Speech for the Red Herring Bart Mitzvah on 18th November 2007

Friends, comrades, relatives:

In my memory, the rabbi always began his sermon with the words “this week's sedrah comes from...”. This was a signal for everyone to make themselves comforable and prepare for a little rest. So snuggle down.

Our Torah reading today comes from the portion Va-Yetse – 'and he left'. The chapterisation and verse division that we Jews borrowed from the Christians makes this Genesis chapter 28 verses 10-22. The bit that the kids read covers the very important story of Jacob's ladder, where the patriarch who is going to become the ancestor of all Israelites and therefore all Jews, sleeps in the open with a stone for a pillow. There he has a dream in which he sees a ladder going between heaven and earth, and angels ascending and descending.

This really short passage is so full of symbolism and associations that it's almost embarrassing. For kabbalists, the ladder represents the relationship between higher and lower worlds – because they see the material world that we experience as being only one of many different realms. For those of a more fundamentalist inclination, the story indicates the future location of the holy temple, and of Jerusalem – although there is nothing in the story that says so, they interpret the place where it happens as being Mount Moriah, and therefore confirming the centrality of Jerusalem in Jewish worship. For nationalists, verse 13 assigns the land to Jacob and his offspring, and verse 14 confirms the descendants of Jacob as having a special status among all the families of the earth.

Christians interpret the portion as presaging the future coming of Jesus as a bridge between God and man. Even the Scottish Nationalists get a look in, because the stone that Jacob used for a pillow is said to be the Stone of Scone, on which Kings of Scotland were crowned – and which was subsequently looted by the English and carried off to Westminster Abbey.

Very clever rabbis have spent a great deal of time examining the words of the text, finding many levels of meaning, fleshing out the details, and explaining some of the apparent contradictions and inconsistencies. Why do the angels need a ladder – what happened to their wings? How big was the ladder – how many rungs, and how wide were they? How come when God tells Jacob that he will protect him wherever he goes, Jacob is still frightened about something only a few chapters on? The interpretations go on for many pages, and it all makes me very proud to be a secularist.

But secularists don't have to be dreary. We can enjoy rituals, and ceremonies, and symbolism too. The ladder seems to me to be a great symbol for a Coming of Age rite of passage – an event that marks a tranistion from one status into another. Many societies and civilisations have them, and they seem to me to be an entirely good thing.

One of the things we do in our secular cheder is to look at Jewish customs and traditions as something that is evolving rather than static. Nowhere is this more evident than the custom of the big barmitzvah. By now everybody really does know the joke about the elephant safari bar mitzvah, but the big bar mitzvah, as we know it, isn’t a timeless tradition at all. It’s only about fifty years old. Older men here will perhaps remember a small celebration at their own house, with a few bits of plaive cake, some bridge rolls, and some tiny glasses of cherry brandy.

Even the religious bar mitzvah ceremony isn’t all that old – perhaps a few hundred years. Once upon a time the big coming of age event for boys was around five years old, when the child was taken from its mother and given to the Rabbi to be educated. This was a public ceremony, which included the child being carried through the streets, and involved special foods, including food like eggs and cakes on which the verses of the Torah were actually written (and by the way, this led to some very interesting discussions between rabbis as to whether it was permissible to excrete holy words).

It’s only from the fifteenth century onwards that Jewish children were seen as taking on the rights and responsibilities of adulthood at thirteen. The ceremony of the bar mitzvah, to mark the Jewish boy as having attained the age at which he could be counted in a minyan and called to the reading of the law, dates from this time. The big party, the catered meal, and so on didn't come for another four hundred years, and most of that was made up by the caterers.

Well, that’s the end of the history lesson. The point of it is really that social institutions, and especially religious traditions, like the bar mitzvah, are made up by people like us. We’ve got just as much right to make up our own way of doing things as did the rabbis in medieval Germany. What is, is the product of a process of change, and can be changed.

We have chosen to call this ceremony a Bart mitzvah, after the celebrated character from popular culture, Bart Simpson. It's fun to say that in an appropriately rabbinical voice, and if I was really doing this right I am sure I could come up with some really great numerological allusions about the letters of Bart's name. In fact, Bart presents many theological problems, not least the fact that his voice is actually provided by a woman, so that if the character were to begin to sing orthodox Jewish men would have to quickly switch off – because it's forbidden to listen to a woman singing. Once again, reading that it's hard not to feel a burst of pride at being a secularist.

But there is also a wonderful web page called 'The Simpsons Talmud', which presents the episode featuring Rabbi Hyman Krustovskyand his son Herschel Pinkus Yerucham Krustofski (or Krusty the Clown, as he is perhaps better known) as if it were a Talmudic anecdote. It's possible to appreciate this on many levels. The content of the interpretation, which like the Simpsons episode itself treats the issue of parental estrangement from a son with great insight and warmth. The style of the web page really does present itself as it were a page from the Talmud. And the ability to enjoy the joke seems to me to be a vindication of what we are trying to do here – to appreciate the Jewish heritage not in opposition to living in the modern world, but as a way of getting more out of it. The Simpsons Talmud, and Woody Allen, and lots of other things are funnier if you understand the nuances of Jewish culture. Relating to the Holocaust, and other holocausts, and the experiences of refugees, is different if we recognise the relationships of those stories to our own personal stories.

In our group we have tried to cover all this stuff in one way or another. We began, more than three years ago, with the words “Once there was a rabbi, a man of distinction, who lived in the land of Uz.” This is the beginning of the story “The Rabbi who was turned into a werewolf”. We've spent a while wandering in some of the back lanes of Jewish culture and folklore. We spent a long time in the company of the wise men of Chelm. We studied the stories of the Bible, with the help of beanie babies, an assortment of funny voices, and a really lurid comic-book style version provided by some American bible society.

Somewhere along the way, we invented Jewish Top Trumps, merrily infringing copyright as we went. We made cards for important Jewish heroes and leaders – like Emma Goldmann, Rabbi Akiva, and Amy Winehouse. We made cards for fictional characters with some claim to be Jewish, too, like Tevye the Milkman, Krusty the Clown, and Moses and Jesus too. As of today, there are some new top trumps in the pack, because we've made some for all the graduating students – have a look at the version on the laptop over there.

We've learned some bits of Yiddish, including a great number of words for the male anatomy – why are there so many? We've learned, more or less, to read Hebrew, or at least to recognise some of the letters.

We've watched some good films, and some really bad ones – I'm still not sure why it turned out that our version of The Ten Commandments had subtitles in Brazilian Portuguese. We've even made a film, which you will get to see in a few minutes.

We've done a bit of cooking, a tiny bit of singing, and the occasional craft activity – we made clay dreidels, and we used up the clay to make idols like Abraham's dad used to do for a living. We studied interior decorating, Solomonic style. We've tried to make sure that it was never like school, and I think we've mainly succeeded – although there were a few dodgy moments when we slogged through the background history to Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and I'll lay odds that no-one remembers very much of that.

And we've had good fun, most of the time. I'm going to miss it, and all the students, terribly. The class is going to continue, with some of the students who aren't graduating yet, and perhaps some new ones. It'll be different – not better, or worse, but different for sure.

Now one of the things about this sort of sermon is that it's really hard to end. Perhaps that's why they go on for so long. When I was young, the rabbi used to finish up by presenting the barmitzvah boy with a present from the congregation – usually the book 'The Torah is Our Guide'. I still have mine, and have kept it as fresh and new as the day it was given to me. Well, if the trick worked for him, it might work for me, so I'd like to end the sermon by presenting the students with a specially chosen book. I'd like to, but those mamsers at Amazon have let me down, so instead I will present them all with a picture of the front cover – alongside their graduation certificates, of course. So it gives me great pleasure to present you all with this picture of the front cover of “Yiddish with Dick and Jane”, and may the book when it actually arrives give you many minutes of pleasure.

