A Sermon by Rabbi Charley Baginsky
King’s College Chapel, May 2025

It is an honour to speak here this morning alongside two extraordinary women of faith. To reflect together on the themes of faith, beauty, and joy—or perhaps more clearly, to explore how we might find beauty and invite joy in uncertain times, this feels both deeply needed and deeply challenging.

This Chapel, with its soaring ceilings, sacred music, and centuries of prayer, is a place that itself symbolises faith, beauty, and joy. And yet, even as we sit in its serenity, we are acutely aware of the anguish carried by the wider world. Israel and Gaza. Ukraine. Sudan. Myanmar. Each a wound in our collective body, each conflict echoing across borders and into communities around the globe.

I speak not from a distance, nor as a so-called neutral observer—if such a thing even exists—but as someone deeply enmeshed in the grief and confusion of this moment. As a Jew, as a rabbi, as a mother, as a human being, I have struggled to know what to say. And still, I believe—perhaps because I am a Jew, and perhaps because I am an optimist—that joy is not only possible in such a moment, it is essential.

The German rabbi and theologian Leo Baeck, writing while imprisoned in Theresienstadt, described Judaism as a religion of “ethical optimism.” He spoke not of blind hope or naive certainty, but of a conviction that, despite what we see and despite what we know, the world can still be made better—and we are not exempt from that work. This kind of optimism is not rooted in outcomes; it is rooted in engagement. It is a spiritual posture, a choice we make over and over again.

A midrash, a rabbinic teaching from Bereshit Rabbah, imagines God deliberating whether to create human beings. Justice says yes. Peace says no. Compassion and Truth argue. In the end, God casts Truth to the ground and creates us anyway. The story is both unsettling and profound.

Traditionally, truth is static, unyielding. To throw it down suggests a prioritisation of something else—relationship, compassion, the messy possibility of becoming. Feminist theologians like Dr. Melissa Raphael and Rabbi Sharon Brous have interpreted this moment as an invitation to view God not as a distant judge, but as a partner in human complexity. A God who chooses compassion over perfection. A God who makes room for struggle.

This, too, is joy. Not the fleeting happiness of things going well, but the deep, soul-rooted joy that comes from choosing to engage with the world as it is, and from working to bring about the world as it could be.

Let me turn, for a moment, to Bob Dylan. In a world where traditional religious language often feels inaccessible or contested—especially for women and those outside normative religious power structures—artists like Dylan have long functioned as modern prophets. They reframe spiritual truth in cultural idioms, offering new ways to speak the sacred. Dylan’s great spiritual gift lies in his refusal to be pinned down—by genre, by identity, by politics. In the recent biopic A Complete Unknown, we are reminded of the moment he “went electric” and the backlash it provoked. Fans accused him of betrayal. But Dylan wasn’t abandoning folk music. He was amplifying it, expanding its reach, refusing to let it calcify.

To me, this is theology. It is the willingness to change in order to remain faithful.

As Liberal and Reform Judaism unite into a single Movement for Progressive Judaism in the UK, we are asked similar questions. Are we losing something essential? Or are we, like Dylan, amplifying our tradition—making it resonate more clearly, more boldly, in the world we actually inhabit?

Of course, change invites discomfort. And visibility does not always mean legitimacy. As a woman rabbi, I encounter moments where my presence is noted, even praised—but not always recognised as authoritative. Introduced simply as “Charley” while male colleagues are given titles. Asked to validate pluralistic Jewish life next to a single, male Orthodox Chief Rabbi. These are not just social slights. They are structural signals about whose voice matters.

Too often, public Judaism is represented by a singular image: bearded, male, Orthodox. This is not Judaism. It is a version of Judaism. Our tradition has always been a polyphony—a layered, dialogic, contradictory conversation among texts and communities across time. True inclusion means asking: who gets heard? Who is presumed to speak? Who is rendered invisible?

These questions are not simply about misrecognition. They are about justice. And, in my tradition, justice is inseparable from joy.

Joy and justice might seem like an odd pairing. But in Jewish theology—especially feminist theology—they are intertwined. Joy arises from recognition: from being seen, heard, counted. Justice is not only about fairness; it is about dignity. Joy is not ease. Joy is what happens when we recognise ourselves and one another as made in the image of the divine.

