Pretty much anywhere you go in the world with a substantial number of Jews from Hong Kong to Hungary and from Santiago do Chile to Sydney will have a Progressive Synagogue to welcome you – all you need to do to find it is to look up the city you are visiting on the Website of the World Union for Progressive Judaism (wupj.org). Next Shabbat our EHRS group which is going to Israel with me will be worshipping and enjoying Shabbat hospitality in two Progressive Synagogues in Tel Aviv – Kehillah Ha Lev and Beit Daniel and over the week visiting at least three more.
There are a startling variety of Progressive synagogues in America where The American Reform movement, the Union for Reform Judaism or URJ, has over 900 synagogues as constituents and over 1 1/2 million Jews belonging to them.
If you click through from the World Union site to their home pages you will see that some are wealthy synagogues with grand buildings, some are more modest and seem from their home pages to be more friendly. Reform Synagogues are in all fifty states of the Union from Anchorage Alaska to Austin Texas. There are some less conventional synagogues in the URJ including Synagogues which have deliberately chosen not to have a building but rather to stay tiny and meet in people’s homes, Synagogues which are part of multi denominational Jewish community centres, Synagogues which are specifically set up for the Gay and Lesbian community though welcome members of all kinds.
But there is one kind of Synagogue I know of that does not feature among the hundreds of URJ synagogues on the Internet. That is a Synagogue which applied for membership of the Union for Reform Judaism a few years ago and whose application was turned down after much soul searching at the council of the movement. The Synagogue is located in an American midwestern city and to all intents and purposes operates much like any other American Reform Synagogue with services, a cheder and social activities and Rabbi, who was trained at the Hebrew Union College. So why was its application for membership of the Reform Jewish movement rejected? It is because this Synagogue was specifically set up to be a religious centre for Jews who cannot accept that there is a God. It is a synagogue where God is not believed to exist.
Leaving aside the question of whether or not the URJ was right to reject their membership of the Reform movement and you can find the reasons why on the website of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, let us ask ourselves the question: can there be a synagogue without God?
Well obviously it is possible, otherwise this Synagogue could not have grown to a size where the benefits of membership of a national movement would be helpful. Of course it is possible to teach Jewish tradition, Jewish history, Jewish customs and even much of the ritual of the festivals without recognising God behind them. Jewish social and cultural activities can certainly take place without God. Even services can be held which concentrate on the joys of coming together as a community and the hopes and dreams which bind us together. But I suspect that doing without God altogether in a congregation gives it a limited lifespan.
There are many reasons for this but let me focus on two which are to me particularly crucial. Firstly we are a people who live up to our Hebrew name – Yisrael. This name has designated the Jews for over three thousand years and undoubtedly tells us something about us and our relationship with God. Yisrael literally means the people who struggle with God. It comes from a story which leads on in next week’s Torah portion from the one which we heard today It is the vision which takes place twenty years after Jacobs’s dream of the ladder when we meet him on the night before his re-union with his brother Esau. At the point of his vision he does not know if Esau is coming to meet him in friendship or to carry out his vow to kill his brother as an act of revenge.
Jacob in his vision encounters a mysterious man who wrestles with him, injuring him in the hip. This man turns out to be a messenger from God. Jacob implores him for a blessing and the divine messenger tells him that henceforth he will be known not as Jacob but as Israel – the man who struggled with God and prevailed.
We are truly Yisrael because I am pretty sure that none of us has been able to keep our faith in God, if we have it, constant throughout our lives. Each of us struggles to keep faith in God as we experience the ups and downs of life, the blessings and the tragedies. But when a time comes when our faith is at a low ebb, or when a time comes when our faith is strong, surely we need to feel part of a community where the possibility of God is acknowledged – rather than a community where, like the one I have been speaking about, God is simply denied.
A second reason why a synagogue without God has a limited lifespan is because the concept of God gives meaning to many of our Jewish practices which would otherwise become for us just empty rituals. Yom Kippur is effective because in each of us I am sure either has the faith or there is at least acknowledges the possibility that we are not trying to improve ourselves just for our own sakes. We are trying to come closer to imitating the justice and goodness of God. Chanukkah would be in danger of becoming just the lighting of candles and playing with dreidles without the knowledge that the reason why the Maccabees fought for the Liberation of Israel form the Syrian Greeks was because they would not deny God and they knew that they had to be free to serve God through the Jewish religion.
It is true to say that each of us has struggled and continues to struggle with our relationship and confidence in God, but that is only natural as surely faith in God is not an absolute – something which either is or isn’t – but rather is a process in which the religious man or woman engages throughout their life finding moments when faith is strong and moments, especially as a Rabbi when you are often confronted with great tragedy in people’s lives, when it is virtually impossible to discern the hand of God.
We have been speaking on the level of a Synagogue – what a community stands for but what about Jewish individuals. Can we, live our Jewish lives without God? Again, yes you can be Jewish but not for long and not fully. Part of our journey into and through adulthood must include trying to search for God.
No-one can tell you that you will meet God face to face – even what happened to Jacob in our portion is called a dream. But you can learn a lot from Jacob’s story to help your search to give you faith which can sustain you. When his dream was over Jacob said “behold, God was in this place and I did not know it.” Jacob’s story illustrates that we can get closer to God anywhere and at any time. The ladder to heaven is always there is we choose to look for it. How can you make that choice?
There are some definite things that you can do to help to nourish your relationship with God. Prayer is perhaps the first of them. You need a regular prayer habit – a regular striving of your heart to be in contact with God, just as you cannot access the Internet without the right software and you cannot understand what is available without the right interface, so prayer gives you the Jewish software to begin to make contact. Study is important too, both formally where you give yourself some time to find out what people have said about God and how they have come to have faith and informally – discussing God with your Rabbi, other Jews, other people who care – God should not be a taboo subject. In January I will be beginning a series of classes which I am calling ‘Is God in this place?’ so that we can talk and maybe struggle together – look out in our Week Ahead and What’s On at EHRS. Then there is experience of life. We can open our eyes to the beauty of the world and try to perceive God in the wonder of a mountain, of the stars above us, in the creation of new life. We can try to understand how the knowledge of God comforts people in times of trouble and encourages people to do good for others.
Judaism has always recognised that faith in God is an intensely personal process. As the Rabbis said : everything is in the hand of God except for the fear of God. And as Claude Montefiore, the scholar founder of Progressive Judaism in the UK, wrote referring to an image of the light of God permeating our lives “the windows of some are perhaps nearly shut, the windows of others have only a few chinks and crevices open.’ In our Synagogue and in our lives we have to keep worrying away at the concept of God, discussing God, continuing prayer and study so that at the moment that someone is ready to admit a recognition of God into their lives they will find a natural home here. Cen Yehi ratzon.
