TFTW Archive 2024 May
Shabbat Acharey-Mot
3 May 2024
Dear Members and Friends,
This weekend, our synagogue will celebrate the graduation of eight bright and thoughtful teenagers from the LJS Religion School ‘Rimon’. This ceremony is called Kabbalat Torah, which translates from Hebrew as ‘Accepting/Receiving of the Torah’. To understand this ceremony better, it is important to know its history.
Youth is often the vehicle of change, progress, and evolution in any society and Judaism is not an exception. The earliest reforms in Judaism took place not in the synagogues but in schools. Traditionally, Bar Mitzvah took place at the age of thirteen and demonstrated a boy’s (yes, originally, it was only for boys) ability to read Hebrew from the Torah scroll and knowledge of Judaism and religious practice. In contrast to Bar Mitzvah, Confirmation (as Kabbalat Torah was then called) placed greater emphasis on religious principles and values. Not only did Confirmation extend Jewish education beyond the early teenage years to sixteen and sometimes seventeen, but it also included girls.
The earliest Confirmation ceremony is believed to have occurred in Dessau in 1803. Although this is a relatively new ceremony for Judaism, Kabbalat Torah was the first egalitarian ceremony almost from the beginning. By 1831, the service had moved into synagogues in Berlin, and the leading nineteenth-century American Reform Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise introduced confirmation to the United States in 1846. Since then, it has been practised widely and generally held around the festival of Shavuot, which celebrates the giving of the Torah and the Israelites’ acceptance of the commandments (hence the Hebrew name Kabbalat Torah). Shavuot gave the Confirmation ceremony a particular poignancy because of its emphasis on religious faith and principles.
The Kabbalat Torah service is a cherished tradition in the LJS calendar, dating back to the very beginning of the synagogue’s history. The LJS was established in 1911 and the first Kabbalat Torah took place in 1912. Many of our members never had Bar/Bat Mitzvah, but most had their Confirmation. In fact, B’nei Mitzva ceremonies were introduced to the LJS only in the 1980s, most likely because of the peer pressure our teenagers and families felt from other synagogues. Kabbalat Torah, therefore, is a life-cycle event deeply rooted in the Jewish Progressive values and the history of our community.
Unlike a B’nei Mitzvah ceremony, which focuses on individual participation, the Kabbalat Torah is a collective experience. It's a powerful demonstration of the deep bonds that form within the group and the significant role our community plays in shaping their Jewish identity. What makes it truly special is that a group of KT students leads the entire service, from the Torah reading to the sermon. We encourage the class to extend their invitation to family and friends, making this a truly communal celebration. This is an event you don't want to miss.
Following the service, each individual becomes a member of the synagogue in their own right and takes their place in the adult community. Most importantly, they are now eligible to become helpers in the Religion School, and many continue to help in class, undergo training and become more involved in Liberal Judaism’s youth programmes.
Please join me in supporting our Kabbalat Torah students this weekend and congratulating them on the remarkable achievement of growing into proud, progressive, liberal Jews.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Igor
Shabbat Kedoshim
10 May 2024
Last Sunday evening, on the eve of Yom Ha-Shoah, I had the privilege of standing next to Joan Salter, a child survivor of the Holocaust, as she lit a candle in memory of the six million Jews who died in the Shoah. Several hundred people sat under open-sided tents in Victoria Tower Gardens at a moving ceremony, listening to ninety-six-year-old Bronia Snow, who was eleven years old when she arrived in Britain in 1939 on the Kindertransport from Prague. She lived with her uncle and aunt in London and, throughout the war, waited and hoped that she would be reunited with her parents and younger brother. In 1944, while at school, she learned they had been deported to Auschwitz and murdered there.
The day before on Shabbat, eight young people in our own community had led the service, read from the Torah and commemorated the six million dead, with passages from our Siddur, read by the great-grandson of another refugee who had escaped Hungary and arrived in Britain in 1939. Introducing these readings, the student added his own words:
‘My friends and I are probably one of the last generations to ever get the chance to meet Holocaust survivors. As important and useful as lessons and workshops about this tragedy are, nothing has the same impact as speaking to someone who was there.