How mobility helps maintain work-life balance

I write about enterprise mobility for a living. One of the oft-cited benefits is that it helps workers to maintain a proper work-life balance. This claim is more commonly made on the left-hand side of the Atlantic than on the right-hand side. Over here, there is at least some recognition that knowing when and whether to turn the Blackberry off, or stop doing the emails on the laptop, is an issue. In North America, it seems much more common to assume that being able to do work outside of normal working hours, away from the workplace, is somehow more 'balanced'.

This piece from AP doesn't claim that it's illustrating a more balanced life, though it does suggest that the impetus for taking laptops on holiday so as to continue working is coming from employees, not from employers. It's hard not to despair reading this sort of thing - another example of computers making people easier to use.

Banned in China!

This blog is banned in China. Yours probably is too...check it out via The Great Firewall of China site.

Speech at Lexei's bar mitzvah on 13th January 2007

Hello everybody. Here we all are again. I’ve got five minutes with a more or less captive audience. Once again, for those of you who are familiar with a traditional bar mitzvah, fasten your seat belts. And for those of you who have never been to a bar mitzvah before, rest assured that this is entirely authentic, and that all bar mitzvahs are exactly like this.

If this were a religious bar mitzvah, this would be the spot for the rabbi’s sermon, in which he would expound in a learned way on the significance of this week’s torah portion. Since this is a secular ceremony, it’s very tempting to have a reading from an important secularist text – perhaps an extract from Richard Dawkins’ new book ‘The God Delusion’, on why religion is not only wrong but also stupid and harmful. Fortunately for you, though, I understand that good manners require that I show a little forbearance.

So, back to Plan A, and a little exposition on the torah portion. As you will hear shortly, Lexei’s torah portion, and the associated haftorah portion, are both about somebody being called to a duty that they are reluctant to take on. Well, sometimes we feel the same about being secular Jews. It would have been easier to take the mainstream, religious route. Somebody else would have done the intellectual and pedagological schlepping. We would just have dropped the kids off at a synagogue cheder on Sunday morning, and then had the morning off – instead of having to make up a syllabus, run classes, make up a bar mitzvah ceremony, and so on. Plenty of other people manage like that, and most of their kids more or less get the message that religion, and Jewish culture have their own proper, small place that needn’t spill over into everyday life.

But it honestly felt to us like there really wasn’t any choice. We tried the other route, and in the end it just didn’t make any sense for us. For me the turning point came at a parents’ morning at the synagogue cheder, when one of the speakers – Clive Lawton, for those of you that know him -- asked, rhetorically, what was the point of sending your children to cheder to learn how to daven if you didn’t daven yourself? I had to agree, and Lexei stopped going to the synagogue cheder the following week. Almost certainly not the effect that he had in mind, but there you are.

So we started running our own secular cheder in the front room about three years ago – Lexei, Daniela, Abe, Max and me. We already had a bit of a model, because Leslie had been running a bar and bat mitzvah group in our kitchen for a couple of years – that’s the one Louis went to. But this was the first time that I’d done anything like teaching. So we learned to read Hebrew – and when I say ‘we’ here, I use that particular pronoun carefully. We studied bible stories, some of which were dramatised by a selection of beanie babies and other stuffed animals. We did Jewish history too, and we’ve just spent half of a term learning about the holocaust – Zionism, Israel, and the Palestinians next term, wish me luck!

We studied Jewish folklore – kicking off with the traditional story of the Rabbi who turned into a werewolf. We invented Jewish Top Trumps, merrily infringing copyright as we went. We added Jewish humour – and we learned the famous and important joke about the old Jewish guys who tell the same jokes over and over again, until in the end they just give each joke a number, then tell each other the number and all laugh together. And we didn’t just add stuff – we added people too, so that there were more and more kids in the front room – can we have a wave please, Susie, and Effie? So we added another teacher, too, because with the best will in the world I couldn’t teach Hebrew to ten kids at once. I can honestly say that we wouldn’t have made it through the last two years without my friend and co-teacher, Ms Lukom.

One of the things we do in our secular cheder is to look at Jewish customs and traditions as something that is evolving rather than static. So let’s have a bit of a go now, with a look at how the bar mitzvah itself has evolved. At Louis’ bar mitzvah ceremony, I explained what it meant for us as secular Jews to have a coming of age ceremony in the form of a bar mitzvah. This meant, in effect, to claim the symbolism of the bar mitzvah and to turn it into something that is meaningful for us. Actually, it turns out that this isn’t such a strange thing to have done. Everybody knows the joke about the elephant safari bar mitzvah, but the big bar mitzvah, as we know it, isn’t a timeless tradition at all. It’s only about fifty years old. Older men here will remember a small celebration at their own house, with a few bits of plaive cake, some bridge rolls, and some tiny glasses of cherry brandy.

The form of the big bar mitzvah is to a very great extent copied from the form of the big Jewish wedding. You can see that, for example, in the way that the ritual of lifting up the bar mitzvah boy on a chair has become part of the ritual – among the Orthodox, that’s something that you do at weddings. The same with the entirely invented ritual of the ‘bar mitzvah cake’. In fact, much of the ritual of the bar mitzvah party owes its origins to the traditional enemy of the Jewish people, the Jewish caterer.

Even the religious bar mitzvah ceremony isn’t all that old – perhaps a few hundred years. Once upon a time the big coming of age event for boys was around five years old, when the child was taken from its mother and given to the Rabbi to be educated. This was a public ceremony, which included the child being carried through the streets, and involved special foods, including food like eggs and cakes on which the verses of the torah were actually written (and by the way, this led to some very interesting discussions between rabbis as to whether it was permissible to excrete holy words).

In the Ashkenazic world this event more or less disappeared around the late middle ages, as part of a much bigger set of changes affecting both the Christian and the Jewish worlds. This is when the Christian practice of oblation – when parents gave their children to monasteries – came to an end. In the Jewish world, before this time there was nothing particularly special about the age thirteen. Some rabbinical authorities treated children as little adults, who were eligible for religious duties as long as they were physically capable of them – that’s still the principle in some sephardic communities. Biblical sources tended to treat twenty years as representing maturity, and for some purposes, like studying kabala, the appropriate age is at least forty. Well, at least Madonna is OK on that score.

It’s only from the fifteenth century onwards that Jewish children were seen as taking on the rights and responsibilities of adulthood at thirteen. The ceremony of the bar mitzvah, to mark the Jewish boy as having attained the age at which he could be counted in a minyan and called to the reading of the law, dates from this time.

Well, that’s the end of the history lesson. The point of it is really that social institutions, and especially religious traditions, like the bar mitzvah, are made up by people like us. We’ve got just as much right to make up our own way of doing things as did the rabbis in medieval Germany. What is, is the product of a process of change, and can be changed.

We tend to think about Jewish culture, and Judaism, in terms of its permanence and its resistance to change. Mike Leigh’s play about North London Jews was called ‘Two Thousand Years’ because we are fond of depicting our stuff as being two thousand years old. Everyone knows the joke about the Chassidic rabbis and the light bulb.

But the reality is that Jewishness has changed, in a very fundamental way, several times. The religion described in Judges, for example, is a decentralised affair with multiple holy places and holy men, and probably multiple deities too. The Judaism of the temple period, invented during the Bronze age monarchies that sort of correspond to the Book of Kings, involved a single centre, a hereditary priestly caste, a corps of priestly musicians, animal sacrifices, and so on. Talmudic Judaism, with rabbis and scholars and synagogues and Torah readings, is yet another invention – partly a response to the destruction of the temple, partly a recognition of the fact that even before that destruction huge numbers of Jews lived outside the land of Israel. Much of the familiar traditional liturgy and ritual is from the Middle Ages, or even later.

Right now, most Jews live their lives in the English-speaking world. Most of us are well integrated into the wider community, in terms of economic activity, friendships, and relationships. Cognitively and intellectually, most are already secularists.

So what does this secular bar mitzvah ceremony mean, to our family and our little community? Standing here, in this building which is not a synagogue, in the middle of a ceremony which is not a religious ceremony, we might be engaged in act of pointless frivolity – a departure from the Jewish mainstream which is just a stopping off point on the road to assimilation and disappearance.

