The Lost Ark by: Jeremy Rosen

So many people love conspiracy theories, fantasies, and lost causes. Best- selling books and movies focus on myths of missing people, cities, and treasures such as Atlantis, Treasure Island. And going further back in time, to the Golden Fleece or the Ten Lost Tribes. Christianity of course is the champion of fantasies and relics. For centuries they searched for the Holy Cross. Enough pieces of wood were found to launch a whole armada. Or the nails used in the Crucifixion, to build a battleship. The Holy Grail has retained its grip on the imagination. Of course, we have ours too. The Menorah from the Second Temple that can be seen in Titus’s arch, was carried off to Rome. Some are still convinced it is hidden in the Vatican vaults despite the number of times Rome was ransacked. Anything of value was shipped off or melted down. But pride of place in the realms of myth goes to the ‘lost’ Holy Ark of the Covenant. Of which we read from the this month. Forgetting Hollywood’s obsession, its disappearance has fascinated people for thousands of years.

The details of the Ark’s construction can be found in several chapters in the Book of Exodus, starting with Chapter 25. God commands to “make an Ark of acacia wood, two and a half cubits long, a cubit and a half wide, and a cubit and a half high. Overlay it with pure gold inside and out, make a gold molding roundabout. ….And deposit in it the tablets of the Covenant which I will give you. You shall make a cover of pure gold, two and a half cubits long and a cubit and a half wide.” On top there were .. “two cherubim of beaten gold facing each other from opposite ends.”

The Ark disappeared at some point during the First Temple era, which ended in 586 BCE with the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem by the Babylonians. The Temple was sacked on several occasions even earlier. In 926 BCE, King Shishak of Egypt took the treasuries of the Temple and the royal house of Rehoboam (I Kings 14:25-26). In 786 BCE, King Jehoash of Israel attacked his former ally, King Amaziah of Judah. He seized the gold and silver from the Temple and the royal house and took that booty back to Samaria (II Kings 14:13-14). There is no mention of the Ark in the list of spoils taken from the Temple by the Chaldeans to Babylonia ( II Kings 25:13-17; Jeremiah 52:17-23). In none of these cases does the Bible say that the Ark was taken. And even if it had been it would make no sense to cart off the solid wooden structure. Anything made of gold would have been melted down for easier transport.

Had the Ark still been in its usual place when the Babylonians conquered the Temple Mount, they surely would have seized this most valuable and holy possession. But the myth of the missing Ark continued. II Maccabees claims that Jeremiah hid the Ark in a cave on Mount Nebo, Moses’ final resting place. The precise location of which is unknown.

The (Yoma 53b) contains lots of theories. Rabbi Judah said that the Ark was hidden in a subterranean chamber beneath the Holy of Holies by King Josiah. And several priests died when they accidentally discovering the exact spot and flames shot out and consumed them.

Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Simeon bar Yochai said that the Ark was taken to Babylonia at the time of Jechoniah’s capture and exile (608 BCE). You might get confused over who Jechoniah was if you read the Bible because he was also known as Conia and Jehoakin. And incidentally, according to II Kings 25:27, thirty-seven years after the exile, he was released from prison by King Evil Merodach , welcomed to court, and made the official leader of the Judean community in Babylon

The Talmud also quotes Josiah’s instructions to the Levites when he restored the Temple after the idolatrous reigns of Manasseh and Amon, to return the Ark to the Holy of Holies. (II Chronicles 35:3). But there is no evidence that he did, possibly probably because it no longer existed. While other Temple vessels were replaced when necessary, both in the first and the second Temples, the Ark is never mentioned again.

Some people have suggested that this was because while winged Cherubim in the context of Mesopotamian religions represented a higher, heavenly presence, by the second Temple, the authorities feared that the cherubs might be mistaken for idols. And anyway, the Stone Tablets of the Covenant were no longer to found, so that its symbolism was lost forever. Although even earlier, according to the Bible, King Hezekiah had destroyed the Bronze Serpent on a Staff mentioned in the Torah and the Books of Magical Cures, because simple people were worshipping them in idolatrous fashion.

According to the Talmud (Yoma 52b), there was no Ark in the Second Temple which was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. But even if there had been or it was buried under the temple foundations, after the Second Destruction in70 CE the Romans razed the Temple Mount to its foundations and there is no ark on the Arch of Titus. Either way, the original Ark disappeared and was never seen again. And there is not an ounce of logic to suggest that it was spirited away to darkest Africa or the Andes. Why therefore on earth would one think it must still exist?

