Tag: judaism

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 · judaism · sermon

Knowing we will die helps us live to the fullest

levtaylor

Here’s the deal. Let’s see who will take it.

Today, you get a million pounds. But the catch is, tomorrow you die.

Any takers?

I didn’t think so.

You value living more than you value money. 

In fact, when you put death into the equation, you realise how much living matters to you. It matters more than any amount of wealth or status you could accrue.

Knowing we will die helps us understand what we value from life.

In many ways, Yom Kippur is a death rehearsal.

We act out today as if these were the last moments we would be alive.

Like the dying, we refrain from food and water. 

We turn up in modest clothes, without jewellery. Some wear white, the colour of the funeral shroud. Some wear kittels, the gowns in which we will be buried. Some wear tallits all day, from evening to evening – a unique point in the year when we do so – just as the dead are traditionally buried wearing their tallits. 

Over the course of this fast, we repeatedly recite vidui, the prayer of deathbed confession. We say psalms and chant petitions that are associated with death and funerals.

All of this serves as a ritual memento mori: a reminder that we will die.

Then, as we approach the end, we erupt into songs. We joyfully recite the neilah prayers. For many of us, there is a great rush of relief and joy as we realise we have made it through this marathon day. 

Yes, today is a reminder of our death, and it is one that affirms life. 

On this day, our Torah instructs us: “choose life.” Only by recognising that death is inevitable can we do so.

By really considering the finite amount of time we have on this earth, we are able to celebrate the days we have and live them to the fullest.

So much of modern Western society shies away from death.

For previous generations, death was a sacred process undertaken among family and community.

Today, it is sanitised: dealt with in hospitals and hospices by qualified experts.

There are great advantages to this. The professionalisation of death means that the sick can receive high quality care and pain relief right up to the last moments of their life. It takes a great deal of pressure off of family and friends, because the care for the dying does indeed require constant work.

But one downside to our compartmentalisation of death is that it means it is kept out of sight and taboo. 

When we do have to face death, it is often a shock, and can cause great trauma to living loved ones. Intellectually, all of us know we are mortal, but facing death as a lived and embodied experience can feel like a real rupture.

Having the Yom Kippur experience – which draws our attention to our mortality and makes us reflect on the quality of our lives – can be a powerful way to help us face death. In these rituals and fasts, we can prepare for our mortality. 

This real confrontation with death isn’t morbid. It’s a direction to truly embrace life. 

Knowing we will die helps us consider what we want to do with life.

In Progressive Judaism, we have a tendency to downplay some of the more explicit symbolism of death and mortality in our services. It is there in the machzor – in our silent confessions, themed readings, and traditional prayers. But our services often tiptoe over death’s undercurrents in the prayers.

This year, I have tried to reintroduce some of those themes to the service. 

Last night, at Kol Nidrei, we joined the rest of the Jewish world in holding the scrolls out of the ark, leaving it bare. The great American Reform liturgist, Rabbi Larry Hoffman, points out that the open ark is supposed to evoke a coffin. We stare into the empty space, which usually includes our Book of Life, and lay witness to our own tomb.

This morning, during shacharit prayers, we reintroduced the prayer “who by fire,” a traditional part of Unetaneh Tokef, which recounts the many ways in which a person might die. It is painful to consider life’s fragility, and all the vulnerabilities we face in life. 

But, by facing up to the possibility we will die, we get better at deciding how we will live.

We realise that we value life, and we take stock of what it is we love about it.

Marie de Hennezel is a French therapist focused on end-of-life care. In the early 90s, she was among the first staffers at a palliative care unit for people dying of HIV/AIDS. At this time, there was no cure – the deaths of HIV patients often involved rapid deterioration and great suffering. 

In 1995, de Hennezel wrote up her experiences of accompanying the dying into a memoir, entitled Intimate Death: How the Dying Teach Us to Live. The book even carried a foreword by French president Francois Mitterand.

She recounts stories of individual patients, as well as their carers, doctors, and nurses. In each vignette, she tenderly lays out how important it is to be with the dying. 

From her support, the patients often learn to live through challenging ordeals. Those who feel like giving up or who contemplate suicide decide that they will indeed live until their last moments on earth. By helping them face their death, the patients gain the strength to embrace their life.

