Tag: god

judaism · sermon

Are Jews a religion or a race?

levtaylor

At present, Reform and Liberal Judaism are deciding whether to become a single movement. You will be able to vote on this, and I encourage you to do so. 

As the procedural questions unfold, it is hard to imagine how strongly felt the ideological divisions were between the two movements, even forty years ago. I believe, however, that those differences are now almost entirely within the movements, rather than between them. 

On some fronts, we will find unity, and on others, differences will remain.

There is one point, however, which, to me, is so intrinsic to Liberal thought that I could not stand it to see it lost. That is: there is no such thing as a Jewish race.

There is no such thing as Jewish blood, as a Jewish womb, as Jewish DNA, or as Jewish features.

It is precisely because our Liberal tradition teaches that there is no Jewish race that we have been able to fully embrace converts and, from the very beginning, accepted patrilineal Jews. 

These ideas were critical stumbling-blocks to merger attempts in previous decades. Reform Judaism would not accept patrilineal Jews, and insisted that converts went and were reborn from the “Jewish womb” of a mikvah.

In the past few years, Reform Judaism has come to accept patrilineal Jews, and Liberal Judaism has come to accept that the mikvah can be a meaningful ritual.

Yet not everyone has come to accept the underlying ideology that made these matters so central to Liberal Judaism. The originators of our movement saw Judaism as a religious community, where Jewishness was communicated socially, not “biologically.”

That is no longer a sectarian issue. There are Reform rabbis who ardently agree on this point; and there are Liberals who, instead of denying any racial Jewishness, focus on being “inclusive” about who belongs.

Rejecting the idea of a Jewish race was absolutely foundational to early Liberal thinkers. Regardless of whatever new ideas emerge as rabbis come together, I intend to hold doggedly to their understanding of Jewishness.

Israel Mattuck was the first Liberal rabbi in the UK. In 1911, he was recruited by Lily Montagu and Claude Montefiore from America to lead the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St John’s Wood. He was a prolific preacher, ideologue, and scholar.

At the LJS, Dr Mattuck taught a Confirmation class, for 16-year-olds affirming their faith. He later took his notes and turned them into a book, entitled Essentials of Liberal Judaism so that everyone would know what he thought it meant to be a Jew.

Jews, he insisted, were not a race, but spanned the globe. What made people  Jewish was that they held Jewish ideas, followed a Jewish way of life, and kept Jewish observances. 

He wrote: “In spite of all the differences among them, the Jews of the world constitute a people; but they are a people in a different sense from any other people. Their unity is based on religion and history.”

Editing in 1947, Mattuck was eager to avoid any misconceptions. He insisted that this history was not an unbroken tale of misery and persecution, but one of great spiritual achievements. We were, he said, the first witnesses to God’s unity through the revelation at Sinai. Our history was that of the prophets, the priests, the scholars, the mystics, and all those who sought to reach closer to religious truth. 

Mattuck was clear that you could not be Jewish in anything more than name if you rested on race. You want to be a Jew? Walk humbly with God, taught Rabbi Mattuck from the prophet Micah. 

There is no race – only a demand to live right.

Now, you may be thinking, this all sounds a lot like the Critical Race Theory that Mr Trump so zealously warned us about. Indeed it is! And the American President has good reason to fear people taking a critical approach to race.

In the USA, races were invented to divide and rule people so that the wealthy whites could maintain their plantation economy. Poor whites were incentivised to enforce and uphold slavery by being given some privileges on the basis of their skin colour.

As a result, they felt they could identify with the rich whites, even though they had very little in common with them socially or economically. Using racism, they demeaned and humiliated the stolen Africans so that they would not have the confidence to challenge their own condition.

That is why race-critical scholars in America have the slogan: “race exists because of racism, not the other way round.”

In Race: A Theological Account, the African-American scholar of religion J. Kameron Carter shows how racist ideology had earlier roots – in how European Christians treated Jews. 

To create a system where Jews were second-class citizens, they needed an ideology where Jews were defective human beings. So they made up stories about Jewish bodies, Jewish blood, Jewish noses and hair – even Jewish horns – to justify their system of oppression. It was a nasty division for the purposes of exploitation.

This was exactly why Mattuck was so resistant to talk of Jews as a race, and so adamant about our religion.

In 1939, Mattuck wrote his first major work, What are the Jews?, which was a harsh rebuttal, not only to Jewish racial nationalism, but to racial nationalism as such.

We belong everywhere, he asserted. In the Age of Enlightenment, all citizenship should be communicated on civic grounds, never on ethnic or religious ones. 

A Jew, he felt, could be a nationalist, but they must first adhere to the religious calling. That is: they could be Jewish and happen to have nationalist leanings, but it could not define them as Jewish. 

Nevertheless, he thought that, by properly conceiving of ourselves as a religion, we would be more likely drawn to universal ethics. We would measure our Jewishness by our conduct towards others and our connection with our God, rather than by the supposed quality of our genetic make-up. We could pull apart the stories that separated people and build common bonds.

Racial thinking, thought Mattuck, must be resisted.

Race is a horrible and divisive lie. Religion is a beautiful and unifying truth.

I want to be open about why this idea is hard for others to hold.

It is more demanding. It says that nobody can take their Jewishness for granted, and must work for it. It means that you cannot be “born” Jewish, but have to live Jewish. It sets high ethical and practical demands on anyone who claims Jewishness.

When we say that there is no Jewish race, we also mean that somebody with an unbroken chain of matrilineal descent but without any Jewish upbringing or identity must also learn how to be Jewish, in the same way as a patrilineal Jew would. Everyone has to properly engage with the traditions and practices. Contrary to the doctrine of inclusion, this makes us more exclusive than the Orthodox.

Denying the existence of a Jewish race also has profound implications for how we engage with Israel. If we are a religious community, the demand to achieve a Jewish ethnic majority – still less racial supremacy – is not just grotesque. It is absurd. The measure of whether the state was sufficiently Jewish would not be by how many Jews there were, but by how well it upheld Jewish moral values.

Yet it is precisely because of this more demanding approach to Jewishness that I will keep holding onto it. The call that we be moral in our dealings, conscientious in our practices, and connected with our traditions is a far better one than the narrow pull of racial nationalism. 

Through such a religion, we may connect to every other Jew in a spirit of solidarity.

Through religion, we may connect to all of humanity, by recognising our shared Creator.

Through religion, we may draw nearer to the mystery that is our God.

Through religion, we may live out the words of our haftarah: “For you who revere My Name, the sunbeams of righteousness will rise, with healing in their wings. Then you will go forth and skip about like calves from the stall.”

Shabbat shalom.

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.

high holy days · sermon

What did Jonah do inside the whale?

levtaylor

A simple Jew prays to God on Yom Kippur, and says “Ribon shel olamim, ruler of the Universe, I do not have much to repent of. Not compared to you. Unlike you, O God, I have not taken away children from their parents; I have not taken away parents from their children; I have not allowed disease and starvation and war. Compared to you, Holy One, I have been a saint. So, this year, I won’t be repenting. It’s your turn to repent.”

The rabbi asks him, “what were you praying there?” 

He tells her all that he’s said.

She says: “You fool! You let God off too easy. You should have told God to bring about the Redemption as well.” 

I don’t know about you, but I haven’t felt much like repenting this year. After all, what have I done, compared to the enormity of wrongs perpetrated? 

I haven’t killed anyone or waged any wars. I haven’t robbed anyone or embezzled any funds. To the best of my knowledge, I haven’t brazenly lied or misled. I certainly haven’t intentionally hurt anyone. I’m just not in the same league as the great sinners of our time.

