Val Ross reported last Saturday on a fiery controversy at Toronto’s oldest Jewish congregation, Holy Blossom Temple, about — wait for it — turning around the direction of worship in the 80-year-old “sanctuary.” Post-9/11, in a world convulsed with deadly conflict, much of it religious and much of that between co-religionists, I find the squabble refreshing.

Jewish worshippers traditionally face east, toward Jerusalem and the site of the original Temple, the one described in the Bible, where priests sacrificed, destroyed by Rome in 70 A.D. It is a sign of belief in a return to, and restoration of, that Temple.

Reform Judaism, to which Holy Blossom belongs, began in the 19th century. As part of its modernizing, it called places of worship temples, to show it no longer expected a literal rebuilding of the original. In the Toronto case, it faced west. In recent times, Reform Jews have gone back to many practices they’d left. Now, architect Jack Diamond has found a strikingly simple way to switch that space around. But for some members, the old form of rejecting tradition has become a new tradition they are not ready to abandon. So it goes.

Early Reform Judaism often described its religious core as “ethical monotheism,” with an emphasis on ethics rather than ritual. It stressed social justice and political liberalism. When we were kids at the Holy B., we’d fan out in the area for a “clothing blitz” to collect clothes for the less-well-off. The rabbi of my childhood, Abraham Feinberg, was “the red rabbi.” He preached for nuclear disarmament, against apartheid and, yes, he’s the one who went to Montreal for a “bed-in” with John Lennon and Yoko Ono against the Vietnam War.

A letter to The Globe and Mail about last Saturday’s article mentioned social justice as a tradition that the temple dissenters are rallying around. All the Holy Blossom rabbis were also ardent Zionists, though in the past, conflict rarely seemed to arise between their progressive politics and their support for Israeli policies. That’s become a harder blend now.

I thought of all this in the sanctuary last month during the funeral of my lifelong friend, Gordy Wolfe. He died at a sad, youthful 70. Gordy was a social worker, a role once more common among Jews. Social as in social justice, at least for him. In the 1960s, he was given the job of servicing alienated street kids in Toronto’s Yorkville. He set up a trailer for them, hoping its provisional air would make the kids feel at home, and it did. He ran big organizations like the Jewish Family and Child Service. He was a dynamite administrator.

I worked for and with him at summer camps, including one he owned in Temagami, Ont. Once, he adjudicated a dispute between me and another staff member over something like whose kids would get s’mores for their snack. When he ruled in my favour, I said I guessed it was because he felt it would be best for the kids. “No,” he said, “I just think you were right in that case.” He was all about ethics, as in ethical monotheism. It seems bracing today, when all the ideologies, political and religious, feel stale or corrupt.

He also served — it’s the right word — as president of Holy Blossom. It sounded like chutzpah when I heard it. He didn’t have the kind of money people in the position tend to have. He couldn’t endow a wing of the school in his name or even a public lecture series there. I’m sure it never occurred to him. He was a throwback, or an anticipation, in the Jewish messianic tradition, of what is yet to come when the world is finally set right.

I’d like points, please, for not analogizing the great sanctuary turnaround debate to debates that are finally starting to happen in various Jewish communities — here, the U.S., U.K., Australia — over Israeli policy. I just wanted to write about Gordy, whose passing deserves to be noted and honoured, as the deaths of June Callwood and Doris Anderson, also this spring, have been. I think of them in the same mould.

rick_salutin_small_24_1_1_1_1_0

Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.