This work, it seems, also transforms the carer. De Hennezel writes that she has learnt so much about living from the dying.

She writes poignantly:

Life has taught me three things: The first is that I cannot escape my own death or the deaths of the people I love. 

The second is that no human being can be reduced to what we see, or what we think we see. Any person is infinitely larger and deeper than our narrow judgments can discern. 

And third: one can never be considered to have uttered the final word on anything, is always developing, always has the power of self-fulfilment, and a capacity through all the crises and trials of life.

Let us take this as our message from Yom Kippur today.

Our lives are not over. We can affirm them. We can do so much with them.

And, though we do not always realise it, we love our lives more than any amount of wealth or status.

By facing up to the fact that we will die, we can live the days we have to the fullest.

Gmar chatimah tovah – may you be inscribed in the Book of Life for good.

Yom Kippur Yizkor 5786

high holy days · judaism · sermon

It is time to tell a different story about ourselves

levtaylor

It is time to tell a different story about ourselves.

We are writing a story about our lives right now.

On Rosh Hashanah, our story is written. On Yom Kippur, the story is sealed.

What, then, are we doing today? 

This morning, we are editing. We are looking over our story and choosing what to keep and what to discard. What to highlight and what to relegate to the footnotes.

Of course, we cannot change the events of our past, but we can decide what they mean. In writing our story today, we choose what role we played in the narrative of our own lives. 

When you tell this story, are you a victim, or a villain? A saviour or a sinner? 

Look at your mistakes. The way you tell your story will help you decide whether they were a defining part of your personality, or whether they were opportunities you took to learn and grow. 

Look at your suffering. Others have hurt you. You need to tell your own story of what that pain means. You need to decide if your suffering is the sum of your life, or if it is something you overcome. 

You are writing the story of your life right now. Be careful how you tell it.

In our Mishnah, Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi teaches: “Apply your mind to three things and you will not come into the clutches of sin: Know that there is above you: an eye that sees, an ear that hears, and all your deeds are written in a book.”

But here is what the Mishnah does not tell us:

The eye that sees can see more perspectives than we can.

The ear that listens knows all hearts in ways we do not.

And, most importantly, the book is constantly being edited and re-written.

We are always re-writing the Book of Life with our God, and that means we have the power to shape our story.

We cannot imagine that God’s eyes and ears are anything like ours, or that God writes a book the way we would. The story that an Infinite Being has to tell about you must be incomprehensible from your perspective. 

When we tell ourselves our story, we are biased, seeing only our perspective. Our narrative is partial, not knowing what others really feel.  Our account is unreliable, because we tell it to fit the character we have already made of ourselves. 

God, on the other hand, sees not just what we did, but what we hoped to do. God says to the prophet Samuel: “I do not see as human beings see; human beings see only what is visible, but I see into the heart.”

God instructs the Prophet Isaiah: “Whenever anyone turns back to Me for pardon, I freely forgive, for as the heavens are high above the earth, so are My ways high above your ways, and My plans above your plans.” 

God is able to see errors in ways we cannot. And God can understand our pain in a context that is beyond us.

This is because God is telling a different story about you to your own.

In God’s plan, you are the main character. Of course, so is everyone else. 

But that is because God has written a great novel where every creature has a vital role to play. No character could be introduced if they did not have a role in the great unfolding tale that progresses towards goodness’s triumph over evil.

So, today, look at the manuscript of your life. Decide what you want to focus on. Tell yourself stories of gratitude and joy. Consider the events that have given you pride and a sense of accomplishment. 

Look, too, at the stories in your life that are hard. Re-tell the stories of where you have been hurt, and decide for yourself what meaning you take from them.

Re-examine the stories of when you have hurt others, and decide what changes these will bring for you when you enter your next chapter.

In this way, you can take control over the story of your life. 

You cannot change what happened, but you can decide what it means. 

Only you can decide how your story ends.

Treat God as your co-editor, rather than as the author of your destiny.

For some of you, the story I have told so far is too wrapped up in religious language. You cannot get on board with all this God-talk, and the quotations from Scripture prove nothing. 

Let us turn, then, to the science of psychology. 

Over many decades, psychologists have experimented with what makes for a good life. We now have more data than ever about how people forgive. We understand a great deal more about how to overcome trauma. And we know what motivates people to live better lives.