And I don’t much feel like growing this year, either. Other years, I have enjoyed the stillness of Yom Kippur for reflection on being better. But I don’t feel like doing it this year. 

Sure, I’m grateful for turning off my phone so I don’t have to look at all the bad news, but that’s more about self-care than self-improvement. I’m more interested in switching off from the world than in switching onto myself. 

I mean, really, do I have to move? The world is changing so much, and not for the better. Shouldn’t I be allowed, as a one-off, to stop constantly evolving and just be as I am for a bit?

You know who else just wanted to stay still? 

Jonah.

I think Jonah knew exactly how I am feeling now. 

He was perfectly alright where he was, before God got involved and told him he needed to go and sort out all the problems of the world. 

Who was Jonah in the scheme of things? He certainly was not a big player in the wrongs of the world. All of Nineveh’s sins were enormous and happening miles away. Why should he have to change himself?

So, when God called on Jonah to get up, that was already asking too much. 

Jonah ran away to Tarshish. He shouted at God: “haven’t you got bigger fish to fry?” 

God said: “you want to see a big fish? I’ll give you a big fish!”

One came along and swallowed him whole.

Now, all of the story before is about Jonah not wanting to move and all of the story after is about what happened after God moved him. 

What happened in the whale, however, should really interest us. 

This year, I feel like I’m in the whale. I am sitting in a puddle from which I feel like I cannot budge. I am stuck here and have no idea how to get out. All around me, the waves are crashing down and there’s nothing I can do to stop them.

(A pedant will point out it’s not actually a whale. Technically, it’s a big fish, and the idea of it being a whale came later. But, technically, I’m not actually inside a whale at all, I’m in a synagogue, so I’m going to stick with the idea of the whale because it feels evocative.)

Now, I’m not even on the level of Jonah. My task is not nearly as big and I am not even inside a literal whale. So Jonah should be a good starting-place for my feelings of stubbornness and obstinacy.

What did Jonah do inside that whale? He despaired. He observed. He prayed. He sang. He learnt. And, eventually, he repented and grew.

So, this Yom Kippur, let’s engage with the whale. Let’s focus just on the three days Jonah spent inside the belly. Maybe we can learn from Jonah what to do when everything feels too overwhelming but we know we have to change anyway.

The second chapter of the book of Jonah is not narrative-form, like the rest of the book. Only the first verse, where Jonah gets swallowed by the whale, and the last verse, where the whale spits Jonah back out again, follow a linear storyline. 

The rest of the chapter, only eleven verses long, reads more like a poem. It is a song, where each verses contains a parallel structure. It would fit just as well in the Book of Psalms, where there are similar supplications to God. 

If the second chapter of Jonah is a journey, it is only a spiritual one. Jonah himself remains completely static, stuck in the belly of the beast. 

His soul, on the other hand, begins in the depths of despair, goes through questioning and defeat, recognises the glory of God, and finally comes out committed to getting out there, thanking God, making offerings, and taking part in the deliverance.

This feels like the most important chapter to us, then. We are just sitting and standing in the same space. But we are expecting our souls to move. 

I am feeling stuck in a world I cannot change, but I know I have to get somewhere else spiritually. We can’t just sit around here and hope to become better people. We know it needs work. But without a narrative, how do we know what to do?

Well, in the spaces left by the absence of narrative, the rabbis come up with their own stories. Pirkei deRabbi Eliezer is a collection of creative writing, compiled over many generations, that retells the biblical stories. These are our midrash, and in this rabbinic fan-fiction, we get a story to go with everything that Jonah says. 

From these stories, we might come up with our own meanings of what we should be doing here.

The first thing Jonah does is acknowledge where he is. He accepts that he is in the belly of the fish.

The midrash gives us a grandiose interpretation of what that looked like. It was like entering into the great synagogue: an enormous, echoey chamber. The fish’s eyes were two great windows, so that Jonah could see what was going on underwater. Inside the fish was a giant pearl, which illuminated the belly and shone out towards the sea. With a lamp and windows, Jonah had a clear vision of where he was.

What can we learn from this? We learn that we need to be honest with ourselves about where we are. The world is a bit of a mess right now, and there’s no point putting on a happy face and pretending everything is OK. Equally, we are pretty safe here. We in this room are not under attack, and the risk we would be is very low. 

So, start by taking stock of reality. Where am I? I’m in a synagogue, sitting on a comfy chair, with my feet planted on firm ground. I can see the lights of the room and smell that familiar sweet must of this religious space. 

But it’s not enough to just say where we are. We need to say how we feel. That’s what Jonah does next. 

He says: “I am crying out to God from my narrow-straits, please answer me.” Jonah says, “I am crying out from the belly of Hell, may God hear my voice.”

The midrash says, that’s exactly where the whale took him. It plunged him right down into the depths and showed him the gates to Hell. 

So, we need to do the same. We need to ask ourselves how we are really feeling. Be honest about the frustrations and worries and anger we feel. 

Next, Jonah finds a way to relate what is going on to what has gone before. In the depths of the ocean, Jonah says, he sees the billows and waves and reeds. 

According to the midrash, this is because the whale took him on a tour, not just of the sea, but of Jewish history. The whale showed Jonah the foundations of the earth, deep on the ocean-floor, and reminded him that God had made the world. The fish took him to the Sea of Reeds, and showed him the flora of the spot where the Israelites had crossed out of Egypt.

Faced with adversity, we have to remember that it has happened before. Once, there was nothing, then the world came into being. Once, we were slaves, but then we were freed. Wars and persecutions and empires have all come before and, somehow, our people have survived.

We, as individuals, have also survived challenges before. How recent was the Covid pandemic? We can take pride in our own resilience at getting through such troubles before.

Knowing what had gone before, Jonah was able to feel confident that he could face what was to come. Jonah cries out: “You saved my life from the very pits, O Eternal One my God!”

The midrash says that this came when the whale took Jonah down to meet the great sea-monster of the deep, Leviathan. Jonah told that nautical dragon: “You may think you are going to swallow me up, but I carry the promise of Abraham, and I know that one day, when God chooses, it will be you who gets eaten by the righteous.”

Like Jonah, let’s look at the problems ahead of us, and say: “I have faith. I can face you.”

Next, Jonah reflects back on what he has learned. He notices: “Those who cling onto empty folly forsake their own welfare.” He had been willing to stay where he was, clinging onto old vanities, but he did so at the expense of his own soul.

So, he proclaims, instead: “I, with loud thanksgiving, will sacrifice to You, God.”

We, too, can be grateful for what we have, and take on this next year in service of our Creator.

That is the journey on which Jonah took his soul, and it is where I hope to take mine over this Day of Repentance. 

I said I wanted to stay still, but stillness is not inactivity. The Rambam understood that serious thinking was the most active you could be. It connects you directly to that Most Active Intellect: the thinking, living God. 

In stillness, you can nurture who you are. Jonah was stuck in an underwater pit, but that was when he got most energised. It was when he really engaged in the audit of his soul.

This year, I have spoken to friends and community members and witnessed them say things they normally would never. People who would ordinarily be very liberal, turn racist. People who are normally very peaceful, justifying violence. People who are normally pretty discerning, regurgitating conspiracy theories. People who are usually nuanced, turn to absolutist thinking.

I am not saying this with any judgement. I say it because I’ve done it too.

And when I meet this now, I try to say to myself: I know you are scared and angry, and while you are feeling scared and angry, you can hold all those feelings. You are inside the whale. 

But one day, please God, you will be released from this whale, and you will have to reckon with who you became there. 

Take care of your soul. It is a precious gift. Don’t let it become too cynical or warped by the horrors that surround it.

