In the distant past, people made small gods. They carved out wooden statuettes to represent fertility, or hewed rocks into the shapes of animals that would bring them good luck. They made depictions of stars and planets, which would help them in their daily struggles. The ancients looked after the gods – giving them food, drink, rest, and clothes. In return, their little talismans looked after them.
When Abraham was born, he lived among the idol worshippers of Ur. He had no teacher nor guide, but came to understand, through his own reasoning, that God was the only Creator of all things, and that the world was governed by an invisible Force that could not be depicted. The totems people served were not gods at all, and could have no impact on the world.
As a result, he went around smashing up and destroying every idol and household God he could find. He went around telling everyone that the worship of idols was a great lie, and that the One True God would destroy anyone who bowed down to them. He enjoined his followers, the descendants of Abraham, that they, too, must destroy all idols.
This poses a question: what is so bad about idol worship?
If these are just empty vessels, why fear them? If they are not really gods, what harm can they do? Why should idols be so concerning that we must smash them up everywhere we find them?
By the time we get to the end of Moses’s life, here in the Book of Deuteronomy, the aversion to idol worship is even more intense.
At the start of Re’eh, Moses instructs the Israelites to find every idol, tear down the pillars, smash up the altars, cut down their gods, and destroy any memory that these false gods ever lived there.
If a seer comes to you, says Moses, and they say they have had a vision that you should worship idols, you must kill them instantly. You must purge them and their evil words.
If your own brother, sister, mother, father, or friend wants you to worship idols, Moses says, show them no pity. Don’t try to stop anyone from killing them. In fact, make sure it is your own hand that strikes them down.
And if you find out that there is a town where people worship idols, go and kill everyone in it. Bring everyone from the town together and slaughter them. Bring everything from that town into the square and burn it to the ground. Destroy that city in its entirety and never let anybody rebuild it.
This feels like something of an over-reaction.
How can idol worship be so bad that it is worse than murder, worse than cutting off your own kin, worse even than razing a city to the ground? Why should this practice of building little statues be so intimidating that it requires such destruction?
This feels completely out of place with our moral sensibilities. That’s not just a modern thing.
Even in the 13th Century, rabbis were worried about this injunction. Rambam, the great rabbinic decisor who codified all of the Torah’s laws, was also concerned.
Rambam lived among Muslims and Christians in medieval Egypt. He admired and appreciated them. He read the works of the great Greeks who had never known monotheism, like Plato and Aristotle. He found them wise and inspiring. He was deeply opposed to fundamentalism and chauvinism. Rambam, like us, was not really up for burning cities to the ground just because they did not follow our God.
Rambam says: don’t worry. The world for which these laws were written no longer exists. People don’t worship idols any more. Whatever perverse practices the Pagans once did, they are not doing them now.
Even if they did exist, we would not have the authority to burn a city to the ground like that. You would need a Sanhedrin – a court of 71 learned judges who could recite the laws in their entirety – and we have not had one of those for many centuries.
Even if the idol worshippers did still exist, and we did still have a Sanhedrin, the Sanhedrin would necessarily make sure to do everything possible to educate the idolaters away from their ill-conceived practices, help them to repent, and find ways to make sure they can live in the true religion of monotheism.
So, don’t worry, says Rambam, we can forget about all that.
But the trouble is we can’t.
It’s there in the Torah. We read it every year. Rambam still has to go and codify all these bloody edicts, that make such monsters of people who pray to fetishes.
And Rambam does not answer my fundamental question. The people who bow down to wood and stone might be wrong; their beliefs might be misplaced; but what is so bad about giving a drop of wine to a brick?
The most compelling answer I have found comes from a 20th Century psychoanalyst. Erich Fromm was born in Frankfurt, Germany, at the start of the last century. He studied psychiatry and philosophy among the greats of his generation, then moved, in 1934 to America, where he became a leading writer and critic of modern society. Needless to say, he was Jewish.
In 1976, Erich Fromm wrote a landmark book called “To Have or To Be.” This text became the cornerstone of the anti-consumerist movement.
Fromm engaged seriously with our religious texts. He saw them as inspiring people with a serious psychological message about how to live.
The difference between real worship and idolatry, says Fromm, is not what you worship, but how you do it. He calls it the “being mode” and the “having mode”.
The problem with idolatry, says Fromm, is that it makes you think God is something you can own.
Hebrew monotheism is a rejection of the entire enterprise of having a god:
“The God of the Old Testament is, first of all, a negation of idols, of gods whom one can have… The concept of God transcends itself from the very beginning. God must not have a name; no image must be made of God.”
Fromm writes:
“God, originally a symbol for the highest value that we can experience within us, becomes, in the having mode, an idol. In the prophetic concept, an idol is a thing that we ourselves make and project our own powers into, thus impoverishing ourselves. We then submit to our creation and by our submission are in touch with ourselves in an alienated form. While I can have the idol because it is a thing, by my submission to it, it, simultaneously, has me.”
So, for Fromm, idol worship isn’t over at all. In fact, it is a pitfall any of us can stumble into. If you think that faith is something you can have, rather than a way of living, you are guilty of idolatry. Fromm says:
“Faith, in the having mode, is a crutch for those who want to be certain, those who want an answer to life without daring to search for it themselves.”
Fromm goes further. It’s not just about God. It’s about everything. Do you want to be in this world, or do you want to have it? If you think you can have it, you will never be satisfied. But if you can truly be in it, you will find no need to have any desires met. Fromm says:
“The attitude inherent in consumerism is that of swallowing the whole world.”
Fromm even extends his philosophy to how we love. Do not try to have love, he warns, but try to be in love.
“To love is a productive activity. It implies caring for, knowing, responding, affirming, enjoying: the person, the tree, the painting, the idea. It means bringing to life, increasing his/her/its aliveness. It is a process, self-renewing and self-increasing.”
If we take Fromm seriously, we have a whole new way of looking at the world. Inspired by the prophets, everything we do can be about existing and loving and being. We can reject the whole ideology of possessing.
That is what is wrong with idolatry. The artefacts of the Pagans aren’t just wooden blocks. They tell us a way of living. The wrong way of living. They direct us to control and own.
Rambam may be right. The idolaters do not exist in cities any more.
Instead, today, they live in our own minds. And we must burn them down, if we are to be truly free.
Shabbat shalom.
Category: judaism
The spiritual possibilities for our new Jewish movement
“The history of a community, like the history of an individual, is marked by the recurrence of periods of self-consciousness and self-analysis. At such times its members consider their aggregate achievements and failures, and mark the tendencies of their corporation.”
These are the opening words of an essay that gave birth to our Jewish movement.
In 1898, a social worker named Lily Montagu published an essay in the Jewish Quarterly Review, entitled “The Spiritual Possibilities of Judaism Today.”
What this pioneering thinker asked of Jewish London was that it take stock of what it had achieved and what it wished to be. Only by giving an honest and sober account of where we were, could we imagine a better future for our Jewish life.
This is the perfect time to revisit that essay. We are forming a new movement, which will be far bigger and broader than Miss Lily could have anticipated, and may even soon make up the majority of British Jews. Is that not summons enough to the period of introspection Montagu required of us?
But, more than that, when you look at her essay from over 120 years ago, you can see that the issues Montagu wanted to address had much in common with the challenges facing us today.
Montagu was scathing in her perception of Anglo-Jewry. She accused it of “materialism and spiritual lethargy” and charged “that Judaism has been allowed by the timid and the indifferent to lose much of its inspiring force.”
Judaism, she felt, was supposed to be a great and inspiring system that would draw Jews closer to God and motivate its adherents to face the real-world challenges of the day. Instead, it had been captured by a lazy spirit that wanted nothing more than to assimilate, appease the establishment, and provide a lackluster imitation of religious rituals. Does that sound familiar?
Montagu assessed how London’s Jews actually lived. She called them “East End Jews” and “West End Jews,” but was clear that this was not just a geographical phenomenon. She was talking about class, culture, and background.