I am going to assume that, if you are here on Yom Kippur, you came because you want to let go of some past hurt, to repent of things you have done wrong, and to live a more fulfilling life.

The Scriptures tell us how to do this, but the language they use may feel too alien to the modern mind. The sciences, however, can corroborate the same claims.

Dr Fred Luskin runs the Stamford University forgiveness project. His team has researched the best methods to help people overcome their grudges and live more fulfilling lives. 

He has tried out his techniques for helping hundreds of people forgive, including in the most extreme cases, like mothers whose children were killed in sectarian violence.

His book, Forgive for Good, is an accessible version of his research.

Dr Luskin teaches that our inability to forgive comes when we tell ourselves a “grievance narrative.” 

You may have such a story yourself. If you keep coming back to an event in your life where you were wronged and replaying it, you may be stuck on recalling a past hurt. If, in this story, there is a clear villain, and you are a helpless victim, the chances are you have a grievance narrative.

Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Many people do. 

I began reading Dr Luskin’s book out of academic curiosity, but soon found I was noticing my own grievance narratives. Some of them went right back to old hurts in school. I looked over some of the stories I had about my own life, and found they did not serve me.

Dr Luskin says that the key to getting out of the trap of these painful stories is to consider how you tell them.

First of all, decide how much space in your mind you want this story to occupy. Yes, you have been hurt, but do you want to keep letting those same people hurt you by giving them unlimited air play in your head? 

One way forward is just to change how much you think about them. Rather than letting them be the main character in your story, focus your internal account on your own successes and joys.

Secondly, consider how you are telling your story. If you have a grievance narrative, the hurt you experienced may determine everything that comes after. 

You were wronged, and that may have a lasting impact. But is it not also true that you survived, overcame, and learnt from the experience? You have the power to tell the story so that you are not a victim, but a hero.

None of this means pretending that pain doesn’t hurt, or that the wrongs others did were not wrong. Quite on the contrary: in order to move on with anything, you have to be able to say how wrong it was, and what it made you feel. 

The difference is that you get to decide what it means. You can decide whether someone else has written your story for you, or whether you are your own author. You can choose to focus your attention on your own pride and resilience.

Just as our faith tells you to pay attention to how you tell your story, so, too, do the psychologists. The story you tell can help shape how able you are to move on from past pain and be a better person.

This is true, not just on the individual level, but also at the collective level. The stories we tell about Jews are the stories we tell about ourselves. What is the story we tell about ourselves as Jews?

There are plenty of stories out there about us. There are stories where we are perfect victims, forever blameless for the suffering we endured. There are stories where we are bloodthirsty brutes, responsible for the worst evils in the world. 

Both of these stories deny us agency. These stories turn us into history’s stock character, whether as martyr or as monster. They deny Jews the ability to do what everyone else does: to hurt others, to learn from our mistakes, and to become better people. They strip us of the opportunity to grow and change.

We need, therefore, to think hard about what the narrative is that we are writing about Jews.

Rabbi Dr Tirzah Firestone sits at the intersection of spirituality and psychiatry. Firestone began her career as a psychoanalyst, then came back to the religion of her birth, embraced Renewal Judaism, and became one of its leading rabbis.

Firestone grew up with Holocaust-surviving parents. She felt that she and her siblings inherited great trauma from her family, and from the stories they told. Or rather, did not tell. Much of their former life escaping genocide was clouded by secrecy. The stories her father did tell were of persecution: that the non-Jews inherently hated Jews and would destroy them at every opportunity.

As a therapist and rabbi, Firestone urgently felt the need to tell different stories about Jews. She insists: “Identifying ourselves as victims freezes our focus on the past, and therefore forecloses our future.”

This does not mean pretending that Jews have never been victims. We need to face up to the traumas of Jewish history, including Shoah, pogroms, and persecution. Ignoring them, and refusing to tell the stories, can actually exacerbate the transmission of trauma.

What we need to do, says Rabbi Firestone, is honour Jewish history without internalising the harmful aspects of Jewish trauma. 

We need to remember that, as Jews, we have collective power. We are able to influence the world, and not just subject to the vicissitudes of history. We must claim our agency, and take ownership over what happens to our future. 