That’s my goal for this Yom Kippur: to hold my soul with gentleness, and ask it to be porous and empathic and kind.

I am here, inside the whale. I cannot change what whale I am inside. I cannot stop the waves from crashing or remake the world so it is less scary. 

I can only change what I can change. And what I can change, in this moment, on this Yom Kippur, is myself. I just have to deal with who I am here and now. 

So, let’s be like Jonah. Let’s accept the whale we’re in, and, yes, despair, but also observe, pray, sing, learn, repent. 

And it may be that, when we finally get blown out from that great fish’s blowhole, we might still be better people than when we got swallowed up.

Amen.

high holy days · liturgy · sermon

Do not build a prison in your heart

levtaylor

Imagine a courtroom. Picture those big wooden panels that line the grand hall of a traditional Crown court. The deep reds of the carpets. The judge sitting loftily on a bench,  at the front, draped in black gowns, donning that full-bottomed wig. And all the lawyers surrounding you, speaking Latin and legalese, bewildering you with their words. 

You have not been here before, but, suddenly, you find your life depends on your correct participation. You will have spent extra time ironing your clothes and polishing your shoes. You may have spent weeks picking out an outfit. Perhaps you already know what you would wear. 

How does it feel to stand trial here? Is this somewhere you want to be? From here, how much do you think you will learn and grow? And do you think there might be a better place where you could improve yourself?

This is the metaphor we are often given for Yom Kippur. The Heavenly court and the earthly one. The trial of our souls. The God of Justice, who sits in judgement over us.

We beg for clemency:

סלח לנו – forgive us

We announce our expectation of a just verdict:

סלחתי כדברך – I have forgiven according to your plea.1

We rejoice in the judgement:

אשרי נשוי פשע כסוי חטאה – happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sins are pardoned.2

This is the courtroom of our hearts.

C. S. Lewis, the great 20th Century English author, famed for his Chronicles of Narnia, picked up on this aspect of our thinking. When he wasn’t writing beloved children’s novels, Lewis dabbled in biblical studies as a lay Anglican theologian. 

C. S. Lewis writes: “The ancient Jews, like [Christians], think of God’s judgement in terms of an earthly court of justice. The difference is that the Christian pictures the case to be tried as a criminal case with himself in the dock; the Jew pictures it as a civil case with himself as plaintiff (sic). The one hopes for acquittal; the other for a resounding triumph with heavy damages.”3

Now, Lewis is no antisemite. In fact, he repudiated the hatred of Jews, long before it became fashionable to do so.4 He is eager to point out that, at his time of writing, immediately after the Second World War, the Christian had much to atone for, and the Jew had much to charge against God. 

In many ways, he has us down. We do indeed take this as an opportunity to bring all our charges against God, and to vent our grievances against the injustice of the universe. Lewis is talking about ancient Israelite religion; the religion  of Scripture. 

Lewis would, I’m sure, willingly acknowledge that we modern Jews also share much in common with modern Christians, in terms of our admissions of guilt and prayers for pardon.

C. S. Lewis has astutely picked up that we see all this as a trial. 

But where he errs, I think, is in his understanding of what an ancient Jewish court was. The tribunal of our ancestors looked nothing like the judge’s dock of today. 

A metaphor that worked so well for poets and liturgists many centuries ago can become quite damaging when it is used with the projection of our criminal justice system.

Where today, a court can dole out sentences of imprisonment, the goal of the ancient court was about restitution and social harmony.

Where today, the court expects to find a person innocent or guilty, the ancient court sought to make sure everyone felt like they had a place in their community.

The focus of our sacred writings is to create a society based on compassion, community accountability, and healing.

When we rethink what justice looked like for the authors of our Torah, concepts of trials, pardons, and sentences start to look very different. By seeing the court through ancient eyes, we can re-imagine the trial as a process of growth and healing.

We get mere glimpses of what the earliest courts might have been. In the book of Judges, the archetypal ideal of the judge is Deborah, the prophetess. Her court is a base underneath palm trees in the hill country. We receive an image of her sitting there, while Israelites come up to have their disputes decided.5 Her court was one where people came to negotiate and be heard, but there is no indication they came to be punished. This was in the time of the Judges, the earliest of Israelite civilisations.

Later, however, ancient Israel developed a class system and a monarchy. With a state system came power and punishments. In the book of Samuel, King David pursues after the city of Avel Beit-Maacah, threatening capital punishment against everyone who rebels against him. Here, an unnamed elder-woman comes out. She admonishes the general, saying: “we are among the peaceful and faithful of Israel, will you destroy God’s inheritance?” She rebukes them with a reminder of the old system – that, before there were kings, people used to come and talk out their issues in the city. The generals agree to spare the city, providing they can enact punishment against one ringleader.6

From these two stories, we can garner an insight into what justice may have looked like in the earliest part of the biblical period. The first thing we notice is that women were leaders. This, then, may be a justice system from before patriarchal power was cemented. We also do not detect any hint of crime and punishment. Instead, the courts seem more like public cafes, where experienced negotiators help community members talk through their problems. If this is correct, we are looking at a very different type of court.

Still, courts did develop in ancient Israel, but not like those of today, nor even  of the surrounding empires. In our narratives, most of the times that characters are imprisoned, it is outside of the Land of Israel, by a Pagan power, and unjustly.

Joseph is sent to prison in Egypt on trumped-up charges without any due process.7 Samson the warrior is sent to toil at grinding grain in the jailhouse by the Philistines, not because he has done anything wrong, but as a prisoner of war.8 When the Babylonian rulers send Daniel to the Lion’s Den, it is because of xenophobic laws that stop him practising Judaism.9

Our Scripture treats prisons as something foreign, where good people are sent for bad reasons.

Even when we do see examples of prisons in Israel, they are always treated by the Torah’s authors with contempt. Three of our prophets are sent to prison: Jeremiah;10 Micaiah;11 and Hanani.12  In every single case, this is a monarch warehousing a prophet because they are speaking truth to power. In the Torah’s view of justice, it is hard to see how prisons could have any meaningful role at all.

That does not mean this was a world without punishment. Scripture presents exile, flogging, and even death as options for what might constitute justice in the ancient world.13

Yet, based on our commentaries and traditions, we have the impression that such penalties were implemented only in the most egregious cases. What somebody had to do was so heinous that the death penalty would almost never actually occur.14 

In the Mishnah, we read, the court that puts to death one person in seven years is bloodthirsty. Rabbi Eleazar Ben Azariah takes it even further, saying, ‘One person in seventy years.’ Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Akiva say, ‘If we had been in the Sanhedrin, no one would have ever been put to death.’15

What kind of justice system was this then? No prisons, no death penalty? No patriarchy, no punishments? 

The ancient court sounds more like people just sitting around having a chat.

What if it were? What if, instead of biblical justice being all about burning and smiting, it was mostly about negotiating and feeling? How would that change how we look at our tradition? How would it change how we approach our relationship with God?

Perhaps I am over-egging how different the biblical court was. If so, bear with me. 

I am well aware of how terrible some of the Torah’s punishments were. I am also conscious that what I am describing is so outside of our reality as to make it feel fictitious. If the world of restorative justice I am describing never really existed, please at least indulge me in entertaining the possibility that it could. 

We are not, in this room, coming up with a proposal for how to govern Britain. We are just asking what metaphors work when we think about how to hold our own hearts on Yom Kippur. For me, the metaphor of court cases has proven really problematic, and I am looking to explore new ones with you.

The problem of the courtroom metaphor initially struck me quite suddenly. I was talking with my therapist about an issue that I felt kept coming up in my own behaviours. I said: “I’ve got another case to talk about…”

He looked around the room and said “you know you’re not on trial here, right?” 

