Review: Confessions of a Rabbi

Never let it be said that Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain conforms to the old-style image of the Anglo-Jewish rabbi: “invisible six days a week and incomprehensible on the seventh”. On the contrary; having graduated from Leo Baeck College in 1980, as did I, he has become one of the most high-profile of media rabbis in the UK — by his own counting, more than 1,500 TV and radio appearances.

As well as his post at Maidenhead synagogue, a community that has grown tenfold under his enthusiastic tutelage, his workload embraces prison and police chaplaincy, interfaith work, a JC column, and posts for the Reform movement. His latest book (he is also a prolific writer and editor) is testimony to this almost hyper-manic professional life. It offers an entertaining and intermittently reflective mélange of anecdotes, adventures and pastoral dilemmas, along with the life lessons he has derived from them.

Although he’s taken controversial stances on a number of issues — welcoming mixed-faith couples, supporting assisted dying, opposing faith schools — it’s clear from Rabbi Romain’s meandering narrative that his dedication to his calling has resulted in him being consulted by both congregants and the wider public, Jewish and non-Jewish, on an immense range of personal matters.

His anonymised accounts show him involved with people wrestling with divorce, infidelity, depression, alcoholism, financial misdemeanours and domestic violence, along with the many idiosyncratic ways that Jewish families generate a broiges out of thin air.