Everything has changed. Everything keeps changing.
We meet tonight to pause.
Tonight is a return to a definite, reliable point in the calendar. While the world spins on outside, for a brief moment, we stop. We reflect. We take stock of all that has changed, so that we might change too.
You have already seen this evening many simanim – symbols of the Rosh Hashanah seder. These small tokens speak to us about what the festival means.
There is another one, though, that you won’t see here, partly because our synagogue is a meat-free site, and partly because it just would not feel right in a Liberal synagogue.
It is a ram’s head.
Yes, in many New Year seders throughout the centuries, Jews would place the carcass of a sheep’s skull in the centre of the table. This tradition goes all the way back to 9th Century Babylonia.
By the 15th Century, the German rabbi, the Maharil, explained the custom using a phrase from the Psalms:
שנהיה לראש ולא לזנב
– that we should be the head and not the tail.
There is a play-on-words here. After all, what does Rosh Hashanah literally mean?
The Rosh is the head. It is the head as in the beginning; it is the head as in the body part; and it is the head as in the one who has control.
This symbolism works because, in Hebrew, a word contains multiple meanings and associations.
So, the fish head represents our being on top of our own lives.
Now, what about hashanah? The word shanah does indeed mean year, but its root ש-נ-ה also means cycle, difference, repetition, or change.
This makes sense: a year is a cycle, a return point that we repeat, each time observing the change.
So Rosh Hashanah does mean “start of the year.” But, through the associations with the words’ other meanings, Rosh Hashanah is also “the master of change.”
Outside of these walls, the world is full of changes. AI unleashes new technology into a society that has already been completely transformed by the Internet. Our climate is changing, and we are truly starting to notice its effects on our own seasons.
International relations are changing: violence, war, and fear feel like a new normal. And, of course, we are only a few years out of global pandemic and lockdowns.
So, at this juncture, we return to the start, and try to find a small oasis of calm to reflect on this changing world.
Yet, inside these walls, things have changed too. This is my first High Holy Days with you. This is your first High Holy Days in the newly refurbished sanctuary. This is our first High Holy Days where we have voted to join a new movement.
This is our first time doing the High Holy Days without the choir in every service and, as you will see, that means we are changing how we do music.
In every case, these changes will evoke many feelings, including excitement, trepidation, loss, and growth. This is a chance to face all our feelings.
Change is inevitable. Change can be good. And, yes, change is hard.
I don’t know about you, but I have changed. I have not just grown a year older since the last Rosh Hashanah. I also feel like I have aged many decades in the last few years.
The world transforms and I shift with it. As I shift, I do not even always notice the ways I change, or work out what they mean.
I don’t even have time to decide if I like who I am becoming before I find that things changing again.
So, at Rosh Hashanah I come to this space, this synagogue, this everlasting home with God, and ask: can I love myself better? Can I love my community? Can I muster up the strength to face all that is changing?
Can I find a way to be the head and not the tail?
Blessed are You, Eternal One our God, who gives us the power to change.
There is a verse in the Torah so radical that one of my teachers did not believe me it was even in there.
I was working on a project as a rabbinical student and I brought a text that cited this verse.
“That can’t be in the Torah,” my teacher said. She was a serious scholar, with not only rabbinic ordination but also a PhD in rabbinics and a host of published articles.
“No ancient society would allow a law like that. The entire economy would collapse.”
I thought, perhaps I had misread it. It was a bold claim. So I went back to look.
But there it was, nestled among a litany of miscellaneous commandments in Deuteronomy. On one side of this law was the instruction to make sure soldiers did not have nocturnal emissions, and on the other side was the requirement not to bring money gained from prostitution as a Temple offering.
There it was, a law completely at odds with ancient society, which threatened to collapse an entire economy if enforced:
Do not hand over a slave to his master who is taking refuge with you from his master. He will dwell with you in your neighbourhood in the place he chooses, in one of your gates that is good for him. Do not oppress him.
– Deuteronomy 23:16-17
Let us start by acknowledging why this law is so radical. Ancient agrarian states were built on slavery. Prisoners of war, pillaged people, indentured servants and trafficked humans did back-breaking work to make the farms run. Their unpaid labour was what made the brutal machinations of early states even possible.
Here we have a rule: do not hand over any slave to their master. The Torah is biased, and it’s not on the side of the owners!
More than this, if you get a runaway, your duty is to look after them. You have to give them accommodation. You have to give it in a place where the refugee himself feels is good for him, within the gates of one of your towns.
This is bold.
But still, it may be I had misunderstood. We already know from many other Torah sources that Israelites cannot be held as slaves. They might be debt labourers and bondsmen, but if somebody is part of the Israelite family, they can never be subjected to lifelong slavery.
So, perhaps, this law is just talking about what to do if an Israelite runs away. In such a case, they might have been the slave of another Israelite, in which case they were being held against the law. Of course you would then give the slave refuge.
Or they might have been an Israelite running away from another country, like an Edomite who had captured them in war. Well, then, they have come back to their people and need to be cared for.
So, have I mistranslated? Is this actually about Israelite slaves?
I’d have to look at earlier translations to check what it means.
The earliest translation of the Torah is Targum Onkelos, a 2nd Century rendition of Scripture into the vernacular Aramaic.
This translation gives details that clarify things. In this case, it adds an adjective to the Torah’s word for slave. עממין – from the foreign nations. A non-Israelite. The translation is unambiguous: we are talking specifically about foreigners.
This is even more radical. It’s saying we insist on looking after complete outsiders. They have no connection to us.