I think I had expected, on some level, that, through counselling, I could be acquitted or found guilty for all my past deeds and thought patterns. 

I had built a prison in my own heart, to which I could sentence the parts of myself  I liked least. I had conjured up a jury in my head, who would judge all my actions, according to the standards I had set myself. According to the standards I imagined God has set for me.

What was I doing? The point of therapy is not punishment or exoneration. It’s to learn and grow, and find ways of being better in the life I actually have. The point is not to condemn or discard my negative traits or past mistakes. The point is to work towards loving all of myself and learning from all I have done.

Perhaps you can relate to this. Have you imagined how you might punish others, or cast them into our prison in your heart? Maybe you even seek to punish people or get them out of your life. Maybe you, too, have hoped there were parts of yourself you could lock away.

We cannot apply the carceral system to our spirit. When we are doing wrong or feeling guilty, we must be free to look ourselves in the eye, and change willingly.

Is this not what God wants from us, after all? That we make amends, grow, become better. That we embrace ourselves and each other. That we turn from our ways and live. 

If, then, we are in a court with God, we should make it one where we are in conversation with a loving elder, not facing a law lord who seeks to punish and acquit.

So, let us imagine a new court. It is not the court we thought into existence at the start of this sermon. It is a very ancient one, where our ancestors went thousands of years ago. Deborah’s court. 

You are in the dusty scrubland of Canaan, and a few yards away you can see an oasis. People are gathering around it to fetch water. They are laughing and catching up and telling stories. They are feeding their livestock: sheep, goats, donkeys, camels. 

At the edge of this well is a row of palm trees, and the tribal leaders sit, drinking sweet tea. You cannot go to prison. There is no prison. You cannot be acquitted, because nobody thinks you are guilty. You are just a person, a member of the community, looking for a way through a problem. The goal will be to find a solution that benefits everyone, and that sees maximum spiritual growth. 

When you come away from this court, you can say “happy is the one whose sin is forgiven.” You don’t mean that you are relieved because you thought you were in trouble. You mean you are jubilant, because you are at peace with yourself, your community, and your God.

Let this be your court. Let this be the place you take your heart over Yom Kippur. 

Come before God, not as a claimant nor a defendant, but as a congregant, seeking growth.

And thank God that there is no prison in your heart; only an opportunity for ongoing healing and change.

May this be where we judge ourselves. May this be where we judge others. 

And let us say: amen.

  1. Birkat Selichot ↩︎
  2. Psalms 32:1 ↩︎
  3. CS Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms ↩︎
  4. PH Brazier, A Hebraic Inkling: C. S. Lewis on Judaism and the Jews ↩︎
  5. Judges 4:5 ↩︎
  6. II Samuel 20 ↩︎
  7. Genesis 28 ↩︎
  8. Judges 16 ↩︎
  9. Daniel 6 ↩︎
  10. Jeremiah 37 ↩︎
  11. I Kings 19 ↩︎
  12. II Chronicles 16 ↩︎
  13. Ezra 7:25-26 ↩︎
  14. eg. BT Sanhedrin 71a ↩︎
  15. M Makkot 1:10 ↩︎
sermon · torah

Love is at the heart of the Torah

levtaylor

Within the Torah, there are 5 books.

There are 54 parshiyot.

There are 5,888 verses.

There are 79,980 Hebrew words.

And there are 304,805 letters.

The counting of numbers, verses and spaces actually has a great importance in the Jewish tradition. The word in Hebrew for a scribe is the same as for one who counts (sofer). The Talmud says this is because the original sages spent their time counting the numbers and letters of scrolls.

Now, sometimes, the Talmud is making stuff up, or telling a joke that has been lost to the ages, but in this case, they are almost certainly right. 

Counting words, numbers and verses was a great way to ensure that the Torah was standardised, so there could be no differences between the authoritative versions of God’s Word.

Counting words helps us to work out important things about Torah. For example, the Talmud tells us, you can count from the beginning to the end and find the word that is slap bang in the middle of the scroll.

If you do it by letter, says the Babylonian Talmud, you get the word “belly” – gachon. Yes, right in the middle of our Torah is a big tummy, just like on a human being. It fits, doesn’t it? How much of Jewish culture is about food?

If you do it word by word, then the middle two words of the whole Torah are “darosh darash” – search and search; diligently enquire. The middle words of the Torah are all about asking and questioning. How fitting! We love asking, and searching for answers. Aren’t we always questioning, adding questions to our questions? (Well, are we?)

And, if you do it by verse, then you get to the central verse of the whole Torah, Leviticus 13:33. Here it is, the great lesson our Scripture has been trying to tell us: “then the man or woman must shave themselves, except for the affected area, and the priest is to keep them isolated for another seven days.”

I’ve got nothing. 

Now, the Babylonian Talmud has given us some good answers about the middle of the Torah. But none of them are quite what we’re looking for.

Because if you hold the Torah in your hands, if you physically roll the Torah looking for a midpoint, you’d think it would be here, in this week’s parasha. 

Spatially, the centre of the Torah is here, at the start of Kedoshim. Here, at the beginning of Leviticus 19, God tells the Israelites: “you shall be a holy people, for I, God, am holy.”

And if you follow this bit of Torah down to its centre, right to the middle here, you get the central commandment of the Holiness Code: “love your neighbour as yourself.”

That, says the Palestinian Talmud, is the real heart of the Torah. Never mind all the numbers and counting. If what you are looking for is what the Torah is all about, follow your heart, and get to its intuitive core.

There, in the Yerushalmi, Rabbi Akiva says: “the greatest principle of the Torah is to love your neighbour as yourself.” He says, if someone is going astray, this is the only thing you have to remind them of to get them back on track. 

You may have heard this before. In the Christian Gospel of Mark, Jesus says that the greatest principle of Torah is to love your neighbour as yourself. He might have got more famous than Rabbi Akiva, but he certainly wasn’t the saying’s originator. That’s just a nice Jewish boy, repeating a good rabbinic tradition. 

In fact, anyone who spends more than a minute with our religious tradition will understand that to be so. Love is at the heart of the Torah. That is all any of it is about. 

Yes, the belly matters, of course it does. But it’s not just because we need food to keep ourselves sustained. It’s not even because food is a way of transmitting culture. It’s because through feeding and being fed we can show how much we love each other. These kiddishes, these Friday night dinners, the old recipes handed down, the food bank drives, the seder meals, the cakes we bake… they are all simply different ways of demonstrating love.

And yes, the searching and inquiring matters too. But it’s not just because we’re a learned and inquisitive people. It’s not just because we put such high value on education and on our Scriptures. It’s because it is a beautiful way of showing each other how much we love each other. You sit with a child to tell them a Bible story. You sit with a friend to study some text together. You sit with an elder to ask them for their wisdom. Sure, on some level, you’re just trying to get information. But, at core, these are ways of showing love.

Hold that in mind, then, as we return to the central verse of Torah, in the purity laws given to priests: “they must shave themselves, except for the infected area…”

No, sorry, I’ve still got nothing.

A few weeks ago, I sat down here with the Council to talk about what it would look like to come here as a rabbi, and whether we might be a match. One of your leaders asked: “what do you think are the core functions of the synagogue?” I gave my honest answer: “The synagogue only really serves one purpose, and that is to get people to love each other more.”

We come together, in these Jewish communities, to show that we love others as we love ourselves. We will eat together and learn together and pray together because we love each other. 

We will love each other enough to be with each other in our most trying moments of death, disease and disaster. We will love each other enough to celebrate together through our joys of life, and build each other up.

