Neviim Tovim, blogs by Gillian Gould Lazarus

Victor Meldrewism is real, I believe; one does become grumpier with age. There is a selective misanthropy and some degree of Luddism. In my own case, I cannot bear parking apps, which seem to be in a state of constant flux, a different app every time I park my car.

Humility – the desire to learn, to be taught by wiser people – gives way in age to a kind of arrogance: one no longer submits readily to being taught.

For fifty years, I have been involved in a Reform Synagogue congregation and, for most of those years, I was grateful for that circumstance, arising almost randomly it seemed due to the absence of my in-laws’ ketubah (Jewish marriage certificate).They left Austria after the Anschluss and married on the fly in Paris, before my father-in-law, being an enemy national, was sent to a detention camp and my mother-in-law sailed to New York to join her siblings who were already finding refuge there.

The United Synagogue would not perform the marriage unless we produced ketubot for both sets of parents, so we were married under the auspices of the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain, in the cathedral-like West London Synagogue in Upper Berkeley Street, relying on the signed say so of friends of my in-laws who had witnessed their wedding, conducted by a rabbi in Paris.

Our marriage was not forever, but my membership of the Movement for Reform Judaism, as it is now called, is likely to be for ever, as there is a place for my burial next to my late second husband, in a Reform cemetery.

The feminism of Reform Judaism chimed with my beliefs and one year, on Yom Kippur, I put on a tallit, following the example of a handful of brave women in the community. I did a master’s degree at the UK Reform seminary, which trains rabbis, teachers and others and took exquisite pleasure in the library there. It was the 1990s and the library must be much changed by now, digitised in all the ways a library can be. In the synagogue, I was sometimes a shaliach tzibbur, leading a service or reading from a Torah scroll or producing a d’var Torah on the weekly parashah. I went to a conference of The Half Empty Bookcase, a feminist movement whose name alluded to a lacuna: the Jewish books not written by women across the centuries.

I was glad not to be one of the women of the more traditional United Synagogue, who sat up in a balcony or behind a mechitzah so as not to divert male worshippers from the business of prayer. They chattered and wore hats, I believed. I wore a kippah, like the men and, by this time, like many of the women in my community. Not all Reform congregations were so progressive and, when I realized that a woman in a tallit was an unusual sight in other Reform synagogues, I refrained from wearing mine if I was visiting there.

New prayer books appeared over the years with amended translations of the liturgy. The word Sovereign was preferred to King and the gender-specific term Lord no longer translated the tetragrammaton, yod hé vav hé. God was not called He or She but, ingeniously, You. The language was sensitively chosen so that it would not jar too much, it was hoped, on less progressive ears.

There is one bit of translation which has brought out my inner Victor Meldrew since it appeared in 2008, which is fifteen years ago now. The Hebrew in the Sim Shalom prayer of the Amidah is:

וטוב בעיניך לברך את עמך ישראל ברב עז ובשלום

And in Your eyes, it is good to bless Your people Israel with great strength and peace.

In point of fact, the 2008 translation is:

And in your eyes it is good to bless Your people Israel with the strength to make peace.

Forms of Prayer 2008

We are no longer requesting the gift of peace for ourselves but a peace which we initiate; which we make possible and palatable for a hypothetical enemy. We, the people Israel have all the agency in this set up and the enemy – not really hypothetical, sorry to say – has none, at least none that we or our God can affect.

Be that as it may, it is a good thing, for sure, to have the strength to make peace, especially from a position of strength.

We saw the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 and a swing to the political right in Israel in the years which followed. In 2000, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ascended the Temple Mount and the Second Intifada followed with bloodshed on both sides. Subsequently, Netanyahu was the dominant force in the Knesset while the parliamentary left withered away. Since the last election of 2022, he appears to be dominated himself by the right-wingers whose cooperation made possible his return to power after the interregnum of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid.

In May 2018, the notorious Hamas Kaddish took place in Westminster outside the Houses of Parliament. Kaddish is the prayer for the dead, which, line for line, bears a resemblance to the Christian Pater Noster prayer. A few dozen progressive Jews prayed for the Gazan fatalities, some of whom were believed to be Hamas operatives. The Times of Israel reported the following:

“When Palestinians stand resolute on the Gazan border [for] their freedom and their right to return, they are not committing acts of terrorism, they are performing a mitzvah,” one of the speakers at the Kaddish for Gaza event said.