‘I know that, to me, sometimes the Holocaust doesn’t really feel real. Maybe I just don’t want to believe that something so terrible could happen; maybe I can’t process how much hurt was caused….’
And he ended with these words:
‘So, what can we do, not only to stop the next generation from forgetting how real this was but also to ensure nothing like this ever happens again? Honestly, I don’t know, but I do know that when we think about people as real people with real lives instead of stories or statistics, we can understand them. We can empathise with them. We can believe what happened.’
Listening to this young teenager and to the even younger children, drawn from different Jewish schools, singing songs in Yiddish, Hebrew and English at the Yom Ha-Shoah commemoration, demonstrates the obligation each one of us has to teach our children in the best possible way about the catastrophic tragedy of the Shoah through the individual stories of people, including children who perished, who lost parents, brothers and sisters, and who survived and managed to create new lives following such painful losses.
Yom Ha-Shoah falls just one week before Yom Ha-Zikkaron – Israel’s Day of Memorial in which the fallen soldiers of the last eight decades are remembered, now along with victims of terror attacks. It is a deeply solemn day in Israel when sirens are sounded throughout the country.
In 2006, an alternative ceremony was initiated by Buma Inbar, whose son was killed in Lebanon in 1995. Together with peace activists from Combatants for Peace and Israeli and Palestinian Parents Circle-Families Forum, this event has drawn thousands of people from Israel and Palestine, and online from around the world. The theme for this year is ‘Sharing Our Humanity, Honouring Our Children. Stop The War.’ I urge you to register and follow online as their website states:
‘Our ceremony is radically different from the typical ceremonies that promote a narrative that war and death are inevitable and necessary. Instead, the joint memorial event is a unique opportunity for Israelis and Palestinians to grieve together and stand united in demanding an end to the bloodshed. In mourning together, we seek not to equate experiences, but rather transform despair into hope and build compassion around our shared humanity. We remind ourselves and the world that occupation, oppression, and conflict are not inevitable.’
Yom Ha-Zikkaron is followed the day after by Yom Ha-Atzma’ut – Israel’s Independence Day. Each one of these ‘new’ days of commemoration and celebration have been and will be infused, undoubtedly, by the massacre of October 7 and the catastrophic numbers killed in Gaza, Israel and on the West Bank, where the violence has become out of hand.
We may ask ourselves – how can we feel free to celebrate amidst war, bloodshed, and the grief and sorrow of so many.
I place my hope in the voice and words of twenty-year-old Eden Golan, chosen to sing her song ‘Hurricane’ as part of the Eurovision Song Contest in Malmo on Saturday night. I hope to unite people through music, she said.
‘There is no need for long words,
Only prayers,
Even if it is hard to see,
You will always leave me one small light.’
לא צריך מילים גדולות
רק תפילו
אפילו אם קשה לראות
תמיד אתה משאיר לי אור אחד קטן
May she remain strong holding on to that ‘one small light’ amidst the challenges she will undoubtedly face tomorrow night.
Shabbat Shalom,
Alexandra Wright
How is this Israel's Independence Day Different from Others? 
17 May 2024
Dear Members and Friends,
This week we are reading one of the most recognisable verses in the Torah:
שֶׁבֶר תַּחַת שֶׁבֶר עַיִן תַּחַת עַיִן שֵׁן תַּחַת שֵׁן
fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth
This is not the first time we have known this formula in the history of humanity. The Code of Hammurabi – ancient Babylonian legal text composed in the 18 Century BCE - had a similar principle - if a man destroyed the eye of another man, they were to destroy his eye. If one broke a man's bone, they were to break his bone. However, if a person of higher social status destroyed the eye or broke the bone of an ordinary person, he was to pay monetary compensation. If one destroyed the eye of a slave or broke a bone of a slave, he was to pay one-half of the slave's price.
