A. There are general as well as specific issues to be considered. The main general issue raises the nature of Shabbat. Fundamentally it is a day for spiritual and cultural concerns. Chief Rabbi Hermann Adler was asked whether children may swim on Shabbat and he asked, “Did they daven first?”

When rabbinic authorities addressed the question of sport on Shabbat many were sympathetic, but warned against incidental breaches of the Sabbath laws such as travelling or carrying, though the carrying issue is eased if there is an eruv (a symbolic boundary which encloses an area and allows carrying within it).

Breaches of the law which might be involved in playing golf include muktzeh (handling things that have a “weekday” character), and the prohibition of reaping (in this case, cutting grass) and ploughing (digging up soil). The consensus of rabbinic opinion is disapproving of golf on Shabbat.

A. On the Sh’ma passage that appears in the Torah (Deut. 6:4), Rashi says, “’Love the Lord your God’ – perform His commandments out of love, since a person who serves Him out of love is not to be compared to one who serves Him out of fear”.

When you serve God out of fear, your heart isn’t in it. You don’t act in a certain way because you desire to but because you want to avoid punishment. When the element of punishment is not present you may find yourself breathing a sigh of relief and immediately abandoning the mitzvah.

On the other hand, if you serve God out of love you are ecstatic at the thought that you have a way to show your love. Instead of looking for ways to avoid the mitzvot, you happily and joyously welcome every opportunity of performing acts of love. Possibly you will get a reward, possibly you won’t. The reward is not the main thing.

As a postscript, let me add that fear has two dimensions – one connotation is to be afraid, and that seems to be what Rashi is talking about, as well as the approach that I have taken in this answer; the second interpretation is “reverence”, having a feeling of awe. It is in that sense that the Amidah refers to God as ha-gadol ha-gibbor veha-nora – “the great, mighty and awesome God”.

A. This is an urban myth that I have been hearing for years.

It is certainly the case that according to the Torah, a person should not have tattoos made in his or her skin (Lev.19:28), but tattoos do not prevent a Jewish burial. When recently asked whether a person with a tattoo could have a Jewish burial, I answered, “Only if they were dead!”

Obviously an obscene or idolatrous tattoo can be a great embarrassment while the person is still alive and every reasonable means should be sought to remove it. At the very least it should, if retained, be kept covered up by your clothing.

All this shows how important it is not to get involved with tattoos from the start. In a sense it is a reflection of the verse in the Ten Commandments about visiting the sins of the fathers on the children; in this case it is the actions of a person at one stage in their life affecting them in later years. There’s a good rule of prudence not to do something today that you might regret tomorrow.

A. I was always taught that Moses was punished for what seems like a relatively minor sin because everyone was watching, and there is a principle of “noblesse oblige”.

What this means in modern terms is that orthodox people ought to be extra careful and scrupulous to ensure that no-one can criticise them. Every time that someone with an orthodox beard or hat is deemed to have acted unethically, it damages the reputation of the whole of orthodoxy, and by extension the whole Torah community, so that people say, “If this is religion, it’s no wonder I don’t want it!”

I can’t judge whether the Israeli government, the media and the public are ganging up against ultra-orthodoxy, but if the charedim have that perception they have to be so squeaky clean that no-one can point a finger at them. The Bible says of the Torah (Prov. 3:17), d’racheha dar’chei no’am v’chol n’tivoteha shalom, “Its ways are ways of pleasantness and all its paths are peace” – and giving an example of this principle is the best way to give orthodoxy a good name.

A. These are some principles that I would propose:
1. Synagogues should not ask members about their sexuality.

2. They should not debar a homosexual from being a member, or from being counted to a minyan or receiving an Aliyah.

3. They should however object if a person uses synagogue involvement in order to make a statement or promote a militant cause.

Jewish teaching prohibits many kinds of activity but it still expects the people concerned to participate in and maintain Jewish observance. It deals with acts, not ideations; people’s minds think of many forbidden things but what creates a problem is if they act upon the thoughts.

