Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue
Saturday 4 April 2026

1. How many Orthodox Jews does it take to change a lightbulb? … Change?! What is change?
2. How many Progressive Jews does it take to change a lightbulb? … Ahhh, never mind, I’ll deal with it on Saturday.
3. Jokes making fun of the differences between denominations of Judaism form a whole genre of their own.
4. One particularly fascinating example comes from a commentary on the haggadah by a 19th-century German rabbi called Tevele Bondi. He says that the four children – wise, wicked, simple and too young to ask – represent four types of rabbi. The wise one is eager to learn the minutiae of every law; the wicked one is a hypocrite who flouts Jewish law and encourages their congregation to do likewise; the simple one has no values of their own but is ripe to be educated; and the one who does not know how to ask is someone who went to university and has no Jewish literacy, yet is nonetheless planning to earn a salary by playacting as a religious leader.¹
5. This is a thinly-veiled satire on the four sects into which 19th-century German Judaism was beginning to fracture. Bondi’s wise rabbi, of course, represented Orthodoxy. The Reform rabbi was inevitably wicked; secularists were the ones who do not know how to ask; and the rabbi who has no ideology and could drift in any direction was, with apologies to my esteemed Masorti colleagues, Masorti (Conservative).
6. Bondi did something really meaningful in identifying four different types of rabbi – but, unlike him, I’m not going to make it into a sectarian issue. Rather, it’s a moral issue.
7. Let’s work through an example: how would these four rabbis react to the news that, on Monday, Israel passed a law introducing the death penalty for Palestinian terrorists?²
8. A wicked rabbi will be the loudest cheerleader for this new law, known as Amendment 159. If it results in Palestinian combatants being hanged, it’s a good thing, human rights or no human rights. The fact that Jews who commit murder are not eligible for capital punishment is immaterial: who needs consistency? The noose feels right in these circumstances; it soothes our sense of outrage; there’s no need to look too deeply into its ethics. This rabbi has no moral compass and provides no moral leadership to their community.
9. The rabbi who does not know how to ask will not even have realised that they have the right to question Amendment 159. They’ve been taught, consistently, throughout their whole life, that Israel is right and that Jews support Israel no matter what. That’s what their parents said. That’s what their cheder teachers said. That’s what The Jewish Chronicle says. That’s just the way it is. This rabbi’s reflexive and automatic backing of Israeli state actions comes from a place of love. It is a reaction to generational trauma. They aren’t wicked; but nor are they exactly innocent.
10. The wise rabbi studies the letter of the law. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but their intense focus on small details can lead them to overlook broad moral issues. In the case of Amendment 159, the wise rabbi is comforted by the fact that it kinda-sorta doesn’t apply solely to Palestinians. In fact, it applies to anyone, of any race, who kills with the aim of “negating the State of Israel”.³ Granted, in practice that means only Palestinians; when extremist Jews commit acts of terrorism,⁴ their aim is the preservation of the State, so they escape the hangman. And, granted, the law imposes a mandatory death sentence for Palestinians tried in the West Bank, while Jews are always eligible for life imprisonment instead.⁵ But, still, technically a Jewish person could be executed, so that’s okay then. This wise rabbi, I hope we can agree, is allowing their wisdom to distract them from what’s important. ‘Wisdom’ which shuts down ethical concerns based on technicalities is not really wisdom at all; it’s cleverness at best.
11. Then we come to the simple rabbi. For Bondi, the simple rabbi was to be treated with a mixture of pity and contempt for their lack of firm convictions. But actually, this so-called simple rabbi is not simple at all. Being suasible is not the same as being simple.⁶ This rabbi has an open mind and wants to learn from all sides. They don’t celebrate a cruel law because it affects only their enemy. They don’t wave the blue-and-white flag as a substitute for engaging in critical thinking. And they don’t bury themselves in Talmudic-style casuistry deep enough to forget that their membership of the human race expects more of them than emotionless legal reasoning.
12. Traditionally, the haggadah smiles indulgently on three of the four children, condemning only the wicked one. That approach is reasonable when it’s children we’re dealing with.
13. But if we adopt Bondi’s allegory of the four rabbis, we can and must expect more. As grown-ups, rabbis should be discerning. And on closer examination, two of the three allegedly decent rabbis are far from decent. An adult who has no impetus to learn or discover, and just wants to cruise through life mindlessly rattling a JNF collection tin because that’s the relationship with Israel they grew up with, isn’t worthy of emulation. And an adult who uses their alleged intelligence to fixate on justifying the letter of Israeli law at the expense of Israeli society’s moral spirit isn’t worthy of emulation either.
14. I do my very best to be a simple rabbi and I’m proud to have simple colleagues. The day after the Knesset’s approval of Amendment 159, Progressive Judaism’s two chief executives, Charley Baginsky and Josh Levy, issued a statement denouncing it as an act of “cruelty and domination”.⁷
15. Will a Facebook post from the Progressive movement change the facts on the ground? No. Will a sermon in Brighton change the facts on the ground? No.⁸
16. Yet we don’t measure our moral worth solely by the concrete impact we make. As the parable of the four children teaches us, we are judged by the questions we ask. “The single word ‘what’”, says Bondi in his haggadah commentary, “is sufficient for us to tell what is in someone’s heart.”
17. The wicked rabbi asks: what are all these ‘human rights’ to you? The clever rabbi asks: what should be the height of the gallows in cubits? And the vapid rabbi can’t think of anything to say at all.
18. We, though, should do our utmost to be the simple rabbi. We should ask: “מה זאת? What is this?” Starting from first principles, we should learn, and keep an open mind, and from that foundation build a humane response to the world around us. כן יהי רצון, may this be God’s will.

