The Controversy, Community & Politics (Scrapbook)

Is There Still Reason To Believe?

On the 50th Anniversary of the Publication of We Have Reason to Believe

Rabbi Jeremy Gordon's address to the gathering:-

How good it was to see Rabbi Jacobs in that video, to see him speaking, standing at his pulpit again.
How right it feels.
Just like the good ol' days - taking potshots at the tepidity of Anglo-Orthodoxy, the foolishness of the Manchester Rabbis, and most especially spinning glorious webs of Torah on this, his most beloved subject.

Those of you who saw the start of the film would have seen Rabbi Jacobs arrive at the bimah, unfold his notes, place them on the schtender and proceed to give his talk with barely a single glance.
I'm reminded of a story told of the great historian and Talmud scholar of the last generation, Alexander Marx.

Marx would teach his Talmud class at the Jewish Theological Seminary without bringing the relevant volume of the Talmud with him. There didn't seem much point. He had the whole 20 volumes off by heart, together with any tosafot or manuscript variants.
And if a student erred in their reading, he would correct them from memory.
One day a brave student plucked up the courage to ask the Professor if, he would not consider it to be too great a burden, could he bring a copy of the Talmud with him to class, because it was a little embarrassing to be corrected by someone who didn't have the book open in front of them.
So, next class, Professor Marx arrives opens his volume of the Talmud and appears to scrutinising the page during the class.
At the end of the class Professor Marx leaves the room, forgetting his volume.
One of the students realises what has happened, he picks up the book and runs off after him, as he picks the book the book he realises that Marx had brought the a completely different tractate than the one they were studying.

The Torah in this video,
The Torah in those slow burning but ultimately explosive chapters in We Have Reason to Believe,
The Torah featured in speech after speech and paper after paper year after year after year as Rabbi Louis Jacobs reworked, refined and - let me be honest - repeated his message was as ????????????? ????as fluent in the mouth of Rabbi Jacobs as the Talmud was to Professor Marx.

I wasn't in England 10 years ago when this speech was given, but looking at it, listening to it this last week, it felt so very familiar.
As I flicked through my copies of Rabbi Jacobs' written work.
As I flicked through my memories of so many of Rabbi Jacobs' sermons over so many years,
The arguments, the texts, even the stories were familiar; I'd heard them before, I'd read them before, they were like slipping into comfortable shoes.
He's speaking my language - actually he taught me how to speak this language.

What is this Torah, Rabbi Jacobs' Torah, this so oft-repeated, but so oft-misunderstood message?

There are five claims in Rabbi Jacobs' decades of engagement in issues of revelation, obligation and the nature of holiness in Jewish life.
And while it is of course unfair to traduce a lifetime's great scholarship into five sentences, let me try.
Five claims in five sentences.

1. Traditional Rabbinic thought has long recognised the difference between Torah Min HaShamayim - the true totality of God's revelation to the People of Israel - and the exact literal letter-by-letter reality of the Pentateuch.
   ?) Torah min hashamaim is not the same thing as the Pentateuch.
2. To be explicit that the exact letter-by-letter nature of the Pentateuch, not to mention the entire phalanx of the oral torah, was revealed through humans over time is a matter of honesty and intellectual and spiritual integrity.
   ?) Torah min hashamaim is not the same thing as the Pentateuch.
   ?) To admit this is to be honest.
3. If we are led, by all sorts of evidence, to come to a conclusion that God chose to reveal God's will to Israel in time, over time, through humans - brilliant but fallible humans - we have to conclude that the difference between Torah Min HaShamayim and the contents of any book of Jewish interest is part of God's great, ultimately unknowable plan.
   ?) Torah min hashamaim is not the same thing as the Pentateuch.
   ?) To admit this is to be honest.
   ?) If we can figure this out, it must be that God willed it to be so.
4. Since God evidentially wished to command us in time, over time, through humans we should therefore consider that the contents of these books of Jewish interest; the Pentateuch, the Talmuds, the Shulchan Aruch - the codes of Jewish practice - we should consider these books binding because they bring us to God, because this is what God has come to demand of us.
   ?) Torah min hashamaim is not the same thing as the Pentateuch.
   ?) To admit this is to be honest.
   ?) If we can figure this out, it must be that God willed it to be so.
   ?) If this is how God set up the system, then the 'through human' plan for revelation - all the books - should be considered as binding.
5. Finally, being explicit about the human involvement in the process of creating Torah does indeed deprive us of the ability to be fundamentalists, but that is no bad thing, for Jewish holiness is not a fundamentalist's charter, Jewish holiness is a Quest, a journey, and we are not yet at the end of the road.
   ?) Torah min hashamaim is not the same thing as the Pentateuch.
   ?) To admit this is to be honest.
   ?) If we can figure this out, it must be that God willed it to be so.
   ?) If this is how God set up the system, then the 'through human' plan for revelation - all the books - should be considered as binding.
   ?) If we believe this we become inured from fundamentalism, we become part of the Quest for holiness.

