Sermon: Korach – The Big Iftar at Alyth

Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 22 June 2015

The Big Iftar at Alyth

Parking your car can be a major challenge for religious institutions.  Parking is not easy around Alyth.  We are very much constrained by the land around us – crowded with housing and the needs of local residents – but we cope although earlier this week in what ought to be called a fair cop I got myself ticketed when I forget to move my car by 1pm from Temple Grove.  The Islamic Association for North London, the formal name for Finchley Mosque has a uniquely successful answer to the challenge of parking.  The mosque is located in the corner of a large car park for Homebase, North Finchley which you will know if you have ever tried to shop there on a Friday afternoon at Jummah prayer time.

Finchley Mosque does not share Alyth’s parking challenges, and I envy them the parking space but there is one major challenge of the mosque which I am pleased that we do not share.  Alyth is one of many synagogues in this area which means that people who select this as their shul do so knowing that they are coming to a place with particular values and a particular place in the Jewish community. Finchley Mosque for many years was the only show in town.  The nearest alternative mosques were in Palmers Green, Regents Park, Finsbury Park and Cricklewood.   You’ll understand the scale of the challenge that this poses if when I tell you that whilst 15% of the population of the Barnet Borough is Jewish – and think of how many Synagogues there are for us to choose from – fully 6% of the population is Muslim and that was the case ten years ago when there was one single mosque in the Borough.

This means that the leadership of the mosque, its council and trustees and the Imams have a huge challenge on their hands.  This one single mosque had to cater for the full diversity of London Muslims, from North African, Pakistani, Middle Eastern and Balkan traditions – from the strictest to the most lenient.  Its like trying to run a single synagogue which combines the congregations of Lauderdale Road Sephardi, Munks in Golders Green, Alyth, Finchley Progressive and Kinloss, together with a couple of shtiebels.

By and large the leadership of the mosque managed to keep a cohesive community.  But ten years ago there was a tough challenge to the peaceful operation of the mosque.  In our sedra today we heard Korach’s accusation against Moses and Aaron:  “Why do you lift yourselves up above the congregation of God?”  The same challenge was then put to the governing body of the mosque:  questioning the ethics and credentials of the imams, disrupting lectures and asking officials “Who appointed you?” and being pretty aggressive about it.

According to reports in our local press the groups which challenged the leadership of the mosque were based in the Wahabbist tradition – the very strict interpretation of Islam that emanates nowadays from Saudi Arabia.

A classic Midrash on Korach’s rebellion is based on the last verses of last week’s Torah portion which form the third paragraph of the Shema (Numbers Rabbah 18:3).  There Moses recorded the command that the Israelites should have a thread of blue in their tzitizit.  We don’t do so nowadays on the basis that no-one can identify the precise shade that would be required.  Korach and his followers challenged Moses by wearing cloaks that were entirely blue in a show of greater piety.

What the challengers at the Mosque did was the same as Korach’s followers.  They claimed greater piety than the imams and mosque governors.  They encouraged the preaching of alternative sermons to those given by the Imams at prayers.  They challenged their authority to run the mosque finances.  They distributed leaflets with inflammatory material.

One of the saddest results was the sacking of their then Senior Imam, Mufti Abdul Kadir Barkatullah.  I first met Mufti Barkatullah when he came to Finchley Progressive Synagogue as a walker on the Churches Together in Finchley One World Week march – a perfect expression of his personal aim to be part of interfaith efforts in the area.  There followed an invitation to me to come to the mosque to join the congregation at the end of Ramadan prayers.  What I didn’t realise at the time was the effort that Mufti Barkatullha had made to ensure that this event went ahead – with several local rabbis, vicars and priests attending.  He had to square it with the North African members of the mosque whose tradition has it that non-Muslims should not enter an active mosque and he managed it.  He was also able to bring the mosques more right wing Saudi Imam with him so that the sermon preached on this day in Arabic was entirely supportive of this interfaith gathering. Next Mufti Barkatullah came and gave some informative talks at the Synagogue and also invited a number of Rabbis, of whom I was one, to come to the mosque to discuss how we could ensure that the Muslim and Jewish communities get to know each other as religious people – not only as work and school colleagues.