The “East End Jews” of her day were working class, poor, Ashkenazi immigrants. They were highly observant, but obedient to a fault. They followed along with the old words they already knew, but rarely spent much time thinking about what any of those prayers might mean for their soul. Their main motivation for practising Judaism was a combination of superstition and fear.
“West End Jews,” by contrast, were from higher classes and mixed ethnic backgrounds. They were materialistic, obsessed with status, and only attended synagogue because they thought it was more respectable to be Jewish than to have no religion at all. Yet, she said, by replacing real religion with possessions and status, they ultimately still had a vacuum where religion ought to be.
These types of Jews, as Montagu described them, don’t exist in the same way today as they did then. However much one might nostalgise the factory-working Jews of the Whitechapel shtetl or the days when Jewish aristocrats held drawing room parties in Maida Vale, that world is gone. Economic disparities persist, but far less visibly, and without entire Jewish cultures built around location and class.
She warned that, although the Jews of her age might be economically divided, they still had the same thing in common: their religion was vapid and empty. It was about having an identity rather than having a relationship with God. For both sets of Jews, Montagu argued, Judaism needed a complete spiritual revival.
Apparently, a great number of people agreed with her, because over the years and decades that followed, many came together to form congregations for exactly this purpose. Together, they made the Jewish Religious Union, which then became Liberal Judaism, and is now becoming part of Progressive Judaism.
Our Judaism has, indeed, been reinvigorated. We have opened up new approaches to liturgy, prayer, and worship. Synagogue teams come together to make sure that every Shabbat and festival is meaningful.
Montagu warned a previous generation that they would have to actually live Jewishly, or they would not be Jewish at all. Her prediction has come true, as some generations have just shaken off their roots, while others have decided to commit to Jewish life entirely.
One happy surprise is that, through the Liberals’ embrace of converts, we have Jews who are committed and educated in ways previously unknown in earlier generations. The dedication of converts has also inspired those who might have taken their Jewishness for granted to step up their game, learn more, and embrace their heritage.
Miss Lily did not just advocate for spiritual revival, but wanted to see Jews play a full role in the life of Britain. Full citizenship had only been granted to Jews a few decades previously, and Montagu wanted Jews to rise to the challenge.
Other communal bodies felt that the best thing for Jews to do was toe the establishment line, tell the government how wonderful they were, and hope that they would let us stay in the country without impeding on our religious practices. Our founders wanted us to embrace a more expansive sense of citizenship.
They wanted us to say: we live here, this is our home, and we have the right to change it. They wanted us not to grovel before power, but to make demands of it. They wanted us to ask ourselves “what does God require of our country?” and go about pushing for it.
This wasn’t something that belonged to one political persuasion. The intellectual leader, Montefiore was a capital C Conservative. The first Liberal rabbi, Mattuck, was a socialist who wanted the religious institutions to unite with the unions for revolution.
Montagu herself was a political Liberal. She was a suffragist and social reformer. She believed that the pursuit of peace and human rights were sacred commandments. She dedicated herself to alleviating poverty.
While politically diverse, our founders held in common a conviction that Jews could, in conversation with our God, make demands.
We could change the world. The world, too, could change us, and we should not be afraid of it or hide away in ghettos.
Montagu asserted that the youth were crying out for a Judaism that made moral demands and had something to say to their society. If their elders did not rise to the challenge, the next generation of Jews would vanish away into nothingness.
Montagu knew such Jews because her daily life was taken up as a social worker in London’s youth clubs.
I believe we are facing such a challenge today. Many Jewish young adults are looking at us, including in the movement she founded, and see a Judaism that is reluctant to take stands for fear of rocking the boat. They see a Jewish life where God is, at best, a nice accessory tacked onto a cultural centre. If we look honestly at our own institutions, can we deny their aspersions?
Throughout my twenties, I was one of these disaffected young people, bewildered by why my institutions were so ambivalent on the moral issues of the day, from massive inequality through catastrophic climate change to ongoing Israeli military occupation.
I felt acutely the absence of religious conviction in the establishment and in the institutions. There were pioneering rabbis who led the way on some issues, like gay rights, women’s equality, and refugees, but they were often marginal, and their impact could be felt only dimly in most synagogues. There was a gap.
In terms of our spiritual life, there were peer-led groups that tried to engage in serious prayer and text study, but you’d struggle to find any evidence for their existence in most synagogues.
I do not know how many young Jews fell by the wayside, but I stuck around. I had a strong sense, at least from my peers, that a better Judaism was possible. That we could speak out on social issues and we could have meaningful spirituality. That the Judaism of tomorrow might be more meaningful.
Now, in my thirties, I am a part of the establishment I railed against, and I feel that the issues facing Jewish youth are even worse. The moral and spiritual vacuum has only grown wider, and it looks even harder to fill.
I worry that the demands of our age for renewed spirituality and moral meaning are being quietly subsumed under a banner of “inclusivity.”
Inclusion is a positive and noble goal, but it must be inclusion in something. It must have real substance, if it isn’t just trying to market synagogue membership to the lowest common denominator while offering nothing and standing for nothing.
The challenge facing our movement is, I think, not so much to be broader, but to go deeper. We need to have a deeper relationship with God. We need to ask ourselves searching questions about what God demands of us. We need, as they did over a century ago, a thorough moral and spiritual revival.
In her essay, Montagu warned: “no fresh discovery can be made exactly on the lines of the past; the temperament of one generation differs from that of another.” We cannot apply Montagu’s methods in the same way today.
But we can ask the same questions that she did, and go through a serious process of reflection, as she suggested.
We can look together for new ways of revitalising our spiritual life, and put God at the centre of our synagogue.
We can work together to provide bold answers to the moral questions of our age. We can ask ourselves what God demands of Britain and hold up those prophetic clarions to our leaders.
These are the spiritual possibilities for Judaism today.
That is the spiritual challenge facing our new movement.
If we can rise to it, Progressive Judaism may yet last another century and beyond.
What happened at Mount Sinai?
We are days away from Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, when we celebrate having received the Torah. At this festival, we affirm we have received God’s word and that it is unfailing.
This is what we think we know: these words are not only God’s.
They have human origins, and they were written over many centuries. The Torah is not a single, unaltered revelation. It is a book with a history.
What happened at Mount Sinai matters immensely. It is the foundation of our faith. It is the basis not only of Judaism but of every monotheism that followed it.
The story has been told so many times. Hordes of Hebrews fled from Egypt, gathered around the foot of a desert peak, and heard the voice of the One True God.
What they experienced, they told to their children, and they to theirs, until – after generations – the vision was written down into a collection of stories and laws we call the Torah.
We have to know what really happened at Sinai; so much hinges on this indecipherable point of history.
We have to believe in the real world, where history is something made by human beings, who work, and struggle over resources, and build societies.
We have to believe in the God of Judaism, who is revealed through history.
We must synthesise the two. We cannot split the material and the spiritual. We need to know what the material reality was that lay underneath this spiritual truth. We need to know what happened at Sinai.
We cannot truly know, but we have to try and work it out. A group of human beings felt so inspired that they wrote down ten commandments and passed them on for thousands of generations. Why?
A group of human beings, who surely worked and slept and ate and drank and dreamed, proclaimed that they had seen God.
Something marvellous must have happened at that time. Something awe inspiring – to give us this treasury of ancient wisdom. Who committed these words to paper, what happened to them, and what made these commandments feel so important to them?
What really happened at Mount Sinai? The biblical historian pores over our texts, strips them back, digs out inconsistencies, looks for parallels in ancient cultures, and analyses the language in which the stories are told. The biblical historian discards impossibilities, looks for likelihoods, and reconstructs the best possible version of events.
We cannot know for certain, but we can do our best to do the same – to discard, seek and reconstruct. And, when we do, the truth of/ Mount Sinai that we are left with is far more radical than we might imagine.
