judaism · sermon

Have you considered therapy?

levtaylor

Isaiah stood up on his soap box and preached to the people:

‘Listen to this, you wasters who sit in a drunken stupor, though not from drinking wine. This is what the Sovereign, your God and Defender, says: “See, I have taken the terrible cup from your hands. You will drink no more of my fury. Instead, I will hand that cup to your tormentors, those who trampled you into the dust and walked all over your backs!”’

The people stood and watched his prophecy, then replied: “Isaiah, have you considered therapy?”

Isaiah, you should go to therapy.

Isaiah, beloved prophet, seer of justice, speaker of truth, visionary of God, I do think you would have benefited from a bit of counselling. I read your words, so filled with passion, as you swing between abject rage against all humanity’s follies and then salivating at the possibility of God’s vengeance against your enemies. And I love your words, these are such beautiful Torah, but I also just want to give you a hug.

Isaiah, my friend, my favourite prophet of them all, do you need someone to talk to? Are you going through something just now? When was the last time you were able to open up and be vulnerable? Because this… these speeches… they’re beautiful, they really are, and I think you might need some help processing all of this.

There are tools available. There are ways you can access your feelings and address some of the root causes of your pain. 

I’d like to introduce you to a nice Jewish boy who lives in Hampstead. He doesn’t care much for shul, but he likes studying some of our texts, and he’s had some good ideas. His name is Sigmund Freud. 

He had this fantastic idea that, if a person spoke freely about all that was worrying them, they might feel a little better. 

He found trends that showed that some of what makes us angry or sad or anxious can be connected to our childhood. Now, being honest, some of his theories have lost their appeal. He put a lot of stock in a couple of Greek myths. But, in general, he understood that by re-telling our internal narratives, we can live in ways that are calmer and more fulfilling. 

During his lifetime, Freud had to deny that his techniques were a “Jewish science,” but later his daughter Anna was able to reclaim the label as a “badge of honour.” 

I think it probably is something of a Jewish science, and I wish more Jews would try it.

I look at some of the characters in our Torah and think how much they might have benefited from a trip to a therapist’s couch. 

Would Isaac have pitted his sons Jacob and Esau against each other so callously if he’d been able to cope with the betrayal he felt when his father Abraham tried to kill him?

Could Moses have kept his temper in check a little if he’d had space to talk through the displacement of discovering he had been adopted?

Maybe Rachel and Leah could have done with some family therapy to process their jealousy and build better relationships.

Of course, they wouldn’t have given us such compelling stories if they’d been better adjusted, and we wouldn’t have the Torah we do. 

It’s too late now for the biblical protagonists, but it’s not too late for us. We actually can go to therapy, and learn to like others and ourselves a little better.

As a community, one of our great highlights is Sandra Webber’s Shabbat Island Discs, where members share their life stories alongside their favourite tunes.

Believe it or not, the idea didn’t begin at KLS, but originated on BBC Radio 4, where it is called Desert Island Discs. On 4 August 1989, the show welcomed on a castaway by the name of Rabbi Lionel Blue. You can still listen now on iPlayer, as he speaks with such gentle warmth, and offers up a song about his Yiddishe Momme. 

But there is a really profound moment when Rabbi Lionel describes the benefits of therapy to us all. He had learnt about himself through a self-taught psychotherapist who took him on for free. His first session took 10 hours! 

He says his reason for promoting the benefits of therapy is that “you can only love God as much as you love yourself.”

This approach, that we ought to get to like ourselves better through therapy, positively impacted on how rabbis were trained at Leo Baeck College. For several decades, it has been actively encouraged as part of rabbinic training.

On and off, in various forms, I’ve been going to therapy for about 15 years. And I swear by it. It has helped me know myself better and love myself more. It has made me a better pastor, partner, and friend. 

And I think Lionel was right: it has made me love God more.

With the lengthy commute between Essex and Surrey, I wasn’t able to go so often. But now, with space and time for it, I find myself back on the couch. It’s doing me a world of good.

As Jews, we don’t evangelise, but if I were asked to give a rabbinic endorsement to anything, it would be psychotherapy. If you’re not already bought in, I encourage you to give it a try. 

Spend just under an hour talking to a trained listener, and see how much better you feel.

Shabbat shalom.

social justice · spirituality · theology

One God, No Masters

levtaylor

We are, all of us, sparks of the divine.

There is something within each of us that is holy. 

We are more than moving limbs and functioning organs. We have a quality that cannot be reduced to DNA, or psychology, or narrative. 

There is something about a person that makes them who they are: more than their physical experiences, and more than our experiences of them. 

It is a feature that we can’t perceive by touch, sight or smell, but we know it is definitely there. It is the unfathomable essence within a human being that glows invisible and breathes without lungs and animates without moving.

This property cannot really be named, but it has been known in English as soul, spirit, or lifeforce; in Hebrew as neshama, ruach, nefesh.

There is something unique about life. And, if anything deserves to be called sacred, it is that.

In Judaism, we call it “the spark of the Divine.” As if God were one burning bonfire in which all of us were the flames. As if, inside every one of us, a candle was lit before we were born and cannot be extinguished after we die. 

There have been moments in my life when I have truly felt it. When I have seen the sacred spark in myself and realised, in a way I still cannot explain, that I am made in God’s image. 

There have been times when I have truly seen the sacred spark in others. Not just that another person was special or lovable, but infinite: that, qualitatively, their true essence could never be contained. 

I hope you have felt this at times too, or already know it to be true, because I want to talk about how radical this concept is.

If you truly believe, as I do, that we all have sacred souls, how could it ever make sense for one person to be better than another? 

In the light of God’s majesty, the divisions of gender, race, nation, and physical characteristics look like pale imitation of reality. Our bodies are real and diverse, but our spirits have a reality that is incomprehensibly more real and more diverse.

The Divine Spark within us comes from the Source of all Truth. And because God has implanted it within us, every life is equally, completely, and unassailably holy.

Every human spirit is remarkably equal. Not because each one is in some way alike, but because each one is infinitely different. 

In this week’s haftarah, the Prophet Isaiah proclaims: “O Eternal God, masters other than you have ruled over us, but we only remember your Name. Those others are dead and lifeless; sunken beings who will never rise. You, O God, have wiped them out and obliterated their memory.”