Most importantly, says Firestone, we should draw connections with others suffering from persecuting systems. By making these links, we strengthen ourselves, support our neighbours, and find positive meaning out of difficult circumstances.

We must, therefore, tell a new story about Jews. A story where we are survivors, who have been hurt and used creativity and resilience to overcome our pain. A story where we are complete human beings, who can hurt others, and who can repent and change. A story where our story connects to all of humanity for the sake of a shared future.

The story we are writing does not have to be one where we are always victims, nor incomparable monsters. We can create a narrative that acknowledges our past, honours it, and uses it to direct us towards a more positive future.

On Rosh Hashanah, our story is written. On Yom Kippur, the story is sealed.

We are writing a story about our lives right now.

Today, with the help of God and this sacred time, write your story.

Write a story you can be proud of. Write a story where you have the power to do better. Write a story where you overcome your challenges.

The events of your life so far have already been written. What they mean is up to you.

Gmar chatimah tovah – may you be written in the Book of Life for good.

Yom Kippur Shacharit 5786

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 · sermon · theology

What if death comes as a kiss?

levtaylor

Moses said to the Israelites: “I am one hundred and twenty years old. I cannot go on. God has already told me that I will not cross over the Jordan River. Now, do not be afraid. God is going with you. You will do marvellous things.”

Moses was not afraid of death. He asked the Israelites not to fear either. Instead, carry on and keep living.

How could Moses not fear?

If I asked you to depict death, you would likely draw a ferocious figure. For centuries, the Western imagination has presented death as a cruel and frightening creature.

To the Ancient Greeks, death was the merciless deity Thanatos, who came into the world with his siblings, Blame, Suffering, Deceit, Strife, and Doom. Thanatos, the despised god with wings, wrested the souls of the living and dragged them down to the Underworld, where they were handed over to Charon, the Ferryman who took the dead across the Acheron and the River Styx.

Michelangelo, Charon, The Sistine Chapel

On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo depicts Charon, the chaperone of the dead, as a terrifying monster. Charon has clawed talons for feet and grotesquely bulging eyes. He hoists his oar over his shoulder, ready to transport the unfortunate souls.

From the time of the Bubonic Plague in Europe, death was often depicted as a morbid skeleton. In The Triumph of Death, a great oil panel painting by Dutch master Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Death is an enormous skeleton upon an emaciated red horse, slaying all in sight. He brings with him an entire army of macabre skeleton figures, all of them razing the mortals from the earth. 

Today, we know this figure as the Grim Reaper, who reached his full form in the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. You can thank that 19th Century American novelist for the popular image of death today: the skeleton in a cloak holding an hourglass and scythe.

With such frightening depictions of death, how could Moses not fear?

Moses was lucky. He did not inherit the Western artistic tradition. The ancient Israelite attitude was remarkably different. The Jewish view of death was one far more tender.

At the end of Moses’s life, we read: “Moses the servant of the Eternal One died in the land of Moab, by the mouth of God. God buried him there in the valley, and nobody knows Moses’s grave to this day.”

In the Jewish imagination, it is God who comes personally, and takes care of the treasured people. In our Torah’s description of Moses’s burial, it sounds almost like a parent tucking in a child to sleep. The sand covers Moses’s body like a blanket, and he can finally rest.

Pieter Bruegel, section, The Triumph of Death

Our rabbis noticed an interesting choice of words from the Torah. Here, it says that Moses died by the mouth of God. 

This language is also applied to the deaths of Aaron and Miriam. They, too, die by the mouth of God.

Literally, this might mean that Moses and his siblings died at God’s command.

In the Talmud, the rabbis say instead that this means they died by a kiss. 

There are many ways that we might imagine this. We might picture a personal God pressing lips against our prophets to remove their last breath.

I like to picture a parent, gently kissing our legendary figures on the forehead. When Moses dies, God wraps him up in the blankets of the desert sand, embraces him, and pecks him on the forehead, to send him off into his eternal sleep.

Moses, the last of his siblings to die, would also have seen Miriam’s and Aaron’s deaths. He would know that death was not a fearsome monster, but the gentle caress of sleep at the end of a long day.

Indeed, the Roman Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, when he tried to explain the Jewish attitude to life to a Western audience, asked: “why should we fear death, when we embrace the repose of sleep?”

