The Co-Leads of Progressive Judaism, Rabbi Josh Levy and Rabbi Charley Baginsky, addressed more than 300 Deputies of all denominations at last weekend’s Board of Deputies Plenary meeting.

In their speech, which you can watch and read in full below, Rabbis Charley and Josh outlined their vision for Jewish life in the UK.

They said: “The Jewish community in Britain is more diverse than it has ever been. In practice and observance, in culture, in politics, in language, in geography, in how people identify and express their Jewishness. And there is no sign of that changing. The reality of our community is diversity.

“Our vision is of a Jewish community that proclaims this diversity. That embraces the fact that in modernity there are a variety of different models of Jewish life and sees these as something not to be struggled against or resented but to be celebrated; not as a competition but as a rich collaboration; not something to be hidden, but to be lifted up.”

Board of Deputies President Phil Rosenberg echoed their words in his own remarks, which you can also watch in the video below. Reflecting on the booing at the recent hostages march, he said: “I am really sorry about what happened, and we as a community have just got to do better.”

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Rabbi Charley Baginsky and Rabbi Josh Levy at Board of Deputies Plenary
7 September 2025

Mr President, Honorary Officers, Deputies, friends, thank you for welcoming us here today. We are delighted to be with you, and we are grateful to Michael and to the Honorary Officers for the invitation.

We are Rabbi Charley Baginsky and Rabbi Josh Levy. Until recently we served as the Chief Executives of Liberal Judaism and the Movement for Reform Judaism respectively. Today, together, we are Co-Leads of the new Movement for Progressive Judaism, formed from the combination of our two movements, which is due to be completed by the end of this year.

For those who may not know us, it might be helpful to share just a little of our background. We both have long histories as active participants in Jewish communal life. We both grew up in engaged families, are both graduates of youth movements, and continue to be deeply committed to the peer-led Zionist youth movement model. We are also both rabbis – we have led congregations, taught Torah, celebrated smachot and mourned losses with our communities. We are both members of our respective clergy bodies. We are, and will always be, grounded in community life.

We recognise that there is an ambiguity for some about our role as CEOs and Rabbis, which merits a word of explanation. It is a deliberate choice that we lead this new Movement as rabbis. We hold the responsibilities of Chief Executives, but our conviction is that a religious movement must be led religiously. Leadership is not only an organisational function but also an act of religious responsibility. While we are also rabbis, we should stress that we are not the ‘Senior Rabbis’ of our movements – our rabbinate does not work in a hierarchical way – each of our clergy is mara d’atra, employed by their communities. We are blessed with 100 clergy, each of whom helps to create the rich tapestry of Progressive Jewish life in this country.

It is also worth acknowledging that there are two of us. It is intentional that we do this in co-leadership. Co-leadership is itself a model of what we believe Jewish leadership should look like: collaborative, dialogical, willing to hold differences and disagreements together. We will return to both of these features in a while. We were asked to speak today about our vision for Jewish life in the UK, and we want to acknowledge that there are many different ways of speaking about the Jewish community of this country.

One way is to understand the community as just that – The Community: capital T, capital C. As a unity, something that is, or should be, largely homogenous. In this version, there is nominally a dominant, normative form of Judaism and Jewish life. Other groupings are seen as a divergence from it, and as somehow deviant. That can translate itself into a view that the diversity that exists is problematic, to be hidden, to be managed quietly, never shown too publicly, because somehow it would weaken us. This vision of Jewish homogeneity is not one you will find in our tradition. It has not historically been the way Jewish life has flourished, and it does not reflect our reality today.

The Jewish community in Britain is more diverse than it has ever been – in practice and observance, in culture, in politics, in language, in geography, in how people identify and express their Jewishness. And there is no sign of that changing. The reality of our community is diversity, and it is this reality that inspires us. Our vision is of a Jewish community that proclaims this diversity, that embraces the fact that in modernity there are a variety of different models of Jewish life and sees these as something not to be struggled against or resented but to be celebrated; not as a competition but as a rich collaboration; not something to be hidden, but to be lifted up.

Jews look different, live in different places, pray in different ways, hold different political views, and live out their Jewishness differently. And that is not a problem to be solved, but a richness to be celebrated. This is true not only in the Jewish community as a whole but within every stream and every institution. It is certainly true in Progressive Judaism itself. That is why we so rarely say: ‘this is what Progressive Judaism thinks’, because there is not a single Progressive Jewish view on every issue. Our movement – our rabbinate and cantorate – contains wide difference. Challenging as this can sometimes be, this is not a flaw, it is the point.

Why do we call this a vision rather than just an observation? Because we believe diversity is not only real but also a Jewish ideal. Our tradition does not demand a single voice. The Talmud preserves multiple views side by side and then declares: elu v’elu divrei Elohim chayim, these and those are the words of the living God.

The Talmud condemns any Sanhedrin – any court – in which there is unanimity of opinion, because disagreement is necessary to make good decisions. Ours is and has always been a tradition of argument, contradiction, and plurality.

