Tag: deuteronomy

high holy days · judaism · sermon

Knowing we will die helps us live to the fullest

levtaylor

Here’s the deal. Let’s see who will take it.

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.

Yom Kippur Yizkor 5786

high holy days · sermon · theology

What if death comes as a kiss?

levtaylor

Moses said to the Israelites: “I am one hundred and twenty years old. I cannot go on. God has already told me that I will not cross over the Jordan River. Now, do not be afraid. God is going with you. You will do marvellous things.”

Moses was not afraid of death. He asked the Israelites not to fear either. Instead, carry on and keep living.

How could Moses not fear?

If I asked you to depict death, you would likely draw a ferocious figure. For centuries, the Western imagination has presented death as a cruel and frightening creature.

To the Ancient Greeks, death was the merciless deity Thanatos, who came into the world with his siblings, Blame, Suffering, Deceit, Strife, and Doom. Thanatos, the despised god with wings, wrested the souls of the living and dragged them down to the Underworld, where they were handed over to Charon, the Ferryman who took the dead across the Acheron and the River Styx.

Michelangelo, Charon, The Sistine Chapel

On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo depicts Charon, the chaperone of the dead, as a terrifying monster. Charon has clawed talons for feet and grotesquely bulging eyes. He hoists his oar over his shoulder, ready to transport the unfortunate souls.

From the time of the Bubonic Plague in Europe, death was often depicted as a morbid skeleton. In The Triumph of Death, a great oil panel painting by Dutch master Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Death is an enormous skeleton upon an emaciated red horse, slaying all in sight. He brings with him an entire army of macabre skeleton figures, all of them razing the mortals from the earth. 

Today, we know this figure as the Grim Reaper, who reached his full form in the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. You can thank that 19th Century American novelist for the popular image of death today: the skeleton in a cloak holding an hourglass and scythe.

With such frightening depictions of death, how could Moses not fear?

Moses was lucky. He did not inherit the Western artistic tradition. The ancient Israelite attitude was remarkably different. The Jewish view of death was one far more tender.

At the end of Moses’s life, we read: “Moses the servant of the Eternal One died in the land of Moab, by the mouth of God. God buried him there in the valley, and nobody knows Moses’s grave to this day.”

In the Jewish imagination, it is God who comes personally, and takes care of the treasured people. In our Torah’s description of Moses’s burial, it sounds almost like a parent tucking in a child to sleep. The sand covers Moses’s body like a blanket, and he can finally rest.

Pieter Bruegel, section, The Triumph of Death

Our rabbis noticed an interesting choice of words from the Torah. Here, it says that Moses died by the mouth of God. 

This language is also applied to the deaths of Aaron and Miriam. They, too, die by the mouth of God.

Literally, this might mean that Moses and his siblings died at God’s command.

In the Talmud, the rabbis say instead that this means they died by a kiss. 

There are many ways that we might imagine this. We might picture a personal God pressing lips against our prophets to remove their last breath.

I like to picture a parent, gently kissing our legendary figures on the forehead. When Moses dies, God wraps him up in the blankets of the desert sand, embraces him, and pecks him on the forehead, to send him off into his eternal sleep.

Moses, the last of his siblings to die, would also have seen Miriam’s and Aaron’s deaths. He would know that death was not a fearsome monster, but the gentle caress of sleep at the end of a long day.

Indeed, the Roman Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, when he tried to explain the Jewish attitude to life to a Western audience, asked: “why should we fear death, when we embrace the repose of sleep?”

Of course, to we who are still living, death does not always feel so gentle. It can be painful and fear-inducing to witness the ones we love waste away, or be suddenly snatched from our world. 

Our Torah is aware of this. Sometimes, death is indeed depicted as a menacing spirit, as when the Angel of Death slays the first-born during the Exodus. Sometimes, death is indeed an all-consuming monster, as when the ground opens up on the supporters of Korach, to wrench them down to the netherworld of Sheol.

To us, who have to see death while we live, it can indeed feel frightening, and we should not shy away from that terror.

But, perhaps, for those who die, it does not feel so horrifying.

Sebastian Junger is a conflict journalist from New York. In 2020, he suddenly had a near-death experience. While awaiting surgery and bleeding out on an operating table, Junger suddenly had a vision of his father, hovering above him. 

Junger said his father appeared as a comforting mass of energy. In that moment, he thought he understood that there was a life beyond this one.

A devout atheist and rationalist, he went on a journey to discover how this vision was possible. He turned his voyage of enquiry into a book, published last year, called In My Time of Dying.

Tracking shamans and religious leaders from across the globe, he discovered how common his experience of approaching death was. 

This led him to wonder what his own father, a Jewish physicist, would have made of his experience. There is a poignant moment, towards the end of the text, where Junger sits down with his father’s physicist friends, and asks them for an explanation.

One of the scientists tells Junger that he thinks his father would indeed have believed it, because he was romantic like that. He explains that our understanding of physics is constantly evolving, and we know so little about it. He posits, even, that one day the presence of a reality beyond death might be the foundation of physics, or indeed its absence might be. 

Of course, Junger does not rule out the possibility that this is simply the brain’s way of protecting us, and our body’s way of making the inevitable feel less frightening. Yet, even though he is a firm rationalist, he cannot rule out the possibility that his father really was with him in his moments of near-death. He concludes feeling a deeper connection, both to the living and the dead.

None of us know what happens when we die. Nobody can see beyond the grave. Nobody has ever come back to tell us what exists in the world beyond. 

The Western imagination has conditioned us to find this uncertainty terrifying.

But what if Moses is right? What if neither this world nor the next have anything to be feared?

Maybe death does just arrive as a loving parent, tucking you into an eternal rest.

Would it change the way you lived today, if you believed, as our Torah says, that death comes as a kiss?

Jaume Barba, sculpture, The Kiss of Death

halachah · sermon · social justice

How does the Torah say we should treat refugees?

levtaylor

There is a verse in the Torah so radical that one of my teachers did not believe me it was even in there. 

I was working on a project as a rabbinical student and I brought a text that cited this verse. 

“That can’t be in the Torah,” my teacher said. She was a serious scholar, with not only rabbinic ordination but also a PhD in rabbinics and a host of published articles. 

“No ancient society would allow a law like that. The entire economy would collapse.”

I thought, perhaps I had misread it. It was a bold claim. So I went back to look. 

But there it was, nestled among a litany of miscellaneous commandments in Deuteronomy. On one side of this law was the instruction to make sure soldiers did not have nocturnal emissions, and on the other side was the requirement not to bring money gained from prostitution as a Temple offering. 