Who are these other masters? And why can God destroy them so decisively?

We might be tempted to imagine this as we do the Pagan pantheon, where one god comes in and destroys the others, as the Titan Cronus usurped his father, Uranus, only in turn to be vanquished by Zeus. 

But this is not a myth of many gods. In the Jewish understanding, there is only one God. So who else has ruled over us?

Midrash Tehillim says that this is referring to Nebuchadnezzar, the tyrant of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Nebuchadnezzar ran colonial campaigns throughout the Middle East, suppressing all revolt, and establishing himself as sole dictator over the Levant. In 586, Nebuchadnezzar besieged and ransacked Jerusalem. He bulldozed Solomon’s Temple, conquered the Land of Israel, and carried away its leaders as captives. 

According to our tradition, Nebuchadnezzar demanded that the Israelites he had imprisoned bow down to idols. They refused. Nebuchadnezzar heated a furnace to seven times its regular temperature and attempted to burn the Israelites alive. But, by a miracle, God saved them, and the three pious believers walked out from the fire unscathed.

In this understanding of the text, there is only one True Ruler, and that is God. The lords who attempt to subjugate others are men. Sure, they may be able to win some wars, defeat some people, and make some people bow down to their will. But, ultimately, they are mortal.

Their lives are nothing in the span of God’s eternity. Their empires are worthless in the expanse of God’s universe. They are lying to themselves and others that they can be anything but dust and ashes. 

Only one being is immortal – that is God – and all are equal in the Eternal One’s beneficent eyes. The rulers of the world can never conquer us in a way that truly matters, because our spirits belong to something greater than their meager understanding.

If we deeply internalised this sanctity of every life, our entire world order would seek to function. Consider what it would mean to believe in the profound equality of every soul. How could anyone take more than they need from society, or abide for anyone else to have less? Surely nobody would ever be able to kill another and there would be no more wars. 

How would we have borders and checkpoints, when no human being can own the earth, because everything is God’s possession? Nobody could ever dominate or govern another.

And, in truth, if we truly got rid of all borders, states, laws, militaries, and inequalities, civilisation would fall apart. Society, as we know it, would cease to exist.

Well, good, said Rabbi Avraham Yehuda Heyn. He was one of the leading intellectuals among the Chabad Chassidim in 20th Century Ukraine. He taught that Judaism was a rejection of hierarchy, force, and inequality. We wrestle against the strong arm to make everyone strong and uproot weakness. 

He outlined a view of the world that would upturn all order. Absolute equality for everyone in everything. Complete refusal to participate in states or war. The abolition of all classes, and the levelling of all people.

Avraham Yehuda Heyn was part of a cohort of rabbis from Eastern Europe, profoundly educated in Talmud, as well as the modern thought of Tolstoy, Nietzsche, and Kropotkin. There were many like him, in the 19th and 20th Centuries, who believed that the only logical conclusion to Judaism’s insistence on the sanctity of life was freedom and equality for all. In his recent book, No Masters but God, Hayyim Rothman calls this ideology of strictly Orthodox mystics “anarcho-Judaism.”

This idea may sound radical, and even intimidating. You can feel that it belongs to the heady days of a time when Jews were becoming free and anything felt possible. It belongs with the revolutionary optimism of mystics in another era. It is bold.

And yet: it is hard to honestly believe what we do – in God and the sanctity of the spirit – without arriving at some pretty bold conclusions. 

Think seriously about what it would mean to say that we are all holy embers. To say that we are sparks of the divine.

As if God were one burning bonfire in which all of us were the flames. As if, inside every one of us, a candle was lit before we were born and cannot be extinguished after we die. 

Breathe life into the flames. Give fuel to the candle. And, perhaps, something within us all, will set this world ablaze.

Shabbat shalom.

judaism · sermon · spirituality

My body and my soul are always growing

levtaylor



A few years ago, I started putting on a lot of weight. I got a spare tyre around my waist and started to sag in unexpected places.

After a lifetime of enjoying a diet of junk food and fizzy drinks, my metabolism had finally caught up with me.

I felt a lot of shame about my body shape. At the time, I was midway through rabbinic College, and blessed to be surrounded by sensitive and thoughtful colleagues.

I took my worries to my classmate, David Yehuda Stern. I said: “I’m getting fat, and I don’t like it.”

He smiled lightly and shrugged. “My body’s changed too. But my body’s always been changing. It changed when I was a teenager. Why would I expect it to stop changing now?”

This is some of the best advice I’ve ever had, and I refer back to it often. This week, I texted Rabbi David Yehuda to ask if he’d be OK with me passing on these words of wisdom.

He said that, of course, he had no recollection of ever having said such a thing, but it sounded like an important message, so I should feel free to share it with you.

Having a healthy, happy relationship with my body has been one of the great challenges of my life. I sometimes joke that I’d be a lot better off if I didn’t have a physical form and could just be a concept.

But I definitely feel more at home in my skin at 37 than I did at 27, and certainly far more than I ever did at 17. I find some beauty, now, in accepting that my body, like my soul, is always growing and changing.

When I think about working on my spirit, I know that the perfected version isn’t the one that’s superficially nicest to look at. It’s the one that has lived, learned, and adapted from experience, maintaining its tenderness, while toughening its boundaries. Why should my body be any different?

The best version of my body will be the one that has fully experienced life: wrinkled from laughter; weathered from sunshine; built by adventure and experimentation; and, if I am lucky enough, blessed to reach a very old age.

Our haftarah for this week points us to a similar message of embracing our changing bodies and souls. The Prophet Isaiah preaches to us:

“Consider the rock from which you were cut, the quarry from which you were mined. Think about Abraham, your ancestor, and Sarah, who gave birth to your nation. Abraham was only one man when I called him. But when I blessed him, he became a great nation.”

It’s an interesting formulation, to put “the rock from which you were cut” and “the quarry from which you were mined” alongside Abraham and Sarah. Why should these two concepts be parallel to one another?

In the structure of a biblical poem, which these words from Isaiah certainly are, you usually get a mirroring of similar words in succession like this. Why would Abraham be compared to a rock and Sarah to a quarry?

Our rabbis see an interesting message in the use of language. In Tractate Yevamot of the Babylonian Talmud, they see this as a commentary on the lives of our ancestors, Abraham and Sarah.