It is concerned at any form of sexual (including heterosexual) obsession, and indeed at all forms of obsession (including money, status and violence). It is also concerned at any form of selfishness and self-centredness; it sees (heterosexual) marriage as balancing the self and the other, and using this balance to construct the future.

A. Judaism has always had its priests, poets, prophets and pedagogues, its masters and mystics, saints and sages, charismatics and characters. The destruction of the Temple replaced the kohen (priest) with the sage, later called the rabbi.

Some rabbis were also kohanim or poets. Some had a prophet-like quality. But their chief characteristic was not lineage but learning, not poetry but pedagog.

Rabbinic ordination, s’michah, the “laying on of hands”, linked every rabbi with Moses, the first rabbi. The original s’michah lapsed, but the rabbi was the scholar in residence, the student, the teacher, the exemplar of Torah.

At first rabbis did not take a salary. They were scholars who followed a range of trades and professions. Hillel was a woodcutter. Shammai a builder. There were blacksmiths, bootmakers and even a gladiator. Only in the 15th century did a salaried rabbinate develop as a reluctant concession to the conditions, but the rabbinic emphasis was still academic. Rabbis were scholars and teachers, writers and judges. Few were preachers in the modern sense.

With the 18th century came a new type, the Chassidic tzaddik. The masses in Europe felt alienated by rabbinic intellectually. They needed motivators and inspirers. There was a tug-of-war between rabbis and tzaddikim and their respective followers, until a modus vivendi recognised that both were imperiled by the same Haskalah.

About a century later, German Jewry developed the Rabbiner, moulded both by traditional texts and the modern intellectual challenge. Anglo-Jewry for its part created the minister, usually called Reverend. He looked, dressed and acted like a pastor. He had preaching and pastoral skills, but he often lacked halachic knowledge.

The post-Holocaust era has seen a resurgence of halachic study as the keynote of rabbinic leadership. In some circles, this is unaccompanied by general education, but usually the rabbi learns to unite the terminology of the Talmudic text with the idiom of the modern intellectual. In many cases the rabbi is also a minister, but the rabbi prefers to be a rav, and the community is thirstier than ever before for the tradition to which the rabbi is the key.

There were times when you could not recognise the rabbi from his appearance. He looked, dressed and acted like a pastor. A beard is still not the universal adornment of every rabbi. Nor does black have to be the dominant colour of his garments or hat.

So how do you recognise a rabbi? There is a Hebrew phrase, tzurat harav, “the shape of a rabbi”. In some cases it is a physical, visible characteristic. More important is the moral tzurat harav, the rabbi who earns respect for Torah by his integrity and way of the life, and the intellectual tzurah, the rabbi who knows who does not know it all, the rabbi who may be learned but, more importantly, is constantly learning – a Talmid chacham, not a finished product.

A. Ahad HaAm argued in his essay, “Slavery to Freedom”, that he did not need to subscribe to the opinions of his father and grandfather if he wanted to be a good son or grandson. What he thought he needed was to strengthen his family as a means of continuity, facing the challenges of the new age in a contemporary way.

He was addressing more than the personal aspect of honouring his forebears but how to maintain his Jewish identity. His father and grandfather could have decided to be believing and practising Jews but he should be able to make up his own mind without slavish adherence to their opinions. His preference was for a secular cultural Jewish identity regardless of what his ancestors might have chosen.

His is the dilemma of the secularist Jew in our age a century later. His problem is how to find a Jewish ideology and position that will be sufficiently passionate and poetic to satisfy his descendants. Breaking with the God-talk and halachic pattern of the past may empty Jewish identity of its quality.

Does this mean that a grandson must force himself to live a lie, to “worship” a God he does not believe in and to “practise” commandments which do not appeal to him?

Not at all. Living a life of Jewish observance can be done whatever one’s present motivation. One can say it is a source of poetry in one’s life, that its symbolic content enriches one’s ethics, that it is a mark of Jewish belonging. And often it grows on you and you are able to say, “This religion business is beginning to make sense”…

The code of Hammurabi

Since Moses had a sophisticated education, he might have known of the Hammurabi code but it is a gross exaggeration to derive the Torah from Hammurabi. The two more or less share certain principles, probably because every society has a system of justice.

