Imagining the Next Century
Keynote address for the Centenary of the World Union for Progressive Judaism
If you prefer to read this text in French, Portuguese or German you can do so thanks to some wonderful translators :-)
We gather here at the close of our celebrations of the centenary of the World Union for Progressive Judaism with one hundred years behind us and the horizon still ahead.
Much of our first century was, necessarily, a century of institution-building. Across continents and languages, Progressive Jews built communities, movements, rabbinic seminaries, youth movements, schools, charities, advocacy organisations and global networks.
That work was not administrative. It was sacred. Without those builders, we would not be gathered in this room. Without their courage, there would be no “we” capable of speaking about the future.
It would be tempting to focus this keynote address on the important work of the EUPJ, which I have the privilege of chairing. But this historic moment, I believe calls for more.
Because I want to suggest that the next hundred years will ask something different of us. Not because institutions no longer matter — of course, they do — but because they can house a movement without by themselves making it move. For that, we need ideas: ideas deep enough to teach, brave enough to challenge, generous enough to gather, and compelling enough to travel.
So, at the risk of oversimplifying history, I would summarise the first hundred 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 hundred 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.
Among the many builders we could honour this morning, I want to name just one: Lily Montagu. Not because she was the only one, but because she understood, with extraordinary clarity, that institutions become possible only when someone first dares to articulate a need.
Lily Montagu was instrumental in the founding of the World Union for Progressive Judaism and the Jewish Religious Union, which became Liberal Judaism and is now part of the Movement for Progressive Judaism.
But she also built institutions that responded directly to the needs of individuals. At the West Central Jewish Girls’ Club, working-class Jewish girls could develop themselves socially, intellectually and spiritually. Even the timing of prayer was reshaped around their lives: Shabbat morning services held at three o’clock in the afternoon so that young women working in the hotels of the West End could attend.
That is Progressive Judaism at its best: not changing Judaism because we are casual about it; but changing the doorway so that those who need Torah can enter.
And yet, before Lily Montagu built institutions, she built ideas. In 1899, in her essay “Spiritual Possibilities of Judaism To-Day”, she wrote with a sharpness that continues to inspire. She understood that Judaism could not be renewed by respectability, nostalgia, or maintenance.
Jews, she wrote, needed “energy to examine their religious needs and courage to formulate them.”[1] Without that courage, they would fail “to restore to Judaism its life and the endless possibilities inherent in life.”[2]
The question before us is whether our Judaism can live with enough truth, depth, courage and beauty that future generations will want to build with it, argue with it, pray with it, inherit it and transform it.
So, as we leave this conference, I want to ask: What will it take for Progressive Judaism to travel into its second century with purpose?
Rabbi John Rayner, of blessed memory, once preached in this very sanctuary a sermon with the wonderfully concise title: “Have Torah, Will Travel.”[3]
And in it, he suggested that anyone undertaking a journey needs five things: discontent, preparation, an efficient vehicle, perseverance and a destination.
So let us ask what it would mean for Progressive Judaism, standing at the edge of its second century as a global movement, to say with humility and resolve: have Torah, will travel.
Our journey begins with discontent. Not the familiar Jewish discontent of committee meetings that go on too long and minutes that are never quite accurate, but something deeper: the sacred discontent that recognises the gap between what is and what could yet be.
The discontent of Abraham, who left the familiar because he heard a call towards blessing; of the daughters of Zelophehad, who demanded their rightful inheritance; of the prophets, who loved Israel too much to confuse worship with righteousness.
Progressive Judaism was born from that kind of discontent: not contempt for tradition, but the conviction that tradition itself asks us to tell the truth. If the next hundred 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 warm but thin, 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.
Sacred discontent may begin the journey, but it cannot sustain it by itself. Anger can expose what is broken. Longing can reveal what is missing. But neither anger nor longing is enough to build a future. For that, we need preparation.
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 the prophets, the rabbis, and the many women whose innovations were ignored or accredited to men. We must be courageous enough to be willing to wash our dirty linen in public.
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.
Preparation means taking our own Judaism seriously enough to learn it.
It means knowing enough Torah to know that our tradition has never spoken in only one voice. It means knowing enough Hebrew to hear the layers beneath the translation. It means knowing enough history to understand how much courage renewal has required in every generation and to pay attention to the voices that were forgotten or marginalised.
And preparation also means moral and spiritual formation. We will need leaders who can hold complexity without collapsing into vagueness, who can speak about Israel with love and honesty, who can respond to antisemitism without allowing fear to become our only Jewish language, who can build communities of genuine welcome without mistaking welcome for the absence of expectation.
This is why our seminaries matter. This is why youth movements matter. This is why cheder, adult learning, serious prayer, courageous preaching, pastoral depth and interfaith work. Not because they are programmes to be maintained, but because they are the provisions we pack for the road.
The Mishnah (Pirkei Avot 5:22) teaches: “Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it.” Not glance at it. Not admire it from a distance. Turn it. Return to it. Question it. Let it question us. For a movement that wishes to travel into the future must know what it carries.