Or we might be at the front of the next wave of change – the bellwethers, or harbingers, or whatever word you like, of the next kind of Jewishness to emerge. In which case when Lexei tells his grandchildren one day that he had a secular bar mitzvah, they’ll say, impatiently I hope, “Well duh – what other kind is there?” I can think of no better picture with which to leave you.

Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism

Some twenty years ago there was a row within the Jewish Socialists Group (JSG), a small organisation to which I have been affiliated from time to time. The row was over whether it was right for the group to publish a book written by one of its members, Steve Cohen, about anti-Semitism within the left. The ‘debate’ was very badly handled, and people were nasty to each other. In the end the Group did not publish the book, but a specially formed Jewish feminist collective, called Shifra, published it.

I parted company with the Group, partly about the book, partly about the way the debate was handled, and partly out of a general dissatisfaction with the way it was going; inevitably, there were some personal issues too. I didn’t write a stinging letter of resignation, I just stopped paying membership fees. Although I had been a high-profile member for a long time, no one ever sent me a renewal re-minder or asked me why I hadn’t renewed.

Recently there has been a new row going on within the JSG, about Anti-Semitism within the Anti-War movement. Some of the protagonists are the same as in the last one. Now it may be that the new row has been resolved in a more comradely way than the last one. I understand that there’s been a civil exchange of apologies between some of the parties. But the new row has persuaded me to put down a few thoughts of my own about the allegations of anti-Semitism on the left. Some of this has been brewing for some time anyway. I haven’t much enjoyed recent demonstrations by the Stop the War campaign, even when I marched with a Jewish contingent who were treated with the utmost courtesy by the organisers.

What do allegations that the left is anti-Semitic amount to? Most of it comes down to how the left treats the Israel-Palestine conflict and the question of Zionism. For some people, any criticism of Israel is either anti-Semitic in content or is motivated by anti-Semitism. It doesn’t even matter if the critics are Jews – such people are either dupes or ‘self-haters’. This is, of course, politically motivated stupidity, which is not susceptible to any rational argument or discussion.And there can be little doubt that some supporters of Israel use the ‘Anti-Zionism equals Anti-Semitism’ allegation to deflect and de-legitimise criticism of Israel and Zionism.

Nevertheless, there is a more substantial case that some of the left’s hostility to Israel and Zionism is anti-Semitic. This deserves serious consideration and reflection, not just a straightforward rejection. It seems to me that there are six main elements, which deserve a proper discussion.

· The use of anti-Semitic imagery in opposition to Israel. The best recent example of this was the New Statesman cover, which bore the headline ‘A Kosher Conspiracy?’ and showed a golden star of David standing on top of a lying-down British flag. But there are plenty of other examples, in pictures and in language. Discussions about the power of the Jewish or Zionist lobby in either the US or the UK are particularly prone to this. The suggestion that what happens in the world is because of behind-the-scenes manipulation by shadowy Jewish figures is an old one that pre-dates Zionism. These discussions usually ignore the fact that many other groups and countries maintain powerful lobbies themselves, and also seem to suggest that the US government supports Israel despite its own geo-political interests rather than because of them. Of course it isn’t anti-Semitic to draw attention to the activities of the pro-Israel lobby; but principled Socialists ought to be very careful not to appear to suggest that there is anything especially sinister about Jews being involved in lobbying activities.

· Disproportionate attention to Israel compared to other oppressive regimes. This is the suggestion that the left either ignores or doesn’t give comparable attention to other conflicts and oppression in the world (especially in Arab or Muslim countries). This is a somewhat tricky allegation – how to decide what is proportionate? Just the number of deaths, or the number of people been oppressed? And there is sometimes a response that attention to Israel comes from the historical relationship of Britain to the conflict – that Britain created the problem, so it’s incumbent on the British left to help sort it out. This doesn’t appear to count with respect to Cyprus, to Sudan (where it is directly true that the British deliberately created a problem), to or to Kashmir. Left involvement in solidarity with anyone involved in these conflicts has been minimal.

· Stricter standards applied to Israel. This is the claim that the Left is critical about negative aspects of Israel and that it is less bothered about other similar or worse breaches of human rights elsewhere. It’s not too hard to find some evidence of this. Without in any way excusing the behaviour of the Israeli military or the structures of discrimination that characterise the Israeli state, it is at least odd that there isn’t much attention given on the left to the breaches of human rights in Arab countries. Both Saudi Arabia and Iran consider eye gouging to be a legitimate judicial punishment, and courts do sentence people to have their eyes gouged out. I haven’t seen this reported in any mainstream or left paper. The answer that is given to this is usually that Israel should be judged by stricter standards because it purports to be a civilised and democratic country; I don’t get this argument at all – does that mean we should go easy on fascist dictatorships, because they’re not claiming to be democracies?

· Moral sadism in equating Zionists to Nazis. There is a nasty air that hangs around the claim that Israel fails to live up to its claims of moral superiority. The idea that the Jews set high moral standards and then fail to live up to them is a persistent theme in Christian anti-Semitism. This seems to me to be linked to the frequent association of Israeli abuses with Nazism. These parallels are rarely drawn in the context of other conflicts. The Interahamwe in Rwanda aren’t routinely compared to the Nazis, for example, even though the Rwandan genocide is often compared to the Holocaust. If this is intended as a tactical device to try to shame Jews into withdrawing support for Israel, it hasn’t been very successful. Rather, the perceived unfairness of the claim has made Jewish supporters of Israel much less likely to listen to criticism. I think that for some people, comparing the Israelis to Nazis feels like a liberation – a permission to dismiss the implicit (and sometimes explicit) Israeli claim that the Holocaust entitles the Jews to special treatment.

· Uncritical attitudes towards Arab nationalism and more recently Islamic movements. Neither Hamas, Hizbollah, nor the Muslim Brotherhood are progressive movements. They organise charitable work, care for the poor, and so on – so do plenty of reactionary Catholic, Protestant and indeed Jewish organisations. Some Islamic movements profess to be anti-Capitalist too – well, so does the Pope. But they are out and out reactionaries in their attitude towards woman, sexual minorities, Jews, criminal justice, education and just about anything else that matters. It’s worth saying, too, that the strategy and tactics of opposing the war by mass terror against the civilian populations of the warmongers’ capitals is the tactics of fascism. Opposition to Zionism, or to the war in Iraq, should not make them ‘kosher’ in the eyes of the Left.

· Anti-Semitism as an incorrect tactic. When there is an argument within the left as to whether a particular theme, argument or activity has come too close to anti-semitism, it won’t be long before someone reminds participants that appearing to be hostile to Jews (rather than Zionists) is ‘playing into the hands of the Zionists’. It’s hard to know where to start with this, particularly since the argument is often raised by people who have shown at least some sensitivity to the issue of anti-Semitism. But it‘s nevertheless wrong. Anti-Semitism should be treated as wrong in itself.

Many people on the left don’t see any problem in distinguishing between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Zionism is an ideology, and a set of organisations and institutions, whereas the Jews are an ethno-religious group. Of course you can be opposed to the first without being racist towards the second.

In reality the relationship is more complex and deserves a more serious analysis. For a start, most Zionists are Jews and – though we might wish otherwise, most Jews are Zionists. The distinction between opposing an ideology championed by most members of a group, and opposing the group itself, is conceptually possible, but maintaining it in practice requires the utmost clarity. Sadly, that clarity often hasn’t been there.

What’s more, “Zionist” has often been used as a code word for “Jew” by people who are outright anti-Semites. Much Soviet-sponsored anti-Semitism took this form – consider the loyal Jewish Stalinists who were accused of involvement in “Zionist plots” across East Europe and the USSR in the 1950s, or the vile outpourings of Soviet authors in the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, the far Right in Western Europe, in its more respectable publications, uses Zionist as a euphemism for Jew. If you start to follow the links on 9/11 conspiracy websites, often following a link from an apparently un-impeachable anti-imperialist source, you soon end up in the milieu where The Protocols are cited as a historical source. If diaspora Jews have some sort of moral obligation to say ‘Not In My Name’ regarding Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, then surely a similar imperative requires Anti-Zionists to distance themselves from this.