Rabbi Yitzhak says this is a commentary on their infertility. Abraham and Sarah were both initially unable to conceive. In this sense, says the Talmud, they were barren like rocks and quarries.

God wanted them to pray and to grow spiritually enough before they were ready for progeny. God needed to see that their souls had grown so that their bodies could change to accommodate miracle births.

Building on this, Rabbi Ami goes even further. He says that, initially, Abraham and Sarah were tumtumim. This is a word that comes up a fair bit in rabbinic literature but a lot less so in modern medical journals. It means that, biologically, they were sexless. They had the same genitals as Action Man and Barbie: just one smooth surface.

(I checked with an obstetrician friend, who said that this was not something she had seen so far in her career. Truly special people then, were Abraham and Sarah.)

So Abraham and Sarah were not just infertile inside. Externally, to begin with, they simply didn’t have the equipment to make Isaac.

According to our rabbis, then, our ancestors went on a great journey with their bodies, spirits, and names. They began like a rock and a quarry, but gradually, over time, they eroded the hard outer layers until their bodies and souls were porous enough to receive God’s blessings. Only then did Avram become Abraham and Sarai become Sarah.

Now, most of us are not going to undergo such dramatic transitions, but there are lessons here for us all. We, like the founders of monotheism, can embrace our bodies and souls as works in progress.

In our society, that is very counter-cultural. The modern world glamourises youth and shuns any body-type that deviates from an unattainable ideal. We are taught to hate our bodies and neglect our souls.

Judaism has a different message for us entirely. When we first wake, we are supposed to thank God for our soul, which the prayer says, God is constantly creating and implanting within us.

Upon getting up, Jews are meant to thank God for our body; for all its openings and closings; for getting to breathe and have a heartbeat; to sit and stand and walk. We say to God: I am so grateful to be alive.

I can’t lie and pretend I’m good at doing this every day. I definitely can’t claim to have suddenly developed a great relationship with my body.

But the principle, taught by our text and our tefillah, has been a great relief to me. The idea, that I first learnt from my classmate, that my body has never stayed the same, gives me permission to see my body not as my enemy, but as an ever-changing vehicle for exploring the world.

My body and my soul are cherished gifts from God. May I be blessed enough to see them grow and change.

Shabbat shalom.

judaism · sermon

We’re clearing a path by gentle steps

levtaylor

It’s a pleasure to be back here.

About ten years ago, I used to sit over there on a Shabbat morning. Rabbi Nathan was still a student, taking over from Rabbi Janet, and I was applying to Leo Baeck College. This community was then, and still is, such a wonderful home for all kinds of Jewish characters.

I’ve just moved back to south London after a long time away, although I’ve been commuting to my synagogue in Kingston from Essex for nearly two years. 

This fortnight, I have finally found myself living and working in the same area. The best bit? I can do something I haven’t been able to do for a while in my daily life: walking.

I love walking. I love the meditative rhythm of getting between places; seeing what the landscape, the nature, and the people are doing along the way.

I love a good hiking holiday. Wandering with my husband and friends through the hills. 

In the mountains, anywhere you may walk in this country, you’ll find paths that have been paved. Not by bulldozers and concrete but by the gradual gentle treading of a route over thousands of years. 

Rocks are smoothed over; ledges and grooves formed into the hillside like staircases; rubble cleared and large boulders pushed aside. These pathways are a reminder that people have trampled the same routes for generations, each traveller beating out a physical memory into the mountain, following on from those before, and leaving a trail for others to follow.

This is, I think, what we do with Judaism. In every generation, we are taking our own path up the mountain of religious truth. We are trampling our way up towards the Heavens. We follow a path that others have made, and, through our footsteps, make sure the way is clear for others to follow.

The Hebrew word “halachah” is often mistranslated as “Jewish law,” but its literal meaning is “the path.” Similarly, “minhag” gets translated as “customs” but its literal meaning is “the way we go.” That is what Judaism is: in every community, a way of walking the path to God.

This week is Shabbat Nachamu: the Sabbath of Comfort. In our liturgical calendar, we begin the six weeks of consolation, taking us to the High Holy Days. Each week, we read words from the prophets that offer us solace.

This week’s haftarah comes from the Prophet Isaiah and begins with the words “nachamu nachamu ami”: comfort, take comfort, my people, hence the name of our Shabbat.

Isaiah declares to the Israelites: “clear a way in the desert for the Eternal One; raze a highway for God! Let the rugged ground become level and the ridges become a plain!”

This is, of course, not literal. The Jewish religion is incompatible with the brute force of bulldozers and never seeks to subjugate land. Our Torah’s ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace.

Isaiah is speaking metaphorically. The valleys and mountains he wants to flatten are spiritual. 

Isaiah is writing to the exiled Israelites in Babylon, promising them that there is still hope. These refugees are held in captivity and have no idea if they will ever return. 

To them, God feels miles away. Without their home or their people, they don’t know how to communicate with their Creator. 

Keep walking, says Isaiah. Tread down that path with your feet. Wherever you are, you are on your journey to God.

Remember that this way has been trodden many times before.

For forty years, the Hebrews wandered in the wilderness. There, their feet really were stepping literally. But something deeper was happening too: their souls were on the voyage to freedom. They were learning to live without certainty and material comfort in harsh conditions. They had to walk the path of faith, putting their trust in God.

At our point in the Torah story, Moses knows that his physical journey is coming to an end. He tells them, with some heartbreak: “I must die in this land, I cannot cross over the Jordan.” After a lifetime of roaming, Moses has to finally hang up his sandals.

But he knows the spiritual journey is far from through. He is passing that on to the next generation. 

He tells them: stay on that sacred path to God. Don’t deviate from it by turning away to worship idols. Keep on that search for the divine. Walk on the way I have shown you.

Today, coming back to the South London Liberal Synagogue, I feel myself treading again on an old path. These are the steps I walked on my journey to becoming a rabbi, and I feel a wistful nostalgia to come back to this part of the mountain. 

I feel conscious, too, of those who trod down the path into this synagogue for me, especially the wonderful members of this synagogue, now departed, who made me feel so at home here. 

And I think to those who first saw a path for a Liberal Synagogue in Streatham. They had walked the path of Judaism inherited from their ancestors. They could see that some more conservative Jews were carrying on walking ahead, but no longer ascending the mountain. They were stuck on a path to nowhere, and heading towards a ravine. So those Liberal Jews had to beat out a new path and clear away rubble others dared not touch.

