Why Be Jewish - Thoughts on 'Good' by C.P. Taylor - A Sermon for Vayeitze

 

I went to see a particularly distressing play this week, Good at the Pinter Theatre. It’s a play about a man’s descent from being a debonaire German intellectual – an expert on humanism no less – into a suited and booted Nazi SS officer visiting Auschwitz to check on the progress of the Nazi Genocide of our people.

I did say it was distressing.

But it’s had me thinking about this question – what is it about being Jewish that would be lost from this world if we were to disappear? What is our unique possible contribution?

To be clear, I don’t need everyone in the world to be Jewish, I mean, if you aren’t Jewish, you go right ahead and work as hard on being the best version of who you are as you can possibly be. But if this is your gift, my gift, and my obligation, what exactly does it mean? Hi Noah, welcome to the adult part of all of this. What’s next after succeeding brilliantly at the task of reading from our sacred scriptures and sharing your insight from this podium.

In one particularly nasty – if affecting and effective - piece of writing, the Scottish Jewish playwright, C.P. Taylor, has his lead character give a lecture on the problem with the Jews. David Tenant, playing the lead role of John Halder addresses us, the audience, as if we were the potential recruits to the Nazi ideology he seeks to win over, or the smug already-Nazis he seeks to impress with his elocution and smooth patter.

Halder’s point is that the Jews are essentially individualists, looking out primarily for the self as opposed to the vision of a Nazi State – that looks out for its people as a collective – as long, of course as that collective is collectively Aryan of course. I paraphrase the speech, but Halfer cites an aphorism of Hillel, from Pirkei Avot.

“After all, it says in their Talmud,” says Halder, “That if I am not for myself who will be for me.”

Now Tenant is an affecting actor, and Taylor has written an affecting script and it’s part of the brilliance of the performance and the play that you find yourself, as a member of the audience almost nodding along as we are told that the central problem with Jews – with me, and so many of you – is that we are “for ourselves” above all. It takes a moment, even for me – sitting there with my Kippa on in the lofty heights of the upper circle to shake myself out of this.

But of course, it’s not true.

Or at least it’s as true as saying that a bridge is a supremely dangerous piece of engineering since it has only one side securely fastened to the ground while the other side dangles over a chasm.

The full aphorism or possibly our greatest ever Rabbi, Hillel, reads

“If I am not for myself who will be for me. And if I am only for myself, what am I?”

Don’t be misled by the rhetorical question. “If I am only for myself, what am I?” has a very clear assumed answer – unhuman, inhuman, failures at being human.

As I said, I was a little too destabilised by the theatrical moment to get up and heckle, and maybe that’s part of what went wrong in Nazi Germany – it’s hard to get up and heckle when one charismatic human being spouts nonsense about an entire class of other human beings – but I should have heckled, someone should have heckled, we all should have heckled.

No Halder – you only got half the quotation. It’s like saying a bridge is only rooted to one side of a chasm. The full quotation is “If I am not for myself who will be for me. And if I am only for myself, [I am unhuman, inhuman … a monster]. And the monsters are the Nazis. And the monster, Professor Halder is you. And the reason you are a monster is that despite you professing to care about the humanism of human behaviour you only really care about humans like you. You don’t care about the humanity of humans who are too ill to for themselves. You don’t care about Jews. You only care for people who can make your life more comfy and more powerful and …. Ach, you, Professor Halder are not Good. You, Professor Halder are bad, very bad indeed.

One of the advantages of being a congregational Rabbi who didn’t heckle in public a play demonstrating quite how seamlessly a person can be seduced into Nazism, is that you get to make your point on a Shabbat, in Shul.

Sorry, do I need to pause a second and ensure I say that the play is absolutely on the side of the entire human race. The fact that the Jewish C. P. Taylor and everyone else involved in the play wants to demonstrate how a person can be turned into the very worst kind of Nazi doesn’t, of course, mean they have a mote of sympathy for Nazi ideology. There I’ve said it.

