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Who will be a Jew? - Yom Kippur Morning 5770 - Rabbi Alex Wright

There are Rabbis on both sides of my family — paternal and maternal. In the 1890s when my great-grandfather left the small, rather unprepossessing town of Plungyan in Lithuania he was not yet twenty years old. My father used to tell me that Joe was hoping to make his way to New York and there make his fortune. When the boat docked at Dublin, the captain told him to get off, and Joe disembarked thinking that he had reached the Goldene Medina. He was ambitious and determined, astute and strong-minded. His wife, Tilly, an accomplished singer and musician, was the daughter of Rabbi Israel Leventon, my great-great grandfather. Israel was born in Poland but had arrived in England earlier on in the century, moving to Swansea and then to Dublin where he was Rabbi, shochet, mohel and sofer — having produced the most beautiful scroll which remains in Dublin to this day and which he took ten years to write.

On the other side of the family, my maternal great-grandfather remarried after the tragic death of his first wife when she was just 32. She left four very young children and Max's second wife became their step-mother and mother to 2 more daughters. This second wife was the daughter of an orthodox Rabbi.

Why share these personal details of my family's lineage with you? Not to boast a rabbinic pedigree, but because I suspect that the two sides of my family, like all Eastern European families of that time, shared four major beliefs and assumptions about their Jewishness.

First, that they were part of a unique group, whose origins went all the way back to Abraham and Sarah, to the Israelites at Sinai, and continued through an unbroken line of Jewish history that had brought them to the lands of their dispersion.

Secondly, they held on to a belief that they shared a common destiny. They may not have conceived of their descendants — their female descendants — becoming rabbis but, even if they feared it, I don't think they imagined that their offspring would marry out of the faith, that their grandchildren or great-grandchildren might not be Jewish.

Thirdly, there was a sense of solidarity among Jews. Although migration was widespread and took place for many reasons — economic privation, anti-semitism, a repressive and autocratic government that demanded conscription for twenty years out of a young boy's life, there was a collective cultural bond that bound Jewish families and communities together.

And fourthly, Jewish identity was defined by distinctive features and characteristics — a loyalty and belief in One God, the centrality of prayer, the use of Hebrew, distinctive laws surrounding food, festivals, holidays, Sabbaths and New Moons, a distinguishing kind of dress particularly for prayer in the tallit and kippah. All these things bound Jews together, or appeared to bind Jews together and gave them a sense of a strongly-rooted religious, cultural and ethnic identity.

Even if they were not always explicit, these four beliefs and a clear rabbinic definition of who was a Jew made it evident who was and who was not Jewish. There was no half-way house, you were or you weren't a Jew. The boundaries appeared to be clear and unbroken.

Such clarity and certainty over issues of Jewish identity and faithfulness to Judaism can no longer be taken for granted. To begin with halakhah, rabbinic law's definition that the child of a Jewish mother is Jewish, or someone who has converted under the auspices of orthodox Jewish law, applies to only a minority of the world's Jews. Consider the social realities that dispense with that narrow definition. Conversion takes place under a variety of religious auspices in Israel and the diaspora, orthodox, reform, liberal and conservative. The rate of intermarriage has reached over 50% - and the children born of those marriages may feel themselves to be Jewish, non-Jewish or even half-Jewish. There are Jews who dissociate themselves completely from the Jewish community and can scarcely bring themselves to admit that they are Jewish. There are Israelis for whom a national, ethnic identity takes first place over a religious loyalty to their Judaism — the two remain quite distinct in their minds. There are non-Jews who enjoy living on the periphery of Jewish life, or who are part of Jewish families living a Jewish existence, bringing up Jewish children, but who are not actually Jewish according to any definition of who is a Jew.

This question of who is a Jew received a somewhat surprising challenge in the Court of Appeal earlier on in the summer. Until June of this year, a child's eligibility for admission to the Jewish Free School and other orthodox schools, was controlled by the Office of the Chief Rabbi. It meant that to secure a place at JFS, you had to prove that your parents or maternal grandparents were Jewish by producing the necessary documentation to satisfy an orthodox Beth Din. When the judges of the Court of Appeal ruled that defining a Jew by descent was a purely ethnic definition and contravened the Race Relations Act, Jewish schools suddenly had to develop new admissions' criteria to determine eligibility in the form of a ‘faith test’.

This means that Rabbis will now have to sign forms declaring that families are loyal members and attendees at synagogue, that their children attend Religion School regularly and that they volunteer in some capacity for the community. Which should be good for synagogue business!

