judaism

A true prophet’s destiny is despair

May 9, 2026May 9, 2026 levtaylor

All has been foreseen. That is a warning, not a comfort.

When the Progressive Jewish movement was born, its founders pledged to uphold the religion of the Prophets. Our guides would be those men of ancient Israel who courageously denounced injustice and proclaimed hope to the world.

At the time, I wonder how much attention they paid to the lives of the visionaries they sought to emulate. We know little about most of the historic prophets, if indeed they existed at all.

But, if we have one image of what they looked like, it’s probably Rembrandt’s painting of Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem.

Jeremiah is surrounded by darkness, slumped on the craggy rocks of the Negev. His left elbow rests on what are possibly his only possessions, including a book that we know will become part of our Bible.

The most illuminated part of the composition is Jeremiah’s bald forehead, drawing our eyes into his face. That face. It is so intensely pained; so sullen and exhausted. The wrinkles furrow, as if calling us to ask whether anything of this destruction was avoidable. I am captivated by the eyes, which cannot be more than two dark brushstrokes, but communicate more anguish than any scream I have ever heard.

Jeremiah spent his entire life warning Israel that it would be destroyed. He chastised them that their social injustice and complacency would be their ruin. He promised them plagues, persecution, exile and war.

Jeremiah had the unfortunate honour to see all of his visions come true.

At every stage, he promised them they could be redeemed if only they would repent of their ways. Whether that part was true, we will never have the fortune of knowing.

This is the model of our religion; the person whose mantle we have chosen to take. It is that of a man miserable enough to have been proven right; to watch everything he loved, and all that he held sacred, burn.

In some ways, prophesying doom is an easy gig. Economists are always predicting the next crash and defence experts are forever prepared for the next war. Misery is one of life’s guarantees.

When Progressive Judaism began, its progenitors insisted that prophecy was about forthtelling, not foretelling: speaking the truth about how the world really is, rather than guessing what is to be. But really one yields the other. When you see clearly how terrible the world is, you can accurately predict its tragic ends.

In Greek antiquity, Cassandra was cursed by the god Apollo to always tell the truth and never be believed. She issued accurate prophecies, and nobody took note.

Perhaps with hindsight, what she foresaw was obvious. War was coming and Troy would be defeated. Then King Agamemnon would be captured and slaughtered, as would she. The Greek ships would sink. As the city states fell, people would spend decades at sea without mooring. Disaster awaited.

All Cassandra had to do was see clearly what was happening in Greece’s unfolding civilisational collapse to know that destruction was inevitable.

And we cannot blame her countrymen for disbelieving her either. If someone stares that far into the abyss, nobody wants to be dragged into the darkness with them. Their misery sounds cloying and narcissistic. It feels impossible to bear.

If somebody tells you that the world you know and the people you love are on the brink of destruction, you have to disbelieve them. How else will you go to work, raise your children, care for your sick? How can you live in this world if you honestly believe it is ending?

Torah warned us that if a prophet predicted something and it did not come to pass, you could ignore them. They prophesied in vain.

The grand visions of peace on earth and justice rolling out like a stream haven’t happened yet.

The Christians circumvented this by writing their texts so it looked like their carpenter was fulfilling all the visions; even if the world self-evidently was not perfected. They deferred it by saying the other prophecies were still to come.

And we Progressive Jews have avoided the problem too, by claiming that the Messianic Age is forever not yet.

Perhaps it is forever not at all.

The only prophecies that have come true are the promises of disaster. The only accurate predictions were of death, plague, humiliation, and exile.

We said we wanted to be heirs to the prophets. We saw in their proclamations antecedents to the Enlightenment values of truth, equality, peace, comradeship, progress and righteousness. We heard God’s word refracted through them like a clarion call, and said we would now take it as ours.

Scattered in exile, we would be a light unto the nations. We would teach the world to study war no more. We would bring on the day when the false gods of prejudice and materialism were finally vanquished before the altar of Infinite Unity.

