Chair: An old Jew was observed in a railway carriage muttering to himself and waving his hands in dismissive gestures from time to time.
“What are you doing?” he was asked.
“I was bored with the long journey and I was telling myself Jewish jokes to while away the time.”
“And why did you wave your hands?”
“I’ve heard them all before.”
Now before we go any further I must declare an interest. I’m a member of the New North London Synagogue, as are, I’m very pleased to say, very many of the people here tonight. It is part of the Masorti movement inspired by Louis Jacobs. So if it hadn’t been for this book, perhaps I would not have benefited from the open, questioning form of traditional Judaism that I personally find so attractive. On the other hand, if this book hadn’t been published in 1957, then I suppose Louis Jacobs would probably have gone on to become Chief Rabbi a few years afterwards and we would all have benefited from his scholarly but critical approach to Judaism.
I also have another interest to declare, of a rather different nature. That is the fact that I too am trying to flog a book, called Privacy and the Press. It is not a Jewish book at all. On the other hand, a quick flick through the index from Louis Brandeis to Harry Woolf might well make you think it is.
Now, a couple of apologies. As soon as I sit down and we start the discussion of our session a little later on, most of you in the room won’t be able to see me and although Jewish Book Week has got a jazzy new website, online ticketing, a professional bookseller and a brand new sound system, if last night’s opening session is anything to go by you might not be able to hear me either! So I apologise in advance, but so far it’s looking good.
Now let me start with an introduction ‘for new readers’. As Louis Jacobs says in the latest edition, the thesis of his book is that modern knowledge and scholarship have made it impossible to accept the traditional view that God dictated to Moses, word for word and letter by letter, the whole of the Torah. Even so, he says, the traditional doctrine that the Torah is from heaven can and should be maintained.
Let’s take an example from the book that I found very striking. It’s a verse from Bereshit that we all know:
“And on the seventh day God finished His work which He had made and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made.”
You see the problem. As Louis Jacobs points out, if God had ceased His activity before the Sabbath, how can it be said that He finished his work on the seventh day? Now I’d always assumed that maybe the verse meant that God had finished His work by the seventh day, or maybe He finished early on the seventh day and had a rest, after lunch. But could this be an error in the text? The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Bible produced by 70 translators in Alexandria over 2000 years ago has
“on the sixth day God finished His work.”
Now whether you accept that the text is wrong or not, says Louis Jacobs, it doesn’t detract from the beauty of the rabbinic notion that God finished His work on the seventh day because rest itself is a creation. Still less does it suggest that we should cease to observe the Sabbath. And, as Louis Jacobs himself says in the preface to the fourth edition (which doesn’t seem to appear in the fifth edition), the book was accepted without the slightest objection by Chief Rabbi Brodie in 1957 although Rabbi Jacobs has no idea whether Chief Rabbi Brodie bothered to read it at the time. But then in 1960, when Louis Jacobs was minister of the New West End Synagogue in Kensington, he was appointed moral tutor at Jews College. He took the job on the understanding that he would take over as principal of Jews College when it became vacant the following year but, in 1961, his appointment was vetoed by the Chief Rabbi and Dr Brodie eventually said that this was because of Dr Jacobs’ published views.
This was the Jacobs Affair part one and Louis Jacobs resigned from Jews College. He had the strong support of the editor of The Jewish Chronicle at the time, William Frankel and, as Mr Frankel makes clear in his preface to this fifth edition, he, William Frankel, engineered a vacancy at the New West End so that Louis Jacobs could go back to his old pulpit. And what happened then, many of you will remember, Rabbi Jacobs was appointed by the board of the New West End shul but the Chief Rabbi failed to give his approval so not only was Rabbi Jacobs sacked but the whole board left as well. That was the second ‘Jacobs Affair’ forty years ago in 1964 and the board and the rabbi went off and formed the New North London Synagogue which eventually found a home in St John’s Wood, the very shul where Dr Brodie himself used to worship.
But that’s enough history from me. In a moment I’m going to hand this pulpit over to our main speaker. I want him to talk about the theological question of Torah min hashomayim, Torah from heaven. I want him to perhaps consider whether he would have been better off to have followed the advice that he himself quotes from Rabbi Israel Salanter:
“Not everything one thinks should be spoken aloud. Not everything spoken aloud should be committed to writing. Not everything committed to writing should be published.”
Maybe you’ll tell us a little bit about what you thought of Dr Brodie from blocking you in 1961 and blocking your return to the New West End in 1964. And we may or may not during the course of the discussion move to the subject of the present Chief Rabbi: how his views differ from yours; what does he imply when he talks of ‘the Mosaic books’. And possibly some personal reflections at some point in the evening: how do you as a rabbi, a man of immense learning and piety feel about the fact that you can’t be called up to the Torah in the United Synagogue, let alone officiate at weddings. Although, as you say, you are allowed a non-speaking part in the service. And I’d like to know how you see the future of Anglo-Jewry, not so much ‘will we have Jewish grandchildren?’, as of course you do, but: Will we have another Chief Rabbi after Jonathan Sacks?
So, those are the questions. After Louis Jacobs has spoken, just fairly briefly to begin with I will introduce the rest of the panel and I’ll tell you how we are going to organise the discussion. But, first of all, not before time, I’m honoured to hand over to Rabbi Dr Louis Jacobs.
Louis Jacobs: Ladies and Gentlemen. On many occasions during the past forty years or so I have had to speak about various subjects: Jewish mysticism; Jewish theology in general; Talmud, and I have discovered that somehow, whatever my subject, the Jacobs Affair was on the agenda. I used to tell the story of a teacher of English history. She taught the kids about King Alfred and she said to the kids, “Now King Alfred was a great king and there is so much you could say about him. So, whatever you do, if I ask you to write an essay on Alfred, don’t mention burning the cakes.” So one of the kids turns in an essay and said: “King Alfred was a great king and one day he came to the house of a woman, but the less said about that the better.”
So I feel like this and have felt so for many years. I don’t want to go over the old ground but I can’t help tonight talking about Torah min hashamayim, which is a very big subject. And I don’t really know where to begin. Ben Zvi, when he was President of Israel and had a problem, he used to say: “We haven’t a great deal of time so let’s start from the end!” The end being, in this context (at least I want to choose this as an end): who wrote Psalm 137? Now Psalm 137:
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea we wept when we remembered Zion.”
The Book of Psalms traditionally was written by King David because some of the psalms, not this one, some of the psalms talk about David. The traditional view as it appears in the Midrash and in the Talmud was that King David wrote the whole of the Book of Psalms including the psalm “By the rivers of Babylon”.
