Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris in The Mark Gevisser Profile
This week, during Rosh Hashanah, two strange things happened to Rabbi Cyril Harris. They are not unconnected. On Tuesday morning at 6am he received a personal call from Nelson Mandela, wishing the Jewish People a Happy New Year (his awestruck maid had to explain to the President that he didn’t take calls on holy days, but promised to pass the message on anyway).
The previous night he was heckled, for only the second time in his life, as he gave a sermon to the Etz Chaim congregation in Yeoville. He had begun by softening up his audience, in his timbrous and melodic Glasgow lilt, with a Jackie Gleason joke, much kitchen-Yiddish, a line from Janis Joplin (“Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz?”).
Then things started to get heavy: The New South Africa, he said, was “not coming on too well”. It was “moving too slowly”. And Jews had an obligation to help speed things up.
“Some of you might say, why should we help these schvartzes when they are killing us with all the violence, all the car-jackings and muggings and murders. Well that’s equivalent to anti-Semitism. It’s like the Christian who was swindled once by a Jew and now says all Jews are ganovim (crooks)!” The gist: there are bad blacks and good blacks, like there are bad Jews and good Jews. Most blacks are good, decent
Most of the few hundred Orthodox rabbis whom Harris leads wag their fingers at the future, accuse Yitzhak Rabin of “shaking the bloodstained hands of terrorism” (a direct quote from one rabbi on the first night of Rosh Hashanah this year), and scuttle into the obscure netherworld — the ghetto, really — of biblical injunctions and ethnic chauvinism in the face of this new South Africa.
They have retreated beneath the broad-brimmed black hats of right-wing fundamentalism, while Harris appears to all the world like a dapper and elegant professional who just happens to have a mauve silk yarmulke perched atop his coiffed silver hair. In counterpoint to their wild and unruly beards, he clips his close to the jaw.
At this point in his Rosh Hashanah sermon, however, his eyes blazed; his beard quivered. He became a biblical prophet; his favourite Isaiah, perhaps, he of the swords into ploughshares. “There are those Jews,” he said, “who say that the Bible tells us Judaism is only for the Jews, and that we should put Jews first and not worry about the goyim. Well that is nonsense!” He bellowed, he shook his fist, “Nonsense!”, and proceded to quote chapter and verse from the Old Testament, where Abraham helped the Sodomites even though they were the most evil people on earth.
It was at that point that the Rabbi was heckled, for perhaps precisely the same reason that Mandela phoned him. Finally, the Jewish community has a religious leader battling insularity, providing moral leadership from the front — a Hurley, a Tutu, a Storey.
This is the Chief Rabbi who marched with the Muslims for Bosnia last month, who has launched a Jewish RDP project called “Tikkun” (making things right). This is the Chief Rabbi who spoke first at Chris Hani’s funeral and then at Joe Slovo’s, implying that the atheist, communist Slovo was more of a Jew than those devout hypocrites who supported apartheid ever were. This is the orthodox Chief Rabbi who tells me, as we sit in the study of his Upper Houghton residence, that “I’m a great believer that God judges us on fact. Not on whether we serve him and pray three times a day, but on what we did as human beings with respect to our other human beings. I think Joe Slovo comes out very very high according to those criteria.”
Perhaps the ultras are irritated with him, but the Jewish Board of Deputies, which runs secular Jewish affairs for the 90 000-odd Jews of this country, are, in the words of chair Marlene Bethlehem, “thrilled and delighted with the role he has taken. He has played an important and valuable role bringing the community into the new political agenda.”
Whether or not other Jews approve of Harris’ left-wing politics, they know that they have to make a compact with this new South Africa, and he is their agent.
Sure enough, South African Jewry has never had so high a profile. Harris read from Isaiah at Mandela’s inauguration; he has introduced, into the South African political discourse, an institutional voice of Jewish conscience. Taking the lead from his mentor — retired British Chief Rabbi Lord Jacobovitz — he has gone out and found a public moral role for himself, pronouncing on matters the way Jewish leaders never have before.
Many in the Jewish community think he is playing this suit to bolster a candidacy for the British chief rabbinate. He is clearly ambitious: he notes, however, that — at 59 — he is now too old to be considered.
While he might be doing wonders for the profile of Jewry in South Africa, and while he might be helping his congregations find a way into democracy, his moderate orthodoxy is not succeeding, yet, in bringing secular Jews back to the faith. If you want to see a robust, muscular Judaism at work, go to the Or Sameach (“Joyous Light”) congregation in Glenhazel. Here are services filled with young people, singing the ecstasy of rebirth; nothing at all like the mumbling old men you’ll see in other, shrinking congregations, left behind by children now in Sydney or Toronto.