They may even, then, be running away from Israelite masters. The Torah is saying that, if a slave runs away from their master, even though the slave is definitely not one of us, and the master might actually be one of us, we are on the side of the slaves.
About a century after this translation, the rabbis in the school of Rabbi Akiva wrote a commentary on the Book of Deuteronomy to expound its meaning. The book is called Sifre Devarim, and it takes all the legal verses from these books and adds oral traditions about how to interpret the laws.
Sifre’s explanation of this verse gives details on how you are supposed to treat a runaway slave when they come to you. Not only do you have to welcome them into your towns, say the rabbis, you also have to make it possible for them to make a living. They have to live with you, and not on the borders of the town.
It adds that the commandment not to oppress the runaway extends even towards words. Even the language you use must be kind. And it insists: you have to make them feel like the place they have come to is better than the one they left.
This is even bolder than where we began. It’s an official open borders policy to every runaway, with the requirement that they not only get refuge but actually get a livelihood and integration in the place where they move to.
It is not only uneconomical, it goes against all the foundations of the ancient economy.
You cannot even appeal to other economic reasons. There’s no organised mass of runaway slaves that the law-givers need to accommodate. There’s no suggestion that there was great pressure from the peasantry to be kind to foreigners.
It is a law entirely based on compassion.
What makes this law so radical is that it seems to be motivated entirely by altruism. That is why my teacher was so incredulous about the law being in the Torah at all.
And yet, isn’t that why we turn to the Torah to begin with? Not for cold economics, but to know the right way to live. We want a moral guide for how we should treat people.
Rabbi Julia Neuberger, who serves as a crossbencher in the House of Lords, has been a consistent voice for refugees, as each successive government has threatened hostility and sanctions.
As a lawmaker and a rabbi, she has to balance the high moral demands of our religion with the practicalities of government.
In all her addresses, she emphasises the need for compassion. She treats refugees as a litmus test for the compassion of a society, because their marginal status tells us how our country is likely to treat everyone else.
Baroness Neuberger advocates firmly for the rights of refugees.
Perhaps that is why the Torah introduces this seemingly radical rule. It wants to set a culture where the most vulnerable people get the best possible treatment, so that the whole of society will be based on kindness.
The foundation of Torah law is about caring for the poor, the orphan, and the widow. This most intense case – a complete outsider running away from slavery – is the Torah’s own test for its moral system.
It is a test every society faces. How people treat refugees shows what they think of human beings.
For the past few weeks, protesters have been gathering outside hotels, demanding refugees be sent back. The main political parties have entered into a race to the bottom for how unwelcome they would make refugees.
Their rhetoric and laws may turn out to be a threat to us all. They may undermine the very basis of a compassionate society.
Let us consider what would happen if Britain implemented Torah laws in its approach to refugees.
What would happen if this country made an active decision to welcome refugees and refuse to send them back? To deliberately integrate them and make sure they were firmly part of our towns? To set them up so that they could make a livelihood and refuse any insult to them?
Would this collapse our economy, or would it make this place better for everyone?
And, if we had to choose, why would we not choose to follow the Torah?
In the distant past, people made small gods. They carved out wooden statuettes to represent fertility, or hewed rocks into the shapes of animals that would bring them good luck. They made depictions of stars and planets, which would help them in their daily struggles. The ancients looked after the gods – giving them food, drink, rest, and clothes. In return, their little talismans looked after them.
When Abraham was born, he lived among the idol worshippers of Ur. He had no teacher nor guide, but came to understand, through his own reasoning, that God was the only Creator of all things, and that the world was governed by an invisible Force that could not be depicted. The totems people served were not gods at all, and could have no impact on the world.
As a result, he went around smashing up and destroying every idol and household God he could find. He went around telling everyone that the worship of idols was a great lie, and that the One True God would destroy anyone who bowed down to them. He enjoined his followers, the descendants of Abraham, that they, too, must destroy all idols.
This poses a question: what is so bad about idol worship?
If these are just empty vessels, why fear them? If they are not really gods, what harm can they do? Why should idols be so concerning that we must smash them up everywhere we find them?
By the time we get to the end of Moses’s life, here in the Book of Deuteronomy, the aversion to idol worship is even more intense.
At the start of Re’eh, Moses instructs the Israelites to find every idol, tear down the pillars, smash up the altars, cut down their gods, and destroy any memory that these false gods ever lived there.
If a seer comes to you, says Moses, and they say they have had a vision that you should worship idols, you must kill them instantly. You must purge them and their evil words.
If your own brother, sister, mother, father, or friend wants you to worship idols, Moses says, show them no pity. Don’t try to stop anyone from killing them. In fact, make sure it is your own hand that strikes them down.
And if you find out that there is a town where people worship idols, go and kill everyone in it. Bring everyone from the town together and slaughter them. Bring everything from that town into the square and burn it to the ground. Destroy that city in its entirety and never let anybody rebuild it.
This feels like something of an over-reaction.
How can idol worship be so bad that it is worse than murder, worse than cutting off your own kin, worse even than razing a city to the ground? Why should this practice of building little statues be so intimidating that it requires such destruction?
This feels completely out of place with our moral sensibilities. That’s not just a modern thing.
Even in the 13th Century, rabbis were worried about this injunction. Rambam, the great rabbinic decisor who codified all of the Torah’s laws, was also concerned.
Rambam lived among Muslims and Christians in medieval Egypt. He admired and appreciated them. He read the works of the great Greeks who had never known monotheism, like Plato and Aristotle. He found them wise and inspiring. He was deeply opposed to fundamentalism and chauvinism. Rambam, like us, was not really up for burning cities to the ground just because they did not follow our God.