As Hillel once said,
???????????????????????????????????????????????????
That is the totality of Rabbi Jacobs' Torah, the rest is commentary, now go finish it.

So the experience of reading one of Rabbi Jacobs' books on the subject - and there are many books, or attending one of Rabbi Jacobs' speeches on the subject - and there are many speeches, or being present for one of the 40 years' worth of sermons given from this very pulpit is the experience of being present not at new argument, but an argument that comes rolling in, like Jacques Derrida said of Emanuel Levinas - comes rolling in like a wave.

Every wave that crashes against the shore is, of course, unique. No wave has ever, could ever, be an identical copy of a previous wave.
But every wave is also the same.
All the anecdotes, all the examples, all the learning, every chapter, every book, every speech, every sermon are doing the same thing.
And the waves pound away, eroding any human defence, until we find ourselves unable to resist their power.
And this is why the orthodox couldn't handle Rabbi Jacobs.
And this is why Rabbi Jacobs kept taunting them to take him on, about any single part of his argument.
Because it wasn't about any single part of the argument.
It was about this ever rolling wave.
A wave that eroded the safe comfortable positions of power that Chief Rabbi Brodie and the dayanim preferred to shelter behind.
It was a wave that suggested that blindly following any book, any Rebbe, any Chief Rabbi, any false messiah was not holy.
It was a wave that suggested that blindly following was a surrender of honesty and integrity and a failure of holiness.

Rabbi Jacobs himself, of course, could have been one of those Rebbes, those false Messiahs. He had the learning, he had the skills as an orator and communicator.
He could have been a Chief Rabbi, gently intoning on our Radios, bringing the values of our ancient tradition to bear on the issues of the day, impressing the non-Jews with his erudition and the peerage or the knighthood that comes with the job.
But he couldn't back down.
It comes back to that second claim of Rabbi Jacobs' Torah.

To be explicit that the exact letter-by-letter nature of the Pentateuch, not to mention the entire phalanx of the oral torah, was revealed through humans over time is a matter of honesty and intellectual and spiritual integrity.

That's the one that cost Rabbi Jacobs the office of the Chief Rabbi; it was the honesty and the intellectual and spiritual integrity.

In my eulogy for Rabbi Jacobs I told how Solomon Schechter, the first President of the Jewish Theological Seminary, understood the Midrash in which Avaraham avinu, our patriarch Abraham, smashes the wares of his father, the seller of idols. It must have been tempting for Abraham, wrote Schechter to continue the life of dishonesty of an idol salesman. He could have sat quiet and waited until he entered into his due inheritance, the respectable family business.
But this dishonesty was not the way of our patriarch. Abraham felt the need to smash the idols of the house of his father, because they represented a lie.
And dishonesty can never be squared with a true religious quest.