For the historian, Mount Sinai may not have been Mount Sinai at all. It may be, as the Samaritans claim, Mount Gerizim, near Nablus, since that is also one of the mountains the Torah names as a site of revelation. It may have been Mount Pisgah or Mount Nebo, on the eastern side of the Jordan River, since our Torah names those locations too.
We do not know at which mountain the important revelation happened. But there was a mountain.
This is what we think we know: there was a mountain.
Some people went there. They may not have been Jews, since that word did not exist yet. They may not even have been Israelites, since the story teaches that they only became Israelites through the process of what happened at that mountain.
They were, says the Torah, a mixed multitude. They were drawn from all the nations of the Ancient Near East: from Ethiopia and Yemen; through Egypt and Sudan; to Lebanon and Syria.
They were, by their own self-description, border-crossing nomads. They had no land or title. There are no records to suggest they owned any weapons, let alone that they had military strength.
If we are to trust how they wrote about themselves, they were menial workers. Water drawers; grain carriers; tenant farmers; shepherds. They had been slaves. They were a ragtag of the ancient world’s lowest classes.
We do not know who these people were. But they were poor and transient.
This is what we think we know:
the poorest people of many ethnicities came together at a mountain.
We are not sure when it happened. It may have been any time from the 15th Century BCE. The latest it could have been is the 5th Century BCE, when the Torah was edited into its final form. That is a difference of nearly a thousand years.
We do not know what brought them to that mountain. We cannot prove that the exodus took place exactly as it was described in the Torah.
But we do know that, in the 12th Century BCE, there was a massive societal collapse in all the nations of the Mediterranean basin. In the broad period when our Torah tells us that our ancestors received the Ten Commandments, the Egyptian empire was crumbling.
We also know this. When Egypt was collapsing in the late Bronze Age, a Pharaoh wrote a stele, complaining of slave uprisings by a group of nomads on the fringes of his empire. He calls those people Habiru. The biblical historian notes the linguistic similarity between these people and the Hebrews.
This is what we think we know: the poorest people of many ethnicities rebelled together against a decaying empire some time around the late Bronze Age.
They met at a mountain.
The stories they tell of their experiences at that mountain are fantastical. Fire descended from heaven. Thunder crashed and lightning roared. Thick smoke descended over the peak. The earth trembled violently. The Creator of Heaven and Earth became manifest before them.
How can we know if any of this happened? Nobody else could have testified to what they saw. There are no contemporary meteorological records. There are only two possibilities: either the authors of our Torah really believed that was what they experienced, or they made it up.
If they made it up, so many others were convinced that they had been part of that experience at the mountain, that they faithfully transmitted the story for hundreds of years to their children and grandchildren. Which is more likely: that these people lied, or that they genuinely believed they had a transcendent experience?
This is what we think we know: the poorest people of many ethnicities rebelled together against a decaying empire some time around the late Bronze Age.
At a mountain, they had an experience so profound that they felt as if they saw God manifest, and it changed their lives and the lives of their descendants forever.
The God they thought they heard told them: “Although the whole earth is Mine, you will be for Me a dominion of priests and a holy nation.”
The poorest people in the world affirmed belief in a God who knew no borders and rejected all hierarchies. Every one of these ancient landless waifs would be holy.
According to our Torah, those people entered into a covenant.
Until this point in history, contracts of these kind were predominantly made between empires and vassal states. They took the form: “you will pay me tribute, and I will be your landlord.”
This was a covenant of a new kind. It said:
“you will do justly by one another, and I will be your God.”
They ratified this new agreement and remade what a covenant was. They swore an oath, committing themselves to an entirely new society. They bound themselves to a Law that knew no Sovereign save for a universal God.
They promised that their society would have no more killing; no more trafficking in human beings; no more greed. They declared fealty to each other, to their God; and to their sacred days of rest.
Take our texts. Strip them back. Dig out inconsistencies. Look for parallels in ancient cultures. Pay close attention to language. Discard impossibilities.
From what remains, you can reconstruct the best possible version of events.
This is where we have arrived.
This is what we think we know.
Thousands of years ago, poor people from many ethnicities got together in common rebellion against a decaying empire. They had an experience so profound that they felt as if they saw God manifest.
At a mountain, they made a covenant to create a society based on dignity.
Many hands have since re-written and interpreted that event – but, deep at its core, buried under years of transmission and analysis, was one moment.
This, is what we think we know:
Somewhere in history, there was a slave rebellion by a mountain.
And it was marvellous.
Originally published in Vashti.
Be humble about what we can know
Before the Enlightenment, the world was governed by unknowable spirits and invisible entities.
There was so much we did not know.
If your farm didn’t produce any crops or the skies did not give you enough rain, you did not have modern technology to inform you about drought predictions for the next three years. You would have no way to know that the water coming from your clouds was directly connected to oceans miles away.
But you had your priests, and your rituals, and your superstitions. You had small gods in the hill country to which you offered libations. And, so far, when you had upheld your traditions, the rain came as it was supposed to.
When you got sick with a skin infection, you could not see a GP who would consult a modern medicine manual and give you a cream that would clear it up in just a few days. You would not have knowledge about germs, allergies, and viruses.
But you had your priests, and your rituals, and your superstitions. You had your rules governing sin and repentance. You had reliable experience that bodily suffering could be healed by atonement. And, so far, when you had upheld your traditions, the rain came as it was supposed to.
Please hold this in mind as we read this week’s Torah portion.
It may be easy for a modern mind, after the Enlightenment, to scoff at the strange priests, rituals, and superstitions that govern these chapters in the Book of Leviticus.
You might feel slightly embarrassed to imagine the rites our ancestors slit open goats, threw their entrails around and burned them for days until they stunk out a tent as expiation for their sins.
You might squirm at the vivid descriptions of cotton-clad priests flailing around the limbs of slaughtered cattle to win the favour of their god.
It may even seem primitive how they delight at the animal fat creating explosive fire, which they see as evidence of their god’s approval.
But they were doing what they could with what they knew. And they were engaging earnestly with what they did not know. Beyond the world they experienced was an unfathomable mystery, and they wanted to draw closer to it.
Indeed, only verses later, we get an insight into their own feelings of inadequacy. We get a real sense that they knew how much they did not know.
Nadav and Abihu do absolutely everything right. They follow the priests, carry out the rituals, and trust in the superstitions. They are formally inducted into all the correct practices by their father, Aaron the High Priest.
They do everything right. And then they die.
The burning animal fat explodes in a blaze that kills them both.
How can our ancestors make sense of this?
Our Torah gives two answers. The first is from Moses. Moses recalls a prophecy when God said: “Among those who approach me I will be proved holy; in the sight of all the people I will be honored.’”
We may interpret this as a way of Moses defending God. Moses is saying: while this may feel like a violation of our belief system, it is in fact proof of it. Holiness is a very dangerous quality.
God has demonstrated how sacred it is to engage in the rituals. God has shown what honour and risk are involved in holy service.
So, for Moses, this sudden death of their priests does not undermine their belief system. It’s just evidence of how little they understand about their sacred rituals. In the fire, they have reached the limits of their knowledge.
Aaron, too, offers an answer. Silence.
We may interpret Aaron’s unspoken response variously. We may read into it horror, resignation, anger, acceptance, or solemnity.
But regardless of what he was feeling, we see that Aaron has no intellectual answer to the problem. He neither agrees nor disagrees with Moses. Aaron finds the limits of speech. He finds the boundaries of what he can even express.
Moses and Aaron lived in a world of unknowable spirits, governed by superstition. They made sense of their confusing world through priests and sacrifices. And no matter how well they constructed their rituals, they still found their limits.
There were things they did not know.
But we live in an era after such theologies. From the 17th Century onwards, Western Europe was gripped by a profound truth.
As the people challenged the unlimited power of the established church, philosophers pulled apart the stories religions had told.
This was the Enlightenment.
