together at Congress gives us a voice with Israeli politicians – they need our support and are ready to negotiate with us. This gives us a modest but vital degree of influence on issues close to our hearts: democratic values, religious pluralism and minority rights in Israel.

Over the past months there has been a titanic struggle over the future of the National Institutions. Right wing and Orthodox parties were poised to change the long tradition of including all Zionist parties in the governance of the institutions by staging a take-over and excluding moderate and progressive voices (including the Reform and Masorti movements and centre-left Israeli political parties) from all positions of influence. This would have meant the end of funding for our institutions and a critical weakening of our political influence. At the last moment, the representatives of Mercaz, the Masorti Zionist organisation, together with our political allies, managed to block this move and install a broad-based coalition (albeit one dominated by the Orthodox and the right wing) to lead the WZO for the next five years.

More specifically, this agreement includes increased budgets for Masorti and Reform Judaism, and both movements and their centre-left political allies have received senior leadership positions within the National Institutions. For example, Yizhar Hess, the outgoing CEO of Masorti Judaism in Israel will become a Vice-Chair of the WZO with responsibility for Israel-Diaspora relations and control of a significant budget.

But these achievements are one small part of a larger struggle within the Jewish world between the forces of insularity, religious intolerance and chauvinism on the one hand and those of us who believe in combining Judaism with universal, democratic and liberal values on the other. (To be clear, the latter group encompasses people from all streams of Judaism including many moderate Orthodox Jews.) This week, for example, the Likud has nominated Jacques Kupfer, a man with a record of anti-Palestinian, racist and extremist comments, to head up the WZO’s Department for Diaspora affairs.

Our struggle continues. To get involved and find out more about Mercaz – Masorti for Israel – go to masorti.org.uk/about-masorti/mercaz.

Read more about this year’s World Zionist Congress in this article in Haaretz (£) and this first-hand account by one of the Mercaz delegates.

Matt Plen is the Chief Executive of Masorti Judaism in the UK, a board member of Mercaz Olami and a newly-elected member of the Zionist General Council, the body that governs the WZO between Congresses. Thanks to Rabbi Alan Silverstein, President of Mercaz Olami, for information that contributed to this article.

Thoughts on Jews and Black Lives Matter

During the recent debates about the destruction of racist statues, my Facebook timeline featured several posts highlighting examples of antisemitic statues and monuments, mainly from the middle ages, which have never been removed. At first, this reminded me of the deflective responses of some white people to the current Black Lives Matter protests – either complaining about the destruction of property or, more tellingly, saying ‘all lives matter’. But the Jewish response felt decisively different to these attempts to sideline the problem of racism.

Although many (but by no means all) Jews identify as white, our relationship with racism cannot be the same as that of members of the white majority, as we are also a minority and subject to a form of racism – antisemitism. We cannot simply be allies as we also have a personal stake in the struggle. Anti-black racism and antisemitism are different but overlapping phenomena, or perhaps it’s better to say they are subsets of one bigger, overarching problem. How do these forms of racism interact and what does this mean for the relationship between Jews and people of colour (acknowledging that there are plenty of people who are both)? Unless Jews can answer these questions, we’ll lack a firm foundation for our involvement in Black Lives Matter and the broader anti-racist movement.

A caveat – I identify as a white, Ashkenazi (European) Jew and whatever expertise I have is in Jewish history, Jewish thought and the Jewish community. I have very little expert knowledge of the history and culture of people of colour and no first-hand experience of anti-black racism. The following analysis is presented tentatively in the hope it will provoke discussion, feedback and criticism. If it includes misunderstandings or unintentionally causes offence, I absolutely welcome feedback, corrections and further discussion.

A good place to start is Nancy Fraser’s article ‘Social justice in the age of identity politics’ (1996). She says:

In today’s world, claims for social justice seem increasingly to divide into two types. First, and most familiar, are redistributive claims, which seek a more just distribution of resources and goods. Examples include claims for redistribution from the North to the South, from the rich to the poor, and from owners to workers….

(I would add to this category the redistribution of power as well as economic resources.)

Today, however, we increasingly encounter a second type of social-justice claim in the “politics of recognition.” Here the goal, in its most plausible form, is a difference-friendly world, where assimilation to majority or dominant cultural norms is no longer the price of equal respect. Examples include claims for the recognition of the distinctive perspectives of ethnic, “racial,” and sexual minorities, as well as of gender difference.

Fraser goes on to attack what she sees as the false dichotomy between these two modes of progressive politics, arguing that many oppressed groups are in fact affected by economic equality and by cultural domination and non-recognition and are therefore in need of both redistributive and recognition-based political solutions. She weaves these two modes into a unified conception of social justice in which economic and cultural oppression are seen as twin barriers to parity of participation in society.

The distinction between politics of redistribution and recognition can help us understand the relationships between anti-black racism and antisemitism. It’s clear that the racism directed at people of colour means the unfair distribution of resources (economic inequality, poverty, discrimination in education and employment) as well as misrecognition (the example I recently heard of a black barrister being repeatedly misidentified in court as a defendant could not make this clearer, but misrecognition also explains phenomena like police brutality and the denigration of black culture). As Fraser argues, misrecognition often also underpins unfair distribution. Well-documented examples include teachers discouraging and setting low standards for black students, preventing them getting into university, and job applicants with foreign-sounding names finding it harder to get interviews.

