Tag: oaks lane

sermon · talmud

Approaching an ending

levtaylor

We are approaching the end of our time together.

In January, I handed in my notice. 

Over the last few months, I have packed away my books and cleared my office.

On Wednesday, I will hand back my keys to the synagogue building.

Today is the last time I will stand up here and address you. 

We are approaching the end of Pesach. In two days from now, we will carry out our final service of this festival. In the evening, we will start eating leaven again, and bring back out our toasters and bread machines.

We are also approaching the end of the rainy season. In ancient Israel, this time of year marked the transition from when they hoped for life-giving downpours to the dry heat of summer when they prayed for morning dew.

The rabbis could not agree on exactly when the change took place. The Mishnah asked when we should stop praying for the rain and switch to asking for dew.

Rabbi Yehudah said: “We should keep our prayers going until the festival of Pesach has ended.” 

Rabbi Meir disagreed: “We should keep our prayers going until the end of the month of Nissan.” 

Centuries later, in Babylon, Rav Hisda came along and said: “this is not difficult.”

Now, this is the Talmud. If I’ve learnt one thing from studying the Talmud, it’s that, when a rabbi comes along and says something isn’t difficult, what follows will be really confusing.

Rav Hisda says these rabbis do not actually disagree at all! They’re just talking about different things. There’s a difference, he says, between praying for rain, and mentioning rain in your prayers. 

Clear? As muck.

You can see why this question made the rabbis feel anxious. Endings are hard. And knowing when one thing ends and another begins is important. 

Don’t worry. Another rabbi, Ulla, comes in. He says the problem isn’t that Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Yehudah disagree with each other. It’s that there are two different ways of reading Rabbi Yehudah. 

We are going to have to agree with Rabbi Yehuda, says Ulla. We’re just not sure what he means.

Rabbi Yehuda says that prayers for rain end when Pesach ends. And we agree with him.

But hang on a minute! When does Pesach end?

A whole new raft of rabbis enter the discussion, each with conflicting opinions. 

Personally, I would have thought Pesach would end at evening on the eighth day. The rabbis do not even consider this as an option.

No – their first suggestion is that Pesach is the first day, so that is when we should shift our prayers.

But we don’t put requests into our prayers at festivals. They’re like Shabbat – they’re God’s days off from being bothered by us. So that can’t possibly be the day we stop asking for rain. We weren’t going to ask for anything then anyway.

So maybe,  instead, after Pesach means after the need for slaughtering a paschal lamb has passed. In Temple times, the paschal lamb was killed just before the Pesach festival started. 

So the prayers for rain end when we would have slaughtered the paschal lamb. 

But that would mean Pesach ends before Pesach starts!

And the Talmud is even more confused now, because we no longer have a Temple and we live in the Diaspora and we are still nowhere closer to knowing when one prayer for rain stops and another one starts.

Clear? But Rav Hisda said it wasn’t difficult!

OK I have chosen a really complicated bit of Talmud to hang this sermon on. I still don’t understand it myself. Maybe that’s just because the changes of seasons really are confusing.

Perhaps the Talmud doesn’t quite want to resolve the question. They want to leave us hanging, so that there is always a slight liminal time when one season is ending and another is beginning.

Transitions are hard. In fact, this sugya of Talmud keeps coming back to the same stock phrase: this isn’t difficult. It seems to say it so often because it knows that it is.

This obviously matters to me, because I am standing here in liminal time, in the gap between having been a rabbi here and not being one anymore. It is important to say, with surety, that there is an end date. I won’t be preaching here again.

But I think we can learn something from the Talmud too. The Talmud knows that sometimes dew comes in winter and sometimes there are heavy downpours when it’s dry. All water is part of a bigger cycle of seasons. 

The rain teaches us how transitions carry within them all that has gone before and all that is yet to come.

Seasons and rainfalls are strange, transitory moments. We can read great meaning into them. 

Having a clear sense of when one passes into another matters. So let’s make this our moment of acknowledging a shift. 

This is our last time praying on Shabbat together. It is my last time preaching from here. 

You will continue to grow in this community, and I will go and minister elsewhere. 

And, just like the passing between the winter and the summer rains, we will always be part of the same water cycle. Our rains will be part of each other forever.

I will hold onto and cherish the droplets I carry from Oaks Lane. Your piety, your care for the sick, your love of music, your attention to detail, your Yiddish soul. 

I pray that some of the best of the waters I poured here will stay, and that you will find some use in them too, after I have gone.

It has been a privilege.

Shabbat shalom. 

protest · sermon · social justice

When a swastika appeared on my primary school wall

levtaylor

Do you remember the first sermon that really moved you?

I do. It was a primary school assembly.

Mrs. Kilou stood at the front of the hall, as all us uniformed children awaited the morning messages.

She began with a question: “who knows what I hate most in the world?”

A kid suggested: “Lateness.”

“No, not lateness.”