They made the way for a Judaism, our Judaism, that would be inclusive, justice-oriented and spiritually meaningful. Over the last century, the way they foresaw has been walked on more, made deeper grooves, and come further. 

Over the last few years, we have found that many of those brave first pathways are now converging with routes that others have trodden. Liberal and Reform paths are coming together. The traditional and the radical are finding they can walk the same way. 

What a joy to walk on the same road after waving at each other for years! Together, we are going to walk a deeper and wider path. 

The challenge for those of us who hold onto the vision of the earliest Liberal Jews will be to make sure the way is always progressing up the mountain. 

If ever the tracks that everyone else is going down look too narrow, or like they are heading somewhere stagnant, we must have the confidence to point towards the Heavens. 

We, today, must continue to walk the path that others have paved. And we must look ahead, so that there will be a clear route for others to follow behind.

“Every valley shall be raised up; every mountain and hill made low. And the glory of the Eternal One will be revealed.”

Walk together. Keep on hiking. Let us climb towards our God.

Shabbat shalom.

sermon · social justice · theology

Who am I to judge?

levtaylor



Have you ever heard someone say “who am I to judge?”

Not just casually. I’m talking about major situations, when something clearly is wrong. There are those who will shrug off great indecencies, and say they don’t feel qualified to provide a moral assessment.

There is a tendency, in the modern West, to avoid moral judgment, even when something quite clearly deserves condemnation. There are situations when people say “who am I to judge?” when they really ought to be judging.

This desire not to act as judge likely comes from certain interpretations of the Christian tradition. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus teaches: “Judge not, lest ye be not judged” and in the Gospel of Luke, he instructs: “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned.”

There is a fundamentally Christian idea underpinning the notion that we shouldn’t judge. We are flawed flesh and blood, whereas God, who is perfect, is the only one who has the right to judge.

This is, I think, the direct opposite of the Jewish attitude towards judgment. Quite on the contrary, we are expected to be God’s hands in the world. We are expected to look at the world, analyse it, judge it, and find ways of making it better. We are supposed to be active participants in the world, working towards holiness and justice, by discerning right from wrong. God is not going to intervene for us: we have to intervene for God.

(I should be clear here that I don’t want to set up a false dichotomy between Christian and Jewish teachings. Some Christians say the verses I quoted from the Gospels are really about avoiding hypocrisy; and some Christians are in fact overly quick to judge others. I draw this distinction only to show that, in Judaism, judging is good. According to our Torah, our Prophets, our Mishnah, and our philosophy, judgment is the key to living righteously.)

In our parashah this week, Moses recalls the system of government he established with his father-in-law, Yitro. He reminds the Israelites that he appointed judges and told them: ‘You must hear the cases of your fellow Israelites and the foreigners living among you. Be perfectly fair in your decisions and impartial in your judgments. Hear the cases of those who are poor as well as those who are rich. Don’t be afraid of anyone’s anger, for the decision you make is God’s decision.’

For Moses, it’s not that God makes perfect judgments in Heaven and we make flawed ones on Earth. The process of judging is sacred. Finding a way to judge everyone fairly is doing God’s work.

We are supposed to judge. Fairly, honestly, without deference to the rich or patronising the poor, without fear or favour, human beings are supposed to judge each other.

In our haftarah, the Prophet Isaiah tells us exactly what happens when we stop judging. He chastises Israel: “Your leaders have become rebellious and companions of thieves; everyone loves bribes and runs after payments; they do not advocate for the orphan, and the quarrel of the widow does not come to them.”

When you abrogate responsibility for judging, it is the most vulnerable people who suffer. Unless people are willing to say that something is wrong, the people with the least power are left without advocates or intercessors. In Isaiah’s time, he saw that this created “a sinful nation, a people heavy with iniquity.”

Not everyone will sit on the Sanhedrin, but all of us are supposed to be on the lookout for infractions against the moral order. In the aftermath of the Second World War, this became especially relevant.

Hannah Arendt, one of the 20th Century’s greatest philosophers, escaped from the Nazi Gestapo in 1933. She was a stateless refugee in Paris throughout the war, during which she spent some years in an internment camp.

Afterwards, Arendt moved to New York, and became one of the only foreign journalists to report on Israel’s trial of the Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann. Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to refer to the Final Solution’s pen pusher. Anybody, said Arendt, could perform the most wicked acts in the most indifferent ways. She warned that, if the most disgusting crimes could be prosecuted, they could almost certainly be committed again.

When Arendt wrote her reports, and turned them into a book, she received considerable backlash from readers. Sometimes, she defended what she had said. Some of it caused her to revise her position. But only one criticism made her truly incensed. What got her truly angry were those who said she had no right to judge.

“Who are we to judge?” her critics asked. “How can we say that we would behave any differently to Eichmann under the circumstances? How easy it must have been to get swept up in the fog of committing genocide. Maybe anybody else would do such a thing.”

Arendt wrote a furious riposte to such critics, called Responsibility and Judgment. She said:

“Who am I to judge? actually means We’re all alike, equally bad, and those who try, or pretend that they try, to remain halfway decent are either saints or hypocrites, and in either case should leave us alone. Hence the huge outcry the moment anyone fixes specific blame on some particular person instead of blaming all deeds or events on historical trends and dialectical movements, in short on some mysterious necessity that works behind the backs of men and bestows upon everything they do some kind of deeper meaning.”

This reluctance to judge Nazi war criminals who oversaw death camps was offensive to Arendt, as one who had survived that terrible era. But it was also, she felt, philosophically abhorrent.

If you can’t judge, says Arendt, nobody can ever take responsibility for anything. And if nobody can take responsibility, then history is just a bunch of forces acting on us all, that never requires us to take action.

On the contrary, judgment is the prerequisite for recognising when something is wrong in the world, and doing all we can to change it.

You can’t blame psychology or circumstances or material realities. Everyone must take moral responsibility.

That is by no means easy. The Christian rebuttal against judging warns that if you judge someone, you will be judged to the same standard.

Yet surely that is the point! Saying that something is morally wrong means making a commitment not to do it. Labeling another’s actions as monstrous means we commit ourselves never to be like them.

