Tag: israel

israel · sermon · social justice

We must drag the sun over the horizon

levtaylor


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then the dawn broke.

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

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

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

Again, they fasted, wept, and prayed.

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

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

We begin with darkness. Light follows.

There is evening. Then the dawn comes.

There is winter. And it always becomes spring.

This is the way of the world.

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

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

This is the way of the world.

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

This is the way of the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are able to bring on the day.

Now we must create even more sunshine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the first dawn of a new morning.

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

We must wrest the light into the darkness.

We cannot say the day will come.

We must bring on the day.

high holy days · sermon

The world is governed by compassion

levtaylor

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

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

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

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

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

This year, these words feel more profound than usual. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God’s name is Compassion. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God is always willing to give people another chance.

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

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

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

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

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

God remembers good deeds even for a thousand years.

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

This is how one truly maximises compassion.

So, let us be compassionate.

Let us maximise how much compassion we feel.

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

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

She urged her congregation to practise compassion, saying:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is the best that we can do.

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

Amen.

Kol Nidrei 5786, Kingston Liberal Synagogue

high holy days · judaism · sermon

If God can change, why can’t you?

levtaylor

Everyone changes. People change all the time.

In our Scriptures, the changes are often dramatic. 

Avram is an idol worshipper who lives in Mesopotamia, then undergoes complete conversion to monotheism and sets out on foot to a new country. With that, he gets a new name: Abraham.

Sarai is barren then, miraculously, in her old age, conceives a son. God gives her a new name: Sarah.

Jacob is a lying trickster who wrestles with an angel in the wilderness. When his heart has truly changed, he gets a new name: Yisrael. 

In fact, in each biblical story, a change of direction, outlook, and often name, are the key points of the narrative.

So, what about our Rosh Hashanah reading? Who is it that changes there?

In the Aqeidah, our Torah reading for the new year, Abraham is called upon to climb a mountain and sacrifice his son.

We know nothing about Sarah, who is largely kept out of the story. We don’t know anything of how Isaac feels about this, since he stops talking once he realises what his dad could do to him. 

Abraham is remarkably unchanged. At the bottom of the mountain, he is willing to do whatever God says. At the top, God says Abraham is no longer required to sacrifice his son, and to sacrifice the ram instead. At the top of the mountain, Abraham still just does whatever God says.

But there is a character who really changes in this story: God. 

God begins the narrative as zealous and demanding of human sacrifice. God ends the story compassionate and eager to enter into meaningful relationships. God begins by effectively threatening to blot out all of Abraham’s children, then ends by promising Abraham as many descendants as stars in the sky.

And, yes, God undergoes a change of name. Through the whole of the story, God is called Elohim, a name associated with strict justice and universal truth. At the very end, God is revealed by a new name – יהוה – Adonai, a name associated with the close personal relationship God has with every human being. 

In this story, the character who undergoes the greatest change is God.

Even God, the Creator of the world, the Almighty and All-Powerful, can transform. The Holy One, who by nature is completely eternal, can shift from being strict and distant to close and loving.

So, if even God can change, why can’t you?

In our Talmud, the rabbis introduce us to the idea that we are supposed to imitate God.

Rabbi Hama baRabbi Hanina teaches: be like God. Just as God clothed Adam, you will care for the poor. Just as God visited Abraham when he was unwell, you will visit the sick in your community. Just as God consoled Isaac over the death of his father Abraham, you will comfort the mourners. Just as God buried Moses, you will inter the dead.

God shows us a model of how we ought to live. Like God, we are supposed to be compassionate, loving, kind, morally clear, and doing justice in the world.

But more than that. Like God, we are supposed to change.

Here, at Rosh Hashanah, we learn: just as God can change, so can we.

We are made in God’s image. At the start of each year, we read a story where our Creator transforms. So we know that we can change too.

We can face our fast-shifting world. We can rise to the challenge of our changing community. We can look inside ourselves and love our own souls a little more.

Blessed are You, Eternal One our God, who gives us the power to change.

judaism · theology

A Theological Platform for a Judaism that Does Not Yet Exist

levtaylor

1. We are living in apocalyptic times. War, climate disaster, and neoliberal capitalism are plunging us into ongoing and worsening crisis. Apocalyptic times call for apocalyptic theologies.

2. When we survey how Jewish people rebuilt their communities in the face of devastation, we see that Jews have stubbornly held onto hope. From the destructions of the Temples, through Crusades and Expulsions, to colonialism and genocide, our greatest leaders have never wallowed in despair. They always reaffirmed their faith in God and humanity.

3. The task of building the Messianic age is more pressing than ever. Like our forebears, we affirm that the Messiah will not be a man, but a time, in which all will understand the Oneness that lies beneath all superficial differences. The Messianic Age will be defined by equality between people, peace between nations, and harmony with nature. Our task is to build it.

4. Because of faith in God, we understand that our desire for a transformed world is sacred and just. With an outstretched arm and wondrous deeds, God liberated the slaves from Egypt. God hears the cries of all who suffer and shares their pain. God continues to defend the dignity of all who are subjugated.

5. In every age, our people have sought to understand the will of God. In their hardship, they communed with their Creator. Out of their struggles, they developed theologies. These are our inheritance: Torah; Prophets; Writings; rabbinic literature; Jewish philosophies. We claim them for our own time.