Still, fantasies sell, both religions and entertainment. Myths often have very important messages. So, what possibly could be the message of stories of the Lost Ark? To start with, from the Babylonian exile there was always a dream that eventually the House of David would return and rebuild Jerusalem and The Temple. It was revived with the Second Destruction as a powerful story of hope for the exiles. To this day rebuilding the Temple remains a powerful dream for many. All the more so, since Christianity claimed that the Temple and sacrifices were now redundant and symbols of an Old Covenant that had been replaced by a New One. The “stubborn Jews” were not going to give up their ideas until a Messiah came who really would bring peace on Earth.

For me, the Ark is a symbol of how religions develop over time and are modified both by internal and external forces. But it also illustrates how whatever mistakes or disasters we inflict upon ourselves, there is always a future to look forward to. Looking back is only helpful if it enables us to go forward. The idea of sacrifices or even a rebuilt Temple does not excite me. But hope is a powerful and therapeutic emotion. And to think that we are the heirs to a tradition that goes back so many thousands of years and once included little cherubs on an Ark is a powerful incentive for wanting to see that tradition flourish and survive.

Purim or Poor them. by: Rabbi Jeremy Rosen

Purim is the happiest and craziest day in the Jewish calendar and the only festival that celebrates an event in the Diaspora. But is it really?

According to tradition, the story of Purim and the Book of Esther date to the early Persian period somewhere in the 5th century BCE. The story is of a naïve, drunken, male chauvinist, incompetent Persian king. He rules over an empire that extended from India to Africa but has no control over his wife. He relies on a series of different advisors who can twist him around their fingers. And issues pathetic Royal decrees insisting that all wives should obey their husbands and only speak their native tongue. Ahasuerus, otherwise known as Achashverosh, is gulled by a wicked Haman into agreeing to kill all the Jews of the Persian Empire. But the evil plan is thwarted by the combined stratagems of Queen Esther (who hides her Jewish ancestry) and her uncle Mordechai.

It is in fact the first example of anti-Semitism. Hating and wanting to destroy Jews for absolutely no logical reason other than that they are different and have different ways of life. The bad guy of the story, Haman, is called the Agagite. And Agag was an Amalekite king mentioned in the Bible. The author obviously wanted to make a connection with the first attack by the Amalekites on the Israelites, vulnerable as they left Egypt. The Amalekites were not being threatened so that the attack on the exhausted stragglers was particularly despicable. The Torah commanded the Israelites to never forget their enemies.

Did the story of Esther and Mordechai ever take place? Some have argued that this is all about the rivalry of the Babylonian gods Marduk and Ishtar, as mentioned in the Gilgamesh Epic. Of course, names do not necessarily date anything. No more than someone called Mary in the USA today has any connection with the Virgin Mary of Christianity.

The story raises all kinds of questions. The fact is that the first Persian king, Cyrus (600-530 BCE) decreed that all religions should be tolerated and respected throughout his empire. His declaration, the Cyrus Stele, can be seen today in the British Museum. Although succeeding kings varied in the degree of their support of Jewish communities both in Babylon and Judea, there is no evidence of a Persian king wanting to exterminate the Jews. Being different was never a problem so long as you accepted the political authority. Indeed, this policy continued under Alexander the Great when he conquered the Persian Empire. This is why it may have been a story concocted much later that reflected tensions between Jews and Greeks two thousand years ago.

The timeline as given in the Biblical Book of Esther is also problematic. According to the text Mordechai arrived in Babylon with the first exile in 609 BCE in the reign of the Judean king Yechonia, which was well before the final destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 586 BCE. Opinions vary as to who Achashverosh might have been. The earliest candidate would be Xerxes (518-465 BCE) followed by Artaxerxes ( who ruled 465-424 BCE) when Mordechai would have been well over one hundred years old. It also might even have been Darius II (423-404) who wrote to the priests of Elephantine in Upper Egypt, ordering them to stop harassing the Judean garrison and allow them to keep the Passover unmolested.

Purim and the Megillah were challenged in the Jewish world on theological and political grounds. The Megillah does not mention the name of God. The Jewish characters are not shown performing any Jewish religious rituals. The heroine is a Jewish woman married to a heathen king (and had to agree to a one-night-stand to get there).

The Book of Esther itself tells how after the crisis was over, Esther had to issue repeated decrees calling on reluctant Jews to keep Purim. And that Mordechai’s authority was not accepted by everyone in the community. The Talmud concedes that Purim first was established in Shushan and only later throughout the Jewish diaspora (Megillah 7a). Ben Sira, writing in the Land of Israel around 200 BCE, did not mention Mordecai and Esther in his list of ancient Israelite heroes (Ecclesiasticus 49).

