The Rabbis Big Sin & Other Short Stories

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If he [the guest] was too long, they shortened him [by lopping off his feet]; if too short, they stretched him out. When he died, each came and took back his. They made this agreement amongst themselves: Now, a banquet was in progress, when Eliezer chanced there, but they gave him no bread. Wishing to dine, he went and sat down at the end of them all.

Thus he [Eliezer] did to all, until they had all gone; whereupon he consumed the entire repast. A certain maiden gave some bread to a poor man, [hiding it] in a pitcher. When the matter becoming known, they daubed her with honey and placed her on the parapet of the wall, and the bees came and consumed her. On account of the maiden [ribah]. Also note that this is a purely Babylonian telling of the story. We know this because it is told in Babylonian Aramaic. This version comes from Pirke deRabbi Eliezer. This is a later midrash which is different in form from the midrash in Bereishit Rabbah.

That midrash is closely linked to textual interpretation. This midrash takes on more of the form of a retelling of the story. There are some who speculate that this midrash was influenced by the Moslem style of telling stories making it a midrash edited after the Moslem conquest of Eretz Israel. He would go and take for him greens and find in its place gold, as it says: Rabbi Joshua ben Korha said: They were not sufficiently concerned with the honor of their Creator to provide food for guests and strangers but rather they would cut of the branches of fruit trees above the fruit so as not to provide benefit to birds of the heavens: They set up as their judges false judges who ruled with regard to any guest or stranger who entered Sodom, that they should defraud them in their crooked judgment and set them out naked, as it is written: She saw a certain very poor man in the street of the city and her soul was grieved on the account.

What did she do? Every day when she went out to draw water, she put in her pitcher all kinds of provisions from her house and she sustained that poor man. The men of Sodom said: Sovereign of all world! Maintain my right and my cause at the hands of the men of Sodom! And her cry ascended before the throne of glory. In that hour the Holy One Blessed be He said: Your insights into this set of midrashim were quite insightful.

You plainly saw that the theme that was found in the first midrash in Bereishit Rabbah was developed in the two later sources in most creative ways. The textual jumping off point for all these midrashim focused on two words: Where did the young woman come from? This is exactly what we see in the Bereishit Rabbah midrash where one young girls compassion for her friend is answered by communal cruelty. I gave you here a little additional material to see how the Bavli plays with the theme but the bottom line is that the story of the compassionate young woman is the same but is played out a little differently.

Her altruism is for a poor man in this version and her punishment is played out differently but the same textual impetus is at play. In other words, in Babylonia they knew the same basic midrash and simply used it with their own trimmings. I am not sure I see things in this story that I can identify as particularly Babylonian historical themes — such conclusions would require more than speculation.

When my family came to Britain, they were opting to share its fate. They were sacrificing their past for the sake of what they saw as a better future. They were moving home. Today, thanks to globalization and the ease and low real cost of travel, no one has to make that choice any more. What then becomes of identity? Britain is where we are, but in what sense is it who we are? Citizens of the world, we no longer have a sense of the local, which is where identity begins.

The nation state is fragmenting before our eyes. One is the hubris that says: The other is the fear that says: Each technological advance carries with it the possibility of diminishing or enhancing human dignity. What matters is how we use it. The way to use it is in covenant with God, honouring His image that is mankind.

Worldwide, the number of children - girls especially — who lack adequate education is a scandal. It means that most will remain disadvantaged throughout their lives. Schools, curricula, the training of teachers, the provision of computers, and low cost downloading of information should be key forms of international aid and voluntary assistance to developing countries. No other single intervention offers greater prospects of enhancing economic opportunities for everyone, and for moving us forward in the long, hard journey to universal human dignity.

One is a personal matter of manners, sensitivity, politeness, tact. The other is a social phenomenon: What connects them is concern for the welfare of others, a refusal to let everything be determined by politics or economics, an insistence that human beings owe one another a respect that is no coerced or paid for, but simply because they are human beings. Civility and civil society represent the power of the personal in a world of impersonal forces. They create friendships in societies where we are thrown together as strangers. They are oases of togetherness in the anonymity of urban life and the lonely crowd.

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They cut across conflict and competition. If we lose civility, and if civil society becomes politicized, the future of freedom is in danger. They saw no contradiction between the two; nor should we. In the secular state there is no incompatibility between religious and national identities. None the less, a sense of collective belonging does not happen without sustained and focused effort.

This means integration without assimilation. There are, and will continue to be, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and all the other shades of the rainbow. But what we make, we make together. That is what makes them creative and unpredictable. Any attempt to impose of them an artificial uniformity in the name of a single culture or faith, represents a tragic misunderstanding of what it takes for a system to flourish.

