The Sceptic Blog

Dear Magen Avot Friends,

I just watched a beautiful flash mob rendition of Beethoven’s Ode to Spring which is highly appropriate to our Chag HaAviv – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj6r3-sQr58. It put a thought in my mind that I wanted to share with my friends at Magen Avot half way through this yom tov.

A shul is a bit like a flash mob – or at least ours is: in particular, it is normally rather less spontaneous than it appears, because someone had to organise it and arrange it. Which makes this a good moment to offer thanks on behalf of us all to Daniel Ehreich who has performed the sole gabbai in residence role with such aplomb, to Simon Leigh for ensuring continuity of morning minyonim and to everyone else who keeps us going.

But the organisation isn’t the point of a flash mob – it’s the mob that it enables to flash in. It’s always slightly different, and it always gives a slightly different feel and flavour to old melodies and old words. And that sums up what Magen Avot means to me. One of the reasons why we wanted to set up an open shul and not a closed community back nearly three years ago is that this way every tefillah takes on a slightly different flavour depending on exactly who comes to join us. There are some common and continuous components, but they are given a constant freshness and reinvigoration by being surrounded by a variable cast who place the tefillos in an entirely new setting every time.

The Seder Table teaches us many things: one of them is that the table is not complete without the four sons. As the baal Haggadah says, even if we were all chachomim, nevonim and yodei Torah, we would sit and tell the story of the four sons, yearning to be joined by everyone in the widest possible Jewish family, whether they contribute wisdom like the chacham, challenge us like the rashah, offer us an opportunity to help them like the tam, or just stand in silent wonder and inspire us to draw them in and help them to formulate a useful question. Every child’s contribution is unique and invaluable and the table is empty without any one of them; in our community everyone who joins us adds something special and irreplaceable to the davening.

This Pesach has been wonderful at Magen Avot. We have missed many of our regulars who are away but the fact that so many are in Israel makes us feel closer to the time when we will all be olim l’regel iy’h. The absence of so many has made it even more important for all our remaining members, regular visitors, occasional visitors, and once-off guests to step up to make the flash mob work – and it has, for me and I hope for everyone.

On the last day of yom tov that flash mob becomes even more special, when we let into our midst the memories of so many people we loved when they were alive and still love now they are gone. Pesach probably carries more poignant memories than any other yom tov, as the familiar kitchen and dining room items come out of storage again and each one brings a memory of a smile, a laugh or a tear. Yizkor is important for each person who remembers someone, but it is also so important for the community as a whole, to enhance our final flash mob of the yom tov with special memories. Once again, I hope this year those who leave the shul for Yizkor will do so very quietly, as if we were tiptoeing out of the room to leave space and time for our friends to reflect on those they have loved.

Sorry for the random thoughts – but that’s Youtube for you: chag sameyach l’kulanu, la’rochok v’lakorov.

Daniel Greenberg

1. In a comment on a post about the Me Too campaign a reader writes the following:
2. “The “Bagehot” article in “The Economist”, 10 March ’18, is entitled “It could happen here”.  The author makes the case that Britain could suffer an authoritarian takeover in the next 5 years. The threats come from: a government lead by Jeremy Corbyn, the incendiary right, Britain’s weak formal defences against authoritarian populism and its vulnerability to external shocks. The biggest threat comes “from a growing sense that democracy has let people down”. The proportion of Britons who support a “strongman leader” has increased from 25% in 1999 to 50%.The article concludes: “It is too early to head for the exits. ….. But anyone who doesn’t know where the exits are is a fool”.How should the Jewish community react to this article?”
3. My initial reactions are as follows.
4. The UK is still very much a malchus shel chessed (host nation that treats the Jewish people kindly).
5. But the chessed (kindness) appears to some to be wearing slightly thin at the edges.  The hostility faced by university students who wish to express their Jewish identity in part by supporting Israel has certainly made some of them feel less than welcome within the UK academic environment.  The decision of a London coroner to change long-standing arrangements to accommodate the burial timing wishes of bereaved Jewish families has struck some as an act of overt anti-religious hostility by a public official.  Parts of the Jewish educational system feel under attack for failing to teach British values in the way they are interpreted by particular sectors.  Threats to ban shechitah and bris milah appear to some to be growing stronger.  These perceptions may or may not be fair, and they may or may not be accurate, but they certainly combine to show that some parts of the Jewish community do not feel entirely welcomed by significant parts of the wider UK citizenry.
6. I speak for nobody on this, and I have no knowledge as to how many Jews, or what proportion of the UK Jewish community, would identify with all or any of the previous paragraph.  Personally, I think that there is some truth in some of the perceptions mentioned there, and although some are exaggerated from time to time they are not to be dismissed entirely and should at the least be used as a basis for thought as to whether the relationship between the UK and the Jewish community has changed, is changing or perhaps needs to change.
7. Jewish history is marked by periods of ups and downs around the world.  We have often settled conspicuously comfortably in one region or country, enjoying a long and apparently mutually-appreciated relationship with a host nation, only to find the tables turned into expulsion or persecution in a relatively short period of time.
8. Could that happen in the United Kingdom?  Of course it could.  If it can happen in all the different countries in which it has happened over the centuries, why should it be impossible that it could happen here?
9. As a British Jew – born and educated here and operating daily in a range of professional, commercial, public and academic environments – I am always conscious not exactly of a divided loyalty but of having a range of loyalties.  Not divided, because that suggests a conflict that I have never felt.  But a range of loyalties, including to my religious beliefs, my family, and my community, as well as to my country, my Queen, my government and my people.
10. Presumably everyone – religious or secular – also experiences a range of loyalties?
11. So does that mean that I could find that loyalty to my religious beliefs was no longer compatible with loyalty to or participation in UK society?  Of course I could.
12. Do I expect it?  Possibly naïvely, I don’t.  I believe that there is an innate tolerance and respect in British society that would be very difficult (although obviously not impossible) for one or more authoritarian or sectarian interests to displace.
13. So personally I’m not packing any bags: rather, I am proposing to redouble my efforts to promote positive inter-action between all faith and non-faith communities in the UK to make it more difficult for unpleasant people to drive wedges between us.
14. I have always believed and argued that real inter-community activity takes place not at planned events but on the streets, in shops, libraries, pubs, offices and everywhere open to the public (hopefully not too much on the tube, as I’m normally rather grumpy there).
15. I do sense threats to tolerance from various sources; and I believe that we counter them most effectively by continuing to encourage tolerance, and by being increasingly scrupulous in ensuring that the behaviour of anyone who wittingly or unwittingly represents or is seen as representing a particular faith or other community, brings credit on that community and avoids disgracing it in a way that plays into the hands of those who enjoy division.
16. I think it would be naïve to assert that there could never be a time when as a Jew I felt so uncomfortable or threatened in the UK that I had to leave, or try to leave.  Our history has shown that this can happen anywhere in the world.  But for me the identification of a possible threat to continued diversity and harmony in the UK is a spur to renewed emphasis on positive participation as a citizen, rather than on projected flight.

