He no longer attends services, even on Yom Kippur. Instead, he marks the day by reading to himself a selection of the sins that are part of the liturgy.
Confessions before the god Me? But he’s rich and spends much of his money promoting Jewish scholarship. Therefore, he has been made welcome in many universities that teach Judaism and need funding. Last month he was an honoured guest at the World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem.
Felix Posen was born into an Orthodox family in Germany that left for safer shores shortly before World War II. He lived in New York and now resides in London. According to newspaper reports, he made his money in oil, metal, minerals and coal before he became something of an apostle of what he terms secular Judaism.
He’s opposed to conventional expressions of faith but, like many so-called secular Jews, fighting anti-Semitism seems to be something of a surrogate religion. Combining passion with philanthropy, he has poured money into the Centre for the Study of anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University.
Though he accepts that religion is a component of Jewish culture, it’s faithless Jewish education that he promotes. Ironically, to further his goal he seems to imitate the kind of scant instruction that’s currently on offer in synagogues and which he decries, by believing that you can teach Judaism without having to practise it. Like the system he denigrates he, too, seems to confuse teaching about Judaism with instruction in living as a Jew.
At least in synagogue religion schools, the potential for such living is available to students, but it’s not really possible to live the abstraction that’s Jewish culture. The type of education Posen supports cannot be transmitted to future generations, not even in Israel.
He’s being lionized in many places not only because of the ubiquitous need for money and respect for its owners, but also as a symptom of the search for novel ways of being Jewish that ranges from New Age “spirituality” to secular “culture” and is often laced with atheism.
Sadly, therefore, though Posen is genuinely trying to provide remedies for the malaise of Jewish ignorance, his efforts may only contribute to it, despite the learned papers recipients of his grants will deliver and the impressive curricula of the day schools he wants to build.
Canadian Jewry is the fourth largest in the world. Should the finances of the Posen Foundation recover after reputed recent reversals, its misguided mission is bound to target us, too. There’s no reason to look forward to it.