Tag: god

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.

debate · judaism · spirituality

The spiritual possibilities for our new Jewish movement 

levtaylor

“The history of a community, like the history of an individual, is marked by the recurrence of periods of self-consciousness and self-analysis. At such times its members consider their aggregate achievements and failures, and mark the tendencies of their corporation.” 

These are the opening words of an essay that gave birth to our Jewish movement. 

In 1898, a social worker named Lily Montagu published an essay in the Jewish Quarterly Review, entitled “The Spiritual Possibilities of Judaism Today.” 

What this pioneering thinker asked of Jewish London was that it take stock of what it had achieved and what it wished to be.  Only by giving an honest and sober account of where we were, could we imagine a better future for our Jewish life.

This is the perfect time to revisit that essay. We are forming a new movement, which will be far bigger and broader than Miss Lily could have anticipated, and may even soon make up the majority of British Jews. Is that not summons enough to the period of introspection Montagu required of us? 

But, more than that, when you look at her essay from over 120 years ago, you can see that the issues Montagu wanted to address had much in common with the challenges facing us today. 

Montagu was scathing in her perception of Anglo-Jewry. She accused it of “materialism and spiritual lethargy” and charged “that Judaism has been allowed by the timid and the indifferent to lose much of its inspiring force.”

Judaism, she felt, was supposed to be a great and inspiring system that would draw Jews closer to God and motivate its adherents to face the real-world challenges of the day. Instead, it had been captured by a lazy spirit that wanted nothing more than to assimilate, appease the establishment, and provide a lackluster imitation of religious rituals. Does that sound familiar?

Montagu assessed how London’s Jews actually lived. She called them “East End Jews” and “West End Jews,” but was clear that this was not just a geographical phenomenon. She was talking about class, culture, and background. 

The “East End Jews” of her day were working class, poor, Ashkenazi immigrants. They were highly observant, but obedient to a fault. They followed along with the old words they already knew, but rarely spent much time thinking about what any of those prayers might mean for their soul. Their main motivation for practising Judaism was a combination of superstition and fear.

“West End Jews,” by contrast, were from higher classes and mixed ethnic backgrounds. They were materialistic, obsessed with status, and only attended synagogue because they thought it was more respectable to be Jewish than to have no religion at all. Yet, she said, by replacing real religion with possessions and status, they ultimately still had a vacuum where religion ought to be.

These types of Jews, as Montagu described them, don’t exist in the same way today as they did then. However much one might nostalgise the factory-working Jews of the Whitechapel shtetl or the days when Jewish aristocrats held drawing room parties in Maida Vale, that world is gone. Economic disparities persist, but far less visibly, and without entire Jewish cultures built around location and class.

She warned that, although the Jews of her age might be economically divided, they still had the same thing in common: their religion was vapid and empty. It was about having an identity rather than having a relationship with God. For both sets of Jews, Montagu argued, Judaism needed a complete spiritual revival.

Apparently, a great number of people agreed with her, because over the years and decades that followed, many came together to form congregations for exactly this purpose. Together, they made the Jewish Religious Union, which then became Liberal Judaism, and is now becoming part of Progressive Judaism. 

Our Judaism has, indeed, been reinvigorated. We have opened up new approaches to liturgy, prayer, and worship. Synagogue teams come together to make sure that every Shabbat and festival is meaningful.

Montagu warned a previous generation that they would have to actually live Jewishly, or they would not be Jewish at all. Her prediction has come true, as some generations have just shaken off their roots, while others have decided to commit to Jewish life entirely. 

One happy surprise is that, through the Liberals’ embrace of converts, we have Jews who are committed and educated in ways previously unknown in earlier generations. The dedication of converts has also inspired those who might have taken their Jewishness for granted to step up their game, learn more, and embrace their heritage.

Miss Lily did not just advocate for spiritual revival, but wanted to see Jews play a full role in the life of Britain. Full citizenship had only been granted to Jews a few decades previously, and Montagu wanted Jews to rise to the challenge. 

