When the silver trumpet blasted, the Israelites decamped and moved to a new location in the desert.
At the front of the procession, this seems to have been a marvellous affair. The tribal leaders assembled at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting with triumphant fanfare. God’s presence ascended from the Tabernacle as a glorious pillar of smoke in the day or a fearsome column of fire at night, and the chieftains marched in pre-assigned order behind their divinely appointed leaders: Moses, Aaron, Miriam, and the priests.
For the men at the head of the procession, this must have felt like a victorious military march towards the future.
But what was it like at the back? How did this experience of moving through the desert feel to the people who were on the edges of this grand voyage?
Consider how many Israelites were wandering in the desert. We have heard their numbers and know they amount to the size of a small city. There were more Israelites crossing the Sinai desert than there are people living in the modern country of Luxembourg.
In such a large group of people, most had no idea that all this pomp was happening at the front of the group. If they were midway through the camp and all the travellers were silent, they might have had a chance at hearing the vaguest echoes of trumpet blasts. But it is unlikely that anyone on the edges heard these fantastic instruments at all.
Perhaps, at a far distance, they could see the plumes of smoke and fire to let them know they were moving. But, far more likely, the greater indication would be the others around them shifting. They would hear rumours and murmurings, and get ready to move on their encampment to its next stage.
While the priests at the front played with their horns and struck up a marching rhythm, a whole other group of people would get to work.
The people who pitched tents would start the laborious process of deconstructing them. Breastfeeding mothers would gather up their infants in slings. Parents would call out to playing children and try desperately to cajole them into staying close. Water-carriers would haul tankards over their heads or hoist them on their backs. Animal handlers would load their donkeys and camels, and entice them to carry rations.
Our Torah is told from the perspective of those at the front of the procession. We learn their family dramas, hear the complicated rituals they performed, and picture the magnificent relationship they had with God.
For most of the desert Israelites, however, the journey was altogether different. What kept them together, more than these supranatural experiences and religious rites, were their relationships with each other.
I think it is important to centre their stories.
I have a long commute from Essex to Surrey. If the traffic is good, it takes about an hour and a half each way. To pass the time, I spend my journeys listening to audiobooks.
This has opened up a new world of literature to me. My usual reading is philosophy and theology, but that’s hard to focus on at the same time as the road. So I’ve started listening to sci-fi and fantasy novels.
Over the last few months, I’ve made my way through a whole bunch of stories by Ursula Le Guin. As a storyteller, she is a favourite of the college principal, Rabbi Dr Deborah Kahn Harris, and was beloved by her teacher, the legendary Rabbi Sheila Shulman.
Fiction, Rabbi Deborah assured me, is sometimes the best way to get across theological ideas. I have found this to be totally true.
During my car journeys, I have listened to Le Guin’s Earthsea Quartet from beginning to end. For the first three books, this was a world inhabited by dragons, powerful mages, young kings, demonic spirits, and magic spells. It was captivating.
The fourth book, Tehanu, has a sudden change in tempo and style. It was written more than 25 years after the first novel, with the characters having aged by the same amount of time.
At first, hearing this final book, I was somewhat disappointed. The pace is slower. Far less seems to happen. The characters, who had previously been magical heroes who cast spells and rode dragons, were now old, disempowered, and facing a world that is violent and cruel.
Only after I finished listening did I get to hear the author’s own voice. In a recorded post-script for the audiobook, Le Guin says that Tehanu looks at the high fantasy world from below. It shows what the world I had loved and lived in during my car journeys is like from the vantage of the people without power: women, workers, and children. She says this was her way to give voice to her own people in the world of Earthsea.
Now it made sense. I was, I discovered, learning a philosophical and theological lesson from the story, just as Rabbi Deborah had threatened I would. The world, after all, can be violent and cruel, and it is especially so to those without power.
History and politics are very different when you see them through the eyes of people who don’t march at the front, but gather at the back.
That doesn’t mean that life for workers and women is all misery. In Le Guin’s story, the powerless still have their own magic, their own rituals, their own beliefs, and build their power in community with each other.
That’s true for our biblical ancestors, too. Thanks to archaeology, we now have a better idea of what life looked like for the earliest Israelites who had no access to the Temple cult. They had their own parallel religious practices, with God centred in their homes. In their kitchens and bedrooms. They had fertility rituals, prayers they recited, and stories they told, even though they were excluded from the world of priests and kings.
This is one of the great joys of Judaism. While it has always had its figureheads who spearhead the community from the front and pronounce the direction for all to proceed, it has also always had its margins.
Within Jewish life, those who were excluded from the centre have built a religious life on the edges. These are exciting, creative places. They are, often, where real changes are first ignited.
Today, we must pay attention to the wonderful world of Jewish life that is being created far from board rooms and conference podia. There are other Judaisms, constantly being made in people’s homes, and in communities quite separate from the centre of north west London. Why, there are even congregations south of the River! This Judaism may not always make headlines or even get written down, but it is the lifeblood of our religion.
We should, of course, listen to the sounds of the great trumpets blasting to tell us we are moving.
But we must also pay close attention to what people are saying at the back, as we move on our eternal journey to freedom.
If you are looking for a religion to make your life easier, give you comfort when you’re troubled, and to help give you certainty in life… I wouldn’t recommend Judaism.
Judaism gives us many things, but certainty, comfort, and ease? You won’t find those here.
Our religion is one of ‘ol Torah – the yoke of Torah. Our Talmud teaches: We must subjugate ourselves to the Torah like an ox to a yoke. Like a donkey to its burden.
For everyone, life feels heavy. It feels like too much to bear.
For Jews, our Torah comes along and says: would you like some more obligations to go with your struggles? I can add a few more worries to your load.
At Shavuot, we read the story of Ruth. Ruth has lost her husband. She has no land or property. There is famine and disease. She is in the middle of nowhere. She and her sister, Orpah, face a choice. They can go back to their own people, the Moabites, get new husbands and start life anew. Or they can stay in the wilderness with no possessions to look after their mother-in-law, Naomi.
Ruth takes the harder option. She chooses to stay with her mother-in-law, learn new ways, and take on a new God. It is an act of remarkable bravery.
We read it at this time of year to remind ourselves that we are always out in that wilderness, always with the option to turn our backs and leave behind this people and this God. But, like Ruth, we keep on choosing to stay.
Ruth’s is a personal story of her connection to Judaism. Shavuot is also the story of our collective embrace of the Torah.
This is the festival that commemorates when forty thousand freed slaves received the Torah.
Our Talmud says that, when they came to Sinai, God lifted the mountain up over their heads. From underneath, they could see the enormous peak suspended above them like a keg.
Out of the clouds, God declared: “Accept the Torah, or this will be your grave.”
Now, our Talmud concedes, in that situation, accepting the Torah would be the easy option. (When a robber says “your money or your life,” they’re not actually expecting you to think it over.)
If that’s the case, the rabbis say, we should be able to reject the Torah now. If our ancestors had to accept it under duress, faced with threats, we are not bound by the decisions they made.
But, says the Talmud, our ancestors affirmed their Jewishness in the time of Esther. Here, the shoe is on the other foot. In the time of Esther, being Jewish was a dangerous thing that might get you killed at the hands of a tyrannical regime. But, the story says, the Jews reaffirmed their Torah and took upon themselves even more commandments.
That’s right, at the time when they were carrying the heaviest burden, they chose to weigh themselves down more.
Look at our present situation. There is no threat to us that we must keep being Jewish. Everyone here has the right, without consequence, to walk out of this synagogue, and never come through the doors of another one again. We could take the easy choice, and forget this old religion.
But what actually happens? On the days when there are attacks on Jews, synagogue attendance goes up. When it feels dangerous to be Jewish, we get more requests from people who want to connect with their heritage. In just the last few weeks, we have had more requests than usual from people seeking conversion.
When being Jewish is the toughest choice – that’s when our people really show up, and take on the burden of the Torah.
Now, you may be thinking, this sounds like an awfully Orthodox sermon from our extremely liberal local rabbi. All this talk of the burden of Torah, and the yoke of submitting to Heaven – it sounds like something that belongs to the black-hats.
Let me tell you something I feel quite sure of: being a Progressive Jew is a much greater burden than being an Orthodox one.