There it was, a law completely at odds with ancient society, which threatened to collapse an entire economy if enforced:

Do not hand over a slave to his master who is taking refuge with you from his master. He will dwell with you in your neighbourhood in the place he chooses, in one of your gates that is good for him. Do not oppress him.

– Deuteronomy 23:16-17

Let us start by acknowledging why this law is so radical. Ancient agrarian states were built on slavery. Prisoners of war, pillaged people, indentured servants and trafficked humans did back-breaking work to make the farms run. Their unpaid labour was what made the brutal machinations of early states even possible. 

Here we have a rule: do not hand over any slave to their master. The Torah is biased, and it’s not on the side of the owners!

More than this, if you get a runaway, your duty is to look after them. You have to give them accommodation. You have to give it in a place where the refugee himself feels is good for him, within the gates of one of your towns.

This is bold.

But still, it may be I had misunderstood. We already know from many other Torah sources that Israelites cannot be held as slaves. They might be debt labourers and bondsmen, but if somebody is part of the Israelite family, they can never be subjected to lifelong slavery. 

So, perhaps, this law is just talking about what to do if an Israelite runs away. In such a case, they might have been the slave of another Israelite, in which case they were being held against the law. Of course you would then give the slave refuge. 

Or they might have been an Israelite running away from another country, like an Edomite who had captured them in war. Well, then, they have come back to their people and need to be cared for.

So, have I mistranslated? Is this actually about Israelite slaves?

I’d have to look at earlier translations to check what it means. 

The earliest translation of the Torah is Targum Onkelos, a 2nd Century rendition of Scripture into the vernacular Aramaic. 

This translation gives details that clarify things. In this case, it adds an adjective to the Torah’s word for slave. עממין – from the foreign nations. A non-Israelite. The translation is unambiguous: we are talking specifically about foreigners.

This is even more radical. It’s saying we insist on looking after complete outsiders. They have no connection to us. 

They may even, then, be running away from Israelite masters. The Torah is saying that, if a slave runs away from their master, even though the slave is definitely not one of us, and the master might actually be one of us, we are on the side of the slaves.

About a century after this translation, the rabbis in the school of Rabbi Akiva wrote a commentary on the Book of Deuteronomy to expound its meaning. The book is called Sifre Devarim, and it takes all the legal verses from these books and adds oral traditions about how to interpret the laws.

Sifre’s explanation of this verse gives details on how you are supposed to treat a runaway slave when they come to you. Not only do you have to welcome them into your towns, say the rabbis, you also have to make it possible for them to make a living. They have to live with you, and not on the borders of the town.

It adds that the commandment not to oppress the runaway extends even towards words. Even the language you use must be kind. And it insists: you have to make them feel like the place they have come to is better than the one they left.

This is even bolder than where we began. It’s an official open borders policy to every runaway, with the requirement that they not only get refuge but actually get a livelihood and integration in the place where they move to. 

It is not only uneconomical, it goes against all the foundations of the ancient economy. 

You cannot even appeal to other economic reasons. There’s no organised mass of runaway slaves that the law-givers need to accommodate. There’s no suggestion that there was great pressure from the peasantry to be kind to foreigners.

It is a law entirely based on compassion.

What makes this law so radical is that it seems to be motivated entirely by altruism. That is why my teacher was so incredulous about the law being in the Torah at all.

And yet, isn’t that why we turn to the Torah to begin with? Not for cold economics, but to know the right way to live. We want a moral guide for how we should treat people.

Rabbi Julia Neuberger, who serves as a crossbencher in the House of Lords, has been a consistent voice for refugees, as each successive government has threatened hostility and sanctions.

As a lawmaker and a rabbi, she has to balance the high moral demands of our religion with the practicalities of government. 

In all her addresses, she emphasises the need for compassion. She treats refugees as a litmus test for the compassion of a society, because their marginal status tells us how our country is likely to treat everyone else. 

Baroness Neuberger advocates firmly for the rights of refugees.

Perhaps that is why the Torah introduces this seemingly radical rule. It wants to set a culture where the most vulnerable people get the best possible treatment, so that the whole of society will be based on kindness. 

The foundation of Torah law is about caring for the poor, the orphan, and the widow. This most intense case – a complete outsider running away from slavery – is the Torah’s own test for its moral system. 

It is a test every society faces. How people treat refugees shows what they think of human beings.

For the past few weeks, protesters have been gathering outside hotels, demanding refugees be sent back. The main political parties have entered into a race to the bottom for how unwelcome they would make refugees. 

Their rhetoric and laws may turn out to be a threat to us all. They may undermine the very basis of a compassionate society. 

Let us consider what would happen if Britain implemented Torah laws in its approach to refugees.

What would happen if this country made an active decision to welcome refugees and refuse to send them back? To deliberately integrate them and make sure they were firmly part of our towns? To set them up so that they could make a livelihood and refuse any insult to them? 

Would this collapse our economy, or would it make this place better for everyone?

And, if we had to choose, why would we not choose to follow the Torah?

Shabbat shalom.

judaism · sermon · theology

What’s so bad about idolatry?

levtaylor



In the distant past, people made small gods. They carved out wooden statuettes to represent fertility, or hewed rocks into the shapes of animals that would bring them good luck. They made depictions of stars and planets, which would help them in their daily struggles. The ancients looked after the gods – giving them food, drink, rest, and clothes. In return, their little talismans looked after them.

When Abraham was born, he lived among the idol worshippers of Ur. He had no teacher nor guide, but came to understand, through his own reasoning, that God was the only Creator of all things, and that the world was governed by an invisible Force that could not be depicted. The totems people served were not gods at all, and could have no impact on the world.

As a result, he went around smashing up and destroying every idol and household God he could find. He went around telling everyone that the worship of idols was a great lie, and that the One True God would destroy anyone who bowed down to them. He enjoined his followers, the descendants of Abraham, that they, too, must destroy all idols.

This poses a question: what is so bad about idol worship?

If these are just empty vessels, why fear them? If they are not really gods, what harm can they do? Why should idols be so concerning that we must smash them up everywhere we find them?

By the time we get to the end of Moses’s life, here in the Book of Deuteronomy, the aversion to idol worship is even more intense.

At the start of Re’eh, Moses instructs the Israelites to find every idol, tear down the pillars, smash up the altars, cut down their gods, and destroy any memory that these false gods ever lived there.

If a seer comes to you, says Moses, and they say they have had a vision that you should worship idols, you must kill them instantly. You must purge them and their evil words.