Nachman Krochmal, the great historian of Talmud and Midrash, pointed out in his great book Guide for the Perplexed of our Time that in the Middle Ages you would tell a person, an ordinary Jew, you would tell him that King David sat on his throne long before the Babylonian Empire had been known, long before the first Temple had been built, yet this king, gazing into the future, saw the Jewish people, the Levites, after the destruction of the Temple – and they were in Babylon: they’d been exiled to Babylon – they were asked to sing the Lord’s song. And they said, “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”
The average Jew in the Middle Ages would have said, “Marvellous. Wonderful, the power of a seer, the power of a man like David, the ‘sweet singer in Israel’, to see into the future.” And Krochmal said that that was no doubt very inspiring in those days but that nowadays every schoolchild really has a sense of history and that he finds it not at all inspiring because this belongs to what we today know as ‘time travel’. That a man should gaze into the future. Now no-one is suggesting that God could not endow a man with that power. Who are we to say what God can or cannot do? although that idea of gazing into the future in detail raises problems of its own.
But nowadays a person would say: Well, it all makes sense provided we ignore the superscription to the Book of Psalms and we say that that psalm wasn’t written by King David; that psalm was written by a contemporary, by a Levite perhaps who was asked to sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land. And he said, “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” and that would be inspiring.
So why then does the tradition say “it was written by David”? Because David was the sweet singer in Israel, as he is described in the Bible, and therefore he attracted to himself psalmology. People wrote psalms and we know that they wrote psalms over a long period. There are psalms in Qumran, the Dead Sea Scrolls. And they were gradually collected in a book called Sefer Tehillim, the Book of Psalms, written by David.
Now that’s a modern approach. Krochmal was a pioneer in the modern, historical, critical study of Jewish sources. Why is it modern? There’s nothing magic about modernity. As I understand it, modernity in this context means the best that modern knowledge and scholarship has to offer. And so, why not (and this is my constant complaint against Modern Orthodoxy): I’ve no complaints with the charedi world or the yeshiva world. They go their own sweet way. It’s not my way, although I come from there. But they go their way. Nor is it my complaint with Reform or Liberal Judaism because they would say: Yes, it is all human and it was only attributed to Moses but that’s why we’re not so particular about keeping every detail.
But my complaint is with the Modern Orthodox who will see nothing startling or daring, or even untraditional, in postulating that Psalm 137 was not written by David. They would accept, for example, on historical grounds, historical critical grounds, that there is a second Isaiah. They will accept that the Book of Ecclesiastes could not possibly have been written by King Solomon or whoever was attributed to King Solomon. So why not say, and this is the heart of the problem, why not say that the same applies to the Torah, the Torah being the five books of Moses?
Why should you not know that in the Torah itself, in the Chumash, in the Pentateuch, there is no reference to Torah in the sense in which we understand it today? In the Chumash¸ a Torah means a particular law. The torat ha’olah, the law of the burnt offering. The torat hachatat, the law of the sin offering. It is not the whole of the Torah, the whole corpus.
In other words, what we call the Torah, what the rabbis call the Torah, does not speak of itself as the Torah. It’s something which emerged. It’s something which developed over a long period of time and, therefore, it seems to me that if a person is moved to say, on textual, historical, critical grounds that King Solomon didn’t write the Book of Ecclesiastes, could not have written the Book of Ecclesiastes, why not go on from there and say that our present state of knowledge shows that God could not have dictated the whole of the Chumash to Moses? Not that we doubt that God could have done it, but all the evidence goes to show that it’s not the work of God in any direct sense. It’s not ‘dictated’. Maimonides doesn’t use the word ‘dictated’: conveyed. It’s not conveyed word for word and letter by letter. It’s the sum total of countless generations of Jews, and before Jews the Israelites reaching out to God and being found by Him.
In other words, human elements in the Torah. And so I’ve often said that I believe, together with so many millions of Jews all over the world (it’s not my original view), I believe in Torah min hashamayim, that the Torah which is a synonym for the Jewish religion is min hashamayim, is from Heaven, Heaven being God. The problem is: What do you mean by min? And min, I’ve suggested, is the human element.
Like hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz. We are all familiar with the benediction. You eat bread, you say hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz. The same word is used, min. ‘God bringeth forth bread from the ground.’ What does this mean, he bringeth forth bread from the ground? It doesn’t mean that bread grows on trees! Sliced bread! It means that God has endowed his creatures with the power to reap and to sow and to bake and to produce bread and it is God who does it but He does it with the co-operation of human beings.
And why not say, and I have tried to show in my book that there is warrant for this in the tradition itself, that Torah min hashamayim can mean God working together with His creatures.
Now I will admit that I was mistaken when at the beginning of my quest that I thought that this was compatible with Orthodoxy. In those days, it was, at least I think it was! It was the result of discussions I had with a study group at the New West End Synagogue and the New West End Synagogue was of a very lukewarm type of Orthodoxy. Dr Adler, the Chief Rabbi, before then had allowed certain reforms in Anglo-Jewish synagogues and I felt, although I was a yeshiva man from a yeshiva background, I felt that here in this broader element of Anglo-Jewish piety, and it was piety in its own way, I was able to develop my ideas on this notion of Torah min hashamayim.
But I admit that nowadays it would not be admitted as Orthodox. And the question is really the question of halachah. And I’ve written about this elsewhere and I don’t want to talk about it just now, although I’m prepared to answer questions about it.
If, people argue, it’s man-made, then why keep it? And the answer to that is: What do you mean by man-made? Unless you have a notion of it dropping down from heaven and it’s divine. I remember at the time of the Jacobs Affair one of my supporters was the chairman of the Chelsea Synagogue. Chelsea was an Orthodox synagogue and it was at the time when, at the Cup Final, the Queen handed the FA cup to the winning team. And the winning team at that time was Fulham United, which was just round the corner from the Chelsea Synagogue. So this man wrote that evidently the Chief Rabbi held that when the tradition says that God gave the Torah to Moses, it was like the Queen handing over the FA cup to the captain of Fulham!
It is not that. It is not a package. It’s a dynamic concept. There’s the idea, the modern idea yes, but very cogent idea, of development: that the Torah is developing through the Jewish people; that God gave the Torah not only to the Jewish people but gave the Torah, and is giving the Torah all the time, to the Jewish people.
Now I am going to sit down now. I agree that there are all sorts of problems about this and I am aware of those problems. I have tried to deal with them. And I am vague: I am vague on the basic contention of scholarship, that the Chumash is a composite work produced at different times. Of course there is strong evidence for this. I’m not vague about this because this is a matter of fact.
I knew an old lady in Manchester who said: “It isn’t only emes: it’s fact.” And she was right. You can have different views in matters of faith but you can’t deny the facts unless you believe in the god who plants false clues and I can’t believe in the god who plants false clues. And for the rest, a religious Jew, if he is involved in the tremendous thing that we call the Torah, has doubts, is bound to have doubts because we’re dealing with infinite communication itself to finite human beings. So if it is too clear, then it is wrong. And if you try to gain clarity at the expense of … [unclear] in close scientific investigation, then you are believing in the god who plants false clues.
So I’ve said often that it is better to be vaguely right than definitely wrong! And I want to finish this part of my talk with a favourite story of mine about the Kotsker Rebbe. Now the Kotsker Rebbe was a maverick and he was fighting against everybody, including his fellow hassidim. But there is a marvellous story illustrating this idea of being involved.