A year ago at this time, we brought together our Liberal and Reform strands to build the Movement for Progressive Judaism. A uniting figure from our shared history is Sir Basil Henriques, who led both Reform and Liberal communities in the Jewish East End. He set out his vision of what our shared belief system is, saying:
“The Law has been handed down to the Prophets of Israel. That Law is not static, but ever expanding and progressing. It has been revealed to Israel in every generation, and every age should be able to stand on the shoulders of the previous generation, and to see further and be able to see more clearly what is the perfect Law of God. The Law, the Torah, should be the highest ethical code of which man can conceive. If the Perfect Spirit of Righteousness demands of us perfect righteousness, then the Laws of Righteousness must be as perfect as we can conceive them to be.”
In other words, we Progressive Jews must embody, through our lives, the highest moral standards possible. The question we ask is not: “what does the tradition say I should do with my life?” but, the far tougher question: “what does God require of me?” An individual Jew ought to wake up every morning, asking how best we can serve our Creator. As a movement, we should be in a constant struggle to work out together the morally best choices.
It is relatively difficult to say no to pork and shellfish, as I do.
But it is far harder to grapple with the morality of food itself. Should we be eating any kinds of fish? What are the air miles on our vegetables? Can we truly eat ethically in this unjust system?
But a Progressive Jew wants to know what the morally right thing to do is, not just what conforms to ritual law. So these are the questions we must ask ourselves.
A Progressive Jew can live life just as an Orthodox Jew would, with one exception. We can never unlearn the Enlightenment. We cannot backslide into racism and sexism; or magical thinking and superstition. We must always face the world full-on, with all its problems, to see how we can live up to the highest moral ideals in our time.
That is far harder.
Let me give you some living examples.
Here in the UK, in the last few months, we have experienced some real threats as a Jewish community. Things that make us rightly scared.
Cantor Zoe Jacobs’ shul, Finchley Reform Synagogue was attacked recently. What did she do? She threw open the doors and welcomed in the whole community. People of every nationality and religion came to join her in prayer.
Do you think that was easy? Do you think it is comfortable to open doors when your instinct is to put up walls?
But that is what Progressive Jews do. We refuse racism and fear. We refuse to be pushed back into the ghettoes.
In Israel, compare our religious leaders there.
On the one hand, the Ashkenazi Orthodox ‘Chief’ Rabbi Kalman Ber has supported Netanyahu, his corrupt cabinet, and his wicked war every step of the way.
On the other hand, Rabbi Avi Dabush, one of the leading Reform rabbis, comes from Kibbutz Nirim, a place that was attacked by Hamas on October 7th 2023. For the last three years, he has been demanding answers from the Israeli government for why his community was abandoned, while at the same time, physically putting himself in the way of attacks against Palestinians and trying to stop this war.
Now I ask you, who took the easy route? And who took the hard one?
And let me ask the real question: which response is the more godly; the more moral; the more Jewish?
Doing the correct thing, the Progressive thing, is harder. It takes real courage, and most of us will not live up to such high standards.
This is the burden of our Torah.
That, no matter how difficult things are, we will take on responsibility for doing what is right.
And, we all keep taking on that challenge, in every generation.
All has been foreseen. That is a warning, not a comfort.
When the Progressive Jewish movement was born, its founders pledged to uphold the religion of the Prophets. Our guides would be those men of ancient Israel who courageously denounced injustice and proclaimed hope to the world.
At the time, I wonder how much attention they paid to the lives of the visionaries they sought to emulate. We know little about most of the historic prophets, if indeed they existed at all.
But, if we have one image of what they looked like, it’s probably Rembrandt’s painting of Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem.
Jeremiah is surrounded by darkness, slumped on the craggy rocks of the Negev. His left elbow rests on what are possibly his only possessions, including a book that we know will become part of our Bible.
The most illuminated part of the composition is Jeremiah’s bald forehead, drawing our eyes into his face. That face. It is so intensely pained; so sullen and exhausted. The wrinkles furrow, as if calling us to ask whether anything of this destruction was avoidable. I am captivated by the eyes, which cannot be more than two dark brushstrokes, but communicate more anguish than any scream I have ever heard.
Jeremiah spent his entire life warning Israel that it would be destroyed. He chastised them that their social injustice and complacency would be their ruin. He promised them plagues, persecution, exile and war.
Jeremiah had the unfortunate honour to see all of his visions come true.
At every stage, he promised them they could be redeemed if only they would repent of their ways. Whether that part was true, we will never have the fortune of knowing.
This is the model of our religion; the person whose mantle we have chosen to take. It is that of a man miserable enough to have been proven right; to watch everything he loved, and all that he held sacred, burn.
In some ways, prophesying doom is an easy gig. Economists are always predicting the next crash and defence experts are forever prepared for the next war. Misery is one of life’s guarantees.
When Progressive Judaism began, its progenitors insisted that prophecy was about forthtelling, not foretelling: speaking the truth about how the world really is, rather than guessing what is to be. But really one yields the other. When you see clearly how terrible the world is, you can accurately predict its tragic ends.
In Greek antiquity, Cassandra was cursed by the god Apollo to always tell the truth and never be believed. She issued accurate prophecies, and nobody took note.
Perhaps with hindsight, what she foresaw was obvious. War was coming and Troy would be defeated. Then King Agamemnon would be captured and slaughtered, as would she. The Greek ships would sink. As the city states fell, people would spend decades at sea without mooring. Disaster awaited.
All Cassandra had to do was see clearly what was happening in Greece’s unfolding civilisational collapse to know that destruction was inevitable.
And we cannot blame her countrymen for disbelieving her either. If someone stares that far into the abyss, nobody wants to be dragged into the darkness with them. Their misery sounds cloying and narcissistic. It feels impossible to bear.
If somebody tells you that the world you know and the people you love are on the brink of destruction, you have to disbelieve them. How else will you go to work, raise your children, care for your sick? How can you live in this world if you honestly believe it is ending?
Torah warned us that if a prophet predicted something and it did not come to pass, you could ignore them. They prophesied in vain.
The grand visions of peace on earth and justice rolling out like a stream haven’t happened yet.
The Christians circumvented this by writing their texts so it looked like their carpenter was fulfilling all the visions; even if the world self-evidently was not perfected. They deferred it by saying the other prophecies were still to come.
And we Progressive Jews have avoided the problem too, by claiming that the Messianic Age is forever not yet.
Perhaps it is forever not at all.
The only prophecies that have come true are the promises of disaster. The only accurate predictions were of death, plague, humiliation, and exile.
We said we wanted to be heirs to the prophets. We saw in their proclamations antecedents to the Enlightenment values of truth, equality, peace, comradeship, progress and righteousness. We heard God’s word refracted through them like a clarion call, and said we would now take it as ours.
Scattered in exile, we would be a light unto the nations. We would teach the world to study war no more. We would bring on the day when the false gods of prejudice and materialism were finally vanquished before the altar of Infinite Unity.
I need you to know that I believed every word. Even if nobody else did, I really did.
I thought I might see it in my lifetime. The great unfolding of history. Our glorious march towards true justice and equality. Call it the Revolution or the Messianic Age or Peace on Earth, I truly believed it was coming.
And it didn’t matter to us that the only full life story we knew was Jeremiah’s. Jeremiah went to jail and we would go to jail too. For the climate, for peace, for civil rights, for democracy. Progressive Jews have proudly broken the law and resisted injustice to take up the place of the suffering servant.
In Lamentations, we see the words Jeremiah spoke when he witnessed his city destroyed.
“I am the man who has seen afflictions at God’s hands…”
“…We have suffered terror and pitfalls, ruin and destruction. Streams of tears flow from my eyes because my people are destroyed…”
“…My people have become heartless, like ostriches in the desert…”
“…All this has happened because of the sins of the prophets and the iniquities of the priests…”
“…The visions of your prophets were false and worthless; they did not expose your sin to ward off your captivity. The prophecies they gave you were false and misleading…”
“… All our friends have betrayed us, and become our enemies…”
I am not sleeping well.
I wake up multiple times in the night with my fists clenched, gripping my bedsheets. I’m scared and angry and I feel so alone.