Arendt saw Eichmann, the mass murderer and war criminal, as an everyman. He was a mindless bureaucrat, who had never given any thought to whether what he was doing might be wrong. To adopt the familiar phrasing, Eichmann was “just following orders.”

One of the central goals of Shoah education must be moral instruction. Not only to teach about what happened to our people, but to show what any person is capable of doing. It must be to train people to look critically, with judging eyes, at all that happens in the political sphere, and never excuse it by blaming circumstances, history, psychology, or upbringing.

No, let us never say “who am I to judge?” Let us instead insist on appraising right from wrong and good from evil at every possible opportunity. Let us be willing to assess, without fear or favour, what we feel lives up to and defies God’s law.

May we fulfil the words of the Prophet, and live out Isaiah’s proclamation, that we shall be redeemed through justice and find repentance through righteousness.

Shabbat shalom.

judaism · sermon · social justice

People! Remember that there is a God!

levtaylor

In the Zhitomyr Oblast of what is now Ukraine, there is a city called Berdichyiv. In the middle of the 18th Century, this was a great market town in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

To here, flocked all the great, the good, and the downright nasty from every quarter of their empire. But, of the permanent residents, three-quarters of those who lived here were Jews.

So, come with me, on any ordinary day, to the old Jewish city of Berdichyiv. You will find the streets lined with stalls; you will see shop fronts wide open; you will meet throngs of people moving to music and entertainment. Here, you can buy just about anything, and sell just about anything too.

You have to watch your wallet for thieves, of course; and be very careful not to get involved in any of the gambling games on the side streets, because you are sure to be hustled. And pay attention to the great crush and clamour of shoppers beating each other for products, or tradesmen jostling for space and trying to bargain.

But that’s not the main show. You have to really listen if you want to know why we’ve come here. Can you hear it?

Can you hear the man shouting? You have to strain your ear to get a good grip on the sound over all the noise of the market square, but you’ll catch it. There it is!

“People! Remember that there is a God! People! Remember that there is a God!”

Look. There he is, standing atop the clocktower. The man with the fluffy shtreimel and wispy beard and sidelocks. He’s thin and spritely, and he’s gripping the side of the wall and calling out with all his might:

“People! Remember that there is a God!”

To most of the people shopping here, that’s Levi Yitzchok. But to his supporters, that’s the Holy Berdichever, the great Hassidic rabbi, the disciple of the Maggid of Mezritch.

To most of the people here, he’s just a madman. But to his supporters… well, they think he’s mad too. But they love him.

Of all of the places in the world that this sage could go, he chose to go to the most corrupt town with the most unbelieving Jews with the most sinful dispositions and minister to them with fanatical spiritual messages.

Sometimes he did that by going out to the poorest and the most despised, and treating them with great love, as if they were the shining light of God on Earth. And sometimes, like today, he would stand on a platform ranting at everyone to remember that there was a God.

Now, you might indeed think this man sounds like he was mad. But I think he sounds… relatable.

I cannot tell you how much I would love to find a spot at the London Stock Exchange or the arms fairs at the City Hall or on the steps of Parliament and do exactly this. “People! Remember that there is a God!”

Would our politicians and corporations treat our planet as if it were their own dustbin to be discarded and destroyed if they knew that it was a gift from their loving Creator?

Would they treat human life as if it were something so disposable and meaningless if they understood that each person was created in God’s image?

Could they behave in ways that are so shamelessly venal and debased if they thought they would one day have to answer for their deeds?

No. They act as if there is no God but greed itself, as they sacrifice everything on the altar of the market.

Oh sure, there are those who pretend to believe in God. If you like, Donald Trump will sign a copy of his own version of the Bible, which he has hawked in American public schools to make as much as $300k. But does anyone believe that Trump actually thinks there is One above him?

His only faith is in the false idols of wealth and power.

The snivelling lapdogs around him from the Christian fundamentalist right know that Trump doesn’t fear God. That’s what they like about him.

They are impressed by his ability to manipulate and lie for their own purposes. Their religion, whatever god they worship, wants racial segregation, control over women’s bodies, war on every continent, refugees in cages, and queer people excised from public life.

This doctrine of reaction may be one of the world’s major religions. (In fact, I think it’s the true belief system shared by many of the world leaders, whatever their outward claims may be.) But it has nothing to do with the God of our Scriptures.

In our haftarah, the Prophet Jeremiah takes to task exactly these people who profess belief on the one hand and behave amorally on the other. The priests, the teachers, and the rulers, he says, have all given up looking for God and decided to waste their time on their worthless idols.

In the world to which Jeremiah brought God’s message, the leaders worshipped the work of their hands. They venerated material things, but treated life as something disposable.

They loved their possessions but turned their back on the Fountain of Living Waters. They did deals and went to war with all the empires of the world, but neglected the still small voice of conscience implanted within them.

Today, has anything changed?

Actually, I think it has. We can do far more damage now than ever before.

The kinds of weapons held in very few hands were unimaginable to the biblical prophets. The levels of environmental destruction that companies could reap on God’s forests, skies, and waters have never been so great. The cost of such cruelty and indifference has never been so high.

In our liturgical cycle, we are in the three weeks of warning: where we read the Prophets’ greatest indictments against the Jews. That is why today we read the words of Jeremiah, chastising our people to remember their God and cease lusting after vanity and emptiness.

In this build-up to Tish Bav, we are supposed to be confronted by the scale of the world’s wrongs and the dangers of our inaction. So, we could just leave it there, to feel angry and devastated by all the brazen ruination.

But, the rabbis taught, even in these weeks of warning, we should never go away feeling hopeless. So, in constructing the haftarah, they skip an entire chapter, to Jeremiah’s promise of restoration, where he vows:

“Turn away from your love of material possessions, and God will come straight back to you. You will be able to speak of your faith with truth, justice, and righteousness. Then you will be a blessing to the nations of the world, and everyone will come and praise my name.”

Jeremiah offers us a way out, available at any moment.

The great condemnations of the prophets might better be delivered at Davos or the United Nations, but we all have a role to play. We can remember, in our own lives, what it means to behave as if there is a God.

Let us conduct ourselves as though, one day, we will have to answer for our deeds.

Let us treat each human being as if they were created in God’s image.

Let us act as if this world is a gift from a loving Creator.

