March 2025 – Sim Lev

During prayers, I find my mind wanders- or rather focuses. It sees things it otherwise wouldn’t.

The details of the space I am in suddenly interest me in new ways. I, who live in a world of words, suddenly find myself in a world of space: physical and embodied.

Look around: what do you see?

Perhaps a more pertinent question is: how do you see it? In a synagogue, walls are not just walls. Ceilings are not just ceilings. Curtains are not just curtains.

Every inch of space buzzes with meaning, crying out for interpretation.

For months, we have looked at this space with a certain set of eyes. For the Council, commissioning a new sanctuary, they have looked at the room with eyes of possibility. For the team responsible for the redesign, they have been looking at the space with the eyes of architects, artists and technicians. Those who were accustomed to this space have perhaps looked at it with nostalgic loss, knowing that their familiar sanctuary would be transformed.

I want to invite you now to look at this space anew: through the eyes of a believer.

In 539 BCE, Cyrus the Great permitted the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their Temple, which had been destroyed in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar. A generation of exiled elites returned and remade their holy space.

The books of Ezra and Nehemiah are dedicated to explaining what happened in those formative years.

Ezra recounts the dramatic unveiling ceremony for the new Temple. He says that, when the elders of the generation saw the new Temple, they began to cry, while the young cheered out in jubilation.

Seventy years they had been held captive. Seventy years they had not seen their holy mountain.

For the old, this was a place they never dreamed they would see again, certainly not within their own lifetimes. For the young, this was a place that had only existed in myth and psalm.

What a moving experience it must have been to witness it.

So, I invite you to come to this building with the eyes of exiles. True, our four weeks in the next door hall do not quite compare to the seventy years the Jews spent in Babylon.

Nevertheless, soak it up, because it is a marvel to enter after a period away. Absence surely makes the heart grow fonder, and I know I had missed the beautiful serenity of this synagogue.

Yet the commentaries on the book of Ezra believe that the elders were not shedding tears of joy. Rashi says they were, in fact, crying for the Temple they had lost. The First Temple, he says, was even bigger. Solomon’s Temple was enormous by comparison.

This is an interesting proposition, because it is almost certainly not true. We do not have any archaeological evidence to suggest there was a First Temple, still less a bigger one with wider foundations. By all accounts, it is far more likely that the First Temple was smaller and more frail.

Yet, Rashi is right that the elders could truly have believed the old Temple was bigger and grander. When they last saw it, they would all have been infants.

My primary school’s doors were enormous wooden structures that towered over all who entered them… until I returned as an adult and realised they were just doors.

There may be a part of you that looks back with wistful nostalgia at the old sanctuary, dilapidated though it was. This is natural: in our synagogues we find safe spaces that ground us in our youth. Adjusting can be hard.

So, this is an invitation: try to look at this space through the eyes of a child. Try to feel the comfort and wonderment that you did in your youth.

When Ezra returned and rebuilt the Temple, he sought to recreate all that was best in the one that had stood before.

Like us, the Jews dedicated and blessed their Second Temple in the month of Adar, between the festivals of Purim and Pesach.

They brought in what they had preserved from the last Temple: cleansing bowls and musicals instruments. Where they could not repeat, they replicated, weaving curtains and priestly garments.

In Solomon’s Temple, there had been a permanently lit flame above the altar, symbolising God’s eternal presence with the Israelites.

When the exiles returned with Ezra, they relit the pyre, to show that, while they had left the Temple, God had never left them.

After the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jews installed in their synagogues a ner tamid, an everlasting light. Through this emblem, the flames showed that God’s light was not only in every time, but also in every space.

So, look at our light, with its memorial to the Shoah, and see how this same flame has burned for 3,000 years, linking us to hundreds of generations of worshippers.

But do not stop there, or you may be tempted by conservatism.

After the Temple, our rabbis reinvented every ritual item so that they could have new homes in the synagogues.

The Ark that contained the Two Tablets of the Law became the ark that holds our Torah scroll. The breastplate and crown that the priests wore became adornments for Torah. The sacrificial altar became the bimah from which Torah was read.

In every object, you can see the theological creativity of our people. You witness the myriad ways in which we constantly reinvent and reanimate our traditions.

So, look at the details of this sanctuary and embrace all the ways that our artists and architects have participated in that great tradition of innovation.

Everything contains the holy sparks of what went before. Every spark is breathed new life by the creatives who recreate it.

You, too, can fill this space with life, as you bring your own meanings to it.

Come to this sanctuary. Come with the eyes of an exile; the eyes of an elder; the eyes of a child. Come with eyes that are ancient and new. Come with eyes that have seen thousands of years and still look to the future.

Then bring those eyes back out into the world – and see what needs to be done.

Shabbat shalom.

There are ways of remembering intended to make you forget.

There are ways of forgetting intended to help you remember.

So, says the Torah, remember in order not to forget.

