Diary of a Chief Rabbi - May 1999

More of Ruth, less of ruthlessness

THE SCENE IN ISRAEL: a new country, still raw at the edges. Divisions run deep. The population often seems more like a collection of tribes than a cohesive society. At moments of crisis there is a sense of national unity, but only then. At other times, leaders emerge who capture the public imagination, but the population as a whole has not yet developed a sense of collective identity, and the strains show.

Today? No - this was Israel in the days of the judges, the period in which the Book of Ruth is set. Reading it in shul on Shavuot I was struck by the similarities between then and now - all the more so having just returned from Jerusalem where I spent the week leading up to the election.

I had gone as Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University. It was a dazzling experience to sit on Mount Scopus, looking down at the Old City and the Judean hills, teaching under the city's sharp blue skies, and feeling the thrill of Isaiah's words, "From Zion shall go forth Torah and the word of God from Jerusalem." If there is heaven on earth, this is it.

BUT EVEN PARADISE HAS ITS SERPENT, and its name is politics. The election campaign showed how fissured Israeli society still is. It has become fragmented into a myriad ethnic and single-issue groups - religious, anti-religious, Sefardi, Russian, each with specific grievances and parochial agendas. Recent years have seen a heightening of internal tensions, and Israel's unusual electoral system tends to make them worse, not better.

Most Israelis with whom I spoke agreed that this - not the peace process or the economy - was the real problem facing the country. In a public lecture at the Van Leer Institute six days before the election, I concluded with these words: "Whoever wins must set it as his foremost task to heal the wounds the past few years have opened up. Let the next Prime Minister say: In Israel there is no 'Us' and 'Them'. There is only Us, in all our God-given and necessary diversity." A week later I was moved to hear Ehud Barak, in his victory speech, use almost the same words. We wish him well. Israel and the Jewish people need him to succeed.

Israel is a young country and it has had to achieve almost impossible things. Not only has it had to wage a constant battle for its very survival. It has had to accommodate Jews from 102 countries, speaking 82 different languages, and bringing with them vastly different traditions and expectations. Against this background it has achieved miracles, and they should fill us with pride. But the task Israel faces today is how to create goi echad ba'aretz, a single society out of a human landscape of astonishing complexity.

WHICH BRINGS ME BACK TO THE BOOK OF RUTH, one of the most glorious stories in world literature. The book is set in a turbulent period of Israel's history. The people have entered the land, but they are still twelve tribes, not yet a nation. The mood is more like chaos than cohesion. Yet against this backdrop, we encounter the moving story of Ruth, her unbreakable loyalty to Naomi, and her personal journey to the faith and people of Israel.

If I were to sum up the message of Ruth it would be: the primacy of the personal over the political. There are no politics in the book. Instead it focusses on a single theme, chessed, a word which means kindness, tenderness, a refusal to walk away when times are tough, faithfulness in all its forms.

Ruth is, as the sages said, a book that "begins and ends with acts of kindness". It is about private, not public life. Yet Ruth's story ends with a fact of supreme significance for Jewish history. Her great-grandson was David, Israel's greatest king and its supreme religious poet, author of the Book of Psalms. Love, suggests the Bible, has public consequences. It is where the character of a people is born.

Judaism, in contemporary Israel, has become political. It exists in the form of parties, electioneering, votes, coalitions and deals. Caught up in the pursuit of power, it has lost its ability to heal and inspire. When religion and politics mix, it is bad for politics and even worse for religion. The Book of Ruth gives us an alternative picture of what Jewish life might be - chessed, the simple kindness that unites human beings and gives them moral strength.

The message of these elections is that this is what religion in Israel must become again - less politics, more kindness, less ruthlessness, more Ruth. Judaism is not a set of political parties but a way of life, simple but majestic in its moral beauty. That is how you break through the boundaries between people and turn divided tribes into a single nation.