Before coming here, a friend sent me a podcast about how resilience is not so much an intrinsic quality as it is the culture of support you have around you. Who can stay strong when nobody is holding them up?
The podcast was talking about the experiences of people living through illness and disability. How much more true must it be for those trying to defend their land against an entire military and its bureaucracy?
Last night, we slept with the Bedouin shepherds doing “protective presence” to keep the settlers away. Before we went to sleep, an Israeli activist showed the Palestinian women and girls her videos from Saturday’s protests. They rejoiced watching.
The oldest woman called out: “Yes! Free Palestine! Everyone in the world wants us to be free! All the Arabs want us to be free! All the Jews around the world want us to be free!”
Despite everything, knowing that others were calling for her freedom was giving her strength. If it weren’t for international protests, solidarity from Israelis coming to camp with them, and activists worldwide showing their support, she might feel insignificant against the much mightier force of the occupier.
In the morning, we drove over to Umm al-Khair, a Bedouin village where the settlers just razed 12 families’ homes to the ground. Delegation from all around the world were there to denounce these illegal actions and demand international law.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
“We are showing them they are not alone, right in front of the settlers. Everyone needs to know the Palestinians are not alone.”
After that, we headed to Susiya with aid packages. Susiya’s economy has been destroyed since Israel withdrew all work permits. We came with food and formula milk to tide them over, as they struggled with having their economic independence taken from them.
In a way, it is a sticking plaster. What they really need is access to their own land which has been taken from them. But the food is also more than food. It is a statement: “Stay strong. Don’t leave. You have the right to be here.”
As long as Palestinians refuse to leave, their fight is not over. As long as people keep supporting them, they will have the resilience to resist.
“If we could just flood the West Bank with activists, I truly believe this place would look so different,” one of the Israelis told me.
He is right. I hope others will come out and join us here in being part of this.
But everything everyone is doing – all the solidarity from around the world – is giving people the strength to carry on.
As long as Moses held up his hands, the Israelites were winning, but whenever he lowered his hands, the Amalekites were winning. When Moses’ hands grew tired, they took a stone and put it under him and he sat on it. Aaron and Hur held his hands up—one on one side, one on the other—so that his hands remained steady till sunset.
When King David was a boy, he worked as a shepherd in the valleys. His job was to keep the wolves away from the flocks.
Today, in the valleys of this ancient land, there are no wolves.
But there are settlers.
We are waiting in the shadow of a large Israeli settlement, comprised of roughly 1,000 people. Palestinian shepherds graze their flocks, hoping the settler youth won’t turn up and attack the locals. If they do, our only role is as a “protective presence.” The hope is that Israeli and international observers will deter them from being excessively violent. It is unlikely that the police or army will intervene and, if they do, it will be on the side of the settlers.
I am amazed by the resilience of the shepherds. The Palestinians call it by the Arabic word sumud: going to ground and not giving up.
Yet what other choice do they have? This is not just their ancestral land and their generational way of life. They have nowhere else to go. Why should they join others as refugees or in displaced person camps?
The shepherds describe how their space has got ever smaller. “Our lives are very hard. The settler wants to live, and he wants the Palestinian not to live.” This, they say, has ramped up significantly since the start of the war.
Their homes have already been destroyed. The settlers have cut off their water, made it harder for them to access their land, and paved motorways with military checkpoints through the grazing pastures.
It is so unjust, and I cannot see how anything will change.
For now, I hope, we may be able to keep the wolves at bay.
In the morning, at Shabbat services, a young woman got up at the end to announce that last week was the birthday of a girl she had taught as a youth leader. Her friends all met up in Tel Aviv to celebrate it. She wasn’t there.
Her name is Naama Levy. She was taken hostage on October 7th. The images of her capture are burned into my brain. If you have not seen them, please exercise extreme caution before you look them up.
After Shabbat services, I went down to see friends in Rechavya. There, all the posters are displayed for a guy called Hersh Goldberg-Polin. He is an ultra for the local football team, HaPoel Yerushalayim.
Hersh was abducted on October 7th after his arm was blown off by a grenade. His mother has been campaigning tirelessly for diplomatic measures to get her son home safe.
At my friend’s house, she asks: “my mum says that back home in America “bring them home” is a pro-war slogan? Can that be true?”
“Yes, it is in Britain too. It’s been quite the adjustment seeing it here.”
“But who is it directed at?”
“I don’t know, I guess they’re petitioning Hamas.”
“I don’t understand though: how can people want the hostages home and be pro-war?”
“The hostages are the pretext for all the attacks on Gaza.”
“But they are not in Gaza for the hostages!” her husband insists.
I know. They know. Everyone here knows. I wish people in Britain knew too.