I need you to know that I believed every word. Even if nobody else did, I really did.

I thought I might see it in my lifetime. The great unfolding of history. Our glorious march towards true justice and equality. Call it the Revolution or the Messianic Age or Peace on Earth, I truly believed it was coming.

And it didn’t matter to us that the only full life story we knew was Jeremiah’s. Jeremiah went to jail and we would go to jail too. For the climate, for peace, for civil rights, for democracy. Progressive Jews have proudly broken the law and resisted injustice to take up the place of the suffering servant.

In Lamentations, we see the words Jeremiah spoke when he witnessed his city destroyed.

“I am the man who has seen afflictions at God’s hands…”

“…We have suffered terror and pitfalls, ruin and destruction. Streams of tears flow from my eyes because my people are destroyed…”

“…My people have become heartless, like ostriches in the desert…”

“…All this has happened because of the sins of the prophets and the iniquities of the priests…”

“…The visions of your prophets were false and worthless; they did not expose your sin to ward off your captivity. The prophecies they gave you were false and misleading…”

“… All our friends have betrayed us, and become our enemies…”

I am not sleeping well.

I wake up multiple times in the night with my fists clenched, gripping my bedsheets. I’m scared and angry and I feel so alone.

In the last month, an Iranian was arrested for hostile reconnaissance on the college where I trained to be a rabbi. A close friend, my witness at my wedding, had her street evacuated because terrorists were hiding in the gardens. A close friend, who I’m going on holiday with at the end of the month, had the synagogue where she works targeted with a petrol bomb.

None of these incidents made national news.

They are background noise to stabbings in Golders Green; murders at Heaton Park; arson at Nelson Street; smashed windows with lighter fluid at Kenton Park. Every festival, I interrupt the running of religious services to say Jews have been killed somewhere.

Am I even praying any more, or am I just trying to keep people calm?

All of this was so foreseeable. At least it feels so in hindsight.

We Progressive Jews fully embraced citizenship in Europe. We aligned ourselves with the British establishment for our protection. We swore fidelity to the monarchy in our weekly prayers. We embedded ourselves in this country and became integral to the state.

Then, in a moment of counter-culture, when people became anti-establishment and angry at the state, we were the accessible human bodies they could grasp, and stab.

We Progressive Jews rejected all politics of race and nation. We would be a moral movement, expressing only the best of the prophetic message.

But the rest of the world is based on racism and nationalism. Everyone else sees the world through the lens of race. Through their glasses, a Jew at prayer in London is indistinguishable from a Jew driving a tank in Gaza. They think they can exact war and revenge on us.

We aligned ourselves with Israel because it promised us hope. After the Shoah, we needed some guarantee of safety to cling to. We advocated for Israel and defended it. Maybe in our own eyes, too, the Diaspora and the State became indistinguishable.

We muddied the waters of our own understanding of what antisemitism was. We fought with each other, to define it, and to show where our loyalties lay. People couldn’t trust us to say what was happening. Now they absorb hateful propaganda that says we are doing all this to ourselves.

We chose bad allies to bring down people who weren’t real enemies. At the time, I expressed my fear that because of all this, people would blame the Jews for Britain’s problems.

‘Of course they wouldn’t,’ a friend assured me. ‘That would be antisemitic.’

Now, we attend rallies addressed by Nigel Farage. It is the last gasp of a failed effort to find security in race, the state, and the establishment: the very things that are making us unsafe.

The Progressive Jewish answer was always supposed to be different. We would, instead, find safety in solidarity. Our best defence is our neighbours. True security is in the positive relationships we build across other faiths, with all the oppressed communities of the world.

Where are our allies now?

I suppose we may never know whether our way would have worked.

Jeremiah told the Israelites, he told them it would happen. “Do not ally with one power,” he warned, “or another one will destroy you. And then your allies will destroy you too.”

“Do not seek surety in militaries and empires. You can only count on God.”

And then God will abandon you, too.

