Stifling Anglo-Jewish Creativity
by 06/24/2011
Stifling Anglo-Jewish Creativity
By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
Eleven years ago I lived in the United Kingdom for eleven years and though I served primarily as Rabbi to the students at Oxford University I gradually expanded the scope of my activities until I was well entrenched in mainstream Anglo-Jewish life. Amid my affection and admiration for a community renowned for its high Jewish day school attendance, the most generous social-welfare programs, and committed communal charities, I slowly became alienated from the dysfunctional nature of Anglo-Jewish life where internecine warfare seemed a defining characteristic. Every week saw unseemly public squabbling between Reform and Orthodox, Masorti and the United Synagogue. One week gays and lesbians would clamor that they were left out of a Jewish pride parade and the next week Agunot would march on the Chief Rabbi’s office to protest their chained existence. It got so bad that when a much-loved reformed Rabbi and holocaust survivor died, we the orthodox clergy did not perform the mitzvah of participating in his funeral. Much of the time these communal disputes spilled over into the mainstream press which seemed obsessed with how and why Anglo-Jews were constantly at each other’s throats.
As a marriage counselor I have witnessed many couples who are addicted to drama and whose main form of getting along is the fact that they don’t get along. Incessant bickering serves as the glue that binds them, argumentation mitigates the stultifying boredom that would otherwise characterize the relationship. Is it possible, I asked, that Anglo-Jewry suffered from this same addiction to manufactured drama because, for all its blessings, Anglo-Jewish life is just not that interesting?
There is a reason that American Jewry, for all its shortcomings, does not exhibit these same ills and it has everything to do with the UK’s centralized communal structure.
In the United States there is no Chief Rabbi and all Synagogues are only, at best, loosely affiliated. This creates an entrepreneurial environment where Rabbis and lay leaders rise and fall by creativity and effectiveness alone rather than being cogs in a larger communal machine. What determines, say, the acceptability of a new initiative on the part of an Orthodox Rabbi in America is not conformity to a rigid communal code or subservience to a solitary Rabbinical authority or court but rather innovation within the confines of Jewish law, which even in orthodoxy is much more flexible than one would otherwise supposed.
For example, I always found it absurd and counterproductive, not to mention insulting and condescending, that orthodox Rabbis in the UK could not appear alongside reform colleagues on public panels, something that has nothing to do with Jewish law. Two weeks ago the Jewish Chronicle actually found it newsworthy to report on its front page that the Chief Rabbi had invited reform leaders to a private meeting. Really? In America, this would not have merited inclusion in a private blog.
I am a passionately orthodox Jew and there is something to be said for how the United Synagogue and the Chief Rabbinate have allowed orthodoxy to be the stand bearers of Jewry in the UK. But at what cost? Aside from Rabbi Sacks, the UK is not producing innovative spiritual or lay leaders. Here in the United States Birthright was actually started by two businessmen. But in the UK, with the notable exception of Limmud – a grass-roots movement that did not stem from, and was not sanctioned by, officialdom – Anglo-Jewry has yet to produce a single idea that has universally impacted its community and that’s because bureaucracies stifle rather than promote creativity.
Moreover, centralized structures and officialdoms are way too invested in being proper and avoiding controversy at all costs. While American Jews aggressively lobby their government to support Israel, British Jewry has failed to produce anything like AIPAC, the enormously powerful American Jewish lobby, not because of smaller numbers but because, in Britain many in the community would deem it unseemly for Jewry to overtly flex its political or financial muscle. But American Jewry’s lack of a central structure makes the comradely competitiveness of communal organizations like the ADL or Simon Wiesenthal Center far more interested in results than propriety.
Which leads me to my important point. We American Jews have watched in shock and amazement at the tsunami of anti-Semitism that has washed over Britain in the past decade. From unthinkable bans on Israeli academics at British University conferences, to arrest warrants being issued against Israeli government ministers, to high courts usurping the Jewish community’s right to define its own members, to bans on Israeli advertising where the Kotel is featured, to a sewer of anti-Israel hate speech on UK campuses which Chief Rabbi Sacks has himself, albeit belatedly, admitted publicly is making Jewish students “despondent and demoralized at the failure of university authorities to take firm and decisive action.”
Most puzzling thing of all is that this eruption of Jew-hatred has all happened on the watch of the man universally recognized as the single most eloquent spokesman for Judaism in the English-speaking world with unlimited access to a fawning media whom he could have used to condemn it. So why was Chief Rabbi Sacks’ voice muted? Because the very office is a straightjacket. It allows for dazzlingly exegesis on the Parsha and bland Rabbinical investitures. But it neuters its occupant from saying anything of conviction that would ruffle the feathers of establishment figures one hangs out with at Royal Weddings.
The 2001 UK census showed that the only group in the UK where 75-plus cohorts outnumbered those in the 65–74 age group was Anglo-Jewry. But were the girdle that constricts Anglo-Jewish creativity be relaxed through a greater decentralization of its communal structures, a new era of youthfulness and dynamism would be unleashed.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach won the Times Preacher of the Year Competition at the Millennium. The international best-selling author of 25 books, his most recent work is “Renewal: A Guide to the Values-Filled Life.” Newsweek calls him “the most famous Rabbi in America.” Follow him Twitter @RabbiShmuley.