When Shabbat ended and the first stars appeared in the sky, I joined the protests to bring the hostages home.
Everyone had banners calling for an end to war and an end to occupation. Supporters of Hersh’s mum handed out stickers with the number of days he has been held captive.
At the end, legendary Israeli peacenik David Grossman gave a speech as police charged at demonstrators.
Where is their support from Diaspora Jews? I wish I could hear my own community’s voices raised like these in Jerusalem- against war.
We are looking at a video of a little girl, learning to dance, waving to her daddy.
He has not seen her since October.
Gone is the joy of our hearts; our dancing has turned into mourning.
Yesterday, I spent the day with paperless workers from Gaza in the West Bank. After October 7th, all of the workers from Gaza who had passed the security checks had their work permits revoked. If they stayed at their postings in Israel, they would be taken to detention centres, where they would be beaten. If they returned to Gaza, they may well die. They fled to the West Bank, where they are now in hiding.
One of them is showing me a video of his daughter learning a traditional Palestinian dance. “The war has destroyed everything beautiful,” he says.
These men tell me their stories, and I hear them intermingled with every other story of disaster I have ever heard. I was not prepared for the scale of despair I would feel. I hear their words, and I hear the prophet Jeremiah echoing back lamentations.
I am the strong man who has seen oppression under the totem of his overflowing rage.
They are still not safe in the West Bank, either. A few days ago, the Israeli army marched up and down their stairs at night. If they had found them, they would have deported them to Gaza or imprisoned them. They weren’t actually looking for anyone, though. The army calls it “making our presence known.” Breaking the Silence reports it as a common intimidation tactic.
“We haven’t left the house in three days. It just feels too scary to go outside.”
He has walled me in and I cannot escape; he is weighed me down with chains.
They are catching up on the situation, sharing news from Gaza City, Khan Younis, Nuseirat, Rafah. We watch a video of an old lady woken up in the night by soldiers, who set their dog on her.
Streams of water fall from my eyes over the destruction of my people.
We hear stories of families back home. They cannot eat properly. People have only eaten tinned food. There are no fresh vegetables. The water is dirty. People are smoking leaves from trees. Everything is so expensive. People will fight each other for scraps.
Children beg for bread, but not a scrap for them.
Now they are getting sick. Skin diseases. Insects that eat up arms. Sores and spots appearing on the face. Why are my child’s lips fuzzy red? Why can’t my mother get up out of bed? They are all so sick in mind and body.
Our skin glows like an oven with the fever of famine.
They have been chased around by bombs to every corner of the beseiged area of Gaza. Now, one man’s entire family are staying in a sweaty fabric tent on a cousin’s land. Everything is destroyed. Where there are buildings, they cram twenty people into tiny rooms. It is already so very hot here.
Swifter were our pursuers than the eagles of the sky. In the mountains they pursued us and in the wilderness they ambushed us.
Back in London, there were all kinds of debates about ideology and tactics and strategies. Now, in front of me, there are real human beings, who just want to go home and see their children. “They are destroying the world on top of our heads.”
My life is bereft of peace. I have forgotten what happiness is.
I ask about their childhoods in Gaza. “We had a lot of adventures. We had days at the beach. We endured wars and all kinds of problems but never anything like this. Our celebrations were so huge. A wedding lasts a week and thousands of people come from all round. I married my best friend’s sister and he married mine and we were all going to grow up together…”
He has ravaged the booth like a garden; he has slaughtered his sanctuary.
“I don’t want a big house any more. I just want the war to be over. I just want to see my daughters again.”
I woke up this morning in a friend’s home on a moshav in Israel-Palestine. I am here for a month to learn and to volunteer with Rabbis for Human Rights.
The setting is beautiful. As the sun set last night over the mountains, the shrublands lit up in shades of orange and brown. Then jackals began to bray, calling out in the echoing valley. As we went to sleep, we even heard a hyena.
Overlooking us is a massive military compound for Israeli surveillance. On the walk to my friend’s home, I could see the separation wall.
We are on land that was taken during the Nakba of 1948. The people who lived here were dispersed, and their farmland taken. We can now see the native fig vines still, but alongside European pine trees planted by the JNF. The village opposite us is comprised of people who were forcefully evicted from a neighbouring town. They are Palestinian citizens of Israel within the “Green Line.”
It is all here. The beauty and the architecture of war. The reality of cruelty and the possibility of what might be.
“If anything, I am more convinced I want to stay now,” my friend says.
Since the start of the war, they have been protesting for peace several times a week. They have been involved in grassroots solidarity actions and getting aid to the people who need it most. At the very beginning, they were part of underground efforts to get people to safety. (And now you understand why I have to write so vaguely.)
The work looks exhausting. They and their friends have been beaten, imprisoned, shot at, and surveyed, only for trying to bring about peace.