This synagogue already has a wonderful reputation. Rene, your outgoing rabbi, has told me how much he loves you. Charley, your former rabbi, and now movement head, has shared the same. Danny, your rabbi emeritus, has told me how lucky I am to be coming here. 

I meet adults who grew up here, friends of Laurence, and they share what a warm and wonderful place this is. In just the few meetings I have had with members, I can already see why.

The love that people speak of you all with is because of the love that you put out and create in your community.

I cannot wait to start here, and to love you as much as everyone else does.

וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ

May you love your neighbour as you love yourself.

Shabbat shalom.

sermon · theology · torah

Purity or justice

levtaylor

Let’s start with a question.

An adult couple accidentally runs over their pet dog. Instead of burying their dog in the garden, they take it home, cook it in the oven, and eat it. 

Here’s the question: have they done something immoral? 

Most of us will have an instinctive reaction: what that couple did was disgusting. We will feel some revulsion.

But whether you think it was morally wrong will depend on how you see the world. It will depend on your moral palate. 

This was what was demonstrated by the Jewish-American psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, in his popular book, The Righteous Mind.

Haidt sought to find out why it was that caring, rational people could disagree so profoundly on moral issues. Why was it that America was so polarised? There, people fight furiously about issues like abortion, guns, and marriage, as if they have no common moral basis.

Haidt argues that we do have shared moral bases, but our morality is more like the palate on our tongue. “We humans all have the same five taste receptors, but we don’t all like the same foods,” he says. “It’s the same for moral judgments.”

We have, he says, five main taste receptors: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. 

If you are an educated person who lives in an urban area of a Western capitalist country, you are likely to feel that the couple who ate their dog did not do anything morally wrong. You’ll be disgusted, sure, but you might not think that they violated any kind of moral rule.

That’s because, in these cultures, people have a moral palate that puts a big emphasis on ethics of care and harm. If nobody was hurt, then there’s nothing immoral.

If, however, you live in a close-knit community of farmers, you are far more likely to say that the couple who ate their dog did do something morally wrong. That’s because those cultures have a strong sense of sanctity and taboo.

Both of these systems are ways to help people get on with each other. In a busy metropolis like London, you need to be able to live and let live, because if you can’t tolerate diversity, society will fall apart. In a tribal farming community, like ancient Israel, you need to have strong social norms to protect people.

Both these impulses – care and sanctity – come from a deep, ancient social need. 

Since humanity’s beginning, our survival has depended on our ability to care for our most vulnerable members. How would we have lasted a single generation if not for looking after the young, the old, and the vulnerable?

From the start of civilisation, we have also needed to be able to express disgust. It comes down to the most basic distinction between excrement and edibles. We need to tell each other: “this food is poisonous; this disease is contagious; this behaviour is dangerous…” Without clearly agreed boundaries and taboos, we would quickly perish.

It is worth holding these two tendencies in mind – care and sanctity; purity and justice – as we approach our readings for this week.

Our Torah portion goes into minute detail about how to do proper sacrifices, how to lay out the Temple, and who is supposed to do what in religious services. To us, the attention to detail might seem absurd.

But remember that this is part of a group of people’s moral palate. This is their sense of the sacred. Messing it up, from their point of view, would be ethically disastrous. It would be similar to eating the family pet. 

No wonder, then, that the prophet Ezekiel opens the haftarah by telling the Israelites “if they are ashamed of all they have done, make known to them the design of the temple.” Failure to get it right, says Ezekiel, is a serious sin.

There are two great moral impulses in Torah: justice and purity. This trend appears throughout the whole Scripture: contradictory, competing moral voices speak through our books.

The voice of justice tells us about care and compassion. It tells us about fairness and redistribution. The voice of justice charges us towards more equality and more freedom. Justice says that a society is only as strong as its weakest members.

The voice of purity tells us about how to keep holy things sacred. It tells us what the boundaries are on sex, so that we do not cross them. The voice of purity tells us not to eat octopus and not to mix linens. Purity makes sure everything is kept in its proper place, so that society can function, and people feel safe.

The voice of purity might feel less relevant to us today. We celebrate the prophets for their concern for the most vulnerable, because it fits so well with our ethics of care. We see ourselves in the narratives of the exodus because they chime with our moral intuitions about freedom from slavery. Laws on architecture… feel less like big moral issues.

That’s because what the big taboos and boundaries are can change a lot between time periods. 

When I was growing up, one of the big focuses of popular disgust was gay men. There was a long period when the media was seemingly obsessed over sex between men, especially in public toilets. This was the full gambit of taboos: waste and excrement; sex between the wrong sorts of people; and blurring the boundaries between public and private.

I think that is why some of the things that cause people moral disgust today just don’t bother me. I have had to push through a society telling me I was disgusting, and unlearn that contempt towards gay people. Now, the other sources of disgust just seem like passing fads. 

Knowing that has helped me understand where others are coming from.

I find Haidt’s ideas about moral palates really helpful for thinking through why sometimes it’s hard for people to agree. My ethical taste buds are highly attuned to care and fairness, but I don’t get much flavour from sanctity, and I can barely taste authority. 

Please do not think that one of these is left-wing and the other is right-wing. There are plenty of conservatives deeply motivated by wanting to make sure people are cared for and that distribution is just. There are just as many socialists who want to ensure the purity of the Marxist tradition, and to live in a world without contaminating ideas or contaminating people. 

What we morally feel is not just about ideology, but about all the factors in our cultures and upbringing that make us need to focus on certain values.

So, this is my advice. The next time you encounter someone that you really disagree with, try not to assume they are evil or weird. Think back, instead, to this Torah portion. Maybe what is just a building to you is somebody else’s Temple. Maybe what really triggers one person just doesn’t impact you.

Haidt’s goal, when he did this study, was to make it possible for people to talk to each other across divides. I don’t want us to become like America, where some issues cause massive wedges between neighbours. 

So let’s try listening to each other, and hearing each other’s worldviews.

Shabbat shalom.

israel · theology · torah

I believe that God is screaming.

levtaylor

A few weeks back, I attended a retreat with Christian colleagues. At some point, surprisingly enough, we got onto talking about God. I asked one of the priests a question: “do you believe God speaks to you?”

He looked slightly bewildered by the question. “Literally?” he asked. “No, not really.” He shook his head.

The answer seemed obvious. After all, we were liberals, at an interfaith event. That kind of talk is for fundamentalists. We’re all too rational for that. 

“Why?” he asked, turning back to me, “do you?”

“No,” I said, sheepishly. I don’t know why I felt so embarrassed. Of course, many believers see the voice of God mostly as a metaphor, or as a way of giving expression to moral intuition. I’m just not one of them. 

I do believe in a personal God, who has a loving relationship with every human being on earth. And I do talk to God. It’s not that I expect answers in any sense, but I do believe some One is listening: that prayers are more than idle words I recite to myself.

Perhaps my Christian colleague would have agreed with me if I’d put it in these terms, because finding vocabulary to talk about God is hard. Words like ‘literally’ and ‘metaphorically’ start to evaporate when you are dealing with faith.

I think, perhaps, the reason I gave a sheepish no – maybe even that I asked the question at all – was that I was having a mini-crisis of faith of my own. Ever since the war broke out, I have been praying differently, more fervently, desperately begging the Universe for peace. I have been hurling questions and recriminations into the void. I have been wondering… do I still believe in this God?

My personal relationship with God has carried me through some of the toughest times. When I have felt most lonely, God has been like a best friend. When I have hated myself, God has been like a lover. When I have needed direction, God has been a wise counsellor. I have looked to God in every time of disaster, and always found comfort in a loving Presence that reaches out and caresses from across a boundary of unknowability.