If your own brother, sister, mother, father, or friend wants you to worship idols, Moses says, show them no pity. Don’t try to stop anyone from killing them. In fact, make sure it is your own hand that strikes them down.

And if you find out that there is a town where people worship idols, go and kill everyone in it. Bring everyone from the town together and slaughter them. Bring everything from that town into the square and burn it to the ground. Destroy that city in its entirety and never let anybody rebuild it.

This feels like something of an over-reaction.

How can idol worship be so bad that it is worse than murder, worse than cutting off your own kin, worse even than razing a city to the ground? Why should this practice of building little statues be so intimidating that it requires such destruction?

This feels completely out of place with our moral sensibilities. That’s not just a modern thing.

Even in the 13th Century, rabbis were worried about this injunction. Rambam, the great rabbinic decisor who codified all of the Torah’s laws, was also concerned.

Rambam lived among Muslims and Christians in medieval Egypt. He admired and appreciated them. He read the works of the great Greeks who had never known monotheism, like Plato and Aristotle. He found them wise and inspiring. He was deeply opposed to fundamentalism and chauvinism. Rambam, like us, was not really up for burning cities to the ground just because they did not follow our God.

Rambam says: don’t worry. The world for which these laws were written no longer exists. People don’t worship idols any more. Whatever perverse practices the Pagans once did, they are not doing them now.

Even if they did exist, we would not have the authority to burn a city to the ground like that. You would need a Sanhedrin – a court of 71 learned judges who could recite the laws in their entirety – and we have not had one of those for many centuries.

Even if the idol worshippers did still exist, and we did still have a Sanhedrin, the Sanhedrin would necessarily make sure to do everything possible to educate the idolaters away from their ill-conceived practices, help them to repent, and find ways to make sure they can live in the true religion of monotheism.

So, don’t worry, says Rambam, we can forget about all that.

But the trouble is we can’t.

It’s there in the Torah. We read it every year. Rambam still has to go and codify all these bloody edicts, that make such monsters of people who pray to fetishes.

And Rambam does not answer my fundamental question. The people who bow down to wood and stone might be wrong; their beliefs might be misplaced; but what is so bad about giving a drop of wine to a brick?

The most compelling answer I have found comes from a 20th Century psychoanalyst. Erich Fromm was born in Frankfurt, Germany, at the start of the last century. He studied psychiatry and philosophy among the greats of his generation, then moved, in 1934 to America, where he became a leading writer and critic of modern society. Needless to say, he was Jewish.

In 1976, Erich Fromm wrote a landmark book called “To Have or To Be.” This text became the cornerstone of the anti-consumerist movement.

Fromm engaged seriously with our religious texts. He saw them as inspiring people with a serious psychological message about how to live.

The difference between real worship and idolatry, says Fromm, is not what you worship, but how you do it. He calls it the “being mode” and the “having mode”.

The problem with idolatry, says Fromm, is that it makes you think God is something you can own.

Hebrew monotheism is a rejection of the entire enterprise of having a god:

“The God of the Old Testament is, first of all, a negation of idols, of gods whom one can have… The concept of God transcends itself from the very beginning. God must not have a name; no image must be made of God.”

Fromm writes:

“God, originally a symbol for the highest value that we can experience within us, becomes, in the having mode, an idol. In the prophetic concept, an idol is a thing that we ourselves make and project our own powers into, thus impoverishing ourselves. We then submit to our creation and by our submission are in touch with ourselves in an alienated form. While I can have the idol because it is a thing, by my submission to it, it, simultaneously, has me.”

So, for Fromm, idol worship isn’t over at all. In fact, it is a pitfall any of us can stumble into. If you think that faith is something you can have, rather than a way of living, you are guilty of idolatry. Fromm says:

“Faith, in the having mode, is a crutch for those who want to be certain, those who want an answer to life without daring to search for it themselves.”

Fromm goes further. It’s not just about God. It’s about everything. Do you want to be in this world, or do you want to have it? If you think you can have it, you will never be satisfied. But if you can truly be in it, you will find no need to have any desires met. Fromm says:

“The attitude inherent in consumerism is that of swallowing the whole world.”

Fromm even extends his philosophy to how we love. Do not try to have love, he warns, but try to be in love.

“To love is a productive activity. It implies caring for, knowing, responding, affirming, enjoying: the person, the tree, the painting, the idea. It means bringing to life, increasing his/her/its aliveness. It is a process, self-renewing and self-increasing.”

If we take Fromm seriously, we have a whole new way of looking at the world. Inspired by the prophets, everything we do can be about existing and loving and being. We can reject the whole ideology of possessing.

That is what is wrong with idolatry. The artefacts of the Pagans aren’t just wooden blocks. They tell us a way of living. The wrong way of living. They direct us to control and own.

Rambam may be right. The idolaters do not exist in cities any more.

Instead, today, they live in our own minds. And we must burn them down, if we are to be truly free.

Shabbat shalom.

protest · sermon · theology

We are guests in God’s mansion

levtaylor


Suppose you woke up one morning and discovered, to your surprise, that you had inherited an enormous mansion.

The lord of the manor has welcomed you as a guest to his entire estate. You have no need to pay rent.

This country villa has plush places to sleep, wonderful waters to swim in, and endless entertainment.

More than that, this house is magical. It provides for your every need. Its luscious garden grows your favourite fruit and vegetables. There is plenty of space to graze and raise whatever animals you desire.

It belongs to you and your descendants forever.

What if I told you that you had indeed been bequeathed such a home, and that you were already living in it?

It is this Earth.

That is how Moses understood the planet on which we live when he instructed the Israelites in Deuteronomy. Moses wanted to impart to the people what a miracle it was to be alive, and to get to live in this abundant and fertile world.

So, says Moses, “the Eternal One your God is bringing you into a good land – with brooks, streams, and deep springs gushing out into the valleys and hills; a land with wheat and barley, vines and fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey; a land where you can eat bread and never run out, where you will lack nothing; a land where the rocks are iron and you can dig copper out of the hills.”

This is the biblical mindset. You are guests in God’s mansion.

You have inherited a paradise and it is the whole world. The seas, the ice caps, the deserts, the mountains, and the forests. They are all yours. And they are all everyone else’s too.

Every human being was granted this world as a gift. Every living creature was placed here by their loving Creator.

Now, if you inherited a mansion like that, you wouldn’t trash it on the first day. You’d want to look after it and make sure your children and theirs got to enjoy it the way you did. You’d want to make sure the grass stayed green and the water kept flowing and the fruit trees kept producing. You’d want to know that everybody would be able to dwell in it for all time.

