Coming Home to Progressive Judaism

Written by Rabbi Elliott Karstadt — 12 April 2025

I want to speak more personally than I usually do. But first, a story.

An elderly Jewish woman from New York goes to the travel agent one day and announces her intention to visit India.

‘But it’s such a long journey!’ they tell her, ‘and those trains, how will you manage? What will you eat? The food is too hot and spicy for you, and you won’t be able to drink the water. You’ll get sick – the plague, hepatitis, cholera, typhoid, malaria, God only knows. What will you do? Can you imagine the hospital – no Jewish doctors! Why torture yourself?’

But she insists. So the necessary arrangements are made, and off she goes to India. When she arrives, undeterred by the noise, the smell, and the crowds, she makes her way to an ashram, where she joins the seemingly never-ending queue of people waiting for an audience with the guru. The attendant tells her she will have to wait at least three days to see the guru.

‘That’s ok,’ she says.

Eventually she reaches the hallowed portals. There they tell her firmly that, because there are so many people there to see him, each person will be allowed to say only three words to the guru.

‘Fine,’ she says.

She is finally ushered into the inner sanctum, where the guru is seated, ready to bestow spiritual blessings upon eager initiates. Just before she reaches the holy of holies they again remind her that she has just three words. As she approaches, she does not prostrate at the feet of the guru. Instead, she stands right in front of him, crosses her arms, fixes a stern gaze upon him, and says: ‘Sheldon, come home.’

Pesach is a time for coming home to our families, and for coming home to our Judism. In our Pesach Seders we will invoke the image of our ancestors who struck out to do something different. Arami oved avi – a wandering Aramean was my father…

The story of Sheldon and his mother took on yet another nuance for me a number of years ago, as I was about to embark on the journey to become a rabbi. I was about to travel up to Manchester to lead my first High Holy Day services as a student rabbi, and I was going to begin with this story, and in preparation, I told the story to my own mother, who isn’t Jewish. She shared the joke, and laughed in the right places, but as we laughed together at the punchline, it dawned on me that this situation might so easily describe the two of us. Here I was, reading my Rosh Hashanah sermon to my mum. Me, a student rabbi; my mum, a non-Jew with (by her own admission) very little interest in religious ideas. She could so easily have been marching down to Leo Baeck College and demanding that I ‘come home’.

Fortunately, nothing would be more unlikely – both of my parents have been nothing but supportive and encouraging throughout my journey to the rabbinate and beyond.

This is a journey that was only possible living in a Progressive Jewish community. And, it is important to say, a journey that until a few years ago, could only have happened in a Liberal Progressive Jewish community. When my parents started looking for a place for me to go to cheder and prepare for a Bar Mitzvah in the early 1990s, there were few places they could find that would not have expected me, my brother, and my sister to be converted. Few synagogues in which we would be automatically accepted because it was our father who was the wandering Aramean rather than our mother.

Since the 1970s, Liberal Judaism, like Reform Judaism in the US but not in the UK, had a policy of accepting child of Jewish fathers but not Jewish mothers – patrilineal Jews – into the community. This was not necessarily on an equal basis – it was on the proviso that those children had a Jewish upbringing. But even this was not possible in Reform synagogues like Alyth.

So, my dad went for a meeting at Finchley Progressive Synagogue. When we first joined, the rabbi was Frank Hellner, but when he retired in 1999, he was replaced by Rabbi Mark Goldsmith, who joined just in time for me to be one of his first Bar Mitzvahs at FPS. My sister was one of his last in 2006, just before he made the move to Alyth. When Alyth brought Rabbi Mark in they knew that in doing so they would bring in change, bringing in a rabbi with a strong liberal background to lead a staunchly Reform community into the future. And looking through the archives of sermons, I found one that must have been by him, speaking of the importance of welcoming in patrilineal families

And less than ten years later, as I was applying for the rabbinic programme at Leo Baeck College, the Reform Assembly of Rabbis and Cantor made the historic move of introducing the idea of Inherited Status – the idea that Jewish status could be inherited from either parent. As with Liberal Judaism, this conferral of Jewish identity onto a child (or an adult) was not automatic. It required that that child was brought up exclusively in a Jewish home, that both their parents made the commitment to promoting Jewish identity. That doesn’t mean erasing their non-Jewish family or their non-Jewish heritage. But it means holding onto what is important about being Jewish, about being part of Jewish home.

So, when I was a child, my patrilineal Jewish background was the reason that I joined a Liberal community. As an adult, the journey that the Reform Movement had been on – spearheaded by our own Rabbi Josh – was what enabled me to be a rabbi here at Alyth – and Alyth really has become my home over the last five years since I was ordained.

And this is one of the reasons why it seems right to me that this is the time for the Liberal and Reform movements to come together and form Progressive Judaism. Our values are Progressive values. There may be historical differences between the two, and differences of emphasis. But really we have been one movement for a while now – it’s now time to formalise it. So that we can continue the task of expanding this inclusive community, of continuing to develop, to bring more people into our Jewish home, and to make more people feel at home.

Shabbat Shalom