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 is it wrong for a person to marry their dog? Sex in the Torah and liberal values

We're in danger of reducing Judaism to a pale reflection of itself if we ignore everything about it that we don't like.

Last Shabbat's parshah (weekly Torah portion) was Aharei Mot - Kedoshim, a double parshah that sums up this dilemma.  Aharei Mot includes the Torah's laws about forbidden sexual practices, a vital part of Jewish law: don't have sex with family members, in-laws, menstruating women (the author clearly had in mind a male audience), animals or other men.  We still get the bits about incest, adultery and bestiality, but not the  ones about homosexuality or, if we're honest, about avoiding sex during menstruation.  More specifically, some people might want to avoid sex during menstruation but they'd be unlikely to back law enforcement on the subject.

Kedoshim, on the other hand, contains some of the Torah's greatest hits: don't curse the deaf, don't put a stumbling block in front of the blind, leave the crops at the corners of your fields for the poor, love your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord.  This parshah also contains bits we don't like, but it certainly provides a good amount of material for left-wing, liberal and even secular sermon givers and doesn't make us feel embarrassed to be Jewish.

The other day a Liberal rabbi friend told me that readings from the book of Vayikra (Leviticus), rich as it tends to be with content that makes modern people uncomfortable, are often skipped over or de-emphasised by his colleagues.  While at Masorti we read every line of the Torah as part of the annual cycle, we can't deny that this temptation also exists for us.  A broader temptation for liberal-minded Jews (and I include Masorti in that definition) is to filter Judaism through the prism of our liberal values, simply ignoring the bits we don't like, and claiming that the result reflects an authentic interpretation of the tradition.

There are two problems with this: one has to do with liberalism and the other has to do with Judaism.

First, liberalism.  John Stuart Mill taught us that the State (or any other source of authority) has no right to coerce individuals other than to prevent them from harming others.  This is the basic justification for important progressive policies such as recognising same-sex marriage.  Thoroughgoing liberalism removes the need for value judgements or imposing our views on others.  It simply says live and let live.  If two people want to marry each other, we have no right to interfere.  Similarly, if someone wants to protest about same-sex marriage, they have the right to do that, as long as the protest doesn't verge on coercion.  The same applies to any other activities engaged in by consenting adults: hard drug use, incest, potentially even bestiality (as long as we could prove no animal cruelty was involved).

These examples show that the liberalism of most liberals is not all that thoroughgoing: most of us want to be able to make judgements, think about the kind of society we want to live in, and influence others in line with this.  Liberalism does not provide an escape from difficult, ideological, values-based debate.

Next, Judaism.  Judaism isn't interested in rights but in obligations.  As my colleague Rabbi Jeremy Gordon recently wrote in an article about Judaism and homosexuality (see page 22), halacha wants to control us from the time we get up to the time we go to bed at night, in every detail of our lives.  Judaism has been shaped by historical forces and shifting social values but if we try to reshape it in liberal, non-coercive terms we will be doing violence to its fundamental shape.  We need to hang on to Aharei Mot alongside Kedoshim.  This is important because Judaism has the potential to act as an effective check and balance against the excesses of liberalism taken to its logical conclusion.  Balancing ourselves between two such different ethical and political traditions forces us out of formulaic approaches and makes us think in an innovative way about each new issue we encounter.

This week

It's been busy.  Our professional staff have carried out a mid-year progress review and, while we face tough challenges in our efforts to grow the Masorti movement, we've made important achievements: expanding Noam's work in our communities and boosting summer camp numbers, running a successful Marom Lithuania trip and an international Marom Europe conference in London, finding ways to support Masorti rabbinical students, creating volunteer leadership teams for this year's Leadership Day (St Albans, 13th October - save the date!), our Annual Dinner and next year's Yom Masorti, creating a new Masorti corporate brochure to bring our message to a wider audience, and working hard to secure enough funding to expand our activities and achieve even bigger aims next year.

I've met with Charlotte Fischer, Citizens UK's Jewish Community Organiser to support her work with Noam and the Citizens' Group at New North London Synagogue, with Rael Goodman from the Jewish Agency to explore how to work in partnership to strengthen our relationship with Israel, and with Jon Benjamin from the Board of Deputies to find out how Masorti can get involved with the Board's new small community outreach programme.  I've also represented Masorti at meetings about the Jewish Leadership Council's Community Vitality Project and the professional advisory board of their leadership training initiative, LEAD; at a meeting of the Community Consultative Committee with heads of the United Synagogue, Reform and Liberal Judaism, and at the Israeli Embassy's Israel 65 reception.  And tomorrow I'm looking forward to running a shiur for members of New Stoke Newington Shul entitled 'Judaism Without God?'