Because we are different, we each have something unique to contribute, and ever contribution counts. To the contrary, it is that unity creates diversity. The glory of the created world is its astonishing multiplicity: That is what I mean by the dignity of difference. God exists in difference and thus chooses as His witness a people dedicated to difference. That tells us that God is bigger than religion, even though we need religion to speak to God. Religions are like languages. The existence of English does not refute, replace or supersede the existence of French, Italian or Urdu.

Each language preserves a unique set of sensibilities. There are things you can say in one that you cannot translate, without loss, into others. That is why we are enlarged by their multiplicity and would be impoverished if one disappeared. Nonetheless, they describe the same reality, as religions reach out to the one God. They do not, should not, threaten one another. To believe otherwise is to mistake religion for God. There are many of them, and they are not reducible to one another.

In order to express myself at all, I must acquire a mastery of my own language.. But as I venture out into the world I discover that there are other people who have different languages which I must learn if we are to communicate across borders. That is the Jewish message to the world. If we were all the same, we would have nothing unique to contribute, nor anything to learn from others. The more diverse we are, the richer our culture becomes, and the more expansive our horizons of possibility. But that depends on our willingness to bring our differences as gifts to the common good.

It requires integration rather than segregation, and that in turn means that we must have a rich and compelling sense of the common good. Without it, we will find that difference spells discord and creates, not music, but noise. Can I recognise Gods image in someone who is not in my image, whose language, faith, ideals are difference from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in His. When it leads to mutual enrichment, both sides gain. In Israel one is Jewish by living in a Jewish state, surrounded by a Jewish culture and Jewish institutions.

But elsewhere, being Jewish means going against the grain, being counter-cultural. There is a deep connection between ethics and the human spirit, between morality and morale. If we lose the former, the latter begins to fail. Its use could only be justified as a concession to crisis. Far from being grounds for divorce, it is the crises the bring us together, showing us how, by sharing our vulnerabilities, we can discover strength.

They are crimes against God, even when — especially when - they are committed in the name of God. But their crimes do not rival the crimes of those who have killed believing that they were gods. It may be fun, but it is not an achievement. It is what I call a covenantal relationship. That is our relationship with God. It is also the relationship of marriage. Contract is about association for self-interest; conveant is about association in shared identity.

Both are important life skills. Contract teaches us the logic of non-zero-sumness. Life is not a match in which you either win or lose. Creative, lateral thought can often create win-win scenarios. Covenant teaches us about relationships: Teaching children about covenant-making will help them in later life to build families and communities, based on a regard for the other as well as self.

Covenant is politics without power, economics without self-interest. What difference does it make? For one thing, it gets us to think about the common good, the good of all-of-us-together. But something has changed: And if all that should prove untrue, then I would rather be accused of taking the risk of believing the best about existence than of having taken refuge in the safety of believing the worst. The old certainties, set forth in the Bible and refined by almost two millennia of rabbinic Judaism, were shaken. A single century gave birth to more dissension on how to define Jewish identity than the whole of the preceding seventeen centuries combined.

We may not survive while others drown; we may not feast while others starve; we are not free when others are in servitude; we are not well when billions languish in disease and premature death. It needs enormous strength, emotional and intellectual, to have faith in the human story. Faith is a marriage; marriage is an act of faith. It is the courage to live with uncertainty. It is not knowing all the answers. The central task of religion is to create an opening in the soul. It is simpler and deeper than that. It is about not taking things for granted. It is a sustained discipline of meditation on the miracle of being.

Faith in the future changes lives and rebuilds the ruins of Jerusalem. It exists in the relationships we create and it lies deep in our moral commitments. To suppose that God is scientifically provable is to identify God with what is observable, and this for Judaism is idolatry. That is what makes fundamentalism — text without interpretation — an act of violence against tradition. They read them directly and literally, ignoring the single most important fact about a sacred text, namely that its meaning is not self-evident.

It has a history and an authority of its own. Essentially it defines Jews as victims. It says that Jews are the people who, historically, have been subject to persecution, isolation and alienation…This is the wrong way to think of Jewish peoplehood. Jews are a people of faith, not fate alone. Jews are choosers, not victims; co-authors of their destiny, not swept by the winds of circumstance.

Remove either element and it will fall apart. Without religion, there is no global nation. It is not about ignoring evil, the darkness and the pain. It is about courage, endurance and the capacity to hold fast to ideals even when they are ignored by others. It is the ability to see the world for what it is and yet still believe that it could be different. At the heart of religion is not just the faith we have in God.