“I have to stay now because I can see what it could be.”
Amidst all the rubble, they can see even more clearly the possibilities of a shared peaceful future with the Palestinians. And feel even more that is worth fighting for.
Once our rabbis were ascending to Jerusalem. When they reached Mount Scopus, they tore their garments. When they reached the Temple Mount, they saw a jackal leaving from the site of the inner sanctum of the Temple ruins. They began weeping, but Rabbi Akiva laughed.
The sages said to him, “Why do you laugh?” He said to them, “Why do you weep?”
They said to him, “Jackals now tread on the site regarding which it is written, ‘And the stranger who approaches shall die’ (Bamdibar 1:51) – shall we not weep?”
He said to them, “For this very reason I laugh… In the context of the prophecy of Uriya it is written, ‘Therefore, because of you, Zion shall be plowed like a field’ (Yirmiyahu 26:18), and in the prophecy of Zekharya it is written, ‘Elderly men and women shall once again sit along the streets of Jerusalem’ (Zekharya 8:5).
Until Uriya’s prophecy was realized, I feared that perhaps Zekharya’s prophecy would not be realized; but now that Uriya’s prophecy has been realized, it is certain that Zekharya’s prophecy will be realized.”
There are jackals braying in the mountains here. There is occupation and division and war.
And there are also the people building solidarity. Because of them, the prophecies of peace may be fulfilled.
The counting of numbers, verses and spaces actually has a great importance in the Jewish tradition. The word in Hebrew for a scribe is the same as for one who counts (sofer). The Talmud says this is because the original sages spent their time counting the numbers and letters of scrolls.
Now, sometimes, the Talmud is making stuff up, or telling a joke that has been lost to the ages, but in this case, they are almost certainly right.
Counting words, numbers and verses was a great way to ensure that the Torah was standardised, so there could be no differences between the authoritative versions of God’s Word.
Counting words helps us to work out important things about Torah. For example, the Talmud tells us, you can count from the beginning to the end and find the word that is slap bang in the middle of the scroll.
If you do it by letter, says the Babylonian Talmud, you get the word “belly” – gachon. Yes, right in the middle of our Torah is a big tummy, just like on a human being. It fits, doesn’t it? How much of Jewish culture is about food?
If you do it word by word, then the middle two words of the whole Torah are “darosh darash” – search and search; diligently enquire. The middle words of the Torah are all about asking and questioning. How fitting! We love asking, and searching for answers. Aren’t we always questioning, adding questions to our questions? (Well, are we?)
And, if you do it by verse, then you get to the central verse of the whole Torah, Leviticus 13:33. Here it is, the great lesson our Scripture has been trying to tell us: “then the man or woman must shave themselves, except for the affected area, and the priest is to keep them isolated for another seven days.”
I’ve got nothing.
Now, the Babylonian Talmud has given us some good answers about the middle of the Torah. But none of them are quite what we’re looking for.
Because if you hold the Torah in your hands, if you physically roll the Torah looking for a midpoint, you’d think it would be here, in this week’s parasha.
Spatially, the centre of the Torah is here, at the start of Kedoshim. Here, at the beginning of Leviticus 19, God tells the Israelites: “you shall be a holy people, for I, God, am holy.”
And if you follow this bit of Torah down to its centre, right to the middle here, you get the central commandment of the Holiness Code: “love your neighbour as yourself.”
That, says the Palestinian Talmud, is the real heart of the Torah. Never mind all the numbers and counting. If what you are looking for is what the Torah is all about, follow your heart, and get to its intuitive core.
There, in the Yerushalmi, Rabbi Akiva says: “the greatest principle of the Torah is to love your neighbour as yourself.” He says, if someone is going astray, this is the only thing you have to remind them of to get them back on track.
You may have heard this before. In the Christian Gospel of Mark, Jesus says that the greatest principle of Torah is to love your neighbour as yourself. He might have got more famous than Rabbi Akiva, but he certainly wasn’t the saying’s originator. That’s just a nice Jewish boy, repeating a good rabbinic tradition.
In fact, anyone who spends more than a minute with our religious tradition will understand that to be so. Love is at the heart of the Torah. That is all any of it is about.
Yes, the belly matters, of course it does. But it’s not just because we need food to keep ourselves sustained. It’s not even because food is a way of transmitting culture. It’s because through feeding and being fed we can show how much we love each other. These kiddishes, these Friday night dinners, the old recipes handed down, the food bank drives, the seder meals, the cakes we bake… they are all simply different ways of demonstrating love.