In the last month, an Iranian was arrested for hostile reconnaissance on the college where I trained to be a rabbi. A close friend, my witness at my wedding, had her street evacuated because terrorists were hiding in the gardens. A close friend, who I’m going on holiday with at the end of the month, had the synagogue where she works targeted with a petrol bomb.
None of these incidents made national news.
They are background noise to stabbings in Golders Green; murders at Heaton Park; arson at Nelson Street; smashed windows with lighter fluid at Kenton Park. Every festival, I interrupt the running of religious services to say Jews have been killed somewhere.
Am I even praying any more, or am I just trying to keep people calm?
All of this was so foreseeable. At least it feels so in hindsight.
We Progressive Jews fully embraced citizenship in Europe. We aligned ourselves with the British establishment for our protection. We swore fidelity to the monarchy in our weekly prayers. We embedded ourselves in this country and became integral to the state.
Then, in a moment of counter-culture, when people became anti-establishment and angry at the state, we were the accessible human bodies they could grasp, and stab.
We Progressive Jews rejected all politics of race and nation. We would be a moral movement, expressing only the best of the prophetic message.
But the rest of the world is based on racism and nationalism. Everyone else sees the world through the lens of race. Through their glasses, a Jew at prayer in London is indistinguishable from a Jew driving a tank in Gaza. They think they can exact war and revenge on us.
We aligned ourselves with Israel because it promised us hope. After the Shoah, we needed some guarantee of safety to cling to. We advocated for Israel and defended it. Maybe in our own eyes, too, the Diaspora and the State became indistinguishable.
We muddied the waters of our own understanding of what antisemitism was. We fought with each other, to define it, and to show where our loyalties lay. People couldn’t trust us to say what was happening. Now they absorb hateful propaganda that says we are doing all this to ourselves.
We chose bad allies to bring down people who weren’t real enemies. At the time, I expressed my fear that because of all this, people would blame the Jews for Britain’s problems.
‘Of course they wouldn’t,’ a friend assured me. ‘That would be antisemitic.’
Now, we attend rallies addressed by Nigel Farage. It is the last gasp of a failed effort to find security in race, the state, and the establishment: the very things that are making us unsafe.
The Progressive Jewish answer was always supposed to be different. We would, instead, find safety in solidarity. Our best defence is our neighbours. True security is in the positive relationships we build across other faiths, with all the oppressed communities of the world.
Where are our allies now?
I suppose we may never know whether our way would have worked.
Jeremiah told the Israelites, he told them it would happen. “Do not ally with one power,” he warned, “or another one will destroy you. And then your allies will destroy you too.”
“Do not seek surety in militaries and empires. You can only count on God.”
And then God will abandon you, too.
After the Shoah, Progressive Jews rejected the cruelty of Orthodox theologies that insisted we only had ourselves to blame. We were the victims of unjust systems, who only had bad choices in a world stacked against us.
What a great promise the worker’s revolution had been! The proletariat would shake off the chains of capitalism and all would finally be free. And yet, in every country where Jews lived under communism, they were so far from free.
The Bund: the Jewish worker’s movement; the Yiddish pamphleteers; the revolutionary singers. They would save us!
I think, now, that we romanticised them so much because they were all dead. They couldn’t make mistakes or show their weaknesses or try out their ideas and see them fail. They are all dead. All of them. The dead cannot save us.
Maybe some day, we will be the subjects of nostalgia too: the last Jews crazy enough to have faith in the prophets.
And the tolerance of liberal democracy, what of it? Didn’t it offer the very first promise under Napoleon’s tricolor that Jews might have freedom?
The safest places are safe until they are not.
I think of my great grandmother who left Lima for Berlin at the start of the 20th Century. How confident she must have been that she was heading to the safest haven on earth. I don’t need to tell you what happened to her.
I don’t think we have anywhere safe to run this time. Not Israel, even with its Iron Dome and bomb shelters. Not America, even with the hegemon’s promise to be the land of the free. I cannot imagine escaping to anywhere.
And do not pretend to me that there is any virtue in the Orthodox fantasy of good wives helping their little husbands do mitzvot while they all pretend the world is unchanging and grow ever more sadistic with it. You cannot pray your way out of reality, or study your way out of people’s dignity.
Every option available to the Jews failed miserably. Zangwill imagined that Salonika would be a great centre of Jewish life as part of an international community. The Nazis had a near complete kill-rate there.
After the Shoah, we had to find hope somewhere else.
Israel may have been a mistake, but it was the only mistake the Jews had left to make. Zionism was the only dead end the Jews hadn’t yet gone down. And, after all that, sadly, it will not bring us safety in the end either.
Why would the Palestinians give up their land and abandon their homes without a fight? How could we expect the Muslims to tolerate Jews controlling Jerusalem? There was no way any of it could survive without subjugating the Arabs and contorting the Jews until neither were recognisable.
The Jewish Left said that the Israelis and Palestinians would either all live together or all die together. I fear the choice has been made for them in board rooms they have not entered.
If I could see into the abyss as clearly as Cassandra did, I would wager that, in less than a hundred years, Jerusalem will be a desert wasteland, where every few weeks a new man will declare himself Pope, Emperor, Caliph, or Mashiach. The only thing we can’t yet imagine is what awful weapons they will have.
The only option still not explored is the prophets’ dream of lions lying down with lambs and justice flowing like an ever-flowing stream. It hasn’t happened yet.
I need you to know that I still believe in it. Even if nobody else does really, I still believe.
I just don’t think it will happen in my lifetime. It may never happen at all.
When Progressive Judaism was born, we renounced all claim to Israel. ‘Berlin will be our Jerusalem,’ promised Mendelssohn, as he cajoled us out of the ghetto. The enlightened democracies will be our Zion.
Berlin was Jerusalem, for a while. And then it was a graveyard for a generation of my family.
I’m not sleeping well. I feel like a balding man, clutching his bible, watching his city burn.
With such pride we said that I was the first person in my family to be born in the same country as his father. England was our home.
England is our home. Jewish life here is beautiful and vibrant. If they could only see how our children run around at house parties; how we spend weeks immersed in study; how our musicians play the house down; how our theatremakers make us laugh our guts out. How we bless our babies, our bnei mitzvah, our teens, our weddings, our anniversaries, our dead; how we pray with all our soul and might.
A quarter of Britons say it would make no difference if we disappeared tomorrow.
England has been our Jerusalem too. I do not know what it will become.
Maybe it isn’t too late.
The future is unwritten. That is a threat, not a promise.
There are seventeen sleeps to go until Pesach. I am genuinely excited.
You know, one of the things I love most about Pesach is the matza.
I enjoy clearing out all the leavened products from the house, dumping bags of pasta with the food bank, hiding the toaster in the garage, and eating only matza for a week.
It’s not that I like the taste. (Although it is good as a vehicle for my favourite food group: butter.)
In fact, I think it’s precisely the discipline that I enjoy. It is having a religiously-mandated prohibition built into my life, if only for a little while.
I am going to talk here about my own relationship with consumption, food, and restriction, but this will be very different for everyone. I know that, for some, ‘saying no’ to food can become a burden rather than a blessing, and that achieving a neutral relationship with food is its own spiritual discipline.
Judaism teaches us that if a fast or a restriction endangers our health—physical or mental—the commandment is actually to eat. Our goal is to be masters of our impulses, not enemies of our own survival.
So, in telling you what is meaningful to me, I am not trying to tell you how to live your life (I have no such right), but to tell you why the practice of clearing out chametz and eating only matza matters to me.
And, personally, I love the moments of spiritual discipline.
I think there is something in the human condition that means we want some help sublimating our desires. Every religion, throughout the world, places restrictions, either permanently or for short periods, on how people can consume.
We all want to know that we are not slaves to endless gluttony, but can serve something Higher than ourselves.
Two weeks ago, I had the privilege of joining the Dialogue Society‘s iftar at Kingston Guildhall. This is a daily meal, served after sunset every day throughout the month of Ramadan.
Throughout the evening, we learned a number of facts about Ramadan and iftars. But as the evening went on, I reflected that I could never truly know what Ramadan was. I would never understand it as an insider; as one who fasts every day for a month; as one who considers this deprivation a pillar of faith.