Perhaps more important, Zionism as an ideology contains a story about Jews, about their history, their current situation and status, and the meaning of Jewish identity; this story is only partly about Israel, the Palestinians, and the politics of the Middle East. The story is contestable, but it’s quite close to the story that most Jews believe. For example, most Jews think of their own Jewishness as an ethnic and national identity, not as a form of religious belief. This is true of most anti-Zionist Jews too – after all, how else can they protest about what is done ‘in my name’?

The commonality between the Zionist story and mainstream Jewish thinking isn’t a co-incidence. Of course it owes something to Zionist domination of Jewish organisations and institutions, particularly since the 1960s. Many Diaspora Jews believe that Israeli culture, much of it made up in the twentieth century, is their traditional culture. But it’s also because Zionism genuinely grew out of the experience and place in the world of European Jews. It wasn’t injected into their heads by some external group of manipulators. Zionism has become the dominant ideology among the Jewish communities of the world because it speaks to their concerns – the sense of insecurity, the feeling of not quite belonging, and ‘assimilation’ -- the inability to preserve a cultural legacy that is valued but not lived.

For many Jews, then, anti-Zionism means more than identification with the Palestinian side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – it also means a rejection of their story about themselves. This isn’t helped by the way that the Left from time to time engages in a direct polemic against it – arguing that the Jews are not a nation, just a religious group; Stalin’s 1913 definition often surfaces here, quoted by people who would be deeply ashamed to quote Stalin on anything else. Elsewhere there are discussions about whether Jews are really oppressed – or at least how low down on the official hierarchy of oppressions anti-Semitism ought to be placed.

But why does any of this matter? So what if honest, non-racist anti-Zionism is misconstrued as anti-Semitism? Life is complicated, shit happens, it’s not only Jews who have feelings, and it’s more important to be on the side of the oppressed than it is to be absolute correct in our formulations of support.

Well, I think it does matter.

Firstly, it matters to us – Jewish Socialists who want to be active in the Left, and to develop and argue for our own narrative of Jewishness. We need the confidence and security that comes from believing our comrades on the Left really are with us.

Secondly, it ought to matter to the Palestinians and their supporters. Of course it’s not surprising that the victims of Israel and Zionism are not terribly interested in the nuances of Jewish history. But practically and politically, it’s critical for them to be able to break up the monolith of support for Israel – to divide the liberals from the outright reactionaries, not to drive them closer together.

Finally, it ought to matter to the Left. Socialists owe it to themselves to face up to their own history, and to be truthful about it. This was the subject of Steve Cohen’s book, That’s Funny You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic. Before there was ever an issue of Zionism, there was much hostility on the Left and in the Labour Movement towards Jews – just as there was racism, homophobia and support for eugenics. There is much dirty linen that requires a good public washing. The Left is never going to be any good at multi-culturalism and ethic plurality unless it can deal properly with the Jews, the first minority immigrant culture it ever encountered.

Transmitting Torah: is this something you really want to do?

On 1st June I was invited by the North London Progressive Jewish Community to take part in a panel on ‘The Trouble with Transmitting Torah’. This is more or less what I said.

I’m the secretary of an organisation called ‘The Red Herring Club and Alternative Cheder’. I’m also one of the teachers in our little ‘cheder’, where we teach – among other things – a bit of Hebrew, some Yiddish, some folklore, and the stories of the Torah.

We describe ourselves as a secular Jewish Community based in London, oriented towards activities for children and families. We run activities and celebrate Jewish festivals and occasions in a non-religious way. We aim to preserve Jewish identity in a secular context and to foster the development and application of progressive and humanistic values.

We are a secular group, in that we are interested in those aspects of Jewish culture which form part of our identity but are not explicitly religious in form or content. I know that lots of members of Jewish communities, and synagogues as well, are actually secular Jews too, who have joined their schules as a form of cultural identification.

It’s not a condition of membership of our group that you are an atheist, but I am. I’m confident enough to say that the so-called “philosopher’s God”, the one who is necessary as a first cause in the universe or whose existence is entailed by his definition, and so on, is a logical nonsense. As it happens I don’t believe that the much more limited God in which the ancient Israelites believed, and who they wrote about in their Torah, is a logical nonsense – I just don’t think that he is a real entity.

So it ought to be straightforward to say that I don’t accept the traditional Jewish account of what the Torah is or how it came about – that is, that it was dictated in its entirety by God to Moses, all at once, on Mount Sinai (or was in on Mount Horeb?).

Very few serious biblical scholars believe this either, and those that do tend to be fundamentalists and creationists and so on. In fact, even among the orthodox, there is an internal tradition of questioning and criticising the received version of the Torah’s origins. As early as the 11th Century Abraham Ibn Ezra noticed that Deuteronomy was in a different style, and used different language, to the rest of the Torah.

These days most scholars believe that the Torah is a compilation of multiple texts, composed at different times and edited together in several stages. There are legitimate, genuine differences as to when and how this happened (If anyone wants a good introduction to the subject matter, I suggest Richard Friedman’s “Who Wrote the Bible?”), but it is possible to distinguish between several authors, each with their own particular linguistic styles and their own specific concerns. It’s possible too, to make hypotheses about what motivated these authors – among other ways, by looking at the ways in which they tell different versions of the same story.

And we can compare the narratives of the Torah with what we know from other sources – from archaeology, and from the study of other civilisations from the same time and regions – particularly Egypt, Assyria and Babylon. Now there are lots of debates going on here too, but it soon becomes clear that the Torah is not a reliable historical record. To cite just one example, the story that the Israelites were descended from people who escaped from Egypt and then conquered the Land of Canaan is probably just a story. There is some strong evidence that this story was made up relatively late in the First Temple period, to serve as a justification for the foreign policies of King Josiah. (Again, if anyone wants to follow up this argument, I recommend Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman’s “The Bible Unearthed”).

Well, perhaps the Torah is not great history, but maybe it’s a source of moral inspiration. Hardly. The morality of the Torah is complex and contradictory – how could it be otherwise, with all those different authors and editors? Lots of it was never intended for moral edification, of course. The ancestor-tales of the patriarchs were meant to explain where our tribe came from and how it was different from and related to the surrounding tribes, but they weren’t meant as moral lessons – maybe a bit of celebration as to how we put one over the other lot, but that’s all. It’s later commentators who have to engage in intellectual acrobatics to try to uncover some sort of consistent morality where none was intended.

The bits where moral lessons are intended are much worse. The Torah prescribes capital punishment for a wide variety of offences, including Sabbath-breaking and disrespect of parents. It’s very keen on hierarchy and unquestioning obedience, hereditary castes and privileges. There is a lot about purity and cleanliness, and even more about the dangers of mixing things – stuff, animals, and especially people. It’s big on animal sacrifices (with really lots and lots of detail on how these should be carried out). And finally, there is a very proscriptive sexual morality, no doubt aimed at maximising reproductive performance – which has the effect of anathematising many sexual practices and relationships that most civilised people regard as matters of personal choice.

So what possible place can this have in a group that aims “to preserve Jewish identity in a secular context and to foster the development and application of progressive and humanistic values”? Why do we bother trying to teach Torah to our kids? I think that there are four arguments for doing this.

Firstly, there are some really great stories in it, and not enjoying them would be a pointless act of self-denial – like not studying the Greek or Norse myths because they weren’t historically true or morally useful. And the individual stories are more interesting and more enjoyable if you understand where they fit in the overall narrative – for example, the story of Joseph and his brothers is better for knowing that these twelve are going to be the ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel. Knowing how these stories dovetail with other people’s – the connections between the story of Samson and those of other heroes like Herakles, for example – enhances rather than detracts from the enjoyment.

