Rabbis wrestle for the soul of Judaism
Something very unusual happened last week. I found three things of interest in the Church Times. Two things were only of minor interest: Dr Mark Barwick is retiring as Chaplain of St Alban’s, Strasbourg, on June 1st. And the Ven. Dr Peter Hooper is standing down as Archdeacon of France and Switzerland at the end of July. I don’t know Mark Barwick at all, but Susie and I did a two-month locum spell at Strasbourg ten years ago in 2016. It was a few days after returning from the States, and we certainly enjoyed our time with an interesting congregation in that beautiful city. I don’t know Peter Hooper either, but we met at the ICS Celebratory Service in Eaton Square a couple of years ago. He spent ten minutes telling me how busy he was, and then excused himself as he had someone more important to speak to !
Strasbourg, 2016
Of much greater significance was an article by Paul Vallely, the British journalist who writes regularly on religion, ethics, and development issues. He has a weekly column in the Church Times. His starting point was an exchange on Times Radio. The political journalist Adam Boulton had asked the question: “Wasn’t it the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza that was the trigger for the significant rise in anti-Semitic attacks on the Jewish community ?” Vallely calls this question the elephant in the room. Certainly politicians respond to it in different ways. Baroness Falkner, a Lib Dem and cross-bench life peer, and a Muslim, has criticised her fellow Muslims for their “deafening silence”on anti-Semitism. But both the Muslim Council of Britain and Baroness Warsi, a prominent Muslim peer, were very swift to condemn the Golders Green attack. As was the Prime Minister, who convened a Downing Street forum on the heightened threat to the Jewish communities, and then told us all that it was “everyone’s job” to confront “the crisis”. [This week the Prime Minister has of course a crisis of his own to confront.]
Paul Vallely then reported the publication of Progressive Judaism, Zionism, and the State of Israel, a collection of essays by some 40 British rabbis and Jewish scholars. The essays warn that the behaviour of the current government in Israel is ”incompatible with Jewish values”. And that the Netanyahu coalition now poses an “existential threat” to Judaism itself.
Gaza city
They highlight weaknesses in Israeli democracy, corruption, inequality, threats to the independence of the judiciary, abuses of Palestinians, and violence by Jewish settlers on the occupied West Bank. All this, they argue, undermines the “millennia-old moral and spiritual underpinning of Jewish existence”, which ought to make it “a light to the nations” and “a blessing to all mankind”.
The authors stress that the 9/11 bombings taught us to “make the necessary distinction between the religion of Islam and the political ideology of Islamism”. Now, they say, they must do the same thing for their own faith. The nationalistic, political ideology of the Netanyahu coalition has “ridden roughshod over Judaism’s moral orientation towards compassion, justice, and peace”. They urge such Jewish leaders as the Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, to condemn publicly the disproportionate violence of the current Israeli government. Such a pronouncement might lessen the willingness of pro-Palestinian demonstrators to blame innocent Jews for what is happening in Gaza and in the West Bank and in southern Lebanon. Which might mean fewer peaceful demonstrators being arrested on London streets ?
Return to Gaza
Three Years on Fire
Andrey Kurkov [b.1961] is a Ukrainian author and public intellectual. He is the author of some 19 novels and is a respected commentator on Ukrainian affairs for the international press. I have just been reading Three Years on Fire, the third volume of his war diaries. He is a civilised and thoughtful commentator, who offers a balanced picture of what has been happening in Ukraine in the past couple of years. He does not shy away from the human cost of Putin’s war; the ongoing pain of casualties and bereavement; the destruction of entire towns in the east of the country, and the damage to Ukraine’s patrimony and culture; the huge numbers of internally displaced persons. But he also notes the small victories: the mother of a young soldier killed in the fighting who uses his compensation money to create a rehabilitation centre for veterans; the ingenious ways that Ukrainians cope with disruption and shortages; the market gardener who is producing a range of bijou banana trees in varying sizes. He explains the unexpected popularity of Touareg pop music from Mali. He notes that the Dnipro river seems to flow more slowly as the first missiles fall. And he gives thanks for the way that Zelensky has grown from being a jobbing actor into a President who is respected both at home and internationally.
