Values

by Rabbi John D. Rayner

As we look back on the past year - and the past century - many salient facts stand out and they are not all bad. Human knowledge has grown, science has advanced, technology has made life easier. Health has improved, infant mortality has fallen, life expectancy has risen. In Britain the number of centenarians has jumped in fifty years from 250 to 9,000. Literacy and education, once confined to a few, have become general, and the transmission of information world-wide is now virtually instantaneous. Democracy, after some setbacks, is reasserting itself almost everywhere; and various forms of international co-operation are bringing security and prosperity to millions. This catalogue, which could easily be prolonged, is one of enormous gains and, whatever else there is to be said, we should never lose sight of them or cease to be thankful for them.

Nevertheless, in this penitential season it is the negative side of the record that demands our attention, and it is very alarming. Again let me give only a few random examples. In spite of innumerable warnings and international agreements, industrial pollution, deforestation and other human activities are still damaging our environment and changing our climate in potentially disastrous ways. Radio-active materials leaking from our power stations, buried in our seabeds and circling the earth as debris from disintegrated spacecraft, pose a constant threat. Old racial, national and religious tensions continue to simmer, and every now and then, in places like Rwanda, Kosovo and East Timor, erupt into conflicts of unimaginable savagery.

Even here in Britain, vandalism and hooliganism, theft and burglary, road rage, racial attacks, child abuse, rape and murder, feature almost daily in the news bulletins, and several of these have actually increased in recent years. It is no longer safe to leave property unguarded, or for women to go out alone at night, or for children to walk unaccompanied to school. Nurses are attacked by patients, and teachers by pupils. The drug merchants and pornographers ply their trades, and the media unremittingly portray more and yet more adultery and violence. The number of children living in poverty, we are told, has trebled in the last thirty years to five million; 15,000 crimes are committed by children every day; one in three fourteen-year-olds has tried drugs; and teenage pregnancies are the highest in Europe.

Why are these things happening? There are many theories, and they all have some validity, but there is, I suggest, one underlying cause, and that has to do with values.

Now the word 'value' is used in different senses. There is, for instance, a commercial sense, as when we speak of the value of a property or a piece of jewellery. There is an aesthetic sense, which is best distinguished from the commercial one when we remember Oscar Wilde's definition of a cynic as one 'who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing' (Lady Windermere's Fan, Act 3). But of course I mean neither of these. I mean moral or ethical values the values that govern human behaviour.

Where then do these values come from? In part they are innate, for being created in the image of God, we have an inborn capacity to discern between right and wrong. But only to a limited extent. Deposit a group of newborn babies on a desert island and they, if they survive, will develop a code of conduct, but it will be a very primitive one. In the main, we don't make up our own moral values; we learn them from our parents and teachers, and they from theirs. Moral values are culturally transmitted from generation to generation.

And if we push the question further back and ask where they came from in the first place, I think we must answer: largely from religion. That statement, admittedly, requires two qualifications. One is that the values religion has inculcated have not always been good. They have included bigotry and zealotry, and these remain powerful components in some of the bloody conflicts that rage around the world today. It is a fact which those of us who are professionally associated with organised religion must acknowledge with shame.

The other qualification is that religion is not the only source of moral values. There are also humanistic philosophies, political parties, professional associations and trade unions, which have their own codes of conduct. But historically speaking, they don't begin to compare with the magnitude of the influence which the religions have exerted in the course of the centuries on society's perception of right and wrong. Religion, for good and ill, has been, historically, the chief power-house generating moral values.

But if that is so, then the decline of religion in modern times is an amply sufficient explanation of the moral condition of our society. Of course I am referring mainly to the Western world, and therefore to Christianity. Britain is no longer a Christian country as it once was. The average Briton doesn't go to church, doesn't subscribe to Christian doctrines, and looks upon bishops and clergy as amiable eccentrics.