The iftar was lovely, but the fast is what brings people to the meal. Through their fast, Muslims learn what it is to sympathise with the poor, to feel one with a global community, and to submit to their Creator’s will.
I was seated with the other clergy: the imams and vicars that KLS has enabled me to befriend. Reverend Joe shared that the Christians were also going through their own period of deprivation: the Fast of Lent. During these forty days, Christians give up the things that tempt them most. In Reverend Joe’s case, this was alcohol and chocolate.
As an outsider, I have seen the end product of Lent – its festival of Easter, filled with chocolate hunts, painted eggs and, once or twice, even a gory reenactment of Jesus’s crucifixion.
Easter looks fun, but I realise that what must make it so meaningful is the period of deprivation beforehand. Their experience of refusing temptation is designed to help them better understand Jesus’s suffering. Here, too, the spiritually important part is saying no to something else.
The idea of saying no to consumption feels so alien to our modern world. The second I want something, I can order it online and have it delivered a day later. If I like the sound of any food from anywhere in the world, I barely need to think before I’m eating it.
And, personally, I have a hard time saying no to just about anything. I struggle to eat just one biscuit or drink just one glass of wine. And, if there’s food on the table, I can be sure I’ll keep eating until there isn’t.
I shouldn’t be surprised by this.
I’ve been completely inundated with advertising and consumer culture since birth. When I’m bored, I can stare at my phone to shut off my brain and get more of the same.
Our old medieval superstitions have been replaced by the new religion of consumption. You can practise all of them at once: eat chocolate at Easter and turkey at Christmas; eat doughnuts at Chanukah and soup at Pesach.
And, of course, at every opportunity, we must buy; we must spend money. We must make sacrifices to the god of The Market who will slump and weep if we stop purchasing for even a moment. In the name of our new religion, we must swallow the whole world.
So, refusing consumption feels like something medieval and irrational.
But isn’t it precisely the foundation of Judaism?
The tenth commandment is לֹא־תַחְמֹד – thou shalt not covet. Do not desire. Do not lust. Do not gaze greedily at everything around you from your friend’s partners to your neighbour’s animals. Do not envy.
This is the basis of all the other commandments. If we don’t want what others have, why would we ever steal? If we don’t lust after anybody else, why would we ever betray our partners? If we don’t want anything but what we have, why would we ever go chasing after other gods?
But wanting is not like stealing or cheating. Wanting is a primal urge.
How can I be expected to have no desires at all for what is beautiful? This rule is telling me to suppress my own feelings; that just the very fact of wanting anything is a sin. That feels cruel and punitive.
We’re not the first to feel this way. Generations of Jews have grappled with exactly this problem.
There is a lovely midrash from thousands of years ago on this topic, that says, it’s not that we’re supposed to say we have no desires for things we can’t have. Instead, we should say “actually I do want all these things, but God in Heaven has decreed against it.”
Some part of me does want to consume everything; to own everything; to control everything. I need to know that this is within me. And then I need to remember that I am more than a gluttonous animal. I have the ability to exercise restraint.
The medieval commentator, ibn Ezra, taught that this is deeper than just self-deprivation. By saying no to our desires, we say yes to our God. We say yes to trust and faith. We see the world’s beauty as even more beautiful precisely because we know it is forbidden to us.
The French-Algerian philosopher, Albert Camus, wrote that saying no is the foundation of all human values. “I refuse, therefore I exist.” What we are willing to say no to determines who we are.
The Israelites were not truly God’s people until they refused to be Pharaoh’s slaves. Our ancestors said no to subjugation; no to tyranny; no to being someone else’s property; no being held back by the false gods of greed and idolatry.
With one no, they could say many yeses. Yes to the God of all Creation. Yes to being commanded by a greater power. Yes to the festivals and yes to the holy days. Yes to the humble pursuit of God’s will. Yes to peace, equality, dignity, and freedom.
And that is what the matza symbolises to me today.
It is more than a cracker. It is a statement about what I am willing to say no to.
I say no to leaven, and therefore no to a system that demands I consume everything until there is nothing left of the world.
I say yes to matza, and therefore yes to pursuing justice, living with simplicity, and walking in God’s ways.
As we come to this Pesach, consider what you can do to exercise spiritual discipline. My practice is to cut out leavened food, but you may find your own.
Can you clear out your cupboards, and give excess clothes to charity? Can you look at your spending, and set a bigger portion aside for those in need? Can you put a restriction on your phone usage?
What is the chametz, the leaven, that is weighing you down in your life? And how will you make the conscious choice to say no to it?
This sermon will be addressed to two girls who are having baby blessings at Kingston Liberal Synagogue. Their names are redacted from this online version.
Girls, welcome to your synagogue.
I will address this sermon to you, but you will not remember it, and that’s OK, because I am really speaking to all Jewish children when I give this address. And you should know that all adults, no matter how big they get, never stop being children. So I am speaking to you, but really I am speaking to everybody gathered here today.
My message for you, girls, and for all Jews is: learn to be like a spider.
You see, from the moment a spider is born, she already carries everything inside herself to make a home. The silk with which she will construct her web is built into her body. Without ever learning from a parent or attending a school, the spider already knows how to build her home, wherever she goes.
In this way, the spider is the perfect Jew. Jews, wherever we are, carry in us all we need to make our home. Our home can be woven absolutely anywhere. Whether in a desert, an ocean, or an Arctic tundra, Jews will always find ways of creating our sacred spaces.
Our home is not made of silk, like a spider’s. Our home is made of the bonds we build with each other. Between every community member, there is an invisible thread. If you look around this room and squint in exactly the right light, you will see how one thread connects to each other, and every thread interlocks somewhere. That is the web of our community.
Our home is also made of rituals. In Hebrew, the word for a tractate of Talmud is masechet. The masechet is the page of our religious texts that tells us how to mark every moment and celebrate every festival. Do you know what masechet also means, dear girls? It means a weaving; a web.
Because our home is made of rituals, you can find yourself anywhere in the world, and if somebody starts a prayer, or lights a candle, or cooks a food, you will realise that you are suddenly back in your Jewish home.
Our home is made of stories. Yes, we sew together patchworks from ancient traditions and family tales and our life experiences and all of it comes together in this great big web, so that Jews are all brought together by these stories.
Now, some religious knowledge may be innate. Girls, there is a story that before a baby is born, her soul has already been to the Garden of Eden and heard the revelation at Mount Sinai. Perhaps you are sitting there, knowing far more about the secrets of the universe than any of us.
But the truth is, we are not like spiders. We can’t just weave the Jewish home from the moment we are born. We need to learn how to do it. We need teachers and elders who have learned to build the web from the generations before them. The thread we spin with comes from a yarn thousands of years old, and you need people who will pass on the tools to you.
That’s why, here, in your synagogue, you will be able to come to Kinderlach when you are small, and join Beiteinu as you grow, and come to many family services, and go on adventures with your youth movement. All of this exists to help you learn how to make your web, so that it is strong and beautiful and unique, like you.
Children, a moment ago, you came and were held underneath the tallit to receive a blessing. We call the tallit a “sukkah” – a tent, a tabernacle. It represents the Jewish home. “Sukkah” has the same root in Hebrew as “masechet” – the weaving we mentioned earlier. You see, the Jewish home is a portable prayer shawl, made by people skilled with textiles, and we can pull it out at any moment.
In the Torah portion we read today, on this day of your Simchat Bat, God tells us how to build a mishkan – a sacred place where God can live. I’ll give you one guess what it’s made of.
The tabernacle where God lives is made of wool and cloth and thread and yarn. Oh, it comes in so many colours! Blues and purples and crimsons all finely interlocking on a great stretched canvas made of animal hides.
That is where God lived with the Jews for the years we wandered in the desert. After slavery, the Jews had to learn how to be truly free. We needed to be independent of the great demands of Egyptian slaveowners and even the comforts of their homes. We needed to know how to live transiently.
Yes, we needed to learn to be more like spiders. We needed to build a home wherever we went.
And you, dear girls, need to learn to make a home too.
Girls, I have been to your house, and I know how lovely it is. Somehow your dads manage to keep it such a calm and clean place at all times. I don’t know how they do it. I hope they can manage some semblance of the same order when you both start crawling.