The primary form of our intellectual life is dialogical, our tradition contains a multiplicity of often contradictory voices. Where peers in our history did not disagree, our texts create disagreement across generations in order to probe and explore issues, because if we start from a place only of agreement, there is something missing. The American scholar Shaul Magid recently wrote an article with a striking image: Judaism is a map, he says, not a GPS. A map offers you a wide terrain with many routes. Some are winding, some are steep, some more direct. But the point of a map is that there is more than one way forward. The danger, Magid warns, is when we collapse that map into a GPS, when we imagine there is just one route, and any step off it makes the voice command say recalculate.

Jewish tradition has always insisted on the map. Torah is said to have seventy faces. But we also know that in times of crisis and trauma, the temptation to collapse into the GPS is strong. We long for certainty and safety. But we should resist this urge if we want to keep our community strong.

The past decade has given us overlapping traumas: the antisemitism crisis of the Corbyn years, the polarisation of Brexit, the isolation of Covid, and now the horror of 7 October, the war in Gaza, and a surge of antisemitism across the UK. These are not separate blows but cumulative shocks. Collective trauma narrows our imagination. It pushes us towards the GPS, away from the map. It makes us crave certainty, even at the cost of nuance. In those moments disagreement can sound like betrayal, and complexity can feel like danger.

We experienced this directly for ourselves on 10 August outside Downing Street. We were invited to speak at the rally for the hostages. We were clear in advance what we would say, and that we would be echoing the words of hostage families in Israel. We spoke – as we always do – about the brutal reality of Hamas’s violence on 7 October, their moral responsibility for what has happened. We spoke about the hostages, the families who live with unbearable pain every day. We also acknowledged things that others did not say. We spoke of the need for ceasefire – in part because this is the demand of so many hostage families in Israel. We also recognised that Palestinian self-determination is legitimate but stressed that the pathway to it and how it is achieved matters. If we had been able, we would also have spoken – as Jews, as rabbis – about our tradition’s commitment to all human life. But we were not able – from some in the crowd, our words were met with hostility. We were booed and shouted down.

This closing down is a symptom of our moment that we – in diaspora – need to face. Those words – about hostages, about compassion, about Palestinian statehood – are spoken every week in Israel. Hostage families stand up in Tel Aviv and say them with anguish and fury. They criticise the government and plead for unity at the same time. That is one of the things we celebrate about Israel – that, at its best, it models noisy, passionate, public disagreement. We rightly contrast this with Gaza, where the space for open dialogue is almost non-existent. Among the most powerful emails we received after that day were messages of gratitude from hostage families and some of those who had lost loved ones on 7 October – not all, because not all Israelis think and feel the same, any more than all Jews here do. But a recognition that multiplicity of voice here makes a difference there. In the days that followed we also received messages from across the spectrum here: from Progressive Jews, from Orthodox Jews, from people who agreed with us and from people who did not, but who understood that such words must be able to be spoken. That Jewish life cannot be narrowed into one voice.

That moment is an example of the danger of univocality. When we collapse into a single voice, we mistake disagreement for disloyalty. We silence nuance, and we damage our community. And, perhaps most tragically, we downplay the beauty of Jewish life itself. The arguments, the differences, the contradictions – these are not weaknesses, they are the very source of our vibrancy. And in this, leadership matters. These two versions of our community, homogenous or diverse, imply two very different models of leadership.

The homogenous vision produces leadership as certainty, as a single voice – neat, compelling, but narrow. This is not a question of left or right. We see this model from leaders on both sides of the political spectrum. Zack Polanski of the Green Party is an example of how even a movement that began with collaborative models can be pulled towards univocal leadership. But it is not our vision. It is not reflective of Jewish values or Jewish tradition. And we genuinely believe that it makes us weaker. It also carries real risks.

To say ‘this is what Jews think’ inevitably alienates those Jews who think differently. It pushes people out at a time when we want to be welcoming them in. To say ‘this is what Jews do or look like’ – what does that mean for Jews who do not look or act like that? There is an especial challenge for Jews of colour, for Jews in interfaith families, for Jews whose lives do not fit the stereotype, in their workplaces, in hospital, on the street they encounter a mismatch. This is not just an abstract risk, it affects real people. It also weakens us as a community.

No one benefits if those issues that concern us all – love of Israel, concern about antisemitism, fear for the hostages, defence of freedom of religion – become owned or associated with one group, one political or denominational viewpoint. Then we are all worse off. Univocality also erases the complexity of the issues we face. The issues we face are complicated, and we are complicated. Sometimes it might be a little messy, but we have to step into the complexity – to be brave enough to say complicated things even in a world of over-simplification; brave enough to recognise that we don’t all think the same, don’t all agree.

When the government recognises the state of Palestine – as it will in a couple of weeks’ time – it will be easy for us to fall into univocal leadership, to say ‘the Jewish community thinks’. It will be harder for us to say something complex, something nuanced. It will be harder, but more powerful – and a sign of our strength – to recognise our diversity. Can we find a way to say that there are also things happening that we welcome? That the New York declaration, for example, has made enormous steps – especially in the Arab world’s rejection of Hamas and recognition of Israel – while at the same time expressing our shared fear that it feels like the hostages are falling from view, our shared concern that there appears to be an asymmetry of expectation on Israel and not on the PA and Hamas?

