Tag: gaza

interfaith · sermon · torah

Do not hide the tears of tolerance

levtaylor



As some of you know, my kippah is a permanent fixture on my head, and has been since my early 20s. I often get asked whether I experience any feedback for being so visibly Jewish. My answer is: yes. Occasionally, Christians come up to me and say “shalom.” I say “shalom” back.

Well, this week, I have a more interesting story to tell.

Last Saturday night, Laurence and I were on our way back from a friend’s birthday lip synch. (Yes, in my time off, I do competitively mime to Nicki Minaj wearing a space suit and kitten heels.)

We were heading into Vauxhall Station. A group of men in their early 20s were dancing around, holding hands, and reaching out their hands for others to join them.

It will probably not surprise you to hear that I joined in. The boys cheered.

Within moments of joining them, I realised I might have made a terrible mistake. The man whose hand I was holding was, in fact, wearing a Palestine football shirt. They were all speaking Arabic. A taller man noticed my kippah and said to the others “hu yehudi.” I know what this means in Arabic, because you say it the same way in Hebrew: he’s Jewish.

And I thought, well, it’s basically the same language, I’ll try talking with them in Hebrew. Friends, these gentlemen did not, in fact, speak Hebrew. Their English was pretty stilted too.

Right next to us, a fist fight broke out between two white guys.

We all fumbled awkwardly, and tried to communicate across a language barrier. The tension became palpable. It was just me and Laurence and a whole group of Palestinian men.

I asked: “where are you from?”

“We are from Gaza,” the one who had been holding my hand said. “Do you support the government?”

I said: “of course not.”

The man said: “Really?”

I said: “Yes.”

The men cheered, and resumed dancing. I got on my train back to Ditton.

There was no time to explain that the Israeli government wasn’t actually my government at all, but my answer would have been the same whichever government he was talking about.

I am under no illusion that this story could have ended differently. But, as it is, the story ended with dancing in the streets of London, and everybody walking away with their dignity intact.

Now, I may have been the first visibly Jewish person these men had met who was not wearing a military uniform. And perhaps now, with the freedom of London, they will get the chance to learn more about who Jews are.

And perhaps I will go away and actually do my Arabic homework so that I can have a better quality conversation. At least, in the future, I won’t default to Hebrew as a good enough alternative.

I think we tend to imagine that tolerance is the true harmony of everyone fully understanding each other; living side by side; eating in the same restaurants; celebrating and grieving together.

I still believe that true peace will come, when everyone has full equality, and nobody has any more need for conflict.

But, most of the time, life is not like that.

As long as there is inequality, those with less will want what those with more have; and those who have more power will exert it over those with less. Until we all have everything we need, there will be conflict for the power and possessions we lack.

Tolerance, in our society, is the decision to set grudges aside, to suspend prejudice, and to just let each other go on with life. It is the decision of the stronger to spare the weaker. It is a choice to ignore stock characters and old grievances for the sake of everyone getting on with their day.

It is not easy passivity, but a conscious choice to accept the world as it is. Sometimes, that is painful.

So it is with Joseph and his brothers.

Consider all the array of feelings Joseph must have held when he first saw his brothers. The last time he had encountered them, they had thrown him in a pit, then sold him at a cheap price to travelling merchants.

Do you think he was in the mood for forgiving?

And what about his brothers? They are now in abject poverty. They have travelled miles on foot to escape famine in their homeland. And they have to prostrate themselves and beg before a foreign king in a language they do not understand.

The powerful and the powerless have switched places; the resources are now all in Joseph’s hands.

Joseph doesn’t just shrug his shoulders and get over it. Instead, he decides to test his brothers and bring his entire estranged family to Egypt.

Joseph hides a silver cup in his brother Benjamin’s satchel and uses the supposed theft as a pretext to hold him hostage. Joseph announces to his family that he is going to keep their youngest brother as a slave, making them relive what they did to him.

At the moment when our parashah ends, we don’t actually know how the story is going to pan out. We, who have heard this story many times, are already aware that the brothers will repent and offer their lives for Benjamin’s. We know that Joseph will announce himself and forgive his siblings.

But, for this week, we are suspended in the tests of Joseph and his brothers.

The Joseph narrative is the longest part of the Book of Genesis, not least because of the extensive detail given to Jacob’s sons’ journey back and forth between the two countries, and the lengthy description of how Joseph examines his brothers’ hearts.

This story is, in fact, repeated almost exactly in the Quran. Surah Yusuf is a lengthy narrative in the formative text of Islam. Within the chapter itself, the Quran says that it is repeating the words of previous prophets and is confirming the prior revelation of the Torah.

But there is a key difference between the Torah’s version and the Quran’s. In the Islamic retelling, Benjamin is in on the ruse from the start. Joseph reveals himself to Benjamin before hiding the cup and tells him to go along with the ploy.

Perhaps the goal here is to make Joseph seem more righteous. That is, indeed, what many of our midrash do when they retell Torah narratives. They iron out biblical figures’ imperfections.

But, if you look at the texts of the stories side by side, the parallel verse in the Torah reveals something more interesting. In our recension, rather than revealing himself, Joseph runs off to his room and cries.

The Quran’s version, then, makes the story less painful. It glosses over how heart-wrenching and difficult this process is of forgiving and letting go.

There is a lesson here for us. We all want to jump ahead to the part of the story where everyone is friends again and loves each other. We all want to fast forward to the point in history where there is lasting peace and harmony.