But now I listen for God’s voice. And all I can hear is screaming. 

As long as there have been people who believed in religious meaning, there have been those who questioned it. Usually, they were the same people. Abraham, Moses, Hannah, Kohelet, Job: they all had faith, and they all questioned it. They asked questions so that they could challenge their beliefs, and refine them. Lately, although less adequately than those prophets, I have been forced to do the same thing.

The first question we usually ask when confronted with crises of faith is “do I believe in God?” Fairly regularly, people come to me with conclusions one way or the other: “you should know, rabbi, I don’t believe…” or “you should know, I have a strong sense of belief…” My follow-up is always the same “… and what is it that you do (or don’t) believe in?”

For me, the answer is moral truth. When I talk about believing in God, what I am saying is that moral statements are not just opinions. When we say “murder is wrong” we are not just expressing a preference, like “my favourite flavour of ice cream is tutti-frutti.” We are describing a reality, no different to the claim that there are 24 hours in a day. We are describing something literally true.

I think that’s what God is. When we want to know why our feet are firmly on the ground, we give the shorthand answer of “gravity.” When we want to explain why objects in space interact with each other as they do, we use words like “attraction.” And when we want to express how we know that murder is wrong, we use the word “God.”

So, in feeling the great sense of angst I have had since the war began at the end of the High Holy Days, I am forced to return to the old questions. I am forced to ask whether I still think moral statements are true. I am forced to ask whether I still believe murder is wrong.

I do.

And that is why I believe that God is screaming.

What we talk about when we describe God is obviously more complicated: it is something infinite, and greater than we can put into words. That’s why words like “metaphor” and “literal” are so inadequate – because we are describing something more real than reality. So we have to find shortcuts. We have to find ways of talking about God in human language, to make sense of God on human terms. God is then “a tender parent”; “a loving shepherd”; “a righteous judge”; “a generous creator.” All of these are good descriptors, and all of them are incomplete.

I have been relying on a version of God that has worked for me for a while. I have imagined a sweet aunty or a gentle older friend. In times of loneliness, desperation and heartache, that image of a loving God has helped me get through the day. But that image doesn’t serve me now. I think if I used God for comfort in a time like this, I would be retreating from responsibility. God does not need me to feel safe now, but to shake me from illusions and complacency.

If God is the moral voice of the universe, that voice must be crying out in desperation.

In the last few months, 23,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israeli bombs. I am kept awake at night thinking about that. I imagine God, smothered by the rubble of obliterated hospitals, calling out. Like Abel, stricken by Cain, the voice of the blood is calling out from the ground (Gen 4:10). I imagine God, pulled from the wreckage, crying: “Thou shalt not kill. (Ex 20:13) Thou shalt not kill. (Deut 5:17)”

Those were the commandments given to the Jews, above all others. In some variations, it is the very first commandment, the one that holds the most power. And as Israel stands in the dock at the Hague, it is not only South Africa that places it on trial, but God too, who comes with the accusation: “did I not tell you: thou shalt not kill.”

Since the war began, Israeli settlers, with governmental support, have seized around 20 villages in the West Bank, displacing thousands of people, so that Jewish Israelis can expand their territory and claim others’ homes. I imagine God calling out from deserted towns, on the trail with refugee families, wailing “thou shalt not steal” (Ex 20:15), “thou shalt not steal” (Deut 5:19).

Netanyahu says, unabashedly, that he will push the Palestinians from Gaza and create a new border with Egypt. The Torah answers, in desperation: “thou shalt not move thy neighbour’s boundary” (Deut 19:14). Land theft is a sin.

Israeli soldiers enter Gaza and use Jewish symbols as weapons. They recite the Shema from the pulpits of mosques and place mezuzahs on Palestinian homes. They desecrate our religion. They destroy our faith. From the depths of history, God cries out “honour thy mother and thy father (Ex 20:12); honour thy mother and thy father (Deut 5:16).” Do not profane the faith of your ancestors with war crimes.

Worse still, the politicians claim that God gave them the right. That this is what the Torah intended. Can you not hear the scream of revulsion as God decries: “thou shalt not take My name in vain (Ex 20:7); thou shalt not take My name in vain (Deut 5:11).” This is what was intended: do not abuse God’s name for worthless pursuits like war, but elevate it for the purposes of peace. 

I believe that God is screaming. 

The commandments may once have been given as words of instruction or even as a love letter, but now they are a desperate plea. 

God says “I am the Eternal One thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage. Thou shalt have none other gods before me.”

No other gods. No state, no flag, no military, no leader, no ideology, no grudge, no border, nothing. None of these can ever be placed before God. None of them have any trump over God’s words.

God’s word says: “You shall not pollute the land in which you live; for blood pollutes the land, and no expiation can be made for the land, for the blood that is shed in it.” (Num 35:33)

So I believe I can hear God screaming: thou shalt not kill.

And I do not want to silence that voice. I want to amplify it. I want the Holy Torah to be heard now, more than ever. I hear God screaming, and I want to join in.

Thou shalt not kill.

Thou shalt not kill.

Thou shalt not kill.

judaism · sermon · torah

Perhaps we are not powerless

levtaylor

I have a horrible, on-off relationship with the news. I wouldn’t call it a love-hate relationship so much as a hate-hate relationship. 

There are days when I can do nothing but stare at it, soaking in every detail: climate collapse; species extinction; earthquakes: natural disasters; social breakdown; cost of living; refugees in detention centres; wars, wars, wars…

And then there are days when I switch off entirely. I become so overwhelmed I refuse to hear the radio or see current events on TV. I don’t look at any of the news apps or social media for fear that I’ll be reminded of all that is wrong in the world.

Whether endlessly scrolling through the horrors or studiously avoiding admitting they are there, I think I’ve become trapped in a cycle of feeling powerless. It’s all so big, and so frightening. 

But what can I do? I’m one person, seeing the world collapse, and all I can do is observe. 

If this feels at all relatable to you, perhaps you’ll find some comfort in this week’s Torah portion, as I did.

After all, didn’t Moses feel too small and powerless too, at the beginning? He tried to change things, and look where that got him. Stuck in exile, looking after sheep. Moses looked at all that was wrong in his world, found it far too much to bear, and retreated into the wilderness. 

And he would have stayed there too. He could have lived out the rest of his life with a lovely family tending flocks in Midian. 

But God had other ideas. God heard the cry of the Israelites in bondage and decided it was time to set them free. 

So God reached out to Moses from a thornbush. God set a small thicket in the wilderness ablaze and called Moses on his mission.

A thornbush, of all things. Why would God decide to speak from such a lowly and despised place? The thornbush is, at best, a plant to be ignored and, at worst, an annoyance that scratches against bare legs. It’s the desert equivalent of stinging nettles. 

In our Talmud, Rav Yosef says: not because the thornbush is the greatest of plants did God choose to speak from it, but because it is the least of the creatures. God disregarded all the most beautiful trees of the desert in order to be with the lowliest. 

Similarly, God chose to give the Torah from Mount Sinai not because it was the highest or most magnificent of desert peaks, but because it was small and covered in unremarkable roughage. 

In the natural world, God singles out the powerless and unimportant. That’s where God works the real miracles. 

That’s why God chose Moses too. Moses had no idea of his miraculous birth or impressive destiny. As far as he was concerned, he was a loner in the desert.

When Moses gets the call, it’s not God that he doubts. He doubts himself. 

His first question is: “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”

God doesn’t build Moses up or tell him how he wonderful he is. He says: just trust. Have faith.

We don’t get to decide what times we live in or what role we have to play in them. God decided that Moses was going to take the Israelites from Egypt and that was what was going to happen.