After the Shoah, Progressive Jews rejected the cruelty of Orthodox theologies that insisted we only had ourselves to blame. We were the victims of unjust systems, who only had bad choices in a world stacked against us.

What a great promise the worker’s revolution had been! The proletariat would shake off the chains of capitalism and all would finally be free. And yet, in every country where Jews lived under communism, they were so far from free.

The Bund: the Jewish worker’s movement; the Yiddish pamphleteers; the revolutionary singers. They would save us!

I think, now, that we romanticised them so much because they were all dead. They couldn’t make mistakes or show their weaknesses or try out their ideas and see them fail. They are all dead. All of them. The dead cannot save us.

Maybe some day, we will be the subjects of nostalgia too: the last Jews crazy enough to have faith in the prophets.

And the tolerance of liberal democracy, what of it? Didn’t it offer the very first promise under Napoleon’s tricolor that Jews might have freedom?

The safest places are safe until they are not.

I think of my great grandmother who left Lima for Berlin at the start of the 20th Century. How confident she must have been that she was heading to the safest haven on earth. I don’t need to tell you what happened to her.

I don’t think we have anywhere safe to run this time. Not Israel, even with its Iron Dome and bomb shelters. Not America, even with the hegemon’s promise to be the land of the free. I cannot imagine escaping to anywhere.

And do not pretend to me that there is any virtue in the Orthodox fantasy of good wives helping their little husbands do mitzvot while they all pretend the world is unchanging and grow ever more sadistic with it. You cannot pray your way out of reality, or study your way out of people’s dignity.

Every option available to the Jews failed miserably. Zangwill imagined that Salonika would be a great centre of Jewish life as part of an international community. The Nazis had a near complete kill-rate there.

After the Shoah, we had to find hope somewhere else.

Israel may have been a mistake, but it was the only mistake the Jews had left to make. Zionism was the only dead end the Jews hadn’t yet gone down. And, after all that, sadly, it will not bring us safety in the end either.

Why would the Palestinians give up their land and abandon their homes without a fight? How could we expect the Muslims to tolerate Jews controlling Jerusalem? There was no way any of it could survive without subjugating the Arabs and contorting the Jews until neither were recognisable.

The Jewish Left said that the Israelis and Palestinians would either all live together or all die together. I fear the choice has been made for them in board rooms they have not entered.

If I could see into the abyss as clearly as Cassandra did, I would wager that, in less than a hundred years, Jerusalem will be a desert wasteland, where every few weeks a new man will declare himself Pope, Emperor, Caliph, or Mashiach. The only thing we can’t yet imagine is what awful weapons they will have.

The only option still not explored is the prophets’ dream of lions lying down with lambs and justice flowing like an ever-flowing stream. It hasn’t happened yet.

I need you to know that I still believe in it. Even if nobody else does really, I still believe.

I just don’t think it will happen in my lifetime. It may never happen at all.

When Progressive Judaism was born, we renounced all claim to Israel. ‘Berlin will be our Jerusalem,’ promised Mendelssohn, as he cajoled us out of the ghetto. The enlightened democracies will be our Zion.

Berlin was Jerusalem, for a while. And then it was a graveyard for a generation of my family.

I’m not sleeping well. I feel like a balding man, clutching his bible, watching his city burn.

With such pride we said that I was the first person in my family to be born in the same country as his father. England was our home.

England is our home. Jewish life here is beautiful and vibrant. If they could only see how our children run around at house parties; how we spend weeks immersed in study; how our musicians play the house down; how our theatremakers make us laugh our guts out. How we bless our babies, our bnei mitzvah, our teens, our weddings, our anniversaries, our dead; how we pray with all our soul and might.

A quarter of Britons say it would make no difference if we disappeared tomorrow.

England has been our Jerusalem too. I do not know what it will become.

Maybe it isn’t too late.

The future is unwritten. That is a threat, not a promise.

Why do people hate Jews?