And what was Abraham's reward for this act of archetypal iconoclasm? Honesty doesn't go down well amongst those comfortable living in deceit. The Torah tells us that Abraham left his homeland, his home-comforts and became a wanderer. The Midrash tells us that Abraham was cast into the fire. Rabbi Jacobs knew that feels like.
In the speech you have seen this evening you would have heard him musing about finding oneself in hot water. 'The good thing about continually being in hot water,' he reports, 'is that it keeps you clean.'
The bad news, of course, is that you might get a little scolded and polite religious society might find you a dangerous dinner party guest.

Rabbi Jacobs wasn't prepared to give up his quest for honesty for the baubles of polite religious society, and in particular he was never prepared to give up his quest for honesty to appease those he felt were spiritually dishonest.

As it says in the Talmud
And lest the judge should say
?????????????? 'Why should I get involved in this tzoros, this trouble?
Know that God is with the judge and that one should judge only on the basis of what one's own eyes see.'
A judge should never, says every Code, every Gemorah on the subject, a judge should never be swayed by the baubles of polite religious society.
You have to tell is as you see it.

Recently I came across a piece of correspondence between two brave giants of Torah; Shlomo Goren and Shaul Lieberman. I want to share it with you.

You might be able to picture Rav Shlomo Goren. You might have seen David Rubinger's famous photograph of Goren; eyes ablaze, a shofar in each hand, being carried shoulder high by paratroopers to the kottel in the midst of the Six Day War.
Well that Rav Goren, Chaplain to the Israel Defence Force, became the Chief Rabbi of Israel - a big bauble for a guy who thought being devout didn't mean could absent yourself from military service. Well Rav Goren got the big bauble and he threw it away.
He was approached by a brother and sister who were being classified as mamzerim - illegitimate Jews by the haredim.
Goren came to their aid. He published a monumental teshuvah to try and explain why, despite every appearance to the contrary, these poor yiddim should not be treated as mamzerim. And the haredim mocked him.
Goren personally served as the mesader kiddushin he officiated at their weddings. And the haredim excommunicated him - they excommunicated their own Chief Rabbi.
Rav Goren died only recently, zichrono tzadik livracha. His memory is a blessing.

The other party in this correspondence, Shaul Lieberman was, like Rabbi Jacobs, a product of the pre-war Lithuanian Yeshiva world. Lieberman was an absolute giant of Talmud study, one of very few Rabbi Jacobs himself would acknowledge as a far, far greater Talmudic scholar than he. And while personally Lieberman was a man of impeccable orthodoxy he decided to pursue his professional career at the Masorti affiliated Jewish Theological Seminary. And for this he too felt the fire of the haredim. He too was excommunicated. His name has been gently, if deceitfully, edited out of haredi scholarship.
There is something of Rabbi Jacobs in each of these two men.

And when Lieberman heard what was happening to Goren he wrote to Goren offering support.

Goren wrote back, gracious for the collegiality, especially from one who understood what it was to have the haredi Rabbinate turn against him. That's the first paragraph of the letter.
It was the second paragraph that caught my attention.

That said, I'm delighted to note that I have never felt myself so free to deliberate, to teach, to make legal decisions as I see them, according to my own deliberations. I have been set free, blessed be God, from all the impure notions that they continually pursued me with - what would this one say, what would this lot say, or that lot - now I am fulfilling the Gemorah which states that Rabbi should judge only on the basis of what their own eyes see.

The cost of refusing to bend to the religious deceit of those who wish to preserve dictatorial autocracy is that you lose the baubles of polite religious society. Rabbi Jacobs knew that cost, he paid that cost. But there is also great reward for refusing to lie. As Goren put it, you are set free from the 'all the impure notions that they pursued me with always - what would this one say, what would this lot say, or that lot.'

Of course Rabbi Jacobs was right never to cavil, never to apologise for what his own eyes saw, never to grovel to the haredim, because they would never have given up. When you give up your integrity you walk forever with a stoop and a twitch, you spend the rest of your life looking over your right shoulder in case they come at you again.