And yes, the searching and inquiring matters too. But it’s not just because we’re a learned and inquisitive people. It’s not just because we put such high value on education and on our Scriptures. It’s because it is a beautiful way of showing each other how much we love each other. You sit with a child to tell them a Bible story. You sit with a friend to study some text together. You sit with an elder to ask them for their wisdom. Sure, on some level, you’re just trying to get information. But, at core, these are ways of showing love.
Hold that in mind, then, as we return to the central verse of Torah, in the purity laws given to priests: “they must shave themselves, except for the infected area…”
No, sorry, I’ve still got nothing.
A few weeks ago, I sat down here with the Council to talk about what it would look like to come here as a rabbi, and whether we might be a match. One of your leaders asked: “what do you think are the core functions of the synagogue?” I gave my honest answer: “The synagogue only really serves one purpose, and that is to get people to love each other more.”
We come together, in these Jewish communities, to show that we love others as we love ourselves. We will eat together and learn together and pray together because we love each other.
We will love each other enough to be with each other in our most trying moments of death, disease and disaster. We will love each other enough to celebrate together through our joys of life, and build each other up.
This synagogue already has a wonderful reputation. Rene, your outgoing rabbi, has told me how much he loves you. Charley, your former rabbi, and now movement head, has shared the same. Danny, your rabbi emeritus, has told me how lucky I am to be coming here.
I meet adults who grew up here, friends of Laurence, and they share what a warm and wonderful place this is. In just the few meetings I have had with members, I can already see why.
The love that people speak of you all with is because of the love that you put out and create in your community.
I cannot wait to start here, and to love you as much as everyone else does.
Back in January, I attended a civic service for Holocaust Memorial Day. As part of the proceedings, we watched a video, in which a local volunteer interviewed a survivor from the Warsaw Ghetto. The volunteer was kind and gentle. She asked sensitive questions about the survivor’s life.
Then, she asked another question: “what can we learn from the Holocaust?”
The survivor shook her head: “Nothing.”
This answer clearly took the interviewer aback, so she rephrased, and asked again: “What moral lessons do you think people should take away from what the Nazis did?”
Again, the survivor responded. “Nothing. There is nothing to learn. Nobody can take anything from it.”
Her tone was not accusatory or angry. It was matter-of-fact. It seemed so obvious to this survivor that the genocide was not ethically instructive. It seemed just as obvious to the interviewer that there must be some lesson from it.
This reflects something of how the Holocaust is taught today. In British schools, children are educated that the Nazi genocide is an example of man’s inhumanity to man, and that they must learn from it how to act morally.
In the aftermath of the Nazi genocide, the United Nations signed up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. When Holocaust Memorial Day was officially adopted by the United Nations in 2005, its then General-Secretary, Ban Ki-Moon said the purpose was to “apply the lessons of the Holocaust to today’s world.”
This was, presumably, the message the interviewer hoped to hear: “You should learn from the Holocaust how to be morally good.”
Why did the survivor refuse to give her that answer? I can only speculate. I think I can see why somebody who had endured such brutality would not want it to have moral meaning.
After all, what would it say about the death she witnessed and the misery she experienced if it was all just there to teach somebody else a lesson?
What is her life, as a victim of Nazi persecution, if she just a stepping stone for Christian Europeans to develop a moral conscience?
If it is all just a lesson in ethics, then the Shoah’s martyrs are just side characters to help the stars – that is, the genocide’s perpetrators – on their journey to self-improvement.
By giving the Holocaust meaning, something is detracted from the meaning of the survivor’s own life.
Tomorrow, Yom HaShoah starts. In Israel, tomorrow evening, the country will enter into 24 hours of solemn contemplation. They will remember all those who died and suffered during the Second World War.
Then, a week later, next Monday evening, the country will erupt into celebrations for Yom HaAtzmaut, Israeli Independence Day. The streets will be draped in blue and white flags as Israel rejoices at turning 76.
The proximity of genocide remembrance to national celebration is not a coincidence. It is part of how the Shoah is taught in Israel.
There, the country has a national liturgical cycle. The full name of this remembrance day is Yom HaZikaron leShoah veLigvurah: A Day for Remembering the Holocaust and Heroism.
Yom HaShoah is timed to coincide with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when a thousand Jewish militants attempted to physically resist the Nazis. The date is chosen to tell a story that Jews were not passive victims, but did all we could to fight against them.
Six days after Yom HaShoah comes Yom HaZikaron, a day for remembering the soldiers who fought in Israel’s wars. This narrative paves a path. First, the deaths of those killed by Nazis; then, the deaths of those killed for the Israeli state; all pointing towards the joyous outcome, when Israel is founded.
That path is clearly outlined the evening after Yom HaZikaron with Yom HaAtzmaut, Israeli Independence Day.