April 23, 2026April 23, 2026 levtaylor

A joke from darker times in history.

Two Jews sit on a park bench in 1930s Germany. One sees that his friend is reading Der Sturmer, the mouthpiece of the Nazi Party. Horrified, he asks: “what on earth are you doing reading that rag?”

His friend replies: “This newspaper says Jews control the banks, the media, and the governments of every country. These days, that’s the only good news I get!”

I try, where I can, to pay attention to the questions people in this community are asking, and make my sermons answer them. The question I have heard most frequently in the past few weeks is: “why do people hate Jews?”

I’ve heard it from young and old, Jew and non-Jew, left and right. It’s a heartbreaking question, because it shows how anxious people are. It is a serious question, so it deserves serious answers.

Why do people hate Jews?

My first answer is: they don’t.

Look at our neighbours, friends and coworkers. We are surrounded by love.

Whenever the Jewish community faces attacks, this synagogue is inundated with messages of support. (You will remember that, for a while, we kept all our letters of solidarity on a board.)

When Finchley Reform Synagogue was threatened last week, their local community came to uplift them. Mosques, churches and community centres. The Lebanese community brought doughnuts. The councillors, politicians and emergency service workers filled up the shul until it was standing-room only.

These people don’t hate us: they stand with us.

But that doesn’t mean no people hate Jews. Clearly, some do.

On Monday night, the BBC ran a Panorama called “Why are British Jews afraid?” It brought the wider British public’s attention to the reasons for fear of which we are already aware.

The attack on Heaton Park Synagogue on Yom Kippur. The murderous gunman on Bondi Beach at Chanukah.

In the last month, terrorists set fire to Hatzola ambulances and attempted arson against multiple Jewish gathering points in north west London. Recently, an Iranian operative was arrested for plotting to attack the site where I trained to be a rabbi, the Sternberg Centre.

Reports once distant are coming closer to home, affecting my own friends and colleagues.

It is because of these abhorrent acts that the question is even asked: why do people hate Jews?

Yet, even in these cases, I don’t think the perpetrators actually hate Jews, because I don’t think they even know who we are. Had the teenagers from Leyton who set fire to Hatzola ambulances ever met a Jew?

They were not even thinking about Chabad of Golders Green. Presumably, they were responding to news from the Middle East, but that doesn’t mean their violence is just misdirected anger against Israel.

I find it quite perverse to entertain the idea that, if only Israel would behave itself, British Jews wouldn’t warrant terror threats. I think most of us have expressed great anguish over Gaza, but that doesn’t prompt us to attack ambulances. The same is true of the rest of Britain.

As Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust said on the BBC documentary: the vast majority of people attending pro-Palestinian protests in London are motivated by a sincere concern for human rights. It is a minority of interlopers that are the cause for concern.

The primary groups who radicalise against British Jews are white nationalists and Islamists. Neither group particularly cares about Palestinians or Israelis, but only makes a pretence of it to serve their own supremacist agendas.

People were attacking Jews and Jewish institutions for many centuries before Israel was founded. They don’t need Israel to commit war crimes to justify burning synagogues.

Antisemitism is not really about Jews. Not real, living Jewish people. It is about a fantasy boogeyman who causes all the world’s problems.

The people who commit crimes against Jews are generally boys whose lives lack meaning. They know that something is wrong with the world, but they have no words to say what. So they invent an enemy, and their fabricated villain is a Jew.

The problem is not that they don’t like Jews but that they don’t like themselves.

Still, you can’t get from feeling dissatisfied with life to chucking petrol bombs at a synagogue without encouragement.

Antisemitism, like all forms of bigotry, is created from the top down.

April Rosenblum’s pamphlet The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere is a fantastic introduction to what antisemitism is and how to fight it.

Medieval antisemitism, she says, worked by having a group to sit in between the masses and the ruling class. Unlike other forms of racism, which are about making sure the boot is always on some minority’s neck, antisemitism worked by creating a buffer class so the people in charge could blame someone when things went wrong.

