Sermon: Shabbat Atzma’ut – Israel Needs Reform Zionism. We need Reform Zionism
Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 16 April 2018
Alyth Synagogue has been around a while, eighty-five years this year. It means that our Synagogue archive, organised and curated by Henry Cohn and John Libson, tells the story of a Reform Jew’s interaction with the world living through the extraordinary upheavals of the best part of the twentieth century and now the beginning of the 21st.
You can see the coming of Nazism and the flow of refugees from Germany and Austria especially. The Synagogue minutes and annual reports and photo archive show this Synagogue caring for the new refugees, teaching them English and helping them to settle. It records the German and Austrian emigre Rabbis who found their home here until one of them, Werner van der Zyl, became our Rabbi and another, Leo Baeck, our Alyth President.
You can see the struggle of Soviet Jewry against oppression and denial of their human rights as minutes, reports, clippings from papers and more in our archive show the work of members of this Synagogue to help them to find justice and join the campaign for their freedom, finally won with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
You can trace the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s as our Centre magazine and our annual report write up the Seder held for Bosnian refugees, our work to help people to resettle. You can even trace the migration from the terrible wars and oppressions of Afghanistan, Syria, Eritrea, Congo by looking at reports and writings about today’s Alyth refugee drop in.
So our Synagogue archive seemed an obvious place to go to begin this sermon for Shabbat Atzma’ut, the Shabbat celebrating 70 years of the State of Israel’s existence. Wouldn’t it be a good beginning to see what Alyth Synagogue had to say about the birth of Israel in May 1948? We must have been involved and excited. After all the second Rabbi of Alyth, Rev Maurice Perlzweig was known internationally as one of the first activist Zionist Rabbis. He served Alyth from 1938 to 1942. He was on the executive of the Jewish Agency.
Our Synagogue history from 1983 says as much “Reverend Perlzweig was an ardent Zionist, he devoted about one sermon every month during 1939 to the subject of Palestine. In February 1939 (there was) a special service for delegates to the Palestine Conference held at the Synagogue, with Rabbi Stephen S Wise giving the sermon.” (p16, 50 Years of Alyth, June Rose, 1983).
As we heard last night in Rabbi Josh’s sermon, eminent leaders of the Zionist movement in Palestine, such as Moshe Sharet were often to be seen in the streets of Temple Fortune, staying with their British friends. Maurice Perlzweig moved to America in 1942 to lead the World Jewish Congress in its desperate attempts to save Jews from Nazism and then, when he came back to the UK to be Rabbi of the North London Progressive Synagogue in Stamford Hill, he made it and its offshoots the Synagogues which inspired the Liberal Movement to embrace the State of Israel and learn how to support it and her peoples, in contrast to the prevailing non-Zionism of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue and its offshoots.
So what did I find in the minute books of the Alyth Synagogue Council in the months after May 14th 1948 when the State of Israel was declared? What celebrations and records were there in our Annual report for 1948? What was there in the Synagogue Review, the magazine of the recently formed Association of Synagogues of Great Britain, antecedent to our Movement for Reform Judaism to inspire a movement to build a relationship with this extraordinary new phenomenon in the Jewish world?
Absolutely nothing. Not a word about the State of Israel. Quite a bit about the state of the Synagogue electrics and lighting system, but the first independent Jewish state for over two thousand years – didn’t register. There is one mention in our Synagogue history. “In the summer of 1948 Professor Norman Bentwich [attorney general for Palestine under the British mandate, and subsequently Professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and President of Alyth Synagogue from 1958-1971] gave a lecture entitled “From Hertzl to the Jewish State” to a packed audience. In the spirited debate that followed “every shade of opinion was expressed from Revisionism to anti-Zionism”. Questions of the relation of the individual Jews to the State of Israel and of dual loyalties were hotly debated.” (50 years of Alyth p24).
That was then but this is now. Israel has lived for 70 years and is among the nations of the world forever. There was nothing here at Alyth worthy of record in 1948 to build the relationship of Jews to Israel as part of Synagogue life, but in 2018 we are surely in a very different place. Today our Synagogue, like all Reform Synagogues is Zionist, seeking to connect and engage our members with the State of Israel in as many ways as possible. Today when Israel is the home of the majority of the world’s Jews, we are connected. I won’t today trace the history of the change, from what seemed like indifference in Alyth as a Jewish institution in 1948 to the engagement that is demonstrated in so many ways, today. Rather let’s look at what that Zionism means today.