In the UK, Jews do not on the whole suffer from redistributive injustice because of their Jewishness. The community is on average the wealthiest ethnic minority group in the UK and most Jews do not experience discrimination in employment and education. This is not to say there is no discrimination against Jews: 11% of Jews across the EU reported facing antisemitic discrimination in employment, education, housing or healthcare (2018) and 19% of UK Jews reported being victims of antisemitic discrimination (2014). But in Fraser’s terms, the main form of anti-Jewish racism is misrecognition: the marginalisation of Jews’ identity, culture and concerns, perpetuation of stereotypes, gaslighting and failing to recognise antisemitism as a legitimate concern, and incidents of vandalism and violence.

So Jews and people of colour face two different kinds of racism: anti-black racism is an unequal distribution of resources and power underpinned by misrecognition, whereas most antisemitism takes the form of misrecognition with no significant economic impact. People of colour are also deprived of power in a way Jews are not, although there are times when political antisemitism threatens the agency of Jewish people too.

Where does this leave the relationship between Jews and people of colour and the role of Jews around the Black Lives Matter movement? Here are some tentative suggestions aimed at my fellow members of the Jewish community.

First, let’s acknowledge that although most British Jews are of European origin, the whiteness of Jews should not be assumed. I don’t want to get into the argument about whether Jews are by definition non-white – we all define ourselves differently. But it’s an objective fact that there are many Jews of colour and these people are likely to experience both types of racism outlined above. We should avoid thinking and talking in ways that assume Jews are white, and some of the first actions we take should be to identify and combat racism in our own communities.

At the same time, we should remember that black people face forms of oppression that white Jews do not. This means that the imperative to listen to and learn from the experience of people of colour is no less important for white Jews than for any other group. The fact that as Jews we experience our own form of racism does not absolve us of this responsibility. This is nowhere more true than when tackling racism within our own institutions. There’s a powerful temptation to assume that as the victims of antisemitism, we can’t possible be racist. Listening to the history and experience of people of colour is the best antidote to this kind of complacency.

Yet the trauma of antisemitism can make it harder to acknowledge other people’s pain and oppression. Some part of us thinks that recognising someone else’s suffering downgrades our own. But suffering is not a zero-sum game. Arguments about who’s suffered more serve no-one. Nor does hypersensitivity towards instances of antisemitism among people of colour, or demands of reciprocity – ‘we’ll help you fight racism only if you help us fight antisemitism’. We need to resist this kind of impulse and draw on our experience of antisemitism to strengthen our empathy and solidarity with another group’s anti-racist struggle. The theologian and psychotherapist Michael Lerner has written compellingly about the need to break the repetition compulsion which is created by the experience of abuse in order to build healthy relationships and work together for justice.

Finally, we need to get the balance right between what Fraser calls ‘differentiating’ and ‘universal’ approaches to racism. On one hand, it’s vital to resist the liberal impulse towards colour-blindness, the idea that if we ignore race then racism will go away. On the contrary, the first step towards combatting racism has to be recognising the unique experiences of different ethnic groups, the centrality of race and the way it shapes our behaviours and institutions.

However, overdoing this kind of ‘differentiation’ risks destroying solidarity and reducing the black-Jewish relationship to one of simple allyship between two groups who have nothing in common. This would be missing an opportunity for something deeper. The corrective is to recast both antisemitism and anti-black racism not only as particularistic problems which isolate their victims from each other, but as twin targets of a broader anti-racist struggle. The challenge is to recognise the uniqueness of each group’s experience while acknowledging what we have in common.

How to be human - Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt on community and social justice

I’m currently completing a PhD thesis on the topic of Jewish social justice education. I was fascinated by the proliferation of social justice campaigning and educational work all over the Jewish world, and by the surprising absence of any theoretical or academic writing on the subject. The outcome is that while lots of people are trying to do Jewish social justice work, no-one has a clearly defined sense of exactly what this means.

For example, what do we mean by social justice – what is our vision for a just society and how does this inform our critique of existing political and economic arrangements? Are we concerned about human rights, the environment, poverty, the breakdown of community, international development issues, all or none of the above?

What is specifically Jewish about this vision? Does it derive from halacha, Biblical values, Jewish history, modern Jewish political movements – or is it enough to have a universal vision which happens to be pursued by Jews? Either way, is there anything specifically Jewish about the way in which we pursue justice? Can social action itself be recognisably Jewish and what might this mean? If we can’t answer these latter questions, perhaps it would be better to recognise social justice as a universal, political pursuit and throw our lot in with broad-based, secular campaigns and organisations.

