Erev Rosh Hashanah Sermon: Being the leaders of Jewish life

Written by Rabbi Josh Levy — 15 September 2023

It’s relatively rare that I’m asked a question that completely stumps me – but it happened last week.

It was in a meeting with, let’s call him a ‘visitor from Israel’ – who was trying to understand Progressive Judaism in this country.
‘Who is your spiritual leader?’ he asked, with just a hint of menace.

Now, the question made sense.
He was trying to place us in the Jewish spectrum by finding out who our rebbe is.
Whose model of Jewish life do we follow?

Who is our Nachman of Bratslav, who is our Menachem Schneerson, our Rav Kook, our Abraham Joshua Heschel?

The question made sense.
The challenge was giving an answer.

My first instinct as a graduate of Leo Baeck College, and Alyth rabbi was Rabbi Dr Leo Baeck. So important was he in shaping us as a post war community – and much of what he wrote, especially about the orientation of our religious lives towards ethical action, continues to resonate within our forms of Jewish life.

But much of it does not resonate. Our world has moved dramatically since his time – especially in the nature of our ritual lives as Progressive Jews, our relationship with rabbinic texts as well as the prophetic voice. And the same is true of those who came before him; those who provided the early intellectual grounding for Reform Judaism, such as Abraham Geiger.

If I look on the bookshelves in my study, they are full of writings from those trying to articulate a concept of religious life in modernity: Eugene Borowitz, Mark Washofsky, John Rayner, Solomon Freehoff, Neil Gillman, Louis Jacobs, Tony Bayfield – all are guides, all of them grappling with the question of how we need to be and be Jewish in the world. Yet none of them are my rebbe – none articulate what my or our religious life looks like today.

And they sit alongside our classical texts – Talmud, midrash, halachic codes, commentaries, philosophers, all grappling with our questions in different ways, all of them part of our formative literature, providing us with spiritual guidance, but none of which that describe or prescribe that which we do or are.

Because, while the question made sense, there isn’t really a straightforward answer – there is no one authority to whom we turn, no individual’s model of Jewish life is one which we follow or should wish to follow.

Nor should there be.
Because that is not how this religious life that we live and cherish works.

By its nature, progressive Judaism evolves. We can’t have a rebbe placed in a moment in time, because our Jewish life and the challenges that we face change.
And by nature our Judaism is diverse. Communities with shared values can express them in different ways, with different ritual practice and different communal priorities and emphases.

Underlying this is a core idea about how our Jewish life is shaped, where authority lies for us. Our Judaism is not prescribed by those who come before us, because it doesn’t belong to them, it belongs to us.
Judaism is not defined by the commitments made by the generations that came before but by our commitments, how we respond Jewishly to the challenges and needs of our time.

As with so much else in our poly-vocal literary inheritance, this is both a radical idea and one found deeply in our texts. In a number of places in Talmud, the sages look out to the people to understand what Jewish tradition is and should be.

In the case of a forgotten halachah about practice around the Pesach sacrifice, Hillel instructs those he is teaching: ha’nach la’hen l’yisrael – leave it to Israel – they will work it out: im ein n’vi’im hein, b’nei n’vi’im hein – if they are not prophets themselves, they are the children of prophets, capable of making decisions, of shaping Jewish life for themselves.

More powerfully still, there are 14 occasions in Talmud in which halachah in the case of a dispute is set not by argument but by observation of the practice of the people. As articulated by the sage Abaye: pok hazi mai ama davar – Go out and see what the people are doing.

That is, one of the factors that defines the nature of Jewish life is how we live as Jews.
And this is especially true for us.

It is in the nature and values of Progressive Judaism that it cannot be found described or prescribed in any book from the past – to misquote Deuteronomy, in last week’s Torah portion, it is in our mouths and in our hearts to do it.

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But this model of Jewish life comes with a responsibility.

If our Judaism is defined by how we live it, if the commitments that we make in our Jewish life is what shapes Judaism, then the Jewish lives that we lead – each of us – they matter. They have consequences beyond our own personal practice.

We do not have a rebbe, there is no authority to whom we defer; this is a collective exercise – so what each of us does, our input, matters in shaping the whole.

So, ‘Who is your spiritual leader?’

It is a classic example of L’esprit d’escalier – the perfect answer thought of too late:
but the answer I wish I had given was ‘Pok hazi mai ama davar’ – Go out and see what the people are doing.

Because the answer to the question is to look around a room such as this and to say – we are.

Not we, the clergy, but all of us.

Each of us has the capacity to shape Jewish life for future generations, for a community such as this; each of us has the capacity to lean in to our Jewish lives, to respond Jewishly in a rich way; each of us has the ability to commit ourselves to scholarship, to engagement, to being serious Jews, to engage with those big questions and the answers that have been given in the past.

Each of us can shape Jewish life – by being scholars, prayers, thinkers, carers, defining our Judaism, our community, by the richness of the Jewish life we live within it.

Pok hazi – Go out and see what the people are doing.
And not only to define Jewish life by the richness of its content, but also by the ethics that we bring to it. Each of us has the ability to shape Judaism into something that is kind and decent by our kindness and our decency. Or the alternative – to shape Judaism into something more ugly, something that is not kind, not decent, something that doesn’t recognise that what really matters in communal life, what matters above all else, is how we are with one another.
Each of us has the ability to behave towards one another with honour and care – knowing that this is what God wants if us: to behave in God-like ways.

‘Who is your spiritual leader?’
Pok hazi mai ama davar – Go out and see what the people are doing.

Authority does not come from a book written in the past by someone else, however brilliant that book might have been.
Judaism comes from the book of our lives – the stories that we write in the way that we are in this place and out there in the world, and with one another. The Judaism we live, the relationships we form, the way in which we treat each other, daven and study together.

Judaism belongs to us. It is our task as we enter this new year– all of us – to be the answer to that question we were aske. To be the religious, the spiritual, the ethical leaders that this moment needs us to be.