But the more that I have been thinking about Halder’s bastardised citation of the Talmud and the way the deceitful claim that Nazi ideology is about a virtuous collective all working together crumbles through one’s fingers, the more I have come to think that these two issues are part of the same dialectic. They are a central part of the answer to the question what we, as Jews, are here for, part of the central answer of what we should be doing.

When Hillel passes sets his great aphorism rolling down through the ages, and it’s been almost two thousand years at this point, he’s sending two opposite tensions.

If I am not for me, who will be for me.

If I am only for myself, what am I?

On the one hand, and on the other hand.

That sounds like the opening of a Jewish joke, really any Jewish joke. It also sounds like the opening of Sugya of the Talmud, really any sugya. It sounds like the key to an understanding of a Jewish hermeneutic of the world. We don’t do one-sided arguments.

You can feel it throughout anything that gets run through a Jewish process – dialectic, tension, one the one hand and on the other hand. Just to take the example of this week’s Torah reading. You can feel a dialectical tension in the relationship between Jacob and father, Jacob and his mother, Jacob and his brother, Jacob and his first wife, Jacob and his second wife, Jacob and his daughter, Jacob and Shimon and Levi. I could go on.

The Jewish path to truth isn’t walked by smoothing out wrinkles and creating a pure pathway devoid of jagged complexity. It’s a pathway strong enough to sustain us as a people (for two thousand years at this point) because it entails understanding how complexity works, and tension and non-uniformity and variety and plurality.

Right at the heart of Judaism is the understanding that each of us, in our uniqueness and difference embody the singular Image of God – a God who has no form and no shape so instead can only be understood through acknowledging the different ways in which godliness is made manifest in our world.

 That’s why Hillel is so aghast at the inhuman fool who is only for themselves, they are prepared to imagine that they are God, when, in fact, God lives in the space between all of us, and not beheld and not beholden by any of us.

And the purpose of Jewish study, study of the Torah and the Talmud and all of that is to appreciate in ever more sophisticated and sensitive ways the interplay of complexity in the world and how to pass through that challenge with integrity and gentleness and holiness.

Is it important for a Jew to keep Kosher, for sure. You can get Rabbinic ordination for knowing the rules of keeping Kosher. But the rules of keeping Kosher appear to be blindingly simple – don’t eat this, and don’t eat that with this. The truth is it’s all in the detail and the interplay and the hope is that all this our understanding and our embodied living a life of observing so carefully the way in which we consume stops us from seeing our own dominion over the world.

I don’t want to make the case that we Jews have a monopoly on dialectical tension, but we’re really good at it. We’ve been doing it so long and do it in so many ways it’s profoundly part of who we are and who are, as Jews, supposed to be.

And then we enter into a broader society.

And we challenge. Reaching over the summer our member, Anne Summers book on Christian and Jewish Women Living in Britain 1880-1940. The subtitle is ‘Living with Difference.’ She makes the point that the Jewish women arriving on these shores in the nineteenth century were the first community to challenge the hegemony of Waspish Anglo society. We raised problems for those genteel Christian women’s organisations who thought that everyone would want to have Sunday as the Lord's Day.

The very tension we carry around ourselves in our own Jewishness is the way we manifest ourselves in a broader society that can too quickly lapse into thinking that their way is the only way. That was Halder, of course; in his version of the collective German Volk he forgot about the ways in which German Jews were both one thing – German – and the other – Jews – and should have been protected, not persecuted. Again, we’ve been doing this for a while and while there are, by now, so many other differences in contemporary Anglo society – there is still something particularly complex about Jewish differences. We still exist in a space between and in tension. We pass as ‘normal-ish’ but aren’t the establishment. We are protected as a minority but as David Baddiel and others are finding increasingly Jews Don’t really Count.

We exist as provocateurs, checks in the system. Can you handle difference, can you handle the way in which we don’t fit in.