A hassid of the Kotsker came to him and was sitting there and he was brooding.
So the Kotsker said, “What’s the matter with you?”
And he said, “Rebbe, I’m brooding. Something is bothering me.”
So the Rebbe said, “Well, tell me what it is.”
He said, “I’m ashamed to tell you. I’m just ashamed to tell you.”
So the Rebbe said, “Never mind shame. Tell me what’s bothering you.”
So he said, “Rebbe, I’m afraid to say it but you force me to say it. I keep thinking that perhaps there is no God. Perhaps God doesn’t exist.”
So the Rebbe said, “What difference does it make to you?”
So he said, “Rebbe, what difference does it make to me? If there’s no God, so what’s the meaning of the Torah and the mitzvoth?”
So the Rebbe said, “And what difference does that make to you?”
So he said, “Rebbe, if there’s no Torah and mitzvoth, then what’s the meaning of my life? That’s the whole of my life!”
So the Rebbe said, “If it matters all that to you, carry on brooding!”
Chair: Thank you very much. There was a rather useful preview of this session in The Guardian yesterday. Simon Rocker said,
“For some the Jacobs Affair marked the Orthodox establishment’s descent into religious intolerance. For others the sacrifice of Jacobs was the price the United Synagogue had to pay to remain part of Orthodoxy.”
Well, that’s one way of looking at it I suppose, but what Simon Rocker didn’t tell me was how I was going to handle the rest of the session this evening. But I’m going to tell you what we plan to do. We have three distinguished teachers on the panel. Each of them is going to speak for about five minutes, making comments, raising questions, and when all three of them have finished we’ll put some of those questions to Rabbi Jacobs and perhaps even have a discussion among ourselves here. Then we’ll see where we go from there.
Now the three speakers: first of all we shall hear from David-Hillel Ruben, Director of New York University in London, Professor of Philosophy at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and, for two rather interesting years, Director of what was still when he joined it called Jews College and then became the London School of Jewish Studies. He is no longer a member of the United Synagogue but he comes from an Orthodox background and he wants to take up the halachic argument: What role, if any, does man have in divine revelation. That will be David Ruben.
Then we’ll have Geoffrey Alderman, historian, also a professor, also involved in one of the United States universities in London, weekly columnist for The Jewish Chronicle.. He is going to talk about the history of the Jacobs Affair: why it took two years for Chief Rabbi Brodie to take any notice of it perhaps. He is going to talk about the pre-history, the history, the post-history and the extent to which where you stand on the Jacobs Affair has become a litmus test among certain Orthodox parts of the Jewish community here.
Finally, Clive Lawton, former head teacher of King David High School in Liverpool, now Executive Director of Limmud. A founder of Limmud which is perhaps the world’s greatest Jewish educational event, and still out of favour to some extent, I think, with the Beth Din if not the United Synagogue itself. He too is critical of the way that the Jacobs Affair is handled.
So we’ll have these three speakers and then we will open it up for discussion. First, Professor David-Hillel Ruben.
David-Hillel Ruben: Joshua wondered what would have happened if We Have Reason to Believe wouldn’t have been published. I can tell you what the answer is. Joshua and I would have still been sitting next to each other in Ealing United Synagogue, davening.
In this very short presentation I don’t intend to review all of Rabbi Jacobs’ writings on the topic of revelation in the Jewish tradition. I have to look only at sections of his We Have Reason to Believe and Chapter 16, ‘Toward a non-fundamentalist halacha’ in his Tree of Life. For the sake of interpretative accuracy, although he said this himself this evening, Jacobs does not intend to deny the view that Torah is min hashamayim. He says that the difference between his position and that of Orthodox Judaism concerns the meaning of ‘from’, as he said tonight. If so, there’s a lot of difference packed into this one word.
However, what I do take from this is that the debate is not going to be much advanced by concentrating on the slogan ‘Torah is min hashamayim’. What needs to be done is to try and see what his substantive position is: how Rabbi Jacobs understands that slogan. As I understand it, the main issues for Rabbi Jacobs are ones of authorship. I will restrict what I have to say to the question of authorship in the case of the Pentateuch.
I see what I am doing now is trying to be clarificatory and trying to analyse his position. I come here in the role of my being a philosopher really, I guess: my contribution for the evening. And I see it that there are three questions of authorship of the Pentateuch that can be conceptually distinguished and I would like to do that.
A: There is the question of how many authors were there?
B: What was the nature of the relationship, if any, between the author or authors and the Divine? And note in this question, the nature of the relationship between the Divine and the author or authors, there are two directions to consider. There is the direction of the relationship of man or men to God, and God to man or men, depending on what you think about the first question about the number of authors.
C: There is a third separate question: Is the Pentateuch that we have today the same as the one that was originally authored, however it was authored?
I think that those three questions conceptually can be distinguished and should be kept separate.
Now the Orthodox view on A, as is well-known, the number of authors, it’s a well-known view. The five books were written more or less in their entirety by Moses. On B, the Orthodox view is that Moses wrote what God commanded him to write. The mechanics of this remain mysterious and there are many midrashim that try to fill out this idea as far as human understanding can grasp it. It’s fair to say, though, that the relationship is seen as one primarily of God to the author and not vice versa. And finally C, the Orthodox view is that the Pentateuch we have today is the same one that was transcribed at Sinai or in the wilderness by Moses and transmitted to us over the generations.
Just as an aside: I’ve often wondered, from the Orthodox point of view, whether certain concessions couldn’t be made. There is a midrash talking about a pasuk that Ezra has inserted in the scroll so I think it would be interesting, from the point of view of Orthodoxy, to work out actually the details of how much concession could be made. And I don’t know really any discussion from this but it is an interesting question. I am not sure it has to be quite as rigid as I’ve put it.
Now these three views, the Orthodox views on A, B and C, can be refined in various ways. But in the main, and excepting some rough edges to the views, even if you think they are not true, it’s pretty clear what these three Orthodox answers to A, B and C are.
Rabbi Jacobs’ own view of the Pentateuch shares much with various secular approaches. A secular view and Rabbi Jacobs’ position both assert that these five books are human literary artefacts, often of great beauty. They were written by men. They therefore embody the ideas and thoughts of men. All standard canons of literary scholarship apply to them and those literary canons reveal to us such things as that the Pentateuch is a compilation of various documents written by different writers at different periods with somewhat different points of view or agendas.
The details need not concern us here as to how many different sources there were. So both Rabbi Jacobs and the secularists’ response to A is in terms of multiple authors and both, in answer to C, can accept that the text has been altered, corrupted and changed over time.
But what about B? Here the secularist and Rabbi Jacobs must part company. What was the nature of the relationship between the authors and the Divine? The secular view does not bring the Divine into the picture at all. It gives man’s relationship to God in either direction: no explanation and no explanatory role to play in understanding the Pentateuch. Indeed, it might deny the existence of a deity altogether.