No less significant is the faith God has in us.

It is a refusal to accept evil as inevitable, but at the same time an acknowledgement that we cannot leave redemption entirely to God. Leave faith out of the Jewish equation and what is left is a body without a soul. It means the courage to live with uncertainty. It does not mean having the answers, it means having the courage to ask the questions and not let go of God, as he does not let go of us. It means realising that God creates divine justice but only we, acting in accord with his word, can create human justice — and our very existence means that this is what God wants us to do.

Faith lies not in the answer but the question — and the greater the human being, the more intense the question. Faith is the courage to live with uncertainty, knowing that God is with us on that tough but necessary journey to a world that honours life and treasures peace. It is a sustained meditation on the miraculousness of what is, because it might not have been. It is the courage to see the world as it is, without the comfort of myth or the self-pity of despair, knowing that the evil, cruelty and injustice it contains are neither inevitable nor meaningless but instead a call to human responsibility - a call emanating from the heart of existence itself.

Each has contributed something unique to the total experience of mankind. Each, from its own vantage point, has been chosen. But this is ours. This is our faith, our people, our heritage. It is not about ignoring the evil, the darkness and the pain.

It is about courage, endurance and the capacity to hold fast to ideals even then they are ignored by others. It is about not giving up, not letting go. It is the courage to make a commitment to an Other, human or divine. It is the determination to turn ought into is. It is the willingness to listen to a voice not my own, and through hearing, find the strength to heal a fractured world. It is truth made real by how I live. Learning Torah we live revelation. Performing acts of hessed, covenantal love, we live redemption. We do not philosophize about these things, we enact them.

Jewish faith is not primarily about creeds or theologies; it is not faith thought, but faith lived. For most, it is the newest of the new. For Jews it is the oldest of the old. Since the Babylonian exile twenty-six centuries ago, certainly since the Roman era two thousand years ago, Jews lived at great distances from one another, yet they were connected by a thousand gossamer strands of the spirit.

The relationship of soul to body or mind to brain, is precisely analogous to the relationship of God to the physical universe. If there is only a physical universe, there is only brain, not mind, and there is only the universe, not God. The non-existence of God and the non-existence of human freedom go hand in hand. Faith, or more precisely, faithfulness, is born where the freedom of human beings meets the freedom of God in an unconstrained act of mutual commitment.

We have taken ours for granted for too long. It involves developing the capacity to think, feel and act for the benefit of others. The counting of the Omer is thus an act of retracing the steps from individual freedom to a free society. It is a step, however small, in the long, hard journey to redemption.

It does mean, however, an acknowledgement that the past is past and must not be allowed to cast its shadow over the future. Forgiveness heals moral wounds the way the body heals physical wounds. God forgives, and in so doing, teaches us to forgive. There is no such thing as forgiveness in nature. Forgiveness breaks the chain. It introduces into the logic of interpersonal encounter the unpredictability of grace.

It represents a decision not to do what instinct and passion urge us to do. It answers hate with a refusal to hate, animosity with generosity. Few more daring ideas have ever entered the human situation. Forgiveness means that we are not destined endlessly to replay the grievances of yesterday. It is the ability to live with the past without being held captive by the past. It would not be an exaggeration to say that forgiveness is the most compelling testimony to human freedom.

It is about the action that is not reaction. It is the refusal to be defined by circumstance. It represents our ability to change course, reframe the narrative of the past and create an unexpected set of possibilities for the future In the face of tragedy, forgiveness is the counternarrative of hope. It is not a moral luxury, an option for saints.

At times it is the only path through the thickets of hate to the open spaces of coexistence. For without an ordered family we could not envisage an ordered world. Through the trust that grows in families, we discover what it is to have trust in God and His world. They are significant precisely because they are real worlds with people we know and trust. Working out our tensions with them, we learn how to resolve tensions with society. They are where we count, where we make a difference, where we first find that others are there for us and we must be there for them. And, yes, they have their share of pain.

It is the pain of life lived in relationship. Without it we could not learn to love. They are the miniature world in which we learn how to face the wider world. When one breaks down, the others are weakened. When families disintegrate, so too does the sense of neighbourhood and the continuity of our great religious traditions.

When localities become anonymous, families lose the support of neighbours, and congregations are no longer centres of community. When religious belief begins to wane, the moral bonds of marriage and neighbourly duty lose their transcendental base and begin to shift and crumble in the high winds of change. That is precisely what has happened in our time and the loss, though subtle, is immense.

