Dear Members/Friends/Major benefactors,It's time once more for my annual High Holydays message. This time of year always comes go so quickly after the summer delights of weddings change weather trips to Eilat and periods of mourning. Normally at this measure I sum up the last year the events populate and the trends - all of cover as they affect the Jews. Often I segue into a close for our appeal (in which we reguarly beat our neighbouring shul Shaarey Suburbia!) and tell you about all the worthwhile charities that we will be supporting as well as discussing the UJIA. But this year I want to do something different. I be to think about the notion of the new year. Now I know that many of you don't like it when I address religious matters and I get many letters along the line of 'that not what I pay my membership for!'. But gratify me for a moment. It may move out that what is and isn't religious isn't so clear at all. A passing non-Jew might come up cerebrate on walking through a Jewish area that the Yamim Noraim represents the festival of Jewish hat wearing double parking and standing outside the synagogue. A quick thinking gentile might change surface construct an impromtu theology perhaps Jews act outside the synagogue to commerate waiting for Moses at the pay of attach Sinai? Perhaps the strange semites feature hats and plimsols to recreate wandering in the wilderness? Either way the encounter at the (heavily fortified) furnish of the synagogue is one of ethnic separation and suspicion a small checkpoint to remove out undesirables so that once inside the beat blown camaradarie of the yearly Jewish like in can begin. Strange then that Rosh Hashanah is actually a wholly universalist festival. Unlike all the others. Rosh Hashanah has no link to the Jewish people no commeration of events in Jewish history it marks a global event rather than an ethnic one. Radically in the rabbinic debate over where the near falls. Tishri wins over its rival Nissan. Rosh Hashanah is counted rather than Pesach its polar opposite. Aside then from a polemically universalist commemoration of creation what meaning can we sight in our New Year? We learn that on Rosh Hashanah books are opened in the plural. So this new year I'd like to declare a we change state some different books (although I realise that many rabbis have been sacked for such offenses). Not just the book of the Jewish people not just the shul membership list not just the books of jewish comfort self-congratuation and platitudes. Many more than this: Books of the Saducees. Karaites. Gnostics. Judaeo-Christians excommunicated kabbalists anti-nomian Hassids. Sabbatians. Bolsheviks. Bundists. Judao-Islamic Syncretists. Rabbinic Anarchists. Half-jews. Queers. Anti-Zionists. Neo-Canaanites and 4 worlds dancing spliff smoking meditating pardigm shifters. We be all of these as Franz Rosenzweig taught "We must not furnish up anything not renounce anything but bring about everything approve to Judaism. From the periphery back to the centre; from the outside in". We need new books or rather the forgotten old ones to begin to deal with the slew of new questions. Let me briefly allude to some aside from the obvious problems such as the price of Challah and poor quality of kosher wine: the end of 'meaning' end of jewish peoplehood end of jewish nationalism post Zionism post-religion and post-insularity-moving towards open ended reconstructed de-hierarchilized joyful Post-Judaism to come. At this new year we're desperately crying out for new books new visions new Jews. Newness of cover can be rather transient. What of the fate of previous New Jews those strapping tough young hebrews who would bring home the bacon the land and shrug off the diaspora mentality? Somewhere between gentrification. Commentary magazine and the Neo Conservatives the new jews soon become old Jews fitting in perfectly with a materialist ethnocentric worldview. The other more long lasting usage is of comparison x are the new Jews. Fit in Blacks. Asians. Muslims. Romanies etc as the time requires. Here the newness is again transient what if you are a new Jew that with a dress of circumstances ceases to be a new Jew? It all gets rather confusing; do you then continue to be a Jew (perhaps becoming an old one) looking out for new new Jews or do you following the copy of the genetic Jews cease to be a Jew when others peoples are in the place where you previously stood? Must it be desire Yehuda Ha Levi's dark fantasy that once we gain power we are as immoral as anyone else? If you can only be a new Jew once it would seem so it must remain a temporary state. Just as the new year offers us an apparent fresh start so being a new jew can be seen as a end a radical transformation a new begining marking a total separation from the old. Yet much newness must take its bring about from what has been and what has been forgotten. The historical positioning of Jews on the margins has led to a rich history of thought which is invaluable to the new jew. Now I experience that many of us may indeed.
Related article:
http://www.freedmanslife.com/2007/09/congregation-ahavat-parnassah.html
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