Secondly, for the sake of our overall project – preserving Jewish identity in a secular context – the Torah is important too. Now the culture and the identity that we aim to pass on to our children is not the culture of traditional Judaism, with its ritual observances. What we are trying to pass on is the critical, questioning, cosmopolitan aspects of being Jewish – not the rejection of mixing and hybridisation that we find in the Torah, but the sense of sitting across the boundary between two worlds that is, for us, at the heart of the modern Jewish experience, the identification with the alien and the outcast. Now we are aware that the culture that we are seeking to preserve is a much newer one – maybe two to three hundred years old at most. And it’s a culture that developed both in opposition to and engagement with the mainstream Jewish tradition. Our radical and revolutionary Jewish ancestors didn’t just fall from the sky, they grew out of the specific context of traditional communities, and if we want our kids to understand what that was like, they have to know about the context too – the shtetls and the shtiebels and the wonder-rabbis and all the rest of it.

Third, knowing what’s in the Torah – and the rest of the Tanakh too – is fundamental to participating in Western culture. Take Wilfred Owen’s poem “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young” for example – how can you make sense of that without knowing the story of Abraham? Or the song “Go Down Moses”, which we sang at our communal seder a few weeks ago? You can’t understand how the Exodus from Egypt has become a powerful symbol of liberation for many people around the world if you don’t know what the story is. Nor can you understand half of the pictures on the walls of art galleries. Of course, for the same reason it’s necessary to know something about the made-up stories of the Christian Bible too, and the Greek and Roman classics, but hey, we’re a secular Jewish group and we can only do so much.

Fourth and finally, there is what I think is the most important of all. Learning about what is in the Torah, and how and why it came to be there, is inoculation against a dogmatic way of thinking. Right now secularists, and secular Jews, need to know the Torah at least as well as the fundamentalists.

For a long time it was commonly held on the left that religion would just die out, as the relentless advance of technology demonstrated the superiority of scientific rationalism over superstition. Well, it hasn’t worked out that way, at least not so far.

It would be nice if we lived in a secular world, where the Bible was a historical curiosity, like the epic of Gilgamesh; but we don’t. Our kids are going to grow up among people who believe that the Bible is literally true, or that it contains important moral and spiritual truths, or – particularly in our own community, and even more in Israel, that it is an important contribution to political geography. Right now, they are growing up governed by people who sometimes appear to believe that the idea that the Biblical creation is true is a legitimate point of view that should be taught in schools. Some of these people are quite clever, and persuasive too.

For the moment, then, it’s important for secularists to know what is really in the Bible – to know the stories in all their magnificently contradictory details, and if possible to know how they got to be there too. Studying Torah – from a secular perspective – is one way to deal with fundamentalism. It’s not the only way – we could just say “it’s a load of superstitious rubbish, just ignore it” – but I’d rather put my trust in understanding and education.

Wireless LAN Misery

Tale of woe with a happy ending

A few months ago I bought a new PC. Obviously it needs to be connected to the internet, and since I had a Netgear wireless router on top of my broadband connection, I decided to buy a wireless USB adaptor. Now I already had a Linksys wireless G USB adaptor on one of my other PCs, and I was as fond of it as it is possible to be for a small blue plastic box. Most loveable of all was how easy it had been to set up; I plugged it into the USB cable, Windows prompted me for the installation disc, I clicked 'Next' a few times and it was working. It found my wireless network, connected to it all by itself, and never gave me any bother again - it just worked, straight out of the box.

So for the new PC, choosing Linksys was a bit of a no-brainer. Sure, some other adaptors were a tad cheaper, but my time is precious to me, and I was happy to pay a few extra quid for something that I could reasonably expect would work straight out of the box. I ordered exactly the same device as the one I already had from a well-known online retailer. While I waited for the new one to arrive, I sneakily detached the old Linksys adaptor from the old PC (well, the kids could survive without internet access for a day or two) and installed it on my new one, so that I could download service packs and so on. Once again, the installation was painless and it just worked.

Two days later the new one arrived. I unplugged the old chap, uninstalled the driver, and installed the new one. The software and the bumf in the box seemed to have changed a bit, but that didn't seem to be a major problem. The installation still proceeded smoothly enough. But - horror! - it refused to connect to my wireless network, even when I typed in the SSID and told it where to look. Of course, it could see all five of my neighbours' wireless networks, and connect to three of them.

After half an hour of fruitless re-boots of both PC and network, I gave up and called Linksys technical support. Relatively few steps into the automated voice menu, a nice man somewhere in India answered, gave me his badge number, and started listening to my problem. He asked me whether security was turned on in my network - it isn't, because a previous set of problems between PCs and the router could only be resolved by turning it off. So he suggested that I set the new PC to use a static IP address instead of a dynamic one, and left me to try this.

The static IP address made no difference, so it was back on the phone to Linksys technical support - this time the support guy was in Manila, where it was 3AM. We spoke for a while about configuration and version number stickers that should have been on either the device itself or the packaging material, but weren't there.
Between us we tried every possible configuration change that we could think of. We uninstalled and re-installed multiple times. Using one of my other PCs, we downloaded a new version of the drivers for the USB adaptor from the Linksys site, carried them over on a flash drive, uninstalled the old driver and tried the new one. No luck there either.

Then we fiddled with the settings on my router. My last vestige of security - the router doesn't broadcast its SSID - was stripped away, but this also made no difference. We confirmed that the new PC could still connect to the neighbours' networks - most of them don't have security enabled either.

Eventually, one and a half hours after we began the call, Chris in Manila and I admitted defeat. The previous version of the adaptor works happily with a Netgear wireless-G USB, but the present one doesn't. All I could do was return my new Linksys adaptor to the retailer and ask for a refund - minus the cost of recorded delivery postage in both directions, of course. The postage and the phone charges will work out about half the cost of the device, and I still needed to buy a new adaptor that will actually work.

The funny thing is that isn't the usual woeful tale of crappy offshore customer service. The Linksys technical support was really exemplary; few menus, a real human early on in the process, and one who understood the product and its environment.
But I was still out of pocket, frustrated and fed up. My computer still couldn’t connect and real experience has given the lie to claims that WiFi is an easy, customer-friendly technology.

So I escalated the problem. I know some PR people at Cisco, which owns Linksys, so I made it their problem too. Sure enough, a fiendishly clever engineer called me, said that this was not a ‘known issue’, and resignedly offered to find an ‘old’ version of the USB adapter at the back of a warehouse somewhere. He was as good as his word, and a new ‘old’ one duly arrived. Sadly, it worked no better than the previous one. I was decisively beaten.

I arranged for my ISP, Blueyonder, to move my broadband cable point. Two big South African guys came, climbed all over the roof, drilled holes in the wall and left. The router went upstairs, I connected via a wire, and happiness reigned.

Then, a couple of weeks later, in the middle of the night, the source of the problem revealed itself to me. My Netgear router had been set up for me by Vince from over the road. Vince didn’t really think much about whether I might change my computers over, or at least didn’t have a clear vision of me needing to do this but not knowing as much as him. So with the best will in the world, he had turned something called MAC access filtering on in my router’s settings. This meant that it would only ever talked to devices that it already knew about at the time that the filtering was activated. So all my new Linksys adapters – old and new – were locked out because the router was actively barring them.

I probably would have found that out if I had ever tried Netgear’s customer support, but the only experience I had ever had with them had put me off for good. So I had to wait until my unconscious mind dredged up a memory of Vince burbling away about how he was protecting the security of my network, and me saying ‘yeah yeah whatever…’
It took me five minutes to fix the problem, and I felt ten feet tall – but still a bit embarrassed that it taken me so long to ‘remember’ what the problem was. And angry that no-one else had ever thought to suggest MAC access filtering might be the problem. And ashamed that I needed someone else to suggest it. I can afford the kit for my wireless LAN, but I am not sure I am going to be able to afford the therapist’s fees.

Why I hate Channel 4's 'Rock School'

Rock School (Channel 4, Fridays at 9.30pm) is undoubtedly one of the worst things I have seen on TV for a very long time. Why is it so bad? Let me count the ways.

It pretends that Gene Simmons, the exhumed rock star personality who is the centre of the show, is a musician and a teacher when he really isn’t either. He has no interest in teaching anything, or in managing any sort of learning. It’s almost as if he remembered the bad bits of the classroom situation (teacher favouritism, boring lessons that go nowhere) and consciously decided to recreate them.