Other communal bodies felt that the best thing for Jews to do was toe the establishment line, tell the government how wonderful they were, and hope that they would let us stay in the country without impeding on our religious practices. Our founders wanted us to embrace a more expansive sense of citizenship. 

They wanted us to say: we live here, this is our home, and we have the right to change it. They wanted us not to grovel before power, but to make demands of it. They wanted us to ask ourselves “what does God require of our country?” and go about pushing for it. 

This wasn’t something that belonged to one political persuasion. The intellectual leader, Montefiore was a capital C Conservative. The first Liberal rabbi, Mattuck, was a socialist who wanted the religious institutions to unite with the unions for revolution.

Montagu herself was a political Liberal. She was a suffragist and social reformer. She believed that the pursuit of peace and human rights were sacred commandments. She dedicated herself to alleviating poverty.

While politically diverse, our founders held in common a conviction that Jews could, in conversation with our God, make demands.

We could change the world. The world, too, could change us, and we should not be afraid of it or hide away in ghettos.

Montagu asserted that the youth were crying out for a Judaism that made moral demands and had something to say to their society. If their elders did not rise to the challenge, the next generation of Jews would vanish away into nothingness.

Montagu knew such Jews because her daily life was taken up as a social worker in London’s youth clubs. 

I believe we are facing such a challenge today. Many Jewish young adults are looking at us, including in the movement she founded, and see a Judaism that is reluctant to take stands for fear of rocking the boat. They see a Jewish life where God is, at best, a nice accessory tacked onto a cultural centre. If we look honestly at our own institutions, can we deny their aspersions?

Throughout my twenties, I was one of these disaffected young people, bewildered by why my institutions were so ambivalent on the moral issues of the day, from massive inequality through catastrophic climate change to ongoing Israeli military occupation. 

I felt acutely the absence of religious conviction in the establishment and in the institutions. There were pioneering rabbis who led the way on some issues, like gay rights, women’s equality, and refugees, but they were often marginal, and their impact could be felt only dimly in most synagogues. There was a gap.

In terms of our spiritual life, there were peer-led groups that tried to engage in serious prayer and text study, but you’d struggle to find any evidence for their existence in most synagogues.

I do not know how many young Jews fell by the wayside, but I stuck around. I had a strong sense, at least from my peers, that a better Judaism was possible. That we could speak out on social issues and we could have meaningful spirituality. That the Judaism of tomorrow might be more meaningful. 

Now, in my thirties, I am a part of the establishment I railed against, and I feel that the issues facing Jewish youth are even worse. The moral and spiritual vacuum has only grown wider, and it looks even harder to fill.

I worry that the demands of our age for renewed spirituality and moral meaning are being quietly subsumed under a banner of “inclusivity.”

Inclusion is a positive and noble goal, but it must be inclusion in something. It must have real substance, if it isn’t just trying to market synagogue membership to the lowest common denominator while offering nothing and standing for nothing. 

The challenge facing our movement is, I think, not so much to be broader, but to go deeper. We need to have a deeper relationship with God. We need to ask ourselves searching questions about what God demands of us. We need, as they did over a century ago, a thorough moral and spiritual revival.

In her essay, Montagu warned: “no fresh discovery can be made exactly on the lines of the past; the temperament of one generation differs from that of another.” We cannot apply Montagu’s methods in the same way today. 

But we can ask the same questions that she did, and go through a serious process of reflection, as she suggested.

We can look together for new ways of revitalising our spiritual life, and put God at the centre of our synagogue.

We can work together to provide bold answers to the moral questions of our age. We can ask ourselves what God demands of Britain and hold up those prophetic clarions to our leaders.

These are the spiritual possibilities for Judaism today.

That is the spiritual challenge facing our new movement. 

If we can rise to it, Progressive Judaism may yet last another century and beyond.

debate · sermon · torah

Did the God of the Bible have a body?

levtaylor



After our wedding, everyone was excitedly sharing photos and videos. Laurence pored over them and made albums.

I liked them, but the pictures felt a bit flat. What I was craving was words.

I wanted to re-read everything everyone had said. I went about collecting the speeches people had given, and recounted them again. On honeymoon, Laurence and I re-read our vows to each other, this time pausing and discussing them.