Rambam says: don’t worry. The world for which these laws were written no longer exists. People don’t worship idols any more. Whatever perverse practices the Pagans once did, they are not doing them now.
Even if they did exist, we would not have the authority to burn a city to the ground like that. You would need a Sanhedrin – a court of 71 learned judges who could recite the laws in their entirety – and we have not had one of those for many centuries.
Even if the idol worshippers did still exist, and we did still have a Sanhedrin, the Sanhedrin would necessarily make sure to do everything possible to educate the idolaters away from their ill-conceived practices, help them to repent, and find ways to make sure they can live in the true religion of monotheism.
So, don’t worry, says Rambam, we can forget about all that.
But the trouble is we can’t.
It’s there in the Torah. We read it every year. Rambam still has to go and codify all these bloody edicts, that make such monsters of people who pray to fetishes.
And Rambam does not answer my fundamental question. The people who bow down to wood and stone might be wrong; their beliefs might be misplaced; but what is so bad about giving a drop of wine to a brick?
The most compelling answer I have found comes from a 20th Century psychoanalyst. Erich Fromm was born in Frankfurt, Germany, at the start of the last century. He studied psychiatry and philosophy among the greats of his generation, then moved, in 1934 to America, where he became a leading writer and critic of modern society. Needless to say, he was Jewish.
In 1976, Erich Fromm wrote a landmark book called “To Have or To Be.” This text became the cornerstone of the anti-consumerist movement.
Fromm engaged seriously with our religious texts. He saw them as inspiring people with a serious psychological message about how to live.
The difference between real worship and idolatry, says Fromm, is not what you worship, but how you do it. He calls it the “being mode” and the “having mode”.
The problem with idolatry, says Fromm, is that it makes you think God is something you can own.
Hebrew monotheism is a rejection of the entire enterprise of having a god:
“The God of the Old Testament is, first of all, a negation of idols, of gods whom one can have… The concept of God transcends itself from the very beginning. God must not have a name; no image must be made of God.”
Fromm writes:
“God, originally a symbol for the highest value that we can experience within us, becomes, in the having mode, an idol. In the prophetic concept, an idol is a thing that we ourselves make and project our own powers into, thus impoverishing ourselves. We then submit to our creation and by our submission are in touch with ourselves in an alienated form. While I can have the idol because it is a thing, by my submission to it, it, simultaneously, has me.”
So, for Fromm, idol worship isn’t over at all. In fact, it is a pitfall any of us can stumble into. If you think that faith is something you can have, rather than a way of living, you are guilty of idolatry. Fromm says:
“Faith, in the having mode, is a crutch for those who want to be certain, those who want an answer to life without daring to search for it themselves.”
Fromm goes further. It’s not just about God. It’s about everything. Do you want to be in this world, or do you want to have it? If you think you can have it, you will never be satisfied. But if you can truly be in it, you will find no need to have any desires met. Fromm says:
“The attitude inherent in consumerism is that of swallowing the whole world.”
Fromm even extends his philosophy to how we love. Do not try to have love, he warns, but try to be in love.
“To love is a productive activity. It implies caring for, knowing, responding, affirming, enjoying: the person, the tree, the painting, the idea. It means bringing to life, increasing his/her/its aliveness. It is a process, self-renewing and self-increasing.”
If we take Fromm seriously, we have a whole new way of looking at the world. Inspired by the prophets, everything we do can be about existing and loving and being. We can reject the whole ideology of possessing.
That is what is wrong with idolatry. The artefacts of the Pagans aren’t just wooden blocks. They tell us a way of living. The wrong way of living. They direct us to control and own.
Rambam may be right. The idolaters do not exist in cities any more.
Instead, today, they live in our own minds. And we must burn them down, if we are to be truly free.
Suppose you woke up one morning and discovered, to your surprise, that you had inherited an enormous mansion.
The lord of the manor has welcomed you as a guest to his entire estate. You have no need to pay rent.
This country villa has plush places to sleep, wonderful waters to swim in, and endless entertainment.
More than that, this house is magical. It provides for your every need. Its luscious garden grows your favourite fruit and vegetables. There is plenty of space to graze and raise whatever animals you desire.
It belongs to you and your descendants forever.
What if I told you that you had indeed been bequeathed such a home, and that you were already living in it?
It is this Earth.
That is how Moses understood the planet on which we live when he instructed the Israelites in Deuteronomy. Moses wanted to impart to the people what a miracle it was to be alive, and to get to live in this abundant and fertile world.
So, says Moses, “the Eternal One your God is bringing you into a good land – with brooks, streams, and deep springs gushing out into the valleys and hills; a land with wheat and barley, vines and fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey; a land where you can eat bread and never run out, where you will lack nothing; a land where the rocks are iron and you can dig copper out of the hills.”
This is the biblical mindset. You are guests in God’s mansion.
You have inherited a paradise and it is the whole world. The seas, the ice caps, the deserts, the mountains, and the forests. They are all yours. And they are all everyone else’s too.
Every human being was granted this world as a gift. Every living creature was placed here by their loving Creator.
Now, if you inherited a mansion like that, you wouldn’t trash it on the first day. You’d want to look after it and make sure your children and theirs got to enjoy it the way you did. You’d want to make sure the grass stayed green and the water kept flowing and the fruit trees kept producing. You’d want to know that everybody would be able to dwell in it for all time.
So, says Moses: “Keep faithfully every commandment I am giving to you this day, so that you can thrive and increase and come and inherit this land which was promised to your ancestors.”