How does Rabbi Jacobs differ from the secularist? The answer is that, like the Orthodox, he wishes to find a place for the relationship between God and the authors and in explaining the origin of the Pentateuch, he wants to import something about this relationship. In his terminology, both he and Orthodoxy require a theory of divine inspiration between God and the author or authors. But he differs from Orthodoxy also over the nature of that relationship. He calls the Orthodox response to be the doctrine of verbal inspiration.
His own account of the relationship between the authors and the divine is intended to be different. Here are some quotes:
“We have seen that in modern times a different conception of divine inspiration has gained ground. This is the view stated above, that in the Bible we have the divine message conveyed to us through the activities and thoughts of human being.”
That’s from We Have Reason to Believe. Again, when we have reason to believe. the sacred writings display “human cooperation with the divine”. Now it seems to me that the crucial relationship to address to Rabbi Jacobs is about the directionality of this relationship: the way in which he partly agrees with the Orthodox on B.
Many writers have spoken about the relationship of man to God. For example, of man’s attempting in the Pentateuch to reach out to God. But if his view is to count as anything like a traditional Jewish view, albeit non-Orthodox, his view of that relationship between the author or authors and God must also embrace the direction of God speaking to man as well as man speaking to God. What I find utterly lacking in Rabbi Jacobs’ writings is any convincing alternative non-Orthodox account of the relationship from God to man. There are some wonderfully poetic passages but nothing, I think, that has clarity or precision to it. For example,
“Revelation is now seen as a series of meetings or encounters between man and God. It is not the actual words of the Bible that were revealed. These belong rather to the faltering human attempts at putting down what is signified for man to have felt themselves very near to God and how they reflected on the nearness of God to their ancestors.”
That’s from Tree of Life.
These passages move back and forth rather uncritically between the two different directions of the God-author relationship. And so, what was revealed by God to us if not the words? I think we are never told. Either God had a message to convey and we heard it. Or He had a message but we did not quite hear it correctly. Or there was no message that He conveyed and all we are left with is our messages to Him.
The quote, how it felt to be near God, rather suggests the latter. If so, the writings were then merely human responses to His felt presence. Is that Rabbi Jacobs’ view? I am not sure. So, what is the directionality of God to man? Where do we get an account of it in this alternative, non-Orthodox but still traditional view? I am not sure.
And, finally, I am troubled in Rabbi Jacobs’ writing by what we might call ‘The Problem of the Criterion’. Rabbi Jacobs does not hold that all of the contents of the Bible were non-verbally inspired by God. He says, in We Have Reason to Believe,
“It is possible to recognise in the Bible higher and lower stages of spiritual development.”
So there is a problem of criteria. How are we meant to differentiate those parts of these documents that were non-verbally inspired, whatever that means, and those parts that were not? Now certainly Rabbi Jacobs understands that there is this problem. He is not unaware of it. He says, for example, in reply,
“The distinction between what is divinely inspired and what is not is perceived by the human heart,”
and, again,
“We instinctively realise that its appeal is to our higher nature.”
He rejects the idea that his view might degenerate into a kind of halachic anarchy. That’s in We Have Reason to Believe.
Now I think it is a perfectly acceptable view from within Orthodoxy to hold that we have a moral sense independent of God’s commandments. Even the atheist can be a moral person and where Rabbi Jacobs speaks of what speaks to the heart, presumably he is thinking that his independent moral sense can rule some parts of the Pentateuch in and others out from being God’s authentic words. Now this might help him with those parts of the Pentateuch that he finds morally offensive, like the laws of mamzeros, about which he has written. But examples like that are the relatively easy examples for his view.
Consider the whole range of commands that do not relate to moral issues at all: shatnes, kashrus, tephillin, mezuzos. How on earth are we meant to decide which of these, if any, derive from a higher or from a lower stage of spiritual development? None of these speak in any morally independent way to the human heart. I submit that, his good intentions notwithstanding, Rabbi Jacobs’ views would, and indeed have, led to a kind of halachic anarchy. Look across the Atlantic to see.
What sort of arguments can we give, aside from sociological ones, in favour of kashrus but not in favour of other ritual laws? I cannot see that Rabbi Jacobs leaves us with any normative criteria of what to accept and reject in the Pentateuch, especially in dealing with non-moral examples of observance, despite of course his best intentions to deal with this issue. I don’t say that he intends or desires halachic anarchy. It would be rude and an insult and I don’t say that. But I think that there is a logic in his view that doesn’t deal with this issue.
In sum, I find Rabbi Jacobs’ view disappointing on two issues. First, the nature of the relationship from God to the author or authors of the Pentateuch. (That’s B in the question of authorship.) And, secondly, the criterion that his theory requires for which mitzvoth commanded in the Pentateuch would remain relevant for us and which not.
Finally, one thing that Rabbi Jacobs did say, and I think that I’ve heard him say before, is that he feels that an earlier stage of the United Synagogue might have been more open or accepting to his kinds of views and it is often said that it is only in its modern guise that the United Synagogue has become rigid and unaccepting of these more liberal views. I am using here the work of a PhD student at Birkbeck who’s convinced me: but he has been through the works of both Rabbi Adler and Rabbi Hertz and there are just a large number of quotes which seem to say that they did not understand and could not have understood Torah min hashamayim in the way that Rabbi Jacobs does.
Rabbi Hermann Adler:
“The law of the Bible is the word of our God.”
“The Book of Books which in very truth descended from heaven to us.”
“These are commandments revealed by God on Sinai.”
Rabbi Joseph Hertz:
“Judaism stands and falls with its belief in the historical actuality of the revelation at Sinai.”
“The documentary hypothesis is a perversion of history and a desecration of religion.”
So this is just, I think, my little attempt to put the historical record straight about what previous incumbents in the role of Chief Rabbi did actually think on the issue. Thanks.
Chair: The next speaker, ladies and gentlemen, is Geoffrey Alderman who is going to address us on the historical aspects of the Jacobs Affair.
Geoffrey Alderman: Ladies and Gentlemen, what you are going to hear from me are some rather disparate thoughts as a historian on why there was a Jacobs Affair; why the Jacobs Affair was what it was; why there have been subsequent Jacobs Affairs; and why the events of 1959-1961 have had such a profound effect on the social politics of Anglo-Jewry and indeed wider afield.
Joshua, last April, Mr Robert Kilroy-Silk published an article in a national newspaper about Arabs. Nobody heard of this article. It was published and it disappeared from the public stage. Less than three months ago, apparently through a mistake by his secretary on an email, that very same article reappeared. All hell broke loose and Mr Kilroy-Silk and the British Broadcasting Corporation parted company.