1. I sense a danger of the “Me Too” world achieving, in part, almost the opposite of what I imagine the campaign is designed to achieve.
2. As more people come forward to the public to reveal that they were sexually abused in a wide range of different professional and other contexts, it is important that the sheer numbers of the revelations are not allowed to give past, present and future abusers some sense of comfort or safety in numbers, or a feeling that they “can’t be all that bad given that everybody else was and is doing it”.
3. Perhaps I’m worrying about nothing: but the following passage from an internet posting by Neshama Carlebach – the daughter of Shlomo Carlebach (I wrote about allegations against him in 27 December 2016) – makes me suspect that there may be some kind of normalisation attempt underpinning some of the responses to the Me Too movement.
4. She writes (https://neshamacarlebach.com/my-sisters-i-hear-you/ – accessed 18 February 2018):

5. Human beings are complex, the questions of life are complex, the healing is real, and the pain is real. There is no hiding from all these truths. My father, a soul who saw sisters and brothers cut down by the Nazis, who jumped straight from the insular Yeshiva world of his childhood into the boundaryless free-love world of Berkeley in the late 60s, who revolutionized Jewish music forever and embraced every human being, was complicated too.
   …
   Sometime in the late 70s, my father was involved in an intervention staged by women who were hurt by him. He came, even knowing the content of the conversation that was to happen. And when they told him that his actions and behavior had hurt them, he cried and said, “Oy this needs such a fixing.” I do believe that the actions, advocacy work and the way he raised his daughters in the last years of his life showed remarkable listening and personal accountability.
   I accept the fullness of who my father was, flaws and all. I am angry with him. And I refuse to see his faults as the totality of who he was.
   …
   Who knows the apologies he might have made, if he might have been granted the chance to offer the public acknowledgements so many only called for upon his passing, if only he had been able to give more years to repair the world around him as a man brave enough to ask for forgiveness. I wish he had had that chance, and that he could have been part of the healing he necessitated, a healing he would have been particularly equipped to offer. I would have had the chance to ask my own questions, and perhaps to hear what he would have said in response.
   …
   As my father himself said, we have to laugh with one side of our heart and cry with the other. That his life, music and actions prompt both laughter and tears will likely not cease in our lifetimes.

