Perhaps, says the Mishnah, it is when we can see the difference between light blue and white. Or when we can see the difference between sky-blue and leak-green. Or perhaps it is when the sun is fully visible in the sky.
‘No,’ says the Tosefta. It is the moment when you can stand four paces from a friend and recognise their face. That is when you know that the day has come.
In the sunlight, new rays shine upon a familiar face and you can truly see them. In the morning, when the darkness has receded, you can recognise who is standing before you.
How different is this face, and yet how familiar. I see this person, this stranger, and, if the day has come, they are no longer a stranger. They are recognisable. It is possible to interpret their face fully; to understand it in ways one could not comprehend in the night.
Then we know that it is morning.
This is not just true for the passing of time. This is something that happens in life.
There are moments when we encounter someone we thought we knew, and new information, or a new realisation, means that we see them in a completely new light. They are transformed. And, in that process, we, who thought we knew, are transformed too, and our understanding of ourselves is changed.
In 4th Century Greece, the philosopher Aristotle termed this moment “anagnorisis.” It means recognition, or discovery. Aristotle writes that, in the world of theatre, anagnorisis “is a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing either friendship or hatred in those who are destined for good fortune or ill.”
How different you appear in the new light of day. I stand four paces away from you and I can finally see that the night has disappeared and some glints of the morning have come.
It is most effective, says Aristotle, when it coincides with a reversal. The one who seemed weak is strong; the one who appeared as a pauper is rich; the one who we thought was dead has been alive all along.
Aristotle presents the example of Oedipus. Throughout the entirety of his tragedy, Oedipus believed he was avoiding a prophecy that warned he would kill his father and marry his mother. In the moment of anagnorisis, at the cathartic climax of the play, Oedipus discovers that he had already fulfilled this prediction right at the start of his story. His father was not his father and his mother was his wife.
The idea of anagnorisis received a revival a few months ago, when the British-Palestinian author, Isabella Hammad, delivered the annual Edward Said lecture. Hammad spoke of anagnorisis as it appears in Palestinian literature, where recognition scenes are crucial.
“To recognise something,” says Hammad, “is to perceive clearly what you have known all along, but that perhaps you did not want to know. Palestinians are familiar with such scenes in real life: apparent blindness followed by staggering realization. When someone, a stranger, suddenly comes to know what perhaps they did not want to know.”
In Hammad’s understanding, anagnorisis is not just a literary trope, but something deeply personal and political, filled with moral meaning.
Let us turn, then, to our own narrative. This week, in the Torah, we witness one of the most staggering moments of anagnorisis.
Joseph wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard him, and Pharaoh’s household heard about it.
Joseph, the Egyptian vizier, strips off his royal clothes, and cries out: “I am your brother Joseph!”
Until this point, Joseph’s brothers believed that he was probably dead, or a slave somewhere miles away. Joseph’s brothers had believed that he was contemptible; a downtrodden misfit. Joseph’s brothers had believed that they themselves were contemptible; that they had sold their own kin into slavery and could never be redeemed for their sin.
Now they learn that Joseph is alive and is, in fact, the vizier over Egypt.
But this itself is not anagnorisis. Because in a real moment of recognition it is not only the characters who understand the truth of their situation, but the audience also discovers something new. We, the audience, already knew that the vizier was Joseph.
So, what did we really find out?
Joseph cried because he finally knew that his brothers regretted what they did to him, and that his father truly mourned his loss. He wailed because he now realised that these brothers could act as a family and care for their youngest brother. Joseph’s brothers were really penitent. Joseph never knew this, and nor did we.
When Joseph sees his brothers as they really are, Joseph changes how he sees himself.
“Then Joseph said to his brothers, “Come close to me.” When they had done so, he said, “I am your brother Joseph.” One word in Hebrew – just one word – changes entirely our understanding of who Joseph is in this context.
אֲחִיכֶם – your brother
“I am your brother.”
Joseph recognises himself as someone else. Not as the grand vizier of Egypt, but as the lost brother of his family.
Now we, the audience, can finally understand what Joseph wanted from this tragic play all along. All he ever wanted was to be loved. He did not really want power or favouritism or grandeur. He was just a lonely boy who wanted to be loved and did not know how. He resorted to such ridiculous measures to get attention, but all he ever wanted was to be accepted by his family. He wanted to be their brother.
This story was not about what we had thought. We thought it was a divine unfolding of a great man’s place in history. We thought we were reading a rags-to-riches story that explained the hidden greatness of our nation and its God.
Then, instead, we see the entire cast as vulnerable human beings. Joseph is just a flawed boy seeking to make his family happy. Judah is just a stupid brother who made a terrible decision and regretted it. This is no tale of triumph, but is a far more gentle narrative, about family reconciliation and the power of repentance.
In the light of this moment, the entire story of the Torah comes into sharp focus. Cain killed Abel. Abraham tried to kill Isaac. Jacob tricked Esau. Laban tried to kill Jacob. Everyone in this family, going right back to the beginning, deployed violence and cruelty to achieve their aims. This is the first time, the climax of the book of Genesis, when these men are able to be vulnerable, use their words, and find healing.
Suddenly, we understand that this story was not about fulfilling a prophecy but about breaking an intergenerational curse.
In this moment of anagnorisis, everybody is somebody else. They are not hostages to fortune but breathing human beings capable of shaping their own family relationships. They cease being stock characters and become emotionally deep people who can recognise the vulnerability in each other.
So, how do we know when it is morning?
In the sunlight, new rays shine upon a familiar face and you can truly see them. In the morning, when the darkness has receded, you can recognise who is standing before you. How different is this face, and yet how familiar.
When you can stand four paces away from someone whom you thought was a stranger, and see yourself anew. That person is not a stranger, and you are in fact a friend.
There is no more a struggle for power, but a moment of recognition. You recognise who you are, and you can finally say: “I am your brother.”
I am your sister. I am your family. I am your kin.
At home, my fiance paces back and forth, preparing for his exams in anaesthetics. In a week, he will be tested orally to see if he can become a consultant. He recites definitions of key medical terms, revises laws of physics, gives diagnoses of uncommon diseases.
One definition he has repeated so many times it is now imprinted in my mind too.
Death is the irreversible loss of capacity for consciousness and loss of capacity for breathing.
At times, we have pondered over such terms together. On long walks, we have discussed medical ethics through Jewish lenses. We have debated whether and how modern medicine aligns with ancient wisdom.
Now is not the moment to challenge him on the medical definition of death. But the definition sticks with me, because this is an area where I do not think science and religion align.
While Laurence prepares for his exams, you will have to listen to my thoughts on what Judaism teaches about mortality.
Death is the irreversible loss of capacity for consciousness and loss of capacity for breathing.
Is it? Is that what it means to die?
If it were, then would living simply be brain activity and breathing? Is that all we are?
Chayyei Sarah – the life of Sarah – is our portion. It opens with her death. By telling us about her life from her death, the Torah is telling us something about how life and death interact.
The parashah is a recounting of Sarah’s burial. It is a terse text, where the primary narrative concerns Abraham’s attempt to purchase a lot for internment.
So much is left unsaid. So many emotions are not expressed. In the silences and interstices, we are left to reconstruct our own imaginings of what Abraham was thinking. Let us try.
Abraham proceeded to cry and eulogise Sarah.
He held her hands, once so strong and firm. Those hands had kneaded bread for strangers at a moment’s notice. They had sewn garments for whole families. They had, at times, pointed accusations, separated children, raised objections… Strong hands. Determined hands. Strong, determined hands, that were now drained of all their vigour, and sat coldly in his own palms.
Abraham rose from beside his dead, and spoke to the Hittites.
Abraham sprang into action. Sarah had not died in the land of her own family in Egypt, nor of Abraham’s in Chaldea. They were in a strange place, far from their own homes, among Hittites in the hill-country of Canaan.
Abraham said: “Here I am, a stranger and a foreigner among you. Please sell me a piece of land so I can give my wife a proper burial.”
Sarah had left her father’s home in the palaces of Egypt, where she lived as a princess. She was an aristocrat in a great empire who gave it up to travel with a wandering man. Abraham claimed to have spoken with the One True God, and Sarah just followed him. She forsook luxury for a life on the road. Now, she lay dead on the road, and there would be no fine processions to pyramids to entomb her.
The Hittites replied to Abraham, “Listen, my lord, you are an honoured prince among us. Choose the finest of our tombs and bury her there. No one here will refuse to help you in this way.”