This is the core story that the state of Israel tells through its Holocaust remembrance services. Once we were victims because we had no state. Now we are not victims because we have a state. The Jews as a people began as ghetto resistance fighters, became soldiers in the wars for Israel, and now enjoy security in their own country.
That liturgical cycle continues on to early June, when Israel celebrates Yom Yerushalayim, the anniversary of the conquest of Jerusalem in the 1967 War. Look, says the calendar, we won, we kept on winning, we will expand as far as we need. We are not victims after all, but military heroes.
You can see why people would want to tell this story. So much of the storytelling paints Jews as pathetic.
This version of events, the heroic one, stands in direct contrast to the one where the victims are just moral guides to instruct Europeans. Here, they are masters of history, taking events into their own hands.
Yet this story is deeply worrying, especially now, in a context of an ongoing and aggressive war. The deep wounds of the Nazi genocide, when told as a story of heroism, can become a justification for just about anything. Every conquest, every military victory, every land grab, becomes just another way of enacting vengeance for the Holocaust. In showing that Jews are not victims, this story absolves Jews of turning others into victims.
In different ways, the Shoah remembrance events are troubling. They tell stories, but, when you start to pick those stories apart, they look problematic.
We are trying to make sense of something which, by its very nature, was senseless. There is no reason to racism, and there is no great moral lesson in unimaginable suffering.
Nevertheless, we are forced to make our own meaning. Through liturgy, through rituals, and through storytelling, we have to find a way to explain how the world could be so incredibly cruel. We have to develop our own answers to that everlasting question of suffering.
Emil Fackenheim survived the Shoah. He was imprisoned in a concentration camp before escaping to Britain, then Canada, and becoming a Reform rabbi. He taught that the Holocaust might not have its own meaning, but that we Jews would create one from its ashes.
Rabbi Fackenheim argued that, in the wake of the Nazi genocide, we Jews had to add our own commandment to the prior 613. In addition to the Laws given to Moses, we would add a 614th Commandment: never to give Hitler a posthumous victory.
To Fackenheim, this meant that, despite everything, we would keep on being Jews. We would not abandon our faith. We would not forget those who had perished or the extent of their suffering. We would never give up hope. If we did any of these things, said Fackenheim, we would be letting Hitler win after his death.
So instead of looking for an answer to the Holocaust, where all of that suffering finally makes sense, let us take up Fackenheim’s clarion call and respond with a vow.
We will never allow Hitler to win.
We will survive as Jews, full of the hope and ethical mission and faith that make us Jews.
We will never allow anyone to erase the memory of the Shoah martyrs or deny what happened to them.
We will not allow fascists and genocidal forces to win.
Ever.
Anywhere.
Shabbat shalom.
Picture: Edith Birkin, The Death Cart – Lodz Ghetto
Sermon for Birmingham Progressive Synagogue, Parshat Acharei Mot
Over the last few months, I have packed away my books and cleared my office.
On Wednesday, I will hand back my keys to the synagogue building.
Today is the last time I will stand up here and address you.
We are approaching the end of Pesach. In two days from now, we will carry out our final service of this festival. In the evening, we will start eating leaven again, and bring back out our toasters and bread machines.
We are also approaching the end of the rainy season. In ancient Israel, this time of year marked the transition from when they hoped for life-giving downpours to the dry heat of summer when they prayed for morning dew.
The rabbis could not agree on exactly when the change took place. The Mishnah asked when we should stop praying for the rain and switch to asking for dew.
Rabbi Yehudah said: “We should keep our prayers going until the festival of Pesach has ended.”
Rabbi Meir disagreed: “We should keep our prayers going until the end of the month of Nissan.”
Centuries later, in Babylon, Rav Hisda came along and said: “this is not difficult.”
Now, this is the Talmud. If I’ve learnt one thing from studying the Talmud, it’s that, when a rabbi comes along and says something isn’t difficult, what follows will be really confusing.
Rav Hisda says these rabbis do not actually disagree at all! They’re just talking about different things. There’s a difference, he says, between praying for rain, and mentioning rain in your prayers.
Clear? As muck.
You can see why this question made the rabbis feel anxious. Endings are hard. And knowing when one thing ends and another begins is important.
Don’t worry. Another rabbi, Ulla, comes in. He says the problem isn’t that Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Yehudah disagree with each other. It’s that there are two different ways of reading Rabbi Yehudah.
We are going to have to agree with Rabbi Yehuda, says Ulla. We’re just not sure what he means.
Rabbi Yehuda says that prayers for rain end when Pesach ends. And we agree with him.
But hang on a minute! When does Pesach end?
A whole new raft of rabbis enter the discussion, each with conflicting opinions.
Personally, I would have thought Pesach would end at evening on the eighth day. The rabbis do not even consider this as an option.
No – their first suggestion is that Pesach is the first day, so that is when we should shift our prayers.