But Moses still can’t see how he can make a difference. He doesn’t doubt God’s power, he doubts his own. He says: “what if nobody believes me? What if they don’t listen to me? What if they don’t trust that I spoke with God?”

At this point, God shows Moses some miracles. We might think these miracles are about God flexing Divine might, showing Moses all the wonders. In fact, a bush burning in the desert without being consumed by flames would be quite enough to achieve that.

These miracles aren’t about showing God’s power: they’re about showing Moses his own. 

First, God turns Moses’s shepherd’s crook into a venomous snake. Moses recoils in fear. Then God turns it back again.

Next, God afflicts Moses with a deadly skin disease. Moses thinks his life is over. Then God heals him.

Both miracles make Moses face his greatest fears. They are exposure therapy. The worst thing that Moses could imagine is death. God shows him that he can stare it in the eye. Moses thinks he is not brave enough. God shows him that he is.

It’s not that Moses ever doubted God’s power. What he doubted was his own. Now God shows him he does indeed have power. He is stronger and more resilient than he realised.

It’s not that Moses ever doubted God’s importance. What he doubted was his own. Why would anyone care what a stammering wreck like him had to say? 

When God performs miracles through Moses, the message is clear: “I, the Eternal One, care. I care enough to work wonders on you. I care enough to meet you in the desert. I care enough to save you from death.”

And, if God can care about Moses that much, why can’t the Israelites? Why can’t Moses care about Moses that much?

Still, Moses is not ready to own his power. He protests to God: “I can’t speak. I’m slow of speech and stammer constantly.”

God gives the perfect answer: “And who made you that way?”

God made Moses that way. God decided that Moses would be who he was. His speaking ability is not a flaw – it’s the characteristic God gave him that makes him exactly the right man for the moment.

What a message this brings for us, who feel so powerless and insignificant. 

What are we but matter in the void, and yet the Creator of the Universe has chosen for us to be alive at this time?

Who are we with all our foibles and imperfections? But God has made us exactly as we are.

So why don’t we trust in ourselves, and recognise our own power? 

Don’t ask why God made a world with so many problems and sent no solution. The solution is here: God made us.

So I think I need to stop the cycle of doomscrolling and avoiding. Life isn’t just something that happens to me – it’s something I make, too. Society doesn’t just exist apart from me, I’m an active player in making it. And the news isn’t just something that lives on TVs and in devices – it’s something that we can create, every day, if we so choose.

In the Mishnah, Ben Azzai teaches: “Hate nobody, because everyone has their time and everything has its place.” 

We did not choose to be born here and now, but God saw fit that we should be alive at this place and time. God wants us here, in this moment. 

We are like that weedy thornbush in the desert. We might seem insignificant. But God has chosen for us to be here. And, because of that, we can burn brightly enough to change everything.

Shabbat shalom.

high holy days · sermon

Can you pass the human test?

levtaylor

This is the human test, a test to see if you are a human.

These questions were posed by the American comedian, Ze Frank, to see whether his audience was human. I will ask you some of them, and you can see if they apply.

  • Have you ever made a small, weird sound when you remembered something embarrassing?
  •  Have you ever seemed to lose your aeroplane ticket a thousand times as you walked from the check-in to the gate?
  • Have you ever laughed or smiled when someone said something mean to you and then spent the rest of the day wondering why you reacted that way?
  • Have you ever had a nagging feeling that one day you will be discovered as a fraud?
  • Have you ever stared at your phone smiling like an idiot while texting with someone?

Well, congratulations you are human.

With these questions, Ze Frank taps into the parts of being human we so rarely discuss. Our deep anxieties, our senseless irrationalities, our abilities to love people completely. 

Perhaps we laugh because they are embarrassing. It feels awkward to acknowledge that we feel all these things.

But we do. They are, truly, what makes us human.

In 1950, the English mathematician Alan Turing developed a series of tests to distinguish between robots and people. The questions, called ‘The Turing Test,’ can be used with some accuracy to ascertain whether, when speaking to a character online, they are a real human being or a highly intelligent software programme.

This year, those questions gained an entirely new relevance. An AI Language Model, called ChatGTP, became a viral sensation. You can pose the most fascinating questions to this robot, and it will answer them as if you were speaking to a real human being. It can have conversations and play word games and share thoughts on current events. It can even write a half-decent sermon.

But there were some questions it couldn’t answer. It still cannot pass the Turing Test. Tech experts promise that, very soon, it might. But, for now, there are certain things it cannot find adequate responses for.

The questions the Turing Test poses of robots to distinguish them from humans ask them to think critically about their inner lives. You might ask them:

  • “What event from your life changed the way you think?”  
  • “How do you feel when you remember your childhood?”
  • “Can you describe your emotions in only shapes and colours?”

What makes us human, provably so, is that we feel. We rejoice by laughing from our bellies. We hurt by letting tears fall from our eyes. We rage by clenching our fists. We cringe by curling our toes in our shoes. We fall in love by feeling butterflies in our stomachs. 

No algorithm can do that. An algorithm cannot pass that test.

Although machines cannot pass human tests, humans are nevertheless often tested by machines, and measured according to standards set by software.

From the moment children first enter schooling, they are subjected to rigorous examination. Can they multiply figures? Can they recall important historical events and their dates? Can they identify adjectives, verbs, and nouns in sentences? 

Of course, it is impressive when children can do these things. But it also measures them by the kinds of things machines can do much better. Often, these exams are even marked by machines.

By the time we finish schooling, we may have spent most of our formative years revising for, sitting, or fretting about the results of exams.

This process doesn’t stop once you enter adulthood. Throughout our working lives, many of us find ourselves undertaking tests to prove we are competent in our jobs. 

It’s not entirely a bad thing.

We’d all be quite worried if doctors weren’t checked for their abilities to carry out surgeries or bus drivers didn’t prove they could drive without crashing. Food hygiene certificates and accountancy qualifications are an important part of life.

But they are not all of life. They are not what makes us human.

And, sometimes, they detract from our humanity. 

I am going to talk briefly about suicide, and how dehumanising tests can drive people to take their own lives. If you are not in a place where you can hear that right now, I do welcome you to take a break, without judgement, because it is a difficult topic. And if this discussion brings up anything for you, please know that me and Rabbi Jordan are always on-hand for pastoral support and a listening ear.

Earlier this year, a headteacher at a primary school in my hometown, named Ruth Perry, killed herself after receiving a poor Ofsted report.

A study in 2017 found that teen suicides peaked around exam season, as the pressures to do well affronted young people’s mental health. 

There are data spreadsheets that recommend redundancies, crashing people’s entire working lives. Disabled people in Britain have to prove to computers that they are sufficiently unwell, or they will have all their benefits cut.

We live in a world full of judgements. You must prove your competence. Or you must flagellate yourself to prove your incompetence. You must prove that you are who you say you are. You must prove you can be somebody else. You must prove your worth.

But, here, you are in God’s house. Your value is not determined by what you can do. You are valuable in this space because God has chosen to make you human.

On Yom Kippur, we are summoned to face a test. But, this time, it’s the human test. The only question you have to answer today is “are you human?”

During the course of this year, have you breathed? Has your heart beat? Has your blood pumped through your veins?

Have you felt sadness and grief and elation and worry and love? 

Have you been moved by events in the lives of others, and have you formed new memories of your own?

Congratulations. You have passed the human test.

This is the task that God set for you. That you would be alive. And you are. You are here with us.

God has set you the task of being human, which means feeling, in all its complexity. 

Even if you can only remember feeling one thing this year. Even if you only felt bored or exhausted or impatient or in pain, you still felt. You succeeded at doing everything God wanted of you just by being human.

