Why Rabbi Schochet's wrong about feminism

Rabbi Yitzhak Schochet’s attack on the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance lays bare the rift in modern Judaism.  It’s not between the Orthodox and everyone else, but cuts across denominational lines, dividing people who want an insular Judaism to bury its head in the sand from those of us who want our tradition to embrace, critique and play a wholehearted role in the contemporary world. 

Rabbi Schochet advises Orthodox feminists not to push too far in their attempts to find equality in Judaism.  He notes that the glass ceiling has been shattered and women have achieved social equality, but religion is the wrong place to extend these rights further.  He argues that Judaism is about serving God, not ourselves and that halachah as a guide to God’s will is about obligations, not rights.  He claims that no Orthodox rabbi recognises ‘partnership minyanim’ where women read from the Torah and lead parts of the service.  He writes that the bat-mitzvah girl who wished her father could have been there when she was called to the Torah has ‘missed the point.’  Most strikingly, he believes that Judaism has never relegated women to the status of second class citizens. 

I have news for Rabbi Schochet.  We still live in a world of brutal oppression and growing inequality.  You don’t have to go to the wartorn killing fields of Congo and Syria or the misogynist tribal backwaters of the Taliban to work that out.  Even in modern civilised Western Europe and the United States we are beset by growing economic inequality, incitement against the poor, discrimination against immigrants and – yes – anti-Semitism.  If he thinks the glass ceiling has been shattered, he should count the number of women in Parliament or on the boards of public companies.  And all too often, both in the developing world and at home, rather than speaking out against oppression and inequality, religious leaders lend them a helping hand. 

In this context, we have to ask ourselves: which side do we want Judaism to be on?  It’s simply not good enough to argue that while we believe in equality, this value ends at the entrance to the synagogue.  If we believe in equality, the first place to go about realising it is in Judaism.  Anything else is a kind of doublethink which makes a mockery of our values. 

We should make no bones about the fact that the Jewish tradition is a product of a patriarchal era and, as such, has often cast women as second class citizens.  True, the rabbis of the Talmudic period instituted ground-breaking reforms to protect women’s rights.  But nowadays, the gap between women’s status in halachah and the principles of equality and justice is increasingly clear.  Halachic Judaism is built around the value of obligation or commandedness.  The more closely one’s life is aligned with the demands of the mitzvot the better.  But women are defined in Jewish law as a group which has fewer obligations and thus fewer opportunities to do mitzvot.  Less obligation translates into lower status.  This also excludes women from leadership positions in the synagogue. 

More importantly, women have been excluded from halachic decision-making.  It’s no surprise that a tradition shaped almost exclusively by men should turn out to be patriarchal.  This point is lost on Rabbi Schochet, of course, as he regards halachah as a pre-packaged statement of God’s will, transmitted through human beings who take no active role in shaping its contents.  But for most modern Orthodox –and all non-Orthodox – Jews, this is an untenable description of the tradition which contains many voices, has a history and is influenced by social conditions in every period (for more on this see Rabbi Louis Jacobs’ excellent book A Tree of Life).

If halachah is created or at least shaped by human beings, it can’t be expected to deal adequately with gender issues as long as women are excluded from the learning and decision making process. The case for women rabbis and poskot halachah – halachic authorities – is more than clear.  Rabbi Schochet’s point that women should not pursue equality in the synagogue because Jewish law prohibits it is flipped – until halachah can be shaped by women, how can it presume any authority over them?  And why, specifically, should women accept the lower level of obligation and the consequent limiting of their religious lives which has been imposed on them by generations of male rabbis?

JOFA is clearly worthy of support, as were similar movements that pursued gender equality in the Reform and Conservative/Masorti movement a generation ago.   But the fact that Orthodox feminism comes in the wake of its non-Orthodox counterparts offers it both a resource and a challenge.  For decades, Masorti rabbis have been formulating halachic solutions to issues of counting women in the minyan, egalitarian services, calling women to the Torah, women rabbis and witnesses, agunot, and so on.  These are legitimate, well-researched, scholarly legal resources.  At last year’s Limmud Conference, Rabbi Daniel Sperber commented that many Masorti rabbis are indistinguishable from their modern Orthodox colleagues (he meant it as a compliment).  So why let the fact that these solutions are branded with a non-Orthodox label stop you from using them as a resource?  Modern Orthodoxy has far more in common with Masorti than it does with Haredi Judaism as represented by Rabbi Schochet (see Rabbi Sacks' comments on this) – especially on this issue.  Isn’t it time to overcome the denominational divide and learn to work together in pursuit of a common goal?

