Sermon: An Insincere Confession of Sin (Rabbi Tony Bayfield)

Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 22 March 2015

Those of you who are senior citizens like me will remember Ted Heath, the Prime Minister not the band leader. Mr Heath didn’t leave us with a vast repertoire of quotable remarks but one has stayed with me for decades. An interviewer asked him what he considered to be his greatest failing. He paused, and said “a tendency to work too hard”. Now that’s what I call an insincere confession of sin, since not for one moment did he consider working hard to be a failing.

This morning, I’m going to match him. I was Chief Executive of the RSGB, then Head of the Reform Movement for fifteen years. Not a week passed during that decade and a half when somebody didn’t tell me that my job was to sum up Reform Judaism, utilising the media equivalent of standing on one leg. Occasionally I was offered a whole side of A4; more often 100-200 words. I tried. Honest Guv, I tried. But I failed. Back in 2002, master graphic designer Paul Langsford and I produced a trendy, colourful booklet called What is Reform Judaism?. I raised the money to have 20,000 copies printed and we circulated every Reform synagogue with enough for every household. Some sent them out to their members, some left them at the entrance to the sanctuary for all those who never go to Shul but might be interested and others left them mouldering with the rest of the unopened ‘paperwork’ from ‘Head Office’. I assume that very few people actually read it because I don’t remember a single complaint about what it said.

I also wrote a leaflet called Reform Judaism is Living Judaism which suffered much the same fate and, before you call me a communications dinosaur, I also contributed some sharp paragraphs to our cutting-edge website.

But I failed.

I failed because I don’t believe it’s possible to write a summary of Reform Judaism in 150 words which Mrs Ubergritz of Borehamwood will read and be dazzled by. I don’t believe that Reform Judaism or any other form of Judaism is accessible to Mr Kuchinsky of Hatch End who’s not prepared to make a significant effort to be accessed. So now you can see just how Heath-like my vidui, my confession of failure is – completely insincere. But I claim homiletic license in mitigation. Which I now need to explain.

It’s already part of the problem that I’ve only been given 15 minutes this year – yet, even to start, I need to take you back 20 centuries to the time when the centre of Jewish life was Roman-occupied Judaea and the centre of life in Judaea was Jerusalem and the Temple. It was a time of unprecedented upheaval in Jewish life – a mixture of oppressor followed by oppressor; Greek ideas followed by Roman ideas; and a community split into even more sects and parties than now run for Knesset seats. Yet of them all, only two groups survived. The first, you’ll be familiar with – the ‘Messiah is at hand’ party who became the Christians. And the ‘let’s plan for life after the Temple living in exile’ party whose teachers were known as rabbis and who founded Rabbinic Judaism. Which is the Judaism of all Jews today – be they Reform, Haredi or Lubavitch.

Now here’s the important point. I apologise for the fact that you already know this. But the people sitting behind you don’t. The founders of Rabbinic Judaism were rabbis – teachers, not priests, people with academic rather than pastoral concerns, men from all backgrounds and classes with intellectual rather than practical interests.

They weren’t based in the Temple but in little buildings all over the country – and outside it as well – which served as places for meeting, prayer and, above all, inquiry, interrogation. They inquired of, interrogated the text of the Torah which had been written at a much earlier stage in the story of our people. What they were up to was constructing something utterly revolutionary – a way of life as much of the mind, and of the soul, as of the body – that would sustain Jews wherever they were permitted to live in the Roman Empire or beyond.  They called their inquiry, their interrogation ‘Torah’ and said it was as much Torah as the Scroll, the Five Books of Moses they were discussing, debating and disagreeing about.

So here’s the crunch. Rabbinic Judaism, our Judaism, is the only faith in the world which is founded on intellectual inquiry, discussion and debate. Christianity isn’t, Islam isn’t, Hinduism isn’t, Buddhism isn’t – which is in no way a competitive or pejorative statement but just a description. Simply a matter of fact.

Intellectual inquiry, discussion, debate and something else – disagreement. The Rabbis frequently disagreed and, certainly during the foundational period, the Classical period, the first 5, 6, 700 years, the disagreements were allowed to go unresolved. I’ve been asked to give my sermon on what excites me about Judaism. Well, it’s the ideas both theological and ethical which really turn me on. There’s an amazing debate which takes place very early in the development of Rabbinic Judaism. This debate comes to the conclusion that not only are two conflicting opinions both right but both are equally reflective of what God requires of us. God, as it were, is One but can encompass a plurality of ideas and opinions. The debate, however, is framed as one of those instances which requires a decision. Since both opinions were right, of equal merit and endorsed by God, the decision goes in favour of the group who behaved with the greater degree of courtesy and respect for the opinion of the other. Not the ones who shouted loudest or were most certain of their own rightness but those who treated the opinions with which they disagreed with the most respect. It was an intellectual enterprise but one carried out with a stress on kindness and integrity.