But, the Torah tells us, you have to stay in the feelings. You have to live in the mess for a while.

As Jews in Britain, we are forever doing a delicate dance of interfaith relations, while plagued by trauma. As the whole world seems ever more oriented towards intolerance and tribalism, we still need to show up to shared spaces with our best faces and our best expectations of others. We need to set aside prejudices for the sake of a better society.

And that is hard. So don’t gloss over the tears. Don’t hide the pain away in another room. Let us be honest with ourselves and each other that the task of building a multicultural society is tough.

But, while we hold the challenge, remember that we do still know how this story ends. We know that we are heading towards an ultimate conclusion of liberty and equality. God has a plan for the world. And it will end with true peace.

One day, all people will embrace one another as members of the human family. One day, we will all weep together over the years wasted on war. One day, without fear, we will all dance unabashedly in the streets.

May that time come soon and last forever.

Amen.

Alexander Ivanov, The Silver Goblet is Found in Benjamin’s Sack

israel · sermon · social justice

We must drag the sun over the horizon

levtaylor


In Judaism, night comes before day. The day begins when the sun sets and the first stars appear in the sky.

This has been the way of the world since its mythic origins.

In the beginning, there was endless darkness. Then God said “let there be light.” And there was light.

And God separated the light from the darkness. The first distinction. And the darkness God called night, and the brightness God called day.

And there was evening, and there was morning. A first day.

Having created nights and days, God populated them with matter. At the end of each period of creation, there was evening, then there was morning. Each day.

During the sixth day, God created human beings and placed them in a garden. Then there was evening.

The first human beings had never seen an evening before. They did not know that the sun could set. They did not know the difference between night and day.

What must it have been like for the first sentient beings to realise who they were and who their Creator was, only to see the sun disappear? How frightened they must have been!

Perhaps they called out to God and asked for guidance. But that evening marked the beginning of the seventh day, and God was resting. God did not answer them.

Our Talmud teaches that when the first human beings saw their first nightfall, they fell into despair. Adam feared that the sun had disappeared as punishment for his sin. He worried that the world would now return to the endless darkness with which it began.

Eve cried. She fasted and prayed. Adam and Eve wrapped their arms around each other and held their bodies close as they prepared for the end.

Then the dawn broke.

And they realised: this is the way of the world.

The world began in autumn, at the festival of Rosh Hashanah.

When the first winter nights crept in, and they saw the length of days decreasing, they panicked once more. Now in exile from Eden, they had no way of knowing what would come next.

Again, they fasted, wept, and prayed.

Then the spring came, and brought with it longer days.

And they realised: this is the way of the world.

We begin with darkness. Light follows.

There is evening. Then the dawn comes.

There is winter. And it always becomes spring.

This is the way of the world.

We can observe this dialectic in almost all matters of life. Our suffering is followed by joy. Our struggles are replaced by triumphs.

Some days feel like endless nights, but the dawn is always waiting for those who are patient for it. So we hold each other close and wait for the sun to rise.

This is the way of the world.

These trends appear, too, in history. There will be periods of decline followed by ages of plenty. There will be economic busts, and there will be booms. There will be war, but peace will come.

This is the way of the world.

But human history is different from all other natural rules. The order of night and day and the structure of the seasons was predetermined before we arrived on this earth.

History, on the other hand, is made by human beings. History is the one area of life where we can, collectively, choose what happens. Our actions determine whether we live in the winter of war or bountiful springtime.

So, it is incumbent upon us not just to hold each other and wait for morning, but to drag the sun over the horizon and demand that day appears.

In 1969, “Shir LaShalom,” became the anthem of the Israeli peace movement. In the final stanza of the song, we sing out: “Do not say the day will come. Bring on the day.”

Just as people make the active decision to go to war, peace is also a choice. Those who want an end to war cannot just wait in the darkness.

We sang Shir LaShalom in this sanctuary on Simchat Torah. I felt, and I think many of you did too, truly jubilant at the news of ceasefire and hostage release. After two years, we could finally see a possible end to the suffering.

My jubilation was tinged with pain as I remembered the last time that Shir LaShalom was chanted throughout synagogues.

That was in 1995. Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat had shaken hands on the lawn of the White House. They had agreed to the Oslo Accords.

While already imperfect and tentative, the Oslo Accords of three decades ago were the last major effort at a comprehensive peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians. They paved the way for mutual recognition and the possibility of two states.

High on the dream of peace, Rabin joined Peace Now protesters in Tel Aviv Square and sang along to Shir LaShalom. With the lyrics still in his breast pocket, Rabin headed to the car park. There, a far right fundamentalist waited for the Prime Minister, and shot him dead.

There is still a copy of Shir LaShalom, stained with Rabin’s blood. There are those words, covered in the blood of a man who tried to make peace: do not say the day will come, bring on the day.

Yes, we must indeed bring on the day. But there are some who want to return us to endless night.

An Israeli fanatic shot dead Rabin to stop his day from dawning.

When Hamas saw the prospect of the Oslo Accords creating two states, they launched suicide bombing attacks on public transport. They took control of Gaza and promised endless war.

The Israeli far right wrested control over the offices of government. They promised there would be no Palestinian state and that every effort to achieve one would be swiftly repressed.

It saddens me that, even in the brief interludes since Rabin’s assassination when Netanyahu’s party has not had control over the legislature, few Israeli politicians have attempted to break from their logic of violence and occupation as the only answer to the Palestinian national question. 