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.

Ahead of the Seder - why do Jews obsess about rituals?

A few thoughts ahead of the Seder, based on last week's Torah portion, Tzav.

Tzav is one of the most difficult portions of the Torah for the modern reader: not only because the sacrificial cult is alien to contemporary religiosity, but because the general principles of sacrifice have already been laid out in the preceding parsha, Vayikra.  Tzav merely supplements the general commandments to the Israelite nation with more detailed instructions for the priests.  These regulations focus exclusively on ritual minutiae and show no concern whatsoever for theological or ethical matters.

This kind of obsession with ritual detail has a long history in Judaism.  Shabbat Hagadol was historically one of two annual Shabbatot on which rabbis would address their congregations (the other occasion was Shabbat Shuva before Yom Kippur).  Rabbis traditionally used their talk to deal with the intricacies of the Pesach dietary laws; it has been humorously suggested that the name “Shabbat Hagadol” – the great or big Shabbat – was connected with the length of the rabbi’s speech.  The prophet Malachi – the author of today’s haftara – was similarly concerned with punctilious obedience to the law, sarcastically condemning those with lower standards: “When you present a blind animal for sacrifice – it doesn’t matter!  When you present a lame or sick one – it doesn’t matter! ... This is what you have done – will [God] accept any of you?” (1:8-9).  Unlike the author of Tzav, Malachi had ethical concerns too (see 3:5), but his ultimate concern was for faithfulness to God, expressed through adherence to both ritual and ethical laws.

Were today not Shabbat Hagadol, we’d be reading a different haftara, from the book of Jeremiah, whose opening stands in stark contrast to the accompanying Torah portion:

“Thus said the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel: Add your burnt offerings to your other sacrifices and eat the meat! [Rashi explains this sarcastic injunction: as your burnt offerings are unacceptable to Me, why not use those animals for a sacrifice in which the meat is eaten following the ceremony; at least then the meat would not go to waste].  For when I freed your fathers from the land of Egypt, I did not speak with them or command them concerning burnt offerings or sacrifice.  But this is what I commanded them: Do My bidding, that I may be your God and you may be My people; walk only in the way that I enjoin upon you, that it may go well with you” (7:21-23).  While Tzav is all about ritual detail, Jeremiah condemns an exclusive concern for the letter of the law, insisting that sacrifice without obedience to the spirit of Torah is little short of blasphemous.

Tzav, it seems, does not reflect a monolithic Jewish voice which we must either accept or reject.  Instead, the Bible consists of a dialogue between different voices and positions, one in which we are invited to participate.  This diversity was celebrated by the seminal secular-cultural Jewish thinker, Ahad Ha’am, at the turn of the twentieth century.  Ahad Ha’am condemned the tendency of Jews (the ‘people of the Book’) towards a myopic sanctification of the letter of the law.  In “The Law of the Heart” (1894) he wrote: “The Oral Law (which is really the inner law, the law of the moral sense) was reduced to writing and fossilized ... not conscience but the book became the arbiter in every human question.”  He celebrated the prophets and the early rabbis as radicals who refused to submit to the authority of written texts or to allow the tradition to stagnate:  “If on occasion the spontaneity of thought and emotion brought them into conflict with the written word, they did not efface themselves in obedience to its dictates; they revolted against it where it no longer met their needs, and so forced upon it a development in consonance with their new requirements.”

How to community-organise middle class Jews?

A couple of weeks ago I attended a meeting of the Citizens’ group at New North London Synagogue.  The group is affiliated to Citizens UK, Britain’s largest broad-based community organising network which has close to 300 institutions in membership, ranging from mosques and churches to schools and student unions – and, more recently, synagogues.

Community organising focuses on issues which emerge out of the broad self-interest of community members.  Self-interest doesn’t mean selfishness – you can have an interest in an issue which benefits other people.  The important point is that the issues we think are supposed to concern us on ideological grounds very often fail to motivate to take action.  We’re too busy and we just don’t care enough, however much we think we should.

The idea behind self-interest is to build the habits of good citizenship and collective action by tapping into the issues which genuinely motivate people because they have something at stake.  Citizens’ Living Wage campaign was started by members of Citizens-affiliated churches in East London who had no time to spend with their families because they were working two or more jobs.  City Safe was initiated by families who had lost their children to street violence.