So, England on the brink of bankruptcy from Crusades banished the Jews; the Tsar’s supporters in decaying Russia invented The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; and in the 1930s Nazis gained power in impoverished, humiliated Germany by promising to deal with the Jews.

Judaism has changed much in the last thousand years, but antisemitism hasn’t. When Donald Trump says “the Jews don’t like me because they can’t buy me” or Elon Musk says Jews push hatred against whites, they’re standing in a long tradition of elites pointing at Jews for problems they created.

When Iranian leaders say that terrorist attacks are false flags launched by Jeffrey Epstein’s cabal to undermine Europe, they’re not even trying to hide their conspiracies behind innuendos.

These people don’t hate Jews. Jews are just convenient fodder for their smokescreens. What they hate is that they might lose some of their wealth or power. What they can’t stand is the thought that people might see past the lies and blame the real enemy: them!

Whether in America, Iran, or Britain, demagogues want people to hate Jews so that they won’t ask questions about what really causes social problems.

If only people did just hate Jews, it would be easier to defeat antisemitism. We could find every one of our enemies and bash them down like an anti-racist game of whack-a-mole.

But antisemitism runs deeper than that. It is a system of distraction and confusion, baked into the world’s contradictions over hundreds of years. It may draw on myths from religious texts or items from the news, but its core object of hate is not a real Jew.

Its Jew is a pantomime villain, created by corrupt elites to give desperate people someone to blame. The Jew they hate is a phantom, who vanishes on contact with reality.

So, to all those in this community asking why people hate Jews, let me say with surety: there is nothing in you that deserves hatred.

There is nothing you have done that made terrorists mad. There is nothing you could have done differently to stop fools attacking synagogues. Their hatred is not for you.

But the love is real. The relationships we have with our neighbours are based on genuine connections. The friendships we have built across faiths are sincere. The good work we do in our community has a real impact.

May we never let anybody’s hatred diminish that. May we only love harder.

Let us love our neighbours more. Let us love each other more. Let us love, ever more, our synagogue, our Torah, and our God.

So let us love Jews.

Shabbat shalom.

sermon · torah

Who gets to see the world?

October 31, 2025October 31, 2025 levtaylor

Hello, I am back from my holidays in Spain and France. I brought you all back some lovely little trinkets from The Louvre. Just don’t tell anybody you got them from me.

I spent my holiday thinking about how easy it is for me to travel, and how impressive my journey would seem to previous generations. I wondered about what it was like in earlier centuries for people travelling the world.

In 1532, a great king travelled across the Atlantic to meet a previously unencountered tribe. The king was, in some ways, disgusted by the society he encountered, which was rife with inequality, governed by a despotic ruler, near constantly in a state of war, and yet to develop serious hygiene practice.

He was, however, impressed by the luxuries he saw in the local king’s palace, and intrigued by the sophisticated religious culture the people had developed.

The indigenous people went by many names, but the locals called themselves “the English.”

That’s right, in the early 16th Century, an Aimoré king travelled across the Atlantic from Brazil to the court of King Henry VIII and attended the palace as a distinguished guest.

We are used to thinking of international travel in the Tudor Age as something that voyagers from England, Portugal, Italy and Spain did to the so-called “New World,” but plenty of people also went the other way.

Recently, the historian Caroline Dodds Pennock released a book called On Savage Shores, which looks at the people who travelled from the Americas to Europe. They gave their own verdicts on European society, often quite damning of its inequality and sanitation.

Dodds Pennock is well aware that, by telling these stories, she is reversing the gaze. To the indigenous travellers, it was the Europeans who were the strange exotic outsiders.

If this feels surprising to us, it is probably because we are so in the habit of imagining that rich colonising men go out and see the world, but we don’t often think of those same men getting looked at by the world.

There is a reason that Abraham’s story of setting out from Haran was so compelling to its ancient listeners. Most people did not travel more than a mile from their own town. The world beyond was a mysterious and exciting place. They could only hear about the journeys, people, animals, and plants that others saw from testimonies, like those given in the Torah.