More seriously, he isn’t much of a musician, as is evidenced by the pathetic showing he puts up when he tries to play solo to a small audience of local community worthies – my fourteen year-old would really have done a lot better.

The show also pretends that Kiss, in which Simmons plays, is a great rock band, when it knows that Kiss are at best also-rans. If Kiss were really any good, why doesn’t the show play any of their songs? Instead it’s punctuated with lots of good tracks by David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, and Hendrix. For this we must be grateful, but it makes it plain that the producers, like everyone else, know that Kiss are crap.

The show is set in Christ’s Hospital school, just about the only secondary school in the country where it stands a chance of presenting rock music as some sort of subversive influence. The school has all sorts of bizarre Hogwarts-like touches, including the long blue coats that the students wear as uniforms. This lends some shred of credibility to the show’s main premise – that rock is going to provide some ‘real life’ to a conservative backwater.

Even so, it’s pretty obvious that it both staff and students are actually quite open to rock music – the headmistress pops in every so often to see how Simmons’ lessons are going, though some of her occasional remarks suggest that she, too, knows that there are better rock bands than Kiss. The kids are actually much better musicians, and much more rounded in their perspective on music, than the show’s star.

Simmons, and the programme, imply that rock is about rebellion – even though most grown-ups understand that it is a very mainstream part of the entertainment industry. Simmons is rebellious only in the sense that not tidying your bedroom is a protest against authority. When the ‘stultifying atmosphere’ of the school and its community become too claustrophobic for him, he escapes – not to go to a music club, or to hang out with real musicians, but to go to a lap-dancing club. Perhaps next week we’ll see him buying a wank-mag too, to underline just how much of a dangerous rebel he really is.

Speech at the Red Herring Communal Barmitzvah

Friends, comrades, and Gail’s relatives:

How many of you have been at a barmitzvah ceremony before? How many have never been to a barmitzvah ceremony?

When we were planning this event the others explained to me that this was the slot where the ‘elders of the community’ spoke. I’m not quite sure when I turned into an elder – I don’t feel old enough, not even nearly. And it sounds a bit sort of – Mormon really.

I prefer to think of this as the equivalent of the rabbi’s sermon – the long bit where he (or just occasionally she) gets all erudite and quotes from the torah in Hebrew, and the congregation can have a chat or a doze.

So in true rabbinical style, let’s consider the question: “Why are we here?”

The most obvious reason why we are here is to celebrate these four boys coming of age. We are all very proud of our first graduating class, and we hope they will be the first of many. There are already many things that they can do much better than we adults. At least as far as I am concerned foremost among them is the ability to keep time when playing music, which we will demonstrate beyond contradiction a little later in the day.

But why are we here? Why aren’t we in a synagogue, celebrating their entrance as an adult into a conventional Jewish community? And what is this ‘Coming of Age’ thing?

Well, to start with, we think of ourselves as secular Jews – with equal emphasis on both words. That is, we identify with Jewish culture (about which more later) but we are not religious. By that I don’t only mean that we are not frum – not observant. We don’t believe, as Orthodox Jews believe, that the Torah (the five books of Moses) was written by God and dictated to Moses.

Nor do we believe, as Reform Jews appear to believe, that when the superstitious outer layers are stripped away there’s an underlying core of superior ethics and morality. The truth is that those scriptures were written, edited and re-edited, and bolted together over a period of hundreds of years – and that during that long period what counted as morality and ethics changed a lot. Over succeeding centuries really very clever Jewish intellectuals have expended massive amounts of energy denying this, and trying to pretend that the scriptures contain a consistent narrative and a consistent ethical code.

But they don’t. The ancient Israelites were not monotheists (only monolatrists). They practiced animal sacrifices, their society was based on hereditary castes and clan loyalties, and they had a very prescriptive sexual morality with lots of “don’ts”, all designed to prevent practices which did not lead to reproduction. Not much of this is compatible with contemporary ethics and morality, and it takes a lot of intellectual acrobatics to pretend that it is.

Many Jews think the same way that we do. We’ve lost count of the number of people we have spoken to who admit that they don’t believe in God but have joined a synagogue as a form of communal identification – mainly because their cultural identity as Jews is important to them, and because they don’t believe that they have any other option apart from the synagogue. So why have we been able to maintain the courage of our lack of convictions?

Partly because we’ve been lucky. For the last five years we’ve been part of a group of people – the Red Herring Club – which has been dedicated to celebrating Jewish culture in a secular way. For most of those five years we have been organising our activities jointly with another group – the East London Alternative Cheder – so much so that in pretty much everything but name we form a single secular Jewish community.

We’ve celebrated festivals together in a way that felt right to us, allowing us to enjoy the traditions and the customs, and even some of the rituals, without having to take on (or pretend to take on) the theological and moral baggage that go with them.

Fifty years ago our choice, and our way of being Jewish, wouldn’t have looked so eccentric. Then there was a network of secular Jewish organisations – schools, friendly societies, summer camps and youth groups, housing associations – newspapers and magazines, publishing houses – all based on the idea that there was a kind of Jewish identity not based on religious knowledge and practice. In other countries, even now – especially in the US – much of this survives, on a smaller scale. This probably a good time to mention the Congress of Secular Jewish Organisations, which has recently accepted the Red Herring Club as its British – and first ever non-American – affiliate.

But since that network isn’t there any more, why have we bothered? Why try to preserve what doesn’t seem to be capable of preserving itself? Well, the short answer is because it feels right to us. We feel like Jews, and we don’t believe in God, so we’ve chosen this kind of identification. But feelings aren’t always right – maybe this is just a silly sentimental attachment that we should grow out of. Isn’t it time we just threw in the towel?

I don’t think so. This year, as every year, my family made our near-annual pilgrimage to the Womad festival. For those of you who don’t know it, it’s a glorious celebration of human cultural diversity. In a single day we listened to bands from Colombia, Ghana, Italy, Spain, and all over the place. Our favourites are the hybrids, like the Flamenco-influenced rock band that played on the main stage at dusk.

But there can only be hybrids like that if there are things to cross-breed; and our little part of the big picture, our contribution to the recipe, is secular Jewish culture. And if we expect other people to look after their traditions so that they have something to bring to the party, then surely we secular Jews have not just a right, but a duty too, to keep our own culture well watered and looked after.

And why are we celebrating like this? With this sort of ceremony – isn’t a coming of age ceremony, even without the ‘B’ word, inherently a religious activity? Maybe…but let’s not forget that many of the scriptures, the customs, the prayers, and the festivals of religious Jews are actually borrowed from other cultures and contexts – and then given a new meaning that fits them into a specifically Jewish story.

Pesach and Sukkot existed as non-religious agricultural festivals long before they were fitted into the story of the Exodus. The story of Purim was imported from the Bablyonian festival of Zagmuku, with the characters’ names based on the Bablyonian gods. The barmitzvah ceremony didn’t really exist before the middle ages, where it developed under the same influences that led Christians to invent the confirmation ceremony. (For Philip Pullman fans, it’s worth knowing that the latter largely replaced something called Oblation, where children were dedicated to God and given to monasteries at the age of five!)

So why shouldn’t secular Jews mark the coming of age of their children with a ceremony too? After all, once you accept that the Torah wasn’t written by God, you can really start to appreciate it – as a compendium of literature, love poetry, comparative ethics and Bronze Age political propaganda. So we assert the right to pick and choose from the storehouse of Jewish tradition without apology. To light candles, to read from the torah, and to have barmitzvah ceremonies.

So for those of you who have been to lots of other barmitzvahs, I hope you can appreciate why ours – is a little bit different. And for those of you who have never ever been to a barmitzvah before, they are all exactly like this.

Ducks for beginners

Fed up with slugs in your garden, but don’t want to start using pesticides? Tired of going out last thing at night to pull the revolting slimy things off your broccoli? There is a solution, and it’s 100% organic and requires (nearly) no effort. Get yourself a couple of ducks.