1. Let’s acknowledge with unmitigated shame and regret that Classical Rabbinic Judaism was a male-only enterprise. It excluded fifty per cent of the Jewish population from participating in the debates, discussions and disagreements. Which is why the literature that emerged from this process of constantly interrogating, inquiring, questioning, primarily for theological and ethical purposes – ritual was always secondary – constitutes a half-empty bookcase. But it’s remarkable nevertheless.

For century after century, from the time of Jesus and the foundation of his competing Jewish sect right down to the middle of the 18th Century or later, the person with the highest prestige in the Jewish world was the rabbi. And the rabbi was a teacher, a scholar, an intellectual. Rabbinic Judaism favoured intellectual qualities over all others and therefore attracted the best minds in the community – the A stars. Believe it or not, if you were a wealthy man with a marriageable daughter – you wanted to marry her off to the rabbi and support his scholarship. It’s hard to grasp that in today’s very different cultural environment. Though it ismy experience that a successful couple can have a lovely son and want nothing more than to marry him off to a rabbi!

There are many reasons why Jews, ever since the Enlightenment, have made a totally staggering and utterly disproportionate contribution to modern, Western intellectual life. Less than 0.2% of the population of the world, Jews have won 22% of all Nobel prizes. One of the factors is eighteen or more centuries of valuing above all else intellectual inquiry, debate and vigorous, academic disagreement.

So what’s all this got to do with insincere confessions of sin, with my inability to give the Reform Movement what it so desperately craves, two hundred words to light up the life of Mr Shochet from Weybridge – I once knew a Mr Shochet in Weybridge. He was a dentist but practised under the name of Cameron – and turn him into a committed Reform Jew? Well, let me explain in the three or four minutes remaining.

Come back with me to those gathering places in Judaea and Galilee and, a little later, Babylon. They were places of meeting, of community. With that, we can all still identify and empathise. We value the synagogue today as a place which celebrates Jewish identity and Jewish community. We listen to bat Mitzvah afterbar mitzvah pledging allegiance to community, accepting their obligations to the shul and promising to give back. Some of you may have read a recent article in the Saturday Times Magazine in which a young Jewish woman of 27 expressed her utter determination to marry ‘in’ because she felt her Jewish identity and affiliation to peoplehood so strongly.

The Beit Haknesset, the synagogue, the Rabbinic meeting place was also a place of prayer. The Rabbis invented Jewish prayer to replace the sacrificial rites in the Temple. But, today, shul going – other than for the affirmation of identity and community – shul going for prayer in the traditional sense is a chosen, specialist subject, chosen by a tiny minority. The girl in the Sunday Times article only went on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and only then to express identity and solidarity with the Jewish past and present.

But, as we’ve seen, the Jewish spécialité de la maison – our way of doing Torah – is inquiry, debate, discussion, an enthusiasm for engaging with really tough issues – of theology, and of ethics (e-t-h-i-c-s, not my county of upbringing).  It was and is demanding of time and effort and the use of logical, reasoned argument. It’s what has always provided the meaning and the purpose in Judaism and Jewish life.

My fear for the woman in the Times colour supplement – which will have been apparent to every non-Jew reading the article – is that her commitment to identity and peoplehood, though fierce, intense and praiseworthy, had no content whatsoever. Because the content provided by the last 2000 years – interrogating our tradition, asking difficult questions, struggling with the issues of theology and ethics that give meaning and purpose to confronting what life throws up – was completely absent.

The perceptive and challenging amongst you – that’s everyone – will have noticed my earlier reference to not being able to explain Reform Judaism whilst standing on one leg. Hillel managed it, so why not you, Bayfield? But Hillel didn’t manage it. Because as you all know equally well, Hillel said: “Don’t do to others what would be hateful if done to you. That’s the whole of Judaism” – Reform or Orthodox. But he went on: “All the rest is commentary. Go and learn”. Without that commitment, Judaism cannot be lived in the mind and soul – as distinct from the occasional wallow in nostalgic behavioural fragments of an ill-remembered past.

I failed Mrs Le Vine from Hampstead. I failed completely to entrance her with Reform Judaism in a pithy statement, booklet, hyperbolic website, or even in one of a series of eight minute films. Because it can’t be done. We can and do – particularly in this community – provide an inclusive, caring, need-meeting environment that nurtures Jewish identity. But remaining faithful to a tradition of cutting-edge intellectual inquiry, brilliant ethical insights into the true worth of the individual and respect for disagreement requires much more time and effort than reading a page of A4 or even listening to a 17 minute sermon.

“Yes, but what is Reform Judaism?”

Smile, Tony.  At least now you’ve got some really wicked thoughts.  You can confess them all with complete sincerity!