I discovered anew how much more I loved words than pictures or videos. Pictures are static. Even videos, because they only caption one moment from one perspective, feel too final.

To me, words feel so much more alive. Stories are such a great way to engage with events and ideas, because they can be retold so many times and in different ways.

Isn’t this, after all, what religion is: storytelling to access something sublime and unfathomable; a collaboration by people sharing their best narratives and ideas?

We have inherited a literary tradition, our Torah, which is an exercise in storytelling:  a process of openly wondering at the world through poetic sagas and emotion-filled songs.

For some, however, these stories fall flat. They see the words the way that I see pictures.

Fundamentalists will look at our story of a donkey talking to a prophet about an angel and think: that must be the historical truth of what happened.

Similarly, the New Atheists look at this beautiful poetic piece about the prophet Balaam and think: how stupid must religious people be to believe this nonsense?

This is not just a misunderstanding of Scripture. It’s a misunderstanding of storytelling itself.

Seemingly, it does not occur to them that this might be an invitation into conversation. They can’t comprehend that this might be a poem, crying out to be read aloud, sung, chanted, interpreted, and retold to make sense of all the wonders of the world.

Perhaps these talking animals and sword-wielding celestial beings aren’t part of history textbooks but reveal a different kind of truth altogether.

In Britain, we are mercifully spared from most of these types of fundamentalist reading. We don’t have to deal with as many evangelical Christians as our American cousins do.

But we have our own local brand of biblical literalists. They are the radical atheists who have got to know our sacred texts solely for the purpose of showing how irrational they are. The most famous of them is Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou, a biblical scholar at the University of Exeter.

In 2021, Stavrakopoulou brought out her most recent work, God: An Anatomy. The book’s objective is to show that the God of the Bible was an embodied being. He was a gargantuan man with a big beard who sat on his throne in the Jerusalem Temple, gobbling up the sacrifices priests burned for Him.

The God of the Bible, Stavrakopoulou argues, was just like any other ancient god: basically a massive person with all the associated wants and desires. She collapses about 4,000 years of history and three continents into one culture and seeks to show that the biblical god was just like all the others.

And, like all the others, the biblical god had a body.

Sometimes, her evidence for this scant. There are entire pages dedicated to making quite wild claims about the biblical god, appended with just one footnote that points to an obscure translation of a verse from the Psalms.

But, overall, there is plenty of material to go off. If you open up any page of Tanach, you will probably find God described in anthropomorphic terms.

Take our haftarah.

This week’s reading comes from the book of Habakkuk, a 6th Century BCE Prophet in Judah. The book is a vivid war fantasy, where the prophet describes the Judahites crushing the invading armies, some time in the mythic past, and hopes that it will happen again.

Throughout the text, God comes alive as a warrior. He (and I’m going to use the masculine pronoun advisedly here) is an embodied fighter on behalf of the people.

God’s hand lights up with radiance; God’s feet trample over mountains; God’s piercing eyes make the nations trembled with fear. 

God has all the equipment of an ancient military commander. He rides in on a chariot  with His horses and shoots out arrows from His archer’s bow. God rips the spear from the opposing general’s arm and stabs it into his head.

How are we supposed to read this?

Well, for a biblical literalist, you have to take it at face value. That’s exactly what Stavrakopoulou does. She makes the case that this was precisely how the ancient biblical authors and audience understood their god.

Their god was a big bloke with some massive weapons and blood lust.

Stavrakopoulou draws on other ancient gods, whose worshippers also describe them in embodied terms. The Canaanite high god El also had radiant arms. The Akkadian god Enki also trampled over mountains. The Assyrian god Ashur also fought with a bow.

The Israelites, then, were just riffing on old themes. Like the Pagans around them, they were silly enough to believe in all that religious nonsense of big beings. The biblical god was no different to Zeus or Jupiter.

Overall, reading Stavrakopoulou, you get the impression of someone listening to a concerto who can identify every note from every instrument but cannot hear the music. Her entire objective is to show that the tune isn’t even that good because other songs have been written before.