It lies behind our ideas of individual dignity and freedom, or social kinship and concern, and our sense of continuity between the future and the past. Lose it and we will lose much else as well. But in one sense, halakhah does change… Halakhah is the application of an unchanging Torah to a changing world. The Greeks gave the West its philosophy and science. The Jews, obliquely, gave it its prophets and religious faith. He is my God, but also your God. He is on my side, but also on your side. He exists not only in my faith, but also in yours. God is universal, religions are particular.

Religion is the translation of God into a particular language and thus into the life of a group, a nation, a community of faith. In the course of history, God has spoken to mankind in many languages: Only such a God is truly transcendental — greater not only than the natural universe but also than the spiritual universe articulated in any single faith, any specific language of human sensibility.

God is the One within the many; the unity at the core of our diversity; the call that leads us to journey beyond the self and its strivings, to enter into otherness and be enlarged by it, to seek to be a vehicle through which blessing flows outwards to the world, to give thanks for the miracle of being and the radiance that shines wherever two lives touch in affirmation, forgiveness and love.

These things have brought many people to God. But they have also brought many people to worship things that are not God, like power, or ideology, or race. Instead I have sought God in people — people in themselves seemed to point to something or someone beyond themselves. It may take a lifetime to learn how to find these things, but once we learn, we realise in retrospect that it all ever took was the ability to listen.

When God calls, he does not do so by way of universal imperatives. Instead, he whispers our name — and the greatest reply, the reply of Abraham, is simply hineni: He never asked us to be perfect. All He asked was that we try our best, own up to our mistakes when we make them, and try a little harder next time. Because somewhere someone has faith in us; and God never loses that faith. When we stand before God we do so regardless of what we earn, what we own, what we buy, what we can afford.

We do so as beings of ultimate, non-transactional value, here because someone — some force at the heart of being — called us into existence and summoned us to be a blessing. Only such a God would be truly transcendent — greater not only than the natural universe but also than the spiritual universe capable of being comprehended in any one language, any single faith. Only such a God could teach mankind to make peace other than by conquest and conversion, and as something nobler than practical necessity. Biblical monotheism is not the idea that there is one God and therefore one truth, one faith, one way of life, On the contrary, it is the idea that unity creates diversity.

The assertion of Jewish faith, deeply human in its implications, is that God is the objective reality of personhood.

The true religious challenge is to ignore the noise and focus on the music. Discovering God, singular and alone, they found the human person, singular and alone. Od lo avda tikvatenu: For there is a Jewish way of telling the story of our situation… What happens is not chance but a chapter in the complex script of the covenant which leads, mysteriously but assuredly, to our redemption.

Crisis in Jewish history has always led to renewal, not despair. So it must be now. Making the sanctuary, human beings made a home for God. It is hard for us to make a home for God. That is why making the sanctuary takes up so much more space in the narrative than the birth of the universe. Since then He has challenged humanity to create a world that will be a home for Him. God lives wherever we treat one another as beings in His image. Thereafter He entrusted us to create a human world which will be, in the structures of our common life, a home for the Divine presence.

That command still addresses us with its momentous challenge, the persisting call of faith. Marry and have children, bring new Jewish life into the world, build schools, make communities, have faith in God who had faith in man and make sure that His voice is heard wherever evil threatens. Pursue justice, defend the defenceless, have the courage to be different and fight for the dignity of difference. Recognize the image of God in others, and defeat hate with love. Twice a year, on Yom ha-Shoah and the Ninth of Av, sit and mourn for those who died and remember them in your prayer. But most of all, continue to live as Jews.

If the covenant of hate did not distinguish between religious and secular Jews, believers and heretics, neither can its only possible redemption, the covenant of love. But the founding of the state of Israel in raised the no less intractable question of the interpretation of redemption.

The fact that after Auschwitz the Jewish people still lives and can still affirm its faith is the most powerful testimony that God still lives. The reason is clear. The holocaust does not point anywhere but everywhere. History is his story — an event that happened sometime else to someone else. Memory is my story — something that happened to me and is part of who I am. Memory, by contrast, is part of identity. I can study the history of other peoples, cultures and civilizations. They deepen my knowledge and broaden my horizons. But they do not make a claim on me.

They are the past as part. Memory is the past as present, as it lives on in me. Without memory there can be no identity. It is here, but first we have to know how to look. Or you can see it as a candle you light to drive away some of the darkness of the world. The difference is that the first sees other religions as the enemy. The second sees them as other candles, not threatening mine, but adding to the light we share.

What Jews remembered from that victory over the Greeks twenty-two centuries ago was not a God of war but the God of light. What then becomes of peoplehood once the majority of Jews worldwide — some 80 per cent… no longer see themselves as bound by halakhah?

