Over the coming months Edgware and Hendon Reform Synagogue is blessed with many weddings, starting with aufrufs galore in the Synagogue from next Shabbat. Most are couples where one of the partners grew up in this community though some are couples who found us by recommendation. Most of the couples are two Jews who are marrying each other and some are couples where one partner is Jewish and the other isn’t and we are celebrating their commitment to build a Jewish home together.
Each wedding takes quite a bit of delightful work on behalf of the Rabbi who is officiating, meeting up, working out just how the couple will gain most meaning from the Jewish ritual, talking about married life and the potential of a Jewish couple to build a Jewish home, working out the music and such. But something is new, now for the Jewish-Jewish couples taking more and more work than it used to , creating the Ketubah – the Jewish marriage contract.
It used to be that most couples simply used the Ketubah that the Movement for Reform Judaism provided. We shared its content with the couples, they felt fine that what was within it applied to them and the Ketubah was duly prepared for the big day. Not any more – or at least not often.
The men and women who want to get married through our Synagogue are becoming ever more assertive about what they would like to see written in their Ketubah and most weddings now require the actually quite delightful task of negotiating the text of this document. Three factors are to blame for this phenomenon –the first: the Anita Diamant Book “The New Jewish Wedding” which most empowered Jewish couples bring to their Rabbi, full of ideas as to how to make their ceremony and the Ketubah which records it special. The second is the many Jewish artists who market Ketubot, especially created, and will offer a variety of wordings to include on them. The third factor is that today’s couples marrying through a Reform Synagogue have normally been living in very close contact for some years, they are of course not couples who were introduced to each other a short time before their wedding by their respective families and told that they had better marry each other.
Reform Jewish couples have often been living together for months if not years before they decide to marry and so they know each other very well. The impersonal words of a standard Ketubah do not feel appropriate to govern their marriage. The standard Reform Ketubah is based around a promise to cherish and support each other according to the law of Moses and Israel and then to build a Jewish home among the people of Israel. The standard Orthodox Ketubah is based around a similar promise backed up by a guarantee to keep the amount of the bride’s dowry (actual or imaginary) safe for return to her in the case of divorce. And that’s what the problem is – it doesn’t sound terribly romantic or relevant to the years of love and companionship which the couple is hoping to form and has already begun to enjoy.
So Rabbi Debbie, Rabbi Tanya and I have been working with EHRS couples on trying to ensure that there is also the appropriate Jewish content in Ketubot to match the phrases they may have found or written which speak about hearts being united and full of tenderness, hope and wonder, doing everything within our power to permit each of us to become the persons we are yet to be, challenging each other to achieve intellectual and physical fulfilment as we search for spiritual and emotional peace and being ever open while cherishing each other’s uniqueness. The thoughts are lovely – though I suspect rather difficult to enforce in a Beit Din, Jewish law court, which is the ultimate sanction for failing to uphold the terms of a Ketubah.
They occasionally create some chuckles when, as they must be, they are read out at a wedding. I remember in particular one clause in a Ketubah which promised that neither bride nor groom would ever enter their home with impatience or anger which had many longer married couples among the congregation looking at each other with knowing glances which I reckon said – “I’ll give that idea three months at the most”.
The Ketubah is there because Judaism is a religion based on a contract which it models. The final terms of this contact are read this week in later part of our Torah portion. The Torah so far has been full of hope for the future – a society where workers will be paid on time, where no one will sell on false measures, where God not us will own the land, where we won’t steal or swear falsely, where we will love our neighbours as ourselves. Now though in this last portion of the Book of Leviticus we hear what will happen if we do observe it all – a society of fairness and prosperity, comfort and co-operation – and what will happen if we do not observe it – a disaster of a society where everything goes wrong in a house of cards like sequence leading to exile and even starvation as everyone grabs what they think is theirs until in turn they have it grabbed away from them.
Daniel Taub, past Israeli Ambassador to the UK, gave a terrific D’var Torah on this portion, quoting American Progressive Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan. He said that this second half of today’s Torah portion’s opening words show that Judaism is neither a religion of optimism nor pessimism. It opens with the words “im bechukkotai telech” – if you follow my laws. Judaism is a religion of “if-ism” – our actions have consequences and we have to take responsibility for them – just as it says in our ketubot.
If our society is narrow, uncaring, self-interested and unequal then we will have to live with being constricted ourselves behind barriers, with having to fend for ourselves when we are in hard times, with the causes of troubles not being addressed and with the potential to be at the bottom of a hierarchical heap. If our society is open, concerned, involved with the lives of all and with a structure giving equality of opportunity then we will have our own freedom, be helped when we need it, address the problems that will inevitably be there and have the chance for all to thrive. “If-ism” is the natural consequence of living in covenant with God.
It is also the natural consequence of there being an Israel, a Jewish state. Last Shabbat I was in Jerusalem, leading the English Language Beit Midrash, study sessions, for the conference of the World Union for Progressive Judaism. More than fifty countries where Reform Judaism thrives or has recently been seeded were represented. I even got to say a blessing for King Charles and his coronation in the Shabbat service, on behalf of those from Britain and the Commonwealth (though I did get some suspect looks from the Australians present).
Because the conference took place in Jerusalem we had some unique opportunities. We all went to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament to hear directly from Members of the Knesset Reform Rabbi Gilad Kariv and deputy foreign minister in the last government Idan Roll. We visited the Supreme Court of Israel to understand its role in guaranteeing the freedoms in the Israeli declaration of Independence, whatever kind of government is in power. On the Saturday night most of us joined many thousands of Jerusalemites in the eighteenth consecutive week of protests outside the residence of the President of Israel, then marching past the residence of Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Israeli Reform Judaism is thoroughly part of this protest movement – both Likud voters and Labour voters – because, as Rabbi Kariv said at the Knesset, the current government’s threat to freedoms strikes at the heart of Reform Jewish values of egalitarianism for gender, sexuality and religious choice. Please come and join me here at EHRS on Thursday night 18th at 19:30 to hear more about the current crisis direct from Israel with Orly Erez-Likhosfky CEO of the Israel Religious Action Centre. She will answer the question ‘why is this crisis different from all other crises’ – and why there is yet hope for the future – if we navigate it right.
There is a big ‘if’ for Israel. The Jewish state can only thrive and be true to its name if it is a state that enables equality for all. That’s what its founders, the Jewish people intended and the current government is threatening the integrity this covenant with us all on behalf of narrow ultra-orthodox self interest. I am proud that Reform Judaism in Israel, and our World Union for Progressive Judaism is standing up for Israel’s positive open Ketubah and not accepting it becoming a document of restriction and narrowness.
There is a line which the Jewish covenant says a society must never cross. There are terms in our contract with each other that can never appropriately be in our Ketubah. On the eve of the festival of Shavuot, there is a tradition, which we will follow here at EHRS, of reading the terms of the Jewish covenant with God under a Chuppah. Just as lovers becoming a married couple promise to fulfil each other’s needs and to care for each other’s values, so do we the Jewish people need to follow our God given principles whether here in the UK or in Israel.