But preparation still needs a vehicle.
My teacher, British-born Israeli Rabbi Michael Marmur, suggests that Progressive Jews might think of ourselves as akin to the Masoretes, those extraordinary guardians of the biblical text who added vowels and cantillation marks to the consonants of the Torah.
The image is powerful because the Masoretes did not invent the Torah. But they knew that without vowels, the consonants could be read in more than one way. So they added vowels. Not to replace the consonants, but to help them speak.
That indeed is one of the great tasks of Progressive Judaism. We inherit the consonants of Jewish tradition: Torah and Talmud, prayer and practice, Shabbat and festival, covenant and commandment, memory and hope.
We do not invent them, and we do not own them. But we are responsible for helping them speak in our generation.
Our task is to add vowels: to ask how ancient words can become audible again; 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 the living vocalisation of Torah.
And perhaps this is where the next century’s idea-building becomes most urgent. In one hundred years, I hope the person standing here in my place will look back and 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.
The efficient vehicle we need is not novelty for its own sake, nor the reflex to modernise every difficulty away. It is the disciplined, loving, sometimes painful work of giving voice to the tradition we have received, with scholarship, prayer, lived experience, debate, and the courage to say that fidelity to Torah sometimes means hearing in it possibilities that earlier generations could not yet hear.
For consonants alone are not enough. A movement that wishes to travel needs a Torah that can be voiced. And a movement that wishes to build ideas needs to know how to read.
This brings us to maybe the least glamorous of Rayner’s five requirements for a journey: perseverance.
Progressive Judaism enters its second century in a world marked by rising antisemitism, political extremism, climate crisis, loneliness, religious exhaustion, and deep fractures within Jewish life itself. We live in a time when Israel, which should be a source of pride, attachment, creativity and hope, is also a place of anguish, moral struggle and profound disagreement. We live in a time when many Jews feel exposed in the public square, and when many of our communities are tired from carrying too much for too long.
In such a moment, the temptation is to simplify: to become only particular, because the world feels dangerous; or to become only universal, because particularity feels too costly. To harden our language until no one can enter it; or to soften our language until it no longer says anything at all. To define Judaism only as the answer to antisemitism; or to speak about the world so broadly that our Judaism becomes merely decorative.
Perseverance means refusing these false choices. It means remaining Progressive when certainty is seductive. Remaining Jewish when assimilation feels easier. Remaining morally serious when slogans would be more convenient. Remaining committed to Israel without surrendering the prophetic responsibility to speak honestly about power, justice and human dignity.
Remaining open to the world without losing the particular Jewish practices, memories and obligations that make our openness more than sentiment.
Progressive Judaism understands that there is no short cut to the messianic age. Redemption is not something we can await passively, nor something we can force violently into being. It is the long, patient, demanding work of human beings responding to God’s call by doing what lies within our power to make the world more just, more compassionate and more whole.
That is the kind of perseverance Progressive Judaism will need.
And yet, not every destination is worthy of the road. If our destination is only survival, growth, or the fact that Progressive Judaism still exists in another hundred years, then we have mistaken endurance for purpose.
Rabbi Rayner taught that Judaism only fulfils its purpose when it helps form people capable of responsibility: responsibility for one another, for the Jewish people, and ultimately for humanity itself. Jewish community, in this understanding, is a training ground for moral and spiritual responsibility.
That must be our destination: not survival alone, but significance; not continuity alone, but covenantal responsibility; not simply a movement that lasts, but a movement that helps human beings become more truthful, more compassionate, more courageous, more able to carry blessing into the world.
That would be a destination worthy of the journey.
And so we return to the title of this conference: Darkeinu — One story, many journeys.
That title feels truer to me now than it did when we began planning this gathering. Progressive Judaism has been one story because across all our many journeys, we have carried a shared conviction:
that Judaism is alive; that Torah can still speak; that inherited tradition and moral courage belong in conversation; that religious life must be honest enough for the world as it is and brave enough for the world as it could yet become.
For the institutions we have inherited, we give thanks. For the ideas we must now build, we accept responsibility.
In a hundred years, may those who gather in our place be able to say that we did not merely maintain what we inherited. May they say that we imagined bravely, learned deeply, interpreted faithfully, argued honestly, built generously, and travelled with purpose.
May they say that, in our time, at the threshold of the second century, Progressive Judaism found again the courage to be alive.
Have Torah, will travel. Nesi’ah Tovah.
[1] Lily Montagu, “Spiritual Possibilities of Judaism To-Day”, The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Jan 1899), p. 216.
[2] Lily Montagu, “Spiritual Possibilities of Judaism To-Day”, The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Jan 1899), p. 216.
[3] John D. Rayner, “Have Torah, will Travel” Sermon of 11 April 1970 in A Jewish Understanding of the World, Oxford: Berghahn Books (1998,) p. 5.