Of course, to we who are still living, death does not always feel so gentle. It can be painful and fear-inducing to witness the ones we love waste away, or be suddenly snatched from our world. 

Our Torah is aware of this. Sometimes, death is indeed depicted as a menacing spirit, as when the Angel of Death slays the first-born during the Exodus. Sometimes, death is indeed an all-consuming monster, as when the ground opens up on the supporters of Korach, to wrench them down to the netherworld of Sheol.

To us, who have to see death while we live, it can indeed feel frightening, and we should not shy away from that terror.

But, perhaps, for those who die, it does not feel so horrifying.

Sebastian Junger is a conflict journalist from New York. In 2020, he suddenly had a near-death experience. While awaiting surgery and bleeding out on an operating table, Junger suddenly had a vision of his father, hovering above him. 

Junger said his father appeared as a comforting mass of energy. In that moment, he thought he understood that there was a life beyond this one.

A devout atheist and rationalist, he went on a journey to discover how this vision was possible. He turned his voyage of enquiry into a book, published last year, called In My Time of Dying.

Tracking shamans and religious leaders from across the globe, he discovered how common his experience of approaching death was. 

This led him to wonder what his own father, a Jewish physicist, would have made of his experience. There is a poignant moment, towards the end of the text, where Junger sits down with his father’s physicist friends, and asks them for an explanation.

One of the scientists tells Junger that he thinks his father would indeed have believed it, because he was romantic like that. He explains that our understanding of physics is constantly evolving, and we know so little about it. He posits, even, that one day the presence of a reality beyond death might be the foundation of physics, or indeed its absence might be. 

Of course, Junger does not rule out the possibility that this is simply the brain’s way of protecting us, and our body’s way of making the inevitable feel less frightening. Yet, even though he is a firm rationalist, he cannot rule out the possibility that his father really was with him in his moments of near-death. He concludes feeling a deeper connection, both to the living and the dead.

None of us know what happens when we die. Nobody can see beyond the grave. Nobody has ever come back to tell us what exists in the world beyond. 

The Western imagination has conditioned us to find this uncertainty terrifying.

But what if Moses is right? What if neither this world nor the next have anything to be feared?

Maybe death does just arrive as a loving parent, tucking you into an eternal rest.

Would it change the way you lived today, if you believed, as our Torah says, that death comes as a kiss?

Jaume Barba, sculpture, The Kiss of Death

high holy days · sermon

To be the head and not the tail

levtaylor

Everything has changed. Everything keeps changing. 

We meet tonight to pause. 

Tonight is a return to a definite, reliable point in the calendar. While the world spins on outside, for a brief moment, we stop. We reflect. We take stock of all that has changed, so that we might change too.

You have already seen this evening many simanim – symbols of the Rosh Hashanah seder. These small tokens speak to us about what the festival means.

There is another one, though, that you won’t see here, partly because our synagogue is a meat-free site, and partly because it just would not feel right in a Liberal synagogue. 

It is a ram’s head.

Yes, in many New Year seders throughout the centuries, Jews would place the carcass of a sheep’s skull in the centre of the table. This tradition goes all the way back to 9th Century Babylonia.

By the 15th Century, the German rabbi, the Maharil, explained the custom using a phrase from the Psalms: 

שנהיה לראש ולא לזנב 

– that we should be the head and not the tail.

There is a play-on-words here. After all, what does Rosh Hashanah literally mean?

The Rosh is the head. It is the head as in the beginning; it is the head as in the body part; and it is the head as in the one who has control. 

This symbolism works because, in Hebrew, a word contains multiple meanings and associations. 

So, the fish head represents our being on top of our own lives.

Now, what about hashanah? The word shanah does indeed mean year, but its root ש-נ-ה also means cycle, difference, repetition, or change. 

This makes sense: a year is a cycle, a return point that we repeat, each time observing the change. 

So Rosh Hashanah does mean “start of the year.” But, through the associations with the words’ other meanings, Rosh Hashanah is also “the master of change.”

Outside of these walls, the world is full of changes. AI unleashes new technology into a society that has already been completely transformed by the Internet. Our climate is changing, and we are truly starting to notice its effects on our own seasons. 