The Talmud says that the eighty-five Men of the Great Assembly challenged Mordecai and Esther’s request for the establishment of the holiday (Yerushalmi Megillah 70b). Mordechai was blamed for not having bowed down to Haman. Such recklessness endangered the entire Jewish people. After all, Mordechai’s ancestor Jacob bowed to Haman’s ancestor Esau (Yalkut Shimoni Esther 1054).

In Roman times many , apologetically thought it was inappropriate to celebrate Jews killing non-Jews for fear that this might be taken as encouraging the rebellion against Roman authority. On May 29th 408 CE, the Roman emperors Honorius, in the West, and Theodosius II in the East passed a law forbidding Jewish revelry on Purim because it appeared to be a mockery of Christian symbolism. They assumed that burning an effigy of Haman was really a substitute for burning their Christ.

By the end of the Talmudic era, the vast majority of Jews had willingly and lovingly adopted Purim and the Book of Esther entered the Canon. They had added blessings whose wording stated that Purim was Divinely Ordained on a par with Chanukah. Doubtless, the carnival tradition at this time of the year in Christianity is where we got the idea of getting dressed up in disguise. As well as an opportunity to let our hair down. Some later rabbis disapproved of celebrating Purim altogether (Sheilot u’Teshuvot Radvaz 1:284). Others objected to the drunken and disorderly celebrations that often went too far. The Hassidic communities celebrated and still do without much restraint. The Lithuanians have always been more reserved. The one thing they all agree on is the generous disbursement of charity, food, and drunk.

In the 19th century, some Reform congregations in Central Europe and the United States abolished Purim. Abraham Geiger, the leading intellectual of early Reform, referred to the Megillah as a mean-spirited book, encouraging violence against one’s enemies and regretted its canonization. In the 1930s, Purim began to creep back into the Reform congregation in Berlin. Emancipation and integration had proven to be illusory dreams. Haman had returned in the form of Adolph Hitler.

Today sadly, anti-Semitism has metastasized. Jews are again being accused of divided loyalties in precisely the same language that Haman used. Poor him. Poor them, apologies for human beings. We need to be reminded of our history of fighting back. And, given our fractious, divided Jewish world in which people like to claim they are better Jews than everyone else, the lesson is that salvation can come from many different sources, human and Divine. Not just from the pious or the professionals!

We should be grateful, for life and for our good fortune. This is why we celebrate Purim by being kind to our neighbors, giving charity to the poor, and being happy, not sad. In the popular Latin phrase “ Illegitimi non- carborundum” or “Do not let the bastards get you down.”

Happy Purim.

Darkness by: Rabbi Jeremy Rosen

It is almost a year since we first got an inclining of the disastrous Covid19. No one, not even the holy World Health Organization had any idea of how serious it was or how it would spread with it so much death, pain, and gloom. There has been a lot of talk of darkness. If it were just uncertainty, one might say that all of life is uncertain. We have always faced challenges of one sort or another

Why do we assume, historically and culturally, that dark or black is negative or bad? We still talk about the Dark Ages (even if it was not all dark). Many of my favorite modern artists love the color black; Kazimir Malevich, Franz Kline, and Pierre Soulages, to name just a few I really like. Fans of the Rolling Stones will remember the popular song “Paint it Black.” “I wanna see it painted, painted black, black as night, black as coal.” Typically, in Biblical Hebrew, many words can mean opposites. Holy, Kadosh, can mean something sacred or something profane. Shameyn, fat can mean something good and bad. Cheyt, can mean sin. But it can also mean to purify. Dark can be bad if you can’t see. It can also be a time of quiet reflection and dreams. Nothing, no person is intrinsically good or bad. It depends entirely on how we see things or how we act.

You can find different Biblical sources for both darkness and black. Choshech, dark (ness), and Shachor, black, share similar roots SH and CH. The first mention of light and dark comes in the Biblical story of creation. “ There was darkness over the deep and God said let there be light.” As the says, these were not physical features, but mystical ones. They are representations of and contrast between material and spiritual. Both were created or facilitated by God.

But if light and dark, day and night, are meant to be the way that we understand them physically, as having to do with the sun, then how come the sun wasn’t created till the fourth day? What was light before then? I doubt this would have seemed a problem three and a half thousand years ago. Nowadays we might say the pre-sun light was energy. Or poetically, that light and enlightenment were conditions of life on earth.