And, perhaps, through our example, the people of the world will come to remember that there is a God.

Shabbat shalom.

liturgy · social justice

Hashkiveinu for Trans Solidarity

levtaylor

by Rhiannon Humphreys and Lev Saul for Queer Yeshiva

Grant, O God, that we may lie down in peace, so we might rise again in strength. Renew the commitment of our souls to trans liberation.

Spread the palm-leaf thatching of Your peace over all of us, and protect us from the cruelty of bigotry.

Teach us to hold the complexity of all human beings, and to see Your image in all that lives.

You, our God and our Protector, cannot be contained by the confines of gender or reduced to a single name, so be our help.

Let the shadow of Your wings be a refuge for trans and queer people. May You be their sanctuary, shielding them against the enemy of reaction, the sickness of intolerance, the war on equality, the starving of hearts, and the sorrow of living narrower lives out of fear.

Keep us far from the errors of reductive thinking for You, O God, deliver us from narrowness to expanse.

Be with us as we resist hatred and the ease of bystanding, for You watch over us.

Give us the surety to follow Your path of justice without wavering. Incline our hearts to live in solidarity. In Your strength, we gain the courage to sustain the struggle for freedom, for You, Eternal One, are our Deliverer.

Guard our coming out, however many times we may do it, and our staying in, whenever we feel we must.

May we live to see the day when everyone can live their fullest selves with openness and integrity. May we know life and peace evermore.

Amen.

sermon · social justice · torah

Such giants we will slay together

levtaylor1 Comment



Why do giants feature so prominently in our stories for children?

I recently had the joy of reading some chapters from Roald Dahl’s BFG to my six-year-old godson. Reading to him as he got ready to sleep gave me such warm nostalgia. I remembered my own childhood, hearing this story for the first time; feeling at once so safe, and like anything was possible.

To children, the whole world feels populated by giants. Grown-ups are so much larger and, just like in Giant Country, have built everything to their size. Some adults, like the BFG, are kind and fun. But some, like Fleshlumpeater and Bonecruncher, are decidedly nasty and cruel.

So we give children stories where they defeat giants, and help them process these menacing creatures so much larger than themselves.

The Austrian-Jewish psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim explored fairy tales as one of the ways that children gain their sense of self and develop confidence. In The Uses of Enchantment, Bettelheim writes that “although adults can be experienced as frightening giants, a little boy with cunning can get the better of them.”

Such is the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. I remember so gleefully participating in the school pantomime of this story. (I played Jack’s mother, of course.) Through play, we children could act out a world where we saw those bigger than us for the lumbering oafs they were and used our wits to bring them down.

Giant stories have probably existed as long as we have had the words to tell them. In our Torah portion, Shlach Lecha, Caleb, Joshua, and their intrepid band of boys set out on an adventure to see the Promised Land.

Upon arrival, they spot frightening giants, the children of Anak. “We looked like grasshoppers compared to them, and they must have seen us the same way.”

To show the other Israelites back in the wilderness how enormous their foes were, they brought back the ogres’ food. A bunch bearing a single cluster of grapes required two of them to carry it on a pole. They rolled a pomegranate the size of themselves back out of the land of Canaan.

Throughout the camp, everyone burst into terror. Only Joshua and Caleb had faith that the giants could be beaten. We, of course, identify ourselves with those fearless leaders.

“Fairytales,” says Bettelheim, “intimate that a rewarding, good life is within one’s reach despite adversity – but only if one does not shy away from the hazardous struggles without which one can never achieve true identity.”

“Do not be afraid,” say Caleb and Joshua. “Have faith. Trust in each other. Trust in God.”

Here our Torah gives us the same gift of instruction as a fairytale. It reminds us to be brave and use our cunning, because the giants can surely be defeated.

In Torah, grammar is always important. Joshua and Caleb insist: “we can defeat them.” This is not an instruction to others or a profession of their own greatness. It is an invitation to collective power: together, we are going to conquer the giants.

Later, Joshua and Caleb are proven exactly right. They destroy the children of Anak and drive them out, cowering, into Philistine towns. Later still, King David will slay the last of the remaining giants, a monster called Goliath. No wonder this is one of the best stories to tell at cheder.

These fairytales continue to serve us long after we have outgrown them. Now that we are grown-ups, the world may not still feel so magical, but we still have giants to slay.

The problems facing us are manifold in this world dominated by racial injustice. The oppressions of our age are many-headed monsters, far bigger than the enormous ogres of our stories.

I look at the children in our synagogues and feel pained that, perhaps, they will be less protected from the horrors of the world than we were. I wish we could insulate them a little longer from harsh realities.

As an adult, I discovered that my beloved Roald Dahl actually didn’t much like Jews, but, by then, I was secure enough not to be bothered by it. I see that our young people are far less protected from the nasty views others hold. They are already having to learn the skills to deal with antisemitism in their schools and in the material they see online. I feel blessed not to have had to confront such evils until much later.

I do not envy the challenges our young people face, but I feel deeply proud of how they have risen to the task.

On Sunday 10 May, members of RSY and LJY joined the rallies against antisemitism in central London. Holding true to our Progressive values, one of the movement workers’ placards denounced Islamophobia, racism, and anti-immigrant hatred, alongside their condemnation of antisemitism.

They held their heads high, and refused to back down on the prophetic call for unity. Racism are enormous giants to conquer, but these are the battles that have animated the Jewish religion since its inception. The earliest prophets promised “vindication and justice for all who are oppressed” (Psalm 103:6).

For the supposed infraction of drawing connections with other oppressed groups, our young people were harassed as they marched. They were completely unobtrusive, but drew great ire from the Christian fundamentalist sect, Stop the Hate.

Yet, according to the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, the UK’s only academic thinktank on anti-Jewish hatred, drawing connections with others’ struggles is precisely what we need to do.

In their report last year for the Runnymede Trust, these scholars showed that, by pitting the fight against antisemitism against the struggles of other minorities, the problem was only getting worse. Jews were becoming more isolated, and finding their battles harder.

What we needed, the Institute said, was to build alliances with other racialised minorities, so we could take on the mammoth system of racism together.

Here, the wisdom of established academics meets the optimism and zeal of youth. Just as in the earliest days of Judaism “the old dream dreams and the youth see visions” (Joel 2:28).