All the way through, it seems like a strange motivation for going to all the effort of learning Scripture and Ancient Near Eastern texts. Then, we get to the final chapter, entitled “Autopsy,” and we understand her true objectives.

She concludes: “the God of the Bible looks nothing like the deity disected and dismissed by modern atheism. […] Their dead deity is a post-biblical hybrid being, a disembodied, science-free Artificial Intelligence, assembled over two thousand years from selected scraps of ancient Jewish mysticism, Greek philosophy, Christian doctrine, Protestant iconoclasm and European colonialism. In the contemporary age, this composite being has become a god who forgot to create dinosaurs and failed to account for evolution; a god who allows cancer to kill children but hates abortion…”

Stavrakopoulou despises religious belief. So, if she can demonstrate that the biblical god was just like the Egyptian pantheon, and that this embodied god could be killed, then she can also strip the modern god of His powers and kill Him too.

This is the worst of Enlightenment hubris. 19th-century anti-religionists imagined that all religion was just silly superstition, which would eventually be washed away by the cold science of reason.

Our movement, like all progressive religions, has consistently argued for an alternative approach. We see all of history as an evolving effort to understand the sacred mystery beyond our comprehension.

It almost certainly is true that, before Ezra led the exiles back from Babylonian captivity in the 4th Century BCE, most Israelites did worship a small pantheon of Canaanite deities. The Prophets from before this time regularly condemn them for it.

But, while they may have been idolaters, they were not idiots.

If you told one of them that you’d just seen the fertility goddess Asherah out for a stroll in the marketplace, or that the storm god Baal came to your house this morning for a cup of tea, they would think something was wrong with you.

Another scholar of ancient religion, Iraqi Assyriologist Zainab Bahrani, helps us make sense of the ancient worldview. For the Mesopotamians, images were not reproductions of originals like portraits and photographs are for us today.

Instead, they saw their icons as ways of writing existence into being. They were in an active process with their gods of creating reality.

In matters of religion, literal interpretations are dead-ends. Words like metaphor don’t do it justice. Symbols like clay deities stand in for whole cosmologies. They are ways that human beings have tried to understand something that, by definition, is beyond our comprehension.

Perhaps most importantly, Stavrakopoulou misses what a massive departure it was that ancient Israelites abandoned all images in favour of a predominantly literary culture.

In a society where you cannot depict God, but can only engage in description and storytelling, you have to be more imaginative when you try to make sense of infinity.

Poems, sagas, and speeches, like those from our Tanach, are never fixed in their meaning. They are openings that invite listeners to think with them, talk back to them, and struggle for deeper understandings.

When someone reads a text too literally, they strip it of its vitality. Atheists and fundamentalists, both literalists of different kinds, strip the soul from the search for divine truth.

Tell stories, make poems, create art, look for that great truth beyond our reach… and don’t take any of it too seriously.

festivals · judaism · torah

What happened at Mount Sinai?

levtaylor



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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This, is what we think we know:

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

And it was marvellous.

Originally published in Vashti.

sermon · social justice · torah

Don’t make trans people scapegoats

levtaylor

“It makes no sense to hate anybody. It makes no sense to be racist or sexist or anything like that. Because whoever you hate will end up in your family. You don’t like gays? You’re gonna have a gay son. You don’t like Puerto Ricans? Your daughter’s gonna come home Livin’ La Vida Loca!”

This quotation is so erudite, you may wonder which ancient sage said it. That was in fact, the comedian Chris Rock, in his 1999 “Bigger and Blacker” set.

I must have been about 10 when I heard that line, but it has always stuck with me. Over the years since, I have watched it become true. The world is so small that whatever bigotries someone holds, the people they hate are bound to end up in their own homes.

Recently, I realised that this had happened to me. I hope I am not much of a hater, but a friend pointed out to me how much I used to make jokes about Surrey. I used to say that we should saw around the county lines of Surrey and sink it into the sea, drowning all the golf courses and making a shorter trip for Londoners to the beach. 

Now, here I am, eating my words. I am about to marry a man from Surrey and have all my in-laws in Surrey. I’m the rabbi for a congregation in Surrey, and looking to move as soon as I can to Surrey. That thing I hated, even in jest, is right here in my family and inside of me.