Inclusivism conceives it in terms of traditional consciousness. Pluralism arises when a movement initially conceived in opposition to a tradition seeks to reaffirm its links with that tradition within the framework of a non-traditional consciousness. Inclusivism asserts that there is an authoritative set of beliefs that constitute Jewish faith. It involves, among other things, belief in the divine revelation of the Torah and the authority of rabbinic tradition, interpretation, and law…Inclusivism preserves Orthodoxy while not excluding the non-Orthodox from the covenantal community.

A Jewish pluralist, on the other hand, would argue that liberal, Reform, Conservative, and secular Judaisms are equally legitimate ways of understanding the Jewish destiny. None is an error. The discovery of God is the discovery of meaning.

And that is no small thing, for we are meaning-seeking animals. It is what makes us unique. Making us human, not divine, God calls on us to judge and act within the terms of our humanity. We are here because someone willed us into being, who wanted us to be, who knows our innermost thoughts, who values us in our uniqueness, whose breath we breathe and in whose arms we rest; someone in and through whom we are connected to all that is.

How, I have often asked, can we devote our energies to saving planet earth for the sake of future generations while neglecting our own children who are our future generations? He grants dignity — radical, ontological dignity — to the fact that human beings are not gods. Infinity confers a blessing on finitude by recognizing that it is finite, and love it because it is. The ultimate value we should be concerned to maximize is human dignity — the dignity of all human being, equally, as children of the creative, redeeming God.

It carries with it a considerable price. Those who hope refuse to be comforted while the hoped-for outcome is not yet reached. Given their history of suffering, Jews were rarely optimists. But they never gave up hope. That is why, when the prophets saw evil in the world, they refused to be comforted. Optimism is the belief that the world is changing for the better; hope is the belief that, together, we can make the world better. Optimism is a passive virtue, hope an active one. It needs no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to hope.

The Hebrew Bible is not an optimistic book. It is, however, one of the great literatures of hope. These two concepts, often confused, are in fact utterly different. Optimism is the belief that things will get better. Hope is the belief that, together, we can make things better. It takes no courage — only a certain naivety — to be an optimist. It takes courage to sustain hope.

No Jew — knowing what we do of the past, of hatred, bloodshed, persecution in the name of God, suppression of human rights in the name of freedom — can be an optimist. But Jews have never given up hope. It takes no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to have hope. Knowing what we do of our past, no Jew can be an optimist. Hope is the belief that we can make things better.

Optimism is a passive virtue, hope is an active one. It takes no courage to be an optimist, but it does need courage to hope. However dark the world, love still heals. Terror, by defeating others, ultimately defeats itself, while the memory of those who offered kindness to strangers lives on. That may be one way of describing what we are, but it is not all we are, and to believe otherwise is to be deaf to the music of life itself. To win the Jewish battle, the battle of the spirit, the victory of heart, mind and soul, you do not need numbers.

You need dedication, commitment, study, prayer, vision, courage, ideals and hope. You need to offer people tough challenges through which to grow. In the book of Exodus, God tells Moses: Then no plague will come on them when you number them. Throughout history we have been at the epicentre of world history… The Judaic heritage shaped and continues to shape Western civilisation… Why then is it hazardous to count Jews? Because when we take a census we are basing out strength on numbers.

Jewish strength has never lain in numbers. When we count Jews there is a serious danger that we will be demoralised, realising that we are so few. When a people depends — as the Jewish people depends — on its spirit and sense of pride, demoralisation can be nothing short of catastrophic. It can lead to despair, and from despair to defeat. Every ritual, every command, every syllable of the Jewish story is a protest against escapism, resignation and the blind acceptance of fate.

Judaism, the religion of the free God, is a religion of freedom. Jewish faith is written in the future tense. It is belief in a future that is not yet but could be, if we heed Gods call, obey His will and act together as a covenantal community. The name of the Jewish future is hope.

God exists; therefore life has a purpose. Evil exists; therefore we have not yet achieved that purpose. Until then we must travel, just as Abraham and Sarah travelled, to begin the task of shaping a different kind of world. I did not come from nowhere; I have a past, and if any past commands anyone this past commands me. I am a Jew because only if I remain a Jew will the story of a hundred generations live on in me.

I continue their journey because, having come this far, I may not let it and them fail. I cannot be the missing letter in the scroll. To be a Jew is to be a link in the chains of the generations. It is to inherit a way of life which has earned the admiration of the world for its love of family, its devotion to education, its philanthropy, its social justice and its infinitely loyal dedication to a unique destiny.

