My unexpected path to the rabbinate — and a pioneering community

LAST WEEK, after five years of intensive study, I set to work as the new rabbi of the Mosaic Masorti Synagogue in North London. It has been a long journey, with neither the route nor the destination quite what I expected when I first applied to Leo Baeck College’s rabbinical programme. In Pirkei Avot, Rabban Gamliel famously praised the pursuit of Talmud Torah im Derech Eretz: the learning of Torah and the acquisition of a worldly occupation.

But Derech Eretz might also indicate simply “the way of the world” and the Leo Baeck programme takes very seriously the idea that Torah should be acquired hand-in-hand with learning about the world’s ways. That is, that rabbis must be willing and able to bring their Torah learning into close contact with the world in which we are destined to work.

To that end, over five years, we were busily engaged with learning Torah but trained to be rabbis in the real world through supervised placements, vocational studies and courses in compassionate and reflective practice.

Any collegial aspect of our learning was severely affected by two painfully disrupted years of studies during the pandemic. Gone was the buzz of the students’ common room, the chatter around the boiling kettle and the hustle through the college library.

We davened by Zoom, we learned by Zoom, we created community by Zoom, we lived and mourned over Zoom. It was a desperate time for the world and it was certainly challenging for our small college community.

Nonetheless, particularly through the invaluable support of my gang of four classmates, I gained precious insights into how communities of study, prayer and practice transcend and exceed the limits of four walls.

Yom Kippur 2020 found me leading services for a pop-up community of 90 daveners on a cricket field in Cricklewood. These aren’t experiences any of us expected to have and I can only hope that those positive learnings — silver linings from a very grey period — will stay with my class as we go our separate ways.

My final year internship brought me to Mosaic Masorti, a small but lively congregation which has been conducting services for 20 years in a girl guides hut in Hatch End. After a couple of visits, I was convinced that this is where I wanted to begin my rabbinic career.

The davening was good, the commitment was serious and the hospitality was peerless. People genuinely seemed to care about each other. It felt like small community living being done very well.

In many ways, Mosaic Masorti is like any other shul — services, meals, schmoozing, you know the scene.

But we do have an additional and distinctive identity as one-third of the Mosaic Jewish Community. Bringing together our Masorti congregation with a Reform shul and a Liberal community, Mosaic is only the second community in the UK (after Oxford) in which halachic and progressive congregations are building a community under a single roof, although worshipping separately.

There are significant challenges. How to ensure that our strands’ diverse standards and practices are maintained on Shabbat; in the kitchen; on second day Yomtov.

But these areas of difficulty are precisely where pluralism happens, with each legacy community negotiating internally to find our greatest capacity for accommodation, each of us committed to building a shared space where compromise does not feel like loss.

When we make kiddush together — 100 people in a room where we are used to seeing 30 — it all feels thoroughly worthwhile.

This is why communities like Mosaic and Oxford have interesting things to teach the rest of Anglo-Jewry.

Our Jewish community is increasingly geographically concentrated. And so Mosaic’s three communities made a decision to get ahead of the demographic shift from outer North-West London (Wembley, Harrow, Hatch End) towards solid and growing population centres like Stanmore, Bushey and Elstree.

Rather than struggle to individually afford sustainable, highly resourced, beautiful premises, we have a home together. And more than that, in a Jewish world that can seem increasingly polarised — religiously, politically, demographically — we have chosen to invest in a vision of unity.