I had some terrible stereotypes that everyone who lived here was a tax-dodging, fox-hunting billionaire. They weren’t grounded in reality. They were just about my own fears, projected onto people I had never met. 

Chris Rock was right. Whoever you hate will end up in your family. 

More than that: whoever you hate is already something inside of you. 

All of us can do it: we can stereotype, generalise, and project all our antagonisms onto a group as a way to cast off all the fears we have about ourselves. What do we call someone who captures all this externalised hatred? A scapegoat.

In this week’s Torah portion, we read about the original scapegoat. As part of the rituals for collective atonement, Aaron the High Priest gets two goats and brings them into the tabernacle. They pick straws for the goats. 

The lucky one is to be sacrificed for God. Onto the lucky one, Aaron ceremonially transmits all the sins of the Israelites, then chases it out into the wilderness. As it scarpers off, the scapegoat symbolically carries away all of the Israelites’ misdeeds.

The biblical narrative describes a psychological trick we can all play on ourselves. When we are ashamed of something inside ourselves, we take all that fear, turn it into hatred, and throw it at whatever unwitting bystander will carry it. 

Is this not precisely what Britain has been doing to trans people?

Gender is changing. The roles of men and women are shifting dramatically. There are so many new ways to live gender, to express ourselves, and to talk about our identities. 

Rather than embrace these changes and think about what opportunities they can afford us all to be more free, reactionary parts of British society have whipped up a concoction of bigotry and thrown it all at trans people. Every anxiety our bigots have about gender has been exaggerated and projected onto one small part of the population, who have been turned into monsters through these prejudiced eyes. 

It makes sense that people will find social changes scary and destabilising, but why should trans people bear the brunt of those fears?

A few years ago, I went to hear a panel of esteemed Jewish leaders give a retrospective talk about the ordination of gay, lesbian, bi and trans rabbis. On the bimah was Rabbi Indigo Raphael, Europe’s first openly trans rabbi. 

In his opening words to the congregation, Rabbi Raphael proclaimed: “I am a transgender man. I am not an agenda; I am not an ideology; and you can’t catch trans by respecting my pronouns.” The room immediately erupted into applause.

He should not need to say it. He shouldn’t need to defend his own existence, but such is the level of moral panic in parts of Britain that he has to assert his right not to be scapegoated before he can even teach Torah.

In the last few weeks, trans people have been subjected to legal rulings and government decrees that may make their lives unlivable and keep them from basic participation in public life. Like the goats of the ancient world, they are being cast out into the wilderness to carry away all of people’s fears.

It should not be this way. 

When we feel like scapegoating others, the best thing to do is look inside ourselves. We need to face our fears and work out why others bother us. The chances are, it’s something in ourselves that we’re not happy with, and when we need to get right with our own souls.

When we get to know those we “other” we get to know ourselves better. And when we realise we can like the difference in others, we learn more about what we can like in ourselves.

Reflecting on this, Margaret Moers Wenig, an American Reform rabbi wrote an essay called “Spiritual Lessons from Transsexuals.” She talks about how knowing trans people has enriched her own spiritual life. 

Interacting with trans people, Rabbi Wenig says, has taught her that all of us can craft our bodies as we will; we are all more than just our flesh and blood; we have living souls that can differ from others’ assumptions; that only God knows who we truly are. These are wonderful lessons that can only be learned when we turn away from fear and embrace curiosity.

They chime with my own experiences. At first, knowing trans people made me question myself. If gender is something we can change, am I really a man? With time, seeing other people embrace their gender and become who they are has made me feel far more happy in my own gender. I am a man, and I like being a man, and I like being an effeminate man.

When we turn away from fear, we see that we have no need for scapegoats. The parts within us don’t need to be divided up so that some are holy and others need to be chased out into the wilderness. Every part of us is for God.

The world has more than enough hate. It’s time we swapped it for loving curiosity.

After all, Surrey, it turns out, is rather lovely.

