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.

Should we print pictures of the Prophet Muhammad?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So how should we respond?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Israel, Gaza and Masorti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marketing Masorti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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