Sermon: Chukkat: Rabbi Miri Gold and the Rabbi Relay Ride

Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 18 September 2012

They started at Lands End on June 10th with 1400 miles ahead of them.  They finished yesterday at John O’Groats, sore, soaking wet from the rain but, not surprisingly, elated.  This was the Rabbi Relay Ride, a fabulous enterprise led by the Jewish food and environmental charity Gefiltefest.   The idea was that a core team of three extraordinarily fit young people would ride day after day all the way from the foot of Cornwall to the pinnacle of Scotland joined by others for sections of the route.  Meanwhile each day they would be joined by a Rabbi, challenging themselves to cycle the 55 miles or more in a day from point to point.   The Rabbis included Rabbi Harvey Belovski of the Golders Green United Synagogue, Rabbi Anna Gerrard of the Gloucestershire Liberal Jewish Community, Rabbi Jeremy Gordon of the Masorti New London Synagogue and yours truly of Alyth.

 

Each day began the same as the Rabbi for the day blew a Shofar to start the riders off.  On my day, last Tuesday, we began in Alwoodley, the very Jewish part of Leeds where the sight of a Rabbi, assorted kippot and the sound of a Shofar is nothing unusual.  We cycled across the Yorkshire moors for seven solid hours, in, thank goodness, sunshine and a cooling breeze.

 

We went through villages where large groups of Jews are rarely if ever seen, stopping for lunch (Kosher peanut butter sandwiches) in a village called Kilburn.  73 miles later we crossed the River Tees, having left Yorkshire behind. I left the ride in Yarm, a historic village where I suspect my blow of the shofar may have been the first ever heard in this pretty place.  Then I, a Reform Rabbi handed over the shofar to Rabbi Geoffrey Hyman of Ilford United Synagogue who took it onwards for two gruelling days until the ride reached Edinburgh.  I returned to London and cycled my final ten miles from Kings Cross home.

 

Where we are now in the Torah is a point where the journey of forty years is coming to an end.  After so many years of wandering the wilderness Moses is told that he cannot continue to be the leader to bring the children of Israel into the Promised Land.  Yet still he continues to lead until they reach its very borders, having struggled their way through opposing peoples.

 

As religion does when it is a great contributor to the world, the vision of achieving the Promised Land drives the Children of Israel and their leader Moses on to a better future.  So too in a small but still personally challenging way did the riders on the Rabbi Relay Ride, each of us turning the wheels for causes which aim to relieve poverty or distress.

 

Religion is not a private affair.  It is not only a matter between a person and their relationship with God.  Religion is rather the guide that helps to mediate our relationships with all humanity and to drive us onwards towards building a better world for this and future generations.  As it says in Pslam 16:8  “Sh’viti Adonai L’negdi Tamid” – I keep God before me always.   Many Synagogues and Jewish homes have a plaque saying this in prominent display.

 

Take religion out of the public sphere, as if you ever could, and humankind has an aimlessness which can lead to the dominance of the bully, the neglect of the disadvantaged and the survival only of the powerful.  Religion mandates us to do better than this.

 

However Religion can, of course, be a cover for some of the worst aspects of humanity.   Whatever our scriptures say, whether we be Jew, Christian, Muslim of followers of any faith, we have to put our God given faculties of choice making and seeking the moral way that builds the greatest human happiness as an interpretative filter upon our traditions.   Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said “scripture without commentary is like dynamite without protection.”

 

Earlier this week at Alyth, the Leo Baeck College Lecturer in Islam, Mohammed al Hussaini, helped us to understand some of the choices that have been made in Islamist doctrine over the past decades. A line of interpretation of the Koran has led to the ideology behind the Muslim Brotherhood, recently successful in the Egyptian Presidential elections, and further into the ideology behind Al-Quaeda.   It is, he says, an ideology of humiliation.  The idea is that Islam is at a point where it has been humiliated by Western ideas and ways of living which have taken root in Muslim societies.

 

Thus the passages in the Koran which preach co-existence and the rights of other peoples to self determination must for Islamists be set aside for the time being until Islam has a rightful place of dominance.  Sheikh Al Hussaini shared with us texts from the Koran and their traditional interpretation which assert the right of the Jews to the Land of Israel.  These have been set aside by Islamists on the basis, they allege, that Zionism is a western ideology and not truly part of Judaism.   It is an Islam which cannot cope with a pluralist world.  As we know, at its worst it is very dangerous for the world.

