Month: November 2025

judaism · sermon · theology

God is here, and I did not know it

levtaylor

One of the loveliest parts of synagogue life, which many of you will have experienced here, is getting to teach our religion to visiting schools. It’s such a joy to pull out things we normally leave aside, and point to things we often take for granted.

By teaching others about our ritual objects, things that are familiar become foreign. We have to reconsider what they are, and why we have them.

Take, for example, the tallit. Of course, these prayer shawls have existed in some form since biblical times. But, showing them to non-Jewish children, we need to come up with an explanation for why we continue to use them here and now.

I tell the school kids: these four corners remind me that God is everywhere, and the knots on them tell me all of the good deeds I can do in my life.

I do, indeed, feel that way when I wrap myself in the tzitzit. I feel enveloped by God’s mantle. I see the strings and think of all the mitzvot- not, in the Orthodox sense of listing out food rules, but of all that God has asked me to do in this world.

It’s nice to have a visible reminder of God’s presence.

That’s just what Jacob gets in this week’s Torah portion. Jacob lies down while travelling on a certain mountain and has the profound dream of a ladder ascending to heaven, with angels going up and down.

In his dream, the Eternal One appears to promise Jacob many descendants, spreading out like dust across the desert, and that God will forever accompany Jacob on his travels.

When he awakes, Jacob exclaims: “Wow, God is in this place and I did not know it!”

How could Jacob not realise that God was on that mountain? Surely he already knows that God is everywhere?

Perhaps Jacob did not realise already that God is everywhere. For some commentators, this is the beginning of Jacob’s prophecy. Only now does he really understand who God is and that this God is with him.

There is a deeper meaning in the language, too. Before the revelation, God is called Elohim. For the ancients, Elohim was universal- the God that permeates all places and things.

Then, in the dream, God is announced by the ineffable Name, Hashem, which we often render as Adonai. This name of God, in Torah, is specific. It is the personal God, who communicates directly with human beings.

When Jacob awakes, he says: “Behold, Hashem is in this place, and I did not know it.”

Jacob knew that God in general was there, because God is generally everywhere, but only at this moment does Jacob realise that the personal God who cares about him is also present.

Now we can understand why God says to Jacob: “I will not leave you until I have done with you what I promised.” God is helping Jacob understand that he is never truly alone. Not only is the world full of God, but so is Jacob’s own life.

In fact, in the moment before Jacob falls asleep, a miracle happens that is so subtle it can’t be noticed until after he wakes up.

When Jacob lays down his head, the Torah says there are many stones in the place, and he takes one of them as a pillow. When he wakes up, there is only one under his head.

Our Talmud says that this is a divine act. According to Rabbi Yitzḥak, all the stones on the mountain argued with each other about who would lie under Jacob’s head. Unable to decide, they merged together into a single rock. That rock, in turn, became an altar to God.

This is a wonderful view of the world, where God is not only in all places and with human beings personally, but acts in every part of nature. Even stones are agents of miracles and servants of God.

If we take seriously this idea that God is everywhere and personally connected with all that exists, there are real consequences for our lives. It means that everything is sacred. It suggests that we need to treat this world as an arena for revealing divinity.

For Progressive Jews, this is one way we might think of commandments. Rather than just a list of dos and don’ts, they’re an attitude towards reality. They see everything as an opportunity to do good, and to make the world better. We are blessed with the chance to show how God is everywhere, including in our own actions.

The same section of the Talmud says that this is why God loves humanity so much. Angels can only praise God when they are told to. Rocks can only move by miracle. But we, endowed with freedom and reason, can perform miracles and make things sacred whenever we want.

That’s what I see when I look at the tzitzit of my tallit. That God is in every place and that every moment is a chance to do right.

You don’t need to wear a tallit to do that. This is my suggestion to you for this week. Try and shift, ever so slightly, how you see the world.

Look around, for a moment, and imagine that everything permeates God’s presence. See God in the bricks of your home and the slabs of the street. At some point this week, try to picture the space where you are as a massive canvas that you can paint with good deeds.

Let us all try to be like Jacob and say: “Wow, God was here, and I did not even know it.”

Shabbat shalom.


protest · social justice

We must build a wall to protect you from the Moabites.

levtaylor

We must build a wall to protect you from the Moabites.

We must build a wall. You cannot trust the Moabites.

The Moabites are on the other side of the salty Dead Sea and the Jordan River. A river is not big enough to keep the Moabites away from our land. They will take everything we have if they get the chance.

The Moabites are dangerous and brutal. They will destroy you if they get the chance. 

We must destroy the Moabites before they can destroy us. We must kill their kings. Their king Eglon is a murderous tyrant. You will never be safe as long as he reigns. You must kill him.

