New Jewish Thought

The first step

Hello everyone, it's Simcha from Hendon again.

Uncle Keith has reminded me that I should do my best either to keep within the subject of dialogue with one another or come up with something that the Jewish community aren't talking about. I hope that here I shall do a bit of both.

My first blog dealt with my realisation that there is not just one Jewish religion, called Judaism, but lots of different Jewish religions. Some call themselves Judaism, others don't. For example, I would call Zionism a Jewish religion, in which we worship the state, or the land, or some combination of the two. My second blog dealt with the way that religious people draw a line between the good and the bad, and what it was like for me to be put into the dustbin of the bad. Most, if not all, religion claims that it has some moral imperative, dictated by God, on which it considers that it must act. Unfortunately, moral imperatives are always a moveable feast.

For example, if we took Torah at face value, we would be executing children for disobeying their parents, and cutting off the hands of women who, if their husbands have the misfortune to be physically attacked, indecently assault the assailant in order to stop the fight. We don't take Torah at face value because our Rabbis have, quite rightly, told us not to. Although the texts in our sources still exist and cannot be abolished, we have chosen to read them in accordance to agreed methods of understanding which allow us to devise a way of life that works. Otherwise, we would be caught in the moral trap of either taking the commandments literally and therefore acting with brutal savagery, or else rejecting them altogether.

Unfortunately, we don't appear to be capable of admitting that we devised our halachot on utilitarian, rather than on moral, grounds. This helps to explain why we are not very good at dialogue with one another. If it is a question of dialogue with the belief systems held by the overwhelming majority of the Western world, namely Christianity and Islam, we find that relatively straightforward. This is because, unlike Christians and Moslems, we have never believed that our religion is the only way to God. Even the barmiest of the weird among us do not suggest that we should be organising missions to convert our Gentile neighbours to Judaism. Therefore, we will enter into the dialogue with other religious believers with no intention to get them to change their ways.

But when it comes to dialogue among ourselves, we are for the most part utterly convinced that Judaism, or to be precise our version of Judaism, is the only way to God for ourselves. The dialogue therefore breaks down as everyone tries to persuade the other that he/she is mistaken. However, if we are humble enough to admit that, basically, all our ideas are manmade and that we adopted them simply because we thought to do so would get the optimal result, we can take the moral heat out of the discussion and consider, hopefully calmly, what course of action will achieve our aims. What will work, in other words.

This is the meaning of the First Step to Peace: I acknowledge that some of my old beliefs about God and Life are no longer working.

If we want to achieve the end of a thriving Jewish community in Britain, it appears that if the statistics are correct we are not doing too well at it. If we think that our communal answer is the morally correct one, we shall do nothing but alienate those of us who think diffently. If however we stick to the question of what will work, we will have a common ground to go forward on. We also won't be looking down on those of us who have chosen a lifestyle different from ours as their answer to the question of communal survival. We may also be in a position to go beyond questions of mere survival and begin to deal with matters of what sort of community we have got. Is it the kind of community that people actually want to be in, and if not why not?

And finally, if we aren't dealing in rights and wrongs we may become more open to one another. That would be the start of the answer to the questions of some of our other contributors.

My opinions on anything are subject to change. My love for you will not change.

Stephen Handley - London NW4, 26th May 2008

The line drawn between the good and the bad

Here, to begin with, is a joke from real life.

Contents of a Passover skip, 17th April 2008, 8.30 a.m., on corner of The Ridgeway and Woodstock Road, London NW11: a child's car seat, a bicycle, a microwave, a clothes airer, toys, a suitcase, another bicycle, cot frames, a wooden chair, a table, window frames, shelving, mops, brooms, a piece of old kitchen worktop, and the occasional magpie rooting around the bin bags mixed in with all this.

I've been thinking about the language used by the religious opponents of the State of Israel. Classical anti-semitism often centres around rumours of an evil Jewish conspiracy for world domination. I wasn't aware, until recently, that certain of our community believe just as firmly in an evil Zionist conspiracy for atheism and rebellion against God. I don't share that viewpoint because I believe there are no such things as evil conspiracies. Rather, there are people doing exactly what they conceive to be right given their model of the world.

To illustrate from experience, some years ago, I was accused, quite seriously, of working for the Devil. The counsellor who helped me recover from the shock advised me to look at my accusers as people who did not know any better. According to their belief system, there are the good, and there are the bad. It just so happened that the line drawn between the good and the bad moved, and I found myself in the category of the bad. Nothing else had changed. That advice made sense, because to have seen the actions of the accusers as a deliberate conspiracy would have made the healing process very difficult, if not impossible.