 

Something of the same takes place in Israel itself too.  Kibbutz Gezer is a beautiful green Kibbutz in the hills near Modi’in.  It has a population of around 400 people and is a centre for the local area.   Within the Kibbutz is a Synagogue called Bircat Shalom. – blessing of peace.  The Kibbutz was founded in 1945 but has thrived only in the past thirty couple of decades, enough to build a Synagogue within its grounds.

 

Seven years ago the community decided that it had grown enough to merit a Rabbi to be attached to it, provided and employed as they normally are by the Ministry of Religion in Israel.  Four thousand Rabbis are employed and deployed to congregations and the army and other institutions by the Israel Ministry of Religion.  Thing is the community of Kibbutz Gezer and the area around is made up mostly of Jews who share our values here and so what they wanted was a Reform Rabbi, preferably the Rabbi who was already working with their community Miri Gold.

 

Now the four thousand Rabbis employed by the State of Israel are different from Rabbi Miri Gold in two respects – number one they are all men and number two they are all Orthodox.  So a campaign began by the people of Kibbutz Gezer, championed by the Israel Religious Action Centre, to ensure that the State of Israel recognises that as there is more than one way to be a Jew.  Thus if the state is going to provide Rabbis for congregations, there must be more than one kind of Rabbi on offer.    Four weeks ago, after seven years of campaigning,  the Israeli Attorney General ruled that this was indeed so and Rabbi Miri Gold became the first Reform Rabbi to be granted a state salary on the same basis as Orthodox community Rabbis.  So far so excellently good and a great fillip to the thirty congregations of the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism who may in the future not be discriminated against because their Judaism is not Orthodox.

 

However this week the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Shlomo Amar announced that he is calling upon his fellow Orthodox rabbis to prevent the implementation of the Attorney General’s ruling.  He sent a letter to hundreds of Orthodox rabbis in Israel calling on them to object to Rabbi Gold’s employment and invited them to an emergency meeting at his office in Jerusalem.

 

In his letter, Rabbi Amar lamented “the hand given to the uprooters and destroyers of Judaism who have already wrought horrible destruction upon the People of Israel in the Diaspora by causing terrible assimilation and the uprooting of all of the Torah’s precepts. (I think that he was referring to us, here in this Shul, having heard Torah and worshipping God together!) And now they seek recognition in the Land of Israel as well, to be destroyers of the religion… This will not pass!” “No one may be absent from the gathering,” he added.

 

This is not Judaism as a source of vision for our people, rather this is the instigation of, in Anat Hoffman of the Israel Religious Action Centre’s words, sinat Hinam, the kind of senseless hatred that has been at the root of Judaism’s disasters over the millennia.  “The reality is that most Jews, from all denominations, want Israel to be the physical and spiritual home for the entire Jewish people.”

 

If you would like to contribute your voice to support for Israel being the home for all Jews please go to IRAC’s website, www.irac.org , and there they will show you what we here in London can do.

 

Religion should be a source of vision and a positive future, a set of tools that build the world.  It should not be a sledgehammer to deal violently with perceived humiliations, as is fundamentalist Islam , it should not be a chainsaw to rip a people apart, as is the denying by the Israel Chief Rabbinate of the right of Jews to express their Judaism in the way that is true to themselves.  In the end it is up to us to interpret the meaning of our religions and the texts which support it in a direction that builds and does not destroy, that supports and does not crush, that cares and does not reject.

 

Such a positive vision was very evident in the sprit of the Rabbi Relay Ride.  If you would like to work out a little more how religion can be a positive force in Britain then come and join me on Thursday August 9th at the Houses of Parliament.  Our local MP Mike Freer is hosting us there to give us an insight into the working life of an MP and also to host a debate on whether Religion plays a sufficient role in the life of the UK.  Our own House of Commons debate will range from faith schools, to the provision of welfare services by religious groups in the so called big society, to the right of religions to opt in or out of Gay marriage and to the very thinking behind political ideology – can or should it be religiously driven.  Sign up for the trip and the lunch that follow with Carole in the Alyth Synagogue Office.

 

As the Rabbi Relay Riders reached John O’Groats they had shown that there is more than one way to be an energetic Jew or even a foolhardy Rabbi.  May religions always be such a positive force in our lives.