Sarah used to laugh with her whole belly. Her shoulders bounced up and down. She can find humour where nobody else could. Even when she struggled with infertility, she found ways of making jokes. Abraham would not hear her laugh again.
So Abraham bowed low before the Hittites and said, “Since you are willing to help me in this way, be so kind as to ask Ephron son of Zohar to let me buy his cave at Machpelah, down at the end of his field. I will pay the full price in the presence of witnesses, so I will have a permanent burial place for my family.”
Sarah had been so beautiful people tripped over themselves staring at her. On their wanders, every prince desired her. Sarah was as beautiful at 127 as she had been when they had first met. She was still just as honourable and God-fearing. Nobody would be as good and beautiful and true again.
Ephron was sitting there among the others, and he answered Abraham as the others listened, speaking publicly before all the Hittite elders of the town.
Sarah received no ennoblement or reward for marrying Abraham. Yet so much honour came to Abraham through her. She could see visions and speak with God.
“No, my lord,” he said to Abraham, “please listen to me. I will give you the field and the cave. Here in the presence of my people, I give it to you. Go and bury your dead.”
Abraham had bargained over everything. He had struck a deal with Avimelech to share water sources. He had even negotiated with God over the destruction of a city. This was a bargain he could not accept.
Abraham again bowed low before the citizens of the land, and he replied to Ephron as everyone listened.
“No, listen to me. I will buy it from you. Let me pay the full price for the field so I can bury my dead there.”
Abraham was ageing too. Who would bury him? He had cast out one son and tried to murder another.
Ephron answered Abraham, “My lord, please listen to me. The land is worth 400 pieces of silver, but what is that between friends?”
What is four hundred shekels between strangers? What is a price on the life of Sarah? What sort of burial could ever be enough for her?
Ephron said: “Go ahead and bury your dead.”
These are some words we may complete into the silences. They come from the other biblical stories and midrash, and they paint a fuller picture. In the spaces, we see that this is not a negotiation over a burial plot, but a negotiation over the nature of death.
Death is the irreversible loss of capacity for consciousness and loss of capacity for breathing.
Is it? Is that what it means to die?
If it were, then would living simply be brain activity and breathing? Is that all we are?
Medically, scientifically… maybe.
Spiritually, Jewishly… no.
Death is as much a journey as life is.
For seven days, we eulogise, as the last imprint of a person leaves us. For thirty days, we mourn, as the shock and grief harrow us. For eleven months, we pray, as some part of the soul heads on its journey to Heaven.
Then, every year, we say the names of the dead, and some part of our loved ones returns to us. Their soul breaks through the gaps in Aramaic words and we feel them with us once more.
Thousands of years later, we still say Sarah’s name, and some part of her keeps living long after breath and consciousness.
We are more than what we exhale: we are the laughter and joy we bring to others. We are more than our own thoughts: we are the memories living on in others.
In memory, in prayer, in faith, we grasp something greater than the material world.
Trusting in You, Eternal God, we see life beyond death.
“How many more signs do you need that God is not there?”
This was the question one congregant asked last week when I went round for a cup of tea. In fact, a few of you have asked similar things recently.
None of you was asking out of arrogance or triviality, but expressing a real despair at the state of the world. The ongoing war, which has claimed far too many lives, is enough to incite a crisis of faith in even the most devout believers.
Why will God not just stop the war? It is a serious question, and one that deserves a serious answer.
How desperate are we all to see a ceasefire, to see Gaza rebuilt, to see the hostages returned home, to know that the Israelis will no longer hide in bomb shelters, to know that no more people will be rushed to hospitals, to see an end to all the violence and bloodshed?
And it goes deeper than that. How much do we all wish that none of this had ever happened; that there was no war for us to wish to end?
In our anguish at the cruelty, we cry out to the Heavens. There is no answer from On High, so we wonder if there is Anyone there listening at all.
I will not be so presumptuous as to imagine I have the answers. I do not know the nature of God and can give no convincing proof of how our Creator lives in this world. In fact, if I found anyone who thought they did, I would consider them a charlatan.
The great 15th Century Sephardi rabbi, Yosef Albo, said: “If I knew God, I would be God.” We are, all of us, animals scrambling in the dark, as we try to make sense of the mystery.
But we come to synagogue so that we can scramble in the dark together, feeling that if we unpick the mystery in community, we will get further, and develop better ideas. Allow me, then, to share some of my own thinking, so that we can be in that conversation together.
How many more signs do you need that God is not there?
In our Torah, there were times when God did indeed show signs of presence. In the early chapters of Genesis, God walks through the Garden of Eden in the cool of day. At the exodus from Egypt, God came with signs and wonders and an outstretched arm. As the Israelites wandered in the desert, God appeared as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.
This is the kind of sign that we might want from God now, then.
At a hostel in Jerusalem, I met an evangelical Christian who was absolutely convinced that everything happening in the Middle East was already foretold by the Bible and that God was about to rain down hell on the Palestinians and then all the Jews would finally accept Jesus.
Suffice to say I do not think such a God would be worthy of worship.
And I highly doubt this is the kind of divine intervention any of us would embrace.
Is there an alternative way we could wish for a sign?
Some great indication that Someone greater than us is involved in the story and cares about human suffering. Perhaps just a gentle hand to reassure us everything will be OK.
Deep down, most of us know that no such sign will come.
God did, however, send another sign in the Torah. A sign, perhaps, not to look for signs. A sign that God was not going to get involved, no matter how desperate it all seemed.
The rainbow.
At the start of the story of Noah, the world was filled with violence. Everyone had turned to war – nation against nation – all against all. The entire planet was rife with destruction.
God slammed down on the reset button. God sent a flood so catastrophic that it killed everyone bar one family. The flood was like a thorough system cleanse, designed to strip the earth back to its original state and allow Noah to rebuild.
Then, as soon as the rains had stopped and the land had returned, God looked at the devastation, and swore: “never again.”
God promised Noah: “I will maintain My covenant with you: never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”
God hung a rainbow in the sky, and told Noah it was a symbol that there would be no more divine interventions:
“When I bring clouds over the earth, and the bow appears in the clouds, I will remember My covenant between Me and you and every living creature among all flesh, so that the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.”
The rainbow, then, is a sign that God is there, and a sign that God will not get involved. Even if humanity goes back to being as violent as it was in the Generation of the Flood, God is not going to step in and destroy as at the start.
If the rainbow is a sign that God will not come and strike people down when the world is in crisis, it is also a sign of the other half of the covenant. Human beings must now be God’s hands on earth. We have to be the ones to do what we wish God would.
For Jews in the rabbinic period, every rainbow was a reminder to them that God would not act, so they had to take the initiative. They would look up at the sky and say “blessed is God, who remembers the covenant.”
According to the Jerusalem Talmud, no rainbow was seen during the entire lifetime of Rabbi Shimeon bar Yochai. He was so righteous and brought so many others to do good deeds that there was no need to be reminded any more of the covenant. Bar Yochai was one who acted so much like he was God’s actor on earth that even God did not need to send reminders.
The idea that human beings had to be God’s hands became even more important in the post-Holocaust world. Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits escaped from Germany in 1939 and went on to become one of the leading Orthodox rabbis of the 20th Century. For him, a traditional religious Jew, grappling with the enormity of the Shoah, he had to find a way to deal with God’s seeming absence at Auschwitz.
So, Rabbi Berkovits said, the problem lay not with God’s inaction, but with humanity’s. In his book, Faith After the Holocaust, Berkovits wrote:
“Since history is man’s responsibility, one would, in fact, expect [God] to hide, to be silent, while man is going about his God-given task. Responsibility requires freedom, but God’s convincing presence would undermine the freedom of human decision. God hides in human responsibility and human freedom.”
What Berkovits is saying is that it might be in God’s nature to prevent catastrophe, but it would undermine human nature if God did. In order that people can realise our freedom and our full potential, God has to stand back.
It seems that, in almost every generation, Jews are asking why God does not intervene to stop violence.
In each generation, we find an answer: God does not intervene, because that’s our job.
It’s not that any of these classical sources doubt God’s existence or question God’s presence. They just don’t think it is God’s responsibility to act. It is ours.
There is no flood coming to wipe out war or lightning bolt coming from the sky to strike down the wrongdoers.
We began with a question.
How many more signs do you need that God is not there?
Perhaps we can now reframe it positively.
How many more signs do you need that you must act?
God is not going to stop war. So we have to do our bit to bring it to an end.
Even in our small corner of the world, we have to do all we can to push for peace and justice.