Yes, this land requires no rent, but it does have conditions attached. You have to tend to it. You cannot be violent or greedy or deceitful. You must regularly redistribute the land, and make sure that everyone who lives in it gets their fill, and make sure everyone gets plenty of time for rest.
Well, these are small stipulations, given how wonderful my portion is. I get to live on this earth, which is so abundant, and all I have to do is look after it and share it? It sounds like a fantastic deal.
It is, but there is a trap. You see, you might get used to how great this mansion is. You might forget who gave it to you.
You might commit the gravest sin: you might think that this is yours, and yours alone.
This, says Moses, is a terrible error. “You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” Instead, remember the Eternal One your God, for it is God who gives you the power to produce wealth.”
You might think that you earned the mansion, and you built it, and you can do with it as you please. Well, then, you would become a threat. A threat to the mansion and everyone that lives there. A threat to its babbling brooks and fig trees.
If you fool yourself into thinking this is yours, warns Moses, then “your heart will become proud and you will forget the Eternal One, your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.”
Yes, you have a dark past. A history of slaves and masters. There was a time when people claimed ownership over everything. They declared that the Nile River and the rainwater belonged to them. They hoarded the grain and took possession over the vineyards. They owned the animals. They even owned you.
Do you want to go back there?
Now, look around at our home, here in Surrey. This place truly is wonderful. Working here, I have had the chance to paddleboard down the River Wey, walk on the Surrey Downs, and watch others swim in Divers Cove. I can really believe this county was a gift from God.
And yet this county is certainly not treated as a common treasury.
How did it happen that God’s creation became so gated?
You see, Moses’s description of the world as a common heritage bequeathed by God wasn’t just an idle fantasy. That was how many people saw the world throughout a large part of history.
Until the start of the 17th Century, large swathes of English land were held in common by all people. This meant that everyone could graze the land together. They could rotate crops together; care for the land together; and make sure everyone got fed.
It’s not that England was one great egalitarian utopia. Far from it. There had been kings, paupers, lords, peasants, and landless workers, for centuries. But, at least a part of it was treated as a shared inheritance.
Then, in 1605, the government began a process called Inclosure. They took all that had been previously common and handed it over to the already wealthy. They stripped the poor from their land and forced them into the cities to work in factories. They destroyed whole ways of life.
This mansion, already divided, became the possession of just a few. Just as Moses had warned, the wealthy imagined that their power had come about by their own hands. They thought of themselves as more than lords; more than pharaohs: as gods.
Now, right here in Surrey, a group of people tried to resist them. In 1649, on St George’s Hill, and at Little Heath near Cobham, a group of religious dissidents got together, and decided that they would take the land back from the lords. They were called The Diggers.
Their leader, Gerard Winstanley, has a memorial plaque near Weybridge Station, and there is a tour you can take with historic placards, showing where the Diggers went.
The Diggers wanted a return to the Law of Moses and the biblical attitude.
In the Levellers’ Standard, Gerard Winstanley wrote: “The Earth (which was made to be a Common Treasury of relief for all, both Beasts and Men) was hedged in to In-closures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made Servants and Slaves: And that Earth that is within this Creation made a Common Store-house for all, is bought and sold, and kept in the hands of a few, whereby the great Creator is mightily dishonoured, as if he were a respector of persons, delighting in the comfortable Livelihoods of some, and rejoycing in the miserable povertie and straits of others.”
Like Moses before him, Winstanley was adamant that God was not a propertarian but a generous host, and human beings simply welcome guests. How, then, could some divide up the land and force others off of it?
The Diggers lost their battle for the land, and the world we inherit is made according to the laws of those who enacted Inclosure.
But there is a message, that rings out through time, from the era of Moses through the 17th Century, and right up to today.
That message is that this world is a paradise, bequeathed to us all. And we need to act like it is so.
But, if you do not love others, if you do not seek peace, if you do not choose life, who will you be?
When Moses ascended Sinai, he found God adding flourishes to the Torah’s letters, which only Rabbi Akiva would ever be able to read. Moses asked to see what became of Akiva.
The Holy One showed Moses how the Romans flayed Rabbi Akiva’s skin as they martyred him, then sold his flesh in their marketplace.
Moses threw his hands in the air and demanded: “Is this Torah, and this its reward?”
“Silence,” said God. “Such is My will.”
This is Torah. This is its reward.
Vivian Silver was murdered by Hamas on October 7th.
Vivian Silver founded the Israeli peace organisation, Women Wage Peace. She worked for human rights groups like Btzelem and ALLMEP. She lived on Kibbutz Beeri, near the Gaza border, where she engaged in solidarity work with Bedouins, Gazans, and Palestinian construction workers.
Three days before October 7th, she organised a march of 1500 Israeli and Palestinian women for peace.
On October 7th 2023, terrorists broke into her home and murdered her.
Even as she hid from the militants, she gave an interview to Israeli radio, where she said the very fact that she was under attack showed the need for a peace deal.
A year later, her son, Yonatan Zeigen, eulogised her. He said:
“Being a peace activist is not something to save you from being killed in war. It’s something to prevent a war from happening. And to create a reality where war is not an option.”
Silver’s love of others did not make her popular.
Pursuing peace did not make her safe.
Choosing life did not protect her from death.
But it made her fully human.
This is Torah. This is its reward.
On Monday evening, as my community sat down to listen to poetry in preparation for Tisha B’Av, I received a text to say that a Palestinian peace activist I knew had been murdered.
