A-Z OF JEWISH VALUES -

C FOR COMMUNITY

The theme of this service has been Community. As those of you who are regulars will be aware (but for the benefit of our visitors today) we have 6 themes to our services, and today it’s community.

Community is a large group of people with shared experience, and/or history and usually values.

It’s a key topic these days. The Chief Schools Inspector raised a lot of discussion this week when he said that Faith Schools should be doing more to encourage diversity by promoting tolerance of other cultures.

There are better words than tolerance (which means suffering differences): respect, understanding. It’s a privilege for us, if I may say so to our visitors that you pay us the honour of coming all the way from Aberystwyth to be with us and experience our way of Judaism at first hand.

The faith schools issue, whilst it stems from fear of extremism being taught in schools, is about open-mindedness instead of narrow-mindedness.

In the 19^th century when Reform Judaism began in Germany, its founders were very keen on integrating into the general society, and believed that Judaism had a great contribution to make to their own society and to the world. They wanted to be as little different from their Christian neighbours as possible. That’s why they brought the vernacular into their services (German as well as Hebrew), introduced the choir and the organ, and reading the prayers altogether instead of being led by a cantor and breaking off into everyone saying the prayers in an unorganised way.

They believed that the Jewish message, the message of the prophets, was a powerful influence for world peace and justice, and that the Jewish people had a mission in general society.

That vision of course was shattered by the Holocaust. German Jews were the first to suffer complete disillusionment. Jews everywhere were targeted for systematic annihilation as has been depicted in the current TV series about Auschwitz.

The message still has to be taught, and commemorated as by the National Holocaust Day this Thursday, because there is still an active neo-Nazi party, the BNP, which is to be taken seriously, and because a young member of the Royal family could think that to wear a Nazi armband at a party was a good joke. And because it’s hard to find a country in the world today that doesn’t either collude with the oppression of minorities or believe that violence is an answer.

Over the past half century or so there has been a change in thinking. The belief that we should all aim to be one world community, the brotherhood of man, is still a noble ideal. But there is a stronger tendency to value particular traditions, national heritage, faith schools, learning to speak Hebrew – or Welsh come to that – and so on: To be proud of your own specific identity.

The balance is very much up to the individual; for example how you give to charity – what proportion to Jewish charities and what proportion for global causes like the Tsunami.

Or to zoom-in a bit more, what you give to your local faith community, as against the general – how much you believe charity begins at home.

Reform Judaism has been involved in this paradigm shift which is part of what is called Postmodernism. It’s not quite the same as Multiculturalism, which would encourage e.g. schools allowing Muslim girls to wear veils and Jewish boys, yarmulkis. It’s doing your own thing. We now have several Reform Jewish Day Schools in the south of England and their working on a secondary school.

There’s a reluctance to want to subsume our identity under wider headings. For example we’re not keen on the expression Judeo-Christianity. Judaism is Judaism and Christianity is Christianity. They have much in common, but they don’t merge.

Anti-Semitism is a sub-set of Racism. To combat anti-Semitism without combating racism would be myopic. But we have a particular responsibility to be concerned about Anti-Semitism, and to discourage the attitude: ‘why worry about attacks on us, when the problem is global.’

When Reform Judaism started out, religious beliefs were studied and taught in the light of history, science and philosophical rationalism: in other words seen through the lens of the human intellectual inheritance. You were a human being first and a Jew second.

What’s happened is that we’re finding that that doesn’t work in keeping our cultural heritage going.

Parents, for example who say, we’re not going to have our children indoctrinated in a faith – we’re going to let them make up their own minds. There’s enough evidence to show that this does not work. As we grow we make up their own minds eventually, anyway, but if we are not shown a definite way of life at home, we will have no example to choose from, and it will be much more likely that we will simply go with the flow of the people we mix with. If parents are unable or unwilling to provide a distinct cultural or religious background at home, then maybe, in a supportive way, grandparents can do so.

Finally, Community is a force for development. Decisions for Reform Jews are not made by rabbis consulting books – (though that might be taken into account). But by communities being canvassed, looking at what people actually think and do and how we can build on the social reality around us.

A very good example of this is the Family Service we have here every 6 weeks or so. It’s quite an innovation to have children of all ages leading the service. It hasn’t happened before in Jewish history. It’s a reflection of the high value we place upon community as an extension of the family.

And just as community and the family mutually support and strengthen each other, so –

With pride in one’s cultural ID and respect and understanding for others various different communities can give each other support and strength.