Times of Israel 17 May 2018

There was some backlash against this prayer service for the fallen of Gaza. The fact that a Hebrew prayer was spoken for Hamas struck many as inappropriate and one can hardly believe Hamas was grateful for the fraternal thought. Personally, I thought it was understandable that one might want to pray for a fallen enemy – especially if one did not regard them as an enemy – but I saw no reason to do this in Parliament Square, an unusual venue for a minyan, which could only have been chosen to enhance the publicity of the event.

After the Hamas Kaddish, representatives of Reform and Liberal Judaism distanced their denominations from the event.

However, there has also been criticism of the abuse the Kaddish attendees had subsequently received.

…Movement workers of LJY-Netzer, the youth movement of the Liberal synagogue, were present at the Kaddish recital, while RSY-Netzer, the youth movement of Reform Judaism, publicised the event on social media.

In a statement on Tuesday, Reform Judaism said: “When RSY-Netzer discovered that most of those killed in Gaza were claimed as Hamas operatives, they acknowledged that had they known, they would not have shared this [event] on Facebook.”

Jewish Chronicle 1 June 2018

The episode of the Hamas kaddish affected some congregants’ perception of the Reform and Liberal movements, some of whose rabbis and youth leaders had participated in it, although without the explicit approval of the MRJ and LJ leadership.

The Demokratiya movment which defends the status of the Supreme Court vis-a-vis the Knesset has such resonance in UK progressive Judaism that we are encouraged to join demos in the UK against visiting members of Netanyahu’s government. A yored, that is to say an Israeli émigré, came to my synagogue to talk about activism against the dangers imposed on Israeli democracy by the right wing policies, in which the Supreme Court representing the force of law would have no control over the enactments of the Knesset. He painted a depressing picture of an uncertain future. There was no one present to offer a contrasting view. He had greater knowledge of the personalities, the legislature and the unwritten constitution. Perhaps those who thought the government reforms were not so inimical to democracy simply stayed away.

At our shabbat morning services, we still say the prayer for the State of Israel, as well as the prayer for the monarch, now King Charles, and for the UK government. We ask for leaders to have wisdom and understanding, a prayer to which the congregation can readily say amen.

Last month, four hundred Jewish academics from Israel and the diaspora signed a letter titled ‘The Elephant in the Room’ which names Israel as an apartheid regime.

American Jews have long been at the forefront of social justice causes, from racial equality to abortion rights, but have paid insufficient attention to the elephant in the room: Israel’s long-standing occupation that, we repeat, has yielded a regime of apartheid. As Israel has grown more right-wing and come under the spell of the current government’s messianic, homophobic, and misogynistic agenda, young American Jews have grown more and more alienated from it. 

The Elephant in the Room 6 August 2023

There are more than four hundred signatories, name after distinguished name. Among them are a few Reform and Liberal rabbis from the United Kingdom. As with the Hamas Kaddish, there is some backlash against them within progressive Jewish communities. According to the letter, ‘the elephant in the room’ is Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians, including the Israeli presence in the disputed territories.

As I see it, with antisemitism on the rise again, when even liberal Zionists like myself are called ‘apartheid lovers’ as a matter of course on social media, signing such a document helps neither Jews nor Palestinians. One can agree to disagree. However, I am conscious that progressive Judaism, the only kind to which I have belonged, admits hostility to Israel as never before. Is it on the fringes of the congregations or in the mainstream? What will become of our kehilahs? When we say ‘Torah will come out of Zion and the word of God from Jerusalem,’ are we supposed to mean something else? When we say ‘Next year in Jerusalem,’ are we supposed to mean for another people, not ourselves?

Addendum

The number of signatories has grown to over two thousand. There are indeed a lot of people, academics and rabbis, who have chosen to sign this letter abjuring Israel in its present form. There are also many more who have not. We may be few, fourteen million in the world, but two thousand, however influential, are not the majority.