christmas – Sim Lev

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?

I refuse, therefore I am.

We say no, so we are.

Shabbat shalom.

A rabbi and a priest are comparing career trajectories.

The rabbi asks the priest: “so, you start here, what’s the next level up?”

“Well,” says the priest, “if I go further I become a bishop.”

“And how about after that?”

“The next level up is archbishop.”

“And then?”

“Well, then I could be a cardinal.”

“Wow, what next?”

“Well, at the very top, I suppose, in theory, I could become Pope.”

“Great,” says the rabbi, “and what’s the level up from that?”

“Up from that?” splutters the priest. “You want me to go higher than the Pope? What do you want me to be? God?”

The rabbi says: “One of our boys made it.”

Yes, one of our boys did make it. 2020 years ago a little Jewish boy called Jesus was born, and his followers have spent this week celebrating by eating his favourite foods of Brussels sprouts and roast parsnips. For the last month, their homes have been lit up with garish bulbs and their front gardens have been filled with camp inflatable objects.

Personally, I love it. I felt a nostalgic loss at not having heard the Christmas jingles in shops this year, so played Whitney’s and Mariah’s classics to myself in the kitchen. I’m sure many of you did indeed mark the day yesterday. Not for nothing does demand for kosher turkeys sky-rocket at this time of year.

There is an apocryphal story that Lionel Blue, in his first year after becoming a rabbi, found himself with nothing to do on Christmas Day. He decided he ought to visit his congregants. He knocked on a door, then heard stony silence. Out of it, he heard one of them shout: “It’s the rabbi! Quick, hide the tree!”

As far as I’m concerned, you can love or hate the 25th of December in whatever way suits you best. The harder question for Jews is what we do with Jesus.

The most surprising thing for most Christians about Jewish theology is that we barely think about Jesus at all. It’s not just that he’s not our God and he’s not our Messiah. He’s also just not a topic of conversation for us.

But, given that it is Christmas, and the question might well be on your minds, this morning I will talk about how Progressive Jews have approached the question.

From the outset, one of the most interesting responses from Reform Jews has been to claim Jesus as one of our own. This might seem intuitively obvious, especially since today many Christians also emphasise Jesus’s Jewishness. But it wasn’t always so.

In the 19th Century, serious Protestant academics presented Jesus as a lone Aryan in the Middle East. They made clear that we should imagine him as a blonde-haired blue-eyed gentleman among the Semitic masses of Roman Palestine. Jesus, they claimed, was a superior, Western thinker who arrived to save the primitive, purity-obsessed Hebrews from their legalistic superstitions.

When Abraham Geiger, the first reform rabbi in Germany, sought to claim Jesus as a Jew, he was answering back to a Christian intellectual tradition that treated everything Jewish as underdeveloped, and Christianity as a perfected version of the blueprint. The great Jewish academic, Susanna Heschel, called Geiger’s thesis “a revolt of the colonised.” Geiger could reclaim Jesus from the Christians and remind them that he, like their Jewish contemporaries, was a Semite with a Jewish worldview.

This became the operative way for Progressive Jews to look at Jesus. In Victorian England, Claude Montefiore was the leading Jewish biblical scholar. He founded Liberal Judaism in Britain. He was born in the year of Jewish Emancipation and became the first Jew to get a phD in Divinity.

Montefiore’s teacher was the Anglican theologian Benjamin Jowett. Jowett was a liberal, in that he didn’t think Montefiore had to convert to Christianity in order to be saved. Nevertheless, he harboured many Christian prejudices about Judaism. He wrote to Montefiore:

It appears to me that there is good work to be done in Judaism; Christianity has gone forward; ought not Judaism to make a similar progress from the letter to the spirit, from the national to the historical and ideal?

As far as Jowett was concerned, Judaism was still stuck in the past. Montefiore responded by showing Jowett that Jesus was from exactly the same time period. At a lecture named for Jowett, Montefiore spoke to his Christian audience about who he, now an established historian of the Bible, thought Jesus was:

“He was a prophet.” Montefiore even quoted The Gospel of Mark that said so.

Montefiore went on to explain that Jesus “was the sort of man – under other circumstances and environment – such as seven and six hundred years before him had been Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel.”

This analysis places Jesus firmly in the Jewish prophetic tradition, which ended with the destruction of the First Temple. Jesus was not the herald of a new religion, but the practitioner of an old one. He spoke in the same language and on behalf of the same God as the people whose testimonies we read in our haftarot. More than that, said Montefiore, Jesus wasn’t even particularly special:

I do not think that he was always consistent. He urged his disciples to love their enemies, but so far as we can judge he showed little love to those who opposed him. […] To the hardest excellence of all even Jesus could not attain. For it was far easier for him to care for the outcast than to care for his opponent, especially when the outcast was ready to acknowledge that he was sent by God, and the opponent took the liberty of denying it.

For Montefiore, claiming Jesus as a Jew meant also claiming him as a human being. He was a man like any other, full of imperfections, even angry and hypocritical. It is a remarkable testament to how far Montefiore had come that he could speak so openly, and even more so of his Christian peers that they tolerated this exegesis.

Even today, it would probably be hard to speak in such terms. One of the groups that would be most scandalised if Montefiore gave his lecture today would be other Jews. There is a tendency, at present, to try to draw increasingly thick lines between each religion, and to ghettoise Judaism. Certainly, many of my peers would roll their eyes at any attempt to claim Jesus as a Jew.

But I think doing so still has value. When we look at Jesus through the critical, historical lens of Progressive Judaism, we can see that he was just a man, doing his best to understand God’s will.

By association, we can recognise that our rabbis and prophets were no different. And we, too, might have a little less hubris. We might realise that all religions are just efforts to do right in the world and approach our own with some humility.

After all, none of us has all the answers. None of us can be God.

I gave this sermon on Saturday 26th December for Parashat Vayigash at Newcastle Reform Synagogue. The research here is from my MA dissertation, done at King’s College London under supervision by Dr. Andrea Schatz.

Tag: christmas

I refuse, therefore I am

Can we claim Jesus as a Jew?