You must kill every Moabite that stands in your way. You must capture the Moabite city of Heshbon. We need it to keep the Moabites away from us. 

We must build a wall to protect you from the Moabites.

They must never come near you. 

You must never meet them. 

Because, if you met the Moabites, you might see that they are not monsters. You might see that they are like you.

And then you would not be able to kill them.

And then you would ask why we are building walls.

And then you would ask who was building these walls.

So you must always abhor the Moabites. You must fear them and revile them.

We must build a wall to protect you from the Moabites.

It must be high enough to protect you from them. It must be high enough to protect you from yourselves. It must be high enough to protect you from peace.

You may not immediately notice it, but nestled in this week’s Torah portion is an early example of war propaganda. In the vulgar and violent story of Lot is an origin myth for the Israelites’ greatest enemy: the Moabites.

The scene begins as God destroys Sodom and Gamorrah, two cities so wicked and licentious that they have to be wiped out and turned into the Dead Sea.

Only Lot and his daughters escape from that awful place. They retreat into the mountains on the east of the Jordan. There, the two daughters get Lot drunk, seduce him, and use him to sire their children.

The oldest is called Moab. And to really drive the point home, the Torah adds explicitly: the father of the Moabites.

The women in this story are not even given names. They are just grotesque plot devices to tell us how awful the Moabites are. 

Those people, Israel’s nearest neighbours to the east, are so wicked that they came from Sodom. Their ancestors are so twisted that they were born of incest, drunkenness, and assault. It is a story to inspire revulsion in its Israelite listeners.

This is part of a general campaign of literary warfare against the Moabites, continued throughout the Torah. 

Isaiah promises that the Moabites will be trampled like straw in a dung pit. Ezekiel vows endless aggression and possession. Amos says the whole of Moab must be burned down. Zephaniah swears that Moab will end up just like Sodom, a place of weeds and salt pits, a wasteland forever.

The war propaganda reflects real wars. The ancient Israelites did repeatedly wage war, conquer, and capture Moabites. They did kill their kings, and they did turn Moab into a vassal state. 

Based on the Moabites’ texts, we can see that it also went the other way, and that Moab also captured, conquered and slaughtered Israel.

We do not know how many Israelites or Moabites died in these wars. We do not know how many people grieved their families and homes. All that remains is the propaganda of the competing tribes.

Today, it is hard to imagine why anyone would have hated the Moabites so much, or even that we would believe the hyped-up stories of how vulgar they were. With centuries of hindsight, we can see that they were probably very similar to the Israelites, but dragged into wars for the glory and material wealth of their kings.

Of course, there were dissenting voices at the time. The Book of Ruth can be read as a polemic about love between Israelites and Moabites. It is a beautifully humanising story where the central character, Ruth, is portrayed as a Moabite who is kind, loving, devoted to her family, and committed to Israelites.

As long as there has been war propaganda, there has been anti-war propaganda, and our Torah contains it all.

This Shabbat, we honour Remembrance Day. We think of all of those who died in wars past, and those who served their countries in military operations. This feels so close to our hearts, as we reflect on the great toll wars took on military personnel and their families, including many in our communities. 

We remember the pain of those who have lived through and died in the awful wars that have passed.

This solemn day dates back to the armistice of the First World War, on November 11th 1918. The following year, England hosted France for a shared banquet as they recalled the ceasefire. From then on, it became an annual day of reflection on the horrors and sacrifices of war.

During the First World War itself, even as the conflict was ongoing, many challenged the war. The great British-Jewish soldier-poet, Siegfried Sassoon, charged that the war had been whipped up by jingoistic propaganda.

In July 1917, Sassoon published “A Soldier’s Declaration,” which denounced the politicians who were waging and prolonging the war with no regard for its human impact. 

Sassoon lambasted “the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise.”

It is true that people like me, who enjoy peace, cannot even contemplate the pain that people went through in fighting wars and enduring bombing. 

Today, we honour them.

Honouring them does not mean parroting propaganda and whipping up war. 

Quite on the contrary. It is the duty of every civilian to ensure as few people as possible ever have to fight in wars. It is our responsibility to minimise the number of people who suffer and die in armed conflicts.  It is our task to pursue peace.

We, who will never know the sacrifices of the front line, must heed Sassoon’s call, and resist the drive to war.

So instead:

We must tear down every wall with the Moabites. 

Yes, with the Moabites, and, yes, with the Germans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Koreans and the Iranians.

We must find commonalities and engage in shared struggles.

We must learn to trust our fellow human beings and distrust the propaganda of war.

We must cease all killing. The machinery of war has destroyed too much and taken too many lives. We must endeavour to put an end to violence and destruction.

We must learn to understand the people we are told are our enemies.

We must tear down every wall.

Shabbat shalom.