So, says Moses: “Keep faithfully every commandment I am giving to you this day, so that you can thrive and increase and come and inherit this land which was promised to your ancestors.”

Yes, this land requires no rent, but it does have conditions attached. You have to tend to it. You cannot be violent or greedy or deceitful. You must regularly redistribute the land, and make sure that everyone who lives in it gets their fill, and make sure everyone gets plenty of time for rest.

Well, these are small stipulations, given how wonderful my portion is. I get to live on this earth, which is so abundant, and all I have to do is look after it and share it? It sounds like a fantastic deal.

It is, but there is a trap. You see, you might get used to how great this mansion is. You might forget who gave it to you.

You might commit the gravest sin: you might think that this is yours, and yours alone.

This, says Moses, is a terrible error. “You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” Instead, remember the Eternal One your God, for it is God who gives you the power to produce wealth.”

You might think that you earned the mansion, and you built it, and you can do with it as you please. Well, then, you would become a threat. A threat to the mansion and everyone that lives there. A threat to its babbling brooks and fig trees.

If you fool yourself into thinking this is yours, warns Moses, then “your heart will become proud and you will forget the Eternal One, your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.”

Yes, you have a dark past. A history of slaves and masters. There was a time when people claimed ownership over everything. They declared that the Nile River and the rainwater belonged to them. They hoarded the grain and took possession over the vineyards. They owned the animals. They even owned you.

Do you want to go back there?

Now, look around at our home, here in Surrey. This place truly is wonderful. Working here, I have had the chance to paddleboard down the River Wey, walk on the Surrey Downs, and watch others swim in Divers Cove. I can really believe this county was a gift from God.

And yet this county is certainly not treated as a common treasury.

How did it happen that God’s creation became so gated?

You see, Moses’s description of the world as a common heritage bequeathed by God wasn’t just an idle fantasy. That was how many people saw the world throughout a large part of history.

Until the start of the 17th Century, large swathes of English land were held in common by all people. This meant that everyone could graze the land together. They could rotate crops together; care for the land together; and make sure everyone got fed.

It’s not that England was one great egalitarian utopia. Far from it. There had been kings, paupers, lords, peasants, and landless workers, for centuries. But, at least a part of it was treated as a shared inheritance.

Then, in 1605, the government began a process called Inclosure. They took all that had been previously common and handed it over to the already wealthy. They stripped the poor from their land and forced them into the cities to work in factories. They destroyed whole ways of life.

This mansion, already divided, became the possession of just a few. Just as Moses had warned, the wealthy imagined that their power had come about by their own hands. They thought of themselves as more than lords; more than pharaohs: as gods.

Now, right here in Surrey, a group of people tried to resist them. In 1649, on St George’s Hill, and at Little Heath near Cobham, a group of religious dissidents got together, and decided that they would take the land back from the lords. They were called The Diggers.

Their leader, Gerard Winstanley, has a memorial plaque near Weybridge Station, and there is a tour you can take with historic placards, showing where the Diggers went.

The Diggers wanted a return to the Law of Moses and the biblical attitude.

In the Levellers’ Standard, Gerard Winstanley wrote: “The Earth (which was made to be a Common Treasury of relief for all, both Beasts and Men) was hedged in to In-closures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made Servants and Slaves: And that Earth that is within this Creation made a Common Store-house for all, is bought and sold, and kept in the hands of a few, whereby the great Creator is mightily dishonoured, as if he were a respector of persons, delighting in the comfortable Livelihoods of some, and rejoycing in the miserable povertie and straits of others.”

Like Moses before him, Winstanley was adamant that God was not a propertarian but a generous host, and human beings simply welcome guests. How, then, could some divide up the land and force others off of it?

The Diggers lost their battle for the land, and the world we inherit is made according to the laws of those who enacted Inclosure.

But there is a message, that rings out through time, from the era of Moses through the 17th Century, and right up to today.

That message is that this world is a paradise, bequeathed to us all. And we need to act like it is so.

Shabbat shalom.

festivals · judaism · torah

What happened at Mount Sinai?

levtaylor



We are days away from Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, when we celebrate having received the Torah. At this festival, we affirm we have received God’s word and that it is unfailing.

This is what we think we know: these words are not only God’s.


They have human origins, and they were written over many centuries. The Torah is not a single, unaltered revelation. It is a book with a history.

What happened at Mount Sinai matters immensely. It is the foundation of our faith. It is the basis not only of Judaism but of every monotheism that followed it.

The story has been told so many times. Hordes of Hebrews fled from Egypt, gathered around the foot of a desert peak, and heard the voice of the One True God.

What they experienced, they told to their children, and they to theirs, until – after generations – the vision was written down into a collection of stories and laws we call the Torah.

We have to know what really happened at Sinai; so much hinges on this indecipherable point of history.

We have to believe in the real world, where history is something made by human beings, who work, and struggle over resources, and build societies.

We have to believe in the God of Judaism, who is revealed through history.

We must synthesise the two. We cannot split the material and the spiritual. We need to know what the material reality was that lay underneath this spiritual truth. We need to know what happened at Sinai.

We cannot truly know, but we have to try and work it out. A group of human beings felt so inspired that they wrote down ten commandments and passed them on for thousands of generations. Why?

A group of human beings, who surely worked and slept and ate and drank and dreamed, proclaimed that they had seen God.

Something marvellous must have happened at that time. Something awe inspiring – to give us this treasury of ancient wisdom. Who committed these words to paper, what happened to them, and what made these commandments feel so important to them?

What really happened at Mount Sinai? The biblical historian pores over our texts, strips them back, digs out inconsistencies, looks for parallels in ancient cultures, and analyses the language in which the stories are told. The biblical historian discards impossibilities, looks for likelihoods, and reconstructs the best possible version of events.

We cannot know for certain, but we can do our best to do the same – to discard, seek and reconstruct. And, when we do, the truth of/ Mount Sinai that we are left with is far more radical than we might imagine.

For the historian, Mount Sinai may not have been Mount Sinai at all. It may be, as the Samaritans claim, Mount Gerizim, near Nablus, since that is also one of the mountains the Torah names as a site of revelation. It may have been Mount Pisgah or Mount Nebo, on the eastern side of the Jordan River, since our Torah names those locations too.

We do not know at which mountain the important revelation happened. But there was a mountain.


This is what we think we know: there was a mountain.