Awdah Hathaleen was shot in the chest in his home.
Awdah lived in the village of Umm al-Khair in the south Hebron hills. I visited his village twice last year with Rabbis for Human Rights. The second time, I stayed in the bunk beds adjacent to his home. In the morning, he brought breakfast to me and the other solidarity activists.
A delegation of Progressive rabbis met Awdah earlier this year when they went to the West Bank with Yachad.
Awdah was an English teacher. He was born in the south Hebron hills and had known tanks, guns and occupation all his life. He worked with Israelis to protect his home and build a peaceful future.
This did not make him popular. For some Palestinians in neighbouring villages, this meant that he was engaged in normalisation with the Israeli occupier.
Indeed, after the Oscar-winning movie about his village, No Other Land, gained international recognition, the BDS movement called to boycott it, because it showed Israelis and Palestinians working together.
Awdah chose the path of non-violence. Even after his uncle, Haj Suleiman, was crushed by an Israeli police tow truck; yes, even after his elder was cruelly murdered; and yes, even after those who killed his uncle were never brought to justice; after all that, he still chose the peaceful path.
For the settlers who wanted to capture his home and ethnically cleanse his village, his activism made him a target.
He and his family never knew safety.
Awdah wrote for 972 Magazine, a joint Israeli-Palestinian publication, about the struggles of raising his traumatised son in this village under attack. He wrote: “He even knows some of the settlers by name. Sometimes I tell him that they went to jail; I’m lying, but I want to make him feel safe.”
He was lying. Settlers who carry out murders do not go to jail.
The man who murdered Awdah was called Yinon Levi. He was filmed doing it. Still, the only person who has been taken into custody by the Israeli police is Awdah’s cousin, Eid, a fellow non-violent activist.
Yinon Levi was already subject to EU sanctions and recognised internationally as a terrorist. But he is protected by government minister, Ben Gvir, who has dedicated his life to helping settlers get away with murder. Even before the far right coalition took power, plenty of settlers had been able to perpetrate atrocities with impunity.
Loving others did not make Awdah popular.
Pursuing peace did not make him safe.
Choosing life did not protect him from death.
No; you will not be better off if you do the right thing.
But God does not ask us to live lives that are comfortable.
There is no commandment in the Torah that we should be popular.
All of us, regardless of religion, are placed on this earth to be God’s stewards; to uphold God’s most sacred commandments; that we must choose life, pursue peace; seek justice; and love the stranger.
This is Torah. This is its reward.
This sacred work comes with no promises. But who else would you want to be?
It is a charge often laid against woolly moralists like me that we do not really get how militants like Hamas think; that we just cannot understand the mentality of the settlers.
That is true. I do not want to think like them. I do not want to become like them.
Who will we be if we let our hearts become warped and set our minds to cruelty?
Loving others will not make you popular. But it will make you loving. And pursuing peace will make you peaceful. And seeking justice will make you just. And that is what your God asks of you.
We are approaching Tisha B’Av, when we recall every catastrophe that befell our people. If you believe that peace is possible and that these assaults on basic humanity are wrong, you can add another disaster to the roster. On Monday, Awdah was murdered.
Yes, a Muslim murdered by a Jew is a tragedy for us all.
A man who was committed to non-violence was shot in the chest by a settler, leaving behind 3 children. He was 31.
Do not give in to cynicism or try to calculate what you might gain for kindness. This world has no guarantees. And we know nothing about the hereafter.
You do what is right because it is right. Because if you do not, who will you be?
After our wedding, everyone was excitedly sharing photos and videos. Laurence pored over them and made albums.
I liked them, but the pictures felt a bit flat. What I was craving was words.
I wanted to re-read everything everyone had said. I went about collecting the speeches people had given, and recounted them again. On honeymoon, Laurence and I re-read our vows to each other, this time pausing and discussing them.
I discovered anew how much more I loved words than pictures or videos. Pictures are static. Even videos, because they only caption one moment from one perspective, feel too final.
To me, words feel so much more alive. Stories are such a great way to engage with events and ideas, because they can be retold so many times and in different ways.
Isn’t this, after all, what religion is: storytelling to access something sublime and unfathomable; a collaboration by people sharing their best narratives and ideas?
We have inherited a literary tradition, our Torah, which is an exercise in storytelling: a process of openly wondering at the world through poetic sagas and emotion-filled songs.
For some, however, these stories fall flat. They see the words the way that I see pictures.
Fundamentalists will look at our story of a donkey talking to a prophet about an angel and think: that must be the historical truth of what happened.
Similarly, the New Atheists look at this beautiful poetic piece about the prophet Balaam and think: how stupid must religious people be to believe this nonsense?
This is not just a misunderstanding of Scripture. It’s a misunderstanding of storytelling itself.
Seemingly, it does not occur to them that this might be an invitation into conversation. They can’t comprehend that this might be a poem, crying out to be read aloud, sung, chanted, interpreted, and retold to make sense of all the wonders of the world.
Perhaps these talking animals and sword-wielding celestial beings aren’t part of history textbooks but reveal a different kind of truth altogether.
In Britain, we are mercifully spared from most of these types of fundamentalist reading. We don’t have to deal with as many evangelical Christians as our American cousins do.
But we have our own local brand of biblical literalists. They are the radical atheists who have got to know our sacred texts solely for the purpose of showing how irrational they are. The most famous of them is Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou, a biblical scholar at the University of Exeter.
In 2021, Stavrakopoulou brought out her most recent work, God: An Anatomy. The book’s objective is to show that the God of the Bible was an embodied being. He was a gargantuan man with a big beard who sat on his throne in the Jerusalem Temple, gobbling up the sacrifices priests burned for Him.