My research has focused on interviews with 15 UK-based Jewish social justice educators, including the head of informal education at JCoSS, a freelance educator doing feminist education around gender within Orthodox schools, the directors of Yachad and the New Israel Fund, Citizens UK’s Jewish community organiser, a modern-Orthodox rabbi who specialises in interfaith work, the Reform founder of Tzelem – a rabbinic voice for social justice, our own senior rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, educators from human rights NGO René Cassin and the Jewish LGBT organisation Keshet, and Maurice Glasman, a Labour peer, community organiser and inventor of ‘Blue Labour’.

Despite the diversity of this group, they are united in their understanding that discrimination, exclusion and inequality oppress people by denying them their humanity. The remedy is the opposite of this: enabling all human beings to realise their human potential. But what does it actually mean to be fully human? Different people answer this question in different ways, but it boils down to three key ingredients. First, being human means being involved in critical thinking and action in the world – what philosophers call praxis. This is what distinguishes human beings from all other animals. Second, it means being involved with spiritual concerns – not necessarily God, but non-materialist questions of meaning and values. Finally, it means being in community and relationship.

Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt

But even this final idea raises more questions, as there exist radically different concepts of community and relationship, each of which has a different kind of humanising impact on its members. I’ve been exploring alternative versions of this idea as put forward by two seminal 20th century thinkers – the philosopher and theologian Martin Buber, and the political theorist Hannah Arendt.

In his classic book I and Thou, Buber teaches that human beings relate to each other in two different ways. Most of the time we deal with other people as parties to a transaction or as means to some end we’re trying to achieve. This is most obvious in the case of bus drivers, shop keepers or our tax accountants, but can also be true in the case of intimate relationships: we often use friends and partners to meet our own emotional needs. While human society could not exist without this way of interacting, it also leads us to objectivise other people and can be alienating and ultimately dehumanising. But Buber also holds up the possibility of an alternative way of relating to other people not as ‘It’ but as ‘You’. When we see someone as ‘You’, we refuse to instrumentalise them but instead encounter them genuinely in all their unique individuality. This is the true meaning of relationship.

Buber writes that the evolution of modern, industrial, mass society has made relational encounters more and more difficult to achieve. As a result, we have become progressively less authentically human. His solution is to rebuild society as a network of independent, organic communities, within which genuine relationships can take place and people can reclaim their humanity. It’s no surprise that Buber was among the early supporters of the kibbutz movement and always argued that kibbutzim should remain as small, intimate, community groups.

If Buber believes that being human is the ability to engage in genuine, intimate, one-on-one relationships, Hannah Arendt proposes a very different model of relational, community life. She harks back to classical Greece, where she claims there was a clear division between the private and public spheres. The private sphere or the family was not only the location for intimate relationships but was also the basic unit of economic production and social stability, ruled over in an autocratic style by the head of the household. The public sphere, in contrast, emerged at the point where material wellbeing had been assured and took the form of democratic politics: a process of deliberation among active citizens about the important matters that affected the community.

Arendt’s view of community is summed up by the cut and thrust of deliberation, debate and the exchange of views, through which participants realise their freedom and bring their innate uniqueness as human beings into the world. In this light, Buber is guilty of transplanting the private sphere (family-style, intimate relationships) into the public arena, thereby endangering the autonomy and agency of the participants. Against this, Buber would argue that Arendt’s model of political community risks seeing other people as tools for one’s own self-advancement, thereby destroying any chance of genuine relationships.

For Arendt, humanisation means nurturing the potential within each individual human being. Community is a means to this end. Buber believes that being human means encountering the Other: for him, community and relationships are therefore ends in themselves.

Want to find out more about my research? Please get in touch!

Failures of leadership – towards a Masorti response

The UK is reeling from a comprehensive failure of political leadership.  Whatever your view on the outcome of the referendum, it’s become clear that senior government leaders gambled with the future of the country for the sake of tactical advantage or even personal ego – sometimes to the extent of campaigning for a solution they didn’t even believe in.  Millions of people saw their vote not as an opportunity to influence the outcome, but as a protest against an establishment with which they feel no sense of connection.  Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Opposition, failed to throw his weight behind his party’s policy and is refusing to step down despite having lost the confidence of 80% of his MPs, being unable to fill his Shadow Cabinet, and the real risk of splitting his party for good. 

And in case we’re tempted to think that the answer is stronger leadership, a former charismatic Prime Minister stands accused of pushing the country into what has been described as the biggest foreign policy disaster since Suez by withholding information and strong-arming his colleagues rather than listening to them.

I’m reminded of the story of Rabban Yohanan Ben Zakkai the most prominent leader of the Jewish people at the time of the war against Rome, the siege of Jerusalem and, ultimately, the destruction of the Second Temple (66-70 CE)*.  At that time, the Jewish people was riven by sectarian conflict.  The Zealots, an extremist party who preferred death to what they saw as enslavement by the Roman empire (and whose story ended in mass suicide at Masada), had responded to the siege of Jerusalem by burning the city’s grain stores and bringing on famine – creating a situation so desperate that the people, they hoped, would have no choice but to fight.  But when Ben Zakkai, the leader of a moderate faction, walked the streets and saw the people cooking straw and drinking the water, he understood that there was no hope of defeating Rome. 