But we don’t put requests into our prayers at festivals. They’re like Shabbat – they’re God’s days off from being bothered by us. So that can’t possibly be the day we stop asking for rain. We weren’t going to ask for anything then anyway.
So maybe, instead, after Pesach means after the need for slaughtering a paschal lamb has passed. In Temple times, the paschal lamb was killed just before the Pesach festival started.
So the prayers for rain end when we would have slaughtered the paschal lamb.
But that would mean Pesach ends before Pesach starts!
And the Talmud is even more confused now, because we no longer have a Temple and we live in the Diaspora and we are still nowhere closer to knowing when one prayer for rain stops and another one starts.
Clear? But Rav Hisda said it wasn’t difficult!
OK I have chosen a really complicated bit of Talmud to hang this sermon on. I still don’t understand it myself. Maybe that’s just because the changes of seasons really are confusing.
Perhaps the Talmud doesn’t quite want to resolve the question. They want to leave us hanging, so that there is always a slight liminal time when one season is ending and another is beginning.
Transitions are hard. In fact, this sugya of Talmud keeps coming back to the same stock phrase: this isn’t difficult. It seems to say it so often because it knows that it is.
This obviously matters to me, because I am standing here in liminal time, in the gap between having been a rabbi here and not being one anymore. It is important to say, with surety, that there is an end date. I won’t be preaching here again.
But I think we can learn something from the Talmud too. The Talmud knows that sometimes dew comes in winter and sometimes there are heavy downpours when it’s dry. All water is part of a bigger cycle of seasons.
The rain teaches us how transitions carry within them all that has gone before and all that is yet to come.
Seasons and rainfalls are strange, transitory moments. We can read great meaning into them.
Having a clear sense of when one passes into another matters. So let’s make this our moment of acknowledging a shift.
This is our last time praying on Shabbat together. It is my last time preaching from here.
You will continue to grow in this community, and I will go and minister elsewhere.
And, just like the passing between the winter and the summer rains, we will always be part of the same water cycle. Our rains will be part of each other forever.
I will hold onto and cherish the droplets I carry from Oaks Lane. Your piety, your care for the sick, your love of music, your attention to detail, your Yiddish soul.
I pray that some of the best of the waters I poured here will stay, and that you will find some use in them too, after I have gone.
Several years ago, at a seder, I was introduced to a new custom.
When it came time to sing Dayyenu, a Persian-Jewish friend passed us all a spring onion each.
“In my family,” she said, “we hit each other over the heads with spring onions while we are singing this song.”
“It’s supposed to get out of our heads any feeling that we might want to remain in Egypt. So we remind each other by hitting our heads that we do not want to go back there.”
I instantly fell in love with it, and have adopted it into my own family seders. In fact, in my home, it can turn into a bit of a food fight, as we chuck the spring onions around the room.
One year, a Muslim friend came, and was quite baffled by the proceedings. I put quite a unique twist on my seders, and try to make them fun. That year, I had people dress up as the Ten Plagues from bits of fabric around the house, and do a lip-synching competition to the Prince of Egypt soundtrack. As he left, he said: “I can believe all of it is normal Judaism, apart from that bit with the spring onions.” I said: “That’s the only bit that was a real tradition!”
Maybe you might not bash your dinner guests with greenery, but you do sing Dayyenu, don’t you? It’s such a highlight.
I worry that some of our families’ seders don’t get there. The food’s coming out of the oven, everything has already gone on far too long, you’re anxious to eat, maybe you skip this important bit. I hope you don’t.
How about afterwards, when you’ve finished eating: who does the whole thing? Who carries on and sings hallel afterwards, and does the benching, and drinks the next two glasses of wine?
I hope you do. In fact, if this sermon has a message, it’s this: do the whole seder.
As you will see, this is not just me being a stickler for making sure people treat liturgy seriously, or insisting on the importance of halachah. This is about how we live our lives.
Our story begins with slavery and ends with freedom.
So, when you come to have your Pesach meals, make sure you don’t just tell the story of slavery. Make sure you talk a good deal about the freedom that comes afterwards.
The haggadah is actually split into two parts. In the first half, we are supposed to see ourselves as slaves in Egypt, weighed down by the yoke of bondage. Then, we eat. After dinner, we are free. We cross the Sea of Reeds and sing praises to our God. We raise a glass of wine to our redemption. We raise another glass to our future. We keep back a fifth glass for Elijah, who will come and bring about the final redemption, when everyone everywhere will finally know freedom.
Now, which of those two halves of the meal is more important?
Of course, it’s the second one. We don’t get together with our families and communities to dwell on how miserable it was to be stuck in Egypt. We get together to rejoice that we are free. How wonderful is this festival, the season of our liberation, that reminds us of that miraculous exodus out of oppression.