As I wrote in my weekly words, a society that can handle this, can handle us, tends to do well facing the challenges of the day – the scientific achievements, the economic achievements, the cultural achievements all depend on a healthy attitude towards otherness and difference. After all, if we were all trained into being the same, and trying to be the same, none of us would ever do anything new or different at all.

Perhaps that image of the bridge, Halder’s mis-representation of Hillel’s aphorism as a bridge only secured on one side, is worth returning to. Bridges – of course – have strength because of their tension. I’m always nervous about getting too scientific when there are proper engineers around, but bridges aren’t strong because they are straight and strong in their straightness, they hang off themselves, they suspend, they lean into keystones, and they embody strength through tension.

Rebbe Nachman said, “The whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to be afraid.” It is perhaps one of the greatest truths about Jews and Judaism. We Jews are embodied bridges. I took Rebbe Nachman’s aphorism as a title for my blog – on which I’ll shortly be posting a copy of this sermon.

Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid Noah, and don’t be afraid, any of us. We should be proud to stick out oddly, in our difference, in our obsession over “on the one hand” and “on the other hand.” Our delight in complexity and strangeness, our protecting and nurturing of difference in the way we treat our fellow and our world, the food we eat and the way we spend our time, are part of how the narrow bridge on which we all travel is given strength.

That’s our job.

That’s our destiny.

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I”

“The whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to be afraid.”

Shabbat Shalom

On Squirrel Hill and Kristallnacht - Memory and Plurality

Shabbat Shalom

Partic warm welcome to guests; family and friends of Felix in particular.

Usually, if there is a BM, I like to give a sermon that is a little warm and fuzzy and can have everyone going on their way with a spring in their step.

But this isn’t a normal weekend.

And I’m too angry, and too sacred and too in pain to give a warm and fuzzy sermon.

I’m still angry and scared and in pain from the news now two weeks old about the attack on the Synagogue in Squirrel Hill Pittsburgh - no longer the most recent atrocity perpetrated in the United States.
And, frankly, I’m still angry and scared and in pain on this Shabbat marking the 80^th Anniversary of Kristallnacht - a night of destruction of Jewish life and property from the darkest ages of our people - 1938 Germany.

I think I would be less angry and less scared about the attacks from two weeks ago and 80 years ago if I didn’t feel what I do about the world of politics.

There would still be pain. Of course, there would still be pain, about the lives lost, and the simple barbarity of destruction.

But I can deal with pain. The pain thing is somehow assimilatable.

It’s the fact that the destruction of 80 years ago and the destruction of two weeks ago resonate off one another, like some wave of energy bouncing between the past and present and threatening to bounce off again into the future.

That’s the thing that makes me so scared, and so angry.

How come we are here?

How come 80 years after we thought we would never again slide into a world of fascist intolerance, a fascism that stirs up and explicitly or implicitly gives a Heter to racist violence and offence, how come we seem to be back here?

How come instead of having reasoned debate and disagreement about the facts that before us we have - country after country - society after society - adopted as argumentative strategies personal abuse and humiliation, dehumanisation and deceit.

How come it’s acceptable to attack a person for their very existence when the thing they say makes us feel uncomfortable.

Yes, of course, I’m talking about President Trump, and Putin in Russia and Orban in Hungary and ah this list is too long.

And, forgive me, but somewhere on this list of political leaders who are prepared to inflame or permit societal hate to secure their own approval and treat opposition as something to be crushed, not something with which to engage, belongs politicians in this country also. And even politicians in the State of Israel.

And here’s the really bad news - imagine you are a political consultant looking to advise someone on how to get power in these febrile times what advice are you going to give? Actually, these wannabe-politicians don’t need consultants to tell them which way to go. They’ve got the message already.

And if it looked, in those hopeful days of the aftermath of Holocaust as if the UN with it Human Rights’ convention and the whole apparatus of international commitments to “never again” were going to work. It doesn’t feel that way today.

