Leap of faith: Imagining the next Progressive century

Delegates from 25 countries gathered last weekend in London at the Liberal Jewish Synagogue to mark the centenary of the founding of the World Union for Progressive Judaism.

At the risk of oversimplifying history, I would summarise the first 100 years of the World Union as asking: can Progressive Judaism build institutions strong enough to hold us? And I want to suggest that the question for the next 100 years must be: can Progressive Judaism build ideas strong enough to carry us?

Not idea-building as an afterthought to institutional survival, but idea-building as its prerequisite. For Progressive Judaism may endure even where particular institutions change, merge, weaken or disappear. But it cannot endure if we lose the ideas that make it spiritually compelling, morally serious and Jewishly alive.

In 1899, Lily Montagu wrote in her essay Spiritual Possibilities of Judaism Today that Jews needed “energy to examine their religious needs and courage to formulate them”. Without that courage, they would fail “to restore to Judaism its life”.

Progressive Judaism was born from discontent: not contempt for tradition, but the conviction that tradition itself asks us to tell the truth. If the next 100 years are to be a century of idea-building, we will need to recover that holy unease. We will need to be discontent with any version of Judaism that is proud of its values but unsure how to transmit them, open to the world but uncertain of its own Jewish voice.

Above all, we will need to be discontent with any version of Progressive Judaism so anxious about survival that survival itself becomes the mission. We do not exist merely to keep our institutions alive. We build institutions because Judaism has something to say about justice, holiness, responsibility, God, Israel, humanity and the possibility that the world can be otherwise.

One of the dangers for Progressive Judaism in the next century is not that we will be too progressive. We must embrace the bold and creative spirit of our forebearers. But we must be careful not to speak eloquently about values without knowing the texts that formed them; not to invoke tradition without having wrestled with it; not to claim intellectual honesty without doing the intellectual work; not to ask our children to choose Judaism without giving them a Judaism rich enough to choose.

We must ask how inherited practices can become pathways to holiness rather than monuments to nostalgia; how prayer can be spoken with integrity; how Jewish law can be engaged with seriousness without being treated as immune from moral scrutiny; how feminism, queer experience, ecological responsibility, disability justice, interfaith encounter, the advent of AI, Israel and diaspora, grief and joy, all become part of our living Torah.

And perhaps this is where the next century’s idea-building becomes most urgent. In 100 years, I hope that those looking back will be able to celebrate the Progressive Jewish hermeneutics we have developed: ways of reading tradition that are neither defensive nor dismissive; rooted in love of Torah, the Jewish people, the human being created in the image of God, and truth itself; historically conscious, morally serious, spiritually humble and communally responsible.

Rabbi Lea Mühlstein is at The Ark Synagogue