International relations are changing: violence, war, and fear feel like a new normal. And, of course, we are only a few years out of global pandemic and lockdowns.

So, at this juncture, we return to the start, and try to find a small oasis of calm to reflect on this changing world. 

Yet, inside these walls, things have changed too. This is my first High Holy Days with you. This is your first High Holy Days in the newly refurbished sanctuary. This is our first High Holy Days where we have voted to join a new movement. 

This is our first time doing the High Holy Days without the choir in every service and, as you will see, that means we are changing how we do music.

In every case, these changes will evoke many feelings, including excitement, trepidation, loss, and growth. This is a chance to face all our feelings. 

Change is inevitable. Change can be good. And, yes, change is hard. 

I don’t know about you, but I have changed. I have not just grown a year older since the last Rosh Hashanah. I also feel like I have aged many decades in the last few years.

The world transforms and I shift with it. As I shift, I do not even always notice the ways I change, or work out what they mean. 

I don’t even have time to decide if I like who I am becoming before I find that things changing again.

So, at Rosh Hashanah I come to this space, this synagogue, this everlasting home with God, and ask: can I love myself better? Can I love my community? Can I muster up the strength to face all that is changing? 

Can I find a way to be the head and not the tail?

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

halachah · sermon · social justice

How does the Torah say we should treat refugees?

levtaylor

There is a verse in the Torah so radical that one of my teachers did not believe me it was even in there. 

I was working on a project as a rabbinical student and I brought a text that cited this verse. 

“That can’t be in the Torah,” my teacher said. She was a serious scholar, with not only rabbinic ordination but also a PhD in rabbinics and a host of published articles. 

“No ancient society would allow a law like that. The entire economy would collapse.”

I thought, perhaps I had misread it. It was a bold claim. So I went back to look. 

But there it was, nestled among a litany of miscellaneous commandments in Deuteronomy. On one side of this law was the instruction to make sure soldiers did not have nocturnal emissions, and on the other side was the requirement not to bring money gained from prostitution as a Temple offering. 

There it was, a law completely at odds with ancient society, which threatened to collapse an entire economy if enforced:

Do not hand over a slave to his master who is taking refuge with you from his master. He will dwell with you in your neighbourhood in the place he chooses, in one of your gates that is good for him. Do not oppress him.

– Deuteronomy 23:16-17

Let us start by acknowledging why this law is so radical. Ancient agrarian states were built on slavery. Prisoners of war, pillaged people, indentured servants and trafficked humans did back-breaking work to make the farms run. Their unpaid labour was what made the brutal machinations of early states even possible. 

Here we have a rule: do not hand over any slave to their master. The Torah is biased, and it’s not on the side of the owners!

More than this, if you get a runaway, your duty is to look after them. You have to give them accommodation. You have to give it in a place where the refugee himself feels is good for him, within the gates of one of your towns.

This is bold.

But still, it may be I had misunderstood. We already know from many other Torah sources that Israelites cannot be held as slaves. They might be debt labourers and bondsmen, but if somebody is part of the Israelite family, they can never be subjected to lifelong slavery. 

So, perhaps, this law is just talking about what to do if an Israelite runs away. In such a case, they might have been the slave of another Israelite, in which case they were being held against the law. Of course you would then give the slave refuge. 

Or they might have been an Israelite running away from another country, like an Edomite who had captured them in war. Well, then, they have come back to their people and need to be cared for.

So, have I mistranslated? Is this actually about Israelite slaves?

I’d have to look at earlier translations to check what it means. 

The earliest translation of the Torah is Targum Onkelos, a 2nd Century rendition of Scripture into the vernacular Aramaic. 

This translation gives details that clarify things. In this case, it adds an adjective to the Torah’s word for slave. עממין – from the foreign nations. A non-Israelite. The translation is unambiguous: we are talking specifically about foreigners.

This is even more radical. It’s saying we insist on looking after complete outsiders. They have no connection to us. 

They may even, then, be running away from Israelite masters. The Torah is saying that, if a slave runs away from their master, even though the slave is definitely not one of us, and the master might actually be one of us, we are on the side of the slaves.

About a century after this translation, the rabbis in the school of Rabbi Akiva wrote a commentary on the Book of Deuteronomy to expound its meaning. The book is called Sifre Devarim, and it takes all the legal verses from these books and adds oral traditions about how to interpret the laws.