Can we say this and this. Elu v’elu. Can we find a way to speak that is brave enough to reflect that many – most – of us still hope for a diplomatic solution, two states living side by side in peace and security, and that this ultimately requires Palestinian statehood; to not inadvertently give the impression that we reject it in principle and to recognise the diversity of Jewish views? Can we model a form of leadership that is collaborative, that lifts up diverse voices and makes space for disagreement?

Our ability to hold that disagreement is key to who we are. We have sat in many meetings, panels, and demos where people have said things we do not agree with. That is fine. That is the work. That is also Jewish life. The question is not whether we agree but whether we can disagree well.

A text from the earliest layer of Rabbinic Judaism, the Tosefta, brings beautiful imagery to this ideal. It recognises the very real challenge of disagreement: “The house of Shammai declares something unclean, the House of Hillel declares it clean. This one prohibits, that one permits”, the text tells us, “How then can I learn Torah?” Surely, it asks, the purpose of discussion is to reach a firm conclusion, otherwise how do we know anything? The answer is extraordinary: “All the words have been given by a single Shepherd… make yourself a heart of many rooms. Bring into it the words of those who declare unclean and the words of those who declare clean.” That is, the goal is not unanimity, not agreement. To be a Jew, the text says, is to inherit a tradition which is not just comfortable with disagreement, but which embraces it – to build a heart of many rooms. This requires our constant attention.

The concept of Jewish peoplehood itself shows how easily we can narrow a map into a fence. The word peoplehood is modern. It was coined in the United States in the early twentieth century by Mordecai Kaplan and Stephen Wise. They wanted a concept softer than nation and less threatening than nationalism, a way of affirming Jewish belonging without undermining loyalty to the countries in which Jews lived. It was meant to be a map, a broad landscape. But too often peoplehood has hardened into a fence, a way of policing boundaries, deciding who is in and who is out, who is loyal enough, who has the right to speak. Instead of broadening the map, it has shrunk it.

Felix Adler, writing more than a century ago, offered a different vision. He said that a group’s strength does not lie in sameness, but in unlikeness of function – in the fact that different individuals bring different roles and perspectives to a shared moral project. That is what peoplehood should mean.

And this is why this institution, the Board of Deputies, matters. Founded in 1760 to represent Jews to the Crown, it can only now fulfil the representative role for a diverse Jewish community if it resists collapsing diversity into a single voice. In truth, if Jews were homogenous, we would not need a Board at all. The very existence of this institution – of so many of you sat here today – is testimony to our diversity. The Board matters because it is a place where difference is represented and held. That is not easy. It is demanding and uncomfortable. But it is indispensable. And when the Board reflects our diversity, it represents us not only to government and wider society, but also to ourselves – it uplifts all of us.

We want to end with our vision of Progressive Judaism. Because everything we have said about diversity and leadership, about risk and opportunity, comes together here. The merger of Liberal and Reform Judaism into one Movement for Progressive Judaism is itself a statement of vision. It is not about flattening differences. It is about creating a larger, more beautiful map. We now represent 80 communities across the UK, the largest synagogue body by number of congregations in the UK, serving over 35,000 Jews. Our communities stretch across the four nations – from East to West, South to North – from Cardiff to Norwich, from the Isle of Wight to Edinburgh. Each of those communities has its own identity – each is shaped by the people who formed it, seeking to create a rich and meaningful Jewish life for them and their families. And each contains its own diversity – those with long roots in UK Jewish life, interfaith families, Jews by choice, LGBTQ+ Jews, Israelis, deeply committed Zionists, fierce critics of government policy, younger Jews shaped by digital culture, older Jews carrying memory. That is not weakness, it is strength.

As we build a new movement, we have the opportunity to strengthen this diverse, rich, beautiful Jewish life: to strengthen, support, and connect communities, so that wherever Jews live in the UK, inclusive, innovative, vibrant Jewish life is possible; to promote, amplify, and embolden our values, so that they shape Jewish conversation and wider society; to inspire and nurture the next generations of Progressive Jews, so that our values are carried forward with energy and commitment; to foster inclusion and access, so that anyone who wants to live a Progressive Jewish life is welcomed and resourced to do so. Our tradition tells us that Torah was not given to the angels, but into human hands, not given with certainty, but with possibility, with argument.

Our hope – that we hold as CEOs of our organisation, and as rabbis – deeply immersed in UK Jewish life and in our textual tradition – is that Jewish life in the UK can mirror that Jewish truth: diverse, resilient, intellectually alive, spiritually compelling, and capable of holding disagreement without fracture. If we can achieve that, in our communities, in this Board, across the Jewish world, then we will have built not only a future for British Jewry, but also a model for others in this country: at a time when it is desperately needed, a vision of how to live with difference, how to argue with integrity, how to stay in the room together when we disagree.