Shabbat shalom.

judaism · theology

Be humble about what we can know

levtaylor


Before the Enlightenment, the world was governed by unknowable spirits and invisible entities.

There was so much we did not know.

If your farm didn’t produce any crops or the skies did not give you enough rain, you did not have modern technology to inform you about drought predictions for the next three years. You would have no way to know that the water coming from your clouds was directly connected to oceans miles away.

But you had your priests, and your rituals, and your superstitions. You had small gods in the hill country to which you offered libations. And, so far, when you had upheld your traditions, the rain came as it was supposed to.

When you got sick with a skin infection, you could not see a GP who would consult a modern medicine manual and give you a cream that would clear it up in just a few days. You would not have knowledge about germs, allergies, and viruses.

But you had your priests, and your rituals, and your superstitions. You had your rules governing sin and repentance. You had reliable experience that bodily suffering could be healed by atonement. And, so far, when you had upheld your traditions, the rain came as it was supposed to.

Please hold this in mind as we read this week’s Torah portion.

It may be easy for a modern mind, after the Enlightenment, to scoff at the strange priests, rituals, and superstitions that govern these chapters in the Book of Leviticus.

You might feel slightly embarrassed to imagine the rites our ancestors slit open goats, threw their entrails around and burned them for days until they stunk out a tent as expiation for their sins.

You might squirm at the vivid descriptions of cotton-clad priests flailing around the limbs of slaughtered cattle to win the favour of their god.

It may even seem primitive how they delight at the animal fat creating explosive fire, which they see as evidence of their god’s approval.

But they were doing what they could with what they knew. And they were engaging earnestly with what they did not know. Beyond the world they experienced was an unfathomable mystery, and they wanted to draw closer to it.

Indeed, only verses later, we get an insight into their own feelings of inadequacy. We get a real sense that they knew how much they did not know.

Nadav and Abihu do absolutely everything right. They follow the priests, carry out the rituals, and trust in the superstitions. They are formally inducted into all the correct practices by their father, Aaron the High Priest.

They do everything right. And then they die.

The burning animal fat explodes in a blaze that kills them both.

How can our ancestors make sense of this?

Our Torah gives two answers. The first is from Moses. Moses recalls a prophecy when God said: “Among those who approach me I will be proved holy; in the sight of all the people I will be honored.’”

We may interpret this as a way of Moses defending God. Moses is saying: while this may feel like a violation of our belief system, it is in fact proof of it. Holiness is a very dangerous quality.

God has demonstrated how sacred it is to engage in the rituals. God has shown what honour and risk are involved in holy service. 

So, for Moses, this sudden death of their priests does not undermine their belief system. It’s just evidence of how little they understand about their sacred rituals. In the fire, they have reached the limits of their knowledge.

Aaron, too, offers an answer. Silence.

We may interpret Aaron’s unspoken response variously. We may read into it horror, resignation, anger, acceptance, or solemnity.

But regardless of what he was feeling, we see that Aaron has no intellectual answer to the problem. He neither agrees nor disagrees with Moses. Aaron finds the limits of speech. He finds the boundaries of what he can even express.

Moses and Aaron lived in a world of unknowable spirits, governed by superstition. They made sense of their confusing world through priests and sacrifices. And no matter how well they constructed their rituals, they still found their limits.

There were things they did not know.

But we live in an era after such theologies. From the 17th Century onwards, Western Europe was gripped by a profound truth.

As the people challenged the unlimited power of the established church, philosophers pulled apart the stories religions had told.

This was the Enlightenment.

No more would they be hoodwinked by magical thinking or damned by promises of divine retribution. Everything, every idea, would be subjected to ruthless scrutiny. The greats of these generations would challenge the tenets of even science itself.

We live now in a world formed by their ideas. While our ancestors were beholden to talismans, omens, and sacrificial fire, we have evolved to hold modern ideals of truth and rational enquiry.

So, why hasn’t religion disappeared?

Isn’t that the obvious next question?

We have rid ourselves of superstitions, but synagogues are stronger than ever. Most of the world is still deeply religious. Despite constant predictions of its demise, faith remains stronger than ever.