The Hebrew word for darkness is used only eight times in the Torah, either in the context of creation or the Divine Revelation on Sinai. And light only five times, also in the same contexts ( but naturally many more times in the poetic books of the prophets who saw so much human evil around them, yet still saw light at the end of the tunnel). The Torah itself, is much more concerned with the way that human beings behave at all times, regardless of day or night.

The poetry of our morning prayers, says that God “ forms light and creates darkness.” And in the evenings it says that God “brings day and night and rolls up light before darkness and darkness before the light.” There is no hint that day or light is necessarily superior to night and darkness. Quite the contrary, darkness, say the mystics, is the ideal condition for encountering God. God’s promises to Abraham (Gen 15:12)and Jacobs dream (Gen 28:10-22), come in the darkness

Throughout our mystical tradition midnight is the ideal time to encounter the spiritual. Hence the esoteric Tikkun Chatzot, the Midnight Prayer of Reconciliation that the kabbalists created because it was supposed to be the moment when God was closest to human beings.

It is true that children are often scared of the dark, and of bogeymen. Adults, too, are occasionally frightened of the dark, the unseen. But that is their deficiency, not inherent in the state of darkness.

The only indication of negativity comes with the plague in Egypt of darkness that lasted for three days. But that did not necessarily mean it was bad. Like all the other plagues, the normal function of the natural world and the predictable was disrupted. Anyway, it could not have been the darkness as we know it that affects all creatures together. Egyptians spent three days in deep darkness while “all the children of Israel had light in their dwellings.” So that it becomes a way of differentiating morally as much as physically.

Egyptians did not recognize Moses or understand the state of slavery the Israelites suffered under, until after they had experienced the loss of seeing things they were used to. This plague got them to see things differently, more clearly. It took darkness to make them see the light!

So that in light and dark are partners. Neither intrinsically good nor bad. There is a role for both.

We see a similar juxtaposition if we switch to the word Shachor often translated as black. In English, black used to have negative if not racial connotations, a black mood for example. But in The Song of Songs, it can mean beauty. The young maiden cries out in the pangs of unrequited love “I am black ( Shechora ) and beautiful.” Shachar with an identical root also means dawn. With its negative and positive connotations. Negatively presaging the destruction of Sodom (Gen 19) and positively with Jacob’s triumph (Gen 32:23 ).

Similarly, the word Kushi which in Modern Hebrew is used to describe someone African or black. But in the Bible, it is both an honorable first name and a word for beautiful or special. Moses’s wife is a Kushit in Numbers 12. And the Children of Israel are described by the prophet Amos as being Benei Kushiim (Amos 9:7) special, and beloved by God,

At this moment I am challenged, to bring light to my community when there is so much sickness, financial, political, and racial darkness swirling around us. Prophets of doom are overwhelming. How do we face the future with resolve and hope? It is of course by focusing on the other side of the coin. The amazing amount of charity and help. The human spirit can be as kind as it is selfish and cruel.

People live with assumptions, values, and patterns of behavior typical of their societies. They do not necessarily examine their ideas or wonder if their assumptions are valid. Professors Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman used the phrase the “illusion of validity” to describe how we tend to think that our own opinions are correct. We often overlook hard data that contradict our view of the world and to dismiss anything that does not coincide with our own preconceptions.

There is in the Talmud an amazing euphemism for a blind person, Sagi Nahor, which is Aramaic for a lot of light! You might think it is cruel humor. But it could also mean that a blind person has to use other forms of light, other senses to find the right way. To make the most of what other faculties he or she has.

Just as we can use our Jewishness, or our color, as a badge of pride, not shame. We can use it to spur onwards or to hold us back. We tend to worry and see everything in its worst light when we lie awake at night unable to see. But darkness is also an opportunity for imagination, to look again, differently, with hope.

February 9th 2021

The greatest rabbi in the West by: Rabbi Jeremy Rosen

In the latest edition of the Brooklyn Jewish journal Hakirah, there is a fascinating article on Rav Joseph Ber Soloveitchik (1903 -1993) by David. P. Goldman entitled The Rav’s Uncompleted Grand Design. Goldman himself is a Renaissance man. An economist, a musicologist, an expert on China, a columnist as Spengler, a scholar. But this blog is not about him. It is about JB, as Rav Soloveitchik was affectionately known. There were two great men who had a profound impact on American Jewry during the past century, the Lubavitcher and Rav Soloveitchik. They represented the different major streams of Orthodoxy in our times.

