Diary of a Chief Rabbi

The Extraordinary Resurgence of Anglo-Jewry

Something is happening in Anglo-Jewry, and whatever it is, it's exciting.

The scene: a bitterly cold, windswept site on the North Wales Coast in March. Nine hundred young people with their parents have gathered for a Bnei Akiva national weekend. The setting is unpropitious. Who in their right mind would come here at this time of the year for a break? Yet the mood is electric. The Friday night service is charged with energy. And in the dining room, as we begin our Shabbat meal, the singing, slow at first, rises to a crescendo. People start standing on their chairs - and if they can do it, so can I. I put my arm around Arieh Handler, that indefatigable octogenerian, and we start a new song. The place erupts. The noise, the exuberance, the passion are breathtaking. In the middle of nowhere, a moment of Jewish magic is unfolding. We could be in Jerusalem; we could be in Russia; as it happens we're in Wales; but we're also in that extraterritorial space called Shabbat, welcoming the bride, the Shekhinah, and feeling as if we're at the wedding of heaven and earth.

Another scene, a week earlier. Motzei Shabbat, and I've agreed to take part in a panel discussion for Jewish Book Week on 'Freud and the Jewish Mind.' It's one of those awful subjects, post-mortemised to the point of exhaustion, and I assume that no one will turn up. My guess is that we'll be lucky if there are fifty people present. The organisers, in a fit of optimism, have put out chairs for 500. In the event, a thousand people come.

The discussion itself is disappointing, but that is secondary. The real discovery is that an enormous group of people - highly varied, some religious, some secular, some candidly anti-religious - want to hear a conversation about psycho-analysis and Jewish identity. Where do they come from? Who are they? One thing is sure: Jewish Book Week is touching a chord among many Jews who want to engage seriously with the ongoing question of what it is to be a Jewish in the context of contemporary culture.

A third scene, a few weeks before. I travel to Manchester to launch the annual Encounter Conference, a day of lectures and seminars on 'A Day in the Life of a Jew'. Encounter has been going for several years in London and other venues throughout Britain, and each time I anticipate that the momentum will slow down. It's natural, inevitable that events like these gradually lose their freshness and appeal - and yet again I am proved wrong. The organisers have booked the largest venue they can find, Whitworth Hall in Manchester University. The place is packed, with 1,300 people. The sense of occasion is overwhelming. The people are expectant, enthusiastic, lifted by one another's company, as attentive an audience as you would find anywhere. Who witnessing any of these occasions, would believe that the Jewish community in Britain is as small as it is? National non-Jewish organisations would struggle to gather crowds like these for any event, let alone for highbrow presentations on religious and ethical themes.

Time and again in the past few months I've had to pinch myself and check that I'm not dreaming. Together with headteacher Ruth Robbins and chairman of governors Arnold Wagner, I perform the groundbreaking ceremony for the new JFS school. The site is vast. The school, when built, will be massive and magnificent. We have built more new Jewish day schools in the past few years than anyone could have anticipated for a community supposedly in decline, and still we cannot keep up with the demand.

Then I find myself in the House of Commons for the launch of the new Money and Morals Curriculum, produced by the Jewish Association of Business Ethics. The Association has done remarkable work in the past nine years, bringing the Jewish ethical tradition to both the boardroom and the classroom. But it remains a Jewish association. What an extraordinary phenomenon it is, therefore, to find that it is so far ahead of the field that it can now offer a curriculum, together with teaching materials and videos, to every school in the country, Christian, Muslim or secular. And there, as if to prove the point, is Secretary of State for Education, David Blunkett, to add his commendation to the project.

And in the midst of it all is my visit to the new London Jewish News office, scene of a merger with Totally Jewish.com and the subject of a recent BBC television documentary. It seems like only yesterday that I was fixing a mezuzah to the entrance of LJN's last set of offices, but here they are, in even newer premisses, working together with the cream of Anglo-Jewry's web-maestros to create a marriage between the West's oldest religious heritage and its newest communications technology, and you can feel the buzz. There is energy here, and creativity, and it is very exciting.

Not so long ago, when people spoke about Anglo-Jewry they used words like 'staid', 'sedate', 'dull', 'conventional'. Old, it might be, but interesting, it wasn't. That has changed, dramatically and suddenly. How? Why? I'm not sure. I'm not even sure it matters. Young Jews are bringing new life to our community, and even if it doesn't fit within the time-hallowed categories, somehow out of it will come new Judaic affirmations. Abba Eban once called Jews the people who can't take Yes for an answer. Yet almost everywhere I go in our community I hear voices saying Yes - not without questions, doubts, uncertainties, tensions, but a momentous Yes nevertheless. And I, for one, want to say thank you to everyone who has had a share in making our community young and exuberant again.

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