margins – Sim Lev

When the silver trumpet blasted, the Israelites decamped and moved to a new location in the desert.

At the front of the procession, this seems to have been a marvellous affair. The tribal leaders assembled at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting with triumphant fanfare. God’s presence ascended from the Tabernacle as a glorious pillar of smoke in the day or a fearsome column of fire at night, and the chieftains marched in pre-assigned order behind their divinely appointed leaders: Moses, Aaron, Miriam, and the priests.

For the men at the head of the procession, this must have felt like a victorious military march towards the future.

But what was it like at the back? How did this experience of moving through the desert feel to the people who were on the edges of this grand voyage?

Consider how many Israelites were wandering in the desert. We have heard their numbers and know they amount to the size of a small city. There were more Israelites crossing the Sinai desert than there are people living in the modern country of Luxembourg.

In such a large group of people, most had no idea that all this pomp was happening at the front of the group. If they were midway through the camp and all the travellers were silent, they might have had a chance at hearing the vaguest echoes of trumpet blasts. But it is unlikely that anyone on the edges heard these fantastic instruments at all.

Perhaps, at a far distance, they could see the plumes of smoke and fire to let them know they were moving. But, far more likely, the greater indication would be the others around them shifting. They would hear rumours and murmurings, and get ready to move on their encampment to its next stage.

While the priests at the front played with their horns and struck up a marching rhythm, a whole other group of people would get to work.

The people who pitched tents would start the laborious process of deconstructing them. Breastfeeding mothers would gather up their infants in slings. Parents would call out to playing children and try desperately to cajole them into staying close. Water-carriers would haul tankards over their heads or hoist them on their backs. Animal handlers would load their donkeys and camels, and entice them to carry rations.

Our Torah is told from the perspective of those at the front of the procession. We learn their family dramas, hear the complicated rituals they performed, and picture the magnificent relationship they had with God.

For most of the desert Israelites, however, the journey was altogether different. What kept them together, more than these supranatural experiences and religious rites, were their relationships with each other.

I think it is important to centre their stories.

I have a long commute from Essex to Surrey. If the traffic is good, it takes about an hour and a half each way. To pass the time, I spend my journeys listening to audiobooks.

This has opened up a new world of literature to me. My usual reading is philosophy and theology, but that’s hard to focus on at the same time as the road. So I’ve started listening to sci-fi and fantasy novels.

Over the last few months, I’ve made my way through a whole bunch of stories by Ursula Le Guin. As a storyteller, she is a favourite of the college principal, Rabbi Dr Deborah Kahn Harris, and was beloved by her teacher, the legendary Rabbi Sheila Shulman.

Fiction, Rabbi Deborah assured me, is sometimes the best way to get across theological ideas. I have found this to be totally true.

During my car journeys, I have listened to Le Guin’s Earthsea Quartet from beginning to end. For the first three books, this was a world inhabited by dragons, powerful mages, young kings, demonic spirits, and magic spells. It was captivating.

The fourth book, Tehanu, has a sudden change in tempo and style. It was written more than 25 years after the first novel, with the characters having aged by the same amount of time.

At first, hearing this final book, I was somewhat disappointed. The pace is slower. Far less seems to happen. The characters, who had previously been magical heroes who cast spells and rode dragons, were now old, disempowered, and facing a world that is violent and cruel.

Only after I finished listening did I get to hear the author’s own voice. In a recorded post-script for the audiobook, Le Guin says that Tehanu looks at the high fantasy world from below. It shows what the world I had loved and lived in during my car journeys is like from the vantage of the people without power: women, workers, and children. She says this was her way to give voice to her own people in the world of Earthsea.

Now it made sense. I was, I discovered, learning a philosophical and theological lesson from the story, just as Rabbi Deborah had threatened I would. The world, after all, can be violent and cruel, and it is especially so to those without power.

History and politics are very different when you see them through the eyes of people who don’t march at the front, but gather at the back.

That doesn’t mean that life for workers and women is all misery. In Le Guin’s story, the powerless still have their own magic, their own rituals, their own beliefs, and build their power in community with each other.

That’s true for our biblical ancestors, too. Thanks to archaeology, we now have a better idea of what life looked like for the earliest Israelites who had no access to the Temple cult. They had their own parallel religious practices, with God centred in their homes. In their kitchens and bedrooms. They had fertility rituals, prayers they recited, and stories they told, even though they were excluded from the world of priests and kings.

This is one of the great joys of Judaism. While it has always had its figureheads who spearhead the community from the front and pronounce the direction for all to proceed, it has also always had its margins.

Within Jewish life, those who were excluded from the centre have built a religious life on the edges. These are exciting, creative places. They are, often, where real changes are first ignited.

Today, we must pay attention to the wonderful world of Jewish life that is being created far from board rooms and conference podia. There are other Judaisms, constantly being made in people’s homes, and in communities quite separate from the centre of north west London. Why, there are even congregations south of the River! This Judaism may not always make headlines or even get written down, but it is the lifeblood of our religion.

We should, of course, listen to the sounds of the great trumpets blasting to tell us we are moving.

But we must also pay close attention to what people are saying at the back, as we move on our eternal journey to freedom.

Shabbat shalom.

I started wearing a kippah full-time out of the house about six years ago. I was growing increasingly religiously observant and wanted to see how it felt to physically mark my faith. I have worn the kippah almost every day since, and feel naked if I greet guests or leave the house without one.

