Diary of a Chief Rabbi

Our schools are the seedbed of renewal

If you sometimes wonder about the state of Anglo-Jewry, think of the festival we have just celebrated, Sukkot.

Not so long ago, lulavim and etrogim were relative rarities. The rabbi certainly had his set of arba minim, which was passed round the synagogue. So too did a few of the more dedicated members of the congregation. But the procession around the bima was quite small. Today, in community after community, synagogues are thronged with lulavim. It's an exhilarating sight. I hear from suppliers that their business has increased on average some three hundred per cent in recent years.

Or consider the sukkah itself. There was a time when this too was a rarity in Anglo-Jewry. The synagogue had one. So did the rabbi. But how many others? On the first night of Sukkot I picked up an Anglo-Jewish machzor from the Victorian period. I was astonished to see that the entire volume made no reference to the practice of sitting in a Sukkah. I double checked, but there was not a single place where the blessing that we make on sitting in the tabernacle - leshev ba-sukkah - made its appearance in the machzor. It was as if, at a certain point in Anglo-Jewish history, the sukkah had become an idea rather than a reality.

Intrigued, I turned to Israel Abraham's Festival Studies - a series of essays he wrote for the Jewish press between 1887 and 1905. He has some lovely things to say about some of the sukkot he had seen or read about. There was the sukkah of Chief Rabbi Nathan Marcus Adler in which, over breakfast with Anglo-Jewish lay leaders in 1866, he first mooted the idea of an association of congregations which became, four years later, the United Synagogue. There was the magnificent sukkah built in the middle of the nineteenth century by one of the leading figures of Dutch Jewry. What made this memorable was the visit of no less a figure than Queen Sophia of Holland.

An admirer of the Jewish community and of a student of the Bible, the Queen had heard about this sukkah over dinner one evening and expressed a desire to see it for herself. She was duly received in great ceremony and admired the lavish structure with its stained glass windows and elaborate decorations. As she left, she paid her compliments to her host and his majestic construction, but added, "I take your word for a great deal, but you cannot make me believe that your ancestors in the desert lived in such splendid booths as this!"

The dominant impression Abrahams leaves us with, though, is that in his day the sukkah was a vanishing institution. "In our time," he writes, "the sukkah is rapidly becoming a mere symbol. Once lived in, the sukkah is now mostly an ornament of the synagogue, visited at most once for a brief space." He is moved to pray that it should not be relegated to a museum piece, "a mere object of curiosity to antiquarians." How things have changed.

Many things have made a difference. We are more affluent, established and self-confident as a community. The existence of the State of Israel has transformed the very terms of Jewish life. Besides which, Britain, like most other advanced liberal democracies, is altogether more tolerant of, and welcoming towards, cultural and religious diversity. We no longer worry that our way of life will mark us out as outsiders. We realise - or if we don't, we should - that our very differences add to the total richness of society.

I will never forget how, some years ago when we were living in Golders Green, our Christian next door neighbour knocked on our door one September afternoon with a model sukkah made out of a shoe box. She said, "Our son made this at school yesterday but he couldn't remember what it was supposed to represent. I asked the Muslims opposite, but they said it wasn't one of their symbols, and I know it isn't one of ours, so it must be yours." We explained what a sukkah was, and told her that if she wouldn't mind waiting a few days we would be delighted to welcome her and her son to see the real thing. They came, and loved it. Of such moments, mutual respect is born.

But what has really made the difference is the growth of Jewish schools. I was in Redbridge during chol hamoed, visiting the magnificent King Solomon High School and the Ilford Jewish Primary School. It was there, with the five-to-eleven year olds, that I had the most joyous moment of the festival, sitting with the children in the sukkah, listening to their songs and stories, giving out the prizes for the best model sukkot, and seeing our ancient faith come alive again in their fresh faces and innocent delight. A community with traditions has a past. A community with schools has a future. That is why Judaism has always made education its seedbed of renewal.

So, in one of the intervals between the dancing on Simchat Torah, I found myself wondering what a visitor from 1899 might make of Anglo-Jewry today. The old arguments have not changed, but the vitality has. The Jewish people has been through much suffering and pain in the past hundred years - more than any people deserves to undergo. Yet somehow we have emerged re-energised, and you see it on the faces of our children. Perhaps they do not yet fully understand the historical drama of the sukkah and the arba minim - the great symbols of the desert and the land of Israel, exile and homecoming. But one day they will. In the meantime I give thanks to be living at a time when, around you, you sense the full meaning of zeman simchatenu, the festival of our joy.