A sermon delivered at Hineinu, the inaugural conference of The Movement for Progressive Judaism, on Saturday 20 June 2026, Parashat Chukkat 5786:
Hineinu. Here we are. But where are we, actually? How is the name of this place pronounced, and what does the name mean? According to Wikipedia, fount of all knowledge, there is more than one answer to this question. Most people pronounce Daventry the way it’s spelt, and this suggests an Anglo-Saxon root. The name would mean “the tree of Dafa”, just like Coventry is most likely “the tree of Cofa”. Others, however, prefer to pronounce the name of this place something like “Danetree”, implying perhaps a Viking origin. Surprisingly, Wikipedia does not include the possibility that Daventry’s origin is Yiddish, although given the amount of praying and singing we have done here, it might well be “the tree where we daven [pray in Yiddish].”
Intriguingly, there is one possible origin of Daventry’s name which is slightly less fanciful than my Yiddish theory. In Brythonic, a language in the Celtic family, the name might be taken to read as Dwy-Avon-Tree, the town of two rivers. Daventry, a place where two streams meet. Apt indeed for the place where we mark two streams of Judaism, Liberal and Reform, as they meet.
Unsurprisingly since he came from around here, Shakespeare knew of this town, referring in Henry IV Part I to “the red-nosed innkeeper of Daventry.” Some three and a half miles from Daventry is a place of local interest, intriguingly called The Holy Well of Braunston. By all accounts, however, it is less a mysterious and ancient source of water than a water run-off for the church roof. Nevertheless, it is a well of sorts, and it helps link us to the well we encounter in this week’s portion Hukat, Numbers 21:17-18.
After wandering in the wilderness, the Israelites arrived at a place called Be’er, which is the well where God said to Moses, “Assemble the people that I may give them water”. Then Israel sang this song:
Spring up, O well – sing to it –
The well that the chieftains dug…
FIFA missed a trick by not declaring these verses to be the origin of the dehydration break. In later traditions this well was presented as magical and portable, and it became associated with Miriam. The first words of the song at the well read: ‘Alu Ve-er, ‘Enu La, and like so much in our tradition it bears many interpretations. Rabbi Yaakov Zvi Mecklenburg, one of the sternest critics of Reform in the nineteenth century suggested that the word ‘enu os related to a root implying movement. The song at the well is a call to mobilize, to activate, to work as a movement.
The best well I know is called Il Pozzo di San Patrizio in Orvieto in Umbria. The first time I saw it I recited the blessing to be said by rabbis upon encountering a metaphor they know they will later use in a sermon. The well, dating back to the time of Pope Clement VII in the sixteenth century, is ingeniously designed in the form of a double helix, so that you don’t meet a donkey ascending as you and your donkey are descending. It has maximum beauty, maximum accessibility, maximum movement.
A Movement is like the well at San Patrizio, shaped like a double helix. We are called upon simultaneously to drill down and to face up. The well symbolizes different aspects of a Movement’s task:
Radical Thinking
From its inception, there has been a radical dimension to Progressive Judaism in its various manifestations, an urge to the root of things. This has come to expression in philosophical inquiry and textual scholarship, and in interrogating the pressing political and social questions of the day. It’s not that Progressive Judaism is always and only radical – it is not. But the well heading leading in both directions symbolizes the notion that if you want to get to the root of things, you have to face up to them. Commenting in the fifteenth century on our verse from the Song at the Well, Abraham Saba offered a reading reflecting the contemporary realities of Inquisition and expulsion. He wrote: “for now Israel is in decline, but there will come a time when it will rise.”
To be true to a radical tradition means to be prepared to look honestly at the impossible complex times in which we live, standing up to injustice and facing down fear. It also means to innovate, in the spirit of Isaiah (43:19):
See, I am doing a new thing
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.
Personal Search
Progressive Judaism calls us to search for meaning. The well leading down to the fundament and up to the firmament epitomizes the move that each of us, supporting each other in community and solidarity, is invited to make. Some employ tools provided by psychology and counselling, others informed by spiritual practices and personal search, each of us in our own way may find ways up and down the well. We may take with us the words of Lily Montagi, who declared:
We are beings created by the living spirit of goodness, truth, love and justice, who wish to return and draw from our source renewed energy with which to carry on our lives.
Sources and Texts
The well to which we sing here, where two streams meet, also stands for a commitment to dig ever deeper into the sources of our tradition, and to bring wisdom from these sources up to ground level. In an address in 1956 at the inauguration of what was to become the Leo Baeck College, Leon Roth wrote:
The ultimate fount of our theology is the Scriptures, the meaning of which is sought out the by the activity of Midrash.
Roth averred seventy years ago that this midrashic activity, if undertaken in good faith and with seriousness of purpose, could yield fresh insight, Aggada, and from that fresh insight might emerge fresh direction. Halachah. An authentic Jewish Movement should be committed to plumbing the depths of Jewish learning, informed by the same urgency captured in a recent poem by Rabbi Rachel Barenblat:
Will I too
Be a wellspring of Torah,
A source of living waters,
Or will I stagnate here?
Rise and sing, o well! Move in the motion of a double helix, both up and down. The great fourteenth-century commentator Bahya ben Asher employed a remarkable phrase commenting on this song at the well:
Ascend to the place from which you were hewn.
What an excellent aspiration to offer a Movement for Progressive Judaism. Let us go up to our origin.
A Movement at its best is like the Pozzo di San Patrizio in Orvieto – a double helix well allowing us to go deep and aim high. In it we are cast down, and also raised up. In it we look to the foundations, and think of the sky. We bore down into the particular, and aspire to the universal. We dig into tradition, and draw up innovation. We should remember that in Hebrew water, mayim, is a plural noun, and we should not be disturbed when there are differences and disagreements. Our well is situated in a particular place, with a particular set of traditions, but it is case deep and wide, and the water it provides has plurality and possibility. Another such word, singular in English, plural in Hebrew, is hayim, life. Life exists in the double helix. So does a Movement, facing up and doubling down.
We face enormous challenges. We should acknowledge that our world and our people is in crisis. Many crises in fact – relating to security, ideology, technology, ecology, and more. Our crisis is moral, and existential. The only chance we have of being equal to the enormity of these challenges is by banding together, facing up and doubling down, in great seriousness and with great joy.
There are differences of approach and ideology in this holy well. But water and life were always plural, and there is no need to deny the differences or to be afraid of them. Each of us will likely move along the double helix – sometimes more traditional, sometimes more liberal. Sometimes more radical, sometimes more consensual.
Let is draw together from the well, going deeper and aiming higher.
Here, in Dwy-Avon-Tree, the place where two streams meet.
Shabbat Shalom