A-Z OF JEWISH VALUES -

O FOR OWNERSHIP

Kol Nidrei 5766

Everyone should have an ’ology according to Maureen Lipman. To get on in life, you have to have some ’ology or other as your speciality.

At the beginning of 2005 I began a series of pulpit addresses which I have kept going since then and posted up on our shul website on an ’ology which is seldom studied, much less talked about: Axiology. Axiology means the study of values. And, since January, I have been steadily addressing Jewish Axiology and more particularly, Reform Jewish Axiology, Reform Values. The full texts have been posted on our website. As I explained in January:

There is a great need to define where we stand as Reform Jews on all important issues. To explain, to ourselves and to others, what makes us Reform. Reform is all too often defined negatively – in terms of what we don’t believe and don’t do. This creates a negative image. Values – what we value, what we consider good or bad – what principles we maintain – if we could set these out in a way we can all remember and absorb and repeat – this would give us a positive self-definition as Reform Jews.

In order to cover the subject as comprehensively as possible I have been presenting it alphabetically as an A-Z of Jewish Values as you’ll see when you visit our website . The letter of the alphabet I have now reached is ‘O’.

There is good reason to continue this exercise on Yom Kippur because on this day of days, our values, especially of the ethical kind, come prominently to the fore and challenge us to meet up to them. You might say that ‘O’ is for the ‘ology itself.

And the ‘O’ value I would like to examine with you tonight is Ownership.

Ownership not in the sense of the possessions we have, because this is ephemeral, we can easily give them up or transfer them to someone else. Ownership rather in the sense of our actions, our speech, our attitudes.

Try as we may to disown them or transfer them to others, they are ours.

Owning up is the order of the day on Yom Kippur.

But Ownership constitutes a wider value than accepting moral responsibility.

There is also owning the values themselves. Which Reform values are you and I prepared to own?

There are distinct differences here between us and that O which is not ours: Orthodoxy.

For Reform the individual is more central. To say that the Self reigns supreme, however, would not fit the reality. Anarchy would surely reign if Jewish practice were simply a matter of individual choice and no more than that. And most of us appreciate this problem. And yet we also appreciate that the individual is more central than in Orthodoxy – where all the decisions are made by authorities external to oneself, indeed in the overwhelming number of cases, by authorities of the remote past, as I noted when dealing with M for Memory on Rosh Hashanah.

This self-centredness is Reform’s legacy from the 18th century Enlightenment. Why we have more problems with making the individual central today isn’t clear to me, but it may have something to do with the experience of dictatorships in the 20th century.

A way out of the dilemma is suggested by the American Reform thinker Eugene Borowitz, in the conclusion to his book Renewing The Covenant.

In place of self as the arbiter, Borowitz places what he calls Israel-Self. It cannot be merely your personal predilections, or whims, which determine how you behave as a Jew. It has to be your Israel-Self, he says, your Jewish-Self, what identifies you with other Jews. Not necessarily all other Jews, or even the majority of Jews, but your community, its history, its teachings.

This understanding of ownership allows for what we call pluralism – but that would bring us on to ‘P’ which would be for another time!

The positive side to this approach is that it encourages us all to take responsibility for our Judaism. We don’t leave it to others. We don’t allow the ritual to belong to an elite to carry it out for us vicariously, be they rabbis, wardens, frummers, scholars, men – it is for us all to own.

The ethos of Yom Kippur supports this. When we recite the Ashamnu, or the ‘al chets’, in the Viddui, the confession, with its lists of sins, it is customary in all kinds of synagogues, for us all to stand and say it or sing it all together. The reason for this is so that no one should feel that they are the sinner surrounded by a crowd of goody-goodies.

And just in case we think that we are merely paying lip-service to a whole litany of wrongdoings which don’t apply to us, there is the fact that whilst the commission of so many of them may not apply to us, remember O for omission - sins of omission are very much more widely applicable.

It is my experience that people I know are much more worried, not to say ashamed about their sins of omission, in Jewish terms than their sins of commission. If there were a Jewish equivalent of the confessional, the Jewish father confessor would not hear such things as: I’ve eaten treif, or I’ve worked on Shabbat, but rather: I don’t come to shul enough or I’ve not done all I can to ensure that my children’s Jewish education is up to scratch.

And whilst we’re on the subject of ownership, the truth is we would be much stronger if all our children attended our cheder, which is where our Reform values are initially brought across, not to mention our excellent camps and national youth activities.

In terms of Teshuvah (repentance, or literally returning) the first step is owning the problem.

What is it that stands in the way of the next step, doing something about it?

