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Jeremy Rosen (Archive)
Last update - 12:57 05/08/2008
A maverick's life, post one / Forget hypocrisy and humbug
By Jeremy Rosen
Tags: maverick, orthodoxy 

I was born in England during the Second World War into a rabbinical family at a time when Western European Orthodoxy was stagnating and apparently declining. My late father, Kopul Rosen, the Principal Rabbi of the Federation of Synagogues was a charismatic man, brilliant orator and impressive leader who believed it was possible to combine the best of Torah with the best of Western culture.

He was a passionate religious Zionist who resigned as president of the religious Zionist movement in the U.K. when they went into politics in Israel. And he resigned from the rabbinate to establish a Jewish school in the Oxfordshire countryside, Carmel College, where I and my siblings grew up. He died when he was just 49.

I was brought up in this radical, non-conformist family where Torah was enjoyed and loved. But it was outside of the main community. I benefitted from an atmosphere that was anti-establishment and critical of the Anglo-Jewish establishment and the hypocrisy and humbug that characterized most of Jewish life almost everywhere.
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In England then, and still now, and unlike in the U.S., many non-religious Jews are insecure, apologetic and uncomfortable with their Judaism, and in mainstream Jewish institutions are stunted by the ghastly dead hand of the "Establishment."

My father always advocated the best in education, and so I went to Cambridge for my philosophy and Beer Yaakov and Mir for my Torah. My Jewish spiritual roots are in the Haredi world. There's nowhere else to go to get that real depth of study and spiritual, mystical experience, Hasidic or Lithuanian. Any other manifestations of Judaism are a pale shadow. It is like comic books instead of Shakespeare.

I went into the rabbinate and Jewish education because I wanted to persuade people that Judaism, despite its awful public relations, was a beautiful, intense religious experience worth preserving, despite all the attempts of so many of its authorities and leaders to prove the contrary.

When I started my career, as one of the first generation of rabbis to come from Israeli yeshivot instead of local rabbinical seminaries, I was to the right of Anglo-Jewish Orthodoxy. Nowadays, although I have hardly changed, I would be just about hanging on by my fingertips, in terms of the community's rightward swing. In my youth, the Chief Rabbis of the Orthodox United Synagogue and Federation Synagogues went to the opera at Convent Garden together. Nowadays most Orthodox rabbis will not even listen to women singing in public.

I noticed how all those rabbinic figures I admired who tried to change things were usually browbeaten into submission, gave up or just proved not to have what it took. That was why I decided to avoid the establishment. In whatever position I have held, I have made speaking my mind, and criticizing what I saw as a betrayal of Jewish values, part of my role.

Being a maverick, a loose cannon, has meant that conventional routes to apparent success and power have been closed to me. It was why I could not find my place in Israel, even though in many ways Israelis are much more receptive to Orthodox alternatives, in comparison to Jews in the U.K. But in the process I have kept my enthusiasm, my independence and my open mind.

Once I thought I could change things. Make religion more humane, less bureaucratic, and less exclusionary. Now I see all I can do is ensure that an alternative point of view, a non-conformist, non-fundamentalist, yet totally halachic approach to Judaism must be propagated and preserved. If current trends are toward abandoning Torah on the one hand or moving more and more toward obscurantism and power politics on the other, history shows that the circle will turn.

Despite everything I am an optimist. If my critiques sound angry, I am not. On the contrary, I am a happy person who loves Torah as well as other cultures too. I am disappointed that so many poor exemplars of spirituality and mysticism get away with so much that undermines it. I regret that so many of the people I thought had the talent and personality to work for change have either given up or not had it in them.

I am delighted that Orthodoxy has come back from the brink and is now the one sector of Judaism that is not at all worried about the future. But I am sad it has not escaped the universal fundamentalism that all religions think mistakenly will buttress them against the outside world. I can't celebrate the exponential growth of the Haredi community worldwide, in numbers, study, charity, wealth and influence, because of the intellectual fundamentalism and right-wing politics that comes with it (regarding Israel as well as the Diaspora).

And almost everything I have said about Judaism I could say about Israel, how it has changed, why it has lost its moral compass.

After many years of commuting between Antwerp, London and New York, I have now retired from the rabbinate, education and academia and can indulge myself writing all the things I had no time for before and occasionally letting loose with a Jeremiad? No, that's too negative, a tirade against my favourite targets. It is this freedom of thought and speech that I inherited, nurtured, value and hope to pass on.

Jeremy Rosen is Scholar in Residence at the JCC of Manhattan and Professor and Chairman of the Faculty for Comparative Religion in Wilrijk, Belgium. You can read his blog here .

Also by Jeremy Rosen on Haaretz.com:

  • A higher moral order

  • Don't blame multiculturalism

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