So, on the days when you find yourself looking for the sign, you be the sign.
You need to be the sign to somebody else that there is hope in this world.
When they lived in Eden, Adam and Eve did not have to labour for their food. Yet, in the moment that they were expelled from paradise, God gave them stern instructions on what they would have to do.
God warned: “Through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”
Where once they had a homeland, the original people were cast out into a state of permanent exile, to live in the world with all its struggles.
This fable, though mythic, tells us something true about how human beings came to have the life we do. While there was probably never really an original idyll where people lived without work, there was a moment, millennia ago, when humanity’s ancestors shifted how they lived.
For most of our history, we had wandered. All people were nomadic. They hunted and gathered, migrating between caves and carrying temporary shelters all over the neolithic continents.
Then, as the last Ice Age ended, around 11,000 years ago, people discovered that they could store seeds from one year to the next. They developed agricultural systems, with plots of land dedicated to growing crops. Having once roamed the earth, they could stay put in a single place, which would be their land.
Cain and Abel are archetypal characters who tell us about this great change. Abel was a nomad, who herded flocks and grazed them over the hills. His name means “breath” or “waif” – for, like a cloud that drifts across valleys, he wafted without leaving a trace. He was a symbol of the old way of constant movement.
Cain, his brother, had a name which meant “acquire” or “possess.” Just as God had warned his parents when they were cast out from Eden, he worked by the sweat of his brow. He laboured on the soil, where he sowed, grew, and harvested plants for food.
At the dawn of civilisation, these were the two types of people: those who cultivated the land in fixed places; and those who travelled with no fixed abode. Everything that was movable, like herds and clothes, was held by the nomads, the Abels. Everything immovable – like allotments and orchards – was owned by those who settled, the Cains.
Our Torah says that God favoured Abel over Cain, and it probably felt that way. While agriculture can keep people settled and build lasting cultures, it is unpredictable. One bad year of too much rain, or not enough, or bad seeds or infertile soil, can leave an entire community famished and ruined.
A pastoralist, on the other hand, has a tough but durable existence. The life of a shepherd means much moving, but that is part of what makes their life sustainable. Sheep can be moved to wherever water is healthy and available. A goat can graze on thistles and other crops that people find inedible.
So, yes, to the ancient mind, it may have seemed like God looked more kindly on the one who wandered than the one who farmed.
Cain killed Abel.
The one who tilled the land and made it his home sought to destroy that wandering waif. Perhaps, indeed, he did. Perhaps the founders of the earliest civilisations enforced their new way of life with violence and coercion.
But not successfully. As soon as Cain commits the first murder, God tells him what he will become. Cain cries out at his punishment: “Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”
For killing Abel, Cain would become Abel. Having been the acquirer, he would take his place as a nomad. Having been so sure in his farmland, Cain would return to the ancient ways of roaming.
God said to Cain: “Abel had no homeland. Now neither do you. Abel was forced to wander. Now you will wander too.”
Generations passed, but the draw of homeland was irresistible. In ancient Mesopotamia, Abraham was called “ha-ivri” – border-crosser; the one who passed between places.
He heard the voice call out: “Go, get going, to a land that I will show you,” and Abraham traversed to Canaan, to a new land where he hoped he would settle.
He took his family, and his possessions, his movable goods that had sustained him in all his wanderings, and went in search of home.
But, having reached the land that God would show him, he saw it and he left. He pitched his tent and built an altar, then carried on to Egypt. When he returned, he did so as a nomad, travelling with his flocks, threatened by the Canaanites and Perizites who had acquired the land, as Cain had once done.
Abraham sought a home, and found one, but it was never a permanent space. He had wandered to be in one place, but in that one place, he found he had to keep on wandering.
Abel, Cain, and Abraham all wandered. So did the Israelites in the desert. Deep in our ancient stories, there is an idea that, while a settled home may be desirable, migration is part of the human experience. We may dream of Edens, but life is unpredictable, and fortune may force us to move.
In Torah stories, we learn the survival of migrants, passed down from generations who knew what it meant to move with the seasons.
It is a deep knowledge, from before we were Israelites or even Jews, stretching back to our history as neanderthals.
Please do not imagine that I am romanticising exile. Travelling breeds resilience and creativity, but it is far from idyllic.
Instead, wandering is an inevitability.
In every community and in every family, if you go back far enough, you will find a traveller. In the stories of our Torah, you learn that it could be you.
Abel was a restless nomad, and we may wander too.
Shabbat shalom.
Cain and Abel, by Frank Hoesel
I learnt this Torah from Rabbi Joel Levy at the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem.
Not long before I started here, Rebecca came back very excited from a Taylor Swift concert. Taylor Swift, I understand, is a very famous popular music singer.
Rebecca had been to the much-coveted “Eras” tour, where Taylor Swift went through her back catalogue of music. For Swifties – Taylor Swift’s fans – their favourite artist has “eras,” each represented by a different album. Fans ascribe themselves to an “era” – their favourite musical period from the singer.
In her enthusiasm for what she had seen, Rebecca suggested I do a sermon about Taylor Swift.
I curtly replied: “I think I’ll probably talk about Torah.”
That was wrong. I shouldn’t have said that.
If something is relevant to the congregation, there should be a way to make it relevant to Torah. So, I got thinking about what connections there might be, not because I like Taylor Swift, but because I do like a challenge.
And I got thinking, you know who else had eras, each represented by unique creative output?
King Solomon.
According to our tradition, Solomon wrote the Song of Songs as a young man; the book of Ecclesiastes in his middle age; and the Book of Proverbs when he was old.
The Song of Songs is a wonderful collection of erotic love poetry, beloved of weddings, and recited at Pesach as we celebrate fertility. It makes sense that this was composed by somebody young and virile. The Book of Proverbs is a compilation of wisdom and dictums: the sort of knowledge someone can only accumulate by living a full life and learning from everyone.
The Book of Ecclesiastes – called, in Hebrew, Qohelet – is the text attributed to middle age. It is a deep meditation on what happens in a crisis of faith, asking what the meaning of life is, and seeking a transformed relationship with God. It makes sense for midlife, when we question our grand narratives, and find new existential purposes.
It is the Megillah, the sacred text, for this festival of Sukkot. It is so appropriate for this autumn festival, when we build a beautiful structure and watch our sukkah get drenched in rain and torn apart by winds. The Swifties may hold by many different eras, but we Jews, at this festival of Sukkot, are very much in our Qohelet era.
With that in mind, I offer up a pop quiz. I’ll read out a verse, and you tell me: is it a Taylor Swift lyric, or a section from Ecclesiastes?
Some of you may need to sit this out, because you are superfans, and will therefore already have rote memorisation of every part of Tanach.
I saw that there is nothing better for people than to be happy in their work. That is our lot in life. And no one can bring us back to see what happens after we die. (Ecclesiastes 3:22)
Did you not write it down? Just one more thing to do. Where were you, and didn’t they pray, too? (Taylor Swift, Didn’t They, 2003)
Did some bird flap its wings over in Asia? Did some force take you because I didn’t pray? (Taylor Swift, Bigger than the Whole Sky, 2020)
A man might have a hundred children and live to be very old. But if he finds no satisfaction in life and doesn’t even get a decent burial, it would have been better for him to be born dead. (Ecclesiastes 6:3)
If clarity’s in death, then why won’t this die? (Taylor Swift, Should’ve Would’ve Could’ve, 2022)
Anything I wanted, I would take. I denied myself no pleasure. […] But as I looked at everything I had worked so hard to accomplish, it was all so meaningless—like chasing the wind. (Ecclesiastes 2:10-11)
Tell me I was the chosen one / Show me that this world is bigger than us / Then sent me back where I came from / For a moment I knew cosmic love (Taylor Swift, Down Bad, 2023)
Sometimes people say, “Here is something new!” But actually it is old; nothing is ever truly new. We don’t remember what happened in the past, and in future generations, no one will remember what we are doing now. (Ecclesiastes 1:10-11)
Someone told me there’s no such thing as bad thoughts. Only your actions talk (Taylor Swift, Guilty as Sin, 2024)
It seems so wrong that everyone under the sun suffers the same fate. Already twisted by evil, people choose their own mad course, for they have no hope. There is nothing ahead but death anyway. (Ecclesiastes 9:3)
When I set out on this task of connecting Qohelet to Taylor Swift, it was just a bit of fun. I was surprised to find something really profound through it.