Rabbi Jacobs published We Have Reason to Believe in 1957. Why was there a two-year gap before anything happened? The answer to that question is of the same genre as is, I suspect, the answer to the riddle of Mr Kilroy-Silk: that it suited people a few months ago to use the article about Arabs as a lever with which to get Mr Kilroy-Silk out of the BBC. That is my view. And it suited certain people in 1959 to take from the shelf a book which had been written in 1957 and use it as a lever with which to prevent Rabbi Jacobs’ advancement within the United Synagogue. That seems to me to be so palpably obvious as not to require further demonstration. But if further demonstration is needed, I recall, Joshua, conversations with two friends of mine, the late Rabbi Dr Sidney Leperer of Jews College and the late Professor Sidney Greenbaum, sometime Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London who was also one of the alumni of Jews College.
The answer to my question, ladies and gentlemen, seems to have a great deal to do with the internal politics of Jews College and in particular with the bitterness felt by the then principal, the much-published Rabbi Dr Isidore Epstein who did not wish to retire at 65. Epstein took the book of Rabbi Jacobs off the shelf and made a balagan of it. Otherwise, and Louis this is no insult to you: that book might still be gathering dust today and none of us would be here!
Now the history of the Jacobs Affair of course was seminal, pivotal, for the United Synagogue because the decision of the Honorary Officers and Board of Management of the New West End that they were going to have Rabbi Jacobs as their rabbi was vetoed in a most dramatic way by the then incoming new President of the United Synagogue, Sir Isaac Wolfson. And Sir Isaac Wolfson was the first shomer Shabbos practising Orthodox President of the United Synagogue. And ever since that time, the Jacobs Affair has been used, as I said when we were meeting privately before this evening, as a litmus test within the Orthodox world: “Are you for Jacobs or against Jacobs?”
If you want to prove, to legitimise, to validate your Orthodox credentials, you say something against Louis Jacobs.
Some of you will no doubt recall another affair. Anglo-Jewry is full of affairs, Joshua. That was variously called ‘the parshas Lieberman’; ‘the Liebergate affair’; ‘the Lieberman affair’. This was the attempt by the then principal of Jews College, Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks, to dismiss from Jews College by reason of redundancy the senior lecturer in Talmud at that time, a Gerer Chossid, a very, very close friend of mine who now lives in Tzefat, Simcha Bunim Lieberman.
Why did Rabbi Sacks want to do this? Because, in private, Simcha Lieberman, the Gerer Chossid, had told him not to review Rabbi Jacobs’ book A Tree of Life in the Jewish Chronicle. Because Simcha said to Jonathan Sacks, “If you review this book it will give publicity to Rabbi Jacobs who is a greater Talmid chocham than you.” Well, that’s what I have from the Gerer Chossid, now living in Tzefat.
So you can see in that way the attitudes to this man sitting on my left here have become a litmus test. There is a history of the Jacobs Affair, a pre-history and a post-history.
Now, a couple of final points because I know that we’re very tight, Joshua, for time. I’ve often asked myself why it is that a great deal of fuss is made about Rabbi Dr Louis Jacobs in the world of Orthodoxy, more so than Reform or Liberal movements, or even the Lubavitch movement which is a movement tainted with terrible heresy. I know of only one case where a witness to a wedding, to a chupah, was disqualified by the rabbi taking the ceremony on the grounds that he may have been a Lubavitch Messiahnist. In my view, as an Orthodox Jew, the rabbi concerned was quite right to ask this witness, “Do you believe that Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, was/is the Moshiach?”
He was quite right to do that. And when he didn’t receive the answer he wanted, the witness was disqualified. I’m happy to say that that took place in a Federation synagogue! I’m a Federation man. But I am moved to wonder why there is this animus against this man on my left much more so than about people (I hope Rabbi Jacobs will forgive me for saying this) whose heresy is much more palpable, much more palpable. Again, I would suggest to you, ladies and gentlemen, Jewish politics are at the root of this.
Finally, of course, a parting shot. I want to take up something that my friend, former colleague and London University Professor David-Hillel Ruben said. I believe there has been a sea change within the United Synagogue and that up until the late ’fifties, the United Synagogue was a much broader church (to use that term) than it is today. And one of the fascinations for me as a historian of Anglo-Jewry is to see how that dynamic has worked through to make Anglo-Jewry a much more fragmented community, or set of communities, than we really need be. Thank you.
Clive Lawton: Well, you’ve had the heavy stuff! I suppose my strongest feeling when I consider Rabbi Dr Louis Jacobs’ situation is a sense of great sadness. Geoffrey has just given an example. I don’t think anybody denies the towering intellect and capacity for learning, knowledge and insight that Louis has. I don’t think anybody has ever denied that.
So then, why as a community have we successfully wasted him? That is my sense of sadness. Why is it that we failed somehow, as a community, to use him well? Now those of you from within the Masorti movement have used him. Not necessarily well, I understand, in the sense that I don’t think (and I may be wrong about this but this is my impression) that Louis Jacobs ever wanted to start a new movement. I don’t think he wanted to be hived off into a box somewhere and belong to ‘them’.
And I speak of this situation with some real sense of sympathy and not just sadness because I wish that book were now forgotten. Because I think it raised some very good questions: I’m not sure that it presented very useful answers. I think it was a fascinating starting point. It was an exciting book from a mid-30s brilliant rabbi. It was challenging, thought-provoking, engaging, intriguing, exciting: all of those good things. But, here we are in 2004 still calling upon Louis Jacobs to address it. What a trap.
I know about this. My hair is long. The community puts you in places and tells you who you are, what you stand for, what you’re about. The challenge to cut my hair every two years just to prove I can is on a trivial level the challenge that I think Louis Jacobs faces to say more, to say differently, to move on. It’s very hard. And he raised an important question, an important question that was in the ’fifties and ’sixties certainly. I remember it in my film studies: the problem of the auteur. Who is the author of a film? We are quite accustomed to talking about John Ford’s Stagecoach, even though we all know that lots of other people obviously put that film together. Who does it belong to? Who was the author? A very engaging, very challenging, very important question. But, in the end, the question still remains for the Jews: What do we actually do?
We Have Reason to Believe privileges reason and centres on belief. And my understanding of Jewish thought anyway is that these were not the most significant issues for Jews. What do we do? is the question.
Theology, I don’t think, was our favourite game. What defines a frum Jew? That we’re shomer mitzvoth? They kept kashruth. They kept Shabbat. They gave tzedakah. That’s what made a Jew frum, is what he or she did. We have now successfully as a community (and I don’t blame Louis for this but I think he was the cause around which this battle was fought), found ourselves in a situation where it doesn’t matter what a Jew does. ‘What I want to know is what a Jew thinks? what a Jew believes? They can keep kashrut until the cows come home. But I want to know what he really thinks about who wrote the Torah.’
What a bizarre situation for us to get ourselves into. This is not the Jewish way, I think. We talk about a more or less liberal United Synagogue from the past. I just talk about a Jewish world where people were judged by how they behaved and inquisitions into patterns of thought and belief were not our way of doing things.
But, you know, this accent on rationality ‘we have reason to believe’, this ‘we can prove it. It’s a fact.’ Louis used the expression himself. It’s not just emes, it’s fact!
