Haviv's Blog: In the land of fog

England is enveloped in fog this holiday season. It sticks to the ground in the cold night air, so thick you can't see 50 meters ahead on a 150-kilometer drive northward from London's Heathrow Airport to the outskirts of Coventry. Along the way, coalescing out of the fog like carefully orchestrated cinematic hints, road signs offer up town names that are unabashedly lyrical to an American ear: Abingdon, Weston-on-the-Green, Oxford, Banbury, Little Chesterton and Stratford-Upon-Avon.
 
The pervasive quaintness of all things English has been drilled into the American mind at every opportunity, from the strange notion of the 16-country "realm" over which Queen Elizabeth II presides to the Hollywood portrayals of English countryside cabins set in lush green valleys (during, one assumes, some unknown English season not dominated by fog or snow) and sometimes occupied by plucky, furry-footed adventurers.
 
But, as with many of life's assumptions, these whimsical notions of "Englishness" on this, my first visit to the British Isles, are misleading, if only because everything I am here to see is new.
 
Limmud Conference 2007 is the latest incarnation of a quarter-century-old annual tradition of British Jewry. Begun as a program for upgrading the Jewish educators in a country that lost almost 40 percent of its Jews to assimilation since the 1960s, Limmud is becoming the non-hierarchical battle cry of a generation of British Jewry.
 
It is now an annual conference of over 2,000 participants that has spun out many smaller conferences during the year, and has launched a worldwide copy-cat effect that sees Limmud opening in New York, Sydney, the Galilee, Boulder, Toronto, Hungary and, most recently, Moscow.
 
It is a conference that wants to become a movement.
 
The Limmud method - a free-for-all of Jewish teaching and learning, with hundreds of sessions running concurrently over several days dealing with an endless array of topics - has become a "best practice" of Jewish communal life, transferable to nearly every community in widely disparate cultural contexts.
 
In Israel, while a small Limmud is part of the fledgling birth of localized Israeli spirituality, it has yet to become the sought-after sea-change in Israel's polarized religious world. It is a vehicle for pushing forward a phenomenon already taking place. In America, Limmud so obviously connects to the American way of conducting religion that it seems strange that the model came from outside. In Russia, while the content is more academic and the scale much smaller, the method, organization and youth-attracting informality are the same.
 
Worldwide, there is hardly a question as to the usefulness and appropriateness of Limmud. But back home in its cradle England, where Limmud may be developing into a real communal force, it faces its most difficult challenges. The culture war within English Jewry has meant that the chief rabbi, whose son-in-law chairs Limmud, must refuse to attend.
 
Over the next few days, I'll be reporting from this year's conference in an attempt to sketch the outline of Limmud's remarkable position within the UK and the Jewish world. A community that, despite its sharing in the lingua franca of world Jewry, remains fairly unknown to American and Israeli Jews. Here, it will air its problems, its uniqueness in the strange array of the world's Jewish communities, and its hopes for the future.
 
What does it all mean? Is it significant that Liberal Jews - who accept same-sex marriage and  patrilineal descent - and Orthodox rabbis from overseas, that Avrum Burg and Jewish Agency executives and that Americans and Israelis and British expats are all here? Are Limmud's 700 volunteers the face of a changing, younger English Jewry, or the last vestige of a spiritual community dividing into haredi-oriented Orthodoxy and "English" traditionalism?

Wherever it's going, this is English Jewry seen from its cutting edge.