Daybreak always comes, but there are those who prolong the darkness, and we have been living through a terribly long night. The call to bring on the day from earlier generations has been eclipsed by militarism and fear.

We have endless war. This is the way of the world.

But this is the way of the world as some have chosen to make it. And we can make the world another way.

On Monday, we saw the first thing in a long while that looked like a sun beam.

We celebrated the hostages coming home and an end to the bombing of Gaza. It was the first reminder we have had in a long time that peace is possible, and war is a choice.

We are able to bring on the day.

Now we must create even more sunshine.

But we have become so accustomed to darkness that the dawn may even be painful.

In daylight, we will have to look hard at the choices that made this war so prolonged and destructive. We will likely see that peace was possible much earlier and that more hostages might have come back alive sooner. We may ask searching questions about the morality of this war.

In the light of day, we will have to look hard at what Israel has become, and what the spiritual state of our Jewish institutions now is.

But we must bring on the day. We cannot return to the long-lasting night of war, murder, zealotry, and extremism. We cannot let anything that happened in the last two years ever happen again.

Throughout this dark night, our Progressive Jewish counterparts in the Israeli Reform Movement have been pushing hard for serious change.

They have been protesting outside Netanyahu’s house every Saturday evening. They have been joining Palestinian olive farmers in the West Bank to protect them from settlers. They have been demanding a real overhaul of the deep, structural causes of this century-long conflict.

My month with Rabbis for Human Rights before I began here helped positively frame my rabbinate. Although the picture on the ground is bleak, it made me realise just how many people are desperately trying to create daylight in the darkest contexts.

I hope that we will not fall into complacency now because the hostages are home. The task of peace building is more pressing than ever.

I want us to draw ever closer to those who are defending human rights and trying to bring about a future based on dignity and equality. I hope that, next year, we can bring a full delegation of Progressive Jews to support the West Bank olive harvest. I hope this can be a moment where we truly embrace the cause of peace.

This is not the seventh evening of creation. It is not the time to rest. We cannot leave our colleagues alone in this struggle now.

This is the first dawn of a new morning.

It is an opportunity for real accountability. It is a chance for meaningful peace building. It is the first crack of sunshine, and we have to drag out every possible ray of light to join it.

We must wrest the light into the darkness.

We cannot say the day will come.

We must bring on the day.

high holy days · sermon

The world is governed by compassion

levtaylor

“Hineni he’ani mi-ma’as – behold, I am poor in deeds and lacking in merit. Nevertheless, I come trembling in the presence of You, O God, to plead on behalf of Your people Israel who sent me, although I am neither fit nor worthy of the task. You who examine hearts, be my guide, and accept my prayer. Treat these words as if they were spoken by one more righteous than me. For you listen to prayers and delight in repentance. Blessed are You, O God, who hears our prayers.”

In the synagogues of medieval Europe, the service leader used to begin with this public prayer of atonement, openly acknowledging their own inadequacy. 

In the Liberal world, we have been shaped by the Victorian attitude that eschewed public vulnerability. So, instead, this prayer is given out to rabbis to read privately to themselves. 

The days when we had to pretend to be perfectly put-together are over. In our age, we recognise that openly sharing our insecurities builds a more emotionally authentic culture, where people are better at handling their feelings.

So, this year, I not only quietly recite this prayer in my office, but share it with you openly.

This year, these words feel more profound than usual. 

This is a sensitive time, and I know how fragile so many hearts are. 

In the build-up to these Days of Repentance, an American Masorti rabbi, Joshua Gruenberg, wrote:

“Rabbis stand before their congregations with trembling hearts. We know that every word matters. We know that words can wound and words can heal. And we know that in a climate like this one, the margin for error feels impossibly thin. […] The only way we will find wholeness is if we grant each other the space to be imperfect, the courage to be vulnerable, and the grace to be human.”

As this year came to an end, I thought back on the conversations I’d had with you over my time here. I thought back over some of the pain and worry you had felt, and realised just how much stress some members of the community were feeling. 

Words can, indeed, hurt and heal. They matter. I want to honour that, by reflecting on the pain some of you have expressed.

We come here because we want to be together, in our fullness, with all our wounds and trauma, so that we can move towards healing. 

To that end, let’s consider how we can approach anxious and hurting people with compassion. That is, after all, what we all need from each other.

The world has changed greatly in the last few years. So much feels more precarious. 

Ten thousand people rallied at Tommy Robinson’s far right march in London to a speech by Elon Musk telling the crowds to get ready for violence against immigrants. The news from Israel and Gaza, and Russia and Ukraine, and Sudan and Ethiopia, keeps rolling in, feeling ever worse. 

For me – and I know for some of you – the horrors of October 7th and the ensuing assault on Gaza marked a major turning point. In many of us, these events have brought up trauma responses we didn’t even know we had.

Since then, so much has unfolded that is out of our hands. This can feel painful when your instinct is to find solutions and assume control.

We have to accept our own limitations. I sometimes recite to myself the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Those of us within this room do not have the power to bring about peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. We cannot get the hostages back or stop the starvation of Gaza.

That feels hard. If it were up to the members of this synagogue I have no doubt that the whole world could live in peace. 

I am certain that we could indeed solve the country’s problems and fix our hurting planet. But nobody seems to be letting us do that, outside of setting the world to rights over kiddush.

But that does not mean we have no power at all. 

The one area where we have real power is in our own homes and our own community. 

And, there, we have the power to decide how much compassion we feel.

Even in the face of our own trauma and fear, we can choose to feel compassion for others.