A fact is an extremely pedestrian level on which to engage with truth. For example, the Sun newspaper carries ‘facts’ all the time. I don’t think it has ever contained a truth in its life. But what are we really concerned about? And how useful is rationality as the only or the primary or the centre defining pattern of how we look at and understand the world?
When my little daughter asked me when she was about five or six years old how we know there is a God, I didn’t know that the Kotsker Rebbe had got there before me. But my response to her was, “We don’t know but we have a choice of living in this world as if there is a God, or as if there isn’t a God.” And in the process of that we come to our own beliefs. For some of us, the belief, the experience, the understanding is self-evident. For others of us, it is obviously absurd. For many of us, at different times in our lives, we stand in different places. But how do you live as if there is one Father of humanity making us all equal, as if there is a backstop of absolutes, as if humanity determines all that’s true and right on its own? It’s the ‘as ifs’.
So for me, my great regret is that we’re here in 2004 and we’re still on about We Have Reason to Believe and still on about Torah min hashamayim, rather than engaging in not only the several wonderful books that Louis has written since then, but sadly not being able to engage in the vast sea of scholarship that I believe this man could have produced for us had we not trapped him so much in that story back then.
Chair: Now the way we are going to do this is as follows. I am going to pick up some of the points that our speakers have raised and I’m going to put them to Louis and then we will open it up for discussion. I am going to give at least a chance to each of our speakers so I’m going to start with David-Hillel Ruben first and what he said, you remember, is that your views will lead to a kind of ‘halachic anarchy’. He asked what sort of arguments we can give, apart from sociological ones, in favour of kashrut but not in favour of other ritual laws. He said that it leaves us with no criteria of what to accept and what to reject, despite your best intentions. So, would you like to just respond to what David-Hillel Ruben has said on that issue?
Louis Jacobs: Yes, but there is halachic anarchy in any event. How do you explain, say, the laws of kashrut solely on the grounds that at a particular moment in time God, the source of all being, communicated these laws to Moses? But there are laws of kashrut which have nothing to do with Moses. There are laws of kashrut which are post-Mosaic, which are rabbinic. The main example in connection with halachah is the rule found in the Talmud that when you kindle the Chanucah lights you have to recite asher kidashonu bemitzvotav vetzivonu lehadlik ner shel Chanucah. “Who has commanded us his commandments and has commanded us to kindle the lights of Chanucah.” Where is this in the Torah? the Talmud asks. And the answer, one answer, is: “Ask thy father and he will tell thee.” In other words, interpreting that quite legitimately I believe, it means that the Jewish tradition is the source of our practice, of our halachah.
Now of course this can result not so much in anarchy but it can result in behaviourism. There are people who say, and I think Clive Lawton came very near to this, that it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you keep it. And this was the complaint against the famous Breslau school. The Breslau school was concerned with the very problem we are discussing and people used to say that the Breslau school are saying: “It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you keep the mitzvoth.”
Now that’s not my point of view. And I don’t think it was really fair to say that it was the point of view of the Breslau school. What they were saying was that there is a Jewish way and of course you can say it just happened, or you can say that it is not important. You can say that kashrus is important because of its ‘ethnic’ aspect or because it’s health, hygienic. But that’s not religion. Religion is the command of God and I do believe in God and I believe in the command of God.
Chair: Ok. David, do you want to come back and answer questions? …
David-Hillel Ruben: Well, ask a Jew a question and he always replies with a question. And I guess that is where I am now. First of all let me just say that I agree with you, and I thought that when Clive was speaking too, that I think the tradition that we are in is doubly defined both by practice and by beliefs. And about the continuity: it is an interesting question of what makes a later part of the tradition continuous with an earlier part of tradition, rather than just a breakaway. And I think, like you, that it is both belief and practice.
But in what you have just said, I am sorry to say that I still don’t hear the answer that I need. There is a tendency in your thought, and I thought that was what I was picking up now too, that the mitzvoth that should be kept are the ones that are actually being kept by the community. Something like that. And that I why I chose the word ‘normative’ criterion so carefully. With klal Yisrael, I mean if you take a vote about what Jews today are doing, you might surely get the wrong answer about which mitzvoth were to be kept and which are not.
So I still don’t hear in what you say some kind of understanding of how we would look back at the mitzvoth and separate them. I mean you, for example, don’t think we need to keep the law of the mamzer. So I still don’t have a theoretically well-defined answer to the question.
The other thing I just wanted to say is that the other question I asked (and I would like to hear you say something about it if not now perhaps later) is that of the God to man relationship in Revelation. There’s a lot in what you write about the relationship of man to God and understanding the Torah as man seeking God. It’s very Heschel-like for those of you who know the works of Abraham Joshua Heschel. But I still don’t know what you think got revealed in Revelation from God to man.
Louis Jacobs: Yes, there is a problem in Revelation. It seems to me that there are two quite separate issues here. One is: Is the whole critical position true or false? To take the obvious example: Was the world created, as Genesis says, in six days and six nights? Now this problem was faced by Christians in England in the early 19th century and it left the Jews cold. Why did it leave the Jews cold? Because they felt that this was a matter for goyim to discuss. It wasn’t our thing. We keep our Torah. But once there is a build-up of opinion from various disciplines, from geology, from archaeology, from anthropology, a build-up of opinions accepted by scientists of various denominations so to speak, that the Chumash or the Torah is not an infallible document: now how can it be Revelation and yet be fallible?
That is the problem. I don’t know the answer to that. Or at least, it seems to me that a host of dedicated Jews who believe in the Torah and have this problem and want to make sense of it, then they have to invoke, and have invoked, what I have tried to spell out as the idea of ‘liberal supernaturalism’.
What do I mean by ‘liberal supernaturalism’? ‘Liberal’ in the sense that we accept the findings of modern scientific and historical investigation. We don’t believe the world was made in only six days, and we believe that Genesis is wrong, provided you then spell out what you mean by ‘wrong’. It is not wrong in that it teaches that God created man in His image, although we have to spell this out and it is a lifetime and more of thought.
Chair: Geoffrey, you wanted to come in there?
Geoffrey Alderman: It wasn’t so much a question as a comment, Joshua. As I was listening, particularly to Clive’s remarks, I remembered Harold Wilson. Do you remember Harold Wilson? He was a Prime Minister a long time ago who said “Let us unite on technology, not divide on theology” (or something like that). I think that for the average Jew in this country, the sort of debate that we are now being launched into is very far from the problems, the difficulties and the challenges of being a Jew.
What I find so sad about this whole saga which I fear is not yet over is that we are dividing on theology. Now that is not to say that there aren’t lines in the sand that we all draw and that there are points beyond which we shouldn’t go. But as I’ve been listening to this I’ve been remembering Rabbi Akiva who though that Bar Kochba was the Moshiach, the Messiah. Nachman of Bratslav thought that his son was the Messiah. All down the ages, different Jewish personalities have had views about the nature of the relationship between the natural and the supernatural. While some of these disputes have been important, have been important, most of them, I’m afraid to say, have not been important.