No more would they be hoodwinked by magical thinking or damned by promises of divine retribution. Everything, every idea, would be subjected to ruthless scrutiny. The greats of these generations would challenge the tenets of even science itself.
We live now in a world formed by their ideas. While our ancestors were beholden to talismans, omens, and sacrificial fire, we have evolved to hold modern ideals of truth and rational enquiry.
So, why hasn’t religion disappeared?
Isn’t that the obvious next question?
We have rid ourselves of superstitions, but synagogues are stronger than ever. Most of the world is still deeply religious. Despite constant predictions of its demise, faith remains stronger than ever.
For those who wish to understand God’s persistence after the Enlightenment, they may want to look to Immanuel Kant.
Kant was the last of the Enlightenment thinkers. His impact on this period of intellectual history was so great that some even date its end to his death.
Kant was a profound writer on truth, ethics, the scientific method, and what we can really know. He was also a devout Christian.
Kant was animated by the same questions that bothered our ancestors who witnessed Nadav and Abihu die.
He was not confused about why burning fat could cause a blaze, or why religious rituals didn’t always yield the same results. Those were the questions of the past.
The question still lingered, however: why does it seem like there is no justice in the world? Why do bad things happen to good people, and why do the wicked seem to get away with it? Why, no matter what happens, does evil seem to persist?
In his essay, The Miscarriage of All, Kant says he will put God’s justice before the trial of reason. Kant contemplates all the possible answers.
Maybe what we think is evil isn’t really. Maybe the world works in ways we don’t understand so that evil has to be permitted. Maybe there are other forces in the world beyond God’s goodness.
And Kant gives us an answer, which is… we don’t know.
All of these explanations only expose the limits of our understanding.
None of the answers anybody has come up with is satisfactory.
We are finite beings trying to understand Infinite Truth.
And still, says Kant, we retain our faith.
For Kant, none of these questions undermine the existence of God’s justice. They just show what we do not know.
So, perhaps we need to approach these stories with more humility and less contempt.
The ancient priests may well have splashed ox blood around an altar to ward off sin, but we are no closer to answering the questions that motivated their rituals.
We are barely separated from them by any time at all.
We are still just animals, scrambling in the dark, trying to make sense of our world.
And we still need each other, with all our beliefs and rituals, to get through this life that can seem so unjust.
We are each other’s guides through a mystery we may never resolve.
We need to be humble about what we do not know.
Are Jews a religion or a race?
At present, Reform and Liberal Judaism are deciding whether to become a single movement. You will be able to vote on this, and I encourage you to do so.
As the procedural questions unfold, it is hard to imagine how strongly felt the ideological divisions were between the two movements, even forty years ago. I believe, however, that those differences are now almost entirely within the movements, rather than between them.
On some fronts, we will find unity, and on others, differences will remain.
There is one point, however, which, to me, is so intrinsic to Liberal thought that I could not stand it to see it lost. That is: there is no such thing as a Jewish race.
There is no such thing as Jewish blood, as a Jewish womb, as Jewish DNA, or as Jewish features.
It is precisely because our Liberal tradition teaches that there is no Jewish race that we have been able to fully embrace converts and, from the very beginning, accepted patrilineal Jews.
These ideas were critical stumbling-blocks to merger attempts in previous decades. Reform Judaism would not accept patrilineal Jews, and insisted that converts went and were reborn from the “Jewish womb” of a mikvah.
In the past few years, Reform Judaism has come to accept patrilineal Jews, and Liberal Judaism has come to accept that the mikvah can be a meaningful ritual.
Yet not everyone has come to accept the underlying ideology that made these matters so central to Liberal Judaism. The originators of our movement saw Judaism as a religious community, where Jewishness was communicated socially, not “biologically.”
That is no longer a sectarian issue. There are Reform rabbis who ardently agree on this point; and there are Liberals who, instead of denying any racial Jewishness, focus on being “inclusive” about who belongs.
Rejecting the idea of a Jewish race was absolutely foundational to early Liberal thinkers. Regardless of whatever new ideas emerge as rabbis come together, I intend to hold doggedly to their understanding of Jewishness.
Israel Mattuck was the first Liberal rabbi in the UK. In 1911, he was recruited by Lily Montagu and Claude Montefiore from America to lead the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St John’s Wood. He was a prolific preacher, ideologue, and scholar.
At the LJS, Dr Mattuck taught a Confirmation class, for 16-year-olds affirming their faith. He later took his notes and turned them into a book, entitled Essentials of Liberal Judaism so that everyone would know what he thought it meant to be a Jew.
Jews, he insisted, were not a race, but spanned the globe. What made people Jewish was that they held Jewish ideas, followed a Jewish way of life, and kept Jewish observances.
He wrote: “In spite of all the differences among them, the Jews of the world constitute a people; but they are a people in a different sense from any other people. Their unity is based on religion and history.”
Editing in 1947, Mattuck was eager to avoid any misconceptions. He insisted that this history was not an unbroken tale of misery and persecution, but one of great spiritual achievements. We were, he said, the first witnesses to God’s unity through the revelation at Sinai. Our history was that of the prophets, the priests, the scholars, the mystics, and all those who sought to reach closer to religious truth.
Mattuck was clear that you could not be Jewish in anything more than name if you rested on race. You want to be a Jew? Walk humbly with God, taught Rabbi Mattuck from the prophet Micah.
There is no race – only a demand to live right.
Now, you may be thinking, this all sounds a lot like the Critical Race Theory that Mr Trump so zealously warned us about. Indeed it is! And the American President has good reason to fear people taking a critical approach to race.
In the USA, races were invented to divide and rule people so that the wealthy whites could maintain their plantation economy. Poor whites were incentivised to enforce and uphold slavery by being given some privileges on the basis of their skin colour.
As a result, they felt they could identify with the rich whites, even though they had very little in common with them socially or economically. Using racism, they demeaned and humiliated the stolen Africans so that they would not have the confidence to challenge their own condition.
That is why race-critical scholars in America have the slogan: “race exists because of racism, not the other way round.”
In Race: A Theological Account, the African-American scholar of religion J. Kameron Carter shows how racist ideology had earlier roots – in how European Christians treated Jews.
To create a system where Jews were second-class citizens, they needed an ideology where Jews were defective human beings. So they made up stories about Jewish bodies, Jewish blood, Jewish noses and hair – even Jewish horns – to justify their system of oppression. It was a nasty division for the purposes of exploitation.
This was exactly why Mattuck was so resistant to talk of Jews as a race, and so adamant about our religion.
In 1939, Mattuck wrote his first major work, What are the Jews?, which was a harsh rebuttal, not only to Jewish racial nationalism, but to racial nationalism as such.
We belong everywhere, he asserted. In the Age of Enlightenment, all citizenship should be communicated on civic grounds, never on ethnic or religious ones.
A Jew, he felt, could be a nationalist, but they must first adhere to the religious calling. That is: they could be Jewish and happen to have nationalist leanings, but it could not define them as Jewish.
Nevertheless, he thought that, by properly conceiving of ourselves as a religion, we would be more likely drawn to universal ethics. We would measure our Jewishness by our conduct towards others and our connection with our God, rather than by the supposed quality of our genetic make-up. We could pull apart the stories that separated people and build common bonds.
Racial thinking, thought Mattuck, must be resisted.
Race is a horrible and divisive lie. Religion is a beautiful and unifying truth.
I want to be open about why this idea is hard for others to hold.
It is more demanding. It says that nobody can take their Jewishness for granted, and must work for it. It means that you cannot be “born” Jewish, but have to live Jewish. It sets high ethical and practical demands on anyone who claims Jewishness.
When we say that there is no Jewish race, we also mean that somebody with an unbroken chain of matrilineal descent but without any Jewish upbringing or identity must also learn how to be Jewish, in the same way as a patrilineal Jew would. Everyone has to properly engage with the traditions and practices. Contrary to the doctrine of inclusion, this makes us more exclusive than the Orthodox.