Abraham’s trek belongs, then, in a similar category of travel literature to Homer’s Odyssey, which was likely told as an oral story, and then committed to writing at a similar time to Abraham’s journey in the Torah. Odysseus encounters singing sirens, multi-headed monsters, and lotuses that make you forget your home.

Abraham, on the other hand, goes on a thousand-mile hike with no less than the One True God. Along the way, he marries a foreign princess, meets the king of Egypt, does battle in the Dead Sea with local lords, and meets angelic messengers over a meal.

This story must have remained compelling to many generations of Jews afterwards. Medieval Jews were used to living in one place. They may have been visited by merchants and Crusaders. Some may have gone away on fixed routes as merchants, and there were times when whole communities had to leave in haste.

But the idea that one of their own – the first ever Jew – went out on such an exciting adventure would have been thrilling to the Torah’s audience.

We know much of what other people thought of the Jews they met. Medieval accounts describe Jews almost as a people fixed in time; like a noble relic from a simpler age. The European travellers who encounter Jews treat them with a combination of scorn and exotic interest. In that sense, the Jews of Europe had more in common with the colonised people of the Americas, who were similarly treated as foreign oddities.

Bucking the trend, however, was a fascinating figure of the 12th Century, called Benjamin of Tudela. Born in the Spanish kingdom of Navarre, Benjamin went out on a journey tracing the Jewish communities of southern Europe, northern Africa, and south west Asia.

He took a long route on pilgrimage to Jerusalem that brought him through countries we would know today as Italy, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran. He seems also to have travelled around the Arabian peninsula, looking for the Jews of Africa, but never reaching the Gondar region of Ethiopia, where he might have found them.

Benjamin recorded all of his encounters in Hebrew, in a book called Sefer HaMasa’ot, the Book of Travels. His chronicles were so fascinating that they were reproduced over many centuries, and translated into Latin and most European languages.

Today, Benjamin’s records have attracted scholarly attention, not least because they subvert our expectations of who goes exploring and who gets explored. Benjamin writes with fascination and joy about the Pope in Rome and the Caliph in Baghdad.

Most importantly, when Benjamin meets Jews in other countries, he is at once meeting his own people and meeting people entirely different from himself. When he sees how other Jews do things differently, he feels joy in diversity. When he sees Jews doing well, he feels pride; and when he sees other Jews in a persecuted condition, he suffers with them as his own.

This is the great blessing of Benjamin’s travelogue: he can see the world through two sets of eyes – as both an outsider and as an insider. When he travels, he is never quite the colonialist going out to comment on others, but he’s never just looking at his own people. This gives him an impressive position of humble curiosity.

As British Jews, we may learn to do the same thing.

We have a blessing by dint of our position. That blessing is a special ability to look at the world through multiple sets of eyes.

We can, indeed, look at the world through European eyes. We are Europeans, and we belong here. We can see England as it is imagined by the English, where this island is the centre of the world, its monarchs the most illustrious, its culture the highest human attainment. We should not shy away from seeing the best in Europe: we are part of it, and there is much to love.

We can also, if we choose too, see this continent through outsiders’ eyes. We can see its flaws, its delusions of grandeur, and its odd habits. We can be the best possible internal critics of our country, because we understand what it is to belong, and what it is to feel like we do not.

The danger in either of these sets of eyes is that we turn them into a haughty gaze. Like the early colonialists, we have the capacity to see every other culture as backward and barbaric, or its people and lands as subjects for exploitation. Inverting the gaze, we might come to see the Europeans as horrible invaders, without directing the critical lens on ourselves.

But if, instead, we can approach the whole world with modesty, we can see every nation and every place with loving curiosity. With humility, we can see ourselves as fellow travellers with everyone else, discovering this wonderful world together.

If we can do this, then, like Abraham, we may truly learn to walk with God.