The God of the Bible, Stavrakopoulou argues, was just like any other ancient god: basically a massive person with all the associated wants and desires. She collapses about 4,000 years of history and three continents into one culture and seeks to show that the biblical god was just like all the others.
And, like all the others, the biblical god had a body.
Sometimes, her evidence for this scant. There are entire pages dedicated to making quite wild claims about the biblical god, appended with just one footnote that points to an obscure translation of a verse from the Psalms.
But, overall, there is plenty of material to go off. If you open up any page of Tanach, you will probably find God described in anthropomorphic terms.
Take our haftarah.
This week’s reading comes from the book of Habakkuk, a 6th Century BCE Prophet in Judah. The book is a vivid war fantasy, where the prophet describes the Judahites crushing the invading armies, some time in the mythic past, and hopes that it will happen again.
Throughout the text, God comes alive as a warrior. He (and I’m going to use the masculine pronoun advisedly here) is an embodied fighter on behalf of the people.
God’s hand lights up with radiance; God’s feet trample over mountains; God’s piercing eyes make the nations trembled with fear.
God has all the equipment of an ancient military commander. He rides in on a chariot with His horses and shoots out arrows from His archer’s bow. God rips the spear from the opposing general’s arm and stabs it into his head.
How are we supposed to read this?
Well, for a biblical literalist, you have to take it at face value. That’s exactly what Stavrakopoulou does. She makes the case that this was precisely how the ancient biblical authors and audience understood their god.
Their god was a big bloke with some massive weapons and blood lust.
Stavrakopoulou draws on other ancient gods, whose worshippers also describe them in embodied terms. The Canaanite high god El also had radiant arms. The Akkadian god Enki also trampled over mountains. The Assyrian god Ashur also fought with a bow.
The Israelites, then, were just riffing on old themes. Like the Pagans around them, they were silly enough to believe in all that religious nonsense of big beings. The biblical god was no different to Zeus or Jupiter.
Overall, reading Stavrakopoulou, you get the impression of someone listening to a concerto who can identify every note from every instrument but cannot hear the music. Her entire objective is to show that the tune isn’t even that good because other songs have been written before.
All the way through, it seems like a strange motivation for going to all the effort of learning Scripture and Ancient Near Eastern texts. Then, we get to the final chapter, entitled “Autopsy,” and we understand her true objectives.
She concludes: “the God of the Bible looks nothing like the deity disected and dismissed by modern atheism. […] Their dead deity is a post-biblical hybrid being, a disembodied, science-free Artificial Intelligence, assembled over two thousand years from selected scraps of ancient Jewish mysticism, Greek philosophy, Christian doctrine, Protestant iconoclasm and European colonialism. In the contemporary age, this composite being has become a god who forgot to create dinosaurs and failed to account for evolution; a god who allows cancer to kill children but hates abortion…”
Stavrakopoulou despises religious belief. So, if she can demonstrate that the biblical god was just like the Egyptian pantheon, and that this embodied god could be killed, then she can also strip the modern god of His powers and kill Him too.
This is the worst of Enlightenment hubris. 19th-century anti-religionists imagined that all religion was just silly superstition, which would eventually be washed away by the cold science of reason.
Our movement, like all progressive religions, has consistently argued for an alternative approach. We see all of history as an evolving effort to understand the sacred mystery beyond our comprehension.
It almost certainly is true that, before Ezra led the exiles back from Babylonian captivity in the 4th Century BCE, most Israelites did worship a small pantheon of Canaanite deities. The Prophets from before this time regularly condemn them for it.
But, while they may have been idolaters, they were not idiots.
If you told one of them that you’d just seen the fertility goddess Asherah out for a stroll in the marketplace, or that the storm god Baal came to your house this morning for a cup of tea, they would think something was wrong with you.
Another scholar of ancient religion, Iraqi Assyriologist Zainab Bahrani, helps us make sense of the ancient worldview. For the Mesopotamians, images were not reproductions of originals like portraits and photographs are for us today.
Instead, they saw their icons as ways of writing existence into being. They were in an active process with their gods of creating reality.
In matters of religion, literal interpretations are dead-ends. Words like metaphor don’t do it justice. Symbols like clay deities stand in for whole cosmologies. They are ways that human beings have tried to understand something that, by definition, is beyond our comprehension.
Perhaps most importantly, Stavrakopoulou misses what a massive departure it was that ancient Israelites abandoned all images in favour of a predominantly literary culture.
In a society where you cannot depict God, but can only engage in description and storytelling, you have to be more imaginative when you try to make sense of infinity.
Poems, sagas, and speeches, like those from our Tanach, are never fixed in their meaning. They are openings that invite listeners to think with them, talk back to them, and struggle for deeper understandings.
When someone reads a text too literally, they strip it of its vitality. Atheists and fundamentalists, both literalists of different kinds, strip the soul from the search for divine truth.
Tell stories, make poems, create art, look for that great truth beyond our reach… and don’t take any of it too seriously.
“It makes no sense to hate anybody. It makes no sense to be racist or sexist or anything like that. Because whoever you hate will end up in your family. You don’t like gays? You’re gonna have a gay son. You don’t like Puerto Ricans? Your daughter’s gonna come home Livin’ La Vida Loca!”
This quotation is so erudite, you may wonder which ancient sage said it. That was in fact, the comedian Chris Rock, in his 1999 “Bigger and Blacker” set.