And if it looked, in those 8 years in which Obama served as President of the United States, and I don’t care if you are Democrat or a Republican, if it looked for those eight years as though the most powerful country the world has ever seen, had embraced Hope not Hate, it doesn’t feel that way now.

This week I’ve been reading and listening to Sarah Churchwell, author of a new book, Behold America. She points out how triumphalist nationalism, don’t mess with us patriotism and a racism that lurks only just below the surface has never really gone away in America.
American has always thought of itself as the land of the free and home of the brave, and it’s always behaved as a bully taking the lives and the land of whoever came in the way of those who had the might to enforce their sense of right.

I did warn that this was going to be a political sermon.

But the thing that really struck me about America - and America is Ground Zero for this international horror - is how surprised it gets at the same thing happening again. I lived in New York for the five years surrounding 9/11. I saw the stunned amazement of Americans at 9/11. They couldn’t believe they would be attacked. But what was Pearl Harbour? They couldn’t believe it would be so hard to destroy what George Bush called the Axis of Evil. But what was Vietnam?

And the same thing goes for my dear friends in the Jewish community. They couldn’t believe that a Synagogue could be the target of a raging wicked act of antisemitic murder. American Jews feel so at home in America, they can’t imagine themselves as victims of anti-Jewish hatred. They’ve forgotten that General Grant expelled the Jews from the States in 1862. They’ve forgotten the Klu Klux Klan’s invidious Jew-hatred - they should go and watch Spike Lee’s new movie - BlackkKlansman, we all should. I warmly recommend Philip Roth’s Plot Against the Jews. It’s a fiction only a hairs breath away from an entirely plausible past. And today it feels less like some apocalyptic horror show and more like reportage.

Back when I was at Seminary, in New York, we had a class on Mediaeval Jewish History, and the first class of semester was the expulsion of the Jews from England, and the second was the expulsion of the Jews from France, and the third was the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and one of my nice Americal fellow students said something witty about how great it was to be American. And the professor, Dr Benjy Gampel, with the withering scorn of someone who actually knows about history looked down on my colleague and said, ‘If you really think you are so safe in America, you have no understanding of the nature of history.’   

But it’s not just the Americans and not just the Jews.

Anyone else here remembers Gordon Brown announcing the end of the boom-bust cycle?

There is, in us all, a kind of willful amnesia. We don’t want to live in a world where hatred exists, so we imagine we don’t. We don’t want to imagine that it could get worse, so we suppress the knowledge that it ever did.

So what to do?

I want to share two things, two thing I commit myself to, and two things I need your assistance with.

The first thing is we must never forget, we must always memorialise, even as the names are too many and the eyewitnesses too few.

Last week I recited the 11 names of those murdered in the Tree of Life Synagogue. This week I want to recite the names of the 2,000 who were murdered, and the 1,000 synagogues destroyed.

I want to count aloud every Mark’s worth of damage that Nazi acolytes caused and Jews had to pay for, on that awful night 80 years ago.

I want to hold up and hand around photos of this destruction from 80 years ago this very weekend,

Together with photos of what German Jewry used to look like, back in the days when German Jews couldn’t imagine anyone othering them - so at home did they feel as full and equal members of German society.

I want to that term, ‘Never Again’ to sound like a question, a fearful and un-easy gnawing in the gut. Because for the term ‘never again’ to sound confident and secure shows, in that phrase of my Jewish history professor, no understanding of the nature of history.

That’s the first thing.

We need to remember and recount and retell so we don’t fall into selective amnesia.

The second thing we all need to do is make the case for the principle of decent society most under threat in this unstable world.

We need to make a much better case for the principle of plurality; the plurality of people and the plurality of ideas.

Too much of the proto-facism of contemporary society is based on an erroneous idea that there are proper members of society and then there are others. And the others don’t really count as full human beings and we would do well to make their life as tough as possible.

And that idea turns my stomach.