We sing Dayyenu (and bash each other with spring onions) immediately before we eat. That moment comes on the cusp between staying in slavery and leaving for liberty.
Dayyenu comes at the point where we are leaving slavery for freedom. By bashing each other’s heads with the spring onions, we say: “don’t leave any part of your head there! Don’t go back there, not even in your mind! Don’t dwell on those narrow places that kept you oppressed!”
Come on, we’re about to be free. We’re about to eat. Let’s look now to the future, where we will never have to think about those things again.
There’s a good reason why we might use spring onions in particular for the hitting. When the Israelites do get free, and start wandering in the desert, they start moaning about how much they miss slavery. They whinge about how much better being oppressed was. And what do they say they missed eating? The onions.
Those Israelites understood something. Being oppressed can feel easier than getting free. Sure, Egypt might have involved great persecution, but you always knew where you stood. Getting free, or at least trying, is tough. It’s unpredictable. It combines dizzying excitement with a terror of the unknown.
So we have to remind ourselves, over and over again, that however difficult freedom feels, it is better than oppression. However easy it might be to wallow in misery or stay in a victim mentality, there is so much more to be gained from shaking off our chains.
The first part of the seder says: we were slaves in Egypt. The second reminds us: but God helped us get free.
In the 19th Century, the Progressive Jew Israel Abrahams wrote about exactly this optimism for the Jewish Chronicle. He began his article by saying how wonderful it was that even persecuted medieval Jews insisted on keeping their doors open for Elijah on seder night, adamant that God would protect them. He said: “truly there is no danger to Judaism while such eternal hope prevails over despair.”
Israel Abrahams goes on to talk about the messianic hope that Jews hold at Pesach. Look at the bigger picture of history, he says, and you can see that it is not a delusion. “Persecutions come and go, but the Jews go on.” Away with all pessimism,” he says, “away with all pessimism.”
Can you believe that such words appeared in the Jewish Chronicle? How much can change in just over a century! Today, there is no way our communal organs would say how great it is that Jews would keep their doors open. They’d tell us to keep them locked. They’d sell us a more advanced security system. They’d put in a fundraising pitch for CST while they were at it.
Can you imagine any of our great and noble communal representatives sharing a positive view of Jewish history and an even more positive view of our future? No, their message is always the same: we are terrified; we have always been persecuted; we always will be persecuted. All we can do is build up bigger defences, hire tougher security guards, buy more effective security cameras; and keep our bags packed to run away just in case.
Sometimes I think Anglo-Jewry is stuck in the first half of the seder. It is as if many of us believe that we ourselves were slaves in Egypt, but nobody can believe that we were redeemed.
Do any of us really believe we are worse off than Jews were in the time of Israel Abrahams? Do we have more reason to cower than did medieval Jews? And, if we did, is cowering behind even greater security really our best answer?
The point of the seder isn’t that we were slaves. It’s that we got free.
Think of the wonderful things Jews are doing, and that British Jews have done. We are stars of stage and screen, fully represented at every level of politics, working in every strata of society, innovating, building, and living happy lives among our neighbours.
Sure, you can talk about the bad bits. Whenever I talk about the good, someone is eager to remind me of some proof of how much they all hate us. Some people leap to lecture on antisemitism and misery at even the suggestion that things might sometimes be good. That is a mentality that keeps your head in Egypt.
It’s not that everything is miserable and it’s not that everything is fine. It’s always a bit of both, no matter who you are.
The point is that everything could be wonderful. We could build a future so much better than this one.
Many times, with God’s help, we have achieved wonderful things.
When you take up the third cup at your seders, remember all the incredible things you and your ancestors have achieved.
When you take up the final cup, look towards the great utopia you can build here on earth.
And when you leave your Pesach seders this year, don’t carry around with you the slavery and misery of the first part of the meal. Bring out into the world Judaism’s message of hope.
Keep your eyes always on the best of what may be to come.
Beat out of your head any desire to wallow in misery.
Whenever a couple comes to discuss their upcoming wedding, there is one ritual more important to them than any other. Anything else, they feel they can set aside, but this one action, they absolutely must do.
They insist on breaking the glass.
Smashing a glass under the chuppah is not a matter of halachah. In Jewish law, it makes no difference whether you do it or not.
It is also probably not the most visually popular image. If you picture a Hollywood Jewish wedding, the stock footage in your mind is the chair dancing, with couples thrust into the air, and holding on for dear life.
Why do couples want so much to smash the glass? When I ask them, they are not sure. It just feels right. It feels natural.
It is like they are remembering something. Something, a story; not just the stories of all the weddings of family members; not even another wedding in a mythic ancestral past. Something else. Something further back.