If I ask myself that question my honest answer is that there is a false comfort about owning it. There is a feeling that by articulating it you are doing something good. You at least recognise where you’ve erred.

And so perhaps you deserve some forgiveness.

But you can’t pretend that that is satisfactory, because you don’t go on feeling good about it.

I can only speak from personal experience (which if it’s about ownership is all one can do) What blocks my motivation is a nagging internal voice which keeps saying you ‘should’ do such and such, or ‘you ought to’, ‘you must’.

I don’t believe that there’s any value in ought. What you ought comes to nought!

There’s a growing awareness in our society that such language doesn’t work. The general trend these days, - (and if you don’t believe me just listen to how people talk), - is to soften it by, instead of saying ‘you should’, to say ‘you need to’. Instead of issuing an imperative you appeal to a person’s needs. Often it’s a subtle way of issuing orders in disguise.

I’m not referring to external discourse, but internal. The voices of parents and other authority figures which we hear in our heads long after they’ve departed this life. And some times we honour them, out of affection and loyalty and sometimes they get in the way of our being motivated to do even that which is in our own best interests.

And then there’s bridging the gap between motivation and action. What inhibits the move from one to the other? I confess, it’s often my belief that it’s somebody else that’s stopping me, or something outside my control. How many times do I find out that the solution is within me and I’m really stopping myself and using others as an excuse?

There’s that wonderful Chassidic quotation in the meditative passages in one of our Shabbat morning services

'There is no stumbling block one cannot push aside, for the stumbling block is only there for the sake of the will, and there are actually no stumbling blocks save in the spirit.'

Reform Judaism errs on the side of regarding as inadequate leaders and authorities including parents relying on the commanding of obedience as a motivating force. Anyone who has, or has had, teenage children knows, it mostly doesn’t work. You get a reaction – either then or later in life, or both.

So how do we answer the fact that Judaism is based on mitzvoth, commandments? I would suggest it is by a kind of lock and key theory. For the mitzvoth, the traditions, the laws, to work as the key to our Jewish lives, we have to be receptive, there has to be a lock that fits the key. And that lock is fashioned out of our love and commitment for Judaism. So for the whole system to work, I have to be able to find within myself something that I can own as my love and commitment.

Reform means ownership of your religious life; being self-motivated, not delegating to others.

It means, in Martin Buber’s words, starting from yourself, but not ending with yourself – acting in a way that is good for the total community and will enhance it and enable it to grow.

It means not wielding power and fear and guilt, but love and enjoyment.

We all want us to be stronger. Stronger as Jews and as Reform Jews. So I don’t say – you should, you ought to, you must or even you need to log on to Reform more, to read more about it, like say, our movement magazine Manna, or join in more with joint services and activities with Sha’arei Shalom and Menorah, or attend our Northern Congregations weekend in Ilkley in 3 weeks time – what I say is that if you do these things you’re going to find something you’ll like doing, and it could even become habit forming.

If this day is a day of reckoning then perhaps one can apply to it the rabbinic dictum that at the Day of Judgment every person will be called to account for every good thing they might have enjoyed and did not.

Since there is so much to enjoy in Judaism, and so little enjoyment of it, isn’t it time we owned up to what is getting in the way of our enjoyment, and take steps to put it right? And where are those steps to be taken? First and foremost, within our own selves.

The letter O is of course a vowel. A very expressive vowel which conveys feeling- Oh!!! –(In Israeli Hebrew you pronounce it ‘o’. If you’re a Litvak or a Galitziana it’s Oy, which as you know has multiple meanings; if you’re a Yekke it’s Ow as in leshono towvoh). But a good Anglo-Jew says Oh as in Yom Kippur.

In Hebrew the vowels are not strictly part of the alphabet. There is no O in the Aleph Bet. The vowel sounds, the vocalisation follow from one’s understanding of the words. The vowels were added by scholars in Tiberias in the 8th century to standardise the texts and no doubt to help people read whose Hebrew was weak at a time when knowledge of the language was in decline.

The consonants of the Hebrew alphabet are sometimes compared by commentators to the body and the vowels to the soul. (This point is made by Byron Sherwin in ‘The Nature of Jewish Theology’ quoted by Prof Ismar Schorsch:)

But the Sefer Torah is written without vowels. A scroll written with vowels is not fit for use. How can the Sefer Torah be without soul? The answer is – it only comes to be with soul when we read it. A person has to supply the vocalization to make it live in our ears, in our hearts and minds.

A Sefer Torah is a very beautiful thing – to look at – but appearances, how things look are only surface experiences. Without the personal engaging with Torah it becomes mute, and eventually, a dead letter.

And it gains life and gives life all around the more one engages with it and makes it ones own.