I’d wanted to have poultry from the time we first acquired a garden. My great-aunts had had chickens in their tiny yards in North London. As a small child I had watched, fascinated but a little scared, as they strutted their stuff and scratched around the concrete. I’d watched The Good Life as a kid, and as a student I’d read Undercurrents Magazine and thrilled to the idea of urban self-sufficiency. Now that I had all this land (well, thirty metres by ten, actually) I felt like I needed some livestock.

It took us years to get round to it, though. My wife was the one that took the most interest in the garden anyway – I just liked reading about self-sufficiency; actual digging usually left me exhausted for days. She put most of her efforts into growing a few veg – beans, carrots, sweet corn and pumpkins. The slugs put most of their efforts into the veg too, though. We never saw a single sweetcorn. We did get a single pumpkin – some weird genetic mutant that only came up the year after we planted it, and which must have given off some odour that repelled slugs. Nothing much else managed to escape them. We had strawberry plants, some of which even fruited – but the slimy ones always got to the fruit before we did.

We were still committed to not using poisons. We found some organic anti-slug deterrent, which we sprinkled all round the veg beds. The slugs obviously couldn’t read the packet, because they weren’t deterred at all. We made beer traps – we dug great moats around the beds, lined them with bin liners and filled them with the slops from the local pub’s drip tray. We used to go round on a Friday evening with a bucket, which the staff always cheerfully filled. If any of you are reading this, we were telling the truth, we really did want it for the slugs – we weren’t drinking it. The moats worked better, but still the slugs got through. I don’t know whether they flew across, or climbed across on the bodies of their fallen comrades, but they still managed to get to the broccoli, and the courgettes, and anything else we planted.

But a weekend away on an organic smallholding in Cornwall changed our lives. The small farmer – he was quite a big bloke, actually – had half a dozen Indian Runner ducks on his property. We helped him collect the eggs in the morning, and I confessed my long-held desire for poultry in the garden. “They’re really no trouble,” he said. “And they eat slugs, too.” Suddenly my wife was interested. The following week I swung into action with the aspects of gardening I like best. I bought “Country Smallholding” magazine, and a mail order copy of “Raising Ducks in Your Back Garden for Fun and Profit.” In between a terrifying chapter on poultry diseases and a grim section on how to kill and butcher your ducks for meat, I learned the basics.

The first, and most important, is that you don’t need a pond. Ducks are quite happy with a plastic washing up bowl full of water, provided that you change the water every day. They drink out of this, dunk their heads in it – apparently they don’t have very good tear ducts, so their eyes can sore if they can’t dunk – and occasionally jump in it for a bit of a splash.

The second important thing is that you need somewhere to shut them up at nights, a little shed called an ark. They don’t need very much room in there – ours is about the size of a dog kennel, with a door that bolts. We built the first one ourselves, but we made it out of chipboard, so it rotted away in about half a year. We replaced it with a flatpacked affair from Forsham Poultry Arks, which is sort of the Barratts of the poultry world.

The ark is partly to keep them quiet till you (and your neighbours) are ready to get up – they will start quacking when it gets light – but also to keep them safe from predators. Since we got the ducks we have had regular visits from our local neighbourhood fox. In fact, we have put our ark inside a larger (three metres by two metres) chicken run, made out of wooden frames with chicken wire, and with a concrete floor to keep out the fox. This isn’t strictly necessary, and Forsham sell a smaller ‘rye run’ which fits on the front of the ark. When we are in the garden, or even in the kitchen, we let the ducks out to wander round.

We cover the floor of the small ark with straw, which we pile in quite deep. I don’t know if they really need it to be so deep, but it’s the only luxury they get, and it does look a bit more cozy when they are sunk down into it. Changing the straw, which the ducks “enrich” heavily, is the only nasty job associated with having ducks. On the other hand, the straw is great for the compost.

The nicest job is collecting the eggs. Our ducks are Khaki Campbells, which is a good laying breed. Most days each of them lays an egg. They started laying in the Spring, and were due to stop laying once the days got too short. But they didn’t seem to know this, and apart from a few really cold days in December laid all through the winter.

There is surprisingly little to do. Every morning we:

unbolt the door and let them out,
collect the eggs
replace the water in the washing up bowl
put a cupful of grain and a half a cup of layer pellets in another washing up bowl.

The whole thing takes less than five minutes a day. At night we shut them up in the ark – this was a bit fraught at first, because they didn’t really understand what we wanted them to do. But now it’s a well-established routine, and most nights they put themselves away when it gets dark.

Once a week we change the straw in the ark, and put the old straw in the compost bin. At the same time we put a cupful of grit in another bowl. The ducks need grit to replace the calcium they lose by making egg shells, and also because they use it in their gizzards to break up the grain so that they can digest it.

We were a little worried that the ducks would damage the plants in the garden, but it hasn’t really been a problem. They do peck at the grass a bit, but it doesn’t seem to have done it any harm. We put a bit of chicken wire round the vegetable beds when the plants are young. And their webbed feet do much less damage to the garden than chickens’ claws would have. They don’t seem to do that frantic scratching thing that preoccupies chickens for so long.

And the slugs? They love them to death. They spend most of the Spring and Summer poking around with their bills, rooting among the dead leaves and under the plants. They got lots of the slugs early in the year, before most of them had had a chance to lay eggs; and they must have hoovered up most of the remaining hatchlings too. At any rate, we were hardly bothered by them at all last year, even though our neighbours’ crops have been devastated. And we haven’t bought an egg since March 2002.

When I was Irish

First, to be absolutely clear about this, I'm not Irish. None of my parents, grandparents, or remote ancestors are from Ireland. I've only ever been to Ireland once, on a work trip which involved an ecumenical service to dedicate a new halal abattoir, but that's another story.

Four years ago I decided to learn to play music, and hit on the tin whistle as my instrument of choice. It was cheap, portable, and hard to break or ruin. One thing led to another, and I found myself at traditional Irish music classes run by an organisation called Meitheal Cheoil at the Camden Irish Centre -- the only place I could find where it was possible to actually have tin whistle lessons.

Within a few weeks I was beginning to pick out some traditional songs on my whistle. We learned by ear, not by reading music. This suited my musical abilities, but presented another problem; the rest of the group all knew the songs, and I didn't.

I hadn't really thought about this previously. I just wanted to learn an instrument, and was really taking a free ride on the Irish part. But for Methail Cheoil, the passing on and preservation of a part of Irish culture, as a live tradition rather than as a museum piece, was an essential part of the activity.

So I bought CDs, and listened to them as often as I could. There was no point in buying innovative cross-over reworking of the traditional tunes; I needed the raw stuff, so that I could get the songs into my head. To get the simplest renditions, I had to immerse myself in Hiberno-schlock, a twilight world of albums with names like 'Twenty Irish Songs to Warm Your Heart' and 'Irish Party Singalong Tunes'. You'd probably recognise the Jewish equivalent if you saw it, and probably run a mile.

Of course, I did ironically, so that was OK. And there was something rather liberating about taking a dunk in someone else's culture, and not having to worry about whether it was really politically acceptable to enjoy maudlin nationalist sentimentality. Some of the Irish members of the class worried about it rather more.

In any case, it must have worked, because by Christmas I was playing in the beginner's band at the Irish Centre Ceilidh. And that's where I had my revelation; anyone could be Irish if they wanted to.

Even in the whistle class, no one had seemed to find it particularly strange that I as a non-Irish person was participating in their thing. But there it wasn't terribly clear who was and wasn't Irish. Some of the students were first-generation immigrants -- some old people reconnecting with the traditional music they'd grown up with, and some Irish yuppies for whom it was a class that they might have taken back home -- but most were second or even third generation 'assimilated' Irish, on a roots thing. They didn't sound or look that different from me, a third-generation descendant of Jewish immigrants.

But the Ceilidh, which included people from the other music classes and from the broader Irish community, was a whole new experience. Irishness, at least in its North London manifestation, was clearly a much more inclusive category than I had been prepared for. There were quite a few Black Irish people, and one or two Chinese ones. There were a couple of others with what looked to me like Jewish faces, though they might equally have been Greek.