Ben Zakkai sent for his nephew – a leader of the Zealots – and together, secretly, they hatched a plan to escape from the besieged city and negotiate with the Romans.  Ben Zakkai faked his own death and two of his students carried his coffin to the gates of Jerusalem, knowing that the Zealot guards’ piety would require them to ensure that no dead body was left overnight in the holy city.  Upon reaching the Roman camp, Ben Zakkai sprang out of his coffin and presented himself to the Roman General, Vespasian, addressing him as ‘King.’  When, a few moments later, a messenger arrived from Rome to inform Vespasian that he had indeed been appointed Emperor, Vespasian interpreted Ben Zakkai’s words as an omen and offered to grant him any request he might make.  But rather than asking for Jerusalem to be saved, Ben Zakkai asked for the establishment of a rabbinical academy at Yavneh; this would become the foundation of a new form of Judaism which could survive the destruction of the Temple and which has now lasted for close to 2000 years.

This story (recorded in the Talmud, admittedly, by the descendants of Ben Zakkai’s moderate, rabbinic faction) contains stark lessons about leadership.  The Zealots, characterised by ideological purity and a refusal to compromise in the face of reality, failed to achieved their goals and condemned thousands of people to catastrophe.  Had they got their way, Judaism would have died along with them.  Ben Zakkai’s leadership, in contrast, was marked by pragmatism, a willingness to snatch partial victories from the jaws of defeat, and most of all by his success at building and capitalising on relationships.  He saw and understood the concrete situation of the people, he enlisted the help of his followers, he prioritised rescuing his colleagues and, most surprisingly, he built tactical relationships with his opponents and enemies.

A true leader is someone who has followers (look behind you – is anyone there?) and who knows how to bring people together to work for common goals.  This is no less true in community life.  A community is a network of relationships – the stronger the relationships, the stronger the community.  The most successful Masorti communities are the ones which prioritise relationship-building as an end in itself, where guests and new people are introduced to the members and invited into their homes, where community leaders hold regular one-to-ones and small group meetings to build relationships and find out what’s going on in their members’ lives, and where there’s a clear plan for how to get specific individuals more involved in aspects of community life which speak to them and make use of their talents.  Communities which struggle are the ones which spend all their time thinking about programmes and activities (which in the absence of systematic relationship-building rarely bring in more than a hard core of around 15% of members) and where the only time you get a call from the shul is when they want something from you. 

One of Masorti Judaism’s most important programmes is Jewish Community Organising, a training course for developing relational community leaders.  The cohort from this year’s course (including members from New London, New North London, Edgware, Elstree & Borehamwood and New Stoke Newington shuls) will now form the core for a movement-wide relationship-building exercise.  Each course participant plus leaders from additional communities will recruit a team of five ‘listeners’ who, after some initial training, will conduct five one-to-ones with their members.  The outcomes?   We’ll have built relationships between leaders and up to 50 members in each community.  Those leaders will understand the real needs of their members.  When it comes to planning programmes, we’ll know who to get involved, what we can ask of them and where our focus should be.  Most importantly, our investment in relationship-building means that when we invite people, they’re likely to show up. 

While synagogue life does not typically throw up the life-and-death dilemmas of national leadership, there are lessons here that some of our politicians would do well to learn.

*Babylonian Talmud, Gittin 56a-b

Parshat Behar - Freedom From and Freedom To

Parshat Behar - Freedom From and Freedom To

The Torah's take on whether individual rights are worth anything without social and economic equality

At the centre of modern progressive politics has been a debate over the meaning of freedom.  Classical liberals believed all human beings have a fundamental right to live free from outside interference.  They emphasised freedom from – the absence of coercion – and often prioritised the free market and rolling back the power of the State.  Against this, social democrats and contemporary, egalitarian liberals claimed this was not enough.  Freedom from meant nothing without freedom to – and you can’t have freedom to without a basic level of resources.  Freedom of expression means nothing, for example, if you’re denied access to education and don’t know how to write.  Or think of a homeless person who gives up their liberty by committing a crime in the hope of being locked up somewhere warm for the night.  Freedom to, in this sense, means not only the absence of coercion but the fair distribution of goods and opportunities.

In this week’s parashah we read that the Jubilee was a year of freedom in which land was redistributed and all Hebrew slaves were set free.  But in Exodus 21 and Deuteronomy 15 we learn a different procedure: Hebrew slaves are to be released after six years of servitude unless, of their own volition, they decide to submit themselves to the permanent ownership of their master.  A quirk of these texts is that they use different words for freedom.  The freed individual slave is described in Exodus and Deuteronomy as ‘hofshi’, while this week’s reading from Leviticus instructs us to ‘proclaim freedom –“dror” – throughout the land’.  What’s the difference between these two terms?

As pointed out by various commentators, hofshi is used by the Torah in the context of liberty for the individual slave, while dror means universal freedom for all.  Similarly, hofshi connotes a conditional release – Hebrew slaves have the option of remaining chained to their masters – while dror reflects an unqualified freedom with no exceptions.  Other scholars have pointed out that whereas hofshi means a rather narrow release from serfdom and labour, dror implies a much more sweeping freedom from any kind of subservience or domination by a master.  More broadly, hofshi can be understood as a negative release from coercion, whereas dror signifies the positive gift of freedom.  But what is the positive content of this freedom?

