Parashat Bereshit
Maidenhead Synagogue – 9 October 2026 / 28 Tishri 5787
This Shabbat, we start again the endless cycle of Torah reading, a moment that brings us reassurance that some things do not end, but also a reference to measure where we are in this particular time. Where were we a year ago? Ten years ago?
Today, we open the Torah at its first page, Bereishit bara Elohim…, and within a few chapters we move from the creation of the world to the first human family, where almost immediately something goes terribly wrong.
I wanted to speak about something else this week. But last Sunday something happened that I can’t get over, as probably many of you can’t either.
But first, let us begin with a word of Torah. Cain brings an offering from the fruit of the ground, and Abel brings one from his flock. The Eternal accepts Abel’s offering and not Cain’s, and Cain is angry. God speaks to him and warns him that he can still master his anger. Then the Torah says that Cain spoke to his brother Abel, and the sentence stops (Genesis 4: 8). We are never told what he said to his brother. The next thing we read is that in the field, Cain rose up against his brother and killed him.
It is interesting to note how the narrative treats both brothers differently. Cain is given reasons, feelings and a conversation with God, and after the killing he even argues with God about his punishment. Abel is given almost nothing. In the whole story he does not speak a single word, and he is almost a bystander in his own death. Even his name, Hevel, means a breath, something that passes and leaves no trace. This word begins the book of Kohelet, hevel avanim, ha-kol hevel, usually translated by “vanity of vanities, all is vanity”, pointing to the fact that our attachment to things is pointless.
Our tradition took notice of this silence. For example, in an ancient Aramaic translation of the Torah known as Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, the gap in the dialogue is construed as an argument between the brothers, and here Abel is given a voice. Cain complains that the world is not governed fairly, and that this is why his offering was refused, as if there were no justice and no Judge in this world. Abel replies, there is a Judge, and He accepted my offerings, and not yours, which is why you are upset. Incensed, Cain murdered his brother.
Sometimes people are silenced, bullied into accepting a position already decided for them. But sometimes, and maybe that’s worse, if it’s possible, a person can speak and not be heard, because what they say does not fit the story that has already been told about them. This is what happened to the Jewish members of the Green Party last week.
On Sunday, at its national conference in Brighton, the Green Party of England and Wales adopted a motion entitled ‘Zionism is Racism’. It passed by 1,022 votes to 813. Before the vote, Jewish members of the party had warned that it could force them to choose between their party and their community. At the conference itself, an amendment intended to protect Jewish members was rejected. They spoke, and they were outvoted. In effect, they were silenced.
The motion defines Zionism as an ideology seeking an ‘ethnonationalist Jewish State’ built on the ‘exclusion and/or domination’ of the non-Jewish population. Then, it goes to conclude that Zionism equals racism, and that any person in the party who declared themselves Zionist will be treated as racist. In other words, the motion tells British Jews, first I will tell you what you believe by virtue of who you are, and then I will tell you that what you believe makes you a racist. A classic example of gaslighting.
In 1946, just after the war, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre described this mechanism. He observed that the antisemite creates the Jew he hates. ‘If the Jew did not exist,’ Sartre wrote, ‘the antisemite would invent him.’ The Green Party motion has created a fantasied version of what a Zionist is and then condemns the Jews dare admitting being Zionist. And the consequence is obvious: eventually, all Jews will be considered racist because as they imagine in their psyche, all Jews are Zionist. Our own Movement for Progressive Judaism has issued a tatement that says, “The Green Party has made antisemitism party policy and become a racist party”.
However, let me clear here. Not every anti-Zionist is an antisemite, and there are Jews who call themselves anti-Zionist: about one in ten British Jews, according to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in a recent survey published in the days leading to the third anniversary of October 7 and called “October 8 Jews: The impact of October 7 on British Jewish identity”[1]. But the sad truth is, many people hide their antisemitism behind the word, to the point that we can safely say today, that in most cases Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism.
Of course, Israel is not above criticism. No state is, and no government is. Jews most certainly do not all think the same thing about Israel. The same research found that if about two in three British Jews call themselves Zionists, two in five felt Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza clashed with their Jewish values. You can be a Zionist and be deeply troubled by the actions of an Israeli government.
Zionism from its inception has never been a single unified movement. There have been socialist Zionists and religious Zionists, secular Zionists and liberal Zionists, and they have argued with one another almost from the moment modern Zionism emerged. What they broadly share is something much simpler: the belief that the Jewish people are a people, with a right to collective self-determination in the land with which our history, our culture and our religion have been bound for thousands of years. That does not tell us where borders should be, and it certainly does not give Jews permission to dominate another people.
Being anti-racist means that we listen when minorities tell us about their own experience. We would not tell Muslims what it really means to be Muslim in a non-Muslim society, nor tell Black people which experiences of racism they are allowed to condemn. By the same token, we should not do it to Jews.
I am a Zionist. It does not tell me where borders should be or which Israeli government to support. It tells me that my people are a people, and that we belong to that land as well as to the land of our dispersion. And no, it does not make me a racist, because what I believe about my own people I believe about every people.
I know that many of you are hurt and angry this week. Without reading too much into it, this motion was passed the very week we marked the third anniversary of October 7, which probably added to the grief.
You probably feel misheard and misrepresented, and some of you will find yourselves in conversation at work or with friends, when someone says: ‘Well, the Greens do say that Zionism is racism.’ What can we say? Often today words are useless because people have already made up their mind. But you do not have to accept the definition that is being forced upon you.
You can say that this motion is an inaccurate misreading of what Zionism is, and that for you it means that the Jewish people are a people, with the same right to self-determination we want for anyone.
I am angry. As I am sure many of you are. But when we read the first verses of Bereishit, we are reminded that we live within historical cycles, that this too shall pass. However, it would be a mistake to be passive and hope for the best. The people who are telling us what we should be thinking, where we should be living, or simply who we are do not have the right to do this work for us. We won’t allow them to define us.
[1] https://www.jpr.org.uk/reports/october-8-jews-impact-october-7-british-jewish-identity