I must have been about 10 when I heard that line, but it has always stuck with me. Over the years since, I have watched it become true. The world is so small that whatever bigotries someone holds, the people they hate are bound to end up in their own homes.
Recently, I realised that this had happened to me. I hope I am not much of a hater, but a friend pointed out to me how much I used to make jokes about Surrey. I used to say that we should saw around the county lines of Surrey and sink it into the sea, drowning all the golf courses and making a shorter trip for Londoners to the beach.
Now, here I am, eating my words. I am about to marry a man from Surrey and have all my in-laws in Surrey. I’m the rabbi for a congregation in Surrey, and looking to move as soon as I can to Surrey. That thing I hated, even in jest, is right here in my family and inside of me.
I had some terrible stereotypes that everyone who lived here was a tax-dodging, fox-hunting billionaire. They weren’t grounded in reality. They were just about my own fears, projected onto people I had never met.
Chris Rock was right. Whoever you hate will end up in your family.
More than that: whoever you hate is already something inside of you.
All of us can do it: we can stereotype, generalise, and project all our antagonisms onto a group as a way to cast off all the fears we have about ourselves. What do we call someone who captures all this externalised hatred? A scapegoat.
In this week’s Torah portion, we read about the original scapegoat. As part of the rituals for collective atonement, Aaron the High Priest gets two goats and brings them into the tabernacle. They pick straws for the goats.
The lucky one is to be sacrificed for God. Onto the lucky one, Aaron ceremonially transmits all the sins of the Israelites, then chases it out into the wilderness. As it scarpers off, the scapegoat symbolically carries away all of the Israelites’ misdeeds.
The biblical narrative describes a psychological trick we can all play on ourselves. When we are ashamed of something inside ourselves, we take all that fear, turn it into hatred, and throw it at whatever unwitting bystander will carry it.
Is this not precisely what Britain has been doing to trans people?
Gender is changing. The roles of men and women are shifting dramatically. There are so many new ways to live gender, to express ourselves, and to talk about our identities.
Rather than embrace these changes and think about what opportunities they can afford us all to be more free, reactionary parts of British society have whipped up a concoction of bigotry and thrown it all at trans people. Every anxiety our bigots have about gender has been exaggerated and projected onto one small part of the population, who have been turned into monsters through these prejudiced eyes.
It makes sense that people will find social changes scary and destabilising, but why should trans people bear the brunt of those fears?
A few years ago, I went to hear a panel of esteemed Jewish leaders give a retrospective talk about the ordination of gay, lesbian, bi and trans rabbis. On the bimah was Rabbi Indigo Raphael, Europe’s first openly trans rabbi.
In his opening words to the congregation, Rabbi Raphael proclaimed: “I am a transgender man. I am not an agenda; I am not an ideology; and you can’t catch trans by respecting my pronouns.” The room immediately erupted into applause.
He should not need to say it. He shouldn’t need to defend his own existence, but such is the level of moral panic in parts of Britain that he has to assert his right not to be scapegoated before he can even teach Torah.
In the last few weeks, trans people have been subjected to legal rulings and government decrees that may make their lives unlivable and keep them from basic participation in public life. Like the goats of the ancient world, they are being cast out into the wilderness to carry away all of people’s fears.
It should not be this way.
When we feel like scapegoating others, the best thing to do is look inside ourselves. We need to face our fears and work out why others bother us. The chances are, it’s something in ourselves that we’re not happy with, and when we need to get right with our own souls.
When we get to know those we “other” we get to know ourselves better. And when we realise we can like the difference in others, we learn more about what we can like in ourselves.
Reflecting on this, Margaret Moers Wenig, an American Reform rabbi wrote an essay called “Spiritual Lessons from Transsexuals.” She talks about how knowing trans people has enriched her own spiritual life.
Interacting with trans people, Rabbi Wenig says, has taught her that all of us can craft our bodies as we will; we are all more than just our flesh and blood; we have living souls that can differ from others’ assumptions; that only God knows who we truly are. These are wonderful lessons that can only be learned when we turn away from fear and embrace curiosity.
They chime with my own experiences. At first, knowing trans people made me question myself. If gender is something we can change, am I really a man? With time, seeing other people embrace their gender and become who they are has made me feel far more happy in my own gender. I am a man, and I like being a man, and I like being an effeminate man.
When we turn away from fear, we see that we have no need for scapegoats. The parts within us don’t need to be divided up so that some are holy and others need to be chased out into the wilderness. Every part of us is for God.
The world has more than enough hate. It’s time we swapped it for loving curiosity.
After all, Surrey, it turns out, is rather lovely.
At present, Reform and Liberal Judaism are deciding whether to become a single movement. You will be able to vote on this, and I encourage you to do so.
As the procedural questions unfold, it is hard to imagine how strongly felt the ideological divisions were between the two movements, even forty years ago. I believe, however, that those differences are now almost entirely within the movements, rather than between them.
On some fronts, we will find unity, and on others, differences will remain.
There is one point, however, which, to me, is so intrinsic to Liberal thought that I could not stand it to see it lost. That is: there is no such thing as a Jewish race.
There is no such thing as Jewish blood, as a Jewish womb, as Jewish DNA, or as Jewish features.
It is precisely because our Liberal tradition teaches that there is no Jewish race that we have been able to fully embrace converts and, from the very beginning, accepted patrilineal Jews.
These ideas were critical stumbling-blocks to merger attempts in previous decades. Reform Judaism would not accept patrilineal Jews, and insisted that converts went and were reborn from the “Jewish womb” of a mikvah.
