TFTW Archive 2024 May

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.

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.

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 19^th and early 20^th 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