Chief Rabbi makes heartfelt plea for less argument and more respect in communal life

Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis made a passionate call for respect for other, differing viewpoints, in a keynote address to the Board of Deputies plenary session on Sunday.

Mirvis frequently speaks about “the three A’s” — assimilation, antisemitism and apathy — together with advice on how to tackle what he views as issues damaging to the Jewish community.

But for the first time, he added a fourth “A” — argument. It was not lost on his audience that he was speaking after a group led by former senior vice-president Gary Mond formed a rival organisation to the Board, claiming that the Board no longer represented their views.

The Chief Rabbi said that when he first assumed office, he had made a commitment “that no-one would hear from me, during my tenure, any public criticism of any other religious branch of Judaism”, a pledge he had kept since his election. He expressed gratitude to his colleagues in other religious denominations for respecting that view, too.

“The most essential pillar of Jewish engagement is argument”, he said, but it was necessary that such argument should be constructive. Using a cricketing analogy, Rabbi Mirvis declared: “Wherever we are in the community, whatever we are standing for, let’s be batters, not bowlers. Let’s score runs, sometimes fours, otherwise sixes, for our cause. Let’s be champions for what we believe in, and try to persuade others of our point of view. Let us never become bowlers, trying to destroy others, Let’s go for the —and not for the man or the woman”.

He said that argument could be “fierce” but that it should be conducted in a “menschledik” way, “the only way forward for our community. It is our passion for Jewish unity that gives us strength, and if there is an absence of it, the result is that we are weak within, and our representations are weak without”.