Rav Joseph Ber Soloveitchik was born on February 27, 1903, in Eastern Europe. He came from one of its greatest rabbinical dynasties, known as Brisk. After an intensive Talmudic education, he went on to graduate from Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin with a Ph.D. in epistemology and metaphysics. In 1932 he emigrated to the USA. He settled in Boston and took up a rabbinical position. In 1941 he began to teach the main Talmud class at University. He ordained some 2,000 rabbis in his career and his lectures attracted thousands of devotees. He was held in enormous respect by everyone. He died in 1993.

His two most widely read publications are The Lonely Man of Faith and Halakhic Man. Arguably the most significant philosophical analyses of Jewish religious ideology in our times. His unique approach was a combination of European phenomenological philosophy with mysticism and religious experience. His profound rational analysis overlaid a deep commitment to study and religious practice in the context of individual commitment. Unusually, amongst the Eastern European rabbis who came to America, he was a passionate Zionist and a strong advocate of women’s education at the highest level. He was a proponent of Torah UMadda, Torah study, and secular wisdom. Intellectually and academically, he stood head and shoulders above the rest.

My contact with him was only through his writing. Although I have long admired and revered his brilliant son Haym Soloveitchik, whom I first encountered in Jerusalem in 1961. So, it came as a surprise to read in Goldman’s essay, this quote attributed to the great man. In lamenting the state of much of rabbinic leadership and the lack of passion for religious life, he said “And therefore, I affirm that I can identify one of those responsible for the present situation and that is none other than myself. I have not fulfilled my obligation as a guide in Israel. I seem to have lacked the ability-the personal power-required of a teacher and Rav or perhaps I lacked some of the desire to fulfill the role completely and I did not devote myself completely to the task…my students have received much Torah learning from me and their intellectual standing has strengthened-but I have not seen much growth on the experiential plane…I have fallen short as one who spreads the Torah of the heart.”

I was stunned by his humility and honesty. He was no more a failure than Moses, who also was very strong and yet humble, a modest man who struggled throughout his life with his mission. Anyone involved in teaching, advocating, and fighting for a cause, must feel a profound sense of failure sometimes for not living up to one’s own expectations. Similarly, anyone with any sense of introspection must inevitably think that he or she could have done more to inspire and to achieve. But what did he mean by “the present situation”?

In every society, there is a huge gap between the intellectual thinkers and the masses who are not. Most people anywhere are superstitious and credulous. They have little time for grand ideas but simply struggle to cope with life and making the best of it

It was to these people that Hassidism spoke when it emerged in the seventeenth century. Then too there was a huge divide between those like the brilliant Vilna Gaon, the academic Lithuanian intellectual who was a Talmudist, mathematician, and mystic, and the early Hassidic masters who spoke to the simple uneducated people who needed a Rebbe for guidance and to speak to God on their behalf.

These are two very distinct models of leadership, the popular and the elite. This is the dichotomy that the two great rabbis of the previous generation represent. Lubavitch Hassidism brings Judaism to the masses. Their emissaries cater for and speak to the ordinary person or for those who are lost and searching. Their fundamentalism is a comfortable safety zone that helps them deal with the practical preoccupations of every Jew.

On the other side, you have the Lithuanian, Yeshivish rigorous standards of the academy with more of an emphasis on individuality. JB on the other hand expected all his pupils to rise to the heights. He was addressing those already committed who wanted more. What is depressing is the current Lithuanian rejection of the scientific. Perhaps that is where Rav Soloveitchik felt his elitism was being overwhelmed by conformity as anti- intellectualism has taken a firm grip on large parts of the Orthodox world.

Different times call for different responses. Perhaps we have needed the conformist, social Judaism, while we rebuild Jewish life after the Holocaust. But it has come at a price of producing a leadership dominated by a gerontocracy of cloistered men of incredible learning yet out of touch with reality so that herds of religious delinquents ignore civil authority as well as religion. Our leaders seem like rabbits blinded by the headlamps of a car, unable to see that their policies and fundamentalism are not equipping millions to cope with the challenges of modernity. But if, on the other hand, you encourage intellectual thought and individualism as Rav Soloveitchik did, you cannot expect to create a movement of blind loyalty and obedience willing to march at one person’s command.

There is much to criticize in the Orthodox world today. Yet is our situation that bad? There are more Jews than ever before studying Torah, committed to religious life by choice, rather than circumstances. More religious academics producing quality work on philosophy, history, and the whole gamut of intellectual activity. Compared to the paucity I knew as a young man, the pool of talent in Jewish religious life has swelled beyond imagination. I cannot be pessimistic.