Perhaps, the Kabbalists suggest, what they have remembered is the very first smashed glass.
The very, very first crack.
Before there were weddings or people or creatures or planets or stars. Before there was anything at all.
Before there was anything, there was a crack.
In the beginning, there was a crack.
A crack in the Nothingness.
Before the crack, we can only talk about the Nothingness. We cannot even really talk about there being such a thing as before the crack, because, in the Nothingness, there was no time. The Nothingness was an absence. Lacking anything, it had no before, nor after, nor now.
When the first crack appeared in the nothingness, it created the first event. The first now.
Before long, the crack split. It broke further, like a chip in a windscreen that slowly breaks. Now there was a succession of events. A story in the cracking of the Nothingness. Now there was such a thing as now, and before, and after. There was time.
Then, the Nothingness could not bear the weight of the crack any more. It burst and shattered into an infinite myriad of broken fragments. Suddenly, there was time and there was space and it was filled up with the thousands of shattered splinters.
The Nothingness was broken. And there could never be another Nothingness again. It had ruptured and given birth to the Something: to all the imploded pieces of possibility.
And out of that possibility came yearning. The shards could see that they could form into combinations and make Somethings that were greater than just their fragmented pieces, but were the genesis of ideas.
So, they made wisdom, knowledge, and understanding. They made strength, love, and beauty. They created endurance and splendour.
From the broken bits of the Nothingness, they made the potential for Everything. And, with that, they made matter. They made the foundations of all existence.
Now, there could be galaxies and moons and oceans and forests and reptiles and insects and primates and civilisations and cities beings that could contemplate this entire mystery of existence and wonder how it all began.
This was how our world was made.
That is where we live: in the broken world.
We are the products of that initial shattering that yearned to be Something greater than Nothing. And we are able to see the world as it is: infinitely complete and completely broken.
We are those sentient beings who can witness this world and wonder how it all came to be, and wonder if it might ever be like that again. We are able to yearn with our whole souls to be reunited with the great forms that once birthed us. We long to feel again that splendour and majesty and wisdom that brought us into being.
Everything that exists is but a microcosm of the original system of shattered fragments that first delivered creation. We contain within us fractals of the understanding, beauty, and strength that initiated all being.
Those creative life forces exist within everything. They continually reach out to each other, interact with each other, and recreate each other, so that everything is one miraculous dance of metaphysical juices, bubbling beneath a mundane surface.
This means that, inside our own souls is the very first crack. We are the broken vessels that yearn for Something more than this. Out of our own breakages is the genesis of all creativity. It is as if the whole world was given order straight from our own souls.
We are perfect. We are broken. Our hearts were broken long before we were ever born. The Creator burst a puncture in our souls right from the outset. It was what would allow us to love and be loved.
And our hearts have been further broken by life. They get fractured every time we encounter something we do not understand. We can feel ourselves breaking every time we lose a loved one, and every time we see the beauty in a sunrise. Yes, our hearts break in sadness, but they also break in joy. It is our brokenness that brings us back to the very first creation.
So much in this society teaches us to scorn our own brokenness. We are encouraged to deny the parts of us that feel most acutely.
Instead, daily life makes us treat this world as if it is still nothing. As we work and pay bills and undertake routines, it can feel like there is no meaning to any of it.
But, deep down, all of us know that our existence is a miracle. We are divine shrapnel in a seemingly impossible universe.
So, when the couple comes under the chuppah, their first thought is: I want to smash the glass.
I want to see outside of me the brokenness that is within.
I want to remember how, once, in a past that never was, the very first crack made everything possible.
I want to be reminded that this brokenness inside of me is what allows me to connect with others. That fracture inside my heart is what makes me yearn for the love of another. It is what makes my being permeable enough that someone else can enter, and share in it their own broken lovingness.
Without this crack inside me, I would never be able to reach beyond myself. This brokenness is what connects me back to God.
We are broken people in a broken world.
Our brokenness is not a cause of shame. Our brokenness is what makes Anything possible.
I know I am broken when I feel grief and anger and jealousy and pain.
Because I am broken, I can feel love and wonderment and resilience and curiosity and awe.
Thank God I am so broken. I only wish to be moreso.
Dear God, let me be more broken.
Let my heart be more porous so that all its dreams may be freed into this world of infinite possibilities.
Puncture my soul and rip it open, so that I can truly feel the longing of all humanity. May I hear in the depths of my being the cries and joys of all that exists and could exist.
May I truly see this world, in all its diverse variance, and marvel at the infinite Nothingness from which we came.
May I fulfil the prophecy of Ezekiel:
“I will give you a new heart and place a new spirit within you. I will remove that heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My spirit within you, so that you will walk in My ways and uphold My justice.”
Sim Lev 