“If Rabbi Harris has failed,” says one of his supporters, “it’s that he has not provided an appealing enough alternative to these fundamentalists. They provide the bodies when it’s time to count the faithful. So even though he might disagree profoundly with them, he cannot clash too publicly with them.”
He will clash with them, though, on Israel. He is almost alone, in this country’s rabbinate, in supporting the relinquishing of land on the West Bank in favour of peace with the Palestinians. Here, unlike in the United States or in Israel itself, there has never been a dissenting Jewish voice, which he thinks is “a great pity”. If you want the angry Harris response to the “bloodstained handshake” genre of pulpitry, find out where he is speaking on Yom Kippur next week: peace in Israel will be his subject.
Harris, an outsider (he arrived here in 1988), notes — sometimes with approval and sometimes with concern — how insular and tightly knit the South African Jewish community is: “Nowhere else in the diaspora,” he says, “is there a lower marrying-out rate. Nowhere else do so many Jews go to Jewish schools.” But, on the other hand, “there’s a kind of ethnicity in South Africa which has a totally negative impact on bridge-building. It’s not just the Jews — Hindus, Zulus, everyone’s keeping to themselves. It allows Jews to strait-jacket themselves and make no room for the wider issues of the society they live in.”
I know what he means. I went to a Jewish school, and I still resent it bitterly, for when I asked questions — why do we pray? why do we have to keep sabbath? why do we need to keep kosher? — I was given answers that had nothing to do with faith, or with spirit, or with history, or with metaphysics, but that were either mechanistic (“because this is what makes you a Jew!”) or, worse yet, chauvinisitic (“because this is what makes you different to — and better than — the goyim”).
Not only did it make me cynical about faith, but it gave me no clue about how to be a South African. And so there is something quite revolutionary in Harris’ injunction, during his Rosh Hashanah sermon, that his flock must “answer the challenge of what it means to be a South African Jew”.
Cyril Harris is an open-minded man: he loves Wagner, he loves to read history, he is cricket-mad. His wife, Ann, is as far away from the stereotype of the docile Jewish wife as one could imagine: a lawyer, she runs the Law Clinic at Wits University, and is a fierce advocate for the rights of orthodox Jewish women.
Nonetheless, there is still something insular about life around the rabbi; something that comes, perhaps, with the territory. I get into his car and his bodyguard turns round to ask me, “So, where do you daven (pray)?” Teaching a Jewish Studies class at Wits, Harris breaks a piece of chalk as he is writing. “Anti- Semitic chalk!” he exclaims. Ann Harris proclaims that her labrador, Blackberry, is Jewish: “Good Shabbes, Blackberry!” she says, and the dog lifts his paw for her to shake it. The Yiddish interjections; the self- referentiality: it’s all a bit cloying.
One person’s ghetto wall is another’s fortress of pride. We all choose our own sites to erect the boundaries around our identities. I suppose what I respect, ultimately, about Cyril Harris is that his walls are porous — they let ideas pass through. But why do Jews need their “own” way of becoming involved in the RDP? Why not just participate, wherever you are, whoever you are, just because you are South African?
During Harris’ Rosh Hashanah sermon, he asked the congregation why Jews often only “feared” or “despised” goyim. Why not “help” them instead? I listened to him, not at Etz Chaim, but in the congregation my family has belonged to since my birth — that of the Great Synagogue. But now, for the first Rosh Hashanah of my life, the Great Synagogue is empty, looming domed over Wolmarans Street just east of Joubert Park like a grumpy dowager, abandoned.
Now, outside the Great Synagogue, the streets reek of urine and grilled fatty meat. The community is now too small to fill the vast shul; too scared to come into these badlands for services. And so it squats in a function-room at the Transvaal Automobile Club until a new plan can be made.
As I sat listening to the Rabbi’s sermon, in a room still redolent of mock-crayfish and kola-tonic functions of my childhood, I remembered, with the nostalgia that is so central to ethnic identity, how I recited my Bar Mitzvah portion to the filled, burnished pews of Wolmarans Street; how I called my blessings to the response of the choir up beneath the vaulted central dome; how I imagined swinging from the vast chandelier during the doleful liturgy as the ritual pomp of my history paraded before me in a never-ending blur of rabbis, torahs and song; mystical, awesome, utterly incomprehensible except as an indicator that I came from somewhere.
Pity the poor 13-year-olds denied the opportunity of trying out their newly cracked voices in such a chamber! Perhaps, though, the engagement of the current Chief Rabbi makes up for it. Perhaps Jewish faith will make more sense to them, now, than it ever did to me.
But why, I asked myself as I listened to his sermon, are there still only those options — to fear the goyim, to despise them, or to “help”, patronisingly, with our superior skills and values? As I struggled with the nostalgia of my own Jewish childhood, I felt that while Harris was asking the right questions, he wasn’t quite yet answering them.