European Judaism

Three subjects provide a focus for this edition. The centenary of the birth of Abraham Joshua Heschel was commemorated in London with a symposium at University College in November 2007 and we reproduce most of the papers delivered on that occasion. The current state of Jewish–Muslim relations is explored through a programme of mapping areas of cooperation in Europe conducted by CEJI – a Jewish Contribution to an Inclusive Europe. We also include a selection of papers delivered at the annual Jewish Christian Muslim Student Conference (JCM). In our Documentation section we publish the ‘Open Letter’ to the Jewish community by Muslim scholars, launched in Cambridge in February 2008. Thirdly we publish two significant papers given at the opening of a travelling exhibition of the Memorial Scroll Trust, charged with caring for Torah Scrolls formerly in the State Jewish Museum in Prague.

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) hailed from a Hasidic family which numbered among its members the Rebbe of Apt, after whom he was named, and the Maggid (Preacher) of Mezhirichi (Mezhirech, in Volhynia, Ukraine), a prominent Hasidic leader in the generation following the Baal Shem Tov.1 The Judaism he first knew and mastered in his native Poland was that of Talmud, Kabbala and Bible as read and as lived in the Hasidic tradition. Throughout his life he retained the sense of the constant presence of God and of the holiness of creation which he had imbibed in the intense, inwardlooking world of his youth, and he sought to capture its spirit for posterity in works such as The Earth is the Lord’s and A Passion for Truth (his comparative spiritual biography of the Kotzker Rebbe and the Protestant theologian Søren Kierkegaard).

I am a congregational Rabbi; neither an academic scholar of Rabbinics, nor an academic scholar of twentieth-century theology. I was also not the first person Professor Saperstein asked to address a conference designed to appreciate and assess the enduring influence of Professor Heschel’s work on Rabbinic Judaism, which is fine. I would also not have been the first person I would have asked. The first person asked to assess the ‘enduring influence’ of Heschel’s work on Rabbinics was a proper scholar of Rabbinics and that person declined, saying they had never read Heschel’s most important book on Rabbinics – Torah Min HaShamayim.

This paper is a slightly expanded version of the handout for my orally delivered paper at a conference ‘in appreciation of the life, work and enduring influence of Abraham Joshua Heschel’. My task was to consider Heschel’s contribution to Biblical Studies. In some important respects, this was a responsibility I was delighted to undertake; Heschel’s work on the prophets was transformative for me, especially his essay on Jeremiah. In other respects, the conference was a source of considerable anxiety. What does it mean to appreciate a life and work, and can I, an academic Bible scholar, invited to participate on that basis and not for my work on the bimah or in education in Jewish communities, as opposed to universities, appreciate a life while retaining some degree of academic integrity and objectivity.

Ten years ago, at a rather dull, all-day committee meeting, I sat over lunch with a colleague who, in making conversation, foolishly asked me how my doctoral research on Heschel was progressing. So I told him. He sat there openmouthed, and then commented, ‘How can you be so enthusiastic? When I was at your stage I was sick to the back teeth with mine.’

In looking at the topic of Heschel and social activism, I would like to present a perspective based on my personal and professional experience. Let me start with a bit of history. I was born in 1949 on the West Side of Chicago. My parents were first-generation Americans born to Russian immigrants. Like the East Side of New York and the East End of London, the West Side of Chicago was settled by recent immigrants.

In 2005, CEJI – a Jewish Contribution to an Inclusive Europe – began an initiative to promote dialogue and understanding between Jewish and Muslim communities in Europe, and to enhance the visibility of already existing dialogue projects. The endeavour began with a series of national reports, was marked by a European conference of seventy people in April 2007, and culminated in the establishment of a European Platform for Jewish Muslim Co-operation.

For those who are not familiar with the Harry Potter series I apologize; however, I think that a very fine point about fear was made in the third book of the series, The Prisoner of Azkhaban. Harry is about to come up against a Boggart – a creature which has no shape of its own, it is a shape shifter. It takes on the shape of what you fear the most. Harry’s teacher, Professor Lupin, does not allow Harry to confront the Boggart and Harry is upset about this, concerned that Professor Lupin had thought him inadequate in the face of the challenge. However, Lupin assures Harry that he had just been concerned that Lord Voldemort – the Dark Lord – would appear in the classroom. Harry, however, says no – he was not afraid of Lord Voldemort, rather he was afraid of the Dementors, who drain away all happiness from living things. ‘Ah,’ says Lupin, ‘it seems that the thing you fear, is fear itself. Very wise Harry!’ Indeed, very wise Harry. Fear is a crippling emotion.

The Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, wrote of Abraham in ‘fear and trembling’. I am writing this with a sense of panic and terror and so, as always in such a situation, will need to proceed very slowly, taking great care, step by step. What is such fear about? I want to suggest that these feelings, or more accurately, some aspects of them, are inevitable in our human condition, that they are part of what has been called ‘primary anxiety’, which some see as inherent in our awareness of ourselves as mortal human beings.

What is a vocation? Already as a young girl, I did not consider my faith to be something private. Faith was my way of seeing the world; it was also what showed me my responsibility in and for the world. Ever since I was about sixteen years old, it became ever clearer to me that this faith should also become my profession. With that, I made a decision in favour of a public mission where religious matters were concerned.

‘Ein Tzaddik Ela Memaheh’, ‘no-one can pretend to be a Tzaddik – righteous – unless one is ready and willing to intervene in the affairs of the world’. I open with this particular Talmudic phrase because I believe that in many respects this teaching is key to the role of religion in society.

During the summer of 2006 I was in the West Bank. Israel was at war in Lebanon and making incursions into Gaza, and, whilst in Bethlehem and East Jerusalem, I was told that several Palestinians had been arrested as suspected suicide bombers. I travelled to Ramallah, stopping between checkpoints; I walked beside and in the shadow of the security wall, looked out from one hill that is Israel towards another that is Palestine and thought of this poem.

I was only a few years old when I went into hospital for the first time. As we are a religious family, my parents worried about the food we would be served there. Since they could hardly expect the hospital to observe all the rules of the Halal diet my father simply asked the nurse not to give us pork. A few meal times later we were given sausages. I bit off a piece, but then got a bad conscience and spat it out. In order to avoid a confrontation with the nurse, I secretly dropped the sausages into the dustbin. That afternoon I told my parents about it. When my father called the nurse to account she answered in all seriousness ‘What harm is there in it?’

The Jewish Museum in Prague (JMP) was founded as an association in 1906.2 The largest expansion of its collections occurred in tragic circumstances during the Second World War, when almost all the Judaica, books, manuscripts and archival documents of the former Jewish religious communities in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia were gathered in the depositories of the Central Jewish Museum in Prague.3 At the time, the museum was administered by the Jewish religious community in Prague, which was put under so-called ‘national trusteeship’ after the end of the war.4 In 1949, with a view to maintaining the completeness of the museum’s collections, the legal successor to the pre-war Jewish communities – the Council of Jewish Religious Communities in the Czech Lands (hereafter cited as the Jewish Council) – definitively renounced its restitution claims to items that had been shipped to the museum during the war.

The Jewish Museum in Prague has as many as 40,000 items in its collections, the uniqueness of which is underlined by the exceptional circumstances under which most of them were acquired by the museum. Nearly all of the items were confiscated during the Second World War from Jews who were sent to concentration camps and from Jewish communities that were closed down.

Lionel has asked me to write to you ‘describing my lifestyle as a Progressive Jewish hermit and the motivation behind it’. On my website www.jewishcontemplatives.blogspot.com you can read the booklet I wrote in 2005 called ‘Kuntres M’arat ha-Lev’ (Cave of the Heart) and the monthly updates which followed it. They are both concerned with two questions: ‘is there a place for dedicated contemplative lifestyles in contemporary Judaism?’ and ‘is it possible to live a Jewish life if there are no other Jews living anywhere near you?’

This letter is intended as a gesture of goodwill towards rabbinic leaders and the wider Jewish communities of the world. Our aim is to build upon existing relations in order to improve mutual understanding in places where this is required to further the positive work in building bridges between Muslims and Jews. In the face of the negative and destructive tensions in the Middle East, this letter is a call to positive and constructive action that aims to improve Muslim–Jewish relations.

This open letter from Muslims to Jews is a welcome first step towards the goals we aspire to achieve through interfaith dialogues – peace, understanding and mutual respect. The Centre of Studies for Muslim–Jewish Relations should be commended for opening this channel of communication, especially in view of the fierce resistance that is often voiced against the very idea of dialogue – instigated partly for fear of lending voice to the ‘other side’, and partly for fear of seeing the logic and human face of the other side. Those of us who have followed the path of dialogue fear none of the above, for we have experienced the invigorating dignity of disagreement and the liberating power of doubt.

New York, NY, March 3, 2008 – In an historic first, the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations (IJCIC), that represents world Jewry to other world religions, has issued a call for dialogue between Muslims and Jews. The statement follows the recent call to peace, dialogue and understanding issued by Muslim scholars on February 25, 2008.

Following its April 2007 statement on the extended permission to use the Tridentine rite, the discussion group again considered the different versions of the Good Friday prayer at its meeting in February 2008 and adopted the following statement.

Before I Knew Shabbat Desire for Words

Moving a Large Library from My Apartment after 28 Years A Hope for Reincarnation Involving Significant Others