Many of her fans have paid close attention to Taylor Swift’s developing relationship with faith. They have even engaged in a religious textual analysis of her latest album.
Writing for a British Christian magazine, cultural commentator Giles Gough notices “two Taylors.” The early Taylor, he says, has “an uncomplicated yet sincere relationship with God,” befitting of her Bible Belt upbringing. Later, she only turns to God in times of crisis, “typical of the mainstream, secular world she inhabits.”
Gough speculates that Taylor Swift is “someone who has deconstructed their faith, and come out of it not really knowing what she believes. […] Swift seems to still be reaching out to God and when she is unable to find him, has perhaps tried to find salvation in romantic love.”
If his interpretation is correct, then Taylor Swift is even closer to King Solomon than we thought. She is asking the same questions and wrestling with the same theological issues as the Book of Qohelet does.
In Ecclesiastes, the convoker is eager to hold onto his old views of the world. He insists: “Fear God and obey his commands, for this is everyone’s duty. God will judge us for everything we do, including every secret thing, whether good or bad.” (Ecclesiastes 12:13-14).
At the same time, Solomon wrestles with nihilism, saying: “People and animals share the same fate—both breathe and both must die. So people have no real advantage over animals. How meaningless! Both go to the same place—they came from dust and they return to dust. For who can prove that the human spirit goes up and the spirit of animals goes down into the earth?” (Ecclesiastes 3:19-21)
This wrestling may, in fact, be a part of the human condition. In 1981, the psychologist and theologian James W Fowler developed a theory of “stages of faith.” He argued that people naturally go through a process of questioning their ideas, revisiting them, and finding new narratives to accompany their changes in life. This process helps adults to reach mature religious belief, where they can embrace diversity through universal principles of love and justice.
So, Taylor Swift, King Solomon, James Fowler, and the festival of Sukkot all seem to be teaching us the same thing: that it is OK to have doubts. You don’t have to cleave to a naive faith in a higher power, but can wrestle with God, and challenge your traditions.
In doubt and uncertainty, we grow. In dogmatism, we remain static.
So, whatever era you are in, embrace it. Strive for curiosity. Love questioning.
A simple Jew prays to God on Yom Kippur, and says “Ribon shel olamim, ruler of the Universe, I do not have much to repent of. Not compared to you. Unlike you, O God, I have not taken away children from their parents; I have not taken away parents from their children; I have not allowed disease and starvation and war. Compared to you, Holy One, I have been a saint. So, this year, I won’t be repenting. It’s your turn to repent.”
The rabbi asks him, “what were you praying there?”
He tells her all that he’s said.
She says: “You fool! You let God off too easy. You should have told God to bring about the Redemption as well.”
I don’t know about you, but I haven’t felt much like repenting this year. After all, what have I done, compared to the enormity of wrongs perpetrated?
I haven’t killed anyone or waged any wars. I haven’t robbed anyone or embezzled any funds. To the best of my knowledge, I haven’t brazenly lied or misled. I certainly haven’t intentionally hurt anyone. I’m just not in the same league as the great sinners of our time.
And I don’t much feel like growing this year, either. Other years, I have enjoyed the stillness of Yom Kippur for reflection on being better. But I don’t feel like doing it this year.
Sure, I’m grateful for turning off my phone so I don’t have to look at all the bad news, but that’s more about self-care than self-improvement. I’m more interested in switching off from the world than in switching onto myself.
I mean, really, do I have to move? The world is changing so much, and not for the better. Shouldn’t I be allowed, as a one-off, to stop constantly evolving and just be as I am for a bit?
You know who else just wanted to stay still?
Jonah.
I think Jonah knew exactly how I am feeling now.
He was perfectly alright where he was, before God got involved and told him he needed to go and sort out all the problems of the world.
Who was Jonah in the scheme of things? He certainly was not a big player in the wrongs of the world. All of Nineveh’s sins were enormous and happening miles away. Why should he have to change himself?
So, when God called on Jonah to get up, that was already asking too much.
Jonah ran away to Tarshish. He shouted at God: “haven’t you got bigger fish to fry?”
God said: “you want to see a big fish? I’ll give you a big fish!”
One came along and swallowed him whole.
Now, all of the story before is about Jonah not wanting to move and all of the story after is about what happened after God moved him.
What happened in the whale, however, should really interest us.
This year, I feel like I’m in the whale. I am sitting in a puddle from which I feel like I cannot budge. I am stuck here and have no idea how to get out. All around me, the waves are crashing down and there’s nothing I can do to stop them.
(A pedant will point out it’s not actually a whale. Technically, it’s a big fish, and the idea of it being a whale came later. But, technically, I’m not actually inside a whale at all, I’m in a synagogue, so I’m going to stick with the idea of the whale because it feels evocative.)
Now, I’m not even on the level of Jonah. My task is not nearly as big and I am not even inside a literal whale. So Jonah should be a good starting-place for my feelings of stubbornness and obstinacy.
What did Jonah do inside that whale? He despaired. He observed. He prayed. He sang. He learnt. And, eventually, he repented and grew.
So, this Yom Kippur, let’s engage with the whale. Let’s focus just on the three days Jonah spent inside the belly. Maybe we can learn from Jonah what to do when everything feels too overwhelming but we know we have to change anyway.
The second chapter of the book of Jonah is not narrative-form, like the rest of the book. Only the first verse, where Jonah gets swallowed by the whale, and the last verse, where the whale spits Jonah back out again, follow a linear storyline.
The rest of the chapter, only eleven verses long, reads more like a poem. It is a song, where each verses contains a parallel structure. It would fit just as well in the Book of Psalms, where there are similar supplications to God.
If the second chapter of Jonah is a journey, it is only a spiritual one. Jonah himself remains completely static, stuck in the belly of the beast.
His soul, on the other hand, begins in the depths of despair, goes through questioning and defeat, recognises the glory of God, and finally comes out committed to getting out there, thanking God, making offerings, and taking part in the deliverance.
This feels like the most important chapter to us, then. We are just sitting and standing in the same space. But we are expecting our souls to move.
I am feeling stuck in a world I cannot change, but I know I have to get somewhere else spiritually. We can’t just sit around here and hope to become better people. We know it needs work. But without a narrative, how do we know what to do?
Well, in the spaces left by the absence of narrative, the rabbis come up with their own stories. Pirkei deRabbi Eliezer is a collection of creative writing, compiled over many generations, that retells the biblical stories. These are our midrash, and in this rabbinic fan-fiction, we get a story to go with everything that Jonah says.
From these stories, we might come up with our own meanings of what we should be doing here.
The first thing Jonah does is acknowledge where he is. He accepts that he is in the belly of the fish.
The midrash gives us a grandiose interpretation of what that looked like. It was like entering into the great synagogue: an enormous, echoey chamber. The fish’s eyes were two great windows, so that Jonah could see what was going on underwater. Inside the fish was a giant pearl, which illuminated the belly and shone out towards the sea. With a lamp and windows, Jonah had a clear vision of where he was.
What can we learn from this? We learn that we need to be honest with ourselves about where we are. The world is a bit of a mess right now, and there’s no point putting on a happy face and pretending everything is OK. Equally, we are pretty safe here. We in this room are not under attack, and the risk we would be is very low.
So, start by taking stock of reality. Where am I? I’m in a synagogue, sitting on a comfy chair, with my feet planted on firm ground. I can see the lights of the room and smell that familiar sweet must of this religious space.
But it’s not enough to just say where we are. We need to say how we feel. That’s what Jonah does next.
He says: “I am crying out to God from my narrow-straits, please answer me.” Jonah says, “I am crying out from the belly of Hell, may God hear my voice.”
The midrash says, that’s exactly where the whale took him. It plunged him right down into the depths and showed him the gates to Hell.
So, we need to do the same. We need to ask ourselves how we are really feeling. Be honest about the frustrations and worries and anger we feel.
Next, Jonah finds a way to relate what is going on to what has gone before. In the depths of the ocean, Jonah says, he sees the billows and waves and reeds.
According to the midrash, this is because the whale took him on a tour, not just of the sea, but of Jewish history. The whale showed Jonah the foundations of the earth, deep on the ocean-floor, and reminded him that God had made the world. The fish took him to the Sea of Reeds, and showed him the flora of the spot where the Israelites had crossed out of Egypt.
Faced with adversity, we have to remember that it has happened before. Once, there was nothing, then the world came into being. Once, we were slaves, but then we were freed. Wars and persecutions and empires have all come before and, somehow, our people have survived.