But even if you ransack the living room, and draw all over the walls, and leave your toys strewn across the stairs, they will still love you, and it will still be your home. You may move many times, or you may stay in one place, but your home will be the people you come back to. It will be the stories you tell, and the songs you sing, and the rituals you make up. Home will be your own private language that only makes sense between you.
You come today into this synagogue, and know that it will be your home. Around you, you have your whole community, who have come here to show that they will love and support you. They will teach you how to weave webs, and you will soon start wrapping your own silky strands into the patchwork of this community.
When I welcome you to your synagogue, I am not talking about the building. That’s not our home – it’s just the frame we use to make it in.
Our home is the web we weave together – the invisible threads that connect everyone in this community.
We are like the ancient Israelites who carried their home through the desert.
We are like the spiders who carry their homes in their bodies.
We build our home through connection and song and story.
We must build a wall to protect you from the Moabites.
We must build a wall. You cannot trust the Moabites.
The Moabites are on the other side of the salty Dead Sea and the Jordan River. A river is not big enough to keep the Moabites away from our land. They will take everything we have if they get the chance.
The Moabites are dangerous and brutal. They will destroy you if they get the chance.
We must destroy the Moabites before they can destroy us. We must kill their kings. Their king Eglon is a murderous tyrant. You will never be safe as long as he reigns. You must kill him.
You must kill every Moabite that stands in your way. You must capture the Moabite city of Heshbon. We need it to keep the Moabites away from us.
We must build a wall to protect you from the Moabites.
They must never come near you.
You must never meet them.
Because, if you met the Moabites, you might see that they are not monsters. You might see that they are like you.
And then you would not be able to kill them.
And then you would ask why we are building walls.
And then you would ask who was building these walls.
So you must always abhor the Moabites. You must fear them and revile them.
We must build a wall to protect you from the Moabites.
It must be high enough to protect you from them. It must be high enough to protect you from yourselves. It must be high enough to protect you from peace.
You may not immediately notice it, but nestled in this week’s Torah portion is an early example of war propaganda. In the vulgar and violent story of Lot is an origin myth for the Israelites’ greatest enemy: the Moabites.
The scene begins as God destroys Sodom and Gamorrah, two cities so wicked and licentious that they have to be wiped out and turned into the Dead Sea.
Only Lot and his daughters escape from that awful place. They retreat into the mountains on the east of the Jordan. There, the two daughters get Lot drunk, seduce him, and use him to sire their children.
The oldest is called Moab. And to really drive the point home, the Torah adds explicitly: the father of the Moabites.
The women in this story are not even given names. They are just grotesque plot devices to tell us how awful the Moabites are.
Those people, Israel’s nearest neighbours to the east, are so wicked that they came from Sodom. Their ancestors are so twisted that they were born of incest, drunkenness, and assault. It is a story to inspire revulsion in its Israelite listeners.
This is part of a general campaign of literary warfare against the Moabites, continued throughout the Torah.
Isaiah promises that the Moabites will be trampled like straw in a dung pit. Ezekiel vows endless aggression and possession. Amos says the whole of Moab must be burned down. Zephaniah swears that Moab will end up just like Sodom, a place of weeds and salt pits, a wasteland forever.
The war propaganda reflects real wars. The ancient Israelites did repeatedly wage war, conquer, and capture Moabites. They did kill their kings, and they did turn Moab into a vassal state.
Based on the Moabites’ texts, we can see that it also went the other way, and that Moab also captured, conquered and slaughtered Israel.
We do not know how many Israelites or Moabites died in these wars. We do not know how many people grieved their families and homes. All that remains is the propaganda of the competing tribes.
Today, it is hard to imagine why anyone would have hated the Moabites so much, or even that we would believe the hyped-up stories of how vulgar they were. With centuries of hindsight, we can see that they were probably very similar to the Israelites, but dragged into wars for the glory and material wealth of their kings.
Of course, there were dissenting voices at the time. The Book of Ruth can be read as a polemic about love between Israelites and Moabites. It is a beautifully humanising story where the central character, Ruth, is portrayed as a Moabite who is kind, loving, devoted to her family, and committed to Israelites.
As long as there has been war propaganda, there has been anti-war propaganda, and our Torah contains it all.
This Shabbat, we honour Remembrance Day. We think of all of those who died in wars past, and those who served their countries in military operations. This feels so close to our hearts, as we reflect on the great toll wars took on military personnel and their families, including many in our communities.
We remember the pain of those who have lived through and died in the awful wars that have passed.
This solemn day dates back to the armistice of the First World War, on November 11th 1918. The following year, England hosted France for a shared banquet as they recalled the ceasefire. From then on, it became an annual day of reflection on the horrors and sacrifices of war.
During the First World War itself, even as the conflict was ongoing, many challenged the war. The great British-Jewish soldier-poet, Siegfried Sassoon, charged that the war had been whipped up by jingoistic propaganda.
In July 1917, Sassoon published “A Soldier’s Declaration,” which denounced the politicians who were waging and prolonging the war with no regard for its human impact.
Sassoon lambasted “the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise.”
It is true that people like me, who enjoy peace, cannot even contemplate the pain that people went through in fighting wars and enduring bombing.
Today, we honour them.
Honouring them does not mean parroting propaganda and whipping up war.
Quite on the contrary. It is the duty of every civilian to ensure as few people as possible ever have to fight in wars. It is our responsibility to minimise the number of people who suffer and die in armed conflicts. It is our task to pursue peace.
We, who will never know the sacrifices of the front line, must heed Sassoon’s call, and resist the drive to war.
So instead:
We must tear down every wall with the Moabites.
Yes, with the Moabites, and, yes, with the Germans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Koreans and the Iranians.
We must find commonalities and engage in shared struggles.
We must learn to trust our fellow human beings and distrust the propaganda of war.
We must cease all killing. The machinery of war has destroyed too much and taken too many lives. We must endeavour to put an end to violence and destruction.
We must learn to understand the people we are told are our enemies.
Hello, I am back from my holidays in Spain and France. I brought you all back some lovely little trinkets from The Louvre. Just don’t tell anybody you got them from me.
I spent my holiday thinking about how easy it is for me to travel, and how impressive my journey would seem to previous generations. I wondered about what it was like in earlier centuries for people travelling the world.
In 1532, a great king travelled across the Atlantic to meet a previously unencountered tribe. The king was, in some ways, disgusted by the society he encountered, which was rife with inequality, governed by a despotic ruler, near constantly in a state of war, and yet to develop serious hygiene practice.
He was, however, impressed by the luxuries he saw in the local king’s palace, and intrigued by the sophisticated religious culture the people had developed.
The indigenous people went by many names, but the locals called themselves “the English.”
That’s right, in the early 16th Century, an Aimoré king travelled across the Atlantic from Brazil to the court of King Henry VIII and attended the palace as a distinguished guest.
We are used to thinking of international travel in the Tudor Age as something that voyagers from England, Portugal, Italy and Spain did to the so-called “New World,” but plenty of people also went the other way.
Recently, the historian Caroline Dodds Pennock released a book called On Savage Shores, which looks at the people who travelled from the Americas to Europe. They gave their own verdicts on European society, often quite damning of its inequality and sanitation.
Dodds Pennock is well aware that, by telling these stories, she is reversing the gaze. To the indigenous travellers, it was the Europeans who were the strange exotic outsiders.
If this feels surprising to us, it is probably because we are so in the habit of imagining that rich colonising men go out and see the world, but we don’t often think of those same men getting looked at by the world.
There is a reason that Abraham’s story of setting out from Haran was so compelling to its ancient listeners. Most people did not travel more than a mile from their own town. The world beyond was a mysterious and exciting place. They could only hear about the journeys, people, animals, and plants that others saw from testimonies, like those given in the Torah.
Abraham’s trek belongs, then, in a similar category of travel literature to Homer’s Odyssey, which was likely told as an oral story, and then committed to writing at a similar time to Abraham’s journey in the Torah. Odysseus encounters singing sirens, multi-headed monsters, and lotuses that make you forget your home.
Abraham, on the other hand, goes on a thousand-mile hike with no less than the One True God. Along the way, he marries a foreign princess, meets the king of Egypt, does battle in the Dead Sea with local lords, and meets angelic messengers over a meal.