In the Talmud (Rosh Hashanah 9b) Rabbi Yehudah interprets dror to mean the freedom of a person to dwell wherever he likes and to carry on trade in the whole country.  This explanation is etymologically grounded - dror comes from the same root as ‘dwell’ – dar in Hebrew or medayer in Aramaic.  This interpretation connects the release of slaves to the redemption of the land.  It has been argued that just as freedom from subservience to a human master enables us to serve God, so too the redistribution of land reflects the abolition of limited human ownership in favour of God’s absolute sovereignty.

But perhaps the Torah is making a simpler, political point.  Being free to live and trade where you like means having land, a house, and goods to sell.  True liberty requires both freedom from – the release from slavery – and the equitable re-distribution of resources: a deeper conception of freedom to.

Should we print pictures of the Prophet Muhammad?

Should we print pictures of the Prophet Muhammad?  This for me is the thorniest issue to come out of the recent terrible events in Paris.  What’s more important – free speech or respecting the religious beliefs of others?  The question comes down to a clash between two different kinds of rights, where believers tend to emphasise one value, and liberal secularists the opposing one. 

We might assume that freedom of speech inevitably trumps some ill-defined right not to be offended – or to respond to offence.  But the situation is complicated by the fact that it’s clearly legitimate to oppose racist hate speech, and criticisms of Islam can never by entirely disconnected from prejudice against Muslims who are not only a religious group but, in most western countries, a vulnerable ethnic minority too.  As Jews, this sensitivity should be particularly clear to us.

Jewish tradition has two other important contributions to make to this debate.

One is Judaism’s radical monotheism, articulated most powerfully by Maimonides, the 13^th century legal authority and philosopher whose most important intellectual influences were the Islamised versions of Aristotelian thought he learned from Arabic writers like Al Farabi, Avicenna and Averroes.  Maimonides teaches that the fight against idolatry is no longer about combatting the worship of physical images.  Idolatry in his day manifested itself in people’s internalised, anthropomorphic, mental images of God.  For Maimonides, God cannot be conceptualised, known, or spoken about in any way.  God is beyond the grasp of the human intellect and imagination.  Any image of God is by definition human, not divine.  So too, revelation is a purely intellectual process and any anthropomorphic account (which has God speaking or writing, for example) must be understood allegorically.

Maimonides’ theology should make clear to any remotely sophisticated monotheist that blasphemy does not affect God, only the feelings of believers who incorrectly assume that God needs their protection.

The second contribution stems from the fact that unlike western legal systems, Jewish law focuses on obligations, not rights.  This distinction dissolves much of the tension between freedom of speech and freedom from religious offence in which we try, problematically, to defend the absolute right to offend the religious sensibilities of people who we want to avoid upsetting or indirectly harming. 

Rather than rights to speak and respond to offence, Judaism posits two relevant duties: the obligation to avoid harming others through speech (unless specific circumstances mean refraining from speaking out will cause more harm) and the primary obligation not to inflict injury or death.  Every individual has to weigh up whether and how to speak, write and draw in light of the harm likely to be caused by action or inaction.  But if someone steps over the line, we all have an absolute, unconditional obligation to refrain from violence.

Yesterday I met with a Muslim colleague who is keen to initiate serious dialogue between the Jewish and Muslim communities in an effort to create a nuanced, non-fundamentalist theological discourse which will lend support to the values of peace and co-existence.  In the present climate, I believe the role of religious people of faith has never been more important.

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.

“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.

Royal babies, Republicanism and Torah OR why the Bible has a problem with royalty

I’m aware that any whiff of republicanism these days is considered to be outside the bounds of good taste – we all love the royal family now!  I'm going to risk unpopularity and perhaps scandal by relaying these thoughts which recently occurred to me.

Private Eye’s recent front page headline, ‘Woman has baby,’ naturally appealed to me but, although it points out an obvious truth about recent events, it also misses the point.  The new baby is not only a human being; the tremendous fuss around his birth is a reminder that he is part of one of the stranger British institutions – the monarchy.  The monarchy is strange because it exists within a democracy in which, notionally, sovereignty resides with the people.  Accordingly the queen (or king) has no actual political power – just a stack of land and money accumulated over the centuries, a generous taxpayer-funded remuneration package, guaranteed access to the media, and regular one-to-one, confidential meetings with the Prime Minister. 

A few weeks ago, the courts rules that correspondence between Prince Charles and various government departments could not be released under the Freedom of Information Act as publication could damage his position of political neutrality.  The implication was that Charles is not neutral, has clear political opinions and has taken advantage of his position to communicate these to government ministers; keeping his letters secret serves the purpose of maintaining the illusion of political neutrality while allowing him to go about his business influencing government policy.