Perhaps you can relate: in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, I felt intensely isolated. I felt a void where compassion ought to be.

I felt, among Jews, my own people, that I struggled to find many people who felt compassion for the people in Gaza. 

On the left, as much my natural home as the synagogue, I struggled to find many people who felt compassion for Israelis. 

Initially, I narrowed my circle to a small niche of Progressive Jews with left-wing opinions. It was comfortable and reassuring, when what I needed was to feel safe. 

But if I was looking for compassion in the world, I needed to bring it into the world. I needed to model it. 

Not just with the people who I knew felt like I did, but also with those whom I assumed were miles away from me. 

It is easy to love humanity in general, and fine to pity people on TV. It is much harder to love the people nearest you when you feel so distant, or to understand them when it feels like they are living in a different world. 

How could I look for compassion elsewhere if it wasn’t in my own heart? 

How can we look for compassion if we do not feel it?

You can’t expect others to extend compassion to strangers when you can’t even have conversations with the people you already know.

I felt then – I still feel – that, perhaps, if we can feel compassion in our synagogues, and extend it out towards the world, and that others could extend their compassion too, then it might cause something to shift.  

And, ultimately, that shift might make this world, which is harsh and unkind, a little better than it has been.

The message of compassion is already explicit in the liturgy of our Yom Kippur service. 

God’s name is Compassion. 

We read the refrain that repeats throughout the High Holy Days: “Adonai, adonai, el rachum vechanun… a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in compassion and faithfulness…”

It is a beautiful invocation of God’s qualities to help us through Yom Kippur. 

The verses come from Moses’s second acsent of Mount Sinai, when he takes the new set of the Ten Commandments in his hand. As Moses walks down the mountain, God comes with him.

As Moses chants out these declarations of God’s mercy, it is as if Moses has truly understood what kind of God he is dealing with.

He learns how the world really works. He sees that it is governed by compassion.

Just before coming to get the new tablets of the law, Moses had seen the Israelites worshipping a golden calf, and smashed up the first set of the Ten Commandments. 

These are great sins: idol worship and wanton destruction are strictly prohibited. The Israelites have been wayward. Moses has been angry. 

Still, God, abounding in compassion and faithfulness, says: “Try it again. Have another go.”

In the Talmud, Rabbi Yohanan teaches that whenever the Jewish people sin, they should think back to this verse.

In the repetition of “Adonai, Adonai,” the Jews should understand that God is their Loving Creator before a person sins, and God is their Loving Creator after a person sins and performs repentance.

God is always willing to give people another chance.

In the same section of Talmud, we learn that, in the moment when Moses recited those words, God made a covenant based on thirteen attributes of mercy. It was a promise that God would always hear our prayers.

Later, in the Middle Ages, the French commentator Rashi elucidated what these thirteen attributes were.

In each word, says Rashi, is a reflection of the type of compassion God feels. 

God is slow to anger to give you a chance to repent.

God is abundant in mercy, even with those who don’t deserve it.

God remembers good deeds even for a thousand years.

Even when we hear that God holds grudges for three and four generations, Rashi says that this only refers to people who maintain the evil ways of their ancestors. If they repent, all can be forgiven of them too.

This is how one truly maximises compassion.

So, let us be compassionate.

Let us maximise how much compassion we feel.

Our own community and our own homes are small places where we can truly practise compassion in a world where it seems so sorely lacking.

Last week, in her Rosh Hashanah address, Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, of the American Reform movement’s flagship synagogue in New York, reflected on how the division in the world was creating strife even within her synagogue.

She urged her congregation to practise compassion, saying:

“It now seems that any expression of compassion for “the other side” is regarded with suspicion – as disloyal, or even threatening. Is our capacity for empathy so finite? Are our hearts so small, that if we increase our empathy for certain people, that we need to reduce it for others — until one day, we conclude: that ‘other side’ is not deserving of any compassion?”

Here, the “other side” could be so many different groups in this increasingly polarised and hostile world. 

We all want to feel like people understand our own side, but struggle to extend our understanding the other way.

You don’t have to agree with people to love them. You just have to be curious, and try to understand them.

Some days, we may be capable of less compassion than others. On those days, let’s give ourselves grace, take time out, and remember how flawed we all are.

Even on our worst days, we can always try to understand each other. We can hold our own hearts while making them permeable enough to feel others’ pain too.

When people challenge us, let’s look for the best in them. Imagine their best intentions, and try to consider what problems they might be facing.

We are, all of us, flawed and temperamental. We all ask good grace of others, and we can all give it in return.

This year, let’s try to feel compassion for the people in our own families and homes.

Let’s try to find compassion for the people in our neighbourhoods. Perhaps we will shift something in them.

Let’s find compassion for the people in our community, so that we can hold each other, in our diversity, through these trying times. 

And, as much as we can, let’s try to find compassion for everyone. 

It won’t change the news cycle, but it might change you. And you might change others. 

It is a small contribution to this world, but it is a mighty one. 

It is the best that we can do.

Behold, I am poor in deeds and lacking in merit. Nevertheless, I come trembling in the presence of the One who hears the prayers of Israel. O God, You listen to prayers and delight in repentance. Blessed are You, O God, who hears our prayers.

Amen.

Kol Nidrei 5786, Kingston Liberal Synagogue

israel · sermon · torah

This is Torah. This is its reward.

levtaylor

Loving others will not make you popular.

Pursuing peace will not make you safe.

Choosing life will not protect you from death.

