Remembrance and Rededication

low REMEMBRANCE AND REDEDICATION Rabbi John D. Rayner Nottingham Progressive Jewish Congregation 7th November, 1993 We are here to celebrate a milestone in the history of the Nottingham Progressive Jewish Congregation, and warmly welcome all who have come to celebrate it with us, members, friends and distinguished guests. It is an occasion which evokes memories of past episodes in the Congregation‘s history: its early beginnings and first services in 1965; the consecration of the Synagogue in 1972; and the succession of Student Rabbis, Foster Rabbis and Acting Rabbis who have served the Congregation over the years. But it is also a milestone in the personal history of Seth Kunin, whose Induction as the Congregation's first Full-Time Rabbi is what we have come here, more specifically, to celebrate; and it is right that, for a little while at least, our attention should focus on him. He wasn't "in on it" at the beginning for two good reasons: first, that he was only four years old; and secondly, that he grew up in the United States of America, a fact which those with a good ear may find faintly discernible. There he became actively involved in the educational and youth programmes of a Progressive synagogue in Northern Westchester. Then he went on to Columbia University, where he had a fine academic career. He also studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and twice spent a year in Israel. Then he came to England to study at Leo Baeck College, and that is whenI first got to know him. His classmates incluézd Pete Tobias, now Rabbi of the Birmingham Progressive Synagogue, and Pauline Bebe, now France's first woman rabbi. They also included another yOung lady, now Rabbi Helen Freeman, who is, like Seth, an identical twin. Whether that coincidence created a special bond between them, I don‘t know; but after some initial skirmishing they got on extremely well, and their mutual teasing did much to enliven the study of Rabbinic texts in which we were engaged. In July 1990 I had the privilege of preaching at the Ordination of the class, which gave me a second point of contact with Seth. And then he spent three more years in my old university of Cambridge, which is a third point of contact, and which recently conferred on him his doctorate in anthropology. For all these reasons I feel well qualified to commend Rabbi Seth Kum'n to you as a man of the highest credentials and qualities, and to express the confident hope that LEO COLLEGE LIERA; Y n A) under his leadership the Congregation will become, in so far as it is not already, one of the most important Progressive Jewish congregations in the country. A milestone, as I said, evokes memories of the past. But this is a season of remembrance not only domestically, for the Congregation, but also in a wider context. The day after tomorrow will be the 55th anniversary of Kristallnacht, a night of painful memories for all of us, and especially for those who experienced it at close quarters. For my part, I can still see the red glow of the Berlin sky on the night of November 9th, 1938. Living in a remote suburb, we thought it was an unusual sunset. Only the next day did we learn that a campaign of organised terror had been unleashed against the Jews all over Germany, and that the red glow had been caused by the flames of the burning synagogues. And then the Gestapo came for my father...It was the beginning of the end for my parents and millions of others. We owe it to them to remember them, but equally we owe it to ourselves and our children. For half a century later antisemitism, unbelievably, is on the rise again, and therefore we may not be sanguine about the future. And the anniversary of Kristallnucht will be almost immediately followed by another: the 75th of the signing, in the Forest of Compiegne, on 11th November, 1918, of the armistice that ended the First World War and was supposed to end all wars. How shallow the optimism of that hope now seems in retrospect! How many wars have been fought sifice then, and since the Second World War, in almost every part of the world, not only with increasingly devastating weaponry but also with increasing callousness and brutality! How many new tyrannies we have seen, how many terrorist outrages, how many acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing! And in Britain, too, the rising rate of crime, and the seemingly increasing viciousness of the forms it takes, is cause for deep concern. There is no need to cite examples; they are all too well known. I merely want to make the point that not only antisemitism, but evil generally, is very much alive and kicking; and though that is a depressing point to make on such a happy occasion, it does have important implications for the significance of it. For what is the purpose of a synagogue? It would be possible, not least from an anthropological point of View, to regard it as an end in itself. After all, every community has a right to perpetuate itself, to cherish and transmit its traditions, to build institutions and do whatever may be necessary to ensure its continuity. We Jews have a particularly rich heritage of beliefs and laws and customs, an astonishing history and a fascinating literature, and therefore the colourful quilt patchwork of cultures which is human civilisation would be distinctly the poorer if we were to disappear, which we have no intention of doing. So we build synagogues and set up committees and hold services and teach our children and create a whole network of activities and relationships which make us, instead of merely being separate individuals, into a living community, and hopefully keep it going from generation to generation. That is an honourable and necessary task, and even if it had no purpose beyond itself, we would have every right to devote much of our time and effort and resources to it, as the leaders and many of the members of this Congregation so commendably do. It is also a task to which Rabbi Kunin is dedicated: a task which he once defined as a "concern about and commitment to the ongoing vitality of the Jewish community.“ But self-perpetuation cannot be the whole mison d 'étre of a Jewish congregation. Surely, if there is any meaning at all in the concept of the Covenant which God is said to have made with Abraham and renewed with his descendants at Sinai, we have a key role to play in what German theologians call Heilsgeschichte, the "redemptive history" of humanity. Here I must tread carefully because Rabbi Kunin, as an anthropologist, rightly stresses the principle of "cultural relativism“, that no culture may claim to be superior to other cultures, or judge them in its own terms. I take the point, and am very willing to believe that every culture has its own features of excellence. But we can't leave it there; the challenge we face is jus} too serious. For human history is a constant battle between good and evil, in which the opposing forces are more or less equally powerful, so that, as the twentieth century has so dramatically illustrated, now one and now the other gains the upper hand, and the outcome is far from certain. In such a situation it cannot be a matter of indifference that the values which Judaism has pioneered and emphasised - truth and enlightenment, freedom and justice, love and compassion, the sanctity of life, the preciousness of every individual, and an unquenchable hope for the future of humanity - that these values are so urgently needed to help win the battle. Admittedly, we Jews are not alone in cherishing them. To a large extent we share them with Christians, Muslims and other communities. But that fact does not diminish our responsibility, any more than America‘s entry into the Second World War diminished Britain's responsibility to carry on the struggle against Hitler. It simply means that we may be that much more confident of ultimate victory. That, then, is the real purpose of establishing congregations, building synagogues and appointing rabbis: not just that we may perpetuate ourselves as a community, but that we may be a powerful force in the life-and-death struggle of humanity against evil. And though that may seem vague and airy-fairy, it does have all sorts of implications for the way we see ourselves and set our priorities, what we stress in our teaching and preaching, how we relate to other religious communities, and what social programmes we initiate. _ The problem is, how do we arouse the sense of urgency which this task demands? The Torah portion of this week begins with the birth of twins: not identical twins, like Seth and David Kunin, but fraternal twins - and not very fraternal at that! Already before they were born, we are told, nap: Dunn 133mm, Jacob and Esau struggled with each other in their mother's womb (Gen. 25:22), and a famous Midrash, anachronistically, comments that they were impatient to get out and go off in opposite directions, to a synagogue and to a house of idolatry, respectively (GenR. 63:6). But a close inspection of the Midrash shows that in relation to Jacob it only says 031%, that he struggled, but in the case of Esau it says 03mm r1, literally "hastened and struggled“, which prompted a Latvian rabbi, in a commentary written about 1930, to observe: mxnn "mu V1371 tam-15m 1n? mum ’TIR mn'v mm ’3, that the wicked are more enthusiastic to do evil than the righteous are to do good (Yalkut Yehudah, Dvinsk, 1931-35, by Judah L.

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