Rabbi Elliott Karstadt
Growing up as a patrilineal Jew and now serving as a rabbi in one of the country’s largest synagogues is a journey that is only possible in Progressive Judaism.
But before I tell my own story, first an older one (you may have heard it before).
An elderly Jewish woman goes to the travel agent one day and announces her intention to visit India.
“But it’s such a long journey!” they tell her, “and those trains, how will you manage? The food is too hot and spicy for you, and you won’t be able to drink the water. You’ll get sick – the plague, hepatitis, cholera, typhoid, malaria, God only knows. Why torture yourself?”
But she insists. So the necessary arrangements are made, and off she goes to India. When she arrives, undeterred by the noise, the smell, and the crowds, she makes her way to an ashram, where she joins the seemingly never-ending queue of people waiting for an audience with the guru. The attendant tells her she will have to wait at least three days to see the guru.
“That’s ok,” she says.
Eventually she reaches the hallowed portals. There they tell her firmly that, because there are so many people there to see him, each person will be allowed to say only three words to the guru.
Rabbi Elliott with his parents and brother at his Bar Mitzvah at Finchley Progressive Synagogue
“Fine,” she says.
She is finally ushered into the inner sanctum, where the guru is seated, ready to bestow spiritual blessings upon eager initiates. Just before she reaches the holy of holies they again remind her that she has just three words. As she approaches, she does not prostrate at the feet of the guru. Instead, she stands right in front of him, crosses her arms, fixes a stern gaze upon him, and says: “Sheldon, come home.”
This story of Sheldon and his mother took on a nuance for me a number of years ago, as I was embarking on my journey to become a rabbi.
I was about to travel up to Manchester to lead my first High Holy Day services as a student rabbi, and I was going to begin with this story. In preparation, I told it to my own mother, who isn’t Jewish.
She shared the joke, and laughed in the right places, but as we laughed together at the punchline, it dawned on me that this situation might so easily describe the two of us.
Here I was, reading my Rosh Hashanah sermon to my mum. Me, a student rabbi; my mum, a non-Jew who felt that making a commitment to any religion at that point in her life would be insincere. She could so easily have been marching down to Leo Baeck College and demanding that I ‘come home’.
Rabbi Elliott joining the Alyth clergy team in 2020
Fortunately, nothing would be more unlikely – both of my parents have been nothing but supportive and encouraging throughout my journey to the rabbinate and beyond. A journey, as I said at the start, that is only possible in Progressive Judaism.
That’s because in 1955, Liberal Judaism adopted a policy of accepting children of Jewish fathers but not Jewish mothers – patrilineal Jews – into the community, on the proviso that they have a Jewish upbringing and identify as Jewish. Reform Judaism introduced a similar policy in 2016 and it has therefore become a founding practice of our new unified Progressive Judaism in the UK and Ireland.
Today – just as when my parents started looking for a place for me to go to cheder and prepare for a Bar Mitzvah in the early 1990s – parts of the Jewish world will not accept patrilineal Jews like me, my brother and my sister, as Jews, demanding instead that we ‘convert’.
And this is a shame – as there are so many Jews who are lost to Judaism. Today, I go online and find groups on social media populated by patrilineal Jews who feel a great sense of Jewish identity and an inextricable pull towards our wonderful tradition, but are unable to find community, shut out because the matrilineal principle is so embedded in so many communities.
It is only in Progressive communities that patrilineal Jews will be accepted. Because at the cornerstone of our Judaism is the task of expanding this inclusive community, of continuing to develop, to bring more people into our Jewish home, and to make more people feel at home.
- Rabbi Elliott Karstadt is a member of the clergy team at Alyth.