Saints and Sinners

I’ve had Springsteen on constantly recently. Which I appreciate is not an entirely original middle aged development. But listening again to his lyrics, I realised what still grips me is not nostalgia. It is the refusal to give up on flawed human beings.

In my first year at university Springstein was the soundtrack to my life. I was lonely and slightly lost and trying to work out whether my future was in Cambridge or back in Israel. His songs about damaged people, terrible choices and lives going wrong somehow felt more truthful than all the polished certainty adulthood was supposed to contain.

In that same year he first sung ‘Land of Hope and Dreams’ with the lyric '“This train carries saints and sinners.” Nobody in Springsteen’s world is pure. But neither are they disposable. He writes as someone still bound to humanity even when humanity disappoints him.

So much of modern public life now seems organised around the performance of moral cleanliness. Somebody appears beside the wrong politician, signs the wrong letter, attends the wrong event or fails to condemn something quickly enough, and suddenly the conversation is no longer about whether they are decent or thoughtful or trying to contribute something worthwhile. It becomes about contamination. The instinct is everywhere. If a coalition contains difficult people, leave it. If a room feels compromised, denounce it. If an institution disappoints, withdraw publicly, visibly and loudly.

Increasingly, integrity is measured through your ability to quickly articulate your distance from it. And with that comes another shift: moral authority itself becomes performative. The person furthest from contamination acquires the loudest claim to righteousness. Public denunciation starts substituting for political imagination. One no longer has to persuade anyone, build anything or sustain difficult relationships. One simply has to demonstrate sufficient disgust.

I understand why this instinct is attractive because purity simplifies the world. It removes ambiguity. It frees us from the exhausting business of sitting with contradiction, compromise and disappointment.

Part of that same university year, alongside all my theological confusion and existential drama, I discovered Mary Douglas and her argument that societies organise themselves around ideas of purity and contamination. Once you start looking for that framework, it becomes difficult not to see it everywhere.

The rabbis of the Talmud understood something unsettling about this long before social media existed. In the story of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza, Jerusalem begins to unravel at a dinner party. A man is publicly humiliated and thrown out while the religious elite sit silently around the table. Nobody intervenes. Nobody risks discomfort. Later, looking back on the destruction of Jerusalem, the rabbis place some of the blame not only on cruelty, but on excessive moral fastidiousness itself. A rigid righteousness that could not tolerate ambiguity or imperfect compromise even when catastrophe was looming.

The rabbis do not fear a lack of righteousness, instead they fear a society so convinced of its own righteousness that it loses the capacity for generosity, flexibility and collective responsibility. Doesn’t that feels painfully familiar?

Over recent years Josh, my Co Lead, and I have sat in rooms with people from across political, religious and communal life who others would probably think we should never sit with at all. Left and right. Religious conservatives and fierce secularists. Government ministers and activists. Muslim leaders, bishops, parliamentarians, critics, journalists, campaigners and people whose politics make us deeply uncomfortable. Some of those conversations have been difficult. Some infuriating. Some genuinely transformative.

Increasingly there is a particular kind of critique directed at anyone who chooses to remain in those rooms. A critique that assumes proximity itself is corruption. That imagines moral seriousness is proven through refusal, distance and public disavowal. What strikes me is how often this confuses condemnation with courage.

This kind of public moralism derives much of its authority from volume and certainty. It creates the appearance of seriousness while often avoiding the harder work of persuasion, institution building and democratic responsibility. Standing outside the room condemning everyone inside it can feel morally exhilarating. But it is not the same thing as leadership. Real change rarely happens from a position of immaculate separation.

Northern Ireland did not emerge from violence because people waited for morally uncontaminated negotiating partners. The Good Friday Agreement required people to sit in rooms with those they distrusted, disliked and in some cases regarded as morally implicated in terror and bloodshed. South Africa did not dismantle apartheid through ideological purity. Interfaith relationships are not built through unanimity either.

It is always easier to protect one’s own moral innocence than to risk the contamination that comes with leadership, relationship and compromise. If Jewish leadership has something meaningful to offer British public life right now, I think it is precisely here. In resisting the pressure to retreat into ideological tribes. In trying to hold open civic and moral space when almost every cultural incentive pushes towards denunciation and simplification.

It is tempting to replace responsibility with performance and complexity with certainty but frankly that not only looks nothing like real leadership, it lacks humility too.

Of course, the alternative is harder. Instead of the clean emotional satisfaction of feeling righteous, you remain accountable to people who will disappoint you again and again. The Torah, as we know, is extremely familiar with this problem. Yet, communities organised around permanent moral judgement eventually become communities governed by fear. Leaders begin self censoring and retreat from discussion. Eventually the only people left speaking confidently are those performing absolute certainty.

I am grateful for partnership. Because this work would be impossible alone. Josh has reminded me repeatedly over these years that leadership is not about preserving one’s own moral innocence. It is about staying in relationship long enough to build trust, absorb contradiction and keep conversations alive when it would be easier and often more publicly rewarding to walk away.

“This train carries saints and sinners.”

Of course convictions matter. But Judaism was never built on purity for purity’s sake. It was built on the exhausting, sacred work of remaining bound to one another in an imperfect world.

This is the real challenge of this moment. Not whether we can prove our righteousness loudly enough, but whether we still know how to stay human to one another when certainty would be easier. Whether we can still sit at the table. Stay in the room. Board the train.

Saints and sinners together and maybe, just maybe we can turn the train around back to the land of hope and dreams.