Young people – as you go out to fight antisemitism; as you lock arms in the struggle against all forms of racism; as you protest for a more equal world – please know that you are never alone. We are with you, and struggling alongside you.

However small you may feel, come stand on our shoulders. Don’t worry: we are standing on shoulders too. Shoulders of generations before us who battled poverty, war, pogroms, and genocide.

Yes, we Jews stand on the shoulders of ancestors going back centuries, who fought against the same giants you tackle now.

And when you realise that you are standing on top of this human pyramid, you will see that the ogres are much smaller than they first appeared. We may feel like grasshoppers in their eyes, but we stand together on a foundation they cannot even imagine, and that makes us enormous.

Just as Caleb and Joshua once cohorted the Israelites in the desert, we know we need not fear.

Have faith. In your traditions. In each other. In our God.

Together, we are going to slay these giants.

sermon · social justice · torah

How did the exodus look from the back?

levtaylor

When the silver trumpet blasted, the Israelites decamped and moved to a new location in the desert.

At the front of the procession, this seems to have been a marvellous affair. The tribal leaders assembled at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting with triumphant fanfare. God’s presence ascended from the Tabernacle as a glorious pillar of smoke in the day or a fearsome column of fire at night, and the chieftains marched in pre-assigned order behind their divinely appointed leaders: Moses, Aaron, Miriam, and the priests. 

For the men at the head of the procession, this must have felt like a victorious military march towards the future.

But what was it like at the back? How did this experience of moving through the desert feel to the people who were on the edges of this grand voyage?

Consider how many Israelites were wandering in the desert. We have heard their numbers and know they amount to the size of a small city. There were more Israelites crossing the Sinai desert than there are people living in the modern country of Luxembourg. 

In such a large group of people, most had no idea that all this pomp was happening at the front of the group. If they were midway through the camp and all the travellers were silent, they might have had a chance at hearing the vaguest echoes of trumpet blasts. But it is unlikely that anyone on the edges heard these fantastic instruments at all. 

Perhaps, at a far distance, they could see the plumes of smoke and fire to let them know they were moving. But, far more likely, the greater indication would be the others around them shifting. They would hear rumours and murmurings, and get ready to move on their encampment to its next stage.

While the priests at the front played with their horns and struck up a marching rhythm, a whole other group of people would get to work. 

The people who pitched tents would start the laborious process of deconstructing them. Breastfeeding mothers would gather up their infants in slings. Parents would call out to playing children and try desperately to cajole them into staying close. Water-carriers would haul tankards over their heads or hoist them on their backs. Animal handlers would load their donkeys and camels, and entice them to carry rations.

Our Torah is told from the perspective of those at the front of the procession. We learn their family dramas, hear the complicated rituals they performed, and picture the magnificent relationship they had with God.

For most of the desert Israelites, however, the journey was altogether different. What kept them together, more than these supranatural experiences and religious rites, were their relationships with each other. 

I think it is important to centre their stories.

I have a long commute from Essex to Surrey. If the traffic is good, it takes about an hour and a half each way. To pass the time, I spend my journeys listening to audiobooks.

This has opened up a new world of literature to me. My usual reading is philosophy and theology, but that’s hard to focus on at the same time as the road. So I’ve started listening to sci-fi and fantasy novels.

Over the last few months, I’ve made my way through a whole bunch of stories by Ursula Le Guin. As a storyteller, she is a favourite of the college principal, Rabbi Dr Deborah Kahn Harris, and was beloved by her teacher, the legendary Rabbi Sheila Shulman.

Fiction, Rabbi Deborah assured me, is sometimes the best way to get across theological ideas. I have found this to be totally true.

During my car journeys, I have listened to Le Guin’s Earthsea Quartet from beginning to end. For the first three books, this was a world inhabited by dragons, powerful mages, young kings, demonic spirits, and magic spells. It was captivating.

The fourth book, Tehanu, has a sudden change in tempo and style. It was written more than 25 years after the first novel, with the characters having aged by the same amount of time. 

At first, hearing this final book, I was somewhat disappointed. The pace is slower. Far less seems to happen. The characters, who had previously been magical heroes who cast spells and rode dragons, were now old, disempowered, and facing a world that is violent and cruel.

Only after I finished listening did I get to hear the author’s own voice. In a recorded post-script for the audiobook, Le Guin says that Tehanu looks at the high fantasy world from below. It shows what the world I had loved and lived in during my car journeys is like from the vantage of the people without power: women, workers, and children. She says this was her way to give voice to her own people in the world of Earthsea.

Now it made sense.  I was, I discovered, learning a philosophical and theological lesson from the story, just as Rabbi Deborah had threatened I would. The world, after all, can be violent and cruel, and it is especially so to those without power.

History and politics are very different when you see them through the eyes of people who don’t march at the front, but gather at the back. 

That doesn’t mean that life for workers and women is all misery. In Le Guin’s story, the powerless still have their own magic, their own rituals, their own beliefs, and build their power in community with each other.

That’s true for our biblical ancestors, too. Thanks to archaeology, we now have a better idea of what life looked like for the earliest Israelites who had no access to the Temple cult. They had their own parallel religious practices, with God centred in their homes. In their kitchens and bedrooms. They had fertility rituals, prayers they recited, and stories they told, even though they were excluded from the world of priests and kings.

This is one of the great joys of Judaism. While it has always had its figureheads who spearhead the community from the front and pronounce the direction for all to proceed, it has also always had its margins. 

Within Jewish life, those who were excluded from the centre have built a religious life on the edges. These are exciting, creative places. They are, often, where real changes are first ignited.

Today, we must pay attention to the wonderful world of Jewish life that is being created far from board rooms and conference podia. There are other Judaisms, constantly being made in people’s homes, and in communities quite separate from the centre of north west London. Why, there are even congregations south of the River! This Judaism may not always make headlines or even get written down, but it is the lifeblood of our religion.

We should, of course, listen to the sounds of the great trumpets blasting to tell us we are moving.

But we must also pay close attention to what people are saying at the back, as we move on our eternal journey to freedom. 

Shabbat shalom.

Ursula K. Le Guin
festivals · judaism · sermon

Judaism is never the easy option

levtaylor

If you are looking for a religion to make your life easier, give you comfort when you’re troubled, and to help give you certainty in life… I wouldn’t recommend Judaism.