This week is Shabbat Zachor, the Sabbath of remembrance. Just before Purim, we are called to read three additional lines of Scripture. Deuteronomy instructs:

Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey out of Egypt [… ] You shall erase the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget.

Remember… erase the memory… do not forget.

Is the demand to remember not contradicted by the insistence on erasing the memory?

Is the commandment to remember not exactly the same as the one not to forget?

Perhaps not. There are ways of remembering that encourage forgetting, and ways of forgetting that make you remember.

Alan Bennett’s play, The History Boys, is an exploration of what it means to teach history, and what we can learn from it.

In a powerful scene, the newest teacher, Tom Irwin, takes his sixth-form grammar school students on a tour of a war cemetery.

As they walk, he tells them:

The truth was, in 1914, Germany doesn’t want war. Yeah, there’s an arms race, but it’s Britain who’s leading it. So, why does no one admit this?

That’s why. The dead. The body count. We don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault cos so many of our people died. And all the mourning’s veiled the truth. It’s not “lest we forget”, it’s “lest we remember”. That’s what all this is about -the memorials, the Cenotaph, the two minutes’ silence-. Because there is no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.

The truth to these words is palpable. In every village square throughout Britain there is a stone column, inscribed with names. The Cenotaph is so finite. Its concrete defies questions. You cannot ask it: what did they die for?

As we lay wreaths, the liturgy intones that the war dead “made the ultimate sacrifice.” These words carry such gravity that you forget it was a conscript army. You dare not ponder: who sacrificed them, and for what cause?

Then, there is silence. So much silence that you cannot hear the echo: was it worth it?

Real memories are not fixed. They are fluid and living, constantly opening up new interpretations and interrogations. When you really remember, you pore over the details with others, seeking perspectives you missed, guided by a quest for greater understanding. You always want to know what you can learn from it, since the memory teaches something new to each moment.

But, as Alan Bennett’s character teaches us, that is not what happens with certain war memorials.

They are ways of remembering in order to make you forget.

There are, too, ways of forgetting to make you remember.

In 1988, the Israeli historian and Holocaust survivor, Yehuda Elkana, wrote an article for HaAretz called The Need to Forget. Not long after its publication, this article entered the new Jewish canon as one of the most challenging and profound commentaries on Shoah memorialisation.

In it, he warns against the danger that Holocaust consciousness poses to Israeli society.

He writes:

I see no greater threat to the future of the State of Israel than the fact that the Holocaust has systematically and forcefully penetrated the consciousness of the Israeli public.

Reflecting on the school trips to Yad Vashem, Elkana comments:

What did we want those tender youths to do with the experience? We declaimed, insensitively and harshly, and without explanation: “Remember!” “Zechor!” To what purpose? What is the child supposed to do with these memories? Many of the pictures of those horrors are apt to be interpreted as a call to hate. “Zechor!” can easily be understood as a call for continuing and blind hatred.

So, says Elkana, while the rest of the world may need to remember the Holocaust, the Israelis needed to learn to forget it. They needed to uproot the injunction to remember “to displace the Holocaust from being the central axis of our national experience.”

Elkana’s invocation of forgetting is also an invitation to remember. Forget the past in order to remember that we have a future. Forget the cruelties inflicted on our people in order to remember that we are greater than our misery. Forget the wars in order to remember the possibility of peace.

Elkana is not talking about an alternate reality where everyone wakes up tomorrow with amnesia about the last hundred years of history. He is talking about an active process of forgetting: forgetting by asking new questions and building new memories.

These are ways of forgetting intended to help you remember.

There are ways of remembering intended to make you forget.

But, the Torah tells us: remember in order not to forget.

What type of remembering would this be?

A full remembering, the type repeated twice by our parashah, the kind that forces you not to forget.

This remembering, then, must be one that always asks questions and returns to itself. A history that invites constant revision and ever wants to teach new lessons.

For the last sixteen months, Israel has been gripped by war. It has been unavoidable as its details have filled our news feeds and lives.

I know it is too soon to start the painstaking soul-searching involved in real remembering.

But it is plenty early enough to forget.

Already there are those who would like us to forget, so that they can eschew their own accountability.

How easily we can be made complicit in their acts of wilful forgetting.

So I have been considering how to fulfil the Torah’s commandment to remember.

I want to remember in fullness and complexity, always returning to new questions.

I want to remember all the suffering, for there has been so much suffering.

I want to remember all the dead. Every name. There are so many names.

I want to remember all those responsible. Every name. There are so many names.

I want to remember all the alternatives, because there have always been so many options, and there are still so many other ways.

I want to remember completely who I have been, who we have been, at best and at worst throughout this whole time.

It is too soon to remember.

It is too much to remember.

It is too painful to remember.

But, if we do not remember, we will forget.

Month: March 2025

It’s not just what you see, it’s the way that you see it

Remember in order not to forget