Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue
Saturday 22 August 2026¹

• In 1896, Martin M, a Salvation Army captain, gave a series of public lectures on a street in Schleswig in northern Germany. His speeches attracted crowds – sometimes quite unruly and unsympathetic crowds – and eventually the local police ordered him to stop.²
• Captain Martin sued, and the Prussian Administrative Court of Appeals upheld his claim:³

In other words, if the Salvation Army’s audience was behaving badly, the solution is to target the audience, not the Salvation Army.

• In reaching its decision, the Prussian court relied on the concept of proportionality. Proportionality is the legal principle that the state cannot interfere with an individual’s rights unless the interference has a legitimate aim; would genuinely help to achieve that aim; could not be replaced by any less intrusive measure; and strikes a fair balance between the needs of the state and the needs of the individual.⁴ In the colourful language of the American judge Ilana Rovner: “[An] approach [which] furthers the state’s interests the way an atom bomb would further the eradication of a residential ant infestation [is not acceptable].”⁵
• In the Salvation Army case, there was nothing wrong with the police wanting to prevent scuffles on the street, but they could achieve that aim by arresting the scufflers and leaving Captain Martin’s rights intact. So, their order was quashed.
• These days, proportionality is a very standard legal concept, and is used by courts on a daily basis.⁶ But it actually had its roots in 18th- and 19th-century Prussia.⁷ The first scholar to use the word ‘proportionality’ (Verhältnismäßigkeit) in this context was Günther Heinrich von Berg in his 1799 treatise on the limits to police power.⁸
• I’m telling you all this because, earlier this week, I was reading through some Hebrew commentaries on this week’s parashah, when I came across an incredibly long word I didn’t recognise. Eventually I worked out that it was פערהאלטניססמאסיג (Verhältnismäßig, proportionate) written in Hebrew letters.
• The author of this particular passage,⁹ Ya’akov Tzvi Mecklenburg, was a rabbi in Prussia in the 1830s, just as this new legal doctrine of proportionality – of requiring the law to go no further than necessary – was taking off. And he put it into his Torah commentary.
• Specifically, he looked at the phrase וְעָשִׂיתָ כַּאֲשֶׁר … דִּבַּרְתָּ בְּפִיךָ, And you shall do as you have said with your mouth.¹⁰ He pointed out that the word בְּפִיךָ, with your mouth, seems superfluous. If you’ve said something, of course you’ve said it with your mouth. So, concludes Mecklenburg, בְּפִיךָ must actually mean something like to the extent of your ability, which is indeed how the word is used, idiomatically, in other contexts: roughly in the sense of ‘mouthful’, ‘portion’ or ‘manageable amount’.
• Rabbi Mecklenburg’s decision to treat Jewish law as incorporating proportionality was really quite profound. It was borne out of the radicalism of Prussian political thought at the time.
• Unfortunately, that human-oriented radicalism hasn’t quite reached Israel. Last weekend, a Progressive synagogue in Jerusalem was attacked and vandalised. Three youths broke in, smashed windows, destroyed artworks and tore up Pride flags.¹¹ This isn’t the first time that the Kol ha-Neshamah synagogue has been targeted. Its Pride flags are ripped down on a regular basis. In 2018, a passer-by hurled a huge rock into the courtyard in which 200 congregants were celebrating Simchat Torah.¹²
• Here in Brighton, when we fret about security, it typically isn’t attacks by our fellow Jews which worry us. But Kol ha-Neshamah’s members live in fear of homophobic and misogynistic Jews – or, at least, people who call themselves Jews – mounting violent assaults.
• My teacher Rabbi Gilad Kariv, who I know a lot of you heard speak at the recent Movement for Progressive Judaism conference a couple of months ago, told journalists that the Israeli government was not doing enough to protect non-Orthodox communities.¹³
• And, in fact, this is basically where we came in. What we’re looking at here is a modern-day version of the Salvation Army lectures in Schleswig. Captain Martin was simply going about his regular religious practice, hurting noöne, and a group of thugs too immature to handle it lashed out. The Prussian police decided to restrict Captain Martin rather than arrest the aggressors. The Israeli government, likewise, prefers to delegitimise Progressive Jews rather than to deal with those who harass us.¹⁴ Earlier this year, a member of Netanyahu’s cabinet said that Progressive Jews “marry dogs in [our] delusional synagogues” (the speaker was the minister for equality, by the way).¹⁵
• The Prussian court said something extremely wise in its ruling in the Salvation Army case: “After all, they are serving God, albeit in a peculiar way.”¹⁶
• We too, as Progressive Jews, serve God. Even if the way we go about it seems peculiar, or even intolerable, to onlookers – our Pride seders, our female rabbis, that time we sang Adon Olam to the tune of Deck the Halls – we have a right to do so. People who don’t like Progressive Judaism have a corresponding right not to join Progressive synagogues. What they don’t have a right to do is use violence, or even puerile verbal abuse, in a quest to stop us worshipping in the way that we want.
• Verhältnismäßigkeit. Proportionality. People shouldn’t use an atomic bomb to deal with an anthill, because some Nippon powder would be less intrusive. People shouldn’t smash windows to deal with their dislike of Progressive Judaism, because just walking away and ignoring it would suffice. People shouldn’t destroy Pride flags as a way of processing their deep-seated homophobia, because behaving like a civilised human being is a more appropriate option.
• וְעָשִׂיתָ כַּאֲשֶׁר … דִּבַּרְתָּ בְּפִיךָ, And you shall do as you will, insofar as it is appropriate.¹⁷ Rabbi Mecklenburg turned a seemingly superfluous word into a lesson for life.
• No matter what the intolerant and fanatical around us say and do, let us always strive to act proportionately, to respect others’ rights to the maximum extent appropriate, and to serve God in our own, heartfelt, peculiar way. כן יהי רצון, may this be God’s will.

