Sermons

I’ve learnt much Torah from Taylor Swift—Olivia and I have this in common. This week, it’s her lyric “nightmare dressed like a daydream” that encapsulates the beauty and challenge of the diversity of our Jewish world, where it's possible for something to be both someone’s wildest dream and another’s worst nightmare.

I read an article on a website called VINnews (it used to be called Vos Iz Neias), which is the news website of the frum—in inverted commas—Torah Judaism, ultra-Orthodox world. If I’m honest, it’s not my Jewish media provider of choice. The article begins thus:

“Imagine, chalila, the Kosel being run by a ‘Rabbi Jill’ – a Reform Rabbi.”

It goes on to detail a nightmare vision in the eyes of its author: a progressive female rabbi in charge of the Kotel, parity of funding for different religious streams of Judaism, LGBTQ rights, an end to the monopoly of the Orthodox rabbinate on issues of religion and personal life such as marriage, adoption, and divorce across Israel and the diaspora. I don’t think I need to go on.

His nightmare, my daydream.

The article was written to energize the “Torah community” ahead of the upcoming World Zionist Congress elections, registration for which begins in the UK this upcoming Tuesday.

I find the idea that a part of the Jewish community claims a monopoly on the notion of Torah Judaism deeply flawed. Are we not a Torah community? How do we understand what we're doing here this morning if it's not that? It’s deliberately ideologically chosen language—claiming a name to lay claim to something that belongs to all of us—but that doesn’t make it true. Torah Judaism does not only mean fundamentalist Judaism. Torah Judaism, as it calls itself, makes as many choices about what its Torah is as we do.

All Jewish streams as we know them today are a product of the Enlightenment, of the encounter between Judaism and the modern world, and fundamentalist Orthodoxy is as much a chiddush, an innovation, as Reform Judaism is.

We all make choices about the Torah our Judaism is built on, and while there are some similarities—I don’t think anyone anywhere in the Jewish world is—to paraphrase The West Wing—burning their mother in a small family gathering for wearing garments made from two different threads or stoning their stubborn and rebellious child to death—different parts of the Jewish world do make important and justifiable choices about the Torah that anchors their Jewish reality.

You could argue it’s not necessary for our two different worldviews to ever cross paths—we could just coexist as two groups of people who see themselves as having figured out the best way to live a Jewish life in our era. Which would be true—except 77 years ago, the Jewish people embarked on a huge shared task of building a Jewish state, and in this work, these worldviews come into direct conflict.

Because once you have a Jewish state, you have a question: What Judaism is the Judaism of the state? And once you have a Jewish state, its Judaism has ramifications for the rights and freedoms of all of those who live in it, its political character, and it sets powerful norms for Judaism around the world as well. Things like: Who can marry whom? Who can be called a rabbi? Who can pray where? What can people do on Shabbat? Can women sing in public? Can women hold leadership roles? Where are the borders of the State of Israel? Who can be buried where? What rights do LGBTQ people have? And it goes on.

Rabbi Stanley Davids, a teacher I loved who died last week—but not before he’d made sure he voted in the Congress elections—taught me a powerful piece of vocabulary: political theology.

This is a way of thinking about the natural consequences of our religious beliefs, and how they interact with the world. Sometimes, our religious values are just for us and the way that we live our individual lives, but sometimes they have essential and necessary political consequences, where in order to preserve and protect a value, you have to take political action. He argued that Reform Judaism has a necessary political theology, and it’s called Reform Zionism.

To understand what this means, I want to share some words by Stanley’s correspondent, Rabbi Haim Rechnitzer, who explains that:

“The language of political theology is powerful because it can define reality; it can direct the course of policy-making. Most importantly, its power derives from its ability to have a political impact. For example, if part of the narrative of Zionism uses the term ‘redemption of the land’ and the term is woven into a larger religious context, the political act of settlement becomes a religious one, and the preaching of rabbis about redemption of the land has direct political ramifications. Theology can become another player—sometimes the decisive player—in the political-economic decision-making processes.”

And this is why the question of Torah Judaism, of theology, and of our role in this conversation is so, so, so important.

To explore this, I want to focus on the Torah Judaism of FRS—some of the words on the ark behind me.

For instance: “B’tzelem Elohim bara otam”—the idea that all people are created in the image of God, or “V’ahavta l’reacha kamocha.” If these Torah principles are central to your Judaism and your theology—your understanding of what Torah and God require of you—then they have certain significant political ramifications.

It’s these religious ideas that lead the Reform movement in Israel to lead civil discourse, to work actively in Israel’s legal system for the rights of LGBTQ couples, for equal gender rights, for parity of funding for bomb shelters in Jewish and Arab towns, and in support of those who face systemic racism. It’s the notion of “Tzedek, tzedek tirdof” that grounds our movement’s commitment to democracy and the rule of law, and that means our rabbis and lay leaders have been front and center in the democracy protests in Israel—before and during this war—using the structures of Israel’s democracy, like the Supreme Court, to fight for political freedoms and advances.

And it’s this stuff that is the battleground in these upcoming elections, as our Torah Judaism, the political theology of progressive Judaism, is under attack from those who believe that there is another, different Torah Judaism that is incompatible with these tenets of our tradition.