Denying the existence of a Jewish race also has profound implications for how we engage with Israel. If we are a religious community, the demand to achieve a Jewish ethnic majority – still less racial supremacy – is not just grotesque. It is absurd. The measure of whether the state was sufficiently Jewish would not be by how many Jews there were, but by how well it upheld Jewish moral values.
Yet it is precisely because of this more demanding approach to Jewishness that I will keep holding onto it. The call that we be moral in our dealings, conscientious in our practices, and connected with our traditions is a far better one than the narrow pull of racial nationalism.
Through such a religion, we may connect to every other Jew in a spirit of solidarity.
Through religion, we may connect to all of humanity, by recognising our shared Creator.
Through religion, we may draw nearer to the mystery that is our God.
Through religion, we may live out the words of our haftarah: “For you who revere My Name, the sunbeams of righteousness will rise, with healing in their wings. Then you will go forth and skip about like calves from the stall.”
Shabbat shalom.
Who created the Jews?
One day, word came to Joseph, “Your father is failing rapidly.” So Joseph went to visit his father, and he took with him his two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim.
When Joseph arrived, Jacob was told, “Your son Joseph has come to see you.” So Jacob gathered his strength and sat up in his bed.
Jacob was half blind because of his age and could hardly see. So Joseph brought the boys close to him, and Jacob kissed and embraced them. Then Jacob said to Joseph, “I never thought I would see your face again, but now God has let me see your children, too!”
He drew them close, so close, and kissed their foreheads, then offered his blessing, his last testimony upon his grandchildren. He placed his hands on his grandchildren’s heads and said:
“The whole world hates us! They’ve always hated us, right from Pharaoh until today. They’ll never accept us, because they’re jealous of us. They can’t stop thinking about us, even though we’re a tiny fraction of the world. Well, good! We’re going to keep being Jewish to spite them. That’s it, boys, be Jewish to wind up the antisemites. As long as they hate us, wear your yarmulkes.”
Of course, this is not what Jacob said to his grandchildren.
What would have happened to Jews and Judaism if this was all Jacob had to pass on?
Ephraim and Mannasheh would have nothing on which to base their identities but a negative. They would see themselves as Jews only by victim of circumstance. Their choices would be to reluctantly accept their Jewish status as a miserable burden from previous generations; or to concoct a paranoid worldview that lashed out at everyone; or to ditch being Jewish as soon as they got the chance.
Jacob would just have left the boys a neurotic mess, with no pride in themselves or joy in their lives.
Jacob would not have said this to his children, but what are we teaching to ours? Are we teaching them to love being Jewish, with all its culture, rituals, festivals, beliefs, and ways of building community? Are we showing them how to love themselves and their heritage so that they can delight in it for many generations?
Or, are we imparting a negative identity based on misery and fear?
If you open up some of our communal newspapers or listen to some of our representative bodies, it is very much the latter. Maybe it is not as vulgar as the parody I just made up for Jacob, but it comes through in how they talk, and what stories they choose to tell.
It is as if, for them, Jews only exist because of antisemites, and our Jewishness is only exerted when defending ourselves against antisemitism.
This idea is not new.
In 1944, as the war came to an end, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was trying to understand antisemitism. He wrote “Portrait of an Antisemite,” in which he looked to his contemporary antisemitism in France. Sartre saw antisemitism as a lie to uphold class distinctions. The rich relied on antisemitism because it gave them an excuse to put the blame for inequality and injustice somewhere else. The poor turned to antisemitism because, by creating outsiders, it gave them a feeling of belonging to a nation in which they really had no portion.
Antisemites, he said, were people who couldn’t face their own reality, and absconded from their own freedom, to project their fears onto Jews, both real and imagined. From this, he coined the famous saying that “if Jews didn’t exist, antisemites would invent them.”
This was a useful way to begin to understand antisemitism – as a fear constructed about Jews, but in spite of what any Jews were actually like.
Sartre then goes on to ask a question: “does the Jew exist?” That is, if antisemites are just angry at imaginary Jews, what does that make of real Jews? Sartre concludes that Jews do exist, because of their shared experience of antisemitism. Jews exist in response to the persecution they face. Quite literally, he says, “the antisemite creates the Jew.”
The Jews themselves, he said, were outside of history, but victims of its oppression. If antisemitism were to disappear, then, so, too, would Jews. If only everyone were to throw off the shackles of class society, the Revolution would resolve the contradictions that antisemitism needed, and Jews would be able to assimilate into a newly-ordered utopia. Then, they could give up being Jews, and finally become citizens of their countries.
What he outlines is really a popular Bolshevik understanding of antisemitism, sprinkled with existentialism. For many opponents of antisemitism, its appeal was that it could suggest a way out of hatred and racism.
But, for those of who are Jews, that’s not helpful at all. If being liberated as people means being destroyed as Jews, why would we want such a thing?
Sartre had a friend, interlocutor, and fellow intellectual, in Albert Memmi. Like Sartre, he was a French-inflected socialist. But, unlike Sartre, Memmi was a Jew. Born in Tunisia in 1920 to a poor Jewish family, Memmi became a leading thinker, and a revolutionary in Tunisia’s war for independence. Sartre admired Memmi, and brought his anticolonial writings to a European audience.
In response, Memmi wrote “Portrait of a Jew,” and its follow-up, “The Liberation of the Jew.” Memmi was able to describe first-hand experiences of antisemitism on two continents. His personal struggles with prejudice elucidated very clearly why Jews would not want to assimilate into Christian France, even in the classless society Sartre imagined. Centuries of racism and religious discrimination showed him that neither Christianity nor Frenchness offered much hope for Jewish emancipation.
More interestingly, Memmi decided to answer for himself the question, “does the Jew exist?” For Memmi, the answer was a resounding “yes.” Jews exist, and, contra Sartre, have our own history, culture, and civilisation. Yes, that has been created in response to antisemitism, but also in spite of it. Jews were constantly creating our own culture.
Jewishness, said Memmi, was what Jews decided to create in each generation, and could be constantly remade, as part of Jews’ engagement with their own heritage. For Memmi, if antisemitism did not exist, Jews still would. Even if, as many Bolsheviks imagined, the world could be freed of superstitious religion, the Jewish national culture would carry on, and thrive in new ways.
So, antisemitism may create the Jewish condition, but it was the Jews who created Jewishness. We were the authors of our history.
After the service, we will hear from Rachel Shabi, as she talks to us about antisemitism and its challenges. Her thoughts are prescient, and we should pay close attention to them. We need to understand antisemitism, where it comes from, and how to combat it.
Yet we must remember that studying antisemitism can only tell us about antisemites. It cannot teach us about Jews.
Jews make Jews. We decide who we are. Through our love of our heritage and community, we build up Judaism, and we make it what it should be.
So, when we talk to the younger people in our communities, we cannot let their identities be formed by fear of antisemitism.
We must tell them why we have chosen to keep on being Jewish, and give them good reasons to keep it up too. Whether raised Jewish, converted, or affirmed, all of us have chosen being Jewish, and for good reasons that are bound up in love, not defined by hate.
Tell them about your favourite recipes and the best of Jewish songs. Show them Jewish art and take them to Jewish plays. Celebrate the festivals with them because you truly want to bring them to life. Mourn and fast with them because it is filled with meaning.
Teach them that God has given us a sacred task on earth; that we exist in this world to perfect it. That everything we do can light up divine sparks. That we are called upon to unify all that exists with its Creator.
Bless them with the words that Jacob actually spoke, and say:
“May the God before whom my grandfather Abraham and my father, Isaac, walked—
the God who has been my shepherd all my life, to this very day, the Angel who has redeemed me from all harm. May the Eternal One bless these children. May they preserve my name and the names of Abraham and Isaac. And may their descendants multiply greatly throughout the earth.”