You’d think that in a democracy people would notice this kind of anomaly, not to mention the clash between their enthusiasm for these symbols of privilege and the values we all supposedly believe in.  The fact that hardly anyone does is less surprising when you consider how shallow our democracy actually is and take into account the centralisation of power, the inequality and the social immobility which have increasingly come to plague us.  (On the same subject, see the excellent book The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone).   Public worship of the monarchy shows how successful the institution is at implicitly legitimising the status quo.

Next week we’ll be reading Parshat Shoftim (Deuteronomy 16:18 - 21:9) which, among other things, gives us the laws relating to the monarchy:

“If, after you have entered the land that the Lord your God has assigned to you, and taken possession of it and settled in it, you decide, "I will set a king over me, as do all the nations about me," you shall be free to set a king over yourself, one chosen by the Lord your God. Be sure to set as king over yourself one of your own people; you must not set a foreigner over you, one who is not your kinsman.  Moreover, he shall not keep many horses or send people back to Egypt to add to his horses, since the Lord has warned you, "You must not go back that way again." And he shall not have many wives, lest his heart go astray; nor shall he amass silver and gold to excess. 

When he is seated on his royal throne, he shall have a copy of this Teaching written for him on a scroll by the levitical priests.  Let it remain with him and let him read in it all his life, so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God, to observe faithfully every word of this Teaching as well as these laws.  Thus he will not act haughtily toward his fellows or deviate from the Instruction to the right or to the left, to the end that he and his descendants may reign long in the midst of Israel.” (17:14-20).

The important bit is not the Torah’s assumption that a king will be predisposed towards the accumulation of excess wealth, immoral behaviour and idolatry, nor the idea that the king has to be watched by the priests to ensure he keeps to the laws of the Torah.  The most interesting detail is the opening word of the passage – ‘if.’  The Torah’s message is, you can have a king if you want one, but you’ll probably be sorry as this is far from the idea form of government. 

Later (I Samuel chapter 8), we learn how the people rejected the direct rule of God as represented by the Judges, and begged for a king so they could be more like the other nations and have someone to lead them into battle.  The prophet Samuel, while warning the people of the likely outcome, reluctantly agreed.  The rest of the Bible describes how the Israelite monarchy descended into exactly the sort of corruption warned about in the Torah.

I would argue that the Bible is a republican document.  It believes in the direct rule of God and sees monarchy as a pragmatic solution designed to pander to the people, but one which will inevitably lead to bigger problems than the ones it was designed to solve.  In our context, the monarchy has no power to solve our problems, only the capacity to blind us to them.  Yet direct rule by God is also unavailable to us.  In the absence of prophets, when we all have equal potential for understanding God’s will (perhaps alternatively understood as the common good?), is democracy the best available alternative to biblical theocracy?  The fact that the people undeniably still want a king is another matter.

Jewish law is not morality - more on Torah, liberalism and sexual ethics

Here are two examples about the tension between liberalism and halachic Judaism I mentioned in my last post (dedicated to Alex Stein - see his blog at http://falsedichotomies.com/).

1.
Today I attended a learning session for Masorti Judaism staff led by Rabbi Daniella Kolodny. We were looking at a Masorti responsum on smoking by Rabbi David Golinkin (see volume 4) which, aside from unambiguously prohibiting smoking, attacked ultra-Orthodox poskim such as Rabbi Moshe Feinstein for failing to do so.  Just to be clear: I agree with the teshuva; it's clear to me that smoking is contrary to basis halachic injunctions to save life and remain healthy.  But I'm ambivalent about the value of applying halacha to this kind of issue.  I have ultra-Orthodox acquaintances who won't paint their house before asking their rabbi what colour to choose. I wonder whether applying the authoritative framework of Jewish law to a question whose answer is self-evident in terms of modern science and common sense is the start of a slippery slope which leads, ultimately, to this kind of self-abasement.  In other words, as liberal Jews, can we accept a pan-halachic perspective which holds that Jewish law has the capacity to dictate all our decisions, or should we limiting halacha to the areas where we actually need it (ritual matters, genuinely fraught ethical issues) and asserting our right to make our own decisions about most areas of life?

2.
But sometimes it's not clear what's a halachic issue and what isn't.  For example, our rabbis were recently asked to comment on the question of same sex marriage in the UK.  The Church of England and the Orthodox Chief Rabbi have come out against it and the Progressive Jewish movements (Liberal and Reform) among others have predictably been in favour. All the arguments for and against have been framed in moral terms: gay marriage is seen as either a good thing or a bad thing.  Masorti Senior Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg issued a statement making clear that gay Jews are welcome in our communities, that he approved of same-sex civil partnerships, and that he wants to find a way of marking same-sex relationships with a religious ceremony.  The subtext of this statement is that allowing same-sex couples to undergo kiddushin (Jewish marriage) is not a simple proposition - in other words there's a gap between what's moral and what's halachic (on this see Rabbi Jeremy Gordon's article quoted in the previous post).