Rav Soloveitchik was committed to Torah in all its majesty, which transcends human social manipulation and anodyne placebos. He has continued to inspire both through his late great son-in-law Rav Aaron Lichtenstein and the Yeshivah Har Etzion in Israel where his grandson reigns. It might not be a legacy of Facebook friends and clicks, but it is all the more profound and long-lasting for that.

Rav Soloveitchik was fearless. He could stand up to the hard right and the zealots. Unlike most rabbis nowadays, he was not frightened of offending. He would never compromise his beliefs. He was not interested in power or fame. He set an amazing example, in the words of the prophet Micah of “walking humbly with God.” They don’t make them like that anymore. And there is no “completed design” when it comes to Torah.

There is a lovely story told about Rav Soloveitchik that one day someone asked him for a blessing. Now Hassidic and Kabbalists are constantly being asked to give blessings, to heal, to find a wife, to succeed in business and they expect the blessing to work because someone has a hotline to God. Rav Soloveitchik was a rationalist, a mystic, and a halachist. He did not believe in giving meaningless blessings. When he was asked for one he replied “ A blessing, why? Why? Are you an apple?”

Louis Jacobs by: Rabbi Jeremy Rosen

Any Anglo Jew from the 1960s will be familiar with the “Jacobs Affair” that divided the Jewish community more than any other religious debate in its history. There were other conflicts, between Sephardi and Ashkenazi, Reform and Traditional. But none as bitter or as lasting as this. I was a teenager when it all began, but it had a profound effect on how I viewed the Jewish religious establishment. Rabbi Louis (Laibel) Jacobs (1920-2006) studied in Yeshivot in and Gateshead and embarked on a career in the English rabbinate. He moved from the Central Synagogue in Manchester to the prestigious in Bayswater, London. It was part of the powerful Anglo Jewish establishment, the , that was under the authority of the and his Court, the .

He was one of the most impressive scholars and thinkers of his time. In an early book We Have Reason to Believe in 1957, he pointed out that there were different ways of understanding the concept of Divine Revelation, Torah Min Hashamayim. His sources were traditional and nothing he said was really controversial and the book had been positively reviewed even by religious journals. Most United Synagogue rabbis at the time saw no problem with what he wrote.

He resigned from The New West End In 1960 to become a tutor and lecturer in Jews College the rabbinical training academy of Britain. He was expecting to succeed Rabbi Dr. Isadore Epstein the principal, who was about to retire. He was so highly regarded by students and colleagues that I was encouraged by my father to attend his lectures after I had graduated from school. He was a masterful and inspiring teacher with an intellectually open attitude towards modern scholarship.

We Have Reason to Believe fell into the hands of Dayan Grunfeld of the London Beth Din, who came from a rather staid Germanic background. He decided that Jacobs’s views were too heterodox for the Principle of Jews College and campaigned accordingly. When the time came to make an appointment, Jacobs was blocked by Chief Rabbi at the urging of the Beth Din and the newly enthroned lay leader of the United Synagogue, Sir Isaac Wolfson. Jacobs resigned.

The editor of , William Frankel took up the cudgels and turned the issue into one of the character of Anglo Jewry. Frankel felt that given the reality that most United members were not really practicing Orthodoxy but were loyal to tradition, the United Synagogue could best serve them by being tolerant and non-Judgmental. Louis Jacobs agreed. Even if he did not subscribe to Frankel’s personal agenda to get the organization to join the Conservative Synagogues in the USA. Unfortunately, the conflict turned into a conflict of rival visions.

Having resigned from Jews College, Jacobs was invited to return to head his old synagogue, the New West End. But now, egged on by the Dayanim, Brodie refused to authorize his appointment there too, despite not having objected at all previously when he was the rabbi. Louis was caught in a crisis, not of his own making. He was a modest and sensitive man. But the way he was treated brought out an unexpected combative side to him and he defended himself with vigor.

Before the crisis came to head In 1962, as my father was dying at the young age of 48, Louis came to visit him at Carmel College, and I was present for the nearly two hours that they spoke. My father begged Louis not to allow Frankel to make an issue of the situation. He felt that Frankel was motivated by a personal grudge because of the way his father had been treated by the United Synagogue. He told him that Frankel did not have Louis’s best interests at heart and was using him to forward his own desire to undercut the US by establishing the Conservative movement in the UK. The project would not prosper simply because of the deeply entrenched, financially powerful United Synagogue itself, as well as the Anglo reluctance to challenge authority and tradition. Unfortunately, Louis was so pained by his treatment that he reacted more aggressively than was wise or indeed in his nature.

