Maurice Naftalin, Sukkat Shalom chairperson
To members of Sukkat Shalom, welcome – and on behalf of Sukkat Shalom, let me say: welcome to all our friends here today. We are delighted to meet with you and proud to have you here to share in this pivotal moment for our community. Today we will adopt into our community the central religious object of Judaism, the Scroll of the Law. In a sense this marks the real birth of our community as an independent entity. Like all births this one has been accompanied by a great deal of work – and some pain – but the end result is pride and joy. It was only in March that the group that was to become this community met together to decide what path to take. That meeting was marked by doubt and apprehension, because we were well aware that to accept independence would require a great deal of work and mutual commitment. We made that commitment and in the months since there has been an upsurge in energy so that, working together in an atmosphere of trust, we have achieved far more than I would have thought possible in so short a time. The first fruit of that achievement is the scroll which we welcome to our community today.
Why did we make a priority of acquiring a Sefer Torah? At the meeting in March one person called this decision “sentiment and symbolism”. That wasn't meant as a compliment, but actually I think it is very apt. Sentiment links this material object, this parchment written by an unknown scribe 200 years ago, to the ancient beliefs of Judaism formulated more than 2000 years earlier. Orthodox Jewish tradition holds every word of Torah sacred, believing that the Five Books were literally dictated to Moses by God. Progressive Jews have a different view: the revelation of Torah is not the result of a single act or event but of a process, too complex and clouded in history to be convincingly reconstructed. Rabbi Pete Tobias, an influential figure in the formation of this community, used to explain it like this: the societies of the Ancient Near East were, to our eyes, barbaric: Torah represents a divinely-inspired struggle to rise above these conditions, couched in terms that would make sense to our ancestors. For example, human sacrifice was widespread. The story of Isaac represents the encounter between God and humanity which revealed the evil of human sacrifice and made it forbidden from then on.
This view means that as progressive Jews we have to engage in a very traditionally Jewish activity: a struggle with the text. We are blessed with a foundational text that often communicates its injunction to pursue social justice through extraordinary poetic images and clear injunctions. But when it does not, we have a noble tradition of probing the text so as to draw out its inspiration. To combat prejudice, to confront poverty, to struggle against militarism and narrow territoriality, to help our society curb violence, and above all to make justice a living value for us, we can begin by studying our sacred texts, strengthening our resolve through our encounters with them. So the sentiment I mentioned links us to a symbolism that is central to us: the source of our identity, our idea of justice, our very system of thought – and indeed was more influential even than that, as through its adoption by Judaism's daughter religions it brought these ideas into the wider world.
With the arrival of a new scroll in a new Jewish community we can renew and develop that tradition yet again. This is indeed a cause for celebration, and I am proud and happy to welcome everyone here to take part in it. With that, let me now turn to Nick Silk, who will lead us in the service of siyyum , or completion of the scroll as it takes its place in the centre of our community.