We cannot take it for granted. You might have given up. But if you felt like giving up, well, that was also a success, because that was a feeling. You were being human, just the way God wanted for you.

On Yom Kippur, we read “Kedoshim,” a glorious compilation of the Torah’s greatest laws from the Holiness Code. The first dictum of this parsha from Leviticus is “you will be holy people because the Eternal your God is holy.” It is less a commandment than a statement of fact. You are sacred by the virtue of being human. Your life is blessed because your God is blessed.

There may have been moments this year when you felt like you were being treated as less than human. On Yom Kippur, you are reminded of your humanity. You were never supposed to be a cog in a machine. You were supposed to hunger, and thirst, and tire, and mourn, and reminisce, and sing, and connect, and pray.

Once you have passed the test of being human, all you need to do is extend that humanity to others. Kedoshim continues by reminding you of how to treat others with maximum humanity. 

It is a summons to empathy. You will be human and you will treat others as human. You will not only laugh, but you will laugh with others. You will not only hurt, but you will share the hurt of others. When you feel, others will feel with you. And when others feel, you will feel with them. 

Torah gives specific examples.

You will feed the poor and house the foreigner. You will be honest with people who do not know if you are lying. You will pay workers straight away. 

You will never insult the deaf or lead the blind astray. You will not defer to the powerful, no matter how wealthy they are. You will not take advantage of people who work for you.

All of these laws refer to moments when human beings are at their most vulnerable. They refer to people experiencing poverty, disability, homelessness, and exile. These are people experiencing the greatest possible despair, terror, and misery. 

And because they are experiencing these emotions, this is when they are most mortal. This is a picture of humanity at its most human.

Confronted with others in this susceptible state, your Torah commands you to remember that you are human and so are they. You will see the most vulnerable people as if God is shining out through them, and treat them as you would the greatest among yourself.

You will see yourself as fully human, and set aside that robotic urge to calculate kindness or run profit assessments on your mitzvot. You will feel with them instead. You will experience empathy. 

If you can feel, you are human. And, if you are human, you have passed God’s test.

That is the human test. The test to see if you are human.

Congratulations. You have passed.

high holy days · sermon

It’s time to go home

levtaylor

At the end of a holiday, you pack your bags the same way as you did when you were heading out. Only now, your clothes are covered in sand. Your swimwear is salty and smells of chlorine. You put them in black bin bags, and tie them up. Some of the books you brought with you are battered on the spine because you lay them flat on your subbed while you were reading. And some of the books you brought haven’t been opened – why did you think you needed so many?

Maybe you took a photo or two. Maybe there’s a group shot of everyone who was there. Maybe you’ll go back with a postcard from the gift shop, or a keyring, or a fridge magnet, or one of those novelty pencils that you’ll never use.

But ultimately, all you’ll have is your memories. The clothes you wore will get washed and go back in the drawers. The photos you took might get put in a scrapbook, or saved online somewhere, or posted to social media, and then they’ll fade. But it doesn’t matter, because the goal wasn’t to get souvenirs. It was to experience it, and be on the holiday, and enjoy it.

So it is with life. Our mortal bodies are only here for a short stay. Our souls come on a brief holiday. And when we have to go back where we came, everything is a little more worn and broken and used than when we first got it. But that’s only because we’ve used it the way we were meant to. Our faces are a little bit more wrinkled and our hearts are a bit more tired. And we’re ready to go home.

Today is Shabbat Shuva, the Sabbath of Return. It sits at the cusp of Yom Kippur, today, only a day before. Tomorrow evening, we will gather for judgement day, a dress rehearsal for our deaths. Tradition asks us to wear the clothes in which we will be buried and deprive ourselves of food and drink and recite the deathbed confessions and last rites over our own bodies.

Today, Shabbat Shuva, is more muted. It is a day of preparation for that funereal enactment. It is a time when we reflect on the end that is coming, and on what was the point of our lives.

In this week’s Torah portion, we read the final words of Moses and his preparation to depart the mortal world.

God instructs Moses: “Go, climb Mount Nebo, and survey the land. Look over the plains of Moab and the country of Canaan. That is where the others are going.”

“But,” says God. “You can’t go with them. You are mortal just like everyone else. You were only here in this life for a short stay, and now you have to come home. Now, it’s time to come back to Me.”

Moses went up from the steppes of Moab to the summit of Pisgah and looked over absolutely everything, from the western sea to the city of palm trees, and breathed in the life he had lived. Moses was mortal, just like you and me.

He had lived, and he had been great, and he will be remembered longer than any of us will. But, in the end, he was just a man. He had tried and failed and worked just like anybody else. He came to an end and was buried in a plot on the mountain.

Moses returned his soul back to its Sender, now second-hand and a bit more battered than when it had first arrived. He died, as we all know we will.

If you believe the rabbinic tradition, the scroll which recounts the death of Moses was discovered by King Josiah, hidden under a layer of stones in the First Temple. When builders were carrying out renovations on the Temple, they discovered a new text there. That parchment, it is said, was the Book of Deuteronomy, containing all of Moses’ last words and relaying his final hours.

Josiah sent that book by messengers to the prophetess, Huldah, the keeper of the sacred wardrobe. Huldah was then an elderly woman, and one of the sagest prophets to be found throughout Israel. She gingerly inspected the scroll and confirmed that it was indeed the word of God.

Huldah said to the messengers “Go tell the man that you sent you that everything he read in this Book will come true, including the disasters it warns of for Israel.”

The rabbis, reading these words from the prophetess, are horrified. Why does she say “go tell that man” and not “Please inform the King…?” Isn’t this haughty arrogance on her part? Quite on the contrary, because through her gift of prophecy, Huldah could see that Josiah, although King, was still just a man. She knew that he must be, because she had just read in the Torah that even Moses was just a man.

A folktale says that, when Josiah died, there was an enormous procession. Thousands of mourners came out, grieving, and crying, and beating their chests, and lamenting songs in distress.

They carried the King’s casket all the way from Megiddo to Jerusalem, surrounded by crying subjects. They walked with the coffin up to Mount Zion, to the sepulchre of the House of David.

There, at the gates to the tomb where all the great kings had been buried, Huldah, the keeper of the sacred wardrobe, was waiting, keys in her hands. She was ready to begin the final prayers.

At the head of the procession, the High Priest called out: “The Great King Josiah demands admittance to his temple to be laid to rest alongside his ancestors.”

Huldah the prophetess shook her head. “I do not know him.”

The High Priest ruffled with consternation. “King Josiah, son of Amon and Yedidah, descendant of the House of David, Ruler of Judah, insists on being interred according to the Laws of the God of Israel.

Huldah shook her head. “I do not know him.”

Again, the High Priest issued a proclamation. “This is the King, Josiah, restorer of the true faith, protector of the Torah of Moses, rebuilder of God’s Temple, opponent of idolaters and destroyer of the altars of Baal. He must receive burial.”

Again, Huldah shook her head. “I do not know him.”

Now the priest approached Huldah directly and whispered: “A penitent sinner humbly requests to lie down in the ground.”

“Ah yes,” smiled Huldah. “I know him. He can come home.” And she opened the gates.

On Shabbat Shuva, we remember that, no matter who we were in life, we all become the same in death. We were just mortals, offered a split second of existence, permitted to take a short stay on this beautiful planet. We are just holidaymakers here, required only to enjoy this life, and leave this place a little better than when we came. But, eventually, our bodies will go back like battered suitcases from a week away.

On this Shabbat Shuvah, we are called on to return. We remember that we only ever had one true place we belong, and that is with God.

And, soon, it will be time to go home.

Shabbat shalom.