Our Synagogue’s Zionism, and mine personally is Reform Zionism. I am proud of it, I live it and I feel that it is part of my mission as a Rabbi to encourage my Synagogue to grow it. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, former President of the Union for Reform Judaism, has written that there are four principles of Reform Zionism (CCAR Journal Fall 2017 pp31-39). To me they feel very followable.
First Reform Jews love Israel and understand the vital importance of Israel, both for the physical survival of the Jewish people and for the creative religious survival of the Jewish people. Israel though is “not Disneyland or a summer camp.” Reform Zionists can disagree with any government of Israel but will never distance themselves from Israel. The power of there being a Jewish state has restored the public dimension to Jewish life and both gives the power for our Jewish values to be real and the challenge of living them when you must have the responsibility of an entire society.
Second, when it comes to questions of politics and peace in Israel, Reform Zionists are sensible centrists. We seek a Jewish and democratic state. Therefore, we know that there will need to be two states for two peoples requiring territorial compromise, mutual recognition of Israel as a Jewish State and Palestine as a Palestinian state, with dignity for both. It is a position which requires a stop to settlement building and a change of the relationship of the Israeli government of today to Palestinians. It means we must get to know Israeli Arabs and West Bank Palestinians and hear their needs as well as those of our brother and sister Jews. It also requires our Synagogues to be places where we can have civil conversations about the various ideas and challenges of Israel, and, as Alyth member sociologist Keith Kahn Harris showed in his book “Uncivil War” (2014), that takes a great deal of effort to achieve, but Alyth Synagogue is committed to civil conversation around Israel.
The third principle of Reform Zionism – Reform Jews are religious Jews who care about Israel’s religious life purpose and vision. Israel is expected to be a partner in Torah teaching for the world, a centre for our spiritual renaissance which must therefore embrace Jews of all denominations who are religious. Israel should be a home to all Jews and a classroom to world Jewry and we should help to build it. Our Alyth Israel trips for adults and young people inspire us – learning in the land where it all started and where there are great new ideas for Jewish teaching and worship. Reform Zionists know that coercive religions monopoly in Israel undermines Jewish life everywhere and dishonours Torah in Israel.
Finally, and fourthly, we as Reform Jews have a special commitment to advancing Reform Judaism in Israel. We need there to be a strong Israel Movement for Reform Judaism for ourselves because, as Rabbi Richard Hirsch, former Director of the World Union for Progressive Judaism wrote “if we don’t establish ourselves as a significant presence in Israel in a generation we will be at margins of Jewish history.” (q in CCAR Journal, Fall 2017, p.38) And we need to give Jewish religious meaning to lives of the majority of Jews who live in Israel.
We are moving – there are 40 Reform congregations throughout Israel, 60 nursery schools and more than 100 Reform Rabbis ordained in Israel by the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, but, as you will hear on Friday and Sunday here at Alyth from the leadership of the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism we have still only scratched the surface of what our Judaism could be in Israel. We may be opposed in this work by other non-pluralist Jews, but that is because we are succeeding – so that 12% of Israelis now say that they identify with Reform or Conservative Judaism.
Zionism, as Rabbi Paul Golomb writes, (CCAR Journal, Fall 2017, p2) is no more and no less than the relationship of the Jew to Zion. It is not one particular political vision. It is not owned by one group. We Reform Zionists should be proud to use the word Zionist. We know that our relationship will be complex. We know that the Jewish part will entail struggle. We know that Zion could have many many definitions. Yet in this seventieth year of the State of Israel it is time for Alyth and its members to stand up and be builders of Israel for its future, in the State and here in the UK, confident in our Reform Zionism and the contribution we have to make.
When we come to celebrate the centenary of the founding of Israel in 2048 and our Rabbis of the time go to our archive to see what happened at Alyth in the year of the 70th, may they find a deep, rich, Reform Zionist connection with Israel embedded in the life of this community.