The differences are massive, especially when it comes to the spirit of the laws. Hammurabi has a cruel policy towards slaves whereas the Torah treats the servant as a human being. Hammurabi lacks the Torah feeling for the poor and downtrodden, the orphan and the widow, the servant and the stranger, and the Torah spirit of love and mercy. Hammurabi also lacks the Torah sense of service and support for others, the spirituality and Godliness of the human community.

A. Judaism is not pacifist, but it believes in peace. The Jewish greeting is Shalom. Our major prayers culminate in a plea to God to send peace onto His world. No ideal is greater; the sages say, “Great is peace, for all blessings are contained in it”. No dream is more compelling than the abolition of war: “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; they shall not hurt or destroy on all My holy mountain” (Isa.2:4).

But because this is still an imperfect, unredeemed world, there are threats which can only be contained by force of arms. Not that one should glorify or enjoy the fight, and the way a war is waged must follow clear moral guidelines. Non-combatants should be safeguarded from injury as far as possible. Prisoners of war must not be mistreated. Trees must not be wantonly destroyed nor the environment polluted.

Jewish law knows of two basic categories of war: the milchemet reshut (permissible war), aimed at expanding territory and not undertaken without the permission of the Sanhedrin; and the milchemet mitzvah (commanded war), waged in self-defence, including a pre-emptive strike. This category may be proclaimed without the consent of the Sanhedrin.

No war today is automatically either a permissible or commanded war, because the traditional mechanisms empowered to declare war are no longer in existence. The milchemet reshut is thus not a modern option; the milchemet mitzvah is more feasible, but only with halachic approval, as was the case with the first Lebanon campaign which the Israeli Chief Rabbinate Council deemed to be justified as a means of defending Jewish settlements in Galilee.

Rabbinic authorities both in Israel and the Diaspora, also approved the First Gulf War, stating that Israel as well as human moral values were in danger and had to be defended.

Rabbinic responsa, especially since 1948, have addressed many halachic questions arising out of war, for example:

• May a Jew be a conscientious objector?

• May exorbitant conditions be accepted in order to get back prisoners of war?

• May a Jew serve as a mercenary in another nation’s army?

• May one bring weapons into the synagogue?

• May Israel sell arms to other countries?

• May yeshivah students claim exemption from military service?

• May one transgress Shabbat and kashrut in wartime?

• May a kohen be a soldier?

• May the wife of a Jew whose submarine has disappeared be deemed a widow?

These responsa deserve publication in English.

St Augustine, who codified for the Christian world the terms and conditions of a just war, remarked that the tragedy is not so much to kill as to hate. For Judaism, a telling moral lesson is taught by Beruriah, the wife of Rabbi Meir, who said one should pray that the sin, not the sinner, be removed from the earth.

Our greatest prayer and dearest yearning must be that the conditions which produce human hatred and hostility be eradicated from people’s hearts and minds, so that the thought of war will no longer be possible and wars will cease of their own accord.

Image from a security camera showing an extremist breaking the glass at Manny's bookstore

A. None whatsoever. The true way to show you disapprove of someone else is through persuasion and not persecution.

What crime has Manny’s committed after all? They set up a highly popular bookshop in the main street of Me’ah She’arim and attracted thousands of customers. Their Hebrew books are all kosher as far as I can see. Their stock of English Judaica is orthodox – again, at least as far as I can judge. Do a few people patronise the shop in mildly immodest clothing? Possibly, but the books they buy at Manny’s will probably eventually make them more observant.

I am told that most of the orthodox groups that live in the neighbourhood, whilst not resiling from their strict standards, disapprove of the actions of those who have turned themselves into God’s policemen.

If it is the rabbis who rule in that district, I hope they will have the courage to preach more Ahavat Hab’ri’ot and Ahavat Yisra’el – more love of fellow human beings and more love of fellow Jews.