Some people went there. They may not have been Jews, since that word did not exist yet. They may not even have been Israelites, since the story teaches that they only became Israelites through the process of what happened at that mountain.

They were, says the Torah, a mixed multitude. They were drawn from all the nations of the Ancient Near East: from Ethiopia and Yemen; through Egypt and Sudan; to Lebanon and Syria.

They were, by their own self-description, border-crossing nomads. They had no land or title. There are no records to suggest they owned any weapons, let alone that they had military strength.

If we are to trust how they wrote about themselves, they were menial workers. Water drawers; grain carriers; tenant farmers; shepherds. They had been slaves. They were a ragtag of the ancient world’s lowest classes.

We do not know who these people were. But they were poor and transient.

This is what we think we know:
the poorest people of many ethnicities came together at a mountain.


We are not sure when it happened. It may have been any time from the 15th Century BCE. The latest it could have been is the 5th Century BCE, when the Torah was edited into its final form. That is a difference of nearly a thousand years.

We do not know what brought them to that mountain. We cannot prove that the exodus took place exactly as it was described in the Torah.

But we do know that, in the 12th Century BCE, there was a massive societal collapse in all the nations of the Mediterranean basin. In the broad period when our Torah tells us that our ancestors received the Ten Commandments, the Egyptian empire was crumbling.

We also know this. When Egypt was collapsing in the late Bronze Age, a Pharaoh wrote a stele, complaining of slave uprisings by a group of nomads on the fringes of his empire. He calls those people Habiru. The biblical historian notes the linguistic similarity between these people and the Hebrews.


This is what we think we know: the poorest people of many ethnicities rebelled together against a decaying empire some time around the late Bronze Age.
They met at a mountain.

The stories they tell of their experiences at that mountain are fantastical. Fire descended from heaven. Thunder crashed and lightning roared. Thick smoke descended over the peak. The earth trembled violently. The Creator of Heaven and Earth became manifest before them.

How can we know if any of this happened? Nobody else could have testified to what they saw. There are no contemporary meteorological records. There are only two possibilities: either the authors of our Torah really believed that was what they experienced, or they made it up.

If they made it up, so many others were convinced that they had been part of that experience at the mountain, that they faithfully transmitted the story for hundreds of years to their children and grandchildren. Which is more likely: that these people lied, or that they genuinely believed they had a transcendent experience?

This is what we think we know: the poorest people of many ethnicities rebelled together against a decaying empire some time around the late Bronze Age.
At a mountain, they had an experience so profound that they felt as if they saw God manifest, and it changed their lives and the lives of their descendants forever.

The God they thought they heard told them: “Although the whole earth is Mine, you will be for Me a dominion of priests and a holy nation.”

The poorest people in the world affirmed belief in a God who knew no borders and rejected all hierarchies. Every one of these ancient landless waifs would be holy.

According to our Torah, those people entered into a covenant.

Until this point in history, contracts of these kind were predominantly made between empires and vassal states. They took the form: “you will pay me tribute, and I will be your landlord.”

This was a covenant of a new kind. It said:
“you will do justly by one another, and I will be your God.”

They ratified this new agreement and remade what a covenant was. They swore an oath, committing themselves to an entirely new society. They bound themselves to a Law that knew no Sovereign save for a universal God.

They promised that their society would have no more killing; no more trafficking in human beings; no more greed. They declared fealty to each other, to their God; and to their sacred days of rest.

Take our texts. Strip them back. Dig out inconsistencies. Look for parallels in ancient cultures. Pay close attention to language. Discard impossibilities.

From what remains, you can reconstruct the best possible version of events.

This is where we have arrived.
This is what we think we know.

Thousands of years ago, poor people from many ethnicities got together in common rebellion against a decaying empire. They had an experience so profound that they felt as if they saw God manifest.
At a mountain, they made a covenant to create a society based on dignity.

Many hands have since re-written and interpreted that event – but, deep at its core, buried under years of transmission and analysis, was one moment.

This, is what we think we know:

Somewhere in history, there was a slave rebellion by a mountain.

And it was marvellous.

Originally published in Vashti.

israel · sermon

Remember in order not to forget

levtaylor

There are ways of remembering intended to make you forget.

There are ways of forgetting intended to help you remember.

So, says the Torah, remember in order not to forget.

This week is Shabbat Zachor, the Sabbath of remembrance. Just before Purim, we are called to read three additional lines of Scripture. Deuteronomy instructs:

Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey out of Egypt [… ] You shall erase the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget.

Remember… erase the memory… do not forget.

Is the demand to remember not contradicted by the insistence on erasing the memory?

Is the commandment to remember not exactly the same as the one not to forget?

Perhaps not. There are ways of remembering that encourage forgetting, and ways of forgetting that make you remember.

Alan Bennett’s play, The History Boys, is an exploration of what it means to teach history, and what we can learn from it.

In a powerful scene, the newest teacher, Tom Irwin, takes his sixth-form grammar school students on a tour of a war cemetery.

As they walk, he tells them:

The truth was, in 1914, Germany doesn’t want war. Yeah, there’s an arms race, but it’s Britain who’s leading it. So, why does no one admit this?

That’s why. The dead. The body count. We don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault cos so many of our people died. And all the mourning’s veiled the truth. It’s not “lest we forget”, it’s “lest we remember”. That’s what all this is about -the memorials, the Cenotaph, the two minutes’ silence-. Because there is no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.

The truth to these words is palpable. In every village square throughout Britain there is a stone column, inscribed with names. The Cenotaph is so finite. Its concrete defies questions. You cannot ask it: what did they die for?

As we lay wreaths, the liturgy intones that the war dead “made the ultimate sacrifice.” These words carry such gravity that you forget it was a conscript army. You dare not ponder: who sacrificed them, and for what cause?

Then, there is silence. So much silence that you cannot hear the echo: was it worth it?

Real memories are not fixed. They are fluid and living, constantly opening up new interpretations and interrogations. When you really remember, you pore over the details with others, seeking perspectives you missed, guided by a quest for greater understanding. You always want to know what you can learn from it, since the memory teaches something new to each moment.

But, as Alan Bennett’s character teaches us, that is not what happens with certain war memorials.

They are ways of remembering in order to make you forget.

There are, too, ways of forgetting to make you remember.

In 1988, the Israeli historian and Holocaust survivor, Yehuda Elkana, wrote an article for HaAretz called The Need to Forget. Not long after its publication, this article entered the new Jewish canon as one of the most challenging and profound commentaries on Shoah memorialisation.