This story must have remained compelling to many generations of Jews afterwards. Medieval Jews were used to living in one place. They may have been visited by merchants and Crusaders. Some may have gone away on fixed routes as merchants, and there were times when whole communities had to leave in haste.
But the idea that one of their own – the first ever Jew – went out on such an exciting adventure would have been thrilling to the Torah’s audience.
We know much of what other people thought of the Jews they met. Medieval accounts describe Jews almost as a people fixed in time; like a noble relic from a simpler age. The European travellers who encounter Jews treat them with a combination of scorn and exotic interest. In that sense, the Jews of Europe had more in common with the colonised people of the Americas, who were similarly treated as foreign oddities.
Bucking the trend, however, was a fascinating figure of the 12th Century, called Benjamin of Tudela. Born in the Spanish kingdom of Navarre, Benjamin went out on a journey tracing the Jewish communities of southern Europe, northern Africa, and south west Asia.
He took a long route on pilgrimage to Jerusalem that brought him through countries we would know today as Italy, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran. He seems also to have travelled around the Arabian peninsula, looking for the Jews of Africa, but never reaching the Gondar region of Ethiopia, where he might have found them.
Benjamin recorded all of his encounters in Hebrew, in a book called Sefer HaMasa’ot, the Book of Travels. His chronicles were so fascinating that they were reproduced over many centuries, and translated into Latin and most European languages.
Today, Benjamin’s records have attracted scholarly attention, not least because they subvert our expectations of who goes exploring and who gets explored. Benjamin writes with fascination and joy about the Pope in Rome and the Caliph in Baghdad.
Most importantly, when Benjamin meets Jews in other countries, he is at once meeting his own people and meeting people entirely different from himself. When he sees how other Jews do things differently, he feels joy in diversity. When he sees Jews doing well, he feels pride; and when he sees other Jews in a persecuted condition, he suffers with them as his own.
This is the great blessing of Benjamin’s travelogue: he can see the world through two sets of eyes – as both an outsider and as an insider. When he travels, he is never quite the colonialist going out to comment on others, but he’s never just looking at his own people. This gives him an impressive position of humble curiosity.
As British Jews, we may learn to do the same thing.
We have a blessing by dint of our position. That blessing is a special ability to look at the world through multiple sets of eyes.
We can, indeed, look at the world through European eyes. We are Europeans, and we belong here. We can see England as it is imagined by the English, where this island is the centre of the world, its monarchs the most illustrious, its culture the highest human attainment. We should not shy away from seeing the best in Europe: we are part of it, and there is much to love.
We can also, if we choose too, see this continent through outsiders’ eyes. We can see its flaws, its delusions of grandeur, and its odd habits. We can be the best possible internal critics of our country, because we understand what it is to belong, and what it is to feel like we do not.
The danger in either of these sets of eyes is that we turn them into a haughty gaze. Like the early colonialists, we have the capacity to see every other culture as backward and barbaric, or its people and lands as subjects for exploitation. Inverting the gaze, we might come to see the Europeans as horrible invaders, without directing the critical lens on ourselves.
But if, instead, we can approach the whole world with modesty, we can see every nation and every place with loving curiosity. With humility, we can see ourselves as fellow travellers with everyone else, discovering this wonderful world together.
If we can do this, then, like Abraham, we may truly learn to walk with God.
Today, you get a million pounds. But the catch is, tomorrow you die.
Any takers?
I didn’t think so.
You value living more than you value money.
In fact, when you put death into the equation, you realise how much living matters to you. It matters more than any amount of wealth or status you could accrue.
Knowing we will die helps us understand what we value from life.
In many ways, Yom Kippur is a death rehearsal.
We act out today as if these were the last moments we would be alive.
Like the dying, we refrain from food and water.
We turn up in modest clothes, without jewellery. Some wear white, the colour of the funeral shroud. Some wear kittels, the gowns in which we will be buried. Some wear tallits all day, from evening to evening – a unique point in the year when we do so – just as the dead are traditionally buried wearing their tallits.
Over the course of this fast, we repeatedly recite vidui, the prayer of deathbed confession. We say psalms and chant petitions that are associated with death and funerals.
All of this serves as a ritual memento mori: a reminder that we will die.
Then, as we approach the end, we erupt into songs. We joyfully recite the neilah prayers. For many of us, there is a great rush of relief and joy as we realise we have made it through this marathon day.
Yes, today is a reminder of our death, and it is one that affirms life.
On this day, our Torah instructs us: “choose life.” Only by recognising that death is inevitable can we do so.
By really considering the finite amount of time we have on this earth, we are able to celebrate the days we have and live them to the fullest.
So much of modern Western society shies away from death.
For previous generations, death was a sacred process undertaken among family and community.
Today, it is sanitised: dealt with in hospitals and hospices by qualified experts.
There are great advantages to this. The professionalisation of death means that the sick can receive high quality care and pain relief right up to the last moments of their life. It takes a great deal of pressure off of family and friends, because the care for the dying does indeed require constant work.
But one downside to our compartmentalisation of death is that it means it is kept out of sight and taboo.
When we do have to face death, it is often a shock, and can cause great trauma to living loved ones. Intellectually, all of us know we are mortal, but facing death as a lived and embodied experience can feel like a real rupture.
Having the Yom Kippur experience – which draws our attention to our mortality and makes us reflect on the quality of our lives – can be a powerful way to help us face death. In these rituals and fasts, we can prepare for our mortality.
This real confrontation with death isn’t morbid. It’s a direction to truly embrace life.
Knowing we will die helps us consider what we want to do with life.
In Progressive Judaism, we have a tendency to downplay some of the more explicit symbolism of death and mortality in our services. It is there in the machzor – in our silent confessions, themed readings, and traditional prayers. But our services often tiptoe over death’s undercurrents in the prayers.
This year, I have tried to reintroduce some of those themes to the service.
Last night, at Kol Nidrei, we joined the rest of the Jewish world in holding the scrolls out of the ark, leaving it bare. The great American Reform liturgist, Rabbi Larry Hoffman, points out that the open ark is supposed to evoke a coffin. We stare into the empty space, which usually includes our Book of Life, and lay witness to our own tomb.
This morning, during shacharit prayers, we reintroduced the prayer “who by fire,” a traditional part of Unetaneh Tokef, which recounts the many ways in which a person might die. It is painful to consider life’s fragility, and all the vulnerabilities we face in life.
But, by facing up to the possibility we will die, we get better at deciding how we will live.
We realise that we value life, and we take stock of what it is we love about it.
Marie de Hennezel is a French therapist focused on end-of-life care. In the early 90s, she was among the first staffers at a palliative care unit for people dying of HIV/AIDS. At this time, there was no cure – the deaths of HIV patients often involved rapid deterioration and great suffering.
In 1995, de Hennezel wrote up her experiences of accompanying the dying into a memoir, entitled Intimate Death: How the Dying Teach Us to Live. The book even carried a foreword by French president Francois Mitterand.
She recounts stories of individual patients, as well as their carers, doctors, and nurses. In each vignette, she tenderly lays out how important it is to be with the dying.
From her support, the patients often learn to live through challenging ordeals. Those who feel like giving up or who contemplate suicide decide that they will indeed live until their last moments on earth. By helping them face their death, the patients gain the strength to embrace their life.
This work, it seems, also transforms the carer. De Hennezel writes that she has learnt so much about living from the dying.
She writes poignantly:
Life has taught me three things: The first is that I cannot escape my own death or the deaths of the people I love.
The second is that no human being can be reduced to what we see, or what we think we see. Any person is infinitely larger and deeper than our narrow judgments can discern.
And third: one can never be considered to have uttered the final word on anything, is always developing, always has the power of self-fulfilment, and a capacity through all the crises and trials of life.
Let us take this as our message from Yom Kippur today.
Our lives are not over. We can affirm them. We can do so much with them.
And, though we do not always realise it, we love our lives more than any amount of wealth or status.
By facing up to the fact that we will die, we can live the days we have to the fullest.
Gmar chatimah tovah – may you be inscribed in the Book of Life for good.
It is time to tell a different story about ourselves.
We are writing a story about our lives right now.
On Rosh Hashanah, our story is written. On Yom Kippur, the story is sealed.