How the rabbis overturned the Torah: on rebelliousness and religion

Here are my thoughts on this week's Torah portion, published by Masorti Judaism in Reflections.

Parshat Naso contains one of the Torah’s more disturbing passages – the laws relating to an ishah sotah or ‘wayward woman’ (5:11-31).  A man becomes jealous of his wife and suspects her of adultery; there is no evidence against her and she may or may not be guilty.  He brings her to the Tabernacle and presents a meal offering on her behalf.  The priest rips the woman’s clothing, dishevels her hair and makes her swear an oath, declaring that if she has indeed defiled herself, the subsequent ceremony will cause her thigh to fall away and her belly to swell and she will become a curse among her people.  The priest now takes a jug of water into which dirt from the Tabernacle floor has been mixed, blots the inky words of the curse - written on a scroll - into the water, and makes the woman drink it.  If she is guilty, the predetermined results ensue. 

The Mishnah modifies this procedure in several important ways.  Before a woman can be subjected to the ordeal, she must have been warned by her husband against secluding herself with a named individual.  Both the warning and the seclusion itself must be attested to by witnesses.  If such evidence exists, the woman is brought to the high court in Jerusalem where the judges implore her to confess her sins.  If she does so at any point before the curse is blotted into the water, her guilt is assumed and her husband may divorce her, but she avoids the ordeal.  And even if a truly adulterous woman goes through with the ceremony, the effects of the bitter water will be delayed by up to three years by any other good deeds she may have done. 

The contrast between the biblical and rabbinic accounts is striking.  As in other cases (laws relating to the death penalty, the execution of rebellious children, punishments of an eye for an eye) the rabbis, it seems, could not stomach some of the Torah’s more barbarous prescriptions.  Thus, while notionally respecting the sanctity and integrity of the text, they introduced so many procedural safeguards that in effect they reversed the Torah’s intention.  It’s reasonably clear that to the rabbis, the bitter water had no physical effect.  Rabbi Shimon hints at this in the Mishnah, arguing that if merit is understood to delay the punishment, guilty women will cease to fear the water and the reputation of innocent women, ostensibly cleared by the ceremony, may be called into question.  None of this would be the case if the bitter water worked, even occasionally.  Rather than a true trial by ordeal, the rabbis have rewritten the ceremony so as to protect women from arbitrary accusations and as a judicial – not magical - disincentive to adultery.

But this kind of revolutionary reinterpretation goes back further than the Mishnah – right into the text of the Torah itself.  Academic Bible scholars have noted that the ritual of the sotah bears the marks of an earlier, pagan ceremony, which served as the vehicle for a new, monotheistic religious message.  The text itself appears to be fragmented: read chapter 5 verses 24-26 and decide whether the woman drank the water before the priest offered the sacrifice or vice versa.  This kind of repetition and inconsistency indicates to some scholars an evolution and editing together of older traditions into a new text.  Where once the bitter water was considered to have magical powers of its own, the Torah makes clear that its function is symbolic - any harm inflicted comes from God.  And while the procedure reflects patriarchal, sexist assumptions, it’s possible to read the biblical text as an attempt to alleviate some of the worst misogynistic excesses, providing a public, judicial alternative to the private and arbitrary punishment of wives by jealous husbands.

Masorti Judaism: between mitzvah and autonomy

Perhaps the most difficult issue for liberal halachic Jews is the tension between two core values: mitzvah (which I translate here not as an individual commandment but as the concept of commandedness) and autonomy.  Mitzvah is the most important principle of halachic Judaism while autonomy is the indispensable grounding idea of modern ethics.  I want to explain more clearly what these two values mean and why the contradiction between them is inescapable.

Commandedness is perhaps the most important principle of rabbinic Judaism.  For the rabbis, the value of performing a mitzvah is not only inherent in the act itself (and sometimes, as in the case of sha’atnez or tefilin for example, the act might have no intrinsic value other than the fact it’s commanded).  A mitzvah is important simply because it’s commanded and because we are under an obligation to perform it.  The Talmud (Kiddushin 31a) illustrates this idea with the story of a non-Jew, Dama ben Natinah, who was seen to have honoured his parents even at great cost to himself, and was subsequently rewarded by God.  Rabbi Hanina comments that if this happened to someone who honoured his parents despite having no obligation to do so, how much more would a Jew in a similar position be rewarded, as (this is the punchline) it is greater to be commanded and act than to act without being commanded. 

