john rayner – Sim Lev

On Monday evening, we will do something in this synagogue that would have horrified earlier generations of Liberal Jews.

It’s not that we’ll be drinking alcohol in the sanctuary. They did that at Simchat Torah.

It’s not that we’ll be getting dressed up. After all, why not?

It’s not that we will be hosting a Burlesque act. The founders of our movement were great patrons of the arts, and hearing that this was an expression of feminism would make the show even more appealing.

No. What we will be doing is a far greater sin in the eyes of our Liberal forebearers. We will be celebrating Purim.

For true Liberals, Purim is the most-maligned festival.

One year, while at Leo Baeck College, I dressed up as Lily Montagu and chastised all my classmates for reading the Megillah.

My grandfather, Rabbi John Rayner, was opposed to Purim altogether. He called it “unhistorical, irreligious and unethical.”

So I can only imagine how disappointed he would have been, as I put on my heels and stuffed a packet of cigarettes into my push-up bra, to think I was celebrating such an illiberal occasion.

In 1960, my grandfather was invited to give a lecture about Purim at a Reform synagogue, called Alyth, in Hampstead Garden Suburb. He told them that, while he wasn’t too bothered about it, he would let the facts speak for themselves.

The story of Purim never happened, he began. The entire tale is a fantasy built on other such plays from antiquity.

In fact, it couldn’t possibly have happened. No empire has ever been as expensive as the one attributed to Ahasveros. No royal feast has ever lasted six months uninterrupted. Esther was supposed to have spent an entire year on beauty treatments, Haman was supposed to have been bribed with millions of pounds, and his eventual gallows are supposed to have been 83 feet tall. The whole thing is ludicrous.

On this point, every reader of history agrees. But why should that stop us celebrating a festival? After all, we can’t prove that the Ten Plagues ever happened, but we’re not about to give up Pesach any time soon. What matters is the moral message the narrative conveys.

On that point, I’m afraid, granddad has already anticipated me. The point of religious services is ethical instruction, but there is no positive message in Purim.

God is completely absent from the Megillah. While many generations later, rabbis made great interpretations about God’s presence through absence, there is very little trace of divinity in the text.

Everything in the story is about chance. There is no room for human agency, moral conduct, or God’s deliverance. A movement dedicated to service of the sacred has no business entertaining something so atheist.

The entire premise of the story is based on ethnic prejudice. Mordecai refuses to bow down to Haman, the standard greeting in Persia, because Haman is an Amalekite, and the Jews have a centuries-old grudge against his entire people. My grandfather writes, quite rightly, that this chauvanistic loyalty to race has no relation to religion.

And that doesn’t even get into how gruesome the entire story is. The climax is an outrageous bloodbath, wherein Jews go from town to town slaughtering Amalekites by their thousands and tens of thousands. The murdered line the streets and Haman’s ten sons have their heads impaled on pikes and paraded.

It is the most gratuitously violent festival imaginable. It smacks says, my grandfather, of secular nationalism, which everyone knows is the primary enemy of Judaism, and should be given no encouragement.

What lesson are we meant to take from this? The moral, if you can call it that, is that you must commit genocide against others before they get the chance to do it to you.

This is a horrendous position, and I am certain no Progressive Jew would ever endorse it.

For this reason, despite my best efforts, some members of this synagogue continue to boycott Purim altogether. They are “Classical Liberals”: Progressive Jews who hold on to our original mission, that Judaism should be rational, ethical, and God-focused.

In fact, in recent times, even Orthodox Jews like Peter Beinart have come to agree with all these criticisms of Purim.

This sermon is not really an effort to convince the Classical Liberals that they should don their frocks and come for the Cabaret. Honestly, if I did succeed in changing their minds, I’d be a little disappointed to see the diehards give in. But I do want to make the case for why I do celebrate Purim, and why other members should feel free to get out their gladrags and their graggers.

Like the diehards, I also uphold a version of classical liberalism. I agree that Judaism should be God-focused, and I sometimes worry about the secular drift of our synagogues towards becoming cultural centres. Like them, I feel that Judaism only makes sense as an ethical system, and its goal should be to turn us all into better human beings.

But where we disagree, I think, is on what makes a religion rational. Just because our worship should be rational doesn’t mean it needs to be serious. As Oscar Wilde assured us, we must treat all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.

The point of Purim is it’s a joke. The Megillah, the story, the festival, its mitzvot, and its observances, are supposed to be funny.

The story is an old rehash, and we know that because it has all the same characters as the Commedia dellArte from medieval Italy, whose tradition goes back to the court jesters of the ancient empires.

And, no, the empire was not that big. The oversized empire with its outlandish feasts is supposed to be ridiculous.

The characters, the story, and the props are all supposed to be impossibly big. Like a pantomime, with its villains, heroes and dames, its magic comes precisely from how unbelievable it is.

And, yes, it is horribly racist. The whole thing promotes Jewish violence and prejudicial fear. But we have to think about it in its context. This play was written for a time when Jews lived under persecution. It is a revenge fantasy against their oppressors, not a real-world instruction manual for the modern age.

That’s how we ought to understand the gory violence at the end. We should imagine it in the same way as the climax to Tarantino’s movie Inglorious Basterds, when the heroine burns all the Nazis alive, or like in Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit, when the little boy kicks Hitler out the window. The bloodshed is catharsis for a beleaguered people.

And that is Purim’s real moral lesson for us. It’s about how to survive when you feel most downtrodden. Purim is an answer to a question: what do you do when you are persecuted, exiled, and you feel like God has abandoned you?

It answers us: try laughing.

Try to find the funny side.

