In the Zhitomyr Oblast of what is now Ukraine, there is a city called Berdichyiv. In the middle of the 18th Century, this was a great market town in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
To here, flocked all the great, the good, and the downright nasty from every quarter of their empire. But, of the permanent residents, three-quarters of those who lived here were Jews.
So, come with me, on any ordinary day, to the old Jewish city of Berdichyiv. You will find the streets lined with stalls; you will see shop fronts wide open; you will meet throngs of people moving to music and entertainment. Here, you can buy just about anything, and sell just about anything too.
You have to watch your wallet for thieves, of course; and be very careful not to get involved in any of the gambling games on the side streets, because you are sure to be hustled. And pay attention to the great crush and clamour of shoppers beating each other for products, or tradesmen jostling for space and trying to bargain.
But that’s not the main show. You have to really listen if you want to know why we’ve come here. Can you hear it?
Can you hear the man shouting? You have to strain your ear to get a good grip on the sound over all the noise of the market square, but you’ll catch it. There it is!
“People! Remember that there is a God! People! Remember that there is a God!”
Look. There he is, standing atop the clocktower. The man with the fluffy shtreimel and wispy beard and sidelocks. He’s thin and spritely, and he’s gripping the side of the wall and calling out with all his might:
“People! Remember that there is a God!”
To most of the people shopping here, that’s Levi Yitzchok. But to his supporters, that’s the Holy Berdichever, the great Hassidic rabbi, the disciple of the Maggid of Mezritch.
To most of the people here, he’s just a madman. But to his supporters… well, they think he’s mad too. But they love him.
Of all of the places in the world that this sage could go, he chose to go to the most corrupt town with the most unbelieving Jews with the most sinful dispositions and minister to them with fanatical spiritual messages.
Sometimes he did that by going out to the poorest and the most despised, and treating them with great love, as if they were the shining light of God on Earth. And sometimes, like today, he would stand on a platform ranting at everyone to remember that there was a God.
Now, you might indeed think this man sounds like he was mad. But I think he sounds… relatable.
I cannot tell you how much I would love to find a spot at the London Stock Exchange or the arms fairs at the City Hall or on the steps of Parliament and do exactly this. “People! Remember that there is a God!”
Would our politicians and corporations treat our planet as if it were their own dustbin to be discarded and destroyed if they knew that it was a gift from their loving Creator?
Would they treat human life as if it were something so disposable and meaningless if they understood that each person was created in God’s image?
Could they behave in ways that are so shamelessly venal and debased if they thought they would one day have to answer for their deeds?
No. They act as if there is no God but greed itself, as they sacrifice everything on the altar of the market.
Oh sure, there are those who pretend to believe in God. If you like, Donald Trump will sign a copy of his own version of the Bible, which he has hawked in American public schools to make as much as $300k. But does anyone believe that Trump actually thinks there is One above him?
His only faith is in the false idols of wealth and power.
The snivelling lapdogs around him from the Christian fundamentalist right know that Trump doesn’t fear God. That’s what they like about him.
They are impressed by his ability to manipulate and lie for their own purposes. Their religion, whatever god they worship, wants racial segregation, control over women’s bodies, war on every continent, refugees in cages, and queer people excised from public life.
This doctrine of reaction may be one of the world’s major religions. (In fact, I think it’s the true belief system shared by many of the world leaders, whatever their outward claims may be.) But it has nothing to do with the God of our Scriptures.
In our haftarah, the Prophet Jeremiah takes to task exactly these people who profess belief on the one hand and behave amorally on the other. The priests, the teachers, and the rulers, he says, have all given up looking for God and decided to waste their time on their worthless idols.
In the world to which Jeremiah brought God’s message, the leaders worshipped the work of their hands. They venerated material things, but treated life as something disposable.
They loved their possessions but turned their back on the Fountain of Living Waters. They did deals and went to war with all the empires of the world, but neglected the still small voice of conscience implanted within them.
Today, has anything changed?
Actually, I think it has. We can do far more damage now than ever before.
The kinds of weapons held in very few hands were unimaginable to the biblical prophets. The levels of environmental destruction that companies could reap on God’s forests, skies, and waters have never been so great. The cost of such cruelty and indifference has never been so high.
In our liturgical cycle, we are in the three weeks of warning: where we read the Prophets’ greatest indictments against the Jews. That is why today we read the words of Jeremiah, chastising our people to remember their God and cease lusting after vanity and emptiness.
In this build-up to Tish Bav, we are supposed to be confronted by the scale of the world’s wrongs and the dangers of our inaction. So, we could just leave it there, to feel angry and devastated by all the brazen ruination.
But, the rabbis taught, even in these weeks of warning, we should never go away feeling hopeless. So, in constructing the haftarah, they skip an entire chapter, to Jeremiah’s promise of restoration, where he vows:
“Turn away from your love of material possessions, and God will come straight back to you. You will be able to speak of your faith with truth, justice, and righteousness. Then you will be a blessing to the nations of the world, and everyone will come and praise my name.”
Jeremiah offers us a way out, available at any moment.
The great condemnations of the prophets might better be delivered at Davos or the United Nations, but we all have a role to play. We can remember, in our own lives, what it means to behave as if there is a God.
Let us conduct ourselves as though, one day, we will have to answer for our deeds.
Let us treat each human being as if they were created in God’s image.
Let us act as if this world is a gift from a loving Creator.
And, perhaps, through our example, the people of the world will come to remember that there is a God.
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.