This flies in the face of common sense.  Why might it be the case?  The Tosafot (medieval Talmudic commentators) offer several explanations.  The pragmatic view is that a person who is obligated to do a good deed is more likely to act than a person for whom the deed is voluntary (on Kiddushin 31a).  A more principled explanation – and one that in my view goes to the heart of rabbinic Judaism – is that the value of performing a mitzvah is that in so doing a person negates her own desires submits herself to the will of God (Avodah Zarah 3a).  If so, demonstrating obedience rather than the content of the act itself is the vital component in any mitzvah.

In complete contrast, modern ethics is based on the value of autonomy, which literally means self-rule.  The eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that any act which is impelled by a heteronomous (external) source of authority can never be described as moral.  The reason for this is that obedience can only be induced by fear of punishment or hope of reward: we pay tax to avoid being fined, we stop at red lights to avoid being injured or arrested and so on. Because morality is defined in terms of duty while heteronomous action is always a matter of self-interest, heteronomy can never be the basis for morality.  Moral agents are always by definition autonomous in that they make free, rational decisions as to how to behave, based on their sense of duty to others.

The clash between mitzvah and autonomy should now be clear.  Autonomy is about obeying our own, rational, self-imposed moral principles, whereas mitzvah means putting these to one side in order to obey God or submit ourselves to Jewish tradition.  Incidentally, this holds true regardless of whether or not we consider the Torah to be of divine origin: obeying God contradicts the principles of autonomy no less than obeying the rabbis.  Sometimes the practical results of these two principles coincide: either could lead a person to give tzedakah for example.  Less often they clash: when my son was born, I was acutely aware of my halachic obligation to perform a brit milah, whereas my moral sense was outraged by the thought of intentionally injuring a new baby.  But if intentions are what’s important, then the contradiction is always there.  I can’t act in order to realise my own autonomy and simultaneously aspire to overcome my desires so as to obey God or the rabbis, both heteronomous sources of authority.

Progressive and ultra-Orthodox Jews resolve this tension by prioritising one of the two principles.  For ultra-Orthodoxy, commandedness always holds sway and personal values and desires are to be abandoned when they clash with halachah; Progressive Judaism privileges autonomy and empowers the individual to selectively filter the mitzvot in light of modern, rational principles.  The challenge is most squarely faced by the centrist movements in Judaism, modern Orthodoxy and Masorti: neither are prepared to jettison their halachic commitment or sacrifice their modern, liberal principles. 

What might be a Masorti response to this dilemma?  How can we be true to ourselves, our passionately held values, and our sense of personal freedom, while at the same time upholding our commitment to Torah and mitzvot in the framework of halachah?  For my answer, I want to draw on the work of one of the most important of all modern Jewish thinkers, Franz Rosenzweig.  While Rosenzweig is not usually identified with Masorti Judaism, I believe that his commitment to liberal philosophical principles together with his profound commitment to the tradition makes him a particularly suitable role model for us.

Rosenzweig returned to Judaism after a period of assimilation but felt unable to submit himself to Jewish law as this would have compromised his freedom as an individual.  The solution lay in a distinction he drew between Law and Commandment.  Whereas Law is an objective set of rules whose imposition clearly compromises personal autonomy, Commandment is a personal directive issued in the context of a committed, loving relationship, where the power of the relationship enables us to hear and freely obey.  Rosenzweig’s insight is that a loving relationship dissolves the boundary between autonomy and heteronomy: if we are able to feel the power of the mitzvot, in other words to experience God’s love through them, we’ll be able to respond to the commandments without compromising our freedom.

But what if we don’t experience the mitzvot in this way?  What if observance still feels like an imposition and a restriction?  Rosenzweig’s answer is simple: the only way to open yourself to the inner power of the mitzvot is by doing them.  Our job is to experiment: take on a commandment, not because we feel obliged but as an experience, practise it, remain open to its inner power.  Gradually expand the role halachah plays in our lives, without any pretence or abandonment of personal integrity, but as an educational exercise.  Practising Judaism here takes on a double meaning: we practise the mitzvot in the sense of practising a musical instrument, and in so doing we develop our ability to practise them in the sense of practising medicine: performing them in the truest sense.

This seems to me to be the path Masorti Judaism would recommend: an incremental journey through the halachah, taking on practices, experimenting and learning and, as we begin to experience the inner power of the tradition, deepening our commitment and sense of obligation to the truly commanding voice of the mitzvot.

This is my recent piece published in Masorti Judaism's Reflections.

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.