It is to know that this way of life, passed on from parents to children since the days of Abraham and Sarah, can only be sustained through the Jewish family; and knowing this, it is to choose to continue it by creating a Jewish home and having Jewish children. Can we do less? There have been many theories, Jewish and non-Jewish, which attribute to us an innate genius, a racial gift, a genetic endowment, a mystic difference.

Removed from our traditions, our past, our way of life and our community, within three generations or less we merge into the wider landscape and become invisible. Individually we are ordinary. Collectively we become something else… though we might not be born great or achieve greatness, our history thrusts greatness upon us.

We are more than individuals. We are part of a collective history and destiny, perhaps the strangest and most miraculous the world has ever known. That is our inheritance, and the most important thing we can do is to hand it on to our children. Before there were Jews, there was Israel, the people chosen by God to be the bearer of his covenant.

After the death of Solomon the people split in two, into a northern kingdom of ten tribes called Israel, and a southern kingdom called Judah, though it comprised the tribe of Benjamin as well. In the eighth century BCE the northern kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians and its population deported. Rapidly they merged with the surrounding peoples, losing their language, their distinctive faith, and their identity.

They assimilated and disappeared from the pages of history, to be remembered as the lost ten tribes. Those who remained were yehudim, Judeans, or, as the word gradually evolved from Greek to Latin to English, Jews. It was not the last. There Jews, from the most secular to the most pious, suffer equally from war and terror, and benefit equally from prosperity and peace. Judaism, in Israel, is a presence you breathe, not just a religion you practise. In Israel as nowhere else, Jewishness is part of the public domain, in the language, the landscape, the calendar.

There you can stand amid the ruins and relics of towns that were living communities in the time of the Bible and feel the full, astonishing sweep of time across which the Jewish people wrestled with its fate as Jacob once wrestled with the angel. That is why, for Diaspora Jews, spending time in Israel is an essential and transformative experience of Jewish peoplehood and why Birthright, the American programme aimed at sending all young Jews to Israel, is so successful. At the same time, it is equally important that young Israelis spend time in the Jewish communities of the Diaspora.

There they discover what it is to live Judaism as a covenant of faith, something many of them have never fully experienced before. Israel has achieved great things. It has taken a barren land and made it bloom again. Israel has taken a tattered, shattered nation and made it live again. Israel is the country whose national anthem, Hatikva, means hope. Israel is the home of hope. Has a people ever loved a city so deeply for so long? Almost every prayer in the Jewish prayer book includes a prayer for Jerusalem. The word itself figures more than times in the Bible. And though all that remains of the Temple is one wall, still to stand and pray in that spot is to feel the presence of three thousand years of Jewish prayers and tears and hopes.

Israel is the people that has always been sustained by faith, faith in God, in the future, in life itself. And though Israel is a secular state, its very existence is testimony to faith: The Hebrew language has two words for strength: Koach is the strength you need to win a war. Gevurah is the courage you need to make peace. Israel has shown both kinds of strength. But peace is a duet not a solo. It cannot be made by one side alone.

If it could, it would have been made long ago. They had to cultivate land that had never been cultivated before, from the rocky hills of the Galil to the desert wastes of the Negev. On barren lands they made farms, in desolate landscapes they built villages. They had to integrate wave after wave of olim, new arrivals from across the globe.

They had to build a society and create the political and economic infrastructure of a nation. And in some ways the most remarkable of all: Wherever they were, they prayed about Israel and facing Israel. The Jewish people was the circumference of a circle at whose centre was the holy land and Jerusalem the holy city. For centuries they lived suspended between memory and hope, sustained by the promise that one day God would bring them back. That Jews have spent the vast majority of their history away from home and that most Jews today do not live there neither compromises nor contradicts the fact that Jewish life is a life lived toward Israel.

In the early summer of this year, twenty thousand Jews gathered in Madison Square Garden to celebrate the completion of a seven year cycle of Talmud study. Not obviously an epoch-making even, until we recall that little over a century earlier, one of the greatest Jewish scholars of his day, Leopold Zunz, had predicted that by the twentieth century there would be no one left to understand a rabbinic text… The trajectory mapped out by Judaism in the late twentieth century has run counter to prediction. They will see antisemitism where other factors are at work.

They will lend Jewish identity a negativity that will encourage many young Jews to leave rather than stay.

The Sins Of Sodom And Gemorrah – Introduction To Rabbinic Midrash

They will fall into the trap of moral solipism, of talking to themselves in terms only intelligible to themselves. The phrase a people that dwells alone will become a self-fulfilling prophecy that will not augur well for the future of Jews, Judaism or Israel. When it became easy to be a Jew, people stopped being Jewish.