In it, he warns against the danger that Holocaust consciousness poses to Israeli society.

He writes:

I see no greater threat to the future of the State of Israel than the fact that the Holocaust has systematically and forcefully penetrated the consciousness of the Israeli public.

Reflecting on the school trips to Yad Vashem, Elkana comments:

What did we want those tender youths to do with the experience? We declaimed, insensitively and harshly, and without explanation: “Remember!” “Zechor!” To what purpose? What is the child supposed to do with these memories? Many of the pictures of those horrors are apt to be interpreted as a call to hate. “Zechor!” can easily be understood as a call for continuing and blind hatred.

So, says Elkana, while the rest of the world may need to remember the Holocaust, the Israelis needed to learn to forget it. They needed to uproot the injunction to remember “to displace the Holocaust from being the central axis of our national experience.”

Elkana’s invocation of forgetting is also an invitation to remember. Forget the past in order to remember that we have a future. Forget the cruelties inflicted on our people in order to remember that we are greater than our misery. Forget the wars in order to remember the possibility of peace.

Elkana is not talking about an alternate reality where everyone wakes up tomorrow with amnesia about the last hundred years of history. He is talking about an active process of forgetting: forgetting by asking new questions and building new memories.

These are ways of forgetting intended to help you remember.

There are ways of remembering intended to make you forget.

But, the Torah tells us: remember in order not to forget.

What type of remembering would this be?

A full remembering, the type repeated twice by our parashah, the kind that forces you not to forget.

This remembering, then, must be one that always asks questions and returns to itself. A history that invites constant revision and ever wants to teach new lessons.

For the last sixteen months, Israel has been gripped by war. It has been unavoidable as its details have filled our news feeds and lives.

I know it is too soon to start the painstaking soul-searching involved in real remembering.

But it is plenty early enough to forget.

Already there are those who would like us to forget, so that they can eschew their own accountability.

How easily we can be made complicit in their acts of wilful forgetting.

So I have been considering how to fulfil the Torah’s commandment to remember.

I want to remember in fullness and complexity, always returning to new questions.

I want to remember all the suffering, for there has been so much suffering.

I want to remember all the dead. Every name. There are so many names.

I want to remember all those responsible. Every name. There are so many names.

I want to remember all the alternatives, because there have always been so many options, and there are still so many other ways.

I want to remember completely who I have been, who we have been, at best and at worst throughout this whole time.

It is too soon to remember.

It is too much to remember.

It is too painful to remember.

But, if we do not remember, we will forget.

story · torah

A letter to Joshua, from Moses

levtaylor

Dear Joshua,

It’s me, Moses.

Please forgive my shaky handwriting. It has been many years since I wrote anything down.

Can you believe it has already been forty years since we came to that great desert mountain and came into contact with the One God? Twice, I carried those miraculous tablets, etched with the Laws of Life, down from that mountain peak.

I could not carry them now. I would not have the strength. And I do not just mean that because of the way my hands tremble when I lift my food or the staggered steps I take when I wake in the morning. I do not have the zeal I once did. I cannot go on much longer.

Joshua, I am dying, and I will soon be dead.

I wish desperately that I could walk with you across that Jordan. All I have ever wanted was to arrive with you at that great destination to which we have journeyed.

But the Eternal One has told me that I will not go on much longer. I will die here, in the desert, and be buried in the wilderness sands.

At first, I was affronted. I cried out to my Maker. ‘Why, God? Why can I not pass over to finally see the freedom for which I have longed?’

God, who has given me so many words, remained silent.

I think I have an answer, though.

The truth is I was free the moment I first left Egypt. Before I returned with my staff and my message. Before any of those miracles and signs and visions. Before I even knew the God of Israel watched over us.

I was free as soon as I took my life into my own hands and refused to be part of the Egyptian system any longer. Once I decided not to be a slaver; not to subjugate others, nor to be subjugated, I was already then mentally emancipated.

These years we have spent in the desert were a way to work out what to do with that freedom. We have been reciting these laws and developing these rituals to find ways of living that keep us from ever going back to the oppressive ways of Egypt.

Joshua, this is what I need to tell you. Do not go back there. Not even in your mind. Do not try to own and control people. Do not allow others to own or control you. Let your soul be free, so that you can dedicate it to the God who led you here.

I am writing this down so that you can refer back to it, and remember what the point of it all was. Why we left Egypt. Why we spent all this time trudging thirsty through shrubland. Why we said we would go to that country from which our ancestors came many mythical centuries ago.

The point was not the land. The point was what we might do there. That we might be free. That we might finally see every human being as a living representation of their Creator. That we might cease using each other as means to an end but as ends in themselves. That we might truly know the Oneness of God and the deep mysteries underlying our universe.

That’s why I’m writing this now, as a reminder.

I know, I have said this all many times before. Call this my mishneh torah, my deutero-nominon; the repetition of everything I said before. It needs to be repeated, over and again, because freedom is hard to achieve and subjugation is such an easy default.

Please, read it out loud. Read it many times. Read it all the time. Even when the words feel trite and you feel like you have repeated the same phrases all your life, keep coming back to it. Remind yourself why you are here. Remind yourself what is at stake in this brief life we have been given.

I will say it again. Do not become like them. Do not worship the work of your hands. Do not think that work is the goal. Do not seek to own and control. Do not kill or oppress or endanger. Choose life. Seek God. Find holiness in everything that lives.

Joshua, I worry, even as I write these words, that you will not heed them. I know you want to. Ever since you were a boy, you used to sit at my feet and lap up every word. You were desperate to be closer to Divinity, to reach for higher things.

When I said we could conquer Canaan, only you and your friend Caleb believed me. You saw giants and were certain you could slay them. You had more faith than any of us. You had more faith than I did.

Joshua, there have been times when you carried me. Literally. In the war against the Amalekites, you put your shoulders under my arms and kept me upright. You are so, so faithful.

But where will all that zealotry go, once you are charged with leading people in the land? When you no longer have giants and Amalekites left to fight, what will you do with all your conviction?

I am asking too much of you. I am asking you to remember a life you have not lived.

You never knew Egypt. You were born here, in the wasteland, after we had already fled. You don’t remember what it was like to be owned. You cannot know what it meant to be a subject of a system that meant to destroy you.

In some ways, this means you have always been free, because you were not born a slave. In other ways, it means you have never been free, because you have never had to fight for it. You do not know what it feels like to start moving, then notice you are shackled, and to keep moving still, and to never stop moving, and to keep going with nothing but faith to carry you.