Perhaps we are not powerless
I have a horrible, on-off relationship with the news. I wouldn’t call it a love-hate relationship so much as a hate-hate relationship.
There are days when I can do nothing but stare at it, soaking in every detail: climate collapse; species extinction; earthquakes: natural disasters; social breakdown; cost of living; refugees in detention centres; wars, wars, wars…
And then there are days when I switch off entirely. I become so overwhelmed I refuse to hear the radio or see current events on TV. I don’t look at any of the news apps or social media for fear that I’ll be reminded of all that is wrong in the world.
Whether endlessly scrolling through the horrors or studiously avoiding admitting they are there, I think I’ve become trapped in a cycle of feeling powerless. It’s all so big, and so frightening.
But what can I do? I’m one person, seeing the world collapse, and all I can do is observe.
If this feels at all relatable to you, perhaps you’ll find some comfort in this week’s Torah portion, as I did.
After all, didn’t Moses feel too small and powerless too, at the beginning? He tried to change things, and look where that got him. Stuck in exile, looking after sheep. Moses looked at all that was wrong in his world, found it far too much to bear, and retreated into the wilderness.
And he would have stayed there too. He could have lived out the rest of his life with a lovely family tending flocks in Midian.
But God had other ideas. God heard the cry of the Israelites in bondage and decided it was time to set them free.
So God reached out to Moses from a thornbush. God set a small thicket in the wilderness ablaze and called Moses on his mission.
A thornbush, of all things. Why would God decide to speak from such a lowly and despised place? The thornbush is, at best, a plant to be ignored and, at worst, an annoyance that scratches against bare legs. It’s the desert equivalent of stinging nettles.
In our Talmud, Rav Yosef says: not because the thornbush is the greatest of plants did God choose to speak from it, but because it is the least of the creatures. God disregarded all the most beautiful trees of the desert in order to be with the lowliest.
Similarly, God chose to give the Torah from Mount Sinai not because it was the highest or most magnificent of desert peaks, but because it was small and covered in unremarkable roughage.
In the natural world, God singles out the powerless and unimportant. That’s where God works the real miracles.
That’s why God chose Moses too. Moses had no idea of his miraculous birth or impressive destiny. As far as he was concerned, he was a loner in the desert.
When Moses gets the call, it’s not God that he doubts. He doubts himself.
His first question is: “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”
God doesn’t build Moses up or tell him how he wonderful he is. He says: just trust. Have faith.
We don’t get to decide what times we live in or what role we have to play in them. God decided that Moses was going to take the Israelites from Egypt and that was what was going to happen.
But Moses still can’t see how he can make a difference. He doesn’t doubt God’s power, he doubts his own. He says: “what if nobody believes me? What if they don’t listen to me? What if they don’t trust that I spoke with God?”
At this point, God shows Moses some miracles. We might think these miracles are about God flexing Divine might, showing Moses all the wonders. In fact, a bush burning in the desert without being consumed by flames would be quite enough to achieve that.
These miracles aren’t about showing God’s power: they’re about showing Moses his own.
First, God turns Moses’s shepherd’s crook into a venomous snake. Moses recoils in fear. Then God turns it back again.
Next, God afflicts Moses with a deadly skin disease. Moses thinks his life is over. Then God heals him.
Both miracles make Moses face his greatest fears. They are exposure therapy. The worst thing that Moses could imagine is death. God shows him that he can stare it in the eye. Moses thinks he is not brave enough. God shows him that he is.
It’s not that Moses ever doubted God’s power. What he doubted was his own. Now God shows him he does indeed have power. He is stronger and more resilient than he realised.
It’s not that Moses ever doubted God’s importance. What he doubted was his own. Why would anyone care what a stammering wreck like him had to say?
When God performs miracles through Moses, the message is clear: “I, the Eternal One, care. I care enough to work wonders on you. I care enough to meet you in the desert. I care enough to save you from death.”
And, if God can care about Moses that much, why can’t the Israelites? Why can’t Moses care about Moses that much?
Still, Moses is not ready to own his power. He protests to God: “I can’t speak. I’m slow of speech and stammer constantly.”
God gives the perfect answer: “And who made you that way?”
God made Moses that way. God decided that Moses would be who he was. His speaking ability is not a flaw – it’s the characteristic God gave him that makes him exactly the right man for the moment.
What a message this brings for us, who feel so powerless and insignificant.
What are we but matter in the void, and yet the Creator of the Universe has chosen for us to be alive at this time?
Who are we with all our foibles and imperfections? But God has made us exactly as we are.
So why don’t we trust in ourselves, and recognise our own power?
Don’t ask why God made a world with so many problems and sent no solution. The solution is here: God made us.
So I think I need to stop the cycle of doomscrolling and avoiding. Life isn’t just something that happens to me – it’s something I make, too. Society doesn’t just exist apart from me, I’m an active player in making it. And the news isn’t just something that lives on TVs and in devices – it’s something that we can create, every day, if we so choose.
In the Mishnah, Ben Azzai teaches: “Hate nobody, because everyone has their time and everything has its place.”
We did not choose to be born here and now, but God saw fit that we should be alive at this place and time. God wants us here, in this moment.
We are like that weedy thornbush in the desert. We might seem insignificant. But God has chosen for us to be here. And, because of that, we can burn brightly enough to change everything.
Shabbat shalom.
How to be a Jewish man
וּבְמָקוֹם שֶׁאֵין אֲנָשִׁים הִשְׁתַּדֵּל לִהְיוֹת אִישׁ
Pirkei Avot 2:6
“In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man.”
This is one of the central teachings of the founder of rabbinic Judaism, Hillel. You may know him better from his famous aphorisms “treat others as you would be treated” and “if not now, when?” This one gets quoted a little less. Perhaps it is because we instinctively recoil at the expression. It brings to mind those horrible exhortations to “man up.”
So uncomfortable are we with the idea that some have reinterpreted the verse as “in a place where there is no humanity, strive to be human.” We want to make it gender-neutral, so as not to exclude over half of the Jewish population. But it seems to me that the verse means what it says: “in a place where there are no men, strive to be a man.”
This is a teaching about masculinity, and it comes with Hillel’s own manifesto of what it means to be a Jewish man:
A brute cannot fear sin; an ignorant person cannot be compassionate; a lazy person cannot learn; an angry person cannot teach; and a money-grabbing person cannot become wise.
These are the qualities of masculinity Hillel is seeking to impart: be conscientious, not brutal. Be loving, not bigoted. Be studious, not idle. Be generous, not rash. Be sagely, not greedy.
This is a far cry from the image of manhood many of our boys are receiving.
This week, I want to talk about manhood and masculinity. I must, therefore, apologise to the rest of the room, because, in many ways, this sermon is mostly for the men. I hope, however, that the women and non-binary people in this community will appreciate that this is coming from an urgent need to intervene in ongoing conversations directed at teenage boys in Britain.
Every few years, a new figurehead emerges for an unfolding crisis of masculinity. Their goal is to bring back an imagined past of burly blokes who hunted animals, chopped wood and went to war. Right now, their leader is Andrew Tate – a man who looks like he stole the entire Russian Olympic swimming team’s supply of steroids.
Tate is a famous YouTuber, determined to restore what he sees as masculinity lost to a war on men. He wants a return to men’s “natural instincts” as territorial, violent and unemotional. He advocates for men to adopt avarice and aggression to bend the world to their will. His advice to his subscribers is to control, manipulate and stake ownership over women.
He has even forayed into the world of theology, saying: “Read the Bible, every single man had multiple wives, not a single woman had multiple husbands. It’s against the will of God.” This is his justification for having multiple “girlfriends” whose passports he has confiscated and made to work for him in scam call centres.
This misogyny is taking a sinister hold on our youth. A study carried out only a few months ago found that 8 in 10 British teens had watched his videos and nearly half had a positive view of what he had to say. Increasingly, schoolteachers are raising alarm bells about boys being radicalised into sexism.