We, as individuals, have also survived challenges before. How recent was the Covid pandemic? We can take pride in our own resilience at getting through such troubles before.
Knowing what had gone before, Jonah was able to feel confident that he could face what was to come. Jonah cries out: “You saved my life from the very pits, O Eternal One my God!”
The midrash says that this came when the whale took Jonah down to meet the great sea-monster of the deep, Leviathan. Jonah told that nautical dragon: “You may think you are going to swallow me up, but I carry the promise of Abraham, and I know that one day, when God chooses, it will be you who gets eaten by the righteous.”
Like Jonah, let’s look at the problems ahead of us, and say: “I have faith. I can face you.”
Next, Jonah reflects back on what he has learned. He notices: “Those who cling onto empty folly forsake their own welfare.” He had been willing to stay where he was, clinging onto old vanities, but he did so at the expense of his own soul.
So, he proclaims, instead: “I, with loud thanksgiving, will sacrifice to You, God.”
We, too, can be grateful for what we have, and take on this next year in service of our Creator.
That is the journey on which Jonah took his soul, and it is where I hope to take mine over this Day of Repentance.
I said I wanted to stay still, but stillness is not inactivity. The Rambam understood that serious thinking was the most active you could be. It connects you directly to that Most Active Intellect: the thinking, living God.
In stillness, you can nurture who you are. Jonah was stuck in an underwater pit, but that was when he got most energised. It was when he really engaged in the audit of his soul.
This year, I have spoken to friends and community members and witnessed them say things they normally would never. People who would ordinarily be very liberal, turn racist. People who are normally very peaceful, justifying violence. People who are normally pretty discerning, regurgitating conspiracy theories. People who are usually nuanced, turn to absolutist thinking.
I am not saying this with any judgement. I say it because I’ve done it too.
And when I meet this now, I try to say to myself: I know you are scared and angry, and while you are feeling scared and angry, you can hold all those feelings. You are inside the whale.
But one day, please God, you will be released from this whale, and you will have to reckon with who you became there.
Take care of your soul. It is a precious gift. Don’t let it become too cynical or warped by the horrors that surround it.
That’s my goal for this Yom Kippur: to hold my soul with gentleness, and ask it to be porous and empathic and kind.
I am here, inside the whale. I cannot change what whale I am inside. I cannot stop the waves from crashing or remake the world so it is less scary.
I can only change what I can change. And what I can change, in this moment, on this Yom Kippur, is myself. I just have to deal with who I am here and now.
So, let’s be like Jonah. Let’s accept the whale we’re in, and, yes, despair, but also observe, pray, sing, learn, repent.
And it may be that, when we finally get blown out from that great fish’s blowhole, we might still be better people than when we got swallowed up.
Imagine a courtroom. Picture those big wooden panels that line the grand hall of a traditional Crown court. The deep reds of the carpets. The judge sitting loftily on a bench, at the front, draped in black gowns, donning that full-bottomed wig. And all the lawyers surrounding you, speaking Latin and legalese, bewildering you with their words.
You have not been here before, but, suddenly, you find your life depends on your correct participation. You will have spent extra time ironing your clothes and polishing your shoes. You may have spent weeks picking out an outfit. Perhaps you already know what you would wear.
How does it feel to stand trial here? Is this somewhere you want to be? From here, how much do you think you will learn and grow? And do you think there might be a better place where you could improve yourself?
This is the metaphor we are often given for Yom Kippur. The Heavenly court and the earthly one. The trial of our souls. The God of Justice, who sits in judgement over us.
We beg for clemency:
סלח לנו – forgive us
We announce our expectation of a just verdict:
סלחתי כדברך – I have forgiven according to your plea.1
We rejoice in the judgement:
אשרי נשוי פשע כסוי חטאה – happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sins are pardoned.2
This is the courtroom of our hearts.
C. S. Lewis, the great 20th Century English author, famed for his Chronicles of Narnia, picked up on this aspect of our thinking. When he wasn’t writing beloved children’s novels, Lewis dabbled in biblical studies as a lay Anglican theologian.
C. S. Lewis writes: “The ancient Jews, like [Christians], think of God’s judgement in terms of an earthly court of justice. The difference is that the Christian pictures the case to be tried as a criminal case with himself in the dock; the Jew pictures it as a civil case with himself as plaintiff (sic). The one hopes for acquittal; the other for a resounding triumph with heavy damages.”3
Now, Lewis is no antisemite. In fact, he repudiated the hatred of Jews, long before it became fashionable to do so.4 He is eager to point out that, at his time of writing, immediately after the Second World War, the Christian had much to atone for, and the Jew had much to charge against God.
In many ways, he has us down. We do indeed take this as an opportunity to bring all our charges against God, and to vent our grievances against the injustice of the universe. Lewis is talking about ancient Israelite religion; the religion of Scripture.
Lewis would, I’m sure, willingly acknowledge that we modern Jews also share much in common with modern Christians, in terms of our admissions of guilt and prayers for pardon.
C. S. Lewis has astutely picked up that we see all this as a trial.
But where he errs, I think, is in his understanding of what an ancient Jewish court was. The tribunal of our ancestors looked nothing like the judge’s dock of today.
A metaphor that worked so well for poets and liturgists many centuries ago can become quite damaging when it is used with the projection of our criminal justice system.
Where today, a court can dole out sentences of imprisonment, the goal of the ancient court was about restitution and social harmony.
Where today, the court expects to find a person innocent or guilty, the ancient court sought to make sure everyone felt like they had a place in their community.
The focus of our sacred writings is to create a society based on compassion, community accountability, and healing.
When we rethink what justice looked like for the authors of our Torah, concepts of trials, pardons, and sentences start to look very different. By seeing the court through ancient eyes, we can re-imagine the trial as a process of growth and healing.
We get mere glimpses of what the earliest courts might have been. In the book of Judges, the archetypal ideal of the judge is Deborah, the prophetess. Her court is a base underneath palm trees in the hill country. We receive an image of her sitting there, while Israelites come up to have their disputes decided.5 Her court was one where people came to negotiate and be heard, but there is no indication they came to be punished. This was in the time of the Judges, the earliest of Israelite civilisations.
Later, however, ancient Israel developed a class system and a monarchy. With a state system came power and punishments. In the book of Samuel, King David pursues after the city of Avel Beit-Maacah, threatening capital punishment against everyone who rebels against him. Here, an unnamed elder-woman comes out. She admonishes the general, saying: “we are among the peaceful and faithful of Israel, will you destroy God’s inheritance?” She rebukes them with a reminder of the old system – that, before there were kings, people used to come and talk out their issues in the city. The generals agree to spare the city, providing they can enact punishment against one ringleader.6
From these two stories, we can garner an insight into what justice may have looked like in the earliest part of the biblical period. The first thing we notice is that women were leaders. This, then, may be a justice system from before patriarchal power was cemented. We also do not detect any hint of crime and punishment. Instead, the courts seem more like public cafes, where experienced negotiators help community members talk through their problems. If this is correct, we are looking at a very different type of court.
Still, courts did develop in ancient Israel, but not like those of today, nor even of the surrounding empires. In our narratives, most of the times that characters are imprisoned, it is outside of the Land of Israel, by a Pagan power, and unjustly.
Joseph is sent to prison in Egypt on trumped-up charges without any due process.7 Samson the warrior is sent to toil at grinding grain in the jailhouse by the Philistines, not because he has done anything wrong, but as a prisoner of war.8 When the Babylonian rulers send Daniel to the Lion’s Den, it is because of xenophobic laws that stop him practising Judaism.9
Our Scripture treats prisons as something foreign, where good people are sent for bad reasons.
Even when we do see examples of prisons in Israel, they are always treated by the Torah’s authors with contempt. Three of our prophets are sent to prison: Jeremiah;10 Micaiah;11 and Hanani.12 In every single case, this is a monarch warehousing a prophet because they are speaking truth to power. In the Torah’s view of justice, it is hard to see how prisons could have any meaningful role at all.
That does not mean this was a world without punishment. Scripture presents exile, flogging, and even death as options for what might constitute justice in the ancient world.13
Yet, based on our commentaries and traditions, we have the impression that such penalties were implemented only in the most egregious cases. What somebody had to do was so heinous that the death penalty would almost never actually occur.14
In the Mishnah, we read, the court that puts to death one person in seven years is bloodthirsty. Rabbi Eleazar Ben Azariah takes it even further, saying, ‘One person in seventy years.’ Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Akiva say, ‘If we had been in the Sanhedrin, no one would have ever been put to death.’15
What kind of justice system was this then? No prisons, no death penalty? No patriarchy, no punishments?