But while Citizens have been remarkably successful at identifying issues and building a campaigning network in disadvantaged areas of the capital, organising in the synagogue has proved in some ways a tougher challenge.  Last year, we conducted a listening campaign at New North London synagogue with the aim of identifying issues that connected with our self-interest.  While problems definitely came up – notably the problem of bad conditions in care homes where many of our members’ elderly parents live – nothing seemed to spark the kind of passion needed to generate leadership and kick-start a campaign. 

Some people think that as largely middle-class suburb-dwellers, our lives are simply too comfortable.  I think this prejudges the issue – the Jewish community is far more diverse than we think and the fact that disadvantaged people are less visible doesn’t mean they don’t exist.  Their invisibility could well be a symptom of their marginalisation.  But it also seems to me that maybe we just haven’t managed to articulate our issues properly.  So, while genuine issues need to emerge from our members, here’s a quick list of things I’d be prepared to do something about - and I bet other members of the Jewish community would too.

1. The pay gap and time poverty – yesterday’s Observer had a story about bankers’ (anonymous) responses to the proposed EU cap on bonuses.  Most seemed unfazed, saying that anyone who was affected would move into hedge funds or private equity, or that the banks would find a way around the cap.  They also said that a net pay cut of say £50k would be unlikely to make anyone with a seven-figure salary and a family actually relocate to avoid it.  Another article exposed the scandal of growing numbers of women being squeezed out or made redundant after takingmaternity leave.  The same paper’s editorial today focused on the ways new technology is changing the economy and society.  The bottom line was that more automation means fewer jobs but that ultimately unemployment will reduce demand and bring the economy to a halt.  It’s striking how few people point out the connection between rising pay inequality, unemployment and time poverty – ironically among the rich.  I remember reading in the 80s that advancing technology would create more wealth with less labour and would force us to consider how to spend increasing amounts of leisure time.  What’s actually happened is that working hours and inequality have both expanded, leaving us (and that includes the wealthy) busier and less happy than before.  Working to bring about a change of culture and employment practices to encourage part time and flexible employment could be a powerful issue for time-poor middle class families.

2. Schools – lots of people I know are nearly hysterical about getting their kids into the right schools.  Successive governments have emphasised choice and competition in education, rather than providing good neighbourhood schools for all.  Most schools operate distance-based admissions policies and this has created not only a post-code lottery, but effectively a system of selection based on who can afford to live near good schools.  This affects reasonably well-off families who can’t afford million pound houses as much as disadvantaged ones.  While we might not be able to take on the entire education system, what would happen if we campaigned for non-distance based admissions policies (such as that recently adopted by the new Alma primary school in Finchley), thus disconnecting the right to education from the property market and breaking the circle between rising house prices and improving educational standards?

3. Parking – everyone hates parking restrictions in boroughs like Barnet, seeing them as a council-owned racket for making money out of motorists.  But parking policy also impacts on shopkeepers and the local economy.  At a time when suburban high streets have taken on look made up of betting shops, payday loan shops, charity shops and boarded up storefronts, parking is not only an issue which affects everyone and could motivate them to get involved, but could also play a significant role in regenerating local economies and communities.

4. Community relationships – for many Jews, a real piece of self-interest is in building relationships with members of other communities.  Connecting synagogues with local churches, mosques and schools, welcoming their members in to our communities, visiting their and working on projects of common interest in inherently interesting and worthwhile.  Whatever other issues we choose, by working on them in partnership with others, we can find ourselves a constructive place as Jews in British society and begin to make our community more open-minded, outward looking and values-focused.

What other issues should we be taking on?  I’d love to hear feedback via Twitter: @MattPlen.

What’s the connection between the horsemeat hamburgers, the banking crisis and Lance Armstrong? Or why Judaism is the answer to all society’s problems

Some people really think that Judaism is the answer to all of society’s problems.  I once heard Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks argue that if everyone in the world kept Shabbat, the global warming crisis would be solved.  I don’t think he was entirely serious, and his audience of Jewish social activists certainly pulled no punches in taking apart his claim.  For me, Judaism is not a panacea.  The fact that every Jew makes something different of the tradition means ‘Judaism’ can never be imposed as a solution at all.  We read our own ideological predilections into Judaism to such an extent that solutions to problems are ‘Jewish’ only because Jews happen to have come up with them – not because they reflect some non-existent essence of Torah.

Having said that, I do think Torah has something of fundamental importance to say about perhaps the most pressing and deep-rooted problem our society faces.

There’s a connection between the behaviour of the people behind all the recent financial scandals, the horsemeat scandal, and the doping in sport scandal.  All three episodes illustrate what we all know – that in modern society, profit comes before ethics.  The quest for money and success has pushed all other values – professional ethics, pride in your job – to one side.

