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.

Why Yom Kippur doesn't work - and (maybe) how to fix it

This is the drasha (sermon) I gave on Yom Kippur 5776/2015 at New North London Synagogue.

I remember myself as a 14 year-old, the second Yom Kippur after my bar mitzvah, refusing to go to shul, staying home and demonstratively eating because I didn’t believe in God and I refused to be a hypocrite.

Things have changed – here I am! – but in some ways, while I’m less concerned about inconsistency, have found my place within traditional Jewish observance, and have a more sophisticated view of the problems, nothing’s changed for me.

Here are my problems with Yom Kippur. 

Firstly: the whole construct of the Yamim Noraim (and in some ways Judaism as a whole) is built on an unsustainable anthropomorphism – a judging God who rewards and punishes.

I don’t believe in such a God and, on a deeper level, I reject the underlying assumption which is that the world is in some way inherently just.

Secondly: morality for me as a modern, liberal individual, is about the mitzvot beyn adam le-havero (commandments between people), which I regard as the expression of a binding ethical system.  It’s hard to imagine the observance of the mitzvot beyn adam le-makom (between a person and God) as more than a lifestyle choice, since they don’t affect anyone but me.  And why would I need to repent from a lifestyle choice?  

While the process of teshuva (repentance) relates to both kinds of mitzvot, the rabbis teach that Yom Kippur only repents for sins between people if we’ve already made good the damage, received forgiveness and repented before the day starts.  And if, as the Rambam teaches, teshuva is the essence of atonement, then the rituals of Yom Kippur itself seem to have no essential function.

This problem has another aspect: teshuva means making change, changing ourselves.  This requires a deep process of personal transformation, which we’re more likely to achieve through some kind of long term therapy, working with another person or in a group, than by standing in shul, surrounded by other people, but essentially alone with our thoughts. 

This is recognised in the tradition: the Rambam (Maimonides) writes that true repentance means a change both of behaviour and of attitude, requires a person to avoid negative, habit-forming behaviours and to remove herself from the situation in which the sin is likely to recur, and teaches that true repentance can only be achieved by confessing one’s sins to others.  The confessional prayers we say in synagogue, reciting a fixed formula of words in unison, can hardly be described as an authentic confession of personal sins.

Thirdly, modern, liberal ethics has to be based on autonomous choice.  Not just free will in the sense of deciding whether or not to obey the commandments we’ve been given – this is assumed by the rabbis and implies an a priori acceptance of the commandments themselves – but freedom to think for ourselves and shape our own moral code.  I expect not only to choose how to behave, but also to decide for myself the difference between right and wrong. 

But the vidui (confessional prayer) of Yom Kippur presents us with a list of sins, our job being to accept the framework and judge ourselves accordingly.  Even if we happen to agree with many of the sins we’re presented with, how can this be a framework for proper, autonomous moral deliberation?

So what kinds of answers can I suggest?

Firstly, the tradition provides some justification for my concerns and basic perspective.  This is not something that needs to separate me from Judaism, but something that our thinkers have always grappled with.

As an arch-rationalist, Maimonides – perhaps our most important halachic authority and theologian – clearly could not accept the anthropomorphic view of atonement, nor the idea that the ritual has any kind of magical effect.  But he also knew that the traditional concepts were important to his medieval audience.

In his Hilkhot Teshuva / Laws of Repentance, he says: ‘at present, when the Temple does not exist and there is no altar of atonement, there remains nothing else aside from teshuva.’ He also says, ‘the essence of Yom Kippur atones’ but only ‘for those who repent.’

The anthropomorphisms and the rituals are a means to an end, a way of focusing our minds, of bringing people to the correct psychological state to engage in confession and soul-searching.  The essence is the internal process of repentance itself.

Maimonides helps affirm my basic perspective that the real work of repentance has to be done outside of shul, with people, over a long period, and that I don’t need to adopt a simplistic theology in order to engage with it.  Yom Kippur is a moment of introspection, reflection and making personal commitments about the change I want to create.

A practical solution might be to change what we do in shul, building in a process of facilitated, group-based introspection and reflection over the yamim noraim – the ten days between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.  (For more on this see, this article by Donniel Hartman: http://bit.ly/1iNB8tt).

But the Rambam doesn’t help with my fundamental problem: the clash between the vidui, the framework of the mitzvot, and my aspiration to be an autonomous moral agent.

I want to address this through an article by the one of the most important modern Jewish philosophers, Emil Fackenheim (click here to read extracts from the article: http://bit.ly/1LyBsad).  Fackenheim agrees that we cannot stand before God and respond affirmatively to the commandments without free choice.  Recognising and living out our freedom is a necessary condition for any relationship with Judaism. 

But at the same time, freedom to make choices about our relationship with the tradition, means standing in the presence of God and hearing that commanding voice. 

Freedom and service or obedience need each other.  We can’t shape our relationship with the mitzvot unless we accept the framework of mitzvot as our starting point. 

Perhaps this is the function of the vidui, the Al Het prayer we recite throughout Yom Kippur.  It confronts us with this framework, and with the underlying commanding voice of God (alternatively the voice of the tradition or the idea of an objective moral code).  This is the precondition for any meaningful, authentically Jewish, process of deliberation, soul searching, teshuva, and choosing, freely, to be different.

Gmar hatima tova.