I don't know how everyone in the room felt about this; but I do know that there was no outward sign that anybody had any feelings about it at all. Then and subsequently, I have never come across any handwringing about who the traditional music activities ought to be for, let alone 'who is an Irish person?' The activity was Irish in content, and that was enough. Other, non-Irish people's participation did not detract from its Irishness or threaten its existence or value.

In our community, interest by others in our culture is rarely taken at face value. Although discussions about Jewish culture are often shot through with barely-veiled assumptions about cultural superiority, we are usually suspicious about anyone else wanting to partake. Perhaps it's because we are afraid that it won't stand up to much scrutiny from anyone without a sentimental attachment to it; or maybe we are worried that they are only showing an interest so that they can insinuate themselves into our superior institutions. Why else would non-Jews be trying to sneak into our schools?

Either way, there is an all-pervasive obsession with maintaining and policing a boundary, with determining who is and isn't entitled to come in. Look at the selection processes associated with admission to Jewish schools, or the application forms for joining a synagogue. No-one at Meitheal Cheoil ever asked me for my parents' marriage certificate.

I don't want to imply that Irish culture is inherently inclusive and anti-racist. I'm sure that someone else could find plenty of counter-examples, together with joyous examples of Jewish inclusiveness and syncretism. But I don't think that the Jewish obsession with boundaries and separation, which make up an enormous proportion of our law and our lore, are merely accidental add-ons to our culture either. In biblical and talmudic Judaism, the principle of distinction and separation, and the importance of keeping things from mixing, is always imbued with a moral and theological dimension.

We are forbidden to mix meat and milk; fish and meat on the same plate; wool and linen in the same garment; and forbidden to yoke two kinds of animals to the same plough. God does not like it when we mix things, stuff, or ourselves. It's worth remembering this next time you get into one of those discussions about the essential ethical core of Judaism.

I enjoyed the time I spent being Irish. I think it's one of those things that everyone ought to try at least once. It would be nice, too, if it was easier for other people to have a go at being secular Jews too. If that seems an inherently self-contradictory idea to you, have a think about why. Is it because, despite protestations to the contrary, we only have two models of Jewish identity - a religious one that does allow for conversions, and a racial one, that doesn't?

A version of this appeared in Jewish Socialist magazine.

Rosh Hashana for secular Jews

Most Jewish festivals lend themselves to a secular celebration, based on finding some contemporary dimension to a historical commemoration. Hanukkah is a good time to reflect on both religious freedom and national liberation, Pesach suggests a contemplation of freedom from slavery, and so on.

Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur are not well suited to this approach. Unlike almost all the other festivals, they don't commemorate a real or imagined historical event. And they are all about things that don't seem to make much sense outside of a religious context – judgment, confession, sin.

So is there a way into these festivals for secular Jews? Well, let's start by looking at the historical background.

There's not much about Rosh Hashana in the torah. Whereas Leviticus goes into some detail about how to do Yom Kippur and Sukkot, Rosh Hashana is defined as a day of 'complete rest... commemorated with loud blasts', but there's not much else – and it's not called a New Year celebration at all. That's not too surprising, because the ancient Israelites seem to have celebrated their New Year in the Spring. Originally the Hebrew months had numbers rather than names, and by convention Tishri, the month in which Rosh Hashana happens, is the seventh month rather than the first.

For a herder community, the year did begin in the Spring, with the birth of the New Lambs. For a community engaged in more settled, arable-based agriculture, the Autumn harvest was a better time to mark the end of the year. So at some point the Israelites must have changed the time at which they deemed the year to have started. In fact, it's slightly more complicated than that, because Jews later recognised four new years – a New Year for Kings, used for counting the years of the reign and other civil purposes; a New Year of cattle, used for counting animals for tax and tithe purposes; a similar New Year for trees; and the religious New Year, in Tishri.
Of course, having more than one New Year, and changing the date at which New Year is celebrated, are not restricted to the Jews. Britain has a separate 'financial year', and the custom of celebrating the beginning of the year in January doesn't go back beyond the eighteenth century in this country.

But the transformation from herders into agriculturalists meant more for the calendar than just moving the New Year. Herder could make do with a lunar calendar – one based on the phases of the moon. Farmers need more from a calendar, particularly if they have some form of state organisation with taxes and so on. In particular, they need to be able to fix some dates in a way that is consistent with the seasons – so that the harvest festival comes at the right time of year, for example. As they settled down the Israelites moved from a fully Lunar calendar to a 'luni-solar' one.

The Israelites' dating system was based on twelve lunar months, each beginning and ending at the New Moon (the Hebrew word for 'month' has the same root as the word for New Moon, just as our word 'month' has the same root as 'moon'). But twelve lunar months gives you a 'lunar year' of just 354.36 days – well short of the 365.25 (ish) days needed for a solar year. If you use a purely lunar calendar, you soon get out of sync with the seasons.

Originally the Israelites solved this problem by adding in ten days 'between' the years. These ten days were neither part of the old year nor the new one. Incidentally, lots of other cultures did the same thing, in Asia and in Europe; in medieval France the peasants had a twelve-day between-years period, with each day representing one month in the year to come. For the Israelites, their ten-day period was a scary time. Without the proper preparations, the New Year might not might not start auspiciously, or might not start at all. So the ten day period was marked with rituals of purgation and sympathetic magic. The custom of eating sweet food to ensure that the coming year is sweet, and of eating dishes of sliced carrots (which are alleged to resemble gold coins) are examples of sympathetic magic. Fasting, the scapegoat ritual and its successor kapores, and the custom tashlikh, are all purgation rituals (the Romans did something similar before their New Year in March, and the word 'February' comes from the Latin word for purgation).

There are lots of common elements with a Babylonian festival of Judgment that also took place in the Autumn. This is what you'd expect – partly because the Babylonians had a similar luni-solar calendar, and partly because much of what we think of as the Jewish religion was defined during the period when the Judaean ruling class was in exile in Babylon. The Jewish month names are the same as the Babylonian ones, and follow the names of the Babylonian gods (ask a Rabbi to explain that one).

Eventually, the Jews worked out a better luni-solar calendar. They discovered what is sometimes called the Metonic cycle, after the Greek astronomer who worked out the relationship between the solar and lunar cycles, and concluded that the two calendars could be brought into line by the addition of an extra lunar month in seven years out of every nineteen. For a while, the decision as to whether to add an extra month was made empirically, first by the temple priests and then by the Sanhedrin which succeeded them. In the fourth century (the fourth century by Christian reckoning, that is, though the Christians were not reckoning it that way at the time) Hillel 2nd set down the calculations used to make the decision.

But even though they had a better calendar which no longer needed the ten between-year days, the Jews kept their ten day festival of purgation, just as they'd earlier kept the tradition that the New Year was in Tishri but the first month was Nisan, in the Spring.

Does any of this matter? Well, I think it does. Firstly, because an understanding of some of the historical and anthropological dimensions provides a way into celebrating the festival for those of us who find praying ridiculous. Secondly, because it illustrates the way in which Jewish culture isn't at all something constant and unchanging, but rather is built up of many different layers, each a product of a specific set of historical circumstances. And it's kind of nice to have a link back to something that the Babylonians did.

And thirdly, because it gives a nice insight into the 'watchmaker' argument. Religious people often point to the way in which the universe is, for them, well arranged, and then claim that this is proof of the existence of God – if you saw something as complex and well-made as a watch, you'd assume a watchmaker, they say. Well, the calendar is a brilliant human response to a not very well ordered celestial clock. The cycles that are observable from earth don't relate exactly to each other, and the attempts to make an order out of this has resulted in some of the most brilliant science and some of the most bitter religious and cultural disputes. If the celestial clock is a watch made by God, then he's either an incompetent or a sadist.

(NB. Much of this a shameless plagiarism from Hershl Hartman's "The Jewish New Year Festival: A guide for the rest of us". Hershl is a vegvayzer in the Sholem secular Jewish Community in LA. Naturally, his document is longer and better - all the mistakes and over-simplifications are my own work.

There is also a very good detailed explanation about the Jewish calendar in Wikipedia.