I recently read What Money Can’t Buy by Harvard philosophy professor Michael Sandel.  Sandel claims that economics and the values of the market have come to dominate our lives.  The principles of the free market have been applied to everything: children are given cash for achieving good grades, families are incentivised by governments to have a certain number of children, corporations are allowed to trade in carbon credits (essentially buying the right to pollute), and people have come to expect to pay for better healthcare, to drive on faster roads and to skip queues at the airport. 

This Saturday’s Guardian featured an article William Nicolson called ‘Because I’m worth it: the relationship economist’ which analysed dating – only slightly tongue in cheek – from the perspective of economics.  Should failure to get a girlfriend be understood as a lack of demand in the market, to be rectified by restricting supply by means of playing hard to get?  Or should it be solved using the Keynesian technique of boosting demand by displaying affection, thereby inspiring confidence?  The article ends: ‘Keynesian economics and love, it turns out, have rather a lot in common: they both work not by balancing budgets, or reducing supply to increase prices, but by inspiring trust. Economics did, in the end, provide me with an answer – just not the one I expected.’

Sandel writes that the marketization of everything is a problem not only because in an unequal society it discriminates against those who are unable to pay, but because it undermines the values traditionally associated with important activities.  Healthcare comes to be seen as a commodity and a source of profit.  Rather than reading or studying for the pleasure involved, children understand that learning is no more than a means to a financial end.  Ends get mixed up with means and pursuing profit at any cost – even corruption – becomes not only normal but good.

But there’s a deeper problem going on here.  Money is only a medium of exchange, by definition a means and not an end.  Seeing everything in economic terms, as a means to the end of money, implies not only that we’re mixing up means and ends but that ultimately there are no ends, no goals and no ultimate values.  In a world without goals, we’re reduced to chasing our tails.  In this context, banks and other businesses maximising profits at any cost – and for that matter students cheating to get better grades – acquires a logic of its own.

20^th century left-wing philosophers like Hannah Arendt and Jurgen Habermas have critiqued this kind of ‘instrumental rationality,’ a mode of thinking which focuses on what is the most effective means to a given end, but fails to deliberate on what ends we should be pursuing.  They claim that instrumental rationality, which is intimately associated with western, capitalist modernity, leads us in particular to treat other people as objects to be manipulated in the pursuit of our goals (and where money is the goal, we end up exploiting others for no ultimate purpose at all).

Judaism makes an important distinction between performing a mitzvah lishma (‘for its own sake’) – because it’s inherently the right thing to do – and acting out of ulterior motives, for example the hope of reward or the fear of punishment – lo lishma.  But it’s not always clear whether lo lishma is always a bad thing or whether it can be a pathway to observance lishma.  To continue my habit of quoting Maimonides: in the Mishneh Torah, his code of Jewish law he says, ‘A person should not say: "I will fulfill the mitzvot of the Torah and occupy myself in its wisdom in order to receive all the blessings which are contained within it or in order to merit the life of the world to come…" It is not fitting to serve God in this manner’ (Laws of Repentance 10:1).  On the other hand, ‘A person should always occupy himself in Torah study, whether lishma or even lo lishma, for from lo lishma will come lishma’ (Laws of Torah Study 3:5).

I find the idea that we should order our lives not in purely instrumental terms but in line with ultimate goals, core values and a conception of what is right, to be one of Judaism’s most potent insights, and a valuable corrective to our profit-centred and outcome-driven market society.  It seems to me that we need to find ways of inducting ourselves into a purposeful, values-driven mode of existence without going down the dangerous lo lishma route.  In the Masorti movement we do this by trying to build communities whose role is not to further any practical or ideological agenda, but in which we learn to value our relationships with each other – as human beings created in the image of God – as the highest imaginable good.  I hope we’re making a small contribution.

THIS WEEK

We ran our annual Yom Masorti day of learning, with almost 300 people from 11 Masorti communities – and several Orthodox and Reform communities too.  It was an amazing day – thanks to all the staff and volunteers who took part.  Click here for a full report. 

Earlier in the week I participated in a fascinating Jewish-Muslim dialogue group, hosted by the Three Faiths Forum, where we discussed Zionism, Islamism and the place of Jews and Muslims in British society.  One conclusion: too much of the tension between our communities over Israel/Palestine has very little – if anything – to do with the Middle East, which several of the Muslim participants (all with origins on the Indian subcontinent) felt very little connection to.  Ironically, the clash has more to do with the common ground between us: it’s about Jewish and Muslim identity in Britain, specifically the need to defend and assert ourselves as minority groups.