After he was blocked from returning to his old pulpit, in 1963 supporters of Jacobs resigned from the New West End and set up an independent synagogue with him as its rabbi. It continued the very same traditions and rules that New West End synagogue followed, including a mixed choir that all but one other otherwise Orthodox synagogue had abandoned. Some rabbis and a few communities wanted to join him. But the power of conformity won out. The community was split between those who supported him and those who ostracized him. Jacobs continued to defend his position both halachically and intellectually. The United Synagogue retaliated by refusing to recognize his marriages and conversions.

I recall how strongly the younger generation felt about his treatment. The Inter-University Jewish Federation (IUJF) appointed him their Honorary President. At the IUJF student conference in Leeds in 1963, he was given a standing ovation and I invited him to speak at our annual educational seminar. Beyond Britain, his brilliance won him respect, invitations, and awards, both in secular academic circles and Jewish ones. Including a lectureship at Harvard. Whenever he was challenged as to whether he considered himself a Conservative he categorically denied any affinity. He remained strictly orthodox till his dying day. It was others who established what became the Masorti movement in the UK.

Chief Rabbi Israel Jakobovits (himself more orthodox than Brodie) even if he disagreed with some of Jacobs’s arguments, tried to heal the breach. He maintained good and respectful relations with Jacobs personally, supported him privately, and persuaded his Beth Din to recognize his marriages. His successor failed to follow up. Perhaps he was too insecure in his position and on several occasions when he wrote to refute Jacobs he did so aggressively as if to curry favor with the Right Wing.

Some twenty-five years after the “affair” I wrote an article in LeEyla, the house journal of Jews College. In it I praised Louis Jacobs as a giant of Jewish religious and rabbinical thought and repeated my father’s reservation about his trying to take on the establishment of Anglo Jewry. I ended by saying that the ostracism of Louis Jacobs was a tragedy both for him and for Anglo Jewish orthodoxy. And that the affair was a watershed in the right-wing shift and intolerance of the community. I heard from Rabbi Abner Weiss, the then Head of Jews College, that the Chief Rabbi had told the editor not to accept any more articles from me for praising Rabbi Jacobs and thereby, by implication, attacking the Dayanim and the Chief Rabbi.

In 1995 and having retired from the rabbinate, I was asked by the Board of the to consider succeeding Louis at his synagogue. I was not interested in returning to the rabbinate, but out of respect and a desire to see him again, I welcomed the opportunity of a meeting with him. Beforehand I asked the leading Dayan of the Beth Din whether, if I could persuade the synagogue to rejoin the United Synagogue, he would agree and facilitate rectifying any status issues outstanding. He said he would. On that basis, I went to see Louis.

Our meeting was a delight and we agreed on almost all issues except for one. He was passionately committed to his Minhag Anglia, the synagogue customs of the English variation of traditional orthodoxy. I had been brought up by my father to enjoy the more informal, musical, and Israel orientation of services at Carmel College and subsequently the Haredi passion of services in Yeshivahs and Hassidic dynasties in Jerusalem. I found the United Synagogue and Louis’s Minhag far too staid and uninspiring. But as I talked about my views I could see him react negatively. I realized that the most rebellious and creative of the rabbis I had met, was far too traditional to change.

The one example of genuine support in the Orthodox world for Louis Jacobs was the respect that /Lubavitch had for him. He was called as an expert witness in a case in New York about the ownership of the previous Rebbe’s library. Some books were removed and sold by a grandson claiming they were his, as an heir. Lubavitch argued they belonged to the movement. Jacob’s many books about Hassidism enabled him to testify about the nature of property in a Hassidic dynasty, which swayed the judge to decide in favor of the movement

The newly published biography We Have Reason to Believe: The Controversial Life of Rabbi Louis Jacobs by Harry Freedman, records his life, his writing, and many achievements. It describes a genuinely good, modest, caring, religious human being. He bore the slights he suffered with dignity to his dying day. He was even refused an Aliya in a supposedly Orthodox synagogue by the Court of the Chief Rabbi at his grandson’s Bar Mitzvah.

The dispute has remained a sore point in Anglo Jewry to this day. It illustrates how the self-protective, inward-looking attitudes of Orthodoxy and its leadership can sometimes do more harm than good. And it reminds me why I have always been so anti-establishment and how religious authority can be abused at a great cost to its own health.