6. Our texts are central to our worldview. They are incomplete and polyvocal. We will never make idols of them by treating them as unquestionable authorities. Rather, they are our dialogue partners to understand our God, our world, and ourselves. We uphold the tradition of questioning, reconsidering, and retelling. Every answer is open to interrogation.

7. We affirm belief in the pure monotheism to which our ancestors aspired. We seek to connect with God, who is singular and infinite; immaterial and transcendent; eminent and imminent. Our God is nevertheless directly part of our lives. As the source of ultimate truth, God seeks to impart to us truth as we can understand it.

8. Life has meaning. Its meaning is intrinsic. Everything that lives on this earth was placed here deliberately by a loving Creator to serve a purpose. All that affirms life affirms God.

9. Jews are called upon specifically and by name. We feel that the task of healing the world has been entrusted to us, personally and collectively. This is what it means to be chosen. The task of Jews is to speak God’s truth and to fulfill God’s dominion on earth. A world ruled by God will be one in which no human being can subjugate another.

10. God created all people, replete with diversity, deliberately. We do not wish to make others like us. We reject any uniformity. We accept that people inhabit multiple, contradictory, and overlapping spiritual realities.

11. We bring our spiritual reality to life through our rituals. Our laws, practices and customs are all articulations of our moral purpose. Even where they carry no obvious moral instruction, they instill within us discipline, wonder at creation, and hold us together in community.

12. Our ancestors call to us from history. As refugees and outcasts, they knew what it was to live on the margins. Their memories demand vindication.

13. We have witnessed the progress of humanity. Scientists have developed incredible medicines. Engineers have shown how to harness natural resources to power the entire planet. Activists have shown how collective strength can transform history. We believe that it is our duty to sustain that progress.

14. In the hands of oppressors, progress is a dangerous force. Warmongers have found ever more efficient ways to kill. Capitalists have found increasingly profitable ways to exploit. We have seen how human ingenuity can be employed for systemic violence. We must wrest the tools of progress from those who worship the false god of wealth.

15. Nationalism is a sickness that is plaguing the world. We repudiate all xenophobia and chauvinism. We will not worship the false idols of states and their symbols. We reject all efforts to politically divide humanity.

16. Until all of humanity is fully redeemed, we remain in exile. Only when everyone has achieved full political, economic and spiritual freedom can we say we have reached our Jerusalem. The earthly Jerusalem is as much a part of exile as any other city, until the day when it becomes the heartland for peace and brings all humanity into unity with God. As such, we align ourselves with all those who seek to bring about an earthly Jerusalem based on the prophets’ visions of dignity, human rights, and liberation.

17. Individualism is killing us. Human beings have survived by being social creatures. The ideas of autonomy and personal choice do not serve us in this age. We need to resist the atomisation of people and create community, which necessitates sharing norms, ideals, and practices.

18. We see the Jewish family as expansive and interconnected. We are all responsible for one another, and want to live as if we are one family. This includes a commitment to loving rebuke where necessary.

19. We return to halachah. We see it not as the binding decisions of previous generations but as the creative forum of the present, in which we find new ways to live by our shared values.

20. We commit to Jewish time, which is shaped like a snail shell: always progressing, and always returning to the same points. We return constantly to our shabbats, our fasts, and our festivals. Every time we return to them, we learn more of what God requires of us, and we urge ourselves on to the next stage of our development.

21. The end of time is coming. It does not have to be disastrous. It could be wondrous. Our telos is a perfected world. We will never reach it. We will always fight for it.

Rabbi Lev Saul

israel · sermon · torah

This is Torah. This is its reward.

levtaylor

Loving others will not make you popular.

Pursuing peace will not make you safe.

Choosing life will not protect you from death.

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

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

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

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

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

This is Torah. This is its reward.

Vivian Silver was murdered by Hamas on October 7th.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pursuing peace did not make her safe.

Choosing life did not protect her from death.

But it made her fully human.

This is Torah. This is its reward.

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

Awdah Hathaleen was shot in the chest in his home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He and his family never knew safety.

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

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

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

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

Loving others did not make Awdah popular.

Pursuing peace did not make him safe.

Choosing life did not protect him from death.

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

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

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

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

This is Torah. This is its reward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is Torah. This is its reward.

May God have mercy on us all.

diary · israel

The maddening well of war

levtaylor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the well is still there.

The war machine is still waiting for you, too.

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

Remember in order not to forget

levtaylor

There are ways of remembering intended to make you forget.

There are ways of forgetting intended to help you remember.

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

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

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

Remember… erase the memory… do not forget.

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

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

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

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

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

As they walk, he tells them:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

These are ways of forgetting intended to help you remember.

There are ways of remembering intended to make you forget.

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

What type of remembering would this be?

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

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

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

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

But it is plenty early enough to forget.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is too soon to remember.

It is too much to remember.

It is too painful to remember.

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

israel · sermon · theology · torah

Why does God not just stop the war?

levtaylor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rainbow.

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

We began with a question.

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

Perhaps we can now reframe it positively.

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

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

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

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

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

You need to be the sign that peace is possible.

You need to be the rainbow.

Shabbat shalom.

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 ↩︎