The ancient court sounds more like people just sitting around having a chat.
What if it were? What if, instead of biblical justice being all about burning and smiting, it was mostly about negotiating and feeling? How would that change how we look at our tradition? How would it change how we approach our relationship with God?
Perhaps I am over-egging how different the biblical court was. If so, bear with me.
I am well aware of how terrible some of the Torah’s punishments were. I am also conscious that what I am describing is so outside of our reality as to make it feel fictitious. If the world of restorative justice I am describing never really existed, please at least indulge me in entertaining the possibility that it could.
We are not, in this room, coming up with a proposal for how to govern Britain. We are just asking what metaphors work when we think about how to hold our own hearts on Yom Kippur. For me, the metaphor of court cases has proven really problematic, and I am looking to explore new ones with you.
The problem of the courtroom metaphor initially struck me quite suddenly. I was talking with my therapist about an issue that I felt kept coming up in my own behaviours. I said: “I’ve got another case to talk about…”
He looked around the room and said “you know you’re not on trial here, right?”
I think I had expected, on some level, that, through counselling, I could be acquitted or found guilty for all my past deeds and thought patterns.
I had built a prison in my own heart, to which I could sentence the parts of myself I liked least. I had conjured up a jury in my head, who would judge all my actions, according to the standards I had set myself. According to the standards I imagined God has set for me.
What was I doing? The point of therapy is not punishment or exoneration. It’s to learn and grow, and find ways of being better in the life I actually have. The point is not to condemn or discard my negative traits or past mistakes. The point is to work towards loving all of myself and learning from all I have done.
Perhaps you can relate to this. Have you imagined how you might punish others, or cast them into our prison in your heart? Maybe you even seek to punish people or get them out of your life. Maybe you, too, have hoped there were parts of yourself you could lock away.
We cannot apply the carceral system to our spirit. When we are doing wrong or feeling guilty, we must be free to look ourselves in the eye, and change willingly.
Is this not what God wants from us, after all? That we make amends, grow, become better. That we embrace ourselves and each other. That we turn from our ways and live.
If, then, we are in a court with God, we should make it one where we are in conversation with a loving elder, not facing a law lord who seeks to punish and acquit.
So, let us imagine a new court. It is not the court we thought into existence at the start of this sermon. It is a very ancient one, where our ancestors went thousands of years ago. Deborah’s court.
You are in the dusty scrubland of Canaan, and a few yards away you can see an oasis. People are gathering around it to fetch water. They are laughing and catching up and telling stories. They are feeding their livestock: sheep, goats, donkeys, camels.
At the edge of this well is a row of palm trees, and the tribal leaders sit, drinking sweet tea. You cannot go to prison. There is no prison. You cannot be acquitted, because nobody thinks you are guilty. You are just a person, a member of the community, looking for a way through a problem. The goal will be to find a solution that benefits everyone, and that sees maximum spiritual growth.
When you come away from this court, you can say “happy is the one whose sin is forgiven.” You don’t mean that you are relieved because you thought you were in trouble. You mean you are jubilant, because you are at peace with yourself, your community, and your God.
Let this be your court. Let this be the place you take your heart over Yom Kippur.
Come before God, not as a claimant nor a defendant, but as a congregant, seeking growth.
And thank God that there is no prison in your heart; only an opportunity for ongoing healing and change.
May this be where we judge ourselves. May this be where we judge others.
In 1922, archaeologists dug up a site in modern-day southern Iraq. There, they found incredible spans of gold and sophisticated armour, and Iron Age Sumerian artefacts, encased within stone walls. They dubbed this place “the Royal Cemetery of Ur,” an ancient Babylonian mausoleum.
On that site, they also discovered evidence of hundreds of human sacrifices. Among the human sacrifices, a considerable number were children.
Nearly all of the skeletons were killed to accompany an aristocrat or member of the royal family into the afterlife. Some had drunk poison. Some had been bashed over the head with blunt objects. After their death, many were exposed to mercury vapour, so that they would not decompose, but would remain in a lifelike posture, available for public display.
Excavations from the Royal Cemetery at Ur
This site dates to sometime around 2,500 BCE in the ancient city of Ur. According to our legends, another figure came from the ancient city of Ur sometime around 2,500 BCE.
His name was Abraham.
In the biblical narrative, Abraham wandered from Ur to ancient Canaan, where he began to worship the One God, and founded Judaism.
The world in which Abraham purportedly lived was rife with child sacrifice. Across the Ancient Near East, archaeologists have uncovered remains of children on slaughtering altars. They have found steles describing when and why they sacrificed children. They have found stories of child sacrifice from the Egyptian, Greek, Sumerian, and Assyrian civilisations.
So problematic was child sacrifice in the ancient world that our Scripture repeatedly condemns it. The book of Leviticus warns: “Do not permit any of your children to be offered as a sacrifice to Molech, for you must not bring shame on the name of your God.” The prophet Jeremiah describes disparagingly how the Pagans “have built the high places to burn their children in the fire as offerings to Baal.” In the Book of Kings, King Josiah tears down the altars where people are sacrificing their children.
Abraham put a stop to the practice of child sacrifice. It seems to happen suddenly, and without warning, and with even less explanation. No reason is given why he abruptly ended all the cultural deference that had gone before and opposed an entrenched religious practice.
The question we now must ask is: why?
One reason that comes to mind is that it is so obviously immoral. Surely it should be self-evident that you don’t kill kids! But that wasn’t obvious to all the people around Abraham. And that wasn’t obvious to traditional commentators, either. In their world, the morally right thing was always to obey God.
Fresco of the Binding of Isaac at the 3rd Century Duro Europos Synagogue, Syria
A traditional reading says that Abraham stopped child sacrifice in obedience to God. In the story we read today, Abraham is called upon by God to go up on Mount Moriah and slay his son. Only at the summit, when he holds up his arm to murder Isaac, does God stop him, telling Abraham that he has proved his devotion to God by not withholding his son, and that he does not have to kill Isaac.
Yet there are several problems with this story. If we adhere to the traditional reading, God still wanted child sacrifice, and felt that doing so would prove Abraham’s devotion. In fact, nearly all traditionalist readers interpret it this way,saying that obedience before God should be a sacred virtue. A conservative reader of the Bible says that the moral of the story is that we should be subservient to God, and do what we are told.
God said not to perform child sacrifices, so we no longer do. That would mean, then, that if God had said child sacrifice was permitted, we would still be doing it.
In 2007, the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm offered a radical reinterpretation of the story of the binding of Isaac. The story, Dr Boehm argues, is not about Abraham’s fealty to God, but his disobedience. Dr Boehm shows how, reading against the grain of traditional interpretation, this is not a story where God changes tact and decides not to ask for child sacrifices anymore, but where Abraham rebels against authority and refuses to commit murder.
For Boehm, what was truly radical about the Binding of Isaac was that it set out a new set of values, completely at odds with those of the Ancient Near East. Where other cultures practised child sacrifice because it was part of their established culture, Abraham resisted and put life above law. Where others encouraged obedience to authority, so much that poor people could be killed in the palaces of Ur to serve their masters in the afterlife, Abraham made a virtue of rebellion. For our ancestor Abraham, refusing to follow orders, even God’s, was the true measure of faith. By not killing, even if God seemingly tells you to, you show where your values really lie.
This is not a story about obedience, but rebellion. And that message – of resistance against authority in defence of human life – has much to teach us today.
Boehm reconstructs what the archetypal story of child sacrifice was in the Ancient Near East. Across many cultures and time periods, there was a familiar refrain to how the story went. The community is faced with a crisis: some kind of famine, natural disaster, or war. The community realises that its gods are angry. To placate the gods, the community leader brings his most treasured child and sacrifices him on an altar following the traditional rites. Then, the gods are pleased and the disaster is averted.
We can see that the biblical narrative clearly subverts the storytelling tradition that was around it. In other cultures, the community leader really did sacrifice his special child, and that really did please their Pagan god. In our story, the community leader does not sacrifice his special child, and the national God proclaims no longer to desire human sacrifice. This is already then, a bold message to the rest of the world: you might sacrifice children, but we will not.
Boehm takes this a step further and looks at source criticism for the text. Most scholars of Scripture accept that Torah is the work of human hands over several centuries. One of the ways we try to work out who wrote which bits is by looking at what names for God they use. Whenever we see the name “Elohim” used for God, we tend to think this source is earlier. Whenever we see the name “YHVH” used for God, we tend to assume the source is a later edit by Temple priests.