Kiddushin is the legal procedure whereby a man acquires a woman (in the language of the Mishnah) - as such, it simply doesn't apply to same-sex couples.  There's no moral judgement here, just a question of applicability.  On the other hand, when synagogues register marriages in the eyes of the State, they are performing what is by definition an extra-halachic act, as Jewish marriage is a private contract in which the State or even the Bet Din has no role.  To my knowledge, English law doesn't specify the form of religious ceremony people have to undrego before their synagogue can register them as legally married, and increasing numbers of straight couples are choosing alternative ceremonies in preference to kiddushin, which they see as patriarchal and sexist. What would happen if we instituted an innovative, religious commitment ceremony for same-sex couples, having nothing to do with kiddushin, but followed up by a registration of civil marriage under the auspices of the synagogue?

I'm not a rabbi and I'm certainly not empowered to influence this kind of decision.  I'm more interested in it as a thought experiment which might help us think about the question of what is a halachic issue and what is an extra-halachic one.  In most ways, halacha (and Judaism in general) plays too small a role in our lives as liberal Jews.  But all too often halachic categories are invoked to prescribe particular solutions to what could be seen as social or political problems.  I think we need to be very clear about which mode of thinking is relevant to which issue, bringing halacha to bear more intensively where appropriate, but fighting the corner for liberal values and autonomy wherever we can.

Why Gove's got it wrong on (almost) everything

Education secretary Michael Gove has announced that he wants to shorten holidays and lengthen school days so that the UK education can compete more effectively against the Chinese and other east Asian economies.  He also wants pupil feedback to influence performance-related teachers' pay, believes students should study more British history and learn lists of important facts by heart, is set to mandate compulsory language learning (from a list of seven languages including Chinese but not Japanese, Italian but not Portugese, Spanish but not Arabic, and Latin and Greek but not Hebrew or Sanskrit) in primary schools and, while imposing these and a host of other new government directives, simultaneously wants to give schools more independence by encouraging them to convert to academies, opting out of local authority control and becoming directly accountable to central government.

I've already said what I think about Gove's proposals for language teaching and the negative impact this will have on Hebrew and Jewish education - ironically, seeing that Gove himself studies Hebrew and never misses an opportunity to profess his love and respect for the Jewish community.  See my piece here.  I also need to declare and interest (and perhaps a total lack of consistency): I'm a founding governor of a new school being set up under the goverment's Free Schools policy.

Gove's policies seem increasingly confused.  But running through them, I believe, are two entirely coherent and consistently applied principles.  One is a lack of respect for experts - and in the case of education, this means teachers.  The education secretary believes that government, not teachers, should dictate education policy and is endeavoring to drive through politically determined reforms at a breakneck pace.  Plans to lengthen the school day imply that teachers don't work hard enough.  He has been criticised for failing to consult over the new national curriculum.  And where he seeks to decentralise, his partners of choice are not teachers but parents, universities and business.  The Guardian recently reported as follows:

'Gove made an offer to unions who complain about his reforms: "Many of [the teaching unions] have very passionate criticisms of the model of education that I've outlined and there's an open invitation to the unions which is: prove me wrong, set up a free school.
"If the NUT were to set up a free school, we would find them a building, we would fund it. And I would love to see an NUT or another union free school." Turning down Gove's offer, a union spokesperson said: "The NUT is in a lot of places already. They're called schools."'


The second principle is a tacit but extremely powerful belief that the only important goal of education is economic success.  This idea, widespread to the point of ubiquity in education policy across the industrialised world, is apparent in Gove's policies but even more so in his language.  The education system needs reforming so students can acquire skills to better compete in a global marketplace.

But if so, why the emphasis on English culture, English history, the rote learning of poetry, Latin and Greek on the list of mandated languages for primary school children, and the gift of a King James Bible to every school in the country?  On the surface it appears that alongside the desire for economic efficiency Gove wants to resurrect a more old-fashioned, classical education, grounded in the arts and humanities.   But this impression is misleading.  This kind of liberal arts education is about reading, thinking and understanding.  It values above all the richness of the tradition and its role in shaping good citizens, where citizenship means participating in public life for the sake of the common good.  But in Gove's vision, the ultimate authority is not pupils or teachers but government, and the aim of education is not cultural or political but economic.  Not only that, but the government's supposedly cultural educational rhetoric is actually tinged with racism.  An official commented on the latest plans to lengthen the school day: "We can either start working as hard as the Chinese, or we'll all soon be working for the Chinese."

This is what the government's educational vision seems to boil down to.  Children need to spend as much time possible studying at school so they learn the skills needed to spend as many hours possible working once they leave school.  They need to be immersed in a narrative of Britishness so they don't notice that they live in a global economy where the national identity of their employers matters less than the fact that profits keep rising even as average wages stagnate.  And they need to learn by rote and devote themselves to facts and skills rather than critical thinking, creativity and understanding in order to prepare themselves for lives as pliant employees and uncritical consumers.  Charles Dickens' Mr Gradgrind couldn't have wished for more.

How three Guardian articles on Israel made me a happy man

Thoughts about three articles in this weekend’s Guardian and Observer.

The first one was by Iain Banks, on why he won’t allow his books to be sold in Israel.  This is the kind of article I usually avoid as I find the badly-argued hostility and venom they usually contain, directed exclusively against Israel and therefore in some part of my mind against me personally, too much.  But I read this one, partly because it came out the day after Banks announced that he has cancer and only has months to live, an announcement in which he gave the impression of being a genuine, decent person with a sense of humour.  I also like his books. 