The results have surprised me. First of all, Britain is way more accepting than I anticipated. I have lived all over London and travelled all over the country and never had a negative reaction.

I am often met with positivity and fascination. Non-Jews ask me questions and start conversations I’d never otherwise have had.

Meanwhile, Jews come up to me to see if my kippah offers them a sense of belonging. It is like a hat that McDonald’s workers wear saying “ask me about our special offers”, except mine says “ask me about our special task.”

I am very aware that how I conduct myself through life now reflects not only on me but on Jews and Judaism as well. I have become an ambassador for Judaism. I feel obligated to live a more ethical life, and I wonder if that is, perhaps, the point.

Religious clothing carries deep meanings for those who wear it, and has done throughout our history. The kippah itself is not mentioned in the Torah. It is a medieval innovation in Judaism. In the world of the Bible, the item of clothing that symbolised Jews’ distinctiveness and sacred purpose was the tzitzit.

In this week’s parashah, Shlach, God tells Moses: “Speak to the children of Israel and say to them: make for themselves fringes upon the corners of their clothes for all generations, and put a blue thread among them.”

Now, says God, whenever you see them, you will remember what God has commanded of you. You will do what is right instead of what you like. And these fringes will make you holy before God.

But why? What is it about these fringes that should serve such a purpose? Are they simply visual aids? And, if they are, what is it about dangling threads at the corners of garments that should work to remind us of holiness and covenant?

Rashi suggests that the reason is not fringes themselves blue strand among them. This, he says, was once the colour of royalty, and an expensive dye to acquire. The thread is a reminder to the Israelites of their shared regal status – an affirmation both of their equality between each other and of their special status in the eyes of God.

But the blue string that was once part of the tzitzit can no longer be seen. The dye that was once used no longer exists. Although efforts have been made to revive it, for most Jews, our fringes have no dye.

I think the fringes have a meaning of their own. To me, these tzitzit are meaningful because of where they are.

They are situated on the margins. They are so often translated as being “fringes.” They are at the edges.

In this way, they are like Jews.

Every Jew, no matter how visible or assimilated, knows what it means to be on the fringes. It might be the ambivalence we feel as Christmas rolls around, or the unease we feel at a cultural reference that doesn’t include us. It might be a story in the news that we know we are reading differently precisely because we are a Jew.

Throughout history, we have used our marginal position to better understand both the non-Jewish world we inhabit and the Jewish one we inherit. Jewishness gives us a perspective not everyone has: a sense of how life can look from the edges.

When we see tzitzit, we see ourselves: the fringes.

The great 20th Century philosopher, Hannah Arendt, argued that this was no coincidence. We are not just on the margins because others have put us there, but because that is where we are supposed to be.

Arendt says that, even after the Jews were given citizenship and turned into emancipated members of European states, most Jews continued to be “pariahs.”

They were marginalised, never fully accepted into European society. As a refugee from Nazi Germany, Arendt knew this well.

From this position as pariahs, Jews could either consciously embrace who they were or pretend they were assimilated. Arendt says we should be conscious pariahs. We should embrace our marginality. We should use our special position as outsiders to see things the way nobody else can.

But tzitzit are more than just fringes. They are the sacred part on the border that give purpose to the centre. Without its fringes, a tallit is just a scarf. The fringes are the visibly different part that mark it out as holy.

Is this not the role of the Jew in the world? Is this not what it means to be ‘a light unto the nations’; that we are visible reminders to the world of who God is and what it requires of us? Isn’t it exactly our holy purpose to transform the world from the vantage point of our difference?

We who turn up to synagogue, who keep up our strange ways of living at the weekend, who sometimes have unusual dietary requirements. Yes, we who sometimes don kippot and dress in fringes. We have embraced our difference and turned it into a point of pride. We have chosen to live a life by Jewish ethics, transforming society and ourselves.

That is where these tzitzit point us.

They tell us not only that we are sacred for our place on the margins, but that we need to look beyond our space to the further fringes. There are others more excluded than we are, whose difference has made them more vulnerable and excluded.

The fact that they are fringe makes them, like us, sacred. They have perspectives we cannot. Their difference is spiritually powerful. It is not that we should pity the people more marginalised than we are, but that we should seek to bring them from the borders to the centre.

This Torah portion concludes with reminding us why we wear these fringes: God brought you out of the land of Egypt.

With that special deliverance came a sacred purpose.

Countless times, the Torah implores us: you know the heart of a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

If our holy purpose comes from being on the fringes, we need to look to those further out for where to go. Torah tells us about its most marginalised people: orphans, strangers, widows. These are the people that ancient Israelite society too often left out.

In ancestral times, these were the people without income or papers. Judaism calls on us to look to those most marginalised people. Unless we are centering them in our decision-making, we are failing in our religious duties.

The tzitzit at the edges of our tallits remind us where to look. They tell us that the margins are where things matter most.

So, make yourselves fringes. Now whenever you see them, you will remember what God has commanded of you. You will do what is right instead of what you like. And these fringes will make you holy before God.

Shabbat shalom.

This sermon was inspired by the political philosophies of bell hooks and Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz. It is for Parashat Shlach at Edgware and Hendon Reform Synagogue, to be delivered Saturday 5th June.

Tag: margins

Make yourselves fringes