They are upset that it is possible to call LGBTQ helplines from kosher phones. They are concerned about the presence of an egalitarian prayer space at the Kotel. They want to reintroduce segregated bus lines in Israel after the Reform movement successfully won cases and campaigns to desegregate them. They want to redefine the boundaries of the State of Israel as the maximalist boundaries of the biblical land, including vast territory that extends all the way through modern-day Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

I want to make it clear that I have no issue with those who want to live a particular form of Jewish life doing so within certain bounds. I’m a pluralist, as is our movement. It would be deeply hypocritical to acknowledge we are all making choices and have the right to do so, and then assert mine over someone else's.

The challenge is when religious freedoms begin to assert political direction. This is where there is room for debate and political disagreement. What our movement is fighting for is the space for Jewish difference, where there are maximalist religious freedoms and equalities baked into the structures of the Jewish state that enable as many Jews as possible to find their place, and that ensure the ripples out from Israel into the Jewish world continue to reflect and uphold that diversity—while also reflecting and engaging with the reality that the lives of other peoples and sovereign nations are impacted by these theological views.

When people say to me that they find it stressful or frustrating that we as diaspora Jews have no influence on or say in what happens in Israel, I always remind them that this isn’t true. Baked into the structure of the modern State of Israel are some powerful and important legacy organizations that make it possible for us to have the conversation we’re having today about the impact of our movement and its theology.

When Herzl founded the Zionist movement, he brought together Jews from all stripes and ways of thought into a Congress of the Zionist Organisation he formed. In time, that organization developed operational arms like Keren Kayemet L’Yisrael (the Jewish National Fund), which dealt with land purchase, acquisition, and management, and the Jewish Agency, which dealt with education, aliyah, civilian infrastructure, and more. These organizations still exist today, and because of their connection to the Zionist movement, they are still shaped by an amazing—if not absolutely headache-inducing—democratic process.

Herzl’s original Zionist Congress has grown into a 530-ish person parliament, in which Jewish denominations, Israeli political parties, and international Jewish organizations are all represented democratically. The political parties get their seat allocation from the Israeli elections, and the rest of us get our seat allocation from local elections. The parliament of the Congress then votes on and agrees strategies for the national institutions and controls a huge—like, billion-dollar—budget that impacts funding for every single religious group in Israel and around the world: settlement and education funding, and much, much more.

Because of the size of the American Reform movement, we’ve had huge influence in these spaces: ensuring strong funding for the Israeli Reform movement, diversity in religious representation in the army and education system in Israel, funding for pluralist education, and restricting the use of diaspora and national Jewish funds in building and growth over the Green Line in areas that Israel controls but is not likely to hold onto under any future peace agreement.

This work is what has upset and awoken the self-proclaimed Torah world, who are non-Zionist in nature, but believe that the affront we represent to Jewish life is a threat serious enough to issue a religious decree making it permissible to sign a commitment to a state they don’t religiously believe in—because they believe we must wait for the Messiah in the diaspora. It’s upset and awoken the radical right in the diaspora, who would vote for fundamentalist radicals like Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, and advocate for dangerous, violent, and racist policies.

This is why your vote matters—because the unholy alliance of Jewish fundamentalists in the current Israeli Knesset and ultra-Orthodox fundamentalists in the diaspora is seeking to use this election to induce a seismic shift in the structure of Jewish diaspora life and in Israel—and this is our fight to lose. They are relying on our liberalism, our passivity, and our hesitation—born from the outdated nature of these organizations—to stop us turning out the vote.

The first word of this week’s sedra, Vayikra, ends in a small aleph. It is said that Moses wanted to write not Vayikra (He called), but Vayikar (He happened upon), as if God had only happened upon him accidentally. God told him to write an aleph, and to assert his place in the story, and so Moses compromised and wrote it small.

I guess that this Shabbat, I’m asking you not to do what Moses did—to take your rightful-sized place in the story of the Jewish people. This isn’t a moment to be humble. It’s a moment to make sure each and every one of us—our voices and our children's Jewish future—is represented and counted.

Here’s what you need to know:

• The actual vote in the UK is in June.

• Because of the huge amount of money involved and the ideological pressures, the chance of fraud is deemed high.

• This means all people who want to vote have to register first—and this means that the elections will essentially be won or lost during the first registration period.

• Registration opens this Tuesday and lasts a month.

• Anyone Jewish, over 18, who hasn’t voted in the recent Israeli Knesset elections or any other Congress election overseas can vote.

• To vote, you have to pay what is known as the Zionist Shekel—a nominal amount of £1 that has some lovely biblical roots and basically funds the election infrastructure.

• The Reform, Liberal, and Masorti movements are running a joint slate called Our Israel, focusing on religious pluralism, democracy, and freedom.

• There are lots of other parties running—you can vote for whoever you like. All I can do is tell you why this matters to this shul, our values, and our colleagues in Israel—but it has to be up to each eligible voter to make their choice.

Tell your friends. Tell everyone. And know that this voice is ours to use—to shape the future of the Jewish people in Israel and in the diaspora—for a generation to come.

Shabbat shalom.