Sifre’s explanation of this verse gives details on how you are supposed to treat a runaway slave when they come to you. Not only do you have to welcome them into your towns, say the rabbis, you also have to make it possible for them to make a living. They have to live with you, and not on the borders of the town.

It adds that the commandment not to oppress the runaway extends even towards words. Even the language you use must be kind. And it insists: you have to make them feel like the place they have come to is better than the one they left.

This is even bolder than where we began. It’s an official open borders policy to every runaway, with the requirement that they not only get refuge but actually get a livelihood and integration in the place where they move to. 

It is not only uneconomical, it goes against all the foundations of the ancient economy. 

You cannot even appeal to other economic reasons. There’s no organised mass of runaway slaves that the law-givers need to accommodate. There’s no suggestion that there was great pressure from the peasantry to be kind to foreigners.

It is a law entirely based on compassion.

What makes this law so radical is that it seems to be motivated entirely by altruism. That is why my teacher was so incredulous about the law being in the Torah at all.

And yet, isn’t that why we turn to the Torah to begin with? Not for cold economics, but to know the right way to live. We want a moral guide for how we should treat people.

Rabbi Julia Neuberger, who serves as a crossbencher in the House of Lords, has been a consistent voice for refugees, as each successive government has threatened hostility and sanctions.

As a lawmaker and a rabbi, she has to balance the high moral demands of our religion with the practicalities of government. 

In all her addresses, she emphasises the need for compassion. She treats refugees as a litmus test for the compassion of a society, because their marginal status tells us how our country is likely to treat everyone else. 

Baroness Neuberger advocates firmly for the rights of refugees.

Perhaps that is why the Torah introduces this seemingly radical rule. It wants to set a culture where the most vulnerable people get the best possible treatment, so that the whole of society will be based on kindness. 

The foundation of Torah law is about caring for the poor, the orphan, and the widow. This most intense case – a complete outsider running away from slavery – is the Torah’s own test for its moral system. 

It is a test every society faces. How people treat refugees shows what they think of human beings.

For the past few weeks, protesters have been gathering outside hotels, demanding refugees be sent back. The main political parties have entered into a race to the bottom for how unwelcome they would make refugees. 

Their rhetoric and laws may turn out to be a threat to us all. They may undermine the very basis of a compassionate society. 

Let us consider what would happen if Britain implemented Torah laws in its approach to refugees.

What would happen if this country made an active decision to welcome refugees and refuse to send them back? To deliberately integrate them and make sure they were firmly part of our towns? To set them up so that they could make a livelihood and refuse any insult to them? 

Would this collapse our economy, or would it make this place better for everyone?

And, if we had to choose, why would we not choose to follow the Torah?

Shabbat shalom.

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

protest · sermon · theology

We are guests in God’s mansion

levtaylor


Suppose you woke up one morning and discovered, to your surprise, that you had inherited an enormous mansion.

The lord of the manor has welcomed you as a guest to his entire estate. You have no need to pay rent.

This country villa has plush places to sleep, wonderful waters to swim in, and endless entertainment.

More than that, this house is magical. It provides for your every need. Its luscious garden grows your favourite fruit and vegetables. There is plenty of space to graze and raise whatever animals you desire.

It belongs to you and your descendants forever.

What if I told you that you had indeed been bequeathed such a home, and that you were already living in it?

It is this Earth.

That is how Moses understood the planet on which we live when he instructed the Israelites in Deuteronomy. Moses wanted to impart to the people what a miracle it was to be alive, and to get to live in this abundant and fertile world.

So, says Moses, “the Eternal One your God is bringing you into a good land – with brooks, streams, and deep springs gushing out into the valleys and hills; a land with wheat and barley, vines and fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey; a land where you can eat bread and never run out, where you will lack nothing; a land where the rocks are iron and you can dig copper out of the hills.”

This is the biblical mindset. You are guests in God’s mansion.

You have inherited a paradise and it is the whole world. The seas, the ice caps, the deserts, the mountains, and the forests. They are all yours. And they are all everyone else’s too.

Every human being was granted this world as a gift. Every living creature was placed here by their loving Creator.