Over the years, this insight has been developed in two directions. The first of these is the nature of forgiveness. We cannot experience anything unless we perceive in some manner, either through one of our five senses or perhaps through gates of spiritual perception that the world of science hasn't cottoned onto yet. Either way, if we decide that we will look upon an event in our past differently, it becomes a different experience. We can, quite literally, change our past through our own perceptions of past events. That shouldn't be surprising. We are made in the image of God, after all. If He is not bounded by constraints of time such as past and future, nor are we. The ability to re-evaluate the past and thus change our experience of it is the key to real forgiveness.

The second is in the area of moral philosophy. I do not believe in any absolute standards of good or evil. As far as I am concerned, we are all making up our moral standards, myself included. Even if we think we heard it from God, we are still making it up.

You may say that I am advocating moral relativism, in which anything goes. In fact it's the other way about. The people who insist that there is absolute right and wrong are the ones who are creating a situation in which anything goes. To return to my own experience, the faith community that I was in who accused me of being on the side of Satan had very strong views on what was right and what was wrong, and I found myself in the "wrong" basically because the people in charge of the community who decided what was right and what was wrong decided to move the goalposts. If you want to know what I did to deserve such an accusation, here it is, although it is so trivial I can barely bring myself to write it: I became an Amway distributor. Yes folks, in modern Britain there are people who genuinely think the Amway business is somehow Satanic, never mind the fact that it was set up by two thorougly repectable and impeccably evangelically Christian Dutch Americans. You couldn't make it up.

More seriously, there have been times in our history in which it was seen absolutely right to burn traditional pre scientific healers as witches, or else to execute Protestants (if the Catholics were in charge) or to execute Catholics (if the Protestants were in charge), or to send gays, gypsies, conscientious objectors, and Jews to the gas chambers. Examples can be multiplied from every religion in the world. It isn't only religious people who behave like this. Those who don't believe in God or the Devil devise dualistic theologies around animal rights, the Middle East, the environment, politics, and whatever else you get passionate about.

If on the other hand you acknowledge that you are making up your own belief system, whatever it may be, then you will not put anyone else into the dustbin of the "wrong" and you can then help yourself and others around you to answer a much more important question than what is right. That question is, given what you want to achieve, what will work?

Wait a minute, Reb Simcha, you will say. Aren't you meant to be an orthodox Jew? Yes, I am. Well, don't you believe that God commanded us the Torah? Yes, exactly. I do believe that. It is a commandment because I believe it is a commandment. If I didn't believe it was a commandment, it would not be a commandment. If I have signed the lease on a property, I'm commanded to pay the rent. If I haven't signed the lease, the landlord can rant and rave as much as he likes, but I'm under no obligation.

The Torah, holy and eternal as it is, has to be interpreted before it can be put into practice. It is therefore entirely dependent on the way that we choose to interpret it. Our sources quite deliberately include all the opinions on it so that we know there is not only one way. Unfortunately, for whatever reason much of the Jewish world acts and speaks as if there were only one way. That is why we have to be different.

My opinions on anything are subject to change. My love for you will not change.

Simcha Handley.

 

 

 

New publication on women in the Jewish community

The American organisation Advancing Women Professionals in the Jewish Community just released the following press release:

Exciting news! Advancing Women Professionals and the Jewish Community has just released a new book, Leveling the Playing Field: Advancing Women in Jewish Organizational Life, our how-to guide for championing gender equity in the workplace.

Co-authored with our colleague Marty Linsky, a leading expert in organizational change, Leveling the Playing Field speaks to anyone who believes that gender equity is vital to the health of Jewish communities and wants to turn that belief into productive action. The book includes personal reflections from many of our respected colleagues ­ Barbara Dobkin, Ruth Messinger, Mark Terrill, Barbara Balser, Robin Bernstein and Sally Gottesman, among other, and examples of how gender equity has been tackled in academia and the business world.

We¹re thrilled by the lively coverage of the book thus far (see article), showing that people are tired of empty talk about 'closing the leadership gap.' To inspire the next level of response, we have developed a free Conversation Kit to help you organize and facilitate a discussion or workshop about gender equity with friends and co-workers.

As blogger Rebecca Honig Friedman said in her recent posts on Jewess and Lilith: 'It's not about women so much as it's about giving everyone a fair shot at the top and nurturing talent wherever it's found so that everyone benefits. The more people are aware of these inequities and the forces behind them, the more likely they will be to push for change, and the more willing they will be to adapt to new modes of working and thinking.'

We couldn¹t agree more! So, become a Catalyst for Change! Leveling the Playing Field: Advancing Women in Jewish Organizational Life is available for purchase at www.amazon.com or on our website www.advancingwomen.org. For your free copy of the Conversation Kit, contact us at info@advancingwomen.org.

PhD opportunity

Birkbeck

College

is about to put an advert up on www.jobs.ac.uk for a collaborative doctoral studentship funded through the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Youth call, looking at issues arising out of conflicts relating to student faith groups at British universities. If anyone is interested please contact Professor Gordon Lynch at g.lynch@BBK.AC.UK