Rabbis are renowned for their use of words and Rabbi Pete is no exception. Here is a selection of articles that have appeared in various publications over the years.

In the Guardian:
Saturday September 16 2000: Twin dilemmas of God and man
Saturday October 6 2001: Not better, just different
Monday September 30 2002 :The heart of the matter
Saturday July 22 2006: Face to faith
Saturday October 18 2008 : The economy in crisis?
Saturday March 8 2008 : Moses and the burning bush
Wednesday November 14 2007 : Undesireables debate

In the Jewish Chronicle:
October 25th 1002: A Progressive path to ‘modernising’ Shabbat
February 21st 2003: It’s not what you eat, it’s the way that you eat it.


A Progressive path to ‘modernising’ Shabbat  - October 2002

All of us have an almost sub-conscious awareness of the requirement to observe Shabbat from sunset on a Friday until the following evening. But for many contemporary Jews, it is a vague recollection of a series of prohibitions and little more. And so we engage in a variety of weekend activities which, were the rules of Torah to be applied, might well attract the death penalty (see Exodus 31:15 or 35:2).

Beware then, all you who garden, eat out as a family, go to football matches, shop, watch TV or drive your car on a Friday night or during Saturday.

Religion, today, is simply not a central part of most people’s lives as was the case 3,000 years ago. Our society sees less evidence of God in the world, which is both the reward and the cost of living in an age where scientific awareness and individual autonomy have replaced superstition and subservience to religious authority. In biblical times, there was no doubt. The leisure activities mentioned above would have been capital offences. To be sure, the rabbis adapted the regulations and ensured that the punishment for the breach of them could not be as drastic as in biblical times.

But it seems that the only punishment our modern age can inflict on those who break the ancient laws of Shabbat is the burden of a sense of guilt or failure, a well-known Jewish phenomenon which is hardly an aid to spiritual well-being.

The challenge is to find an approach to Shabbat which allows us time to value life and to appreciate the Creator and the Creation, as demanded by Shabbat, without being discouraged by the ancient restrictions. Our world offers many distractions and conveniences which might help us in this aim, though many of them, it would seem, directly contravene religious law.

As individuals in a sophisticated world, we can discern for ourselves what is appropriate to observe in order to make a concept such as Shabbat meaningful in our busy lives. If a person is able to find relaxation in gardening, eating at a restaurant with the family, or attending a football match, who is to say that this is inappropriate behaviour? It may breach a rabbinic rule, but so does driving to synagogue or lighting Shabbat candles after sunset in winter months — activities which can hardly be said to diminish Shabbat observance.

The point surely is to find ways to make our Shabbat experience special, qualitatively different from the rest of the week. To decide what is or is not appropriate to do on Shabbat, we can ask a simple set of questions. Is this activity qualitatively different from something we might do on a regular weekday? Is it something which could just as easily be done on a weekday? Does my participation in it add to or subtract from my ability to appreciate what is good in life?

The answers will often reveal that something which might ostensibly seem to be in complete contravention of the laws of Shabbat actually helps an individual’s enjoyment and appreciation of its spirit: that it is an opportunity to rest from the hardship of everyday toil and to try to rediscover what is valuable in our lives.

Perhaps these should be the “laws” of Shabbat in our modern age, the establishment of principles by which an individual and a community can evaluate the quality of their Shabbat behaviour. The aim must be to ask: do we emerge from this period, set aside from everyday routine, spiritually refreshed and with a renewed sense of gratitude for life?

This won’t be achieved through a list of “Thou shalts” and “Thou shalt nots.” Instead, we must sympathetically present the possibilities offered by this wonderful institution.

By raising awareness of the beautiful simplicity of Jewish observance and its accompanying obligations, perhaps it will be possible for Jews to rediscover the true concept of mitzvah: obligations which arise not out of lists of ancient regulations but which emerge from historical experience and reflect the human responsibility that is at the heart of Judaism and exemplified in the purpose of Shabbat.

Table talk - February 2003
It’s not what you eat, it’s the way that you eat it - a Progressive approach to kashrut.

A current TV advertisement produced by Scotland’s Health Education Board shows the eating habits of an average modern family. The various members of the family are seen making frequent and separate visits to the kitchen, satisfying their appetites with snacks and instant meals. The voiceover then suggests that sharing a meal as a family might do more than improve the family’s health, and we are left with a scene of a shared meal with conversation, laughter and a logo on the screen which invites us to “think about it.”

The implication is that in our busy modern age we have reduced eating to little more than a sort of refuelling process, to be quickly dispensed with so we can get on with our lives. It could be argued, then, that the laws of kashrut are effective and valid because they make us think carefully about even the most trivial of our daily actions and, as a result, elevate the mundane activity of eating to a spiritual level.

And that’s not an unreasonable justification for kashrut, except that it could just as easily be applied to our modern-day preoccupation with the amounts of fat, sugar, carbohydrate and additives which make up our food, or a concern with calorie consumption. Such attitudes and actions also serve to make eating more than a simple response to an appetite, but one would hardly describe them as religious.

Moreover, in many cases the observance of kashrut has not so much elevated the act of food consumption as turned in into something of a circus. There may be debate about the intention of the three-fold inclusion in the Torah of a commandment not to boil a kid in its mother’s milk — my money’s on the likelihood of it being a particularly cruel Canaanite ritual which offended the Israelite lawmakers.

But whatever the reason, I think it’s a pretty safe bet that its purpose was not to inspire the obsessive separation of meat and dairy utensils 3,000 years later. It was to encourage us to behave in a humane fashion. Like any ritual requirement, the intention is not blind adherence to the letter of the law, but a reminder of our human duty to bring God into our world through actions of kindness and humanity.

At the time the Canaanites were boiling kids in their mothers’ milk, great importance was attached to the sacrifice of animals and their subsequent consumption. Biblical festival celebrations included communal consumption of those parts of the sacrifice which were not reserved for the priests or set aside for God. Instructions for the very first Seder night prior to the departure from Egypt make it clear that the paschal lamb is to be shared as a family meal.

It’s no coincidence that the communal Passover Seder is becoming increasingly the norm in the Jewish community. The Seder is the family meal par excellence.


But our fragmented society has seen the collapse of the family as a focal point for eating: as in the Scottish TV advertisement, we eat in haste, and often alone. An adherence to the laws of kashrut may help to lift the act of eating to a spiritual level, but it won’t solve the loneliness or the alienation.

And maybe there is a clue here as to how we can make Jewish eating a more genuine expression of what Judaism is about. It’s about context rather than content. It should be about how we eat, not what we eat. Of course, a structure like kashrut will help us to reach agreement on what we should eat — but ultimately this is a cultural, not a religious, definition.

It is making more effort to share meals as a family or as a community; to see food as a way of relieving loneliness and alienation rather than just hunger that will give eating a far greater purpose than could truly be described as religious. And by serving humanity in this way, we would be doing a better job of serving God than simply focusing on the content of our food.