It should turn all our stomachs even if we aren’t Jewish ourselves, even if we can trace our ancestry on these isles back to the days of Angles and Saxons and Celts, because if we allow ourselves to drift into becoming a society which doesn’t respect otherness - the plurality of people,  if we allow ourselves to drift into becoming a society which doesn’t recognise that all human beings are equally made in the image of God, and all human beings deserve the same opportunities and chance for a decent life they will eventually come for us.

Eventually, we will all fall foul of being too dark-haired, or too blond or too tall or too short, or too fat or too thin, for we are all too much one thing or not enough another.

Pastor Niemoller wrote in the 1930s

First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

It’s that time already.

If we allow ourselves to slide into a society where difference is not celebrated and protected and promoted, they’ll come for us all.

That’s we plurality of people is so important.

The same thing goes for how we talk, how we debate, how we disagree. Debate, disagreement is good.

It’s how we learn, it’s how we discover things we don’t know. Disagreement isn’t to be disparaged. We need a plurality of ideas. People who take positions that are outside the mainstream are the people who most deserve our respect - they are the most important people in society. They aren’t to be threatened, abused, locked up. They certainly aren’t to be strangled, chopped up and boiled in acid in an Embassy in some foreign land. In what kind of world are we living?

So, do something to promote difference. Give some money to our Drop In Centre for Asylum Seekers, talk to me about getting involved in Citizens UK. Do something.

Promote disagreement, listen harder to those who disagree with you in the hope of learning something you don’t already know. Tell others also to see debate as a good thing.

A belief in plurality isn’t just being nice. It isn’t just a belief in human rights, it’s self-interest - it’s the thing that might, just, save us.

Just don’t forget, and don’t just watch on as decency slides away.

Here’s another thing we learnt 80 years ago.

It’s the bystanders who were, in the end, the people who made the difference.

Don’t be a victim, wrote the great Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer, Don’t be a perpetrator, but, above all, Don’t be a bystander.” — Yehuda Bauer

For as Simon Wiesenthal, camp survivor and Nazi hunter put it

“For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.”

Shabbat Shalom

Rosh Hashannah 5779 - Day One Alterity

In case anyone be under any doubt, I agree with you. Jeremy Corbyn has acted antisemitically.
Too many times.

And too many people in the Labour party have been acquiescent - or worse - in this antisemtism.

Here’s a phrasing I’ve appreciated, as these conversations seem, too often, seem based on the notion that there is something unalterably evil about Israel, a country whose right to exist, surely, should be a given.

This is the difference between a Zionist and a non-Zionist;

A Zionist is someone who agrees that every people have the right to self-determination.

An Anti-Zionist is someone who agrees that every people have the right to self-determination, apart from the Jews.

Those of you who are standing up to this blight in contemporary politics - I join you, I salute you. But I want to speak about something broader today something more religious; on this Rosh Hashanah day.

Aside from the disgust and the anger this story stirs in me - what is the most ancient of hatreds doing on the front pages day after day in the year 2018! - there’s a big part of me that is frustrated that our energies are getting sucked into this important fight when there are so many other important fights. So there will be more on this - I am interested in this - but I want to do something else also.

I want to talk about Alterity - a word made famous - well famous in my world - by the Jewish philosopher Immanuel Levinas.

Alterity is an approach to life built from valuing otherness, other people in particular. It’s the refusal to force other people into being just like me. To value alterity is to value the very opposite of the cosy, self-serving narcissism of so much of the world in which we live. Too often we surround ourselves with voices that agree with us and consider those different to us with disdain and distrust - if we consider them at all. That, Levinas would say, is the greatest human failing. He’s right.

Ve-ahavtah Le’Reacha Comacha - love your fellow as you love yourself says the Torah.

It’s the central organising principle in Judaism, taught Rabbi Akiva. Many of us will have heard that idea many times.

But here’s the thing.

Loving your fellow like yourself cannot be a big deal if it means loving people you like already. It can’t be a big deal if it means loving only those people who don’t do things we don’t understand, or disagree with.

Ve-ahavtah Le’Reacha can’t be a big deal if it were easy.