Mufti Barkatullah is convinced that Muslim extremism is of gravest harm to Muslims themselves – making it very difficult for them to be accepted as good neighbours.  To this end he stuck his neck out and allowed himself to be quoted in newspapers and on the BBC publicly criticising the scholar Sheikh Yusef Al-Qaradawi for preaching a message antithetical to Islam calling suicide bombers martyrs.  You may remember that Sheikh Al-Qaradawi at the time was being feted by Mayor Ken Livingstone.  The courageous and open minded Mufti Barkatullah left the community Imamate following his sacking from North Finchley and now works primarily as Sharia Advisor to a number of banks which seek to serve the religious Muslims of the UK.

At the time of this ferment at the Finchley mosque they questioned the authority of the Chairman of the Mosque Bashir Sattar – who had backed the Imam’s outgoing and welcoming attitude in many ways.  He brought four families from the mosque to attend a Shabbat Chavurah supper at my last Synagogue in order that they could speak one to one with Jewish families – and he carefully selected families who were very traditional as well as those who were more secular in their outlook.   He was also removed from office.

In recent years the Finchley Mosque has begun to open up again gingerly seeking relationships with local churches.  It is no longer the only mosque in the borough.  There is now a Hendon Mosque and the Somali Bravanese Muslim Community founded their own mosque in East Finchley, tragically burnt down in an arson attack two years ago.  In Finchley the Korachite controversies came to an end.

For years though there has been little work on building Muslim – Jewish understanding and communication in this area, though much has happened on a national scale between Rabbis and Imams.   Then two things happened, one tragic and one entirely hopeful.  The arson attack on the Somali Mosque saw two Synagogues, Kinloss, Finchley United and Finchley Reform spring into empathetic action.  Between them they hosted the Medrassa, the religion school of the mosque and provided facilities for prayers and other community activities.   As Rabbi Miriam Berger said: “When the arson attack happened, there was a visceral response from the local Jewish community.  It was hard not to think of Kristallnacht [when German Nazis attacked Jews and their property in 1938].”

The other happened here at Alyth last July.   Our Synagogue Interfaith Group under the leadership of our Rabbi Maurice Michaels received a request from Muslim community leader Julie Siddiqi to be the first Synagogue in the country to host an Iftar.   An Iftar is the communal fast breaking meal which observant Muslims take at the end of each day of the thirty day dawn to dusk fast of Ramadan, the season when Muslims seek to reconnect with the teachings of the Quran and, as we do on Yom Kippur, consider how their behaviour matches up with the values of their faith and which began two days ago.    This first Synagogue Iftar took place right in the middle of the Gaza crisis last summer.  It was the most inspiring expression of goodwill that it not only took place with nearly a hundred Jews and Muslims attending sharing food and conversation but also became a rare religious meeting place for Sunni and Shia Muslims, much as Reform and Orthodox Jews get together and mix best in interfaith settings.

Under Julie Siddiqi’s leadership the concept has spread and so this year not only Alyth is hosting an Iftar, here at the Synagogue on Thursday night, but also five other Synagogues around the country and numerous churches.  Julie Siddiqi is calling the campaign the Big Iftar.

This time the Alyth event has been organised with the help of a Golders Green Muslim family who offered to help as soon as they heard we were doing this.  Alyth will host people from across North London who were so touched to hear about last year’s Iftar.   Please come and join us – we will be looking at the concept of hospitality in our two faiths, hosting a Muslim Maghrib prayer session and food and conversation together.   Your presence is what will make it work and be a  true gesture of outreaching friendship and hospitality enabling us to be able to talk together at difficult times and support each other in our struggles with anti-semitism and islamophobia.  Please come here 8:30 on Thursday night with the fastbreaking at 9:22.

Not everybody in Alyth agrees with what we are doing and fair enough – one member, so far only one, but his view should be heard in this Judaism which in Talmudic tradition hears the minority voice as well as the majority, wrote that rather than seeking to understand and make a deep relationship with our local Muslim community his Synagogue should be in his words “defending us against them.”

To my mind this view is the one which leads to groundless confrontation and fails to build for the future.   Surely our mission as Jews in the diaspora is to seek to live at peace with our neighbours whoever they are, bring the best of Jewish values into the towns and cities where we live and reaching out with energy and kindness to make sure that we do.