For those who wish to understand God’s persistence after the Enlightenment, they may want to look to Immanuel Kant.

Kant was the last of the Enlightenment thinkers. His impact on this period of intellectual history was so great that some even date its end to his death.

Kant was a profound writer on truth, ethics, the scientific method, and what we can really know. He was also a devout Christian.

Kant was animated by the same questions that bothered our ancestors who witnessed Nadav and Abihu die.

He was not confused about why burning fat could cause a blaze, or why religious rituals didn’t always yield the same results. Those were the questions of the past.

The question still lingered, however: why does it seem like there is no justice in the world? Why do bad things happen to good people, and why do the wicked seem to get away with it? Why, no matter what happens, does evil seem to persist?

In his essay, The Miscarriage of All, Kant says he will put God’s justice before the trial of reason. Kant contemplates all the possible answers.

Maybe what we think is evil isn’t really. Maybe the world works in ways we don’t understand so that evil has to be permitted. Maybe there are other forces in the world beyond God’s goodness.

And Kant gives us an answer, which is… we don’t know.

All of these explanations only expose the limits of our understanding.

None of the answers anybody has come up with is satisfactory.

We are finite beings trying to understand Infinite Truth.

And still, says Kant, we retain our faith.

For Kant, none of these questions undermine the existence of God’s justice. They just show what we do not know.

So, perhaps we need to approach these stories with more humility and less contempt.

The ancient priests may well have splashed ox blood around an altar to ward off sin, but we are no closer to answering the questions that motivated their rituals.

We are barely separated from them by any time at all.

We are still just animals, scrambling in the dark, trying to make sense of our world.

And we still need each other, with all our beliefs and rituals, to get through this life that can seem so unjust.

We are each other’s guides through a mystery we may never resolve.

We need to be humble about what we do not know.

social justice · theology · torah

We are waiting for a different Messiah

levtaylor

Some years ago, an Orthodox friend asked me: “what would you do if the Messiah came and it turned out we’d been right about everything? What would you say to the Messiah?”

What would I do if the End of Days came, and Elijah literally came storming out of the whirlwind in a chariot made of fire and declared that the Son of David had arrived to cast judgement? And that we were to be judged on how strictly we had separated men and women; how well we had obeyed family purity laws; how stringently we had adhered to traditional authorities?

What would I say to this Messiah?

I have thought about it for a good few years and I think I now have my answer.

I would say: “F@£& off.”

I would tell that messenger: “You are not my Messiah and you’re not my king. Now go back where you came from.”

In this week’s haftarah, we read the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of the dry bones. For centuries, Orthodox Judaism has based its understanding of Messianism on these verses.

Ezekiel finds himself in a desert surrounded by skeletons. God tells Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones, and he does so, covering them in sinew, breathing life back into their lungs, and reviving their bodies, so that they stand up as a skeleton army.

These, says God, are representative of the people of Israel.

So, Orthodox Jewish tradition teaches, a day will come when the dead are literally physically resurrected. The corpses of pious Jews throughout the ages will be brought back to life; the exiles gathered to Jerusalem; and all judged by a righteous king descended from the biblical King David.

For this reason, many Orthodox Jews eschew cremation, and insist on being buried intact, so that their bodies can be resurrected at the End of Days. They vie for graves on the Mount of Olives, so that they can have front row seats when the Messiah arrives at the walls of Jerusalem and summons up the dead from their tombs.  

In recent decades, religious fanatics have come to espouse an even more intense version of this apocalyptic vision. 

There are Orthodox Jewish extremists, funded by American evangelical Christians, who are trying to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount; build a Third Temple; and restore animal sacrifice and priestly leadership.  They seek to expand Israel’s borders to restore the ancient Kingdom of King David.

This week, Rabbi Charley Baginsky was quoted powerfully in The Times, saying: “We are afraid — not just for Israel’s future, but for Judaism itself. What becomes of our tradition if it is captured by messianic extremism, by racism disguised as religion, by power without principle? If the current trajectory continues, if Jewish supremacy becomes policy, then Judaism itself may become synonymous with oppression.”