It is the night on which we tell our children who they are. And they never did. It is not an identity we assume, but one into which we are born. In each case they did more than survive. Every tragedy in Jewish history was followed by a new wave of creativity. What changes us is not what is done for us by God, but what we do in response to his call. It is not meaningless but it is not prescripted either. Its categories are those of fidelity and faithlessness, exile and return, attempted flight and perpetual reminders that the covenant, once undertaken, cannot be rescinded. One can only speculate.

But the following might reflect the thoughts of many traditionally minded parents. The wider society is no longer congruent with our values. We do not want our children taught by fashionable methods that leave them bereft of knowledge and skills. We do not want them to have self-esteem at the cost of self-respect, won by hard work and genuine achievement. We do not want them to be taught that every difference of behaviour reflects an equally valid lifestyle. We do not want them to be moral relativists, tourists in all cultures, at home in none.

We do not want to take the risk of our children taking drugs or alcohol or becoming sexually promiscuous, still less becoming teenage mothers or fathers. They do not want moral values undermined by a secular, sceptical, cynical culture. Nor do they believe that the countervailing influences of place of worship, supplementary schooling and home will be enough.

For the values of the wider secular culture are not confined to school. They are present in the every-more-intrusive media of television, the internet, YouTube, MySpace, and the icons of popular culture. They give us curiosity and confidence. They teach us to ask questions. They connect us to our past and future. We have lots of heroes today — sportsmen, supermodels, media personalities. They come, they have their fifteen minutes of fame, and they go. But the influence of good teachers stays with us.

They are the people who really shape our life. But to defend a civilization you need schools. Schools are where we make children our partners in the long and open-ended task of making a more gracious world. But to defend humanity, you need education. You need parents, families and homes and a constant conversation between the generations. Above all you need memory — the kind of memory that never forgets the bread of affliction and the bitter herbs of slavery. It is no exaggeration to say that this lay at the heart of the Jewish ability to survive catastrophe, negotiate change and flourish in difficult circumstances.

I have suggested that it is the basis of a free society. Because knowledge is power, equal access to knowledge is a precondition of equal access to power. But to defend an identity, you need a school. Judaism is the religion of the book, not the sword. This is the great insight of the Jewish vision, from which all else followed: A free society must be an educated society, and a society of equal dignity must be one in which education is universal. But to defend freedom, you need education. You need families and schools to ensure that your ideals are passed on to the next generation and never lost, or despaired of, or obscured.

The citadels of liberty are houses of study. Its heroes are teachers, its passion is education and the life of the mind. Moses realized that a people achieves immortality not by building temples or mausoleums, but by engraving their values on the hearts of their children, and they on theirs, and so on until the end of time. At the same time I received an invitation to take part in the opening ceremony of a new Jewish school in London. Both events were on the same day, at roughly the same time. I could not attend both. Governments sustain society, but education sustains the world.

The reason is not hard to find. As one Holocaust historian, disturbed by the obsessive interest in the Shoah, put it: Unlike traditional Jewish education, Holocaust education in itself offers no meaning, no hope, no way of life. Orthodoxy maintains that belief. The result is that liberal Judaisms and Orthodoxy are condemned to systematic mutual misunderstanding, a situation that leads to division without providing any shared language through which division might be transcended. Ideologically, Judaism recognizes neither denominations not sects. Sociologically, it is currently organized into just those forms.

Ideologically, Judaism is inclusive of all Jews. Sociologically, exclusivist attitudes prevail in just those sectors of Orthodoxy that most strive to maintain continuity with the past. Orthodoxy, Conservatism, Reform, and Reconstructionism are regularly portrayed as the four Jewish denominations. Those who think in these terms see such a description as just that: But it contains a momentous hidden premise.

It imports pluralism into Judaism. And this itself is an accommodation to secularization.

Orthodoxy does not, and cannot, make this accommodation. It recognizes pluralism along many axes.

It recognizes at least some other faiths as valid religious options for non-Jews. It recognizes, within Judaism itself, different halakhic traditions: Ashkenazi and Sephardi, for example, or Hasidic or Mitnagdic. Beyond halakhah, it legitimates a vast variety of religious approaches: But it does not recognize the legitimacy of interpretations of Judaism that abandon fundamental beliefs or halakhic authority. It does not validate, in the modern sense, a plurality of denominations.

It does not see itself as one version of Judaism among others. Each can argue that the others are insecure and under threat. These four ways of interpreting the present are radically incompatible with one another. Jews use the same words but mean profoundly different things by them It demands the difficult but not impossible exercise of thinking non-adjectivally as a Jew: We are implicated in the fate of one another.

