Tag: change

high holy days · judaism · sermon

If God can change, why can’t you?

levtaylor

Everyone changes. People change all the time.

In our Scriptures, the changes are often dramatic. 

Avram is an idol worshipper who lives in Mesopotamia, then undergoes complete conversion to monotheism and sets out on foot to a new country. With that, he gets a new name: Abraham.

Sarai is barren then, miraculously, in her old age, conceives a son. God gives her a new name: Sarah.

Jacob is a lying trickster who wrestles with an angel in the wilderness. When his heart has truly changed, he gets a new name: Yisrael. 

In fact, in each biblical story, a change of direction, outlook, and often name, are the key points of the narrative.

So, what about our Rosh Hashanah reading? Who is it that changes there?

In the Aqeidah, our Torah reading for the new year, Abraham is called upon to climb a mountain and sacrifice his son.

We know nothing about Sarah, who is largely kept out of the story. We don’t know anything of how Isaac feels about this, since he stops talking once he realises what his dad could do to him. 

Abraham is remarkably unchanged. At the bottom of the mountain, he is willing to do whatever God says. At the top, God says Abraham is no longer required to sacrifice his son, and to sacrifice the ram instead. At the top of the mountain, Abraham still just does whatever God says.

But there is a character who really changes in this story: God. 

God begins the narrative as zealous and demanding of human sacrifice. God ends the story compassionate and eager to enter into meaningful relationships. God begins by effectively threatening to blot out all of Abraham’s children, then ends by promising Abraham as many descendants as stars in the sky.

And, yes, God undergoes a change of name. Through the whole of the story, God is called Elohim, a name associated with strict justice and universal truth. At the very end, God is revealed by a new name – יהוה – Adonai, a name associated with the close personal relationship God has with every human being. 

In this story, the character who undergoes the greatest change is God.

Even God, the Creator of the world, the Almighty and All-Powerful, can transform. The Holy One, who by nature is completely eternal, can shift from being strict and distant to close and loving.

So, if even God can change, why can’t you?

In our Talmud, the rabbis introduce us to the idea that we are supposed to imitate God.

Rabbi Hama baRabbi Hanina teaches: be like God. Just as God clothed Adam, you will care for the poor. Just as God visited Abraham when he was unwell, you will visit the sick in your community. Just as God consoled Isaac over the death of his father Abraham, you will comfort the mourners. Just as God buried Moses, you will inter the dead.

God shows us a model of how we ought to live. Like God, we are supposed to be compassionate, loving, kind, morally clear, and doing justice in the world.

But more than that. Like God, we are supposed to change.

Here, at Rosh Hashanah, we learn: just as God can change, so can we.

We are made in God’s image. At the start of each year, we read a story where our Creator transforms. So we know that we can change too.

We can face our fast-shifting world. We can rise to the challenge of our changing community. We can look inside ourselves and love our own souls a little more.

Blessed are You, Eternal One our God, who gives us the power to change.

high holy days · sermon

To be the head and not the tail

levtaylor

Everything has changed. Everything keeps changing. 

We meet tonight to pause. 

Tonight is a return to a definite, reliable point in the calendar. While the world spins on outside, for a brief moment, we stop. We reflect. We take stock of all that has changed, so that we might change too.

You have already seen this evening many simanim – symbols of the Rosh Hashanah seder. These small tokens speak to us about what the festival means.

There is another one, though, that you won’t see here, partly because our synagogue is a meat-free site, and partly because it just would not feel right in a Liberal synagogue. 

It is a ram’s head.

Yes, in many New Year seders throughout the centuries, Jews would place the carcass of a sheep’s skull in the centre of the table. This tradition goes all the way back to 9th Century Babylonia.

By the 15th Century, the German rabbi, the Maharil, explained the custom using a phrase from the Psalms: 

שנהיה לראש ולא לזנב 

– that we should be the head and not the tail.

There is a play-on-words here. After all, what does Rosh Hashanah literally mean?

The Rosh is the head. It is the head as in the beginning; it is the head as in the body part; and it is the head as in the one who has control. 

This symbolism works because, in Hebrew, a word contains multiple meanings and associations. 

So, the fish head represents our being on top of our own lives.

Now, what about hashanah? The word shanah does indeed mean year, but its root ש-נ-ה also means cycle, difference, repetition, or change. 

This makes sense: a year is a cycle, a return point that we repeat, each time observing the change. 

So Rosh Hashanah does mean “start of the year.” But, through the associations with the words’ other meanings, Rosh Hashanah is also “the master of change.”

Outside of these walls, the world is full of changes. AI unleashes new technology into a society that has already been completely transformed by the Internet. Our climate is changing, and we are truly starting to notice its effects on our own seasons. 

International relations are changing: violence, war, and fear feel like a new normal. And, of course, we are only a few years out of global pandemic and lockdowns.

So, at this juncture, we return to the start, and try to find a small oasis of calm to reflect on this changing world. 

Yet, inside these walls, things have changed too. This is my first High Holy Days with you. This is your first High Holy Days in the newly refurbished sanctuary. This is our first High Holy Days where we have voted to join a new movement. 

This is our first time doing the High Holy Days without the choir in every service and, as you will see, that means we are changing how we do music.

In every case, these changes will evoke many feelings, including excitement, trepidation, loss, and growth. This is a chance to face all our feelings. 

Change is inevitable. Change can be good. And, yes, change is hard. 

I don’t know about you, but I have changed. I have not just grown a year older since the last Rosh Hashanah. I also feel like I have aged many decades in the last few years.

The world transforms and I shift with it. As I shift, I do not even always notice the ways I change, or work out what they mean. 

I don’t even have time to decide if I like who I am becoming before I find that things changing again.

So, at Rosh Hashanah I come to this space, this synagogue, this everlasting home with God, and ask: can I love myself better? Can I love my community? Can I muster up the strength to face all that is changing? 

Can I find a way to be the head and not the tail?

Blessed are You, Eternal One our God, who gives us the power to change.

sermon · talmud

Approaching an ending

levtaylor

We are approaching the end of our time together.

In January, I handed in my notice. 

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.

It has been a privilege.

Shabbat shalom.