Pizzas galore!

Another problem we face in the community is Jewish discontinuity. In order to do something about this in 1993 I created a panic a scare –‘Will we have Jewish grandchildren’ I must say I have a habit of starting controversy in the Jewish community. Frank Field a former politician once said to me ‘I see you have started a controversy well done. If you are not doing so every six months you are not doing your job.’

Professor Lesley Wagner just completed a survey which has found we have moved in a single generation where one quarter of the children attend Jewish education compared to the previous where 60% have done. In other words against all expectation the generation of Jewish children growing up today is more aware and committed then any other in 352 years of our existence.

So we will confront anti Semitism with our many friends across the faiths and political parties and challenges of Jewish continuity which we have done by intensifying Jewish education.

As a Jew I would diagnose the current human situation with number one the family. It is a major grief to us as Jews that marriages are beginning to fade, the covenable bond of marriage being devalued the victims are our children. The image of family is built in our very image that the prophets gave us. The prophets saw marriage as a metaphor for our relationship with God that is one thing that I will say from a Jewish perspective we have to recover faith in the idea of family

Secondly the Hebrew word ‘tzedakah’ meaning justice and charity. In Judaism what we possess we do not own we merely hold it in trust for God. Those who have much have a responsibility to give to those who have little. Nothing voluntary about charity in Judaism you have to give it. In Jewish law which is 2000 years old you have to give people so much charity so they themselves can afford to give to charity. This makes no sense in distributive economics. Giving is essential to human dignity. This system applies to everything: the ownership of the land of Israel, the land should never be sold in parquetry because it belongs to God and we are mere temporary residents it applies to our very position in the world the earth belongs to God. Our existence on earth comes with the condition that we have to protect the environment for generations to come.

Responsibility to others is built into Judaism we are letting our very fragile ecosystem be damaged at a rate which may go beyond repair. We have seen what happens in the financial system in which the pursuit of short term profit is allowed to exist untrammelled without any long term concern for the stability of the system or those who will be the victims of the system’s collapse. You can not have markets without morals, you cannot have wealth creation without responsibility those things are inconceivable in Judaism. Whatever God has given us he had given us so we are its guardians for the benefit of all and that drives Jewish ethics and I believe if a stronger sense of that had been active in the financial institutions this country and others would not have got to a situation where people were being loaned 125% of the value of their house or all the other strange things which were predicated on short term financial gain which is to everyone’s long term loss. So I think in addition to recovering the moral of family we need to recover our sense of moral responsibility.

Finally I called Judaism a voice of humanity in the conversation of humankind because we are living in complex times there is one thing people cannot live with and that is constant relentless change. This makes our generation different from all previous generations. All the movements of nationalism and religious extremism and all the other searches for certainty in rapidly changing world are because we are unable to bear relentless change. We are not equipped to deal with this. That is one voice Judaism has to bring to the conversation. For many centuries Jews lived with situations with uncertainty never knowing if the children would live in the same country as theirs or when the next expulsion would happen. Judaism sees faith as the courage to live with uncertainty. If you have your faith you will not lose your way in a society which is constantly changing. Jews, Muslims and Christians must be agents of hope in a world in danger of despair. The politics of hope are the only alternative to the politics of fear. Faith is essential in a changing world whether it is Jewish or Christian or Muslim it is our nail joining us to something solid immovable and eternal and we will then navigate the winds of change without ever losing hope.