But, if you do not love others, if you do not seek peace, if you do not choose life, who will you be?

When Moses ascended Sinai, he found God adding flourishes to the Torah’s letters, which only Rabbi Akiva would ever be able to read. Moses asked to see what became of Akiva.

The Holy One showed Moses how the Romans flayed Rabbi Akiva’s skin as they martyred him, then sold his flesh in their marketplace.

Moses threw his hands in the air and demanded: “Is this Torah, and this its reward?”

“Silence,” said God. “Such is My will.”

This is Torah. This is its reward.

Vivian Silver was murdered by Hamas on October 7th.

Vivian Silver founded the Israeli peace organisation, Women Wage Peace. She worked for human rights groups like Btzelem and ALLMEP. She lived on Kibbutz Beeri, near the Gaza border, where she engaged in solidarity work with Bedouins, Gazans, and Palestinian construction workers.

Three days before October 7th, she organised a march of 1500 Israeli and Palestinian women for peace.

On October 7th 2023, terrorists broke into her home and murdered her.

Even as she hid from the militants, she gave an interview to Israeli radio, where she said the very fact that she was under attack showed the need for a peace deal.

A year later, her son, Yonatan Zeigen, eulogised her. He said:

“Being a peace activist is not something to save you from being killed in war. It’s something to prevent a war from happening. And to create a reality where war is not an option.”

Silver’s love of others did not make her popular.

Pursuing peace did not make her safe.

Choosing life did not protect her from death.

But it made her fully human.

This is Torah. This is its reward.

On Monday evening, as my community sat down to listen to poetry in preparation for Tisha B’Av, I received a text to say that a Palestinian peace activist I knew had been murdered.

Awdah Hathaleen was shot in the chest in his home.

Awdah lived in the village of Umm al-Khair in the south Hebron hills. I visited his village twice last year with Rabbis for Human Rights. The second time, I stayed in the bunk beds adjacent to his home. In the morning, he brought breakfast to me and the other solidarity activists.

A delegation of Progressive rabbis met Awdah earlier this year when they went to the West Bank with Yachad.

Awdah was an English teacher. He was born in the south Hebron hills and had known tanks, guns and occupation all his life. He worked with Israelis to protect his home and build a peaceful future.

This did not make him popular. For some Palestinians in neighbouring villages, this meant that he was engaged in normalisation with the Israeli occupier.

Indeed, after the Oscar-winning movie about his village, No Other Land, gained international recognition, the BDS movement called to boycott it, because it showed Israelis and Palestinians working together.

Awdah chose the path of non-violence. Even after his uncle, Haj Suleiman, was crushed by an Israeli police tow truck; yes, even after his elder was cruelly murdered; and yes, even after those who killed his uncle were never brought to justice; after all that, he still chose the peaceful path.

For the settlers who wanted to capture his home and ethnically cleanse his village, his activism made him a target.

He and his family never knew safety.

Awdah wrote for 972 Magazine, a joint Israeli-Palestinian publication, about the struggles of raising his traumatised son in this village under attack. He wrote: “He even knows some of the settlers by name. Sometimes I tell him that they went to jail; I’m lying, but I want to make him feel safe.”

He was lying. Settlers who carry out murders do not go to jail.

The man who murdered Awdah was called Yinon Levi. He was filmed doing it. Still, the only person who has been taken into custody by the Israeli police is Awdah’s cousin, Eid, a fellow non-violent activist.

Yinon Levi was already subject to EU sanctions and recognised internationally as a terrorist. But he is protected by government minister, Ben Gvir, who has dedicated his life to helping settlers get away with murder. Even before the far right coalition took power, plenty of settlers had been able to perpetrate atrocities with impunity.

Loving others did not make Awdah popular.

Pursuing peace did not make him safe.

Choosing life did not protect him from death.

No; you will not be better off if you do the right thing.

But God does not ask us to live lives that are comfortable.

There is no commandment in the Torah that we should be popular.

All of us, regardless of religion, are placed on this earth to be God’s stewards; to uphold God’s most sacred commandments; that we must choose life, pursue peace; seek justice; and love the stranger.

This is Torah. This is its reward.

This sacred work comes with no promises. But who else would you want to be?

It is a charge often laid against woolly moralists like me that we do not really get how militants like Hamas think; that we just cannot understand the mentality of the settlers.

That is true. I do not want to think like them. I do not want to become like them.

Who will we be if we let our hearts become warped and set our minds to cruelty?

Loving others will not make you popular. But it will make you loving. And pursuing peace will make you peaceful. And seeking justice will make you just. And that is what your God asks of you.

We are approaching Tisha B’Av, when we recall every catastrophe that befell our people. If you believe that peace is possible and that these assaults on basic humanity are wrong, you can add another disaster to the roster. On Monday, Awdah was murdered.

Yes, a Muslim murdered by a Jew is a tragedy for us all.

A man who was committed to non-violence was shot in the chest by a settler, leaving behind 3 children. He was 31.

Do not give in to cynicism or try to calculate what you might gain for kindness. This world has no guarantees. And we know nothing about the hereafter.

You do what is right because it is right. Because if you do not, who will you be?

This is Torah. This is its reward.

May God have mercy on us all.

diary · israel

The maddening well of war

levtaylor

There is a story – I cannot remember where I heard it – about a village where the well was cursed by an angry magician. Anyone who drank from its water immediately became mad. They became violent and hostile. They were certain of things that could not possibly be true – but when anyone challenged them on their delusions – they flew into a furious rage.