What, then, are we doing today?
This morning, we are editing. We are looking over our story and choosing what to keep and what to discard. What to highlight and what to relegate to the footnotes.
Of course, we cannot change the events of our past, but we can decide what they mean. In writing our story today, we choose what role we played in the narrative of our own lives.
When you tell this story, are you a victim, or a villain? A saviour or a sinner?
Look at your mistakes. The way you tell your story will help you decide whether they were a defining part of your personality, or whether they were opportunities you took to learn and grow.
Look at your suffering. Others have hurt you. You need to tell your own story of what that pain means. You need to decide if your suffering is the sum of your life, or if it is something you overcome.
You are writing the story of your life right now. Be careful how you tell it.
In our Mishnah, Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi teaches: “Apply your mind to three things and you will not come into the clutches of sin: Know that there is above you: an eye that sees, an ear that hears, and all your deeds are written in a book.”
But here is what the Mishnah does not tell us:
The eye that sees can see more perspectives than we can.
The ear that listens knows all hearts in ways we do not.
And, most importantly, the book is constantly being edited and re-written.
We are always re-writing the Book of Life with our God, and that means we have the power to shape our story.
We cannot imagine that God’s eyes and ears are anything like ours, or that God writes a book the way we would. The story that an Infinite Being has to tell about you must be incomprehensible from your perspective.
When we tell ourselves our story, we are biased, seeing only our perspective. Our narrative is partial, not knowing what others really feel. Our account is unreliable, because we tell it to fit the character we have already made of ourselves.
God, on the other hand, sees not just what we did, but what we hoped to do. God says to the prophet Samuel: “I do not see as human beings see; human beings see only what is visible, but I see into the heart.”
God instructs the Prophet Isaiah: “Whenever anyone turns back to Me for pardon, I freely forgive, for as the heavens are high above the earth, so are My ways high above your ways, and My plans above your plans.”
God is able to see errors in ways we cannot. And God can understand our pain in a context that is beyond us.
This is because God is telling a different story about you to your own.
In God’s plan, you are the main character. Of course, so is everyone else.
But that is because God has written a great novel where every creature has a vital role to play. No character could be introduced if they did not have a role in the great unfolding tale that progresses towards goodness’s triumph over evil.
So, today, look at the manuscript of your life. Decide what you want to focus on. Tell yourself stories of gratitude and joy. Consider the events that have given you pride and a sense of accomplishment.
Look, too, at the stories in your life that are hard. Re-tell the stories of where you have been hurt, and decide for yourself what meaning you take from them.
Re-examine the stories of when you have hurt others, and decide what changes these will bring for you when you enter your next chapter.
In this way, you can take control over the story of your life.
You cannot change what happened, but you can decide what it means.
Only you can decide how your story ends.
Treat God as your co-editor, rather than as the author of your destiny.
For some of you, the story I have told so far is too wrapped up in religious language. You cannot get on board with all this God-talk, and the quotations from Scripture prove nothing.
Let us turn, then, to the science of psychology.
Over many decades, psychologists have experimented with what makes for a good life. We now have more data than ever about how people forgive. We understand a great deal more about how to overcome trauma. And we know what motivates people to live better lives.
I am going to assume that, if you are here on Yom Kippur, you came because you want to let go of some past hurt, to repent of things you have done wrong, and to live a more fulfilling life.
The Scriptures tell us how to do this, but the language they use may feel too alien to the modern mind. The sciences, however, can corroborate the same claims.
Dr Fred Luskin runs the Stamford University forgiveness project. His team has researched the best methods to help people overcome their grudges and live more fulfilling lives.
He has tried out his techniques for helping hundreds of people forgive, including in the most extreme cases, like mothers whose children were killed in sectarian violence.
His book, Forgive for Good, is an accessible version of his research.
Dr Luskin teaches that our inability to forgive comes when we tell ourselves a “grievance narrative.”
You may have such a story yourself. If you keep coming back to an event in your life where you were wronged and replaying it, you may be stuck on recalling a past hurt. If, in this story, there is a clear villain, and you are a helpless victim, the chances are you have a grievance narrative.
Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Many people do.
I began reading Dr Luskin’s book out of academic curiosity, but soon found I was noticing my own grievance narratives. Some of them went right back to old hurts in school. I looked over some of the stories I had about my own life, and found they did not serve me.
Dr Luskin says that the key to getting out of the trap of these painful stories is to consider how you tell them.
First of all, decide how much space in your mind you want this story to occupy. Yes, you have been hurt, but do you want to keep letting those same people hurt you by giving them unlimited air play in your head?
One way forward is just to change how much you think about them. Rather than letting them be the main character in your story, focus your internal account on your own successes and joys.
Secondly, consider how you are telling your story. If you have a grievance narrative, the hurt you experienced may determine everything that comes after.
You were wronged, and that may have a lasting impact. But is it not also true that you survived, overcame, and learnt from the experience? You have the power to tell the story so that you are not a victim, but a hero.
None of this means pretending that pain doesn’t hurt, or that the wrongs others did were not wrong. Quite on the contrary: in order to move on with anything, you have to be able to say how wrong it was, and what it made you feel.
The difference is that you get to decide what it means. You can decide whether someone else has written your story for you, or whether you are your own author. You can choose to focus your attention on your own pride and resilience.
Just as our faith tells you to pay attention to how you tell your story, so, too, do the psychologists. The story you tell can help shape how able you are to move on from past pain and be a better person.
This is true, not just on the individual level, but also at the collective level. The stories we tell about Jews are the stories we tell about ourselves. What is the story we tell about ourselves as Jews?
There are plenty of stories out there about us. There are stories where we are perfect victims, forever blameless for the suffering we endured. There are stories where we are bloodthirsty brutes, responsible for the worst evils in the world.
Both of these stories deny us agency. These stories turn us into history’s stock character, whether as martyr or as monster. They deny Jews the ability to do what everyone else does: to hurt others, to learn from our mistakes, and to become better people. They strip us of the opportunity to grow and change.
We need, therefore, to think hard about what the narrative is that we are writing about Jews.
Rabbi Dr Tirzah Firestone sits at the intersection of spirituality and psychiatry. Firestone began her career as a psychoanalyst, then came back to the religion of her birth, embraced Renewal Judaism, and became one of its leading rabbis.
Firestone grew up with Holocaust-surviving parents. She felt that she and her siblings inherited great trauma from her family, and from the stories they told. Or rather, did not tell. Much of their former life escaping genocide was clouded by secrecy. The stories her father did tell were of persecution: that the non-Jews inherently hated Jews and would destroy them at every opportunity.
As a therapist and rabbi, Firestone urgently felt the need to tell different stories about Jews. She insists: “Identifying ourselves as victims freezes our focus on the past, and therefore forecloses our future.”
This does not mean pretending that Jews have never been victims. We need to face up to the traumas of Jewish history, including Shoah, pogroms, and persecution. Ignoring them, and refusing to tell the stories, can actually exacerbate the transmission of trauma.
What we need to do, says Rabbi Firestone, is honour Jewish history without internalising the harmful aspects of Jewish trauma.
We need to remember that, as Jews, we have collective power. We are able to influence the world, and not just subject to the vicissitudes of history. We must claim our agency, and take ownership over what happens to our future.
Most importantly, says Firestone, we should draw connections with others suffering from persecuting systems. By making these links, we strengthen ourselves, support our neighbours, and find positive meaning out of difficult circumstances.
We must, therefore, tell a new story about Jews. A story where we are survivors, who have been hurt and used creativity and resilience to overcome our pain. A story where we are complete human beings, who can hurt others, and who can repent and change. A story where our story connects to all of humanity for the sake of a shared future.
The story we are writing does not have to be one where we are always victims, nor incomparable monsters. We can create a narrative that acknowledges our past, honours it, and uses it to direct us towards a more positive future.
On Rosh Hashanah, our story is written. On Yom Kippur, the story is sealed.
We are writing a story about our lives right now.
Today, with the help of God and this sacred time, write your story.
Write a story you can be proud of. Write a story where you have the power to do better. Write a story where you overcome your challenges.
The events of your life so far have already been written. What they mean is up to you.
Gmar chatimah tovah – may you be written in the Book of Life for good.