This, of course, brings me to Rabbi Jacobs' relationship with the current holder of the post of Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations. Rabbi Jacobs is in jovial mood, in this video, retelling a conversation with Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Sacks says, 'I suppose in the world to come we will see which of us is right.' Jacobs responds, 'according to your boys, I won't be there.'

But it was not always jovial. This extract comes from the epilogue of the 1995 edition of We Have Reason to Believe.

Rabbi Sacks in One People rejects the view that Jewish law, the Halakhah is 'historically endorsed habit,' a view he ascribes to me, quoting from my book A Jewish Theology, 'Yes it is true, in a sense that the whole of Torah is minhag, custom growing through the experience of human beings and interpreted by them in response to particular conditions in human history.' It is beyond belief that Rabbi Sacks has left his readers in ignorance that I continue, in the very next sentence, 'But we go on from there to say that since this happened, since this is how God revealed Himself, then the minhag of Israel is Torah.' And in the next paragraph I go on to say that Judaism is more than ethics, more than history, more than sociology and I add, 'Judaism is a religion and a religious approach must see the mitzvot as ways to God. The sanction for the mitzvot is that they succeed in bringing men to God. Because they do this they are commanded by God.'

It's all but inconceivable that a man of Rabbi Sacks' academic qualifications didn't know what he was doing in ripping one sentence so far out of its context.
It's all but impossible to consider that Rabbi Sacks didn't know he was taking a cheap shot. And yet Rabbi Sacks puts himself forward as a man of integrity. The great success of the United Synagogue, under Rabbi Sacks' leadership has been in persuading good decent Jews that they too are good decent Jews, just like they are. But behind the veneer of acceptability lies no backbone and behind that lies a fierce autocracy prepared to wound, to hurt and to exclude - I'm not talking about Rabbis - we are big enough to look after ourselves - but amcha any member of the People of Israel unfortunate enough to be considered just not good enough for their unimpeachable orthodoxy. And I, my Masorti colleagues, my Reform and Liberal colleagues too, we get left to pick up the pieces.

As many of you will know I am in the process of applying to become the next Rabbi of this great community. The next person to stand in the footsteps of Rabbi Jacobs and they are daunting footsteps indeed. I have to tell you watching and hearing Rabbi Jacobs stand in this place and do what he did better than anyone makes the prospect of my standing here on a regular basis more daunting still. But it is not the breadth and depth of Rabbi Jacobs' learning that most scares me when I allow myself to imagine being the Rabbi of Louis' Shul. I don't know as much as Rabbi Jacobs did, but I know enough.
What really scares me is that I don't know if I have the courage, the commitment to honesty and intellectual and spiritual integrity that Rabbi Jacobs had, because in my eyes I see that as the greater quality and the greater challenge.

So let try a little honesty with you today.
There are those who seem to be waiting for this community, now its great leader has gone, to die away, to fade into a footnote in the history of twentieth century Anglo-Jewry.
I am not applying to this community to officiate at its funeral.
And I will rage rather than go quietly into the dark. I will rage because this community dare not go quietly. Too much is at stake. If Judaism in this country is ever to hold its head up as honest, committed, learned, serious, then this community, the New London Synagogue, will be at the head of that procession. And if Judaism in this country is to be allowed to continue to scurry in fear of the haredim, knowing little and caring less about the Quest for holiness in Jewish life, then this community will have failed. And for the sake of God - for God's sake - that cannot be allowed to happen.

Early in my speech, this evening, I quoted a line from Hillel.
It is, of course, one of the most oft-quoted lines in all the Talmud.
Hillel sums up his Torah
And says

That is the totality of the Torah
But often the last part of the line is forgotten, or ignored

the rest is commentary

now go finish it.
And we are not finished yet, it might be 50 years but we are just getting started.