The royals of this town had their own water source. When they tried to talk to their subjects, they were the ones who were deemed mad. They could not govern, because all the villagers, having drunk from the well, saw their leaders as insane. So, the king and his family went down to the cursed well and drank from it themselves, so that they, too, would be afflicted with insanity, but at least able to retain their power.

In the immediate weeks after October 7th, this story repeated in my mind relentlessly.

When Jews met each other, they immediately scoped each other out. We asked: how are you feeling? Where are you on this?

But the question we were really asking was: have you drunk from the well?

Have you thrown yourself into the grip of the madness that demands war?

At a friend’s house, another Jewish religious leader, having made sure everyone in the room had not swallowed the poisoned water, said: “don’t worry, this happens sometimes. People get angry and frightened and turn to violence, but… it passes. They will calm down.”

So we hunkered down and waited. Waited for the effects of the maddening well of war to wear off.

A ceasefire and a hostage deal. Those were the words coming from everyone who had not drunk from the well.

“One day,” we said, “everyone will say they always opposed this.”

“And, when they do, we will not begrudge them for it. We will just be happy to have the killing over.”

I wondered when the day would come. When people would finally come to their senses and say that enough was enough.

Within days, the death toll in Gaza exceeded any number of any previous war. Then, in weeks, it reached into the thousands. Then tens of thousands. It seemed that the numbers dead only made the mad more ravenous.

And we, who said it should stop, were ever more out of sync with our society; ever more criminally insane.

A ceasefire and a hostage deal. It was a basic humanitarian position that guaranteed everyone got to live. It would bring the captives home and stop the massacre of Gaza.

There were moments, even, when they demonstrated what could be. Temporary ceasefires with limited hostage releases. But, even then, the drive to war was insatiable.

I have asked myself many searching questions over the last eighteen months. Increasingly, the one that pains me is: what happens the day after this all ends, when my people finally awaken from their stupor? What will Jews and Judaism have become when the effects of the well wear off and everyone finally sees what happened?

There have been so many needless deaths. So much unfathomable destruction. So many dreams have been killed.

Now, I think that people are finally shaking the madness. I feel I can talk more openly, and I see others doing the same.

I feel ashamed. I feel like I did not do enough to prevent this. I wish I had been louder and bolder from the start. I wish I had been prepared for this, so I wouldn’t be shocked by it. I regret having turned away from watching at times, unable to bear the pain.

And you? How are you feeling now? Where are you on this?

I have a feeling that, after a year and a half, something is finally changing. Now it seems like the ripple of peace may become an anti-war wave. Maybe now the cleansing waters of truth will finally come and dilute all the curses of the well.

If you are one of the people who feels like your heart is beginning to turn, you are not alone.

I do not begrudge you. Trauma does that. Anger and fear can break you, and you don’t know how and when it will happen.

I am just happy that the killing may finally come to an end.

Now there is even more trauma to heal. Now there is even more peace to pursue.

We have been waiting for you. We are still waiting for you.

But the well is still there.

The war machine is still waiting for you, too.

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.

israel · sermon · theology · torah

Why does God not just stop the war?

levtaylor

“How many more signs do you need that God is not there?”

This was the question one congregant asked last week when I went round for a cup of tea. In fact, a few of you have asked similar things recently.

None of you was asking out of arrogance or triviality, but expressing a real despair at the state of the world.  The ongoing war, which has claimed far too many lives, is enough to incite a crisis of faith in even the most devout believers.

Why will God not just stop the war? It is a serious question, and one that deserves a serious answer.

How desperate are we all to see a ceasefire, to see Gaza rebuilt, to see the hostages returned home, to know that the Israelis will no longer hide in bomb shelters, to know that no more people will be rushed to hospitals, to see an end to all the violence and bloodshed?

And it goes deeper than that. How much do we all wish that none of this had ever happened; that there was no war for us to wish to end?

In our anguish at the cruelty, we cry out to the Heavens. There is no answer from On High, so we wonder if there is Anyone there listening at all.

I will not be so presumptuous as to imagine I have the answers. I do not know the nature of God and can give no convincing proof of how our Creator lives in this world. In fact, if I found anyone who thought they did, I would consider them a charlatan.

The great 15th Century Sephardi rabbi, Yosef Albo, said: “If I knew God, I would be God.” We are, all of us, animals scrambling in the dark, as we try to make sense of the mystery.

But we come to synagogue so that we can scramble in the dark together, feeling that if we unpick the mystery in community, we will get further, and develop better ideas. Allow me, then, to share some of my own thinking, so that we can be in that conversation together.

How many more signs do you need that God is not there?

In our Torah, there were times when God did indeed show signs of presence. In the early chapters of Genesis, God walks through the Garden of Eden in the cool of day. At the exodus from Egypt, God came with signs and wonders and an outstretched arm. As the Israelites wandered in the desert, God appeared as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.

This is the kind of sign that we might want from God now, then.

At a hostel in Jerusalem, I met an evangelical Christian who was absolutely convinced that everything happening in the Middle East was already foretold by the Bible and that God was about to rain down hell on the Palestinians and then all the Jews would finally accept Jesus.

Suffice to say I do not think such a God would be worthy of worship.

And I highly doubt this is the kind of divine intervention any of us would embrace.

Is there an alternative way we could wish for a sign?

Some great indication that Someone greater than us is involved in the story and cares about human suffering. Perhaps just a gentle hand to reassure us everything will be OK.