We have to be honest. If boys are looking to answers like these, it is because they are confused about what their role is in our society. We have to be able to answer them with better values and better role models.
Let us look at the example of Moses. Early on in his story, Moses witnesses a slaver beating an elderly Israelite. According to our Torah, Moses looked this way and that, saw that there was no man, and beat the slaver back. Our tradition asks: what can mean that Moses saw no man? We know that everyone saw what Moses did.
Rather, he saw no man in the sense that Hillel advocated. He saw nobody who cared enough to do anything. The rabbis rebuke Moses for his violence, but praise him for his motivations. What made him a man, in this setting, was that he burned with compassion, even for a complete stranger, and the lowliest in society. His masculinity is defined by his sense of love and justice.
Right now, Andrew Tate is going through the judicial courts in Romania for human trafficking, sexual exploitation, and violence against women. Tate is nothing like what Torah imagines to be a real man. He has literally taken on the role of the slaver. He is everything that God sees as contemptible and wrong.
In this week’s parashah, Moses warns the Israelites not to become like the other nations. He insists that Israelites must not be seduced into worshipping what others worship or valuing what they value. Their practices, Moses warns, burn their sons and their daughters. So it is with the misogyny we see here: it might look alluring to some, but are ultimately destructive.
According to Professor Daniel Boyarin, one of the world’s leading Talmud scholars, Jewish masculinity has always been articulated differently. In Eastern Ashkenaz, the ideal male was gentle and pale, buried in books, concerned with sensitivity and kindness. They imagined the non-Jews, by comparison, as brutes. Their boasts of success in domination of women, land, and resources were dismissed as “goyishe naches.”
For most of Jewish history, women have been the primary breadwinners in households. This is still the case, especially in the most traditional communities. Eastern European Jews prized many of the things that non-Jews saw as feminine traits. They were musicians, gardeners, candle-makers, tailors, and translators. Our Christian neighbours were so surprised by Jewish men’s commitment to housework and childcare that it was even a common rumour among gentiles that Jewish men menstruate.
Think about this in the context of the bar mitzvah, and what we do to turn Jewish boys into men. They are set the task of learning a new language, and mastering a section of holy text. We get them to talk about how these words make them feel, and treat their ideas as if they matter. We send them on expeditions to do charity work, getting them to raise money, visit the sick and care for the elderly. We encourage them to lead the community in prayer. These are the values of traditional Jewish masculinity: scholarly, thoughtful, emotional, charitable, and caring.
Professor Boyarin is keen to be clear that this does not mean Jewish masculinity is unproblematic. After all, we, too, have operated a patriarchal society, and it is still an ongoing struggle, even in Reform synagogues, for us to produce gender-equal communities.
Personally, much of my own journey over the last three years has been to learn that being a man is not just about self-sacrifice, but must also include self-care. I had imagined my only role was to provide, and didn’t know how to receive. I have had to learn to talk about feelings with trusted friends, include my own needs in important decisions, and strive towards open dialogue. This is hard, but I recognise that this is part of the work of becoming a good Jewish man.
I know that there are many men in this community who have been on similar journeys. I see the way you love your families; how you treat discussions with reasoned compassion; how you have spent your lives perfecting your professional crafts; how you seek to model your lives on Torah teachings of gentle wisdom.
That is why this is a heartfelt plea to the men in the community to talk with teenage boys in their lives about what being a man means. Teach them what you have learned about respect, tolerance, and sensitivity. Talk to the boys. Because somebody else is talking to them, and you would be horrified by what he is saying.
And if his ideas infect the minds of our youth, we will lose our nice Jewish boys. And then there truly will be no more men.
So, in a place where there are no men, strive to be a man. A loving, kind, generous, sensitive, and gentle man.
Shabbat shalom.
Barbie World’s Jewish Metaphysics
As you know from all the advertising hype, there is a film out at the moment that deals with some of the most complex moral and philosophical questions of our time. It is already touted to win many awards, and has spurned fantastic conversations about truth, ethics, and politics.
I’m talking, of course, about Barbie.
Barbie already holds such a sentimental place in my heart. While the other boys liked wrestling, Fifa and war toys, I just wanted to play with my dolls’ hair.
I know, you’d never guess it. The butch man you see before you was once obsessed with the Dreamtopia Mermaid Barbie.
So, last week I did my duty as a good consumer, and went to the cinema for the first time since Dead Pool 2 came out. A lot has changed since I last went to the movies five years ago, and it seems that now everyone dresses up as the characters in the film. I was thrilled to get out my Ken costume, which I never knew I would have a use for.
During the film, I laughed, I cried, I reminisced. And as I left the theatre, I thought: “I’m sure I can squeeze a sermon out of this.”
Yes, that’s right, welcome to your Shabbat morning dvar Torah on the theological metaphysics of Barbie World.
Don’t worry if you haven’t seen the movie: I promise that will not help this make any more sense.
To help put this into perspective, I’ll give a quick summary of the storyline. Margot Robbie is a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world. Her life in plastic is fantastic. She is driven by the power of imagination. Life is her creation.
In Barbie World, a doll can be anything. A President, a marine biologist, a Nobel Laureate, a mechanic, a pastry chef, or a lawyer. Even a rabbi.
But then a great intrusion comes into Barbie’s dream world. She finds that she now has cellulite and existential dread. This plastic world of fantasy suddenly starts to turn into something… horrifyingly human.
Barbie therefore must travel to the world in which people play with her, to find out what is going on in the world of real girls.
The result is distressing. It turns out that the real world is defined by misery and hatred, and, in this world, girls absolutely cannot do anything they want.
I am interested in the interplay between these two worlds. In the plastic world, anything is possible, but none of it matters. In the human world, everything matters, but nothing is possible. These two versions of reality conform to two popular narratives.
The first is that this world is just a simulation. That view is being propogated right now by Elon Musk and Neil deGrasse Tyson. It says: none of this is really real. Our world is like Barbie World: it is someone else’s fantasy that we are stuck in, playing roles. Anything is possible, but only the terms of the magnificent computer directing our lives.
I understand why that idea is so appealing. The word is a mess. There is something reassuring about believing that none of it is really happening and it’s all out of our control.
Although today this idea can appeal to new innovations in quantum physics, it is actually a very old idea. In the 17th Century, Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley promoted a similar philosophy, called “immaterialism.” We are all, he said, simply ideas in the mind of God.
Berkeley continues: if this world is just an illusion, your only duty is to conform to the role you have been given. You must blindly follow authority. We must all submit to the law and do as we are told.
Barbie has been told that she must fulfill the stereotype she has been molded in, and she has no choice but to accept it.
We need not wonder why a group of billionaires would like us to think this way. If reality is just an illusion, we just have to accept our place. And there’s no point resisting it, because the script has already been written, and none of it means anything anyway.
But the alternative world of the Barbie film – the human world – is not compelling either. In the human world, everything is made up of futile facts. It’s all real, and there’s nothing you can do about it. The grass is green. People grow old. You will get cellulite. Patriarchy is inevitable. It is all meaningful, but its only meaning is that everything is deeply, existentially depressing.
This is also a very popular worldview right now. It is best encapsulated by conservative talk show host, Ben Shapiro, whose dictum is “facts don’t care about your feelings.”
And that idea can be seductive too. The world is changing so fast and so much. Why can’t everyone just accept that everything is the way it is and stop moving so much?
Ben Shapiro offers brutal reality as an antidote to too many ideas. You think this world is horrible? Tough. You’re lumbered with it. This vulgar materialism, that says everything just is the way it is and nothing will ever change, is just as reactionary as the immaterialism that says nothing matters.
So, let’s get to the point. What does Judaism have to say about this?
Is this all just a simulation so that we are all just living in a fantasy world?
Or is this all the cold, hard, truth of reality?