Find a way to ridicule it all and remember that this whole life is one big joke.

The trouble only comes when you take Purim seriously. If you imagine this festival is supposed to be morally instructive. If that were the case, any rational person would scrap the festival altogether.

But, put in its proper context, this festival can give us the relief we really need.

We’re coming to the end of a long grey winter, in which many of us have felt weighted down and miserable. We’re living through unpredictable times. I can’t tell you how much I long for a news day that was precedented.

We need a bit of ridiculousness, a bit of raucousness, and a chance to do something stupid.

My grandfather actually left us with a little permission in his lecture notes. He said, if you must celebrate Purim, just do as Americans do, expunge the ugly bits, and turn it out into a carnival.

In other words, if you’re going to do it, don’t take it too seriously.

Wise words indeed.

Shabbat shalom.

One of the greatest things I inherited from my grandfather was a tattered red paper folder, containing jokes. I’ll give you a pertinent example: “On the first day of school, a new student hands his teacher a note from his mother. It reads: ‘the opinions expressed by this child are not necessarily those of his parents.’”

My granddad, John Rayner, was the rabbi here for decades. I am now a rabbinic student at Leo Baeck College, where he once lectured on liturgy and codes. Today is Leo Baeck College shabbat: a chance for congregants to see what the future progressive rabbinate might look like. I’ve been invited to speak here because today the LJS will install a new stained glass window in the room named in my granddad’s honour. Rabbi Alex realised that the coincidence of these two events was too fortuitous to pass up. I am here, then, to speak about both Liberal Judaism’s past and its future.

I am often nervous to speak about my grandfather. Whenever I go to preach or lead services at any Liberal synagogue, people come up to me afterwards and tell me how much they loved him. I blush and tell them: “he was a wonderful man.”

I think what worries me most when I talk about my grandfather is that I’ll only disappoint people’s expectations. I don’t have his knowledge of Jewish thought. I can’t even repeat his views on it, because I haven’t read enough of his books. I suspect that most of the people who greet me so enthusiastically know what he thought much better than I did. That’s because I never really knew him as a scholar, or a liturgist, or a homiletician. I only knew him as a lovely man.

So, on this day, in his honour, I’ll share with you something of the lovely man I knew. The John Rayner I knew used to skip along by the brook in a park in Finchley with his two West Highland terriers, Sasson and Simcha. He used to love word games and, when driving along, he used to point out to us the registration plates of the car in front to see who could come up with the best word from the letters on the plate before the car drove off. He used to sing. Really, really badly. He broke into song, because he couldn’t find the key. When we went round for dinner at his house, he always had a stash of jokes that he’d memorised to tell. The rest of us would make sure that we also had new jokes.

That’s why the greatest inheritance I’ve received from him is this red folder containing his collections of jokes. He was so organised that he kept them and catalogued them. Some are hilarious. “Saul Epstein was taking an oral exam, applying for his citizenship papers. He was asked to spell cultivate, and spelled it correctly. He was then asked to use the word in a sentence, and responded ‘Last vinter on a very cold day I was vaiting for a bus, but it was too cultivate, so I took the subvay home.’”

Some are only good in the context of sermons, like this advert he found in a shul newsletter: “Don’t let worry kill you. Let your synagogue help.”

Some just seem wholly inappropriate for sermons: “Where do you find a dog with no legs? Right where you left him.”

Some are completely outdated. Jokes about the pitfalls of this newfangled creation called the internet. Jokes about politicians in the Clinton administration. There are some that seem doubtful whether they were ever funny, some that were probably funny at the time but have since become offensive, and some that I just don’t understand.

This little red folder is a treasured inheritance because it reminds me of my grandfather the man. It isn’t valuable or useful. Nobody else would get much out of it. It’s just a collection of old jokes. But when I look through it, I hear again his sense of humour. I see his yeckerish impulse to organise everything, even joke collections. I remember what his laughter sounded like.

This little red folder stands in for something of what matters most about Judaism. Much of it can be read about in books or understood from watching documentaries on TV. But the essence of Judaism, that part of it that makes it really Jewish, is completely intangible. It is the relationships we have with each other. The feeling of lighting shabbat candles with friends. The shared references. The warmth of sitting in a synagogue together and feeling the gentle strength of community.

That is what I inherited from my grandfather. It is what I hope to pass on. Part of the reason why I decided to pursue this path was because that Jewish world meant so much to me. The experiences that those who gave their time to make Judaism live created for me an oasis in a challenging world. I want to pass on those experiences and create that sanctuary for others.

That little red folder is a microcosm of Jewish inheritance. Just as I filter through these old jokes and find ones I want to pass on and discard, so we modern Jews do with our heritage. In every generation, we look anew at the traditions, rituals and beliefs of the past to see what is relevant in our time. Some of what worked in the past might not work today. Some of what did not work in the past might well work today. Going through that process of filtering through what we have received is what keeps Judaism alive, dynamic and engaging.

Right now, Liberal Judaism is going through just such a process. We are reviewing our old liturgies and customs in the hope of developing new ones. As we go through these changes together, we must of course bring our heads and a sense of intellectual integrity. But we must also bring our hearts. We need to be able to look at the changes our movement needs and ask: how can we make this warmer? How can we make it more heartfelt? How can we be more loving to each other as we disagree and work out new ways of being Liberal Jews?

That is the greatest inheritance I received from my grandfather: a little red folder, reminding me that a good sense of humour, and a desire to share it, matters more than anything else.

Shabbat shalom.

I delivered this sermon on Saturday 9th February 2019 at the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St. John’s Wood.

Tag: john rayner

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What I inherited from my grandfather