And what has filled the void? Nothing much at all except materialism, consumerism, hedonism and football fanaticism. We live in a pagan society! Indeed, considering that, it may seem surprising that most people still behave as decently as they do, that there is still so much kindness and compassion around. But of course moral values don't disappear overnight. Norms persist, and people go on drinking from the stream long after they have ceased to acknowledge its source. The decline is gradual, but the symptoms are unmistakable. Three-and-a-half years ago a Mori opinion poll showed that nearly half of young people aged between fifteen and thirty-five 'did not believe that there were definite rights and wrongs' (Independent, 15 January 1996).

This is a very serious state of affairs, for it confirms what we know, that moral values are not self -sustaining, self-perpetuating. They need to be nurtured; otherwise they become atrophied or at least attenuated. Then people are liable to say: 'Yes, 1 believe that life is sacred, but my enemy's life is not nearly as sacred as mine. Yes, I believe in helping my neighbour, but not while I am busy with myself. Yes, I believe in sheltering refugees, but not in my back yard. Yes, I believe in conserving the environment, stopping the arms trade, and reducing television violence, but not if it means losing my profits. Yes, 1 believe in animal welfare, but not to the extent of doing without a fur coat or spoiling the fun of traditional country sports. Civilisation is a tender plant which if deprived of the oxygen of shared moral values, will eventually disintegrate. In biblical language, 'righteousness exalts a nation' (Prov. 14:34) and 'where there is no vision, a people perishes' (Prov. 29:18).

The 'value vacuum' in contemporary British society has prompted several people to propose a national commission, which would attempt to formulate a code of conduct acceptable to people of all religions and of none. I did so many years ago (A Jewish Understanding of the World, p.166). The Archbishop of Canterbury and Chief Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks have done so more recently. Similarly motivated was John Major's 'Back to Basics' call, and now Tony Blair has launched yet another such campaign, saying: 'We need to find a new national moral purpose for this new generation' (Observer, 5 September 1999). But nothing much ever came of any of these initiatives, and I fear that nothing much will. Nor are parents and teachers seemingly able to do much to reverse the trend, for most of them are just as confused as the young.

In these circumstances, it is more than ever incumbent on religion, to the extent to which it still can, to resume its traditional role as provider of moral guidance. But what kind of religion is best fitted to perform that role? There is a kind, which lives in the past, which denies modern knowledge and defies modern thought, which is dogmatic and intolerant. That kind of religion is a potent source of moral certainty to its devotees, but it cuts little ice with the majority of people; and the values it teaches, though mainly benign, are in other ways malignant. For it preserves old prejudices and injustices, and feeds old animosities, and so exacerbates the ills it should cure.

No, what is needed is the kind of religion that combines what is best in tradition with what is best in modernity, and in a Jewish context that means Liberal Judaism. Happily, after a lean period, in which it has merely held its own, our Movement seems to be growing again, and as it approaches its centenary, I think it is more united and self-confident than it has been since I first became associated with it half-a-century ago.

But I don't wish to be party-political, triumphalist or complacent. That would be out of keeping with the spirit of this penitential season. Let me therefore confess that Liberal Judaism is not perfect, it has yet to be perfected, it has much to learn from others, not excluding the Orthodox, and its rhetoric is not always matched by its performance. Too often, our protestation that we place ethics above ritual is only an excuse for taking all our obligations, including our ethical ones, less seriously than we should.

What I want to suggest to you nevertheless is this: that if we wish to draw strength from this penitential season not only to nourish our personal spiritual growth, but also to exert a positive influence on the value-starved, neo-pagan moral wasteland of British society as it stumbles towards the threshold of a new century and a new millennium, then Liberal Judaism, taken seriously, is a means ready-to-hand by which we may hope to do that. Let others make their contributions; let this be ours.

Rabbi Rabbi Rayner is Emeritus Rabbi of The Liberal Jewish Synagogue, St. John's Wood London and Hon. Life President of the Union of Liberal & Progressive Synagogues.

This sermon was given on Yom Kippur 20 September 1999 at The Liberal Jewish Synagogue.