Hard-hearted by: Rabbi Jeremy Rosen

My last blog was intentionally controversial. The aim was to point out that people rarely seem capable of hearing, let alone absorbing another point of view. Some of my readers only read or misread what confirmed their previous standpoint. We seem conditioned to listen to what we want to hear. I get accused by the right of being left and by the left of being right. The truth is that I am neither. But why do we find it so hard to hear another point of view? Reading the relevant chapters of the Torah these weeks explains a great deal about how humans think.

The background is Pharaoh’s refusal to let the Israelites go. Looked at from his point of view, it would not have made any sense at all. He was the absolute ruler of the most powerful, and technologically advanced empire of his day. Why on earth would he pay any attention to two apparent nobodies, one a slave and the other a herdsman? All the more so, if freeing slaves, an integral part of the Egyptian economy, would damage Egypt’s commercial and financial interests. But if the Torah says that God would harden Pharaoh’s heart, this surely implies that poor Pharaoh even had he wanted to change his mind could not, because God was forcing him.

The Torah uses three different words to describe this process of compulsion. Literally, it means .אקשה The first word that comes in Chapter 7.1, is KaSHA something hard. And it comes in the phrase. “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart.” And the heart of“ ,אחזק ,The next word in Chapter 7.13, is HaZaK strong Pharaoh was strengthened (fortified).” The third word is in Chapter 8.11, and heavy, “I made his heart ,הכבדתי ,in this week’s reading Chapter 10.1 KaVdD heavy (or weighed down).”

Each of these words has different uses or meanings. KaSHA can mean hard, but it can also mean stubborn, After all the Israelites were referred to as “Stiff or stubborn necked people.” In Hebrew, a stiff neck is KaSHA. Similarly, HaZaK meaning strong in a physical sense can also mean strong- willed and strong as a virtue. And although KaVeD means heavy as in a heavy load or weighed down, it can also mean glory, respect, and dignity.

They all have meanings that can convey rising up and being lighter, better, or sinking and being worse. He or we are not compelled but given the opportunity to rise and to fall. Here these words clearly imply his downfall. When used here, they all mean that this man is not going to change his mind. But the reason he will not change his mind is not that he has no choice. It is because of his own stubbornness. His hard heart prevents him from seeing another point of view. He believes he is right regardless and is not going to change his mind. Even as he wilts under pressure, because he really believes he is right, he must not show weakness. Every time he begins to soften, he pulls himself back into his self-righteous cocoon. He must preserve his authority, protect his power.

In ancient Egyptian funeral rites, they weighed the heart of a dead Pharaoh in the process of embalming him, to see how it compared in the balance, to Maat. In Ancient Egypt Maat was the goddess of truth and justice. There were no legal codes in Egypt to compare with Hammurabi’s in Mesopotamia. Judges were expected to know the difference between good and bad and deliver a decision based on common sense, Maat. The heart was supposed to be the repository of all a person’s deeds. A heavy heart meant you were weighed down by your bad deeds. Hence the expression in its modern idiom of feeling regret. Having a heavy or hard heart really meant you were a moral failure. Perhaps the Hebrew word for truth, EMeT, comes from this word Maat. So how do you deal with such a situation? If you cannot change his mind initially you set about slowly undermining all the certainties that have led to the conviction of being all-powerful. First, you undermine the advisors and inner circle and show their limitations. Then you attack their economy and the source of their wealth and communications. From the water to land, from livestock and humans, from airborne disasters to climatic catastrophe and the eclipse of light, everything points to human limitations. There is so much over which we do not control.

This whole narrative carries with it a message for our times too. One of the biggest problems I have had with religious authorities is how, so often, they think that they are absolutely right and must not waver or show weakness for fear that if they do, it will undermine their positions, weaken their authority, and the religion they represent. Saddest of all, they are worried about themselves and what others might think of them. This leads them to be blinded to unpredictable catastrophes like the Holocaust or to changing circumstances.

It also results, much more commonly, in them putting their personal egos and ambitions above the needs of ordinary, and particularly vulnerable human beings. I can’t begin to tell you how disgusted I am at Hassidic rabbis holding weddings for thousands, encouraging mass travel to these crowded events, totally regardless of the Covid19 situation. Or else relying on a Divine miracle, so confident are they in their supernatural powers.

And nothing to my mind illustrates the stubborn, hard, and heavy heart as much as politics where one side is absolutely right, and the other side is absolutely wrong. This is what causes witch hunts, inquisitions, crusades, and heaps more evil on top of what went before. We have too many Pharaohs in our societies and not enough examples of a Moses.