We know why the Temple was destroyed: sinas chinam [baseless hatred], and that is what it seems to me at bottom is what the Jacobs affair is about. It is about politics, not about theology.
Chair: Clive, can I bring you in here?
Clive Lawton: Yes, I just want to say very quickly that I am not suggesting for a minute that belief doesn’t matter to individual people. Obviously every individual figures out their own belief and that’s important. What I’m concerned about, exactly as Geoffrey says, is the business of trying to line people up and face them all in the same direction. I don’t think that’s a very creative thing to do. And in case we think that Jews have to get this sorted, otherwise how can we go on: I’d just like to remind us of Sephardim who seem to manage pretty well without most of this stuff and do not seem to divide up with all this headcase business that Ashkenazim have to get into. So I think that we can remember the ‘broad church’, the ‘big tent’, or whatever it is that we want to call it, is an important Jewish ideal. Needing to line people up or decide who is on which side or who agrees with whom in matters of what you think is not necessarily the most constructive way forward, even though some of us might enjoy these discussions.
Chair: Louis, would you like to answer that?
Louis Jacobs: Well, Milton Himmelfarb edited a symposium in Commentary which was later published. It asked various rabbis of different denominations what they believed: what they believed about Torah; what they believed about God, and so on. In other words, they were theological questions. He pointed out that there were ages in the history of Judaism when Jews were not interested in theology, for various reasons. The French Jews and German Jews in the Middle Ages, Schachter said, “neither understood nor misunderstood Aristotle”. The Spanish Jews were very much interested in “what has Aristotle to say that affects our belief and how do we cope?”
There were different communities. I took the liberty of saying that “the amen in Spain stays mainly in the brain”! They were not emotional. No, they were emotional: I am sure the Rambam was emotional, although I must confess that I have spent a good deal of time, like so many others, trying to understand the Rambam, Maimonides. There is something bleak about his religion. His view of the afterlife, for example. You have to be something of a philosopher to get there. As Leon Roth said, “You have to have a good degree in philosophy in order to get to heaven.”
The rabbis say that the first question a man is asked is: “Was he honest in his business dealings?”
So Himmelfarb rightly says that there were communities who had to face an intellectual challenge and they engaged in theology. And he asked the question at this symposium: “Do we need more theology today?” And the reply was: “We certainly need more than we’re getting.”
So I don’t go along with this idea that: Well, as long as we are Jews.
It’s a cop-out, frankly. It’s a cop-out. I’ve never dreamed, and I’ve often said this, I’ve never dreamed of going to Stamford Hill and going into a Beit Hamidrash and collaring a man who is about to daven and saying to him, “What do you think of Wellhausen?” Why should he be interested in Wellhausen? It’s not his scene, as we say today. But there are people, and this is the point, there are people for whom it is the scene. And we need a good deal more of, I’m not saying theological thinking, but a good deal of thinking about Judaism.
Actually, what we need, speaking of Anglo-Jewry, what we need is a forum embracing all the different denominations, like Judaism in America. [Applause.] In America, you have Judaism: there are articles from Orthodox, Reform, Liberal, secular Jews. But they are discussing Judaism. They have marvellous symposia on Judaism, such as one on matrilineal descent. Now in this symposium there were contributors from the extreme Orthodox to the extreme Liberal. But they were discussing in a calm way. I happen to believe that theology can be a very exciting pursuit. After all, it is about the source of life, about the source of religion.
Years ago, there were four of us rabbis in London: Harry Levy (Dr Harold Levy), two are no longer alive, Solomon Goldman of St John’s Wood and Bernard Casper of the Western Synagogue. We used to meet regularly for theological discussions. We kept it quiet! Why did we keep it quiet? Because people would think it peculiar for rabbis to have nothing else to think about than theology!
But it is interesting. And it is not only interesting but, without being too grandiose about it, it involves the quest for truth. That is what I mean by the need for a symposium, a journal perhaps. An opportunity where people of different views, but convinced that they are on the right road so far as Judaism is concerned, can discuss things.
Chair: All right. Well let’s have a very brief symposium now. We have roving mikes. I know there are people who want to make comments. We’ll have about five minutes of comments and then we will have to wrap up the evening, I’m afraid.
Questioner 1: My name is Neville Conrad. Can I just firstly declare my colours: that I was brought up in a traditional community and was a founder-member of the New London Synagogue in 1964. Now, if anybody in this room was in any doubt before they came this evening that 1964 was a tragic year for Anglo-Jewry, I am sure nobody having heard what we heard tonight will go away not feeling that 1964 was a seminal year for Anglo-Jewry.
I have for many years been uncomfortable with the expression ‘Orthodox’. United Synagogue call themselves an Orthodox community. We heard tonight that there was likely to be anarchy in Anglo-Jewry. Certainly there is anarchy in Anglo-Jewry today. The United Synagogue is under the misapprehension that their congregation is Orthodox. Some 90 per cent of the members of most United Synagogues are no more Orthodox, in an observant sense, than the average Reform Jew.
Chair: I’m going to interrupt you there, not because I want to censor what you’re saying but simply because I want to bring other people in.
Questioner 1, Neville Conrad: Fine. My question to the panel is: My great disappointment in not hearing from anybody what we intend to do to take out of Anglo-Jewry today the bigotry and intolerance and to see and set it on a voyage which will take it into the next twenty or thirty years without it degenerating even further.
Questioner 2: Professor Ruben, you mentioned as one of your initial conditions: Is the Torah that we have today the Torah that we had originally? I don’t believe you answered that in your talk. I’d just like a comment from you on that. And, while not wishing to get into a discussion, I would like to just, perhaps by a raised hand, wonder if any of the members of the panel give any credence to the Bible codes?
David-Hillel Ruben: You can get my answer if you read what I said very carefully and skip every eighth word!
Questioner 3: Rabbi Jacobs, I was born a little before the Jacobs affair so it was absolutely fascinating to hear your words. I am very interested to hear you talk very briefly about a kind of post-denominational structure for Anglo-Jewry and I would love to hear you speak more about it: what you think the future of Anglo-Jewry is; what you think the role of the Chief Rabbi is; if you see a future for a post-denominational Anglo-Jewry.
Questioner 4: This is to Rabbi Jacobs. I have two questions which are related. The first is: In my search for finding a relationship with God I’ve come across different religions, but Judaism holds a certain uniqueness. I’m sure most of you have heard the claims of the historical proof, the idea that all the other religions base their claims of one person with a revolutionary idea, whereas the Jewish tradition started with 600,000 men, not including the women and children, at Mount Sinai. That to me is a unique claim on which I would like to ask your opinion, because for me I don’t find the logical disproof of this.
The second question is related to that. If Judaism is not unique in that sense, you could argue that all religions and all beliefs also descend indirectly from God, including atheism. So what makes Judaism more of a valid path than any other system.