Loving others, valuing others, doesn’t mean agreeing with others. Rather it means caring for them even in disagreement, valuing their difference of opinion even if it feels wrong.

A commitment to alterity doesn’t mean we don’t try and persuade people of their errors. It doesn’t mean we accept the unacceptable.

It means that we make a space for the other’s otherness.

The great commentator on the Zohar, Rav Ashlag had a wonderful term for what I’m calling alterity. He called it - Ahavat Zulato[1] - the love of the one who is other. Ahavat Zulato, he says, “draws a person beyond their narrow world of pain and obstacle and into a world of timelessness and breadth.”

What he means is that focussing on loving people like us, sets up our lives to experience frustrations and pettiness whenever we encounter difference - which we are destined to do all the time. We might think life is easier in a clique where everyone behaves the same, dresses the same and values the same, but cliques are dull and too often more than a little bitchy - that’s no fun for anyone, even the people who find themselves momentarily in favour.

On the other hand when we commit to Ahavat Zulato, when we set up our lives to value people in their difference, we come to appreciate the splendour of humanity. We set ourselves up for joy.

Ashlag went further - the whole purpose of creation - the kabbalist wrote - was God’s desire to have an ‘other’ to be in a relationship with. God wanted something that was beyond God, God valued us - values us, because we are not like God.

God values alterity.

So should we.

Let me go back to the matters of politics - polis - the State.

I’m a democrat only in the sense that Churchill was a democrat - it’s the worst system of Government apart from all the others. I’m not interested in power wielded by majorities. I’m, frankly, nervous of the masses getting together and deciding what’s right for me - in my oddness and idiosyncrasy.

The thing I love about democracies is the way good democracies control the power of the majority; limiting how much power the majority gets to wield. Good democracies value as absolute NOT the majority, but the minority; the right of the opposition to be an opposition, the right to protest, to disagree and to be different. Good democracies need good oppositions. When I hear politicians, in this country or any other, suggesting that to disagree is somehow traitorous I get deeply nervous.

I believe in alterity because I want to live in a society that is as vibrant and multi-faceted as possible.

Valuing alterity is how we learn, how we develop economically, scientifically, artistically - in every way. I really believe in this alterity thing.

And here’s how to value alterity.

Don’t poke fun at people who disagree with you.

Don’t attack people for a supposed sin of disagreeing with you.

Don’t assume others are only disagreeing with you because they have it in for you.

There’s too much of all of that in the world, and none of it is helping.

Engage critically, seriously, even do other people the honour of imagining that it’s you, after all, who might be in the wrong. It’s good to be confident in what we believe, but make allowance for the doubts of others too.

So much for being a better person, what’s it got to do with being better Jews?

As a Rabbi, I struggle with this creeping sense that the melting pot is the way to go. I sometimes hear an argument that Jews should really just consider ourselves just like everyone else, universalist members of a universal society. And that view is wrong; it’s wrong ethically, politically, economically, emotionally. It’s wrong in every way I can count. Among the things we should value when we value alterity - difference - is our own difference; as Jews, as proud committed engaged Jews who understand our faith and our tradition and the contribution we can make to a society in our difference, in our alterity.

We fail to play our part when our Jewish identity - and the things we do to strengthen and preserve that identity - become ever more attenuated.

That’s not to say the antisemtism is the fault of the Jews. I’m not making that point at all. But the power to shift the debate is, in part, in our hands.

There’s this creeping sense many Jews have that the way for us to get on in the world is to request from our schools and our employers and our selves less and less time off work for Jewish sacred celebration. That view is wrong. When we create space in society for our own alterity we strengthen the respect for us in our difference and we strengthen the respect for the difference of others also. The Second Day of Rosh Hashanah is just about the most important day of the religious year. It’s worth a day off work.

I haven’t done the maths - I don’t know how you could do the maths - but in that extraordinary list of Jewish Nobel Prize winners and Jewish titans of creativity and industry I can’t imagine there is anyone who would have failed to make their impact on the world had they not worked on Second Day Rosh Hashanah. But I do believe many of them would have failed had they not relished their own otherness, had they not mined their own otherness for strength, inspiration and insight.