Deep down, most of us know that no such sign will come.

God did, however, send another sign in the Torah. A sign, perhaps, not to look for signs. A sign that God was not going to get involved, no matter how desperate it all seemed.

The rainbow.

At the start of the story of Noah, the world was filled with violence. Everyone had turned to war – nation against nation – all against all. The entire planet was rife with destruction.

God slammed down on the reset button. God sent a flood so catastrophic that it killed everyone bar one family. The flood was like a thorough system cleanse, designed to strip the earth back to its original state and allow Noah to rebuild.

Then, as soon as the rains had stopped and the land had returned, God looked at the devastation, and swore: “never again.”

God promised Noah: “I will maintain My covenant with you: never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

God hung a rainbow in the sky, and told Noah it was a symbol that there would be no more divine interventions:

“When I bring clouds over the earth, and the bow appears in the clouds, I will remember My covenant between Me and you and every living creature among all flesh, so that the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.”


The rainbow, then, is a sign that God is there, and a sign that God will not get involved. Even if humanity goes back to being as violent as it was in the Generation of the Flood, God is not going to step in and destroy as at the start.

If the rainbow is a sign that God will not come and strike people down when the world is in crisis, it is also a sign of the other half of the covenant. Human beings must now be God’s hands on earth. We have to be the ones to do what we wish God would.

For Jews in the rabbinic period, every rainbow was a reminder to them that God would not act, so they had to take the initiative. They would look up at the sky and say “blessed is God, who remembers the covenant.”

According to the Jerusalem Talmud, no rainbow was seen during the entire lifetime of Rabbi Shimeon bar Yochai. He was so righteous and brought so many others to do good deeds that there was no need to be reminded any more of the covenant. Bar Yochai was one who acted so much like he was God’s actor on earth that even God did not need to send reminders.

The idea that human beings had to be God’s hands became even more important in the post-Holocaust world. Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits escaped from Germany in 1939 and went on to become one of the leading Orthodox rabbis of the 20th Century. For him, a traditional religious Jew, grappling with the enormity of the Shoah, he had to find a way to deal with God’s seeming absence at Auschwitz.

So, Rabbi Berkovits said, the problem lay not with God’s inaction, but with humanity’s. In his book, Faith After the Holocaust, Berkovits wrote:


“Since history is man’s responsibility, one would, in fact, expect [God] to hide, to be silent, while man is going about his God-given task. Responsibility requires freedom, but God’s convincing presence would undermine the freedom of human decision. God hides in human responsibility and human freedom.”

What Berkovits is saying is that it might be in God’s nature to prevent catastrophe, but it would undermine human nature if God did. In order that people can realise our freedom and our full potential, God has to stand back.

It seems that, in almost every generation, Jews are asking why God does not intervene to stop violence.

In each generation, we find an answer: God does not intervene, because that’s our job.

It’s not that any of these classical sources doubt God’s existence or question God’s presence. They just don’t think it is God’s responsibility to act. It is ours.

There is no flood coming to wipe out war or lightning bolt coming from the sky to strike down the wrongdoers.

We began with a question.

How many more signs do you need that God is not there?

Perhaps we can now reframe it positively.

How many more signs do you need that you must act?

God is not going to stop war. So we have to do our bit to bring it to an end.

Even in our small corner of the world, we have to do all we can to push for peace and justice.

So, on the days when you find yourself looking for the sign, you be the sign.

You need to be the sign to somebody else that there is hope in this world.

You need to be the sign that peace is possible.

You need to be the rainbow.

Shabbat shalom.

diary · israel

Who are my people?

levtaylor

At a time when the community is suffering, one may not say: “I will go home, and eat, and drink, and be at peace in my soul.” – Talmud Taanit 11a

I began studying this sugya in the immediate aftermath of October 7th and the subsequent war on Gaza. It was evident that people were seriously suffering, and I felt that I could not just sit at home and be at peace in my soul.

No matter where I went, the war was on my mind. I thought that, if I came here, at least my mind and body would be more aligned.

But the sugya prompted a question I did not expect: who is my community? The question of suffering and how to respond seemed already self-answered, but whose suffering ought to concern me? Who were ‘my people’?

Perhaps there was a time when ‘the community’ was just the neighbourhood. Those who lived in close proximity shared in times of trouble. The people on my street might well share with me in some suffering – missed bin collections and sewage in the river – but this suffering was specific.

I found, sometimes, I would talk to my neighbours and realise they were not obsessing about Gaza. They maybe had not thought about it for weeks. They were my community, but they also were far away from it.

In that sense, the Jews were my community. No matter their politics, every Jew was stuck in the same place of fear. Over different things, with different prescriptions, but certainly with the same neurosis.

Yet, in the weeks following October 7th, I heard people in “my” community call to flatten Gaza, and watched Netanyahu’s government heed them. I was sent the most bellicose memes, hungry for war. Most chillingly, a one sentence text from a person I previously respected: “you can’t give human rights to people who aren’t human.” How could I say these were my people? How could I claim them as my community when our values were so misaligned?

At a Friday night dinner, a friend suggested thet our community should be all oppressed people of the world. Jews, he said, were not an ethnic category, but a political one, and anyone who suffered under the burden of injustice was one of us.

Another gently chided him: “it’s too easy to only associate ourselves with victims. It stops us thinking about all the complex ways we are complicit in oppression too,” she said. “We can be both, and we need to face the problems in our own community.”