6. Meaningless drivel I could have overlooked (doubtless being seen by some as a prime perpetrator of it myself): but this seems to me to be insidious meaningless drivel, which is one stage more dangerous.
7. “I refuse to see his faults as the totality of who he was” – yes, that is entirely reasonable for a daughter.  I have been telling my children since they were tiny that it is best to assume that nobody is quite as good or quite as bad as they appear, and the number of complete tzadikim (righteous) or resho’im (wicked) at any one time in the world is tiny.
8. But that’s about private relationships.  In terms of public relationships, nobody has the right to say to the world “yes I’m only human, and now that you’ve found out that I victimised women or some other vulnerable class, please continue to celebrate (and pay for) my artistic genius or other saleable qualities on the grounds that we’re all human after all, aren’t we?”
9. We live in an increasingly celebrity-focused world.  Religious leaders, politicians, actors, singers and others make a living out of presenting their message to the world, and mostly hire expensive marketing teams to promote that message.  That’s fine (or at least unavoidable today): but if your image becomes tarnished because we find out (which will be possible while there remains a relatively free media) that the reality of your behaviour is inconsistent with your public message, then in my eyes you are permanently disqualified from continuing to present that message.  You are probably not a wholly bad person – because few people are – but you are a wholly unsatisfactory promoter of a message that you cannot practise yourself.
10. If Neshama Carlebach is admitting – which she appears to be – that her father abused women, then so far as I am concerned that is indeed the totality of his public persona: by which I mean I no longer want to watch old videos of him singing about spirituality and peace to all mankind on the stage, and I no longer want holy services to be held as “Carlebach minyanim”, and where I think of a tune of having been specifically his, I will aim to avoid it.
11. The Me Too movement makes it impossible for some people to hide: but it may also encourage others to confess, or for their families to confess on their behalf, in the hope that as GK Chesterton reminded us, the best place to hide a leaf is in a tree: something like “now that everyone’s being caught, let’s add ourselves to their number, and hope that our own actions get somehow swept up into the general mass of allegations and we avoid the kind of individual scrutiny that we’ve been hiding from for so long”.
12. The Me Too movement should remain a campaign – it should never become an amnesty.

On 1 December the Jewish Chronicle very kindly carried a review of my book of annotated blog posts by Dr Harris Bor.  The review was extremely fair and I enjoyed it very much.  He finishes with the devastatingly fair point that my thesis that we shouldn’t do anything we might be ashamed of after death perhaps sits oddly with my advocacy for theological intolerance, particularly where it calls for rituals that may impact on other people (circumcision being the most extreme example).  Rather a good point, I thought, and certainly one that significantly modifies (although I do not think it destroys) the fundamental thesis.  He is kind enough to find some of the posts thought-provoking, and I am pleased to have found his review the same.  The book is available on Amazon, from Joseph’s Bookstore in Temple Fortune or direct from me.

And now, in response to overwhelming public indifference, I am delighted to announce the Book of the Blog.

WHAT IF GOD’S A CHRISTIAN?

An annotated compilation of blog posts from The Sceptic Blog, an orthodox but sceptical Jewish view of the world.

For many people, organised religion creates or contributes to the world’s most significant problems today, and causes or foments division, mistrust and hatred.  But most people for whom religion is important would like it to be part of the solution, and not the world’s biggest problem.  What if God’s A Christian? provides reactions to a wide range of events and issues (including a mini-series on business ethics) from an orthodox but sceptical Jewish perspective, in an attempt to demonstrate that a religious approach can contribute ideas that people of other religions, or no religion, may find interesting and even helpful.

Available from Amazon.

HOW TO ORDER DIRECT

1. Send £10 (includes UK postage) cheque or cash to Daniel Greenberg Limited, 74 North End Road, London NW11 7SY. Include address for delivery.
2. Email daniel@danielgreenberg.co.uk including address for delivery, and I’ll reply with bank details to transfer £10 to (includes UK postage).
3. For overseas orders please enquire postage cost by email before placing order.

1. This has been worrying me for a while.
2. Shlomo Carlebach wrote wonderful tunes that without doubt help people to make their prayer and song spiritually richer.
3. But some people say he also behaved inappropriately: there are allegations of sexual abuse of minors and of other sexually inappropriate behaviour.
4. These allegations are anecdotal and appear online in a few places: so far as I can discover, during his lifetime he was never charged formally with any offence.
5. There may be something in these allegations; and there may be nothing in them.
6. So – “innocent until proved guilty” and sing on?
7. I’m not sure it’s so simple.
8. If I were a victim of sexual abuse by Carlebach, how would I feel every time I saw another Carlebach Minyan starting up?  And how would I feel every time one of his songs was started up to turn a service into a rousing chorus?
9. I would feel neglected by a community that seemingly doesn’t care whether or not I was abused.
10. Having thought about it for a while and investigated a little bit online, it seems to me that the allegations are sufficiently serious to need some kind of investigation (the only investigation I have seen mentioned online does not seem to me to have been sufficient).  The international Jewish community should find a way of setting up a credible investigation into the allegations, followed by a report (difficult, but not impossible – there are some precedents we could draw on).  That report would either conclude that it is beyond reasonable doubt that Carlebach behaved improperly; or that there is no credible evidence that he behaved improperly; or that there is some credible evidence, but insufficient to be sure either way.
11. After that, individuals could make up their own mind about what that meant for their own attitude to his music.
12. But until then, the only message we are giving is that we don’t really care.  To embroider a theme from Blowing In The Wind, if we have sufficient ears to hear the beauty of Carlebach’s music, we should have an equal ability and desire to listen to the cries of those who claim to have been abused by him.