Now, if you inherited a mansion like that, you wouldn’t trash it on the first day. You’d want to look after it and make sure your children and theirs got to enjoy it the way you did. You’d want to make sure the grass stayed green and the water kept flowing and the fruit trees kept producing. You’d want to know that everybody would be able to dwell in it for all time.

So, says Moses: “Keep faithfully every commandment I am giving to you this day, so that you can thrive and increase and come and inherit this land which was promised to your ancestors.”

Yes, this land requires no rent, but it does have conditions attached. You have to tend to it. You cannot be violent or greedy or deceitful. You must regularly redistribute the land, and make sure that everyone who lives in it gets their fill, and make sure everyone gets plenty of time for rest.

Well, these are small stipulations, given how wonderful my portion is. I get to live on this earth, which is so abundant, and all I have to do is look after it and share it? It sounds like a fantastic deal.

It is, but there is a trap. You see, you might get used to how great this mansion is. You might forget who gave it to you.

You might commit the gravest sin: you might think that this is yours, and yours alone.

This, says Moses, is a terrible error. “You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” Instead, remember the Eternal One your God, for it is God who gives you the power to produce wealth.”

You might think that you earned the mansion, and you built it, and you can do with it as you please. Well, then, you would become a threat. A threat to the mansion and everyone that lives there. A threat to its babbling brooks and fig trees.

If you fool yourself into thinking this is yours, warns Moses, then “your heart will become proud and you will forget the Eternal One, your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.”

Yes, you have a dark past. A history of slaves and masters. There was a time when people claimed ownership over everything. They declared that the Nile River and the rainwater belonged to them. They hoarded the grain and took possession over the vineyards. They owned the animals. They even owned you.

Do you want to go back there?

Now, look around at our home, here in Surrey. This place truly is wonderful. Working here, I have had the chance to paddleboard down the River Wey, walk on the Surrey Downs, and watch others swim in Divers Cove. I can really believe this county was a gift from God.

And yet this county is certainly not treated as a common treasury.

How did it happen that God’s creation became so gated?

You see, Moses’s description of the world as a common heritage bequeathed by God wasn’t just an idle fantasy. That was how many people saw the world throughout a large part of history.

Until the start of the 17th Century, large swathes of English land were held in common by all people. This meant that everyone could graze the land together. They could rotate crops together; care for the land together; and make sure everyone got fed.

It’s not that England was one great egalitarian utopia. Far from it. There had been kings, paupers, lords, peasants, and landless workers, for centuries. But, at least a part of it was treated as a shared inheritance.

Then, in 1605, the government began a process called Inclosure. They took all that had been previously common and handed it over to the already wealthy. They stripped the poor from their land and forced them into the cities to work in factories. They destroyed whole ways of life.

This mansion, already divided, became the possession of just a few. Just as Moses had warned, the wealthy imagined that their power had come about by their own hands. They thought of themselves as more than lords; more than pharaohs: as gods.

Now, right here in Surrey, a group of people tried to resist them. In 1649, on St George’s Hill, and at Little Heath near Cobham, a group of religious dissidents got together, and decided that they would take the land back from the lords. They were called The Diggers.

Their leader, Gerard Winstanley, has a memorial plaque near Weybridge Station, and there is a tour you can take with historic placards, showing where the Diggers went.

The Diggers wanted a return to the Law of Moses and the biblical attitude.

In the Levellers’ Standard, Gerard Winstanley wrote: “The Earth (which was made to be a Common Treasury of relief for all, both Beasts and Men) was hedged in to In-closures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made Servants and Slaves: And that Earth that is within this Creation made a Common Store-house for all, is bought and sold, and kept in the hands of a few, whereby the great Creator is mightily dishonoured, as if he were a respector of persons, delighting in the comfortable Livelihoods of some, and rejoycing in the miserable povertie and straits of others.”

Like Moses before him, Winstanley was adamant that God was not a propertarian but a generous host, and human beings simply welcome guests. How, then, could some divide up the land and force others off of it?

The Diggers lost their battle for the land, and the world we inherit is made according to the laws of those who enacted Inclosure.

But there is a message, that rings out through time, from the era of Moses through the 17th Century, and right up to today.

That message is that this world is a paradise, bequeathed to us all. And we need to act like it is so.

Shabbat shalom.

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.