Maydan, Kiev, December 2021
It is difficult to fully appreciate that this war has been going on for over 4 years. The invasion came within a month of our leaving Kiev in January 2022. Which means that Putin’s war has already lasted longer that the Soviet Union’s participation in the Second World War. And it is also difficult to remember Trump’s bombastic promise that he could/would end the war within 48 hours of taking office. Trump has clearly lost interest in what is happening in Ukraine. So we go on praying that Europe will be able to continue to make good any shortfall in supplies of weaponry and matériel. And for some kind of peace with justice. It may be wishful thinking but there are some signs that Putin’s popularity in Russia is in significant decline. And that the time may come when the huge cost of Putin’s war may be too much for a struggling economy [Smaller than that of Italy.] Or that death or illness may remove Putin from power after some 26 years ? We pray on.
Kiev, January 2022
The People’s Flag
After last week’s devastating local election results there is a media storm about the way ahead for the Labour Party. Reform under Nigel Farage made the biggest gains. But there was also an equally threatening growth in support for the Greens on the other side of the political spectrum. So we now have an interminable debate about the future of Keir Starmer as Prime Minister. Several junior ministers have resigned and several dozen back-bench Labour MPs have signed a letter of ‘No Confidence’. Most members of the Cabinet have remained silent.
Clearly the electorate have lost faith in our parliamentary leaders. And the two old centrist parties have lost support to Reform in one direction and the Greens in the other. At the same time Starmer has clearly been a disappointment to many. He suffers from being a poor speaker [whiny voice, with a boring delivery]. And he has made some serious political mistakes: scrapping the winter fuel payments, with a subsequent U-turn; proposed cuts in welfare spending and disability benefits, with a subsequent U-turn; the disastrous appointment of Peter Mandelson; and the perceived move to keep Andy Burnham out of the House of Commons. What are essentially local elections turned into a referendum on Starmer’s first two years in office. And it is difficult to escape the conclusion that this centrist lawyer is just not very good at politics.
But. But … The lemming-like rush of Labour back-benchers, many of whom are relative newbies and politically illiterate, to bring about a leadership challenge is incredibly stupid. For one thing, there is no credible alternative. Wes Streeting is perhaps the most able, regarded as a Blairite centrist. But he would be unacceptable to many on the Left and soft-Left of the Party. Andy Burnham is said to be the most popular politician in the country. But he has no seat in the Commons. And creating a by-election for him to re-enter the House is not a fool-proof solution. Remember Patrick Gordon-Walker. [Gordon-Walker, formerly an Oxford Fellow in Modern History, was Harold Wilson’s first choice as Foreign Secretary in 1964, Sadly he lost his seat in Smethwick at the General Election. To a strident, racist-sounding Tory. The Labour Party promptly elevated the MP for the safe seat of Leyton to create an opportunity for Gordon-Walker. But he lost the subsequent by-election in January 1965. The safe but dull Michael Stewart became Foreign Secretary.] And Angela Rayner as Prime Minister would come into the same category as Lis Truss of dreaded memory. ‘Just not up to it’, as Attlee would say.
What the Labour Party ought to be doing is helping Keir Starmer, an honest and decent man, to do his job better. The 2024 election gave him a resounding parliamentary majority. Which could/could have been used to deliver significant change for the better in the UK. After the chaotic decade of Tory misrule. Starmer has been successful in building relationships with other world leaders; with the Europeans, with Zelensky, and even [more-or-less] with Donald Trump. It is on the domestic stage that he is seen to have failed. It is true that there is a yawning shortage of experienced politicians in the Labour Party, with men like David Miliband and Ed Balls earning a living elsewhere. There is a case to be made for a greater degree of financial redistribution. There are obviously ways in which the National Health Service could be better managed. There is genuine outrage about the performance of the privatised water companies. There would be popular support for taking on the seemingly unassailable power of the tech giants and social media. It would be worth pointing out that Scottish and Welsh Nationalism/Independence are the wrong solutions in a globalised world. The case needs to be made, loud and clear and often, that BREXIT was an act of unparalleled economic and cultural self-harm. And that Reform politicians are a bunch of self-interested, politically inept, tax evaders and never-wozzers. And failed Tories. [Tax evasion now seems to be a common factor across politicians of all parties.] Why do I not hear any of these things from the Labour Party ? Not from leaders and not from back-benchers ?
Envoi
After hip surgery in Lithuania in the autumn, Susie is now having problems with the other hip. She now has a Pre-Op assessment for surgery on the second hip, in Kirkcaldy across in Fife, at the end of this month. She may well have a second hip replacement before I get my first ! Which may cause some domestic problems. We may need to be advertising for a live-in gentleman’s gentleman ! Where is Jeeves when you need him ?
May 2026
Through a glass darkly 