In the 20th Century, Jewish philosopher Ernst Bloch tried to offer a third way. Bloch was a religious socialist from Germany, who fled around Europe as the Nazis took power everywhere he went. For him, it was deeply important to develop a view of the world where the unfolding horrors of fascism could be stopped. Any metaphysics that kept people from changing their circumstances had to be resisted.
Bloch turned to great religious thinkers of the past to remind people: it doesn’t just matter what is; it matters what could be.
This world is real, and the one thing we know about reality is that it is constantly in flux. Everything is as it is, and everything will be different.
Everything is subject to change. Everything that is is also something else that is not yet.
Ice turns into water turns into steam. Acorns become sprouts become mighty trees. People grow and age and learn. Societies progress from hunter-gatherers out of feudal peasantry and move to abolish slavery.
In all of their forms, these things are exactly what they are, and are also everything they could be. They are only what they are for a brief moment as they are becoming something else. The movement of water into ice is just as real and possible as the movement for women’s equality.
To put it another way: this world is real, but it doesn’t have to be. There are so many other very real worlds we could live in.
Ernst Bloch would have loved the metaphysics of Barbie World. It doesn’t just leave us with the misery of the real world or the pointlessness of the fantasy world. It shows us that both worlds speak to each other. The real world can become more like the fantasy world, and the fantasy world can become more like the real one.
This is the Jewish approach. Our task is not just to accept the world but to change it. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks used to teach: “faith is a protest against the world-that-is by the world-that-ought-to-be.” Faith, for Sacks, is the demand that this imperfect world could be more like the utopian one. Like Bloch, Sacks talked about Judaism as the “religion of not-yet,” always moving towards what it would one day be.
This is what animates the Jewish religious mind: the possibility that this world, here and now, could be transformed into the vision we have of a perfected Paradise.
So, how do we get there?
Once again, we have to take our inspiration from Barbie. When Barbie wanted to get from the fantasy world to the real one, first, she got in a car, then on a boat, a tandem, a rocket, a camper, a snowmobile, and finally a pair of rollerskates.
To bridge the gap between worlds, all she had to do was put one foot in front of the other.
That is what we must do too. We must take small steps in our pink stilettos, and set out towards the real fantasy world.
Utopia already awaits us.
Shabbat shalom.
Why Jews do not believe in Hell
When I was a teenager, I went on some kind of away day with other Progressive Jewish youth.
The rabbi – I can’t remember who – told a story.
A woman dies and enters the afterlife. There, the angels greet her and offer her a tour of the two possible residencies: Heaven and Hell.
First, she enters Hell. It is just one long table, filled with delicious foods. The only problem is that they all have splinted arms. Their limbs are fixed in such positions that they could not possibly feed themselves. They struggle, thrusting their hands against the table and the bowl. Even if they successfully get some food, they cannot retract their arms back to their mouths. They are eternally starving, crying out in anguish. That was Hell.
Next, she enters Heaven. Well, it’s exactly the same place! There is a long table, filled with delicious foods, and all the people sitting at it have splinted arms. But here, there is banqueting and merriment; everyone is eating and singing and chatting. The difference is simply that, while in Hell, people only tried to feed themselves, here in Heaven they feed each other.
She ran back to Hell to share this solution with the poor souls trapped there. She whispered in the ear of one starving man, “You do not have to go hungry. Use your spoon to feed your neighbor, and he will surely return the favour and feed you.”
“‘You expect me to feed the detestable man sitting across the table?’ said the man angrily. ‘I would rather starve than give him the pleasure of eating!’
The difference between Heaven and Hell isn’t the setting, but how people treat each other.
At the conclusion of this story, one of the other teenagers – I can’t remember who, but I promise it wasn’t me – put his hand up and said: “But I thought Jews don’t believe in Hell?”
The rabbi shrugged and said: “True. It’s just a story.”
Years later, though, the story, and the resultant question, have stuck with me.
Was it just a story? Do Jews really have no concept of Hell?
The truth is complicated.
Among most Jews, you will find very little assent to the idea of punishment in the afterlife.
In part, that is simply because most of Judaism does not have a clear systematic theology. There is no Jewish version of the catechism, affirming a set of views about the nature of God, the point of this life, and the outcomes in the next.
Rather, Judaism holds multiple and conflicting ideas. On almost every issue, you can find rabbinic voices in tension, holding opposite views that are part of the Truth of a greater whole. We don’t mandate ideas, we entertain them.
So, a better question would be: does Judaism entertain the idea of Hell?
And the answer is still: it’s complicated.
Yes, it does. The story that rabbi told of the people with the splinted arms comes from the Lithuanian-Jewish musar tradition. It is attributed to Rabbi Haim of Romshishok.
The idea of pious Jews going on tours of Heaven and Hell has a long history. In the Palestinian Talmud, a pious Jew sees, to his horror, his devoted and charitable friend die but go unmourned. On the same day, a tax collector, a collaborator with the Roman Empire, dies and the entire city stops to attend his funeral.
To comfort the pious man, God grants him a dream-vision of what happened to each of them in the afterlife. His righteous friend enjoys a life of happiness and plenty in Heaven, surrounded by gardens and orchards. The tax collector, on the other hand, sits by waters, desperately thirsty, with his tongue stretched out, but unable to drink. Where one gave in this life, he received in the next. Where the other took in this life, he was famished in the next.
This is a revenge fantasy. The story comes from oppressed people coming to terms with the success of their conquerors and the humiliation of the good in their generation.
The fantasy is powerful, and the motifs repeat throughout Jewish history. In almost every generation, you can find people pondering about how bad people will be punished and good people will be rewarded when this life is over.
But, with equal frequency, you can find Jewish scepticism about this view of the world. The Babylonian rabbis warn us not to speculate on what lies in the hereafter, for God alone knows such secrets. Our greatest philosophers like Rambam and Gersonides strenuously deny any concept of post-mortem torture.
These debates have persisted even into the modern era. During the Enlightenment, there were those who claimed that a rational religion could have no place for the primitive nonsense of Hell. Equally, there were those who said belief in divine retribution was the hallmark of a civilised belief system.
So where did the idea come from, asserted so confidently by that teenager on a day trip, that Jews have no concept of Hell?
The truth is it is very recent.
In surveys of attitudes, Jewish belief in Hell plummeted after the Second World War.
In all the revenge fantasies and horror stories that people could concoct about Hell, not one of them sounded as bad as Auschwitz.
There is no conceivable God who is cruel enough to do what the Nazis did. No such God would be worthy of worship.
We have no need to fantasise about freezing cold places filled with trapped souls, or raging furnaces. We need not imagine a world after this one where people are starved and tortured and brutalised. We know that world has already existed here on earth.
Isn’t Hell already here still? Doesn’t it still exist right here in this world for all those mothers putting their toddlers in dinghies hoping the sea will take them away from the war? Don’t those horrors already exist in for people working in Congolese gold mines or Bangladeshi sweat shops?
Hell is already here. It is war and occupation and famine and drought and slavery and trafficking. There is no need for nightmares of brimstone when people are living these things every day.
That was the point of the story that rabbi was telling us.
The difference between Heaven and Hell isn’t the setting, but how people treat each other.
We already live in a world of plenty. We have the flowing streams and gardens and orchards our sages imagine. But, like the inhabitants of Hell, we are pumping sewage into the streams, turning the gardens into car parks, and logging the orchards for things we do not need.
We are sat before a fine banquet where there is enough for everyone, but half the population are not eating while a tiny minority are engorged with more than they need. We are living the vision laid out in the parable.
Yes, this world is a Hell, but it could be a Heaven too.
The difference between Heaven and Hell isn’t the setting, but how people treat each other.
Look at all that we have. Look at the support we can give each other. We may have splinted arms but all we need do is outstretch them.
We have the capacity to annihilate all hunger, poverty, and war. We really could end all prejudice and oppression. This planet could be a paradise!
And, if we know that we can make this world a Heaven, why would we wait until we die?
Shabbat shalom.
Sim Lev 