Take off Second Day Rosh Hashanah. If you really can’t, come back at 6:30 tonight for Maariv. Come for first day Succot. Come for Shabbat. Come to understand more, to feel more at home in our alterity. We shouldn’t be strangers to our self.

There’s this creeping sense that we are somehow better members of the human race when we abdicate a commitment to keeping Kosher when presented with a piece of treyf steak. And that view is wrong. Next time you see treyf steak offered on a menu, order something else. Next time you are invited to hosts who might not know, explain ahead of time. It’s not so hard. It might save Judaism, it might save the world.

We need more faith in our own alterity.

I know we get nervous when making claims for our alterity, but unless we confront that nervousness we can get locked into a cycle of embarrassment. We claim less and less until there is nothing left.

A tale lifted from Devorah Baum’s newly published book - The Jewish Joke.

Two people, who used to be proud of being Jews, meet on the street. They haven’t seen one another for some time.

“How are you?” says one.

“Fine” says the other.

End of joke.

(It’s not supposed to be funny).

There’s a muscle that is atrophying in our Jewish identity; it’s the muscle that knows how to explain, politely, but with self-confidence, that we don’t do the same thing as everyone else and that we would be grateful - but also that we expect - respect for our difference - a respect we open-heartedly offer to reciprocate for others in their differences also.

I know it’s tricky - but only at first. The first time we respectfully request a space for our own difference, the easier it is the second time, and more often than not it won’t take a second time.

And if it does go wrong, well, the person who takes umbrage at a polite request for the acceptance of my difference as a Jew is probably not the sort of person I want to spend too much time with.

That brings me back to Corbyn and the Labour party he leads.

When the Labour MP, Frank Field, resigned the parliamentary whip he said he did so for two reasons; because of the antisemtism, and because of the “culture of intolerance, nastiness and intimidation.” It’s the same issue. If you don’t like Jews because Jews are different, you betray your dislike of anyone who holds onto difference. No-one is intolerant just of Jews.

We don’t combat intolerance by effacing our own difference as Jews.

We don’t promote the value of alterity by effacing our own alterity.

No-one is fooled when we efface our alterity as Jews, not even ourselves.

Two Jews meet for the first time, ‘My name was Blum, what was yours?’[2]

I know it’s hard for many of us to feel confident enough in our relationship to Judaism to make the claims that our Jewish differences should be honoured. We are, too much of the time, too concerned that we might be seen as a hypocrite, or a fundamentalist, or maybe we just don’t have enough knowledge to understand why one thing or another is worth standing up for.

So here’s my top trip.

Worry less, do more.

Judaism is a bit like love. If we worry too much about whether we love someone and how exactly we should show our love, and whether we should call our possible lover back today, or tomorrow, or possibly the third day after we last spoke ... the whole thing will probably just dribble away.

But if you behave in a loving way there’s a chance of it working out.

And if you can get the words, ‘I love you,’ out of your mouth, there’s a chance your conversation partner might become your lover.

The same goes for Judaism. If we wait to understand enough about Shabbat, or prayer ... if we wait long enough to be sure it’s worth being a bit different - it will be too late. If someone asks if we are serious about our Judaism and we prevaricate and equivocate and obfuscate, we’ll persuade ourselves out of this glorious heritage.

So come, join us. Do things. Take opportunities. Speak up. Start now, start in this New Year, start tomorrow when I’ll have more to say about saving the world, and saving Judaism.

Do things. Take opportunities. Speak up. Start now, start in this New Year. May it come to us all for good, in health, and alterity.