My immediate thought about pro-boycott articles –of which this is one – is why are you boycotting Israel and not one of the many other countries with far worse records of human rights abuse and illegal actions?  In the first paragraph my eye settled on, Banks explained that he would never allow his books to be sold in Saudi Arabia either but that the problem has never come up as they’re banned there anyway.  This seemed to reflect both balance and a certain awareness of the relative merits of Israeli democracy. 

Banks was also clear that his target was the Israeli state not the Israeli people.  He clearly respects and identifies with the Jewish people, even granting tongue-in-cheek that our contribution to world culture has been more important than that of the Scots.  And he took a subtle, friendly swipe at claims that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic (‘Israel and its apologists can't have it both ways, though: if they're going to make the rather hysterical claim that any and every criticism of Israeli domestic or foreign policy amounts to antisemitism, they have to accept that this claimed, if specious, indivisibility provides an opportunity for what they claim to be the censure of one to function as the condemnation of the other.’)  More than anything I was touched by his memories of boycotting apartheid South Africa (I too grew up in a home free of South African products), which he managed to evoke without implying any direct parallel between Israel and apartheid. 

Article two was by Canon Giles Fraser, entitled ‘Why Theodor Herzl's writings still have an urgent message: antisemitic attacks in Hungary illustrate the necessity of Israel.’  The headline really says it all.  One paragraph was particularly striking: ‘I am a Zionist. Not an Israel right-or-wrong type of Zionist. Not a supporter of the settlement movement type of Zionist, and absolutely not a supporter of the shameful treatment of Palestinians type of Zionist.’  A Guardian columnist admitting to being a Zionist is unusual itself.  The nuanced idea that you can be a Zionist and oppose the occupation – rare enough in our community, more so in wider British society – was even more so.

Finally, a report on an article by Amira Hass in Haaretz, Israel’s liberal broadsheet, which called for Palestinian schools to train their students in non-violent protest, including stone throwing against Israeli soldiers.  The article has provoked criticism (some within the pages of Haaretz itself), demonstrations and calls for Hass to be prosecuted for incitement.  The failure of successive Israeli governments (and their Palestinian counterparts) to end the occupation and the damage to democracy and human rights that go along with it, juxtaposed with the fact that a mainstream Israeli newspaper chose - and was allowed - to print such a trenchantly subversive piece, says a lot about the knotty nature of the conflict and the irreducibility of Israeli reality into black and white terms.

When I lived in Israel, I freely criticised the government, voted and even campaigned against it.   My commitment to Israel was never questioned – rather, the depth of my criticism reflected the depth of my commitment to Israeli democracy and by extension to Zionism itself. Since returning to the UK nearly five years ago I’ve become sensitive to the connection between criticism of Israel and attacks on the Jewish community – a connection which is all too prevalent.  But more important than the objective existence of this connection is a deep rooted feeling among UK Jews that protecting Israel’s image is essentially a form of self-defence.  It goes back to the Anglo-Jewish bunker mentality, a mentality formed as a result of the historical experience of living in an ostensibly tolerant society where subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) expressions of antisemitism were always close at hand.  This is the same state of mind that all too often inhibits us from engaging in important projects for the common good with non-Jewish colleagues.

Reading the papers this weekend confirmed me in my belief that while Israel (and the Jewish community) has enemies, we also have friends out there – and the depth of criticism is no indication as to the depth of friendship.  Ten years in Israel helped me step outside the bunker mentality and grow the Jewish self-confidence to understand this issue in a nuanced way.  I wonder how we can encourage the community down the same path.

This month

I’ve neglected my blog as I’ve been writing for other publications: an article for the Jewish News on some of the issues raised here, a piece for the Jewish Chronicle criticising Michael Gove’s decision to exclude Hebrew from compulsory language teaching in primary schools, and a long review of a number of recent Introductions to Judaism books for the Jewish Quarterly (forthcoming). 

At Masorti Judaism, between preparing for and recovering from Pesach, we’ve been busy.  My main task between now and the summer is to raise a chunk of new money to ensure we can achieve the goals set out in our strategic plan next year.  The big new projects are to start working with an outreach rabbi for students and new communities, build up a fund to support rabbinical students and bring them into our communities for placements, take on a new member of the professional team to manage leadership training, education and events, and to expand our communications work through publications and a new website.  To that end I’ve been working with lay-leaders on plans to hold fundraising events, approach potential donors, secure some corporate sponsorship, and begin planning this year’s fundraising dinner. 

The Marom (students and young adults) team have run a successful five-day training seminar for Marom leaders from across Europe and tomorrow 20 students will be heading out on the Marom trip to Lithuania.  Meanwhile, Noam (Masorti youth) have exceeded their target for numbers on this year’s summer camps and have begun raising money for the camp subsidy fund, to ensure no-one’s excluded because of inability to pay.  Next month we’ll all be running in the Maccabi GB Community Fun Run to raise more money for the fund – more details soon.