The story of the binding of Isaac is odd because it uses the name “Elohim” almost the entire way through, until the very end, when the angel of God appears and tells Abraham not to kill Isaac. That means that most of the text is from the early tradition and only the very end part, where the angel of God tells Abraham not to kill Isaac, comes from the later priests.
So, Boehm asks, what was the earlier version of the text? If you take out the verses where God is YHVH and have only the version where God is Elohim, what story remains?
Well, in the version that we know, where both stories are combined, an angel of God calls out and tells Abraham not to sacrifice Isaac. That’s the bit where God is YHVH. If you take that out, and have only God as Elohim, Abraham makes the decision himself. No angel comes to tell him what to do. Next, if we cut out the parts where God is YHVH, there is no praise from the angel, telling Abraham he made the right choice. Instead, you get a story where Abraham deliberately disobeys his God because he loves the life of his son more.
Adi Nes, ‘Abraham and Isaac’, 2004
The earliest version of the text, before the Torah was edited and a later gloss was added, is one in which Abraham is commanded by God to sacrifice Isaac, goes all the way up Mount Moriah, and then refuses. Without prompt or praise from God, Abraham decides to sacrifice a ram instead of his son. In the earliest version of the biblical narrative, when source critics have stripped away priestly edits, God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son and Abraham rebels.
The earliest version, then, is an even more radical counter-narrative to the other stories of the Ancient Near East. Not only do we not sacrifice children. We also recognise that sometimes you have to say no to your god. In this version, rebellion is more important than obedience, especially when it comes to human life.
This isn’t just a modern Bible scholar being provocative and trying to sell books. In fact, Boehm shows, this was also the view of respected Torah scholars like Maimonides and ibn Caspi. These great mediaeval thinkers didn’t think of the Torah as having multiple authors, but they could see that multiple stories were going on in one narrative. One, they thought, was the simple tale of obedience, intended for the masses. But hiding between the lines was another one, for the truly enlightened, that tells the story of Abraham’s refusal.
Boehm terms this “a religious model of disobedience.” By the end of the book, you go away with the unshakable impression that Boehm is right. True faith, he says, is not always doing what you think God is telling you. Sometimes it is reaching deep within your own soul to find moral truth. Sometimes you really show your values by how you defy orders.
In his conclusion, Boehm takes aim at Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, an American religious leader, who lives in the West Bank settlement of Efrat. Rabbi Riskin had said, in his analysis of the binding of Isaac, that Abraham was a model of faith by his willingness to kill his son. Riskin insisted that he was willing to sacrifice his own children in service of the state of Israel.
This, says Boehm, is precisely the opposite of the message of the binding of Isaac. The point was not to let your children die. The point was to bring a final end to child sacrifice. The point was not to submit to unjust authority, but to rebel in defence of life.
Rabbi Riskin does not realise it, but by offering child sacrifice, he is really advocating for the Pagan god. He is describing the explicitly forbidden ritual of allowing your children to die.
Abraham thoroughly opposed these false gods who demanded ritual murder. They were idols; and child sacrifice a monstrous practice that we were supposed to banish to the past. The very essence and origin of Jewish monotheism is its thorough rejection of killing children.
Boehm could not have known how pertinent his words would become. This year has been one of the worst that those of us connected to Israel can remember. Beginning on October 7th, with Hamas’s horrendous massacres and kidnappings, the last Jewish year has seen us rapt in a horrific and seemingly never-ending war.
This year, thousands of Israelis were killed. This is the first time in a generation that more Israeli youth have died in war than in car crashes. Reading through the list of names, it is remarkable how many of the soldiers were teenagers.
That is not to even mention the 40,000 Palestinians whom the IDF have killed. According to Netanyahu’s own statements, well over half were civilians. Around a third were children. As famine and food insecurity rises, the risk of deaths will only accelerate. It has been agonising to witness, and I cannot imagine how painful it has been to live through.
Yet, during my month in Jerusalem, I saw that the voice of Abraham has not been extinguished. There are few groups I hold in higher esteem than the Israeli peace movement. Against untold threats and coercion, in a society that can be intensely hostile to their message, they uphold Abraham’s injunction against killing.
One of the leaders of the cause against war was Rachel Goldberg-Polin. On October 7th, her 19-year-old son, Hersh, was kidnapped by Hamas. His arm was blown off and he was taken hostage in Gaza. From the very outset, Mrs. Golderg-Polin argued fervently for a ceasefire and a hostage deal that would bring her son home. She warned that the only way her son would come home alive would be as part of political negotiations.
At the end of August, as Israeli forces neared to capture Hersh as part of a military operation, Hamas shot her son, Hersh, in the head.
Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s refusal to give up hope, refusal to sacrifice her son, and steadfast insistence on peaceful alternatives is a true model of Abraham’s faith.
Israeli peace protestors
And it involves serious rebellion too. When I met with hostage families in Jerusalem, I was shocked to hear how, for protesting against the war to bring their families home, they had been beaten up by Ben Gvir’s police. I saw this with my own eyes when I marched alongside them. People shouted and jeered at them, and the police came at them with truncheons.
In July, when I went with Rabbis for Human Rights to defend a village in the West Bank against settler violence, we were joined in our car full of nerdy Talmud scholars by a surprising first-timer. A strapping 18-year-old got in to volunteer in supporting the Palestinian village. What was most remarkable was that he himself lived in a West Bank settlement.
He explained that he had refused to serve in the military. He did not know that others had done it before, or that there were organisations to support Israeli military refusers. Instead, he said, he thought to himself: “if I don’t go, they won’t kill me; if I do go, I might kill someone.” What could be a truer expression of Abraham’s message: no to death! No to death, no matter the cost.
He really had to rebel. For refusing to serve in the war, the conscientious objector I met spent seven months in jail. Still now, there are dozens of Israeli teenagers in prison because they would not support the war.
Throughout my time in Jerusalem, I attended every protest against the war and for hostage release that I could. One of the most profound groups I witnessed was the Women in White, a feminist anti-war group going back decades. One of these women, with grey hair and the look of a veteran campaigner, held a placard that read in Hebrew: “we do not have spare children for pointless wars.”
Is this not exactly what Abraham would say? We will not sacrifice our children on the altar of war!
Theirs is truly the voice of Abraham, the true voice of Judaism. It is the voice that opposes child sacrifice. Theirs is the voice that upholds the God who chooses life.
Talmud tells us that, when we blast the shofar one hundred times on Rosh Hashanah, we are repeating the one hundred wails of Sisera’s mother when she heard her son had died. Sisera was, in fact, an enemy of the Israelites, who waged war on Deborah’s armies, and was killed by the Jewish heroine, Yael. Still, at this holy time of year, we place the grief of Sisera’s mother at the forefront of our prayers.
We take the cry of every mother who has lost a child and we make it our cry.
Thousands of years after the Sumerian Empire had ceased existing, archaeologists dug up its remains, and saw a society that practised child sacrifice. From the very fact of how they carried out murder and permitted death, the excavators could tell a great deal about what kind of society this was. One that killed people to serve their wealthy and their gods.
One day, thousands of years from now, historians may look upon us too, and ask questions about what our society was like, and what we valued. May we take upon ourselves the mantle of Abraham.
May they look back and say that we chose to value life. May they look back and see that our people despised death and war. May they look back on us and see a society that practised faithful disobedience.
Please forgive my shaky handwriting. It has been many years since I wrote anything down.
Can you believe it has already been forty years since we came to that great desert mountain and came into contact with the One God? Twice, I carried those miraculous tablets, etched with the Laws of Life, down from that mountain peak.
I could not carry them now. I would not have the strength. And I do not just mean that because of the way my hands tremble when I lift my food or the staggered steps I take when I wake in the morning. I do not have the zeal I once did. I cannot go on much longer.
Joshua, I am dying, and I will soon be dead.
I wish desperately that I could walk with you across that Jordan. All I have ever wanted was to arrive with you at that great destination to which we have journeyed.
But the Eternal One has told me that I will not go on much longer. I will die here, in the desert, and be buried in the wilderness sands.
At first, I was affronted. I cried out to my Maker. ‘Why, God? Why can I not pass over to finally see the freedom for which I have longed?’
God, who has given me so many words, remained silent.
I think I have an answer, though.