Questioner 5: I want to put forward a very, very short reminiscence to add to those of Professor Alderman, and a question. The question is: I would like to know if the panel think that not only the decline of the United Synagogue but the decline of Jews College and the products of Jews College followed from the rejection of Rabbi Jacobs for a post there.
I was a student there for those three years and it was extremely stressful and tense to watch the goings-on of our role models and their disagreements.
Questioner 6: Dr Jacobs, as you’ve done many times before, you’ve singled Modern Orthodoxy out for criticism. I would just like to respond very briefly and ask you if you don’t recognise that, as you know better than all of us, the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, the Pentateuch, are the bedrock of halachah in the way in which the other biblical works are not. That is the reason that Modern Orthodoxy is more reluctant to apply its critical faculties to them. And if you are willing to take on board as well that there has been a willingness within Modern Orthodoxy to take on the findings of critical scholarship, for example the works of Breuer, the publications of the Orthodox forum in the United States, which have really tried to tackle these issues head on. To be sure there is not enough of it going on in Modern Orthodoxy, but there have been attempts since the publication of your book to apply critical faculties to this question and to defend traditional belief.
Chair: Ok. Good questions there. Thank you very much. I think pretty well all the questions were directed at our main speaker so I’m going to ask Louis Jacobs to respond and then we will have to end the evening with that.
Louis Jacobs: … with biblical criticism and modern scholarship. So what then is the story? It is an account by God, and has to be understood as such, of the development of the universe and mankind from the Big Bang (and it uses this term of Big Bang) to the present day. And it’s all an account of God making the universe habitable for man to emerge as a moral thinker.
Now that view is completely untraditional and if you’re prepared to say that, why not go the whole way (I won’t say ‘the whole hog’) and say as I’ve been saying, not only me but scores of theologians and rabbis all over the world, why not say that it’s the human document which didn’t foretell the Big Bang or any other scientific theory but which stands on its own as a sublime testimony, with all its faults and with all its errors because it’s a human document, and it’s still vital and it’s still our lives? Why not say it? I’m puzzled.
So when I hear the idea that the Modern Orthodoxy are grappling with this problem, it’s not true. It’s simply not true. I mention in the new preface that I met Dr Tamar Ross whom I admire. Her husband occupied the position that I was supposed to occupy at Jews College. Now she is a very distinguished writer on Judaism and Jewish thought and she takes me to task for not mentioning people like Rav Kook. She said that I was very close to treating the Adam and Eve story as a myth. But Rav Kook doesn’t say that. Rav Kook talks about the Genesis story as belonging to a sequence of the Torah and therefore it hasn’t to be taken literally and therefore you can accept the theory of evolution.
Well, Kook was an independent thinker. But it still … [inaudible] us to what I have called ‘the fundamentalist doctrine’. And now, just a word. I could go on at this rate, but that would be wrong. But a word about Anglo-Jewry. I’ve kept off this, but the question has been raised: What about Anglo-Jewry?
Let me tell you one or two tales out of school. Isaac Wolfson, the President of the United Synagogue, was on my side. He was on my side. He tried to persuade Rabbi Brodie to agree to my appointment, at least to going back to the New West End. And he asked me to tea one day and he was a man whom one had to respect. He was, as Professor Alderman said, he was the first Orthodox President of the United Synagogue. He asked me to tea and we were talking and he said, “They tell me that your aim is to bring the intellectuals nearer to Judaism, nearer to the synagogue.” He said, “First of all, you’ll never succeed. Secondly, who wants them?!”
Schachter wrote long ago that whereas non-Jews in this country have been in the forefront of thinking about religion, the marvellous debates over Darwin, Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce. And the debates about biblical criticism. And, at least at the intellectual level, why shouldn’t Anglo-Jewry deal with these questions honestly? I don’t know the answer. I don’t know why. I think part of the answer is because of the ‘reign’ (and I use the word advisedly), ‘the reign of terror’ that…
I know a number of younger rabbis, and for that matter older rabbis, who would say something about this but they are scared. And that’s a terrible situation, purely from the sociological point of view. Where do you have in the Jewish world a community where Orthodox rabbis are afraid to state their views, their honestly held views? And if they do state them, they are inhibited.
Let me say a word in conclusion about this word ‘inhibited’. The precursor of the Jacobs Affair was the affair of Morris Joseph at Hampstead. Morris Joseph was a candidate and a very scholarly man by all accounts. He was due to be appointed the minister at the Orthodox synagogue of Hampstead, Dennington Park Road. But his candidature was rejected because he said he could not honestly pray for the restoration of sacrifices. Now, that’s the second question.
But …debating here is, and you’ll find it in the history books and Geoffrey Alderman I’m sure will agree, that Chief Rabbi Adler inhibited (now mark the term), inhibited Morris Joseph from serving as a minister in an Orthodox synagogue. Where did he get the term ‘inhibited’? He got it from the same place where he got his gaiters from! Adler used to wear gaiters. He got it from the Anglican Church. To ‘inhibit’ is for a bishop of the Anglican Church to prevent a curate or a vicar from serving in a …
So that’s Anglo-Jewry. I think it’s marvellous! I think it’s a wonderful community. I mean I’ve often been accused of selling too much the Anglo-Jewish tradition. Why should I sell the Anglo-Jewish tradition? My zaide came from Telz in Lithuania. But that’s my life. It’s been my experience to have served in a number of communities. My first community in Manchester was a thoroughly heimish community and I used to teach a blatt Gemara in Yiddish.
But then I came to the New West End and I marvelled at the real piety that was there. It was an Anglo-Jewish type of piety. They used to use the word frum. But when they used the word frum they usually added meshugge frum. And meshugge frum means going too far. I can tell you this. On Yom Kippur when they korim, fall on their knees, the whole community, lords and ladies and knights and distinguished scientists whatever, they all fell korim. And you could sense the atmosphere of real piety. So there is a lot to be said for this Anglo-Jewish community and I believe very strongly in minhag anglia. But that is nothing to do with my theological views.
Since I have been obliged on the personal level, and I really don’t like to do it because it’s vulgar and so on but sometimes one has to do it. And the lesson I’ve taken away from all this after forty years is (and I’ve quoted it in the new edition of the book) a hassidic saying. The hassidic saying in Hebrew (it sounds better in Hebrew): Me she’ayn lo makom beshum makom yesh lo makom bechol makom, which I translate as: ‘One who has no place anywhere has a place everywhere’.
It’s been painful. But it’s not been so painful. It’s been a tremendous adventure in a way. And the result has been that while I don’t find a place in chareidism, certainly not. I don’t find a place in Modern Orthodoxy. I don’t find a place in Reform or in Liberal or, dare I say, not even totally in Masorti. But there is gain in this and the gain is that I have friends, good friends, even among the chareidim, and even among the Liberals. So I say in the new preface that I’m looking back. The only person who looked back in the Bible was Lot’s wife and you know what happened to her!
Chair: Ladies and gentlemen, Anglo-Jewry’s loss as a whole has been our gain tonight and I want to express the very warm thanks of us all to the panel and to Rabbi Jacobs.
[End]
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