In the past few years, Reform Judaism has come to accept patrilineal Jews, and Liberal Judaism has come to accept that the mikvah can be a meaningful ritual.
Yet not everyone has come to accept the underlying ideology that made these matters so central to Liberal Judaism. The originators of our movement saw Judaism as a religious community, where Jewishness was communicated socially, not “biologically.”
That is no longer a sectarian issue. There are Reform rabbis who ardently agree on this point; and there are Liberals who, instead of denying any racial Jewishness, focus on being “inclusive” about who belongs.
Rejecting the idea of a Jewish race was absolutely foundational to early Liberal thinkers. Regardless of whatever new ideas emerge as rabbis come together, I intend to hold doggedly to their understanding of Jewishness.
Israel Mattuck was the first Liberal rabbi in the UK. In 1911, he was recruited by Lily Montagu and Claude Montefiore from America to lead the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St John’s Wood. He was a prolific preacher, ideologue, and scholar.
At the LJS, Dr Mattuck taught a Confirmation class, for 16-year-olds affirming their faith. He later took his notes and turned them into a book, entitled Essentials of Liberal Judaism so that everyone would know what he thought it meant to be a Jew.
Jews, he insisted, were not a race, but spanned the globe. What made people Jewish was that they held Jewish ideas, followed a Jewish way of life, and kept Jewish observances.
He wrote: “In spite of all the differences among them, the Jews of the world constitute a people; but they are a people in a different sense from any other people. Their unity is based on religion and history.”
Editing in 1947, Mattuck was eager to avoid any misconceptions. He insisted that this history was not an unbroken tale of misery and persecution, but one of great spiritual achievements. We were, he said, the first witnesses to God’s unity through the revelation at Sinai. Our history was that of the prophets, the priests, the scholars, the mystics, and all those who sought to reach closer to religious truth.
Mattuck was clear that you could not be Jewish in anything more than name if you rested on race. You want to be a Jew? Walk humbly with God, taught Rabbi Mattuck from the prophet Micah.
There is no race – only a demand to live right.
Now, you may be thinking, this all sounds a lot like the Critical Race Theory that Mr Trump so zealously warned us about. Indeed it is! And the American President has good reason to fear people taking a critical approach to race.
In the USA, races were invented to divide and rule people so that the wealthy whites could maintain their plantation economy. Poor whites were incentivised to enforce and uphold slavery by being given some privileges on the basis of their skin colour.
As a result, they felt they could identify with the rich whites, even though they had very little in common with them socially or economically. Using racism, they demeaned and humiliated the stolen Africans so that they would not have the confidence to challenge their own condition.
That is why race-critical scholars in America have the slogan: “race exists because of racism, not the other way round.”
In Race: A Theological Account, the African-American scholar of religion J. Kameron Carter shows how racist ideology had earlier roots – in how European Christians treated Jews.
To create a system where Jews were second-class citizens, they needed an ideology where Jews were defective human beings. So they made up stories about Jewish bodies, Jewish blood, Jewish noses and hair – even Jewish horns – to justify their system of oppression. It was a nasty division for the purposes of exploitation.
This was exactly why Mattuck was so resistant to talk of Jews as a race, and so adamant about our religion.
In 1939, Mattuck wrote his first major work, What are the Jews?, which was a harsh rebuttal, not only to Jewish racial nationalism, but to racial nationalism as such.
We belong everywhere, he asserted. In the Age of Enlightenment, all citizenship should be communicated on civic grounds, never on ethnic or religious ones.
A Jew, he felt, could be a nationalist, but they must first adhere to the religious calling. That is: they could be Jewish and happen to have nationalist leanings, but it could not define them as Jewish.
Nevertheless, he thought that, by properly conceiving of ourselves as a religion, we would be more likely drawn to universal ethics. We would measure our Jewishness by our conduct towards others and our connection with our God, rather than by the supposed quality of our genetic make-up. We could pull apart the stories that separated people and build common bonds.
Racial thinking, thought Mattuck, must be resisted.
Race is a horrible and divisive lie. Religion is a beautiful and unifying truth.
I want to be open about why this idea is hard for others to hold.
It is more demanding. It says that nobody can take their Jewishness for granted, and must work for it. It means that you cannot be “born” Jewish, but have to live Jewish. It sets high ethical and practical demands on anyone who claims Jewishness.
When we say that there is no Jewish race, we also mean that somebody with an unbroken chain of matrilineal descent but without any Jewish upbringing or identity must also learn how to be Jewish, in the same way as a patrilineal Jew would. Everyone has to properly engage with the traditions and practices. Contrary to the doctrine of inclusion, this makes us more exclusive than the Orthodox.
Denying the existence of a Jewish race also has profound implications for how we engage with Israel. If we are a religious community, the demand to achieve a Jewish ethnic majority – still less racial supremacy – is not just grotesque. It is absurd. The measure of whether the state was sufficiently Jewish would not be by how many Jews there were, but by how well it upheld Jewish moral values.
Yet it is precisely because of this more demanding approach to Jewishness that I will keep holding onto it. The call that we be moral in our dealings, conscientious in our practices, and connected with our traditions is a far better one than the narrow pull of racial nationalism.
Through such a religion, we may connect to every other Jew in a spirit of solidarity.
Through religion, we may connect to all of humanity, by recognising our shared Creator.
Through religion, we may draw nearer to the mystery that is our God.
Through religion, we may live out the words of our haftarah: “For you who revere My Name, the sunbeams of righteousness will rise, with healing in their wings. Then you will go forth and skip about like calves from the stall.”
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.
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.
Sim Lev 