The truth is I was free the moment I first left Egypt. Before I returned with my staff and my message. Before any of those miracles and signs and visions. Before I even knew the God of Israel watched over us.
I was free as soon as I took my life into my own hands and refused to be part of the Egyptian system any longer. Once I decided not to be a slaver; not to subjugate others, nor to be subjugated, I was already then mentally emancipated.
These years we have spent in the desert were a way to work out what to do with that freedom. We have been reciting these laws and developing these rituals to find ways of living that keep us from ever going back to the oppressive ways of Egypt.
Joshua, this is what I need to tell you. Do not go back there. Not even in your mind. Do not try to own and control people. Do not allow others to own or control you. Let your soul be free, so that you can dedicate it to the God who led you here.
I am writing this down so that you can refer back to it, and remember what the point of it all was. Why we left Egypt. Why we spent all this time trudging thirsty through shrubland. Why we said we would go to that country from which our ancestors came many mythical centuries ago.
The point was not the land. The point was what we might do there. That we might be free. That we might finally see every human being as a living representation of their Creator. That we might cease using each other as means to an end but as ends in themselves. That we might truly know the Oneness of God and the deep mysteries underlying our universe.
That’s why I’m writing this now, as a reminder.
I know, I have said this all many times before. Call this my mishneh torah, my deutero-nominon; the repetition of everything I said before. It needs to be repeated, over and again, because freedom is hard to achieve and subjugation is such an easy default.
Please, read it out loud. Read it many times. Read it all the time. Even when the words feel trite and you feel like you have repeated the same phrases all your life, keep coming back to it. Remind yourself why you are here. Remind yourself what is at stake in this brief life we have been given.
I will say it again. Do not become like them. Do not worship the work of your hands. Do not think that work is the goal. Do not seek to own and control. Do not kill or oppress or endanger. Choose life. Seek God. Find holiness in everything that lives.
Joshua, I worry, even as I write these words, that you will not heed them. I know you want to. Ever since you were a boy, you used to sit at my feet and lap up every word. You were desperate to be closer to Divinity, to reach for higher things.
When I said we could conquer Canaan, only you and your friend Caleb believed me. You saw giants and were certain you could slay them. You had more faith than any of us. You had more faith than I did.
Joshua, there have been times when you carried me. Literally. In the war against the Amalekites, you put your shoulders under my arms and kept me upright. You are so, so faithful.
But where will all that zealotry go, once you are charged with leading people in the land? When you no longer have giants and Amalekites left to fight, what will you do with all your conviction?
I am asking too much of you. I am asking you to remember a life you have not lived.
You never knew Egypt. You were born here, in the wasteland, after we had already fled. You don’t remember what it was like to be owned. You cannot know what it meant to be a subject of a system that meant to destroy you.
In some ways, this means you have always been free, because you were not born a slave. In other ways, it means you have never been free, because you have never had to fight for it. You do not know what it feels like to start moving, then notice you are shackled, and to keep moving still, and to never stop moving, and to keep going with nothing but faith to carry you.
And you cannot know it. Just as I cannot follow you over the Jordan River, you cannot follow me out of Egypt. Some lessons can only be learned by life’s journey, and some journeys can only be made once.
Perhaps, when you go into that new country, you will make the place I dreamed about. Maybe it will flow with milk and honey. It might become a light unto the nations, where everyone lives with equality and dignity, where everyone can walk in the ways of God.
Or perhaps you will make a new Egypt. You, who never knew Egypt, will find new ways to conquer and subjugate and destroy. Maybe you will crown kings and build empires and wage wars.
Then what will the point have been?
I am asking too much of you. I am asking you to build a world I could not, and to do it all without my help. I am asking to you to know things you have not learnt, and to be perfect in ways I was not. I am sorry to put so much pressure on you. It is not fair.
You may not be able to do what I am asking. But at least you can remember. Tell your children where we came from. Teach them where we were trying to go.
And, then, perhaps, when they see new Egypts emerging, or they see that new Zions are possible, they will find paths through the wilderness that you and I could not see. Keep the story alive, so that the dream may continue.
Hi, my name is Lev, and I’m a rabbi. I’m here because I need your help.
I’m looking for a Jewish community. I’ve been trying to build one on my own, but it’s been so difficult.
Last week, I put on my best clothes, and sat in my living room alone saying “amen.” Honestly, it wore off after only five minutes. So I went into my kitchen, where I lay out a lovely spread of bridge rolls and fish balls. I stood around awkwardly with crisps on a paper plate, but there was nobody to make small-talk with.
It was worse during the Holidays. At Purim, I played every character in the spiel, and acted it out to myself. At Pesach, I had the Afikoman in a place I thought my guests would never find it, but then, I was the only guest, and I found it straight away. At Simchat Torah. I danced around fervently to klezmer, but there were no musicians, and the hora doesn’t work solo.
All I wanted to do was go to a bat mitzvah, find a friend, and kvetch about the rabbi. But there was no bat mitzvah. There was no friend. And I was the rabbi!
So I’m looking for your help. Can you tell me what I’ve been doing wrong?
It seems like in order to do anything Jewish, you need a community.
Apparently I’m not alone in coming up against this problem. In fact, the Talmud relates that even back in Babylon, rabbis needed communities in order to be Jews.
Once, according to the very beginning of Berachot – the tractate on blessings – Rav Nahman had not been to the synagogue for a little while.
Rav Yitzhak came to see him, and said: “where have you been? Why haven’t you been at shul?”
Rav Nahman answered: “I’ve been sick.”
So Rav Yitzhak suggested: “Gather ten of your students, and we’ll hold services in your house.”
Rav Nahman said: “I don’t want to impose on anyone.”
So Rav Yitzhak suggested: “Why not get a messenger who will come and tell you when we’re doing prayers, so you can join in?”
Rav Nahman went to protest, and then Rav Yitzhak finally asked: “what’s really going on here?”
And Rav Nahman finally answered: “You have told me many things the community could do for me, but nothing that I can do for the community. I need to feel like God won’t hear your prayers unless I’m there.”*
What do we learn from this story?
First, we learn that it really is important to come to synagogue.
Second, we learn that if you can’t come to synagogue, the synagogue can still come to you.
And, third, we learn that people need to feel needed.
A synagogue is not a subscription service. It’s a membership organisation. You only get out of it what you put into it. And people only come when they have something to put in.
It is the definition of community: we are all in it together, building it together, with a shared stake in its future.
Sometimes, in previous synagogues, Jews said to me: “I’m a member, but I don’t want to be involved.” And I used to say: “don’t worry, Judaism will still be here when you need it.”
But that’s not necessarily true, is it? Judaism needs people who believe in it; who turn up, week in, week out, to keep it living. There is no Judaism without Jews, and Judaism needs every single Jew.
In our Torah portion this week, Moses teaches that if you have an extra sheaf of corn, you need to set it aside for others. When you have olives left on your trees, leave them so that people wandering by can eat them. Got leftover grapes? Share them round.
The point is, in the economy of the Torah, you don’t just feed yourself. You feed everyone. Yes, you make sure you have enough to eat, and then you give away the rest.
The same is true with our religious selves. Yes, we all need the spiritual sustenance we get from coming to synagogue. We all need the companionship; the moments of the serenity; and the support through tough times.
But, when you feel full up on Judaism, that’s when it’s time to share what you have. If your cup overflows, make sure you give the other synagogue goers a sip.
Everyone in this community needs you here. You have skills, strengths, time, and energy that are completely unique to you.
We need you.
I need you. I’m here because I’m a rabbi and I can’t build a Jewish community alone.
This synagogue is in an important moment of transition. Just a couple of weeks ago, you said goodbye to your beloved rabbi of seven years, Rene. In the next few weeks, you will spend Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur with our wonderful colleague, Daniel. And then, at Sukkot, I’ll be starting with you.
I am really hoping that this will be a long term partnership, where we will grow together. For that to happen, I really do need your help. I need you to turn up to synagogue, do mitzvot here, and make all our Shabbats and festivals meaningful. I need you to offer up your time and skills, wherever you can, to make this community run successfully.
Above all, I am asking you to make room for me.
In this week’s haftarah, the prophet Isaiah says: “Enlarge the site of your tent, extend the size of your dwelling.”
So that’s my request to you. I’m a Jew looking for a community. Can you make your dwelling a bit bigger to let me in? Can I come and be part of your tent?
I can’t be a Jew alone. And I’d like to be a Jew with you.
Shabbat shalom.
*Not exactly what he says, but it’s a sermon, and I’m taking license.
Sim Lev 