Comments are welcome at the bottom of the page. Please note that they are premoderated and anything abusive simply won’t be published.

Remember that all of my sermons, handouts and so on can be found here.

Shavua tov!

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to you by email:

Notes

1. Tevele Bondi’s commentary on the haggadah, sv ‘U’l’yeishev’ ↩︎
2. See eg Mordechai Kremnitzer, “The death penalty is a vile, racist law that won’t withstand judicial review“, Ha’aretz (31 March 2026). I’m aware that a pedantic person might try to argue that the legislation doesn’t apply only to some Palestinians; read on. ↩︎
3. Per section 6 of the legislation. ↩︎
4. See eg Matan Golan, “Settler to be prosecuted for fatal shooting of Palestinian activist in West Bank”, Ha’aretz (15 February 2026). ↩︎
5. Amendment 159 contains two tracks. Section 6 applies to Arab citizens of Israel proper, and to Jews anywhere in Israel or the occupied territories, in cases where a killing was an act of terrorism and had the aim of negating the State. In that scenario – anyway unlikely to apply to Jewish terrorists – the court has a choice between imposing a death sentence or life imprisonment. Section 3 applies to the West Bank’s military courts, which only have jurisdiction over Palestinians. If a Palestinian in the West Bank kills as part of an act of terrorism, they face a mandatory, not discretionary, death sentence, whether or not they aimed to negate the State. In no circumstances does this second, considerably more harsh, set of rules apply to Jews. But there’s definitely no regime of apartheid; oh, no. (Incidentally, to read the text of this law I had to download and use an Israeli VPN. For some mysterious reason, when the law was approved, the Knesset’s website was rejecting all web traffic from outside Israel.) ↩︎
6. As my teacher Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah pointed out after hearing this sermon, ‘simple’ is the universal translation for this child, but the original Hebrew, תם, is more complimentary: it literally means ‘whole’, as in ‘wholehearted’. ↩︎
7. Movement for Progressive Judaism, Facebook (31 March 2026). ↩︎
8. That said, one September I gave a sermon demanding that Britain admit refugees from Diego Garcia, and by December they were here, so the only rational conclusion is that my preaching is vastly influential. ↩︎