20 Ideas to Transform Jewish Community Life

Miriam Shaviv, the Foreign Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, invited me to contribute one idea to a series she plans to publish on her JC blog entitled "20 ideas to transform Jewish community life". Each working day in March, she will be publishing a short piece by a different communal figure with one original, innovative suggestion for British Jewry.

Here's my contribution:

A Sukkah in Trafalgar Square

Throughout Sukkot, there ought to be a sukkah in Trafalgar Square. The bigger, the better – halachically, a sukkah can be too low or too high, but there are no restrictions on its length or breadth. It would be staffed by Jewish volunteers and serve as a temporary shelter and soup kitchen – a place for the homeless to come during the day or night for a free hot meal.

Why? First, because a sukkah is a temporary dwelling, a fragile place of refuge that reminds us, in part, of our own vulnerability. Sukkot itself is also a temporary experience – a brief period in the year when we are not protected by the walls, roofs, locks and alarm systems that, for many of us, have become part of our daily existence. In contrast, homelessness is not a temporary state – it is a permanent reality. Could we take a symbol of our own homelessness and exposure, and turn it into a shelter for those who need no symbolic reminders of what it means to have no home or to feel exposed?

Second, the notion of sukkah as soup kitchen bridges the particular and the universal. It both celebrates the particular simcha of a Jewish holiday, and extends our hearts and hands out into the wider world. It actualizes what the sociologist Peter Berger calls “cognitive negotiation,” or what Samson Raphael Hirsch called torah im derech eretz. It helps to cultivate Jews who care about the internal and the external, who are capable of dealing simultaneously with our own challenges and those that beset humanity as a whole.

Third, it clearly associates Judaism with social justice. It makes a clear public statement. To be Jewish is to take responsibility, to reach out to others, to affect change, to create places on earth in which God’s presence can dwell. It demonstrates – in a tangible and genuine way – how Jewish ideas and symbols can, and should be interpreted for good. At a time when religion generally is often associated with violence and extremism, it offers a dramatically different perspective. It should not cost much to set up, but its practical and symbolic value could be immense.


(Also available on the website of the Jewish Chronicle. The JC later published a summary of several of the ideas, and Tablet, an American Jewish daily online magazine, also featured it).