And you cannot know it. Just as I cannot follow you over the Jordan River, you cannot follow me out of Egypt. Some lessons can only be learned by life’s journey, and some journeys can only be made once.

Perhaps, when you go into that new country, you will make the place I dreamed about. Maybe it will flow with milk and honey. It might become a light unto the nations, where everyone lives with equality and dignity, where everyone can walk in the ways of God.

Or perhaps you will make a new Egypt. You, who never knew Egypt, will find new ways to conquer and subjugate and destroy. Maybe you will crown kings and build empires and wage wars.

Then what will the point have been?

I am asking too much of you. I am asking you to build a world I could not, and to do it all without my help. I am asking to you to know things you have not learnt, and to be perfect in ways I was not. I am sorry to put so much pressure on you. It is not fair.

You may not be able to do what I am asking. But at least you can remember. Tell your children where we came from. Teach them where we were trying to go.

And, then, perhaps, when they see new Egypts emerging, or they see that new Zions are possible, they will find paths through the wilderness that you and I could not see. Keep the story alive, so that the dream may continue.

Joshua, I am going to die here.

These words are all you will inherit from me.

I love you, Joshua.

Your friend,

Moses

halachah · judaism · social justice

Are Jews allowed to lend money at interest?

levtaylor

Of course, I am Jewish, but I also consider myself very English. I am English in the very parochial sense that I love canal boats, think provincial churches are beautiful, will definitely barbecue on the only day of summer, and put mayonnaise with everything. But, last autumn, I did the most English thing I have ever done. 

I wrote a disapproving letter of correction.

I had never done it before. I’ve never written in to the BBC or a newspaper. To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never sent a letter of complaint about anything. But this one was too important to simply ignore.

Someone in a play had misrepresented a complex point of Jewish law. 

Now, this may seem trivial. But, six months later, I am still so incensed about this common misconception of halachah, that I feel the need to preach on it. 

In September, last year, I got a real treat: to go see one of our members perform at the Royal Court Theatre. Rachel Hosker, who will be getting married under our auspices in the summer, was performing in a play called ‘Jews. In their Own Words.’ Written by Jonathan Freedland, the play interviews famous Jews, including Tracy-Ann Oberman, Luciana Berger, Margaret Hodge, and Howard Jacobson, trying to give a sense of antisemitism, past and present. 

I’m not a theatre critic, but let me tell you: Rachel acted fantastically. She and the rest of the cast did a fantastic job of bringing the characters to life. 

But there was a line, really a throwaway comment, that stuck with me. The play was attempting to explain the trope of the money-hungry Jew, and how Jews had come to be associated with money-lending. An actor representing CST’s Dave Rich said: “the rulings of the church forbade lending money at interest, which was considered usury, whereas Jewish law allowed it.”

This, to me, is alarmingly inaccurate. It shows not only a misunderstanding of Jewish law, but also of antisemitism, and how it works. It places the responsibility for Jews as medieval money-lenders onto Jews, and our religion. Nothing could be further from the truth.

If it was the case that Jewish law allowed money-lending at interest, you would be hard-pressed to explain the commandment in this week’s Torah portion: “You may not act as a creditor to your people. You may not exact interest from them.” You would also have to reckon with the same commandment, given in the Holiness Code: “Do not exact advance or accrued interest, but fear your God… Do not lend your money at interest, and do not give your food at interest.” The same commandment is repeated again in Deuteronomy: “do not deduct interest from loans to your kindred.”

Of course, you might say, the Torah is not the only source of Jewish law. Perhaps these commandments are amended in the Mishnah, or the Talmud, or the Codes. No, no, and no. The Mishnah says charging interest is so reprehensible that it involves breaking six commandments. The Talmud says that even scribes and witnesses who participate in such contracts are guilty. 

In the defining law code for most of the Jewish world, the Mishneh Torah, Rambam looks at the word for interest – neshech – which is the same as the word for a snakebite, and says it is called as such “because it bites, it causes pain to a fellow human being, and consumes a person.” He repudiates it completely.

Be in no doubt: Jewish law does not permit money-lending at interest.

So, how did it happen that Jews nevertheless ended up associated with money-lending, despite its very explicit prohibition?

In the 4th Century CE, Church Father Augustine of Hippo declared that Jews would be permitted to survive as “living witnesses” to the truth of the Bible, but must be kept in a degraded state, with the mark of Cain, for their refusal to accept Jesus. This became the official policy of Christian Europe’s primary institutions: its churches and monarchies. 

Jews were allowed to live in England neither as citizens nor serfs. They could not own land or participate in the nation. They were excluded from universities, and cut out of the professions. They were only allowed to live in the country on condition that they did the dirty work of the ruling class: tax collecting and money-lending. 

Now, most Jews did not do such jobs. They did the work that was needed for their community, as bakers, vintners, stonemasons, and millers. But, as long as some Jews fulfilled these functions for the monarchy, all Jews could live in European countries as “treasured subjects” – effectively pets of the king. 

This had a profound impact on the lives of medieval European Jews. They were forced to wear humiliating clothes to mark them out. Associated with tax collecting and money-lending, many of the local peasants associated the Jews with all the financial problems they faced. 

The local lords actively exploited this division. They drummed up hatred against Jews, and treated them as a pressure valve, so that, in times of economic crisis, peasants would attack their local Jews rather than turn their ire on the landowner class.

That is why the worst pogroms that we have recorded came in times when the monarchy was in financial straits. In England, these came when the country was bankrupted by its military Crusades to capture Jerusalem. Jews, the perceived cause of money problems, and naturally associated with the Holy Land, had all the anger and resentment of impoverished people poured out on them. 

If the monarchy or the Church were struggling with their own debts, they had an easy way out: they could simply expel the Jews and confiscate all their property. In 1290, Edward I expelled the Jews from England to cancel his debts and win back the support of the knights and lords in parliament, who were also heavily indebted.

This put the rabbis, the arbiters of Jewish law, in a very difficult position. If they permitted lending at interest, they would turn their backs on their entire religious inheritance. If they insisted that Judaism forbade money-lending at interest, they would effectively force their community to leave where they were. And, since all of Christian Europe had adopted the same policy, they would have nowhere to go. 

So, the rabbis had to find a way. They looked at the laws, which said such lending was only prohibited to their kin. Rabbi David Kimchi, writing in medieval France during pogroms and expulsions, said that Jews were not permitted to lend at interest to people who respect Jews. The corollary was that if people would not treat the Jews as full human beings, then they, in turn, could lend to them at interest. In England, the Christians had estranged them and made them explicitly not their kin.