It's possible that the Torah verse isn't just a set of laws but a critique of the Hammurabi Laws. The Torah presents a different perspective, advocating for a universal and egalitarian principle. 'Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, fracture for fracture' applies to all, irrespective of their social standing, origin, wealth or position.
In other words, when you apply the law to your citizens, you need to do the same to all. The equality of the law seems obvious, but it was not always the case in the past, and it is not always the case now. It is easy and wrong to demand justice from the most vulnerable, whose position in society is weak and not demand it from those in power.
This verse makes another point—there is no competition in suffering. This has been one of the hardest ethical challenges of the last months. There seems to be an illusion that people must take sides and either sympathise with Israelis or Palestinians. Why cannot we have feelings for both?
This week marked two significant days in Israel – Yom Ha-Zikkaron (Israel’s Memorial Day for the fallen soldiers) and Yom Ha-Atzma'ut (Israel’s Independence Day). Like many other milestones and festivals this year, these days feel very different. The shadow of the horrific terror attack of October 7th and the rising humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza are making it hard to find the right words to say these days.
Our sister Jewish movement in Israel – The Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism (IMPJ) - has issued a collection of prayers written by Israeli Rabbis to mark these days. [1] One of the Prayers for Israel, written by Rabbi Nardy Grun, stands out in its humanity, balanced approach and clarity. I would like to finish this week’s Thought for The Week with a quote from this prayer:
Blessed be those who make peace and strive for co-existence between peoples
Blessed be those who defend freedom and democracy
Blessed be those who defend the nation’s security
[1] Click here to read the full booklet.
Shabbat Shalom,
Igor Zinkov
Shabbat B'Har 
24 May 2024
Dear Members and Friends,
It is now just over a year since the Movement for Reform Judaism and Liberal Judaism announced they would become one Progressive Judaism movement in the UK. The momentum and excitement have not abated; in fact, if anything, bringing our two rabbinic bodies together recently for joint meetings, has helped us to begin formulating questions about what we represent, ideologically and theologically. They include questions about our understanding of the relationship between ‘progress’ and Progressive Judaism; the ‘relevance’ of Ethical Monotheism in our communities, the place of inclusivity in Progressive Judaism, liberal notions of individual autonomy and whether they help or hinder the building of a community or movement, and how we might understand Progressive Zionism today.
At our last joint meeting, I joined a small group that examined the term ‘Ethical Monotheism’. The term defines the conjunction of two ideas – humanity and God. It was Hermann Cohen, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, who saw deep points of connection between ethics and religion. Judaism is an ethical system of belief and practice, he argued, and the historical source of the idea of universal ethical laws. It was Judaism that offered the world its first model of a universalist morality.
When we strive for morality, for ideal ethical laws, we are striving to create a ‘correlation’ between ourselves and God. That is the purpose of atonement, our own individual attempt to eradicate ‘sin’ and seek God’s guidance towards goodness.
Cohen argued that monotheism, and so too Judaism, was the historical source of the idea that all humanity could be unified by a single set of ethical laws. The view that God is this ‘set of ideal ethical laws’ asserts that there is only one God for all humanity and thus a ‘universal ethical ideal’ that allows us to see people as ‘fellow humans’ and not as ‘others’ who can be excluded from the moral community.
Many of the prophets expressed this universal ethical ideal framed within a strictly monotheistic faith:
‘Hear the word of the Eternal One…
Give ear to our God’s instructions….
Cease to do evil;
Learn to do good.
Devote yourselves to justice;
Aid the wrong.
Uphold the rights of the orphan;
Defend the cause of the widow.’ (Isaiah 1:10, 17).
‘Thus said the Eternal One:
For three transgressions of Israel,
For four, I will not revoke it:
Because they have sold for silver
Those whose cause was just,
And the needy for a pair of sandals.’ (Amos 2:6)
It is these passages and many more in Tanakh that create the idea of ‘ethical monotheism’ – a unifying concept that does not limit God to one people but sees God as representing an ideal of morality. It is God who binds us together as one humanity, unified, accountable to a set of laws that see justice and truth as universal requirements. Unity does not mean uniformity – we have seen how the principle of inclusiveness, particularly in our own community – should affirm diversity and difference.