That is the substantive content of our current sense of unity. But it is a unity imposed, as it were, from outside. Neither anti-Semitism nor anti-Zionism, we believe, makes distinctions between Jews. Hence our collective vigilance, activity, and concern. But from within, in terms of its own self-understanding, the Jewish people evinces no answering solidarity. External crisis unites Jews; internal belief divides. Why then should it not exist as a fact? Yet I was born a Jew, and I cannot betray the hundred generations of my ancestors who lived as Jews and were prepared to die as Jews, who handed their values on to their children, and they to theirs, so that one day their descendants might be free to live their faith without fear, and be a source of inspiration to others, not because Jews are any better than anyone else, but because that is our story, our heritage, our task, to be a source of hope against a world of despair.

They remain a living symbol of hope. Until you know where you want to be, you will not know where to go. But the invisible strands of mutual responsibility mean that even the smallest Jewish community can turn to the Jewish people worldwide for help and achieve things that would be exceptional for a nation many times its size. So that if Jews are no longer Jews there is a missing voice, an empty place, in the conversation of mankind. In eras that worshipped the collective — the nation, the state, the empire — they spoke about the dignity and sanctity of the individual. In cultures that celebrated the right of the individual to do his or her own thing, they spoke of law and duty and mutual responsibility.

They found God in homes, families and relationships. They worshipped God in synagogues, the first places ever to become holy because of the mere fact that people fathered there to pray. They discovered God in the human heart and in our capacity to make the world different by what we do. They encountered God, not in the wind or the thunder or the earthquake, but in words, the words of Torah, the marriage contract between God and the people He took as His own.

They studied those words endlessly and tried to put them into practice. They brought heaven down to earth, because they believed that God lives wherever we dedicate our lives to Him. Each Jewish family is a word, every community a sentence, and the Jewish people at any one time are a paragraph. The Jewish people through time constitute a story, the strangest and most moving story in the annals of mankind. It meant being part of an extended family, many of whose members I did not know, but to whom I nonetheless felt connected by bonds of kinship and responsibility.

They maintained their distinctiveness against every inducement — sometimes benign, often brutal — to assimilate or convert. To every crisis they responded with renewal. In each generation they embellished their ancient faith with new customs and interpretations and made it gleam as if it had just been given. Whenever the opportunity arose they enriched the life of the larger society in which they lived. Through thirty-seven long and difficult centuries they remained faithful to the mandate given by God to Abraham in the first words of covenantal history: Ancient Egypt is no more.

The Moabites have long since disappeared. The Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Romans successively strode the stage of world dominion. Each empire played its part, said its lines, and each in turn has gone… But the Jews survive. A similar dedication is needed now: What I possess belongs to God, and I am merely its legal guardian.

Faith is the call to human responsibility. It needs no sacrifice of the mind, no leap into the void. It is precisely like the gesture of commitment I make in a human relationship when I pledge myself to another, whose body I can see but whose consciousness must always be beyond my reach. So, though I can never enter the consciousness of God, I can still pledge myself to Him in faithfulness, listening to His voice as it is recorded in the Torah and responding to His affirmation of my personhood.

Together we bring into being what neither God-without-man nor man-without-God could create: It is that Jews continue to live them, so that if Judaism were to cease to exist, something fundamental to Western civilization would die. The flames of injustice, violence and oppression are not inevitable. The victory of the strong over the weak, the many over the few, the manipulative over those who act with integrity, even though they have happened at most times and in most places, are not written into the structure of the universe.

They may be natural, but God is above nature, and because God communicates with man, man too can defeat nature. Judaism is the revolutionary moment at which humanity refuses to accept the world that is. That is what has long given it a significance beyond itself. It is not just a Jewish journey, but the human journey in a particularly vivid form. It has inspired not only Jews, but all those who, having read the Hebrew Bible, have come to the conclusion that our lives have a moral purpose, that redemption can be sought in this world with all its imperfection, and that by our efforts we can leave society better than we found it.

Its emphasis on community, compassion and social justice led one generation to identify Judaism with socialism. Its equally strong insistence on individual responsibility led another generation to identify it with the New Right and the minimalist state. But Judaism is not the one nor the other but a religious culture that encompasses both. He has done this for no other nation. On the other hand, it projects the values of Torah against the backdrop of mankind.

They will hear all these rules and say: This great nation is surely a wise and understanding people. A Jewish perspective is both inward and outward, concerned to maintain a critical distance from other cultures while at the same time engaging their attention and ultimately admiration. But it is the faith of a particular people. It is more than a set of truths and commands. It is a people to whom those truths and commands are addressed and in whose lives they are embodied.

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