But on a more serious note, the Court of Appeal's decision is a major challenge to what is deemed by the orthodox, to be the only authentic definition of who is a Jew. I wonder, however, whether it ever occurs to those who maintain this narrow definition that a child born of a Jewish mother is Jewish, that Jewish history has not always held on to this position.

In the Bible, a mixed marriage between an Israelite and a non-Israelite produced offspring whose status was determined by the father. Judah, Joseph, Moses, David and Solomon, all married foreign wives. Their children were all considered to be Israelites. The principle that determined the status of a child from biblical times right up until possibly beyond the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE was patrilineal. Precisely when the change from patrilineality to matrilineality occurred is a bit of a mystery. Why it changed — is another vexed question which perhaps needn't concern us today.

The point I want to make is that Jewish identity was elusive in antiquity. The boundaries were loose, there was no single or simple definition of a Jew. Jews looked no different than their Greek or Roman neighbours, they were not recognisable by their beards or their hair-dos or their clothing; they spoke the language of their neighbours and fellow citizens. They gave their children names in much the same way that we choose names for our children: some had Hebrew or Jewish names, but many, perhaps most, had names that were indistinguishable from non-Jewish names.

The only obvious distinguishing feature of Jews — and that was only half of the Jewish population as women were excluded — was circumcision. But as a rather crude story in the Palestinian Talmud demonstrates, even that wasn't a useful marker of Jewishness.

Just as the boundaries between Jews and non-Jews in pre-rabbinic times were blurred and uncertain, so today we find ourselves in an era when Jewish identity is equally elusive. Who is a Jew? According to Liberal Judaism, you are a Jew if both your parents are Jewish, or if one parent — either father or mother is Jewish and you receive a Jewish upbringing and education culminating in Bar/Bat Mitzvah and Kabbalat Torah. But what happens if you do not identify yourself as a Jew? And what if you are married to a Jew and bringing your children up as Jews, but not converted yourself? Does your empathy with Judaism, your observance on Friday nights and festivals, your attendance at synagogue, make you Jewish? What if you share the beliefs and rituals of Judaism, but have not formally converted — does that make you a Jew? And if you are born of Jewish parents, but reject the faith, the rituals and observances and dissociate yourself from the Jewish community, are you still a Jew?

The old certainties and boundaries have disappeared. The authority and traditions of the last eighteen hundred years are slowly and inexorably shifting to make way for new or more precisely renewed definitions of Jewishness. There are more varieties of Jewish existence, looser boundaries defining communities and individuals and uncertainties around the question of who will be a Jew in the twenty-first century.

For my great-grandfather at the end of the nineteenth century, there were different uncertainties and challenges brought about by anti-semitism, poverty and massive migration. Even if they did not take it for granted, our ancestors prayed fervently that their children would be members of the Jewish people, adhering to the Jewish faith, marrying within the tribe and perpetuating the tradition and the people. Today, I don't believe we can take any of that for granted. There is no guarantee that our offspring will hold on to and cherish their membership of the Jewish people, or guard the faith and traditions that many of us hold dear. I have lost count of the number of families I meet whose last thread of contact with Judaism is broken when they lose their last parent and find themselves silent when it comes to reciting the Kaddish.

As the boundaries between ourselves and others slacken, as definitions of who is a Jew become more varied and more uncertain, so the future of Judaism and the Jewish people cannot be taken for granted. If we care deeply enough about Judaism — about its survival and its contribution to society, we are going to be required to cherish our Jewish faith, rituals, learning and tradition more deeply. We are going to have to demonstrate to our children the indelible link that exists between our faith in a moral God and our conduct on a daily basis. We can no longer afford to indulge our own rejection of things Jewish, they will be lost in the sand. And when in time to come our grandchildren come before us and say to us: ‘What does this service mean?’ ‘Why is Yom Kippur so important to the Jewish people?’ we must be able to respond from our armoury of Jewish learning, from a sense of Jewish responsibility for the future, from our practical knowledge and experience of Jewish tradition, rituals and observance which connect our faith with our deeds. We must be able to respond from the depths of our love and devotion to Judaism, and tell them of the sacred task entrusted to our ancestors which requires faith, learning, positive action and observance of the rituals of our tradition, in order to continue its teachings and its aspirations to bring goodness, justice and truth to our world. Keyn yehi ratzon.

Amen.

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