These are not contradictions but rather creative tensions that allow for a dialectic between the aspiration and knowledge of one humanity, one planet and the unity of all creation, on the one hand, and our own uniqueness, individuality and failings on the other.
Cohen’s ‘idea’ of God is intellectual rather than personal and he was criticised for transforming the ‘living God of Israel’ into a mere philosophical idea. But in Cohen’s thought, God is not indispensable; on the contrary, he identifies the prophetic concept of God with morality. In his later writings, he writes that all reality is rooted in God and both humanity and our reason originate in God – a God whose being is ‘different from all other being’ and ‘represents true being compared with which all being of nature and of the quality of man [sic] itself is mere appearance and shadow’ (‘The Importance of Judaism for the Religious Progress of Humanity’, 1910).
As we construct a brand-new movement of Progressive Judaism, we may have to find a new language to express ideas of progress, autonomy, agency, and new frameworks that allow us to create a sense of inclusiveness, without veering towards sameness and uniformity. The challenge is immense for we are moving the boundaries of our individual movements – Liberal Judaism and Reform Judaism – to become one.
I don’t believe we can afford to lose our prophetic textual tradition which requires us to read, interpret and live by the idea that we are part of one humanity, one creation, one planet. Nor do I believe that we should eradicate ideas of transcendence or immanence, otherness, mystery and relationship – the words that define my relationship with the Being that is the source of our existence and the source of morality.
Shabbat Shalom,
Alexandra Wright
About Torah Portion Bechukotai, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Responsibility.
31 May 2024
Dear Members and Friends,
“Jews are asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of thought: to surpass their needs, to do more than they understand in order to understand more than they do. In carrying out the word of Torah they are ushered into the presence of spiritual meaning. Through the extasy of deeds they learn to be certain of the presence of God. “
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said these words while addressing the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) in 1953. Abraham Joshua Heschel was a Polish-born American rabbi and one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century. Some notable topics that Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel raised in his books include social justice and civil rights, the moral and ethical responsibilities of individuals and society, and the relationship between faith and action. He spoke about relevant topics of his time with clarity and integrity, yet with kindness and spirituality.
Heschel emphasised the importance of taking action over theoretical knowledge in his address. It encourages individuals to go beyond their own needs and understanding.
Progressive Judaism is sometimes described as a non-halachic movement. Some people say that Halachah – the Jewish Law – is only for orthodox Jews, and we, Liberal Jews, should only follow ethical principles of Jewish teaching. Would you agree with this definition?
In this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Bechukotai, God promises peace, security, and abundant crops to those who are loyal and follow all the commandments. However, if they disobey, they will face misery, suffering, exile and destruction. How can you understand such theology? We need to read this parashah from the perspective of responsibility. What underlines this ‘reward and punishment’ approach is the realisation that people’s actions will have consequences. Individuals and societies are never isolated from others. What we do always impacts others; therefore, we must take responsibility and think carefully about what we do and what it mean to others. In reality, one may never say that it is not their responsibility to look after their neighbour. I may sound radical and even utopian, but there is an increasing number of examples – Israel’s attempt to destroy Hamas terrorists and the way it affects international and local politics, the Russian attack on Ukraine and the way it affects most Western economies.
Following Rabbi Heschel’s teaching, Judaism is about actions, not so much about thought or belief. However, our actions are an expression of our values, thoughts, and beliefs. We live in a rapidly changing world. It is becoming almost impossible to predict what the life of future generations will look like. Parents today don’t know what professions will be valuable and successful in their children's lifetime. Therefore, any fixed rules must be constantly reassessed and adjusted to the reality of the time and place. Hence, the Progressive Jewish approach is the only way forward – relying on principles rather than laws, on values rather than fixed practices.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Igor
Tue, 18 March 2025
18 Adar 5785
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