In this context, you might be forgiven for thinking that messianism itself is the problem. Surely a religious zeal that drives people to commit such crimes is itself dangerous. For some, witnessing this fervour makes them question the foundations of Judaism itself.

The Israeli religious scholar, Avraham Uriah Kalman, warns against this way of thinking. His article earlier this year, entitled Another Messianism, addresses a tendency in Israeli secular society to dismiss all religion as varying stripes of nationalist fanaticism.

Yet, he claims, precisely because of the strength with which racist extremists have captured Judaism, we must return with equal zeal in our reclamation of Judaism. We, who believe in justice, democracy, and human rights must just as vigorously defend our corner.

If we do not have an equally powerful vision for what society could be, we will always be on the back foot, compromising with monstrous ideologies that want to blow up buildings and raze down villages.

Our ethics are grounded in the Jewish tradition. They are derived from the Jewish texts. They are sourced from the Living God. 

We cannot allow the far right to take exclusive hold over any part of Jewish life, or we surrender it to them. That includes Messianism – the grand utopian visions of ideal societies promoted in every book of the Prophets. 

The Prophets, whose mission of speaking truth to power and uplifting the lowly, are far more in line with our Progressive visions of the world than they are with the soulless dreams of those who want to oppress women and gays as part of their supremacist agenda. 

In the Prophets, we see clear visions of a perfected world. Their writings testify to a world of peace; where all resources are shared; where everyone lives in dignity; and where all are free.

Outside of specific esoteric texts like this week’s mystical imaginings from Ezekiel, it is hard to see any of the far right’s fantasies reflected in our Prophetic texts.

Messianism is really supposed to represent a rupture in the established order, but that is not really what the far right offers. War, racism, and misogyny are already the norm. At core, they don’t really want to change anything except to make existing tendencies more violent and oppressive.

So, says Dr Kalman, progressives must embrace messianism. We must turn to the Prophets as our source of hope, rather than buckling under the weight of despair. From our own utopian visions, we can develop ethics that speak to our daily lives and help us practically realise a better religious vision.

Kalman draws on a whole range of Jewish religious traditions, including Talmud, Kabbalah, Musar, and 17th Century Tzfat mystics. 

Yet, curiously, he seems not to be aware that this project, of developing a Progressive Messianism, has already been deeply thought through. The early Reform movement in Germany, from which Liberal Judaism descends, was animated by looking to the Prophets to rethink Jewish eschatology.

The early Reformers taught that the Messiah would not be a man, but an Age. 

It would not be characterised by Temple and Kingdom revival, but through the realisation of the values of the Prophets. It would be a world of peace and justice, achieved through the moral advancement of all humanity.

Explaining this theology, Rabbi Sybil Sheridan writes: 

“Though the end goal is world peace, the ideal is not pacifism, nor is it the peace of treaties at the end of war that are based on winners and losers. That notion continues the imbalance of power among peoples and nurtures the resentment that leads to dreams of revenge. The peace of the Messianic Age is a peace forged in complete mutuality. No one should be afraid that people may covet their vine or fig tree, no one will fear the loss of land or resources, no one will be humiliated. The world provides enough for everyone and sufficiency will take away the desire for war.”

While we Progressives do not accept the Orthodox doctrine of bodily resurrection and rebuilt Temples, that does not mean we should reject Messianic thinking. Times of despair and horror are when we most need to cling onto our hopes for a better world.

Progressive Messianism takes the task of perfecting the world away from mythical figures like Elijah and King David, and places it directly in our own hands. It says: we will not wait for someone else to bring about redemption; we are going to do it ourselves.

So, if Elijah came down from the Heavens and declared that the Orthodox had been correct all along, I would tell him he was wrong. 

For thousands of years, we have sought to create a better world. We have learnt through struggle about the dignity of women; the importance of justice; and the shame of racism. We now have a much better idea of how the world can be.

We can see a future in which every human being lives in harmony with each other and their planet. We can see a world where all live in freedom and peace. We are sure now that we can live in love and equality. 

We are going to realise our Messianic age.

And nobody- not even a prophet descending from the skies – is going to stand in our way.

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.