Bernard Spiegal

A D’var Torah is a speech or text exploring a theme, verse, or idea spun out from the weekly Torah (five books of Old Testament) reading conducted in synagogues.

A D’var Torah is essentially homiletic in character, seeking to convey a moral message, enjoining a congregation to right thinking and right behaviour.

Moral purpose shattered

This moral purpose is shattered if a D’var Torah commentary seems out of kilter with the wider views known to be held by the commentator. This is the position we find ourselves in when we consider Chief Rabbi Mirvis’s weekly D’var Torahs. (Note that Rabbi Mirvis is Chief Rabbi only to United Synagogue congregations and affiliated organisations – i.e. Chief Rabbi only to a minority (30% – 40%) of UK Jews. There is a serious problem of him being treated as somehow representative of all, or at least a majority of UK Jews)

A Mitzva (A good deed)

In two recent D’var Torahs, Rabbi Mirvis delivered homilies revolving around the themes of food, sharing, gift giving.  His commentary of August 5, headed ‘Food Parcels Save Lives[1]’, directs attention to what is ‘a great mitzvah [good deed] to send food parcels, and I am so deeply inspired to see the extent to which we see this in our communities when somebody is sitting Shiva [period of mourning], is in hospital, if they’re not well, or when somebody has just given birth …’. Note, ‘our’ communities.

Mirvis continues. ‘It’s a marvellous facility from the goodness of our hearts…the “sending from our hands” is an integral part of what it means to be a giving and a great nation. Great Nation? To whom or what does he refer? And how wide is the scope of the ‘goodness of our hearts’? Does the goodness extend to West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza’? Silence on the question is the resounding answer.

‘And in addition, we have so many wonderful organisations and charities sending hundreds of food parcels to needy people.’ Gaza, take note. You have undoubtedly missed this largesse.

Overflowing now with regard for his version of Judaism, presumably shared by those of his congregants that can stomach this sort of blisteringly insensitive, cruel stuff, he concludes, ‘It gives us such enormous simcha [celebration] in our lives to know that we are capable of assisting others. The sending of food parcels saves many lives, and also brings true simcha into our hearts.’ The only comment possible here is, ‘no comment.’  Rabbi Mirvis has turned the meaning of words into dust.

A whole D’var Torah devoted to the themes of food, sharing and giving yet not a scintilla of reference to Palestine and the mutilation of goodness by the Zionist state to which he cleaves. What is one to say of a ‘spiritual leader’ who can write these self-satisfied, self-regarding encomiums, devoid of irony or a sense of dissonance?   ‘The sending of food parcels saves many lives’ – tell it to the people of Gaza.

Don’t Be Like an Ammonite or a Moabite

Not content with his 5 August homily, Rabbi Mirvis’ issues one on the 19 August entitled ‘Don’t Be Like an Ammonite or a Moabite’.[2]

Once again, the article enters an irony-free zone. Mirvis explains that ‘when the Israelites were travelling through the wilderness on their way to the Holy Land, and they came across the Moabites and the Ammonites, who showed them no hospitality whatsoever. They didn’t even offer bread or water – therefore, we should never be like them’.

 Obviously, something has gone terribly wrong. For modern day Israel, along with those Jews who are congenitally uncritical of that state, are surely ‘like them’ given that Israel is the author and maintainer of Gaza’s starvation.

I’m not connected to any synagogue, so I have no idea, no sense of how Mirvis’s sanctimonious, vacuous pieties are received by congregants. Do any of the participants in a D’var Torah raise complaint or objection? Do any see the cruel irony inherent in Rabbi Mirvis’s words and orientation?

The worry must be that so far-gone have some Jews become in deifying the Israeli State, that they have lost all critical faculties as they bend the knee to this relatively modern idol. An idol fashioned from human desires by human hands, as all idols are.

[1] https://chiefrabbi.org/all-media/food-parcels-save-lives-dvar-torah-for-parshat-reeh/

[2] https://chiefrabbi.org/all-media/dont-be-like-an-ammonite-or-a-moabite-dvar-torah-for-parshat-ki-teitzei/