This is why correcting this point on the understanding of Jewish law is so important. It is not just because we are sticklers for getting the halachah right. It is so that we understand what antisemitism is and how it works. 

We Jews did not create this system. We did not allow it, nor have the power to stop it. For over a millennium, European powers embedded and promoted antisemitism to prop up their system. As Rabbi Lionel Blue, of blessed memory, so pithily wrote: “The problem of the Jews in Europe was never the Jews. It was Europe.”

Now, we are citizens in this country. With Emancipation, we might have hoped that it would bring an end to cultures of debt and division. True, most of the banks and money-lenders are now not owned by Jews, and very few Jews today engage in such work. 

But that is not because we are living closer to the laws of the Torah or our rabbis. It is because the whole of our society is caught up in loans. All of us are more indebted and more divided than we ever were. We are pitted against each other by a media eager to see us all fighting. 

Combating antisemitism does not only mean counteracting myths and biases against Jews. It is also about dismantling the material realities that created antisemitism. The hatred of Jews erupts when we are scapegoated for economic problems in society. We must not only contradict the myth that we are responsible, but also fight to ensure that the problems people face of economic hardship and drowning in debts no longer exist. 

When we realise that the world has enough for all of us, and distribute it so that everyone can prosper, we will be far closer to a world without prejudice and fear.

Shabbat shalom.

sermon · social justice

It could be you

levtaylor

A woman passes her baby over the fence to an American soldier. She does not know the soldier. She does not know if the baby will be safe. She does not know whether she will ever see the baby again. But she knows that she must give the baby to someone, anyone, so that he doesn’t grow up there.

A sixteen year old boy with a promising career as a footballer grabs on to the side of a plane. He begs. He hopes the plane will take him too. The plane takes off, flinging him to the ground. He dies instantly.

An elderly woman with nothing to her name takes off on a long journey across desert mountains by foot. If she is lucky, she will arrive in a squalid refugee camp and spend the rest of her days living in white tents managed by the UN. She probably will not be so lucky.

Today those people are Afghans. 

Only a few generations ago, they might have been you. 

Most of the people here have ancestors who fled just as these refugees do today.

The great migration of Jews into England came at the end of the 19th Century. They had been living in the Pale of Settlement in Russia and Eastern Europe for centuries. Under Tsarist persecution, Jews were confined only to certain parts of the Russian Empire. They worked as peasants and in menial jobs, building their own communities in the shtetls.

When the Tsar’s power was threatened and the Russian Empire began to crumble, his supporters blamed the Jews. For decades, state-backed mobs rampaged through the villages. They torched houses, massacred people, stole property and made life unbearable. We call these waves of antisemitic violence pogroms.

So, our forebearers fled. Most did not make it. Some arrived in England. When they did, they were met by hostility, racism, cramped housing and sweatshop jobs. 

Not long ago, the hordes of fleeing refugees were you. You know what it meant to be a stranger. Even if you do not remember. 

The Torah asks you to remember. According to our narrative, thousands of years ago, we were strangers in the land of Egypt. We were refugees from a famine in Canaan. We were wandering migrants with no home. We were enslaved and confined to one part of the Nile and worked hard labour building garrisons for the Pharaoh. We were mistreated and judged with prejudice. We are instructed by Scripture to remember how that felt.

This week’s parashah sets out the rights of migrants. Never abuse them. Do not exploit them. Pay them upfront. Don’t hold their property hostage. Give them dignity. Don’t mess them around. Make sure they have food and shelter. Look after them.

Why? Over and over again, Deuteronomy repeats: “Always remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt. That is why God enjoins you to observe this commandment.”

You have to support strangers because they are you. When you look at migrants and refugees, you are not allowed to see them as different. You have to look at them as you. It is the most-repeated commandment in the whole of Torah: to know what it is like to be a foreigner in a foreign land. Remember what this means.

Not everyone remembers. 

Last week, Danny Finkelstein wrote in The Times praising border controls. He took his family story of fleeing as refugees from the Nazis to advocate for keeping some foreigners out.

He wrote, and I quote here: “strongly believe in immigration control. And I am not in the slightest bit put off by the suggestion that this would have prevented my grandfather from becoming a British citizen […] yes, I would deny immigration to some very deserving and worthy people I would be quite happy to live next door to. Even people I would be happy to be related to. Just because I favour immigration for someone, that doesn’t mean I favour it for everyone.”

Personally, I cannot share Mr. Finklestein’s flippant disregard for immigrants, or join him in championing border controls. Like his, my family also fled the Nazis. Most did not make it out. Only a few, who were children, or who could prove they would be useful as nurses, were permitted entry. Under the current system, I doubt they would have been allowed. If I were a refugee today, I would not fare so well as my grandfather did.

But the reason I object to Danny Finkelstein so strongly is not selfish pragmatism. It is religious. It is because I truly believe what the Torah teaches about the rights of strangers. Those refugees are my ancestors who fled persecution. They are my progenitors from millennia ago who were strangers in the land of Egypt. Those Afghans, gripping onto planes and handing their babies to soldiers and walking for miles in the sun… they are me.

And they could be me again.

The only thing that stands between a comfortable citizen today and a desperate refugee tomorrow is luck. 

We in this room do not have to think about what we would do if our corner of the world was faced with famine or war. We do not have to imagine where we would go when faced with our own version of the Taliban.

But if ever I did have to think about this, I would pray that somebody, somewhere, had taken to heart the message of the Torah. I would want somebody to say that no number is too many, that their homes were open, and that my life mattered, no matter what I could provide.

Thankfully, there are people in Britain today, making precisely this case. 

The Jewish Council for Race Equality has put together a Jewish community response to the Afghan refugee crisis. It sets out clear actions the government must undertake to meet its moral obligations.

It must scrap its anti-asylum seeker legislation. It must stop deporting Afghans back to certain danger. It must allow more refugees into this country. 

I urge you all to sign this petition in support of these very reasonable demands.

These are really the minimum standards we must meet. The Torah never even thinks to introduce border controls or to police citizenship. Our Scripture assumes that migration is natural and inevitable. God’s instruction is that, once strangers are with you, you give them all the rights and compassion you would show to someone you have known all your life.

Torah repeats itself so many times to drill home this message.

Always remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt. That is why God enjoins you to observe this commandment.

Shabbat shalom. 

I delivered this sermon at South West Essex and Settlement Reform Synagogue on 21st August 2021 for Parashat Ki Teitzei.