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Shavua tov!

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Notes

1. Deuteronomy 23:13-24 ↩︎
2. Entscheidungen des Königlichen Preussischen Oberverwaltungsgerichts vol 31 case 61 @p409. For an intriguingly similar English case, also about attempts to prevent Salvation Army events due to violence by onlookers, see Beatty v Gillbanks (1882) 9 QBD 308 and A V Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1885; repr London: Macmillan, 1915) @p266ff ↩︎
3. Ibid @p410 (Claude’s translation). ↩︎
4. See generally Aharon Barak, Proportionality: constitutional rights and their limitations, trans Doron Kalir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). ↩︎
5. Richwine v Matuszak 148 F 4th 942 (7th Cir 2025) @p955. In the slightly – but only slightly – less colourful language of the Swiss jurist Fritz Fleiner: “You should never use a cannon to kill a sparrow”: see Barak, ibid @p179. ↩︎
6. See eg Charlotte O’Brien, “Proportionality and reasoning in judicial review“, Constitution Society (29 December 2025). ↩︎
7. See generally George Frumkin, “A survey of the sources of the principle of proportionality in German law” (PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 1991). ↩︎
8. Frumkin, ibid @p17. ↩︎
9. Ha-K’tav v’ha-Kabbalah to Deuteronomy 23:24; see also his commentary to Exodus 13:9 ↩︎
10. Deuteronomy 23:24 ↩︎
11. Deborah Danan, “Jerusalem Reform synagogue vandalized, Pride flags torn down in latest attack“, The Jerusalem Post (18 August 2026). ↩︎
12. Ibid. ↩︎
13. Gilad Kariv, Twitter (16 August 2026). ↩︎
14. Ibid. ↩︎
15. Noa Shpigel and Judy Maltz, “Netanyahu minister to Reform rabbi, MK Kariv: ‘You’re marrying dogs in your delusional synagogues’” (20 May 2026). ↩︎
16. Entscheidungen, ibid @p411. ↩︎
17. The root דבר can also refer to volition, intentions or threats: see eg Jeremiah 36:31. ↩︎