“Hineni he’ani mi-ma’as – behold, I am poor in deeds and lacking in merit. Nevertheless, I come trembling in the presence of You, O God, to plead on behalf of Your people Israel who sent me, although I am neither fit nor worthy of the task. You who examine hearts, be my guide, and accept my prayer. Treat these words as if they were spoken by one more righteous than me. For you listen to prayers and delight in repentance. Blessed are You, O God, who hears our prayers.”
In the synagogues of medieval Europe, the service leader used to begin with this public prayer of atonement, openly acknowledging their own inadequacy.
In the Liberal world, we have been shaped by the Victorian attitude that eschewed public vulnerability. So, instead, this prayer is given out to rabbis to read privately to themselves.
The days when we had to pretend to be perfectly put-together are over. In our age, we recognise that openly sharing our insecurities builds a more emotionally authentic culture, where people are better at handling their feelings.
So, this year, I not only quietly recite this prayer in my office, but share it with you openly.
This year, these words feel more profound than usual.
This is a sensitive time, and I know how fragile so many hearts are.
In the build-up to these Days of Repentance, an American Masorti rabbi, Joshua Gruenberg, wrote:
“Rabbis stand before their congregations with trembling hearts. We know that every word matters. We know that words can wound and words can heal. And we know that in a climate like this one, the margin for error feels impossibly thin. […] The only way we will find wholeness is if we grant each other the space to be imperfect, the courage to be vulnerable, and the grace to be human.”
As this year came to an end, I thought back on the conversations I’d had with you over my time here. I thought back over some of the pain and worry you had felt, and realised just how much stress some members of the community were feeling.
Words can, indeed, hurt and heal. They matter. I want to honour that, by reflecting on the pain some of you have expressed.
We come here because we want to be together, in our fullness, with all our wounds and trauma, so that we can move towards healing.
To that end, let’s consider how we can approach anxious and hurting people with compassion. That is, after all, what we all need from each other.
The world has changed greatly in the last few years. So much feels more precarious.
Ten thousand people rallied at Tommy Robinson’s far right march in London to a speech by Elon Musk telling the crowds to get ready for violence against immigrants. The news from Israel and Gaza, and Russia and Ukraine, and Sudan and Ethiopia, keeps rolling in, feeling ever worse.
For me – and I know for some of you – the horrors of October 7th and the ensuing assault on Gaza marked a major turning point. In many of us, these events have brought up trauma responses we didn’t even know we had.
Since then, so much has unfolded that is out of our hands. This can feel painful when your instinct is to find solutions and assume control.
We have to accept our own limitations. I sometimes recite to myself the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Those of us within this room do not have the power to bring about peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. We cannot get the hostages back or stop the starvation of Gaza.
That feels hard. If it were up to the members of this synagogue I have no doubt that the whole world could live in peace.
I am certain that we could indeed solve the country’s problems and fix our hurting planet. But nobody seems to be letting us do that, outside of setting the world to rights over kiddush.
But that does not mean we have no power at all.
The one area where we have real power is in our own homes and our own community.
And, there, we have the power to decide how much compassion we feel.
Even in the face of our own trauma and fear, we can choose to feel compassion for others.
Perhaps you can relate: in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, I felt intensely isolated. I felt a void where compassion ought to be.
I felt, among Jews, my own people, that I struggled to find many people who felt compassion for the people in Gaza.
On the left, as much my natural home as the synagogue, I struggled to find many people who felt compassion for Israelis.
Initially, I narrowed my circle to a small niche of Progressive Jews with left-wing opinions. It was comfortable and reassuring, when what I needed was to feel safe.
But if I was looking for compassion in the world, I needed to bring it into the world. I needed to model it.
Not just with the people who I knew felt like I did, but also with those whom I assumed were miles away from me.
It is easy to love humanity in general, and fine to pity people on TV. It is much harder to love the people nearest you when you feel so distant, or to understand them when it feels like they are living in a different world.
How could I look for compassion elsewhere if it wasn’t in my own heart?
How can we look for compassion if we do not feel it?
You can’t expect others to extend compassion to strangers when you can’t even have conversations with the people you already know.
I felt then – I still feel – that, perhaps, if we can feel compassion in our synagogues, and extend it out towards the world, and that others could extend their compassion too, then it might cause something to shift.
And, ultimately, that shift might make this world, which is harsh and unkind, a little better than it has been.
The message of compassion is already explicit in the liturgy of our Yom Kippur service.
God’s name is Compassion.
We read the refrain that repeats throughout the High Holy Days: “Adonai, adonai, el rachum vechanun… a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in compassion and faithfulness…”
It is a beautiful invocation of God’s qualities to help us through Yom Kippur.
The verses come from Moses’s second acsent of Mount Sinai, when he takes the new set of the Ten Commandments in his hand. As Moses walks down the mountain, God comes with him.
As Moses chants out these declarations of God’s mercy, it is as if Moses has truly understood what kind of God he is dealing with.
He learns how the world really works. He sees that it is governed by compassion.
Just before coming to get the new tablets of the law, Moses had seen the Israelites worshipping a golden calf, and smashed up the first set of the Ten Commandments.
These are great sins: idol worship and wanton destruction are strictly prohibited. The Israelites have been wayward. Moses has been angry.
Still, God, abounding in compassion and faithfulness, says: “Try it again. Have another go.”
In the Talmud, Rabbi Yohanan teaches that whenever the Jewish people sin, they should think back to this verse.
In the repetition of “Adonai, Adonai,” the Jews should understand that God is their Loving Creator before a person sins, and God is their Loving Creator after a person sins and performs repentance.
God is always willing to give people another chance.
In the same section of Talmud, we learn that, in the moment when Moses recited those words, God made a covenant based on thirteen attributes of mercy. It was a promise that God would always hear our prayers.
Later, in the Middle Ages, the French commentator Rashi elucidated what these thirteen attributes were.
In each word, says Rashi, is a reflection of the type of compassion God feels.
God is slow to anger to give you a chance to repent.
God is abundant in mercy, even with those who don’t deserve it.
God remembers good deeds even for a thousand years.
Even when we hear that God holds grudges for three and four generations, Rashi says that this only refers to people who maintain the evil ways of their ancestors. If they repent, all can be forgiven of them too.
This is how one truly maximises compassion.
So, let us be compassionate.
Let us maximise how much compassion we feel.
Our own community and our own homes are small places where we can truly practise compassion in a world where it seems so sorely lacking.
Last week, in her Rosh Hashanah address, Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, of the American Reform movement’s flagship synagogue in New York, reflected on how the division in the world was creating strife even within her synagogue.
She urged her congregation to practise compassion, saying:
“It now seems that any expression of compassion for “the other side” is regarded with suspicion – as disloyal, or even threatening. Is our capacity for empathy so finite? Are our hearts so small, that if we increase our empathy for certain people, that we need to reduce it for others — until one day, we conclude: that ‘other side’ is not deserving of any compassion?”
Here, the “other side” could be so many different groups in this increasingly polarised and hostile world.
We all want to feel like people understand our own side, but struggle to extend our understanding the other way.
You don’t have to agree with people to love them. You just have to be curious, and try to understand them.
Some days, we may be capable of less compassion than others. On those days, let’s give ourselves grace, take time out, and remember how flawed we all are.
Even on our worst days, we can always try to understand each other. We can hold our own hearts while making them permeable enough to feel others’ pain too.
When people challenge us, let’s look for the best in them. Imagine their best intentions, and try to consider what problems they might be facing.
We are, all of us, flawed and temperamental. We all ask good grace of others, and we can all give it in return.
This year, let’s try to feel compassion for the people in our own families and homes.
Let’s try to find compassion for the people in our neighbourhoods. Perhaps we will shift something in them.
Let’s find compassion for the people in our community, so that we can hold each other, in our diversity, through these trying times.
And, as much as we can, let’s try to find compassion for everyone.
It won’t change the news cycle, but it might change you. And you might change others.
It is a small contribution to this world, but it is a mighty one.
It is the best that we can do.
Behold, I am poor in deeds and lacking in merit. Nevertheless, I come trembling in the presence of the One who hears the prayers of Israel. O God, You listen to prayers and delight in repentance. Blessed are You, O God, who hears our prayers.
Sim Lev 