I wondered if I would find my people here among the international left, with those striving against occupation and war. There are people whom I love greatly here. I see them, beaten down in body and spirit, weary from fighting against a world that may destroy them, and destroy all they care about.

I am here to join them in struggle, but when this month ends, I know that I will go back to my own home in England, and tend to my own garden, and eat the foods I am used to, and drink that diluted squash you can only get in British supermarkets.

But my soul will not be at peace.

Perhaps all of these people are my people. Perhaps none of them are. But I will suffer on with them anyway.

Whoever they are, I know my soul will not be at peace while any of them are hurting.

And anyone who suffers with the community has achieved merit and will live to see the consolation of the community.

diary · israel

Bring them home now

levtaylor

In the morning, at Shabbat services, a young woman got up at the end to announce that last week was the birthday of a girl she had taught as a youth leader. Her friends all met up in Tel Aviv to celebrate it. She wasn’t there.

Her name is Naama Levy. She was taken hostage on October 7th. The images of her capture are burned into my brain. If you have not seen them, please exercise extreme caution before you look them up.

After Shabbat services, I went down to see friends in Rechavya. There, all the posters are displayed for a guy called Hersh Goldberg-Polin. He is an ultra for the local football team, HaPoel Yerushalayim.

Hersh was abducted on October 7th after his arm was blown off by a grenade. His mother has been campaigning tirelessly for diplomatic measures to get her son home safe.

At my friend’s house, she asks: “my mum says that back home in America “bring them home” is a pro-war slogan? Can that be true?”

“Yes, it is in Britain too. It’s been quite the adjustment seeing it here.”

“But who is it directed at?”

“I don’t know, I guess they’re petitioning Hamas.”

“I don’t understand though: how can people want the hostages home and be pro-war?”

“The hostages are the pretext for all the attacks on Gaza.”

“But they are not in Gaza for the hostages!” her husband insists.

I know. They know. Everyone here knows. I wish people in Britain knew too.

When Shabbat ended and the first stars appeared in the sky, I joined the protests to bring the hostages home.

Everyone had banners calling for an end to war and an end to occupation. Supporters of Hersh’s mum handed out stickers with the number of days he has been held captive.

At the end, legendary Israeli peacenik David Grossman gave a speech as police charged at demonstrators.

Where is their support from Diaspora Jews? I wish I could hear my own community’s voices raised like these in Jerusalem- against war.

diary · israel

They are destroying the world on top of our heads

levtaylor

We are looking at a video of a little girl, learning to dance, waving to her daddy.

He has not seen her since October.

Gone is the joy of our hearts; our dancing has turned into mourning.

Yesterday, I spent the day with paperless workers from Gaza in the West Bank. After October 7th, all of the workers from Gaza who had passed the security checks had their work permits revoked. If they stayed at their postings in Israel, they would be taken to detention centres, where they would be beaten. If they returned to Gaza, they may well die. They fled to the West Bank, where they are now in hiding.

One of them is showing me a video of his daughter learning a traditional Palestinian dance. “The war has destroyed everything beautiful,” he says.

These men tell me their stories, and I hear them intermingled with every other story of disaster I have ever heard. I was not prepared for the scale of despair I would feel. I hear their words, and I hear the prophet Jeremiah echoing back lamentations.

I am the strong man who has seen oppression under the totem of his overflowing rage.

They are still not safe in the West Bank, either. A few days ago, the Israeli army marched up and down their stairs at night. If they had found them, they would have deported them to Gaza or imprisoned them. They weren’t actually looking for anyone, though. The army calls it “making our presence known.” Breaking the Silence reports it as a common intimidation tactic.

“We haven’t left the house in three days. It just feels too scary to go outside.”

He has walled me in and I cannot escape; he is weighed me down with chains.

They are catching up on the situation, sharing news from Gaza City, Khan Younis, Nuseirat, Rafah. We watch a video of an old lady woken up in the night by soldiers, who set their dog on her.

Streams of water fall from my eyes over the destruction of my people.

We hear stories of families back home. They cannot eat properly. People have only eaten tinned food. There are no fresh vegetables. The water is dirty. People are smoking leaves from trees. Everything is so expensive. People will fight each other for scraps.

Children beg for bread, but not a scrap for them.

Now they are getting sick. Skin diseases. Insects that eat up arms. Sores and spots appearing on the face. Why are my child’s lips fuzzy red? Why can’t my mother get up out of bed? They are all so sick in mind and body.

Our skin glows like an oven with the fever of famine.

They have been chased around by bombs to every corner of the beseiged area of Gaza. Now, one man’s entire family are staying in a sweaty fabric tent on a cousin’s land. Everything is destroyed. Where there are buildings, they cram twenty people into tiny rooms. It is already so very hot here.

Swifter were our pursuers than the eagles of the sky. In the mountains they pursued us and in the wilderness they ambushed us.

Back in London, there were all kinds of debates about ideology and tactics and strategies. Now, in front of me, there are real human beings, who just want to go home and see their children. “They are destroying the world on top of our heads.”

My life is bereft of peace. I have forgotten what happiness is.

I ask about their childhoods in Gaza. “We had a lot of adventures. We had days at the beach. We endured wars and all kinds of problems but never anything like this. Our celebrations were so huge. A wedding lasts a week and thousands of people come from all round. I married my best friend’s sister and he married mine and we were all going to grow up together…”

He has ravaged the booth like a garden; he has slaughtered his sanctuary.

“I don’t want a big house any more. I just want the war to be over. I just want to see my daughters again.”