Alwayswriteagain: Christian Sanctity, Jewish Sacrilege

What a moment!

Deep in the heart of a wedding service bursting with elegiac emotion came a still, small, manicured voice.

It was that of Lady Jane Fellowes, the groom’s maternal aunt reciting two passages of dense lyrical beauty from The Song of Songs (also known as The Song of Solomon and in Hebrew, Shir Hashirim).

But were they the right choice for the marriage of the new Duke and Duchess of Sussex?

Would it have been better to pay tribute to the former Meghan Markle’s African American roots by instead reading the words of the Shulamite from the book’s opening chapter?

“'I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.
“Look not upon me, that I am swarthy, that the sun hath tanned me; my mother's sons were incensed against me, they made me keeper of the vineyards; but mine own vineyard have I not kept’”.

Yet more apt, perhaps, would have been the words of the biblical Ruth whose story was read in synagogues during the Jewish festival of Shavuot (‘Pentecost’, which almost overlapped with the British Royal wedding celebrations.

A Moabite immigrant to ancient Israel who converted to Judaism, Ruth is said to have been the great-grandmother of King David.

“Entreat me not to leave you, or to return from following after you”, she famously begged her mother-in-law, Naomi.

So, as if for the briefest second during her own fine, historic hour, we almost heard Meghan promise Prince Harry:

“For wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people and your God my God”.

But even as billions witnessed the display of brilliantly choreographed majesty at Windsor Castle and absorbed the shifting patterns of universal history being replayed for a new generation, the dreary squalor of routine British life meandered on elsewhere.

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Never mind the customary antics of the anti-Israel hate mob in Glasgow as TRH exchanged vows. Those involved were no worse than the motley Jewish crew who had performed the public pantomimic memorial for HAMAS terrorists at Parliament Square, London some days before.

What amounted to a grossly wicked satire of an ancient prayer that is as deeply ingrained in the Jewish psyche as the Shema and Kol Nidrei, has caused equal distress and anger both to cultural Jews and those who recite it in different guises for different reasons – not simply in bereavement - every day of every week of the year.

If those gathered at Westminster on Wednesday 16 May were not just aping their New York counterparts’ example, why did they not perform the so-called service in a synagogue or a private home?

Why did they use the very spot where only a few weeks prior thousands of incandescently outraged Jews had gathered to tell the antisemites in the British Labour Party that ‘enough is enough’.

The answer is clear but I will spell it out for readers unaccustomed to Jewry’s ongoing internecine strife:

It has been argued by some, that the Kaddish protest was neither organised by nor representative of the Progressive community. I am not convinced. The young woman rabbi who led the charade will have been trained, like all her Progressive colleagues, at Leo Baeck College, London. The students are all intellectually gifted and must have excellent secular qualifications as a basic requirement for being accepted for rabbinical training.

But cerebral prowess and emotional maturity are too often found in direct, inverse proportion and I suggest that the protesters come from a fine tradition of British Jewish anarchists; the sort who delighted in holding “massive public festivals of eating, dancing, and performance for the full 25 hours of Yom Kippur, not only as a way to fight for their right to party, but to unshackle themselves from the oppressive religious dictates they grew up with”.

I argue further that Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner, the Movement for Reform Judaism’s senior rabbi, was being disingenuous when she warned that the Anglo-Jewish community was ‘on a path to “self-destruction”’. Many Progressive movement policies are actively encouraging. if not actually wreaking that harm. I have decided not to delineate them here.

Two days ago, on SaturdayS 26 May, it was announced that IDF soldier, Sergeant Ronen Lubarsky, 20, from Rehovot, south of Tel Aviv, had died from the head injuries he sustained during operations in the West Bank on Thursday last week.

Unusually, there was no daytime funeral. Instead he was due to be buried overnight at the Mount Herzl Military Cemetery, Jerusalem. No matter. No-one who ‘prayed’ for the HAMAS operatives in London on 16 May will have given Lubarsky’s passing a second thought.

Huh! He was only another Israeli Jew – and a another soldier, at that.

So I will end here by attempting to redress the balance and offer a Progressive version of the final lines of the Kaddish prayer. The clip is a musical rendition of Kaddish by the French composer, Maurice Ravel, who was not Jewish.