Diary of a Chief Rabbi

A celebration of Jewish identity in Stirling

It was one of those occasions when you feel the drama of being a Jew. Elaine and I had travelled to Scotland for the opening of the European Maccabi Games, the first time they had been held there and the first to be held in Britain for twenty years.

Well over a thousand participants had travelled there from twenty-seven different countries, including Israel and the United States. One of the things that made it special was the involvement of the newly emerging communities of Eastern Europe, Russia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Latvia, places where Jewish life is beginning to take shape after more than seventy years of active suppression. This was the Jewish phoenix - long dormant communities coming to life again.

It was thrilling to celebrate Shabbat together before the start of the games. It's hard to describe what it feels like to make kiddush and sing Shabbat songs with one and a half thousand people from across the world. I don't know how many of the teams had met one another before. But Judaism is a universal language that turns strangers into friends. Wherever Jews meet and keep Shabbat together, the barriers of language and distance fall away and we become part of a single community. It was a blessed moment of togetherness.

On Friday evening I spoke about the Internet. Instant global communication is changing the way we live. Already we are not far from the time when a university lecturer will be able to give a class to a group of students from St. Petersburg, Russia to St. Petersburg, Florida, and all points between. They will be able to see him. He will be able to see them. Essays will sent and handed back via e-mail. Living in London or Los Angeles you will be able to study at the Hebrew University as easily as if you were living in Jerusalem. The Internet is creating a new kind of community. In the past, a community was a group of people living in the same place. A virtual community is a group of people doing the same thing at the same moment. The communications revolution is transforming communities from the dimension of space to that of time.

I pointed out that this is not a new idea for Jews. Ever since the destruction of the First Temple over two-and-a-half thousand years ago, we have been a global people. Jews were scattered throughout the Middle East. Some remained in Israel. Others were taken to Babylon. Some went to Egypt. Yet they kept in touch with one another. They were, and remained, a single nation. The reason had to do with time. They kept Shabbat and the festivals. Each week, they read and studied the same portion of the Torah. They spoke a common language. They were the world's first virtual community. And so we have been ever since. The Torah was our Internet, linking Jews wherever they were. This idea of global connectedness, so new to most of humanity, is one of the oldest of all Jewish experiences. There in Scotland we felt it again. The Jewish people is smaller - as one American writer put it - than the statistical error in the Chinese census. But being part of it we are joined to something vast, worldwide.

The games were being held in the historic town of Stirling, with its ancient castle and memories of "braveheart" William Wallace who fought his great battle against the English there. We were staying at the university, and this had other memories for me. I told the participants that this was the second time I had been there. The first was exactly thirty years before.

I had just finished university and was looking for a job. There was a vacancy in the philosophy department at Stirling University and I applied. I went there and was interviewed, but I didn't get the job. At the time, it hurt. What would have happened if I had been successful? I would not have become a rabbi, or a Chief Rabbi. I would have been an academic on vacation. As a result I would have missed the largest gathering of Jews ever to have come together in that part of Scotland.

Divine providence works in mysterious ways. I had to experience disappointment years before in order to enjoy the Maccabi celebration in the same place years later. Only in retrospect do we see how the bad things that happen to us turn out to be necessary stages on a journey to much more important things. We don't always see it until long afterwards, but it's usually true. Where we are is where God needs us to be. Knowing that makes difficult times much easier to bear.

So my thanks to Maccabi for a memorable experience. It has taken sport and turned it into a celebration of Jewish identity. Standing in the stadium, seeing young men and women from across the world coming together as part of one people, I felt real emotion as I made the blessing thanking God for "keeping us alive and sustaining us and bringing us to see this day."