Shannah Tovah

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[1] I’m grateful to my colleague Rabbi Adam Zagoria-Moffat for putting me on to Rav Ashlag’s articulation, found in the Sulam, in the article on The Essence and Purpose of Religion. בביאת האדם אל אהבת זולתו, עובר האדם מתוך עולמו הצר המלא מכאובים ואבני נגף, אל עולם נצחי ורחב http://www.kab.co.il/heb/content/view/full/82715

[2] http://www.diacronia.ro/ro/indexing/details/V218/pdf. From T. Farkas, Jewish Surname Changes in Hungary (19^th-20^th Century).

A Very British Antisemitism

I was coming out the shower after a yoga class and struck up a conversation with the guy next to me. 'Are you going to get yourself one of these?' He asked, nodding at his lovely - but expensive - yoga mat. 'No,' I replied, I've got a mat already, it's not as fancy as that one, but it's fine.' By this point I'm doing up the last buttons of my shirt, 'I'll save myself the hundred pounds.' At this I take the last piece of clothing from the locker, my kippah, and put it on my head. 'Oh,' he starts laughing, 'you said that just as you put the Jewish headcovering on, that's fantastic, that is.' He has genuinely found this an amusing moment. It takes a moment to gather myself. It's been a while since I've heard anything quite so crude directed at me and my "Jewish headcovering." He's noticed I am looking at him strangely. 'What,' he asks, 'you're not amused?' 'By the anitsemitic derogatory stereotyping?' I confirm, 'no I'm not.' Now it's his turn to be taken aback. 'I didn't mean to offend.' He sounds hurt. 'No,' I say, 'I know you didn't, but that doesn't really change anything.' And I'm off, bag on shoulder, door swinging shut behind me.

A couple of reflections.

I didn't let the moment pass. I'm proud of myself. I spend a lot of my time swallowing my tongue, as a communal Rabbi you have to. Moreover a changing room isn't a place where I feel comfortable making anything other than smallest of small talk. I'm caught off-guard, but it turns out I didn't shuffle away meekly in the face of offence - on this occasion. The papers in the Britain have recently been full of discussions about women responding fiercely, or meekly, to the slings and arrows of gentler, but still pernicious, acts of everyday sexism. It turns out for Jews too there is that moment of having to decide whether to let offense lie, or speak out. On this occasion I spoke out. I'm delighted to report speaking out against antisemitism feels good. I encourage us all to commit to it.

I often get asked, usually by Americans, 'how bad is it in Europe?' They are worried that the Charlie Hebdo murders or the latest daubing on a Jewish cemetery somewhere are heralds of a descent into the sorts of antisemitic horror that scarred Europe in the last century. I don't believe it. There are a number of genuine fascists in this country, but they are barely capable of drumming up a Minyan. There is also an islamist threat, but again these numbers are tiny and I believe mainstream Islam, not to mention every other part of society, is working hard and largely successfully, to mute and tame this threat. This anti-islamist work is vital and we, as Jews, need to ensure our own safety as well as call on everyone in society to continue to demonstrate their commitment to defending the canaries in the mine, but the threat is far from ubiquitous.

Then there is this; the just-below-the-surface jumble of good ol' fashioned antisemitic stereotypes repackaged for contemporary times; the Jew and their money most of all. And, the new kid on the block, the Zionist who thereby must hate all Arabs and disdains the grief of Palestinian loss (my own feelings on this one are that this is a modern version of the blood libel - we Jews are still being held to require the blood of the innocent non-Jew to meet our nefarious religious necessities). Those harbouring these feelings don't consider themselves to be antisemitic, they might not even realise they are such a harbour. If you were to ask such a person what they thought of antisemitism they would, of course, oppose it vigorously. But these feelings lurk under the conscious radar. For the first three glasses of wine at the dinner party they will remain in check, but come dessert-time there they are. When the person in the locker room is suddenly revealed as an observant Jew the shock dislodges these subterranean vats of pus and up they bubble.

My take on the nature of British antisemitism is not so much that it's coming back, but that it never really disappeared. It just got buried under a thin screed of politesse and, to come back to my first point, that is why naming and shaming the moments when residual antisemitism rears its ugly head is so important.

May we never have to.