To be Jewish today is to carry contradiction. We are expected, especially in public discourse, to either be wholly proud or wholly apologetic. To speak with one voice about Israel. To explain ourselves. But Jewish identity resists simplicity. It carries the trauma of persecution and the power of survival; the longing for homeland and the responsibility to critique injustice; the sacredness of tradition and the necessity of renewal.

As Jewish scholars like Daniel Boyarin and Shaul Magid remind us, Jewish identity is not static. It is formed in dialogue, in tension, in resistance. It is shaped by our relationship to the state, to dominant religious models, to modernity, and to one another.

My optimism makes space for that complexity. In the words of Yehuda Amichai: “From the place where we are right, flowers will never grow in the spring. But doubts and loves dig up the world like a mole, a plough.”

Beauty and joy are not found in perfection. They are made in uncertainty, in contradiction. Joy is a discipline. Beauty is a practice. And faith is what happens when we keep showing up—in the sanctuary, in the street, at the hospital bedside, in the quiet of our own hearts.

The Talmud teaches: “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” This is the optimism I try to live by. Not of outcomes, but of presence. Not certainty, but commitment.

It is also a profoundly feminist optimism. One midrash in Genesis Rabbah (8:1) teaches that the first human being was created as both male and female—a single, whole being—only later divided into two. This is not a story of fragmentation, but of fullness. The Hebrew word shalom, often translated as “peace,” also means “wholeness.”

To be human is to be layered. To be a woman is to be complex. To lead with joy is to honour that complexity.

Judaism begins with words. Our foundational myth is not one of conquest, but of speech: “Let there be light.” This is a counter-narrative in a world that often celebrates power and violence. Words shape the world. That is why language matters so deeply.

Binary frameworks—us and them, male and female, religious and secular—flatten the divine complexity of human life. Jewish tradition invites us into multiplicity. A theology of paradox. A practice of dialogue.

Feminist theologians like Judith Plaskow, Rachel Adler, and Tamar Ross teach that revelation is not a one-time event at Sinai, but a continuous unfolding. Plaskow challenges the patriarchal frame, asking what it would mean for women to be fully present at the mountain. Adler reimagines halakhah/ Jewish law/ as relational, embodied, sacred conversation. Ross insists that divine truth must be dynamic, responding to human lives.

This theology links joy and justice. Joy, here, is not frivolous. It is sacred. It emerges when we are seen, when our stories are heard, when our voices shape the tradition itself. Progressive Judaism must not only speak of God. It must amplify the voices through which God might still be heard.

This is how we find beauty in uncertainty and invite joy amid fragmentation: by widening the frame of who tells the story.

Pete Seeger, who appears in the same cultural orbit as Dylan and is evoked in the film as a kind of moral counterweight, once told a story about a seesaw, weighted with injustice. Most of us, he said, have only a teaspoon to tip the balance toward justice, beauty, joy. So we do what we can. We bring our teaspoons. We add them, faithfully. And one day, someone adds a final spoonful, and the whole thing shifts. And people say: “How sudden it was.”

This resonates with Jewish ethics. Pirkei Avot, a tractate of the Mishnah, teaches: “One who saves a single life is as if they have saved an entire world.” No act is too small. The sacred lives in the cumulative weight of our individual responsibilities. In Judaism, hope is halachic. That is to say, it is a daily practice, a legal and ethical commitment lived out in small, repeatable acts.

Laurie Zoloth, a feminist Jewish ethicist, writes that “the moral life is lived in the everyday.” It is composed of small fidelities and repeated resistances. Together, they form a tapestry of justice, of beauty, of joy.

Before I close, I want to honour something profound.

To stand here, with a Muslim and a Christian woman of faith, is itself an act of hope. We represent traditions that have, at times, wounded one another. And yet, we also carry with us the best of what our communities can offer: language for compassion, rituals for repair, stories that stretch the imagination. We do not dissolve our differences. We honour them.

Interfaith work is not about agreement. It is about presence. About listening deeply. About trusting that faith is not a retreat from the world, but a way of transforming it.

So I close with this blessing:

May we never confuse joy with ease.

May we never wait for beauty to appear, but grow it with our own hands.

May we choose optimism not because we are certain, but because we are committed.

And may we build a world where everyone has a seat at the table—and a voice in the story.

Amen