Judaism gives us many things, but certainty, comfort, and ease? You won’t find those here.

Our religion is one of ‘ol Torah – the yoke of Torah. Our Talmud teaches: We must subjugate ourselves to the Torah like an ox to a yoke. Like a donkey to its  burden.

For everyone, life feels heavy. It feels like too much to bear. 

For Jews, our Torah comes along and says: would you like some more obligations to go with your struggles? I can add a few more worries to your load.

At Shavuot, we read the story of Ruth. Ruth has lost her husband. She has no land or property. There is famine and disease. She is in the middle of nowhere. She and her sister, Orpah, face a choice. They can go back to their own people, the Moabites, get new husbands and start life anew. Or they can stay in the wilderness with no possessions to look after their mother-in-law, Naomi. 

Ruth takes the harder option. She chooses to stay with her mother-in-law, learn new ways, and take on a new God. It is an act of remarkable bravery. 

We read it at this time of year to remind ourselves that we are always out in that wilderness, always with the option to turn our backs and leave behind this people and this God. But, like Ruth, we keep on choosing to stay. 

Ruth’s is a personal story of her connection to Judaism. Shavuot is also the story of our collective embrace of the Torah.

This is the festival that commemorates when forty thousand freed slaves received the Torah. 

Our Talmud says that, when they came to Sinai, God lifted the mountain up over their heads. From underneath, they could see the enormous peak suspended above them like a keg. 

Out of the clouds, God declared: “Accept the Torah, or this will be your grave.”

Now, our Talmud concedes, in that situation, accepting the Torah would be the easy option. (When a robber says “your money or your life,” they’re not actually expecting you to think it over.)

If that’s the case, the rabbis say, we should be able to reject the Torah now. If our ancestors had to accept it under duress, faced with threats, we are not bound by the decisions they made. 

But, says the Talmud, our ancestors affirmed their Jewishness in the time of Esther. Here, the shoe is on the other foot. In the time of Esther, being Jewish was a dangerous thing that might get you killed at the hands of a tyrannical regime. But, the story says, the Jews reaffirmed their Torah and took upon themselves even more commandments.

That’s right, at the time when they were carrying the heaviest burden, they chose to weigh themselves down more.

Look at our present situation. There is no threat to us that we must keep being Jewish. Everyone here has the right, without consequence, to walk out of this synagogue, and never come through the doors of another one again. We could take the easy choice, and forget this old religion.

But what actually happens? On the days when there are attacks on Jews, synagogue attendance goes up. When it feels dangerous to be Jewish, we get more requests from people who want to connect with their heritage. In just the last few weeks, we have had more requests than usual from people seeking conversion.

When being Jewish is the toughest choice – that’s when our people really show up, and take on the burden of the Torah.

Now, you may be thinking, this sounds like an awfully Orthodox sermon from our extremely liberal local rabbi. All this talk of the burden of Torah, and the yoke of submitting to Heaven – it sounds like something that belongs to the black-hats.

Let me tell you something I feel quite sure of: being a Progressive Jew is a much greater burden than being an Orthodox one.

A year ago at this time, we brought together our Liberal and Reform strands to build the Movement for Progressive Judaism. A uniting figure from our shared history is Sir Basil Henriques, who led both Reform and Liberal communities in the Jewish East End. He set out his vision of what our shared belief system is, saying: 

“The Law has been handed down to the Prophets of Israel. That Law is not static, but ever expanding and progressing. It has been revealed to Israel in every generation, and every age should be able to stand on the shoulders of the previous generation, and to see further and be able to see more clearly what is the perfect Law of God. The Law, the Torah, should be the highest ethical code of which man can conceive. If the Perfect Spirit of Righteousness demands of us perfect righteousness, then the Laws of Righteousness must be as perfect as we can conceive them to be.”

In other words, we Progressive Jews must embody, through our lives, the highest moral standards possible. The question we ask is not: “what does the tradition say I should do with my life?” but, the far tougher question: “what does God require of me?” An individual Jew ought to wake up every morning, asking how best we can serve our Creator. As a movement, we should be in a constant struggle to work out together the morally best choices.

It is relatively difficult to say no to pork and shellfish, as I do. 

But it is far harder to grapple with the morality of food itself. Should we be eating any kinds of fish? What are the air miles on our vegetables? Can we truly eat ethically in this unjust system?

But a Progressive Jew wants to know what the morally right thing to do is, not just what conforms to ritual law. So these are the questions we must ask ourselves.

A Progressive Jew can live life just as an Orthodox Jew would, with one exception. We can never unlearn the Enlightenment. We cannot backslide into racism and sexism; or magical thinking and superstition. We must always face the world full-on, with all its problems, to see how we can live up to the highest moral ideals in our time.

That is far harder. 

Let me give you some living examples.

Here in the UK, in the last few months, we have experienced some real threats as a Jewish community. Things that make us rightly scared. 

Cantor Zoe Jacobs’ shul, Finchley Reform Synagogue was attacked recently. What did she do? She threw open the doors and welcomed in the whole community. People of every nationality and religion came to join her in prayer.

Do you think that was easy? Do you think it is comfortable to open doors when your instinct is to put up walls? 

But that is what Progressive Jews do. We refuse racism and fear. We refuse to be pushed back into the ghettoes.

In Israel, compare our religious leaders there.

On the one hand, the Ashkenazi Orthodox ‘Chief’ Rabbi Kalman Ber has supported Netanyahu, his corrupt cabinet, and his wicked war every step of the way. 

On the other hand, Rabbi Avi Dabush, one of the leading Reform rabbis, comes from Kibbutz Nirim, a place that was attacked by Hamas on October 7th 2023. For the last three years, he has been demanding answers from the Israeli government for why his community was abandoned, while at the same time, physically putting himself in the way of attacks against Palestinians and trying to stop this war.

Now I ask you, who took the easy route? And who took the hard one?

And let me ask the real question: which response is the more godly; the more moral; the more Jewish?

Doing the correct thing, the Progressive thing, is harder. It takes real courage, and most of us will not live up to such high standards.

This is the burden of our Torah.

That, no matter how difficult things are, we will take on responsibility for doing what is right.

And, we all keep taking on that challenge, in every generation.

Chag Shavuot sameach.