Another offered: “scruffiness.”

“No, not scruffiness.”

One more: “When we don’t do our homework.”

“No, this is the thing I hate most in the world. Way worse than lateness or scruffiness or not doing the homework. The thing I truly despise.”

Finally, a kid ventured: “racism.”

“Racism, that’s right!” She spat the word and the whole crowd sat up to attention. The fury in her voice was palpable.

She had good reason to be angry. Somebody had spray-painted a large swastika on the outer wall of our primary school.

***

For the last two months, I have been trying to work out what to say. There have been days recently when many of the parents from this community didn’t send their children into school, worried that they would be targets. Members have shared stories of taking down their mezuzot, and hiding their symbols of Jewishness. I have felt, at times, like the community is overtaken by panic.

What do you say to people who are so anxious and angry? How do you meet people in their fear, and help them move beyond it?

I haven’t known what to say. So, the last few times I have stood on this bimah, I have just shared what is in the Torah.

But there is a trauma that needs to be addressed.

It doesn’t help to tell people that there is nothing to fear. That only makes people feel alone in their feelings, and that just makes them more afraid.

What repeated studies show is that what matters about handling traumatic events is less what happens afterwards than what happened before. People are better able to negotiate destabilising situations when they already have a strong sense of self; feel proud of who they are; and have a clear story about themselves.

So, I think the best thing to do from here, for now, is to tell my own story. My own relationship to antisemitism.

My account is, of course, personal, and not definitive. But I hope it will open up spaces for others to share their stories, and for us to begin a conversation about who we are, and what experiences formed us.

***

The swastika on my school wall was not for me. Not in the direct sense. That is to say: whoever drew it did not have Jews at the forefront of their minds.

We were not a Jewish school. We were a multicultural one in the centre of an industrial town, surrounded by white suburbs, and even whiter countryside. The other students, my friends, were Pakistani Muslims, kids from the Caribbean, refugees from Kosovo… we were a little bubble of people from everywhere, and, though I did not know it then, were a source of moral panic among readers of certain newspapers. We were, to those that feared integration, a symbol that Britain wasn’t British anymore.

And, of course, that swastika very much was for me. It was an attack on my community. It was antisemitic because all swastikas are. It was calling to me, because all racism does.

Around that time, my parents began telling me stories. But not the stories you would expect. They didn’t tell me about family members who had escaped Germany or died there. They did not explain why some members of the synagogue had tattoos on their arms, or how others had met each other on refugee trains. I only came to learn that much later.

They told a story about how, not long ago, the Council had erected a new housing block. One of the first people to be offered a home there was a black woman. Racists came to protest. ‘Houses should be for whites.’ The Pakistani community centre came out in large numbers and escorted the racists back to the train station and out of town.

This is an oral history, and I won’t be able to verify it from newspaper reports, but I suspect my parents made it sound more peaceful than it really was.

They told me other stories too. Stories of hundreds turning out to see off the National Front. Stories like how the Jews and the Irish united to defeat the Blackshirts at Cable Street. Stories of partisans and resistors.

They told me how people could stand up against racism and win. They told me about how, when it comes to racism, our greatest strength is each other.

I don’t know if this was their intention, but I learnt then that the swastika was not something to be feared. It was something to be destroyed. And that people could, and did, destroy it, wherever it appeared.

So, I grew up feeling not so scared of Nazis as determined to stamp them out.

***

Some university students spend their weekends studying. Others spend them partying. Me and my friends? We spent our weekends chasing the English Defence League.

Don’t get me wrong. I did study. And I did party. But some of my most formative memories from that time were of bundling into minivans and car convoys with my housemates to towns in the Midlands and the North.

At that time, Tommy Robinson had assembled a band of white supremacists, bored football hooligans, and lost boys, to go and protest wherever there was a mosque. They usually targeted the mosque itself, and would go to the towns with the express aim of intimidating the Muslims.

Opposing them felt like the only right thing to do. Fighting fascism felt like a calling in a very similar way to how the rabbinate does today.

There was a group of us, from different towns, who always went along, led by a gentle couple called Simon and Sadia. We were always met by locals, usually gathered from community centres and religious groups, who would join in showing the racists that they weren’t welcome.

I learnt from these forays into antifascist activism that, while there were always some who resisted fascism, they weren’t necessarily popular. Media narratives after each protest often framed the unfolding events as if the fascists and their opponents were equally bad. As if it would be better if these small groups of students and locals stayed home and let the racists go unchallenged.

I might have believed them, if it weren’t for what I saw happen in Dudley. There, the English Defence League significantly outnumbered the protesters. Police lost control of the situation. Over that weekend, in broad daylight, those thugs went round smashing in the windows of any house with black and brown people living in it.

As we ran away from the violent gangs storming the town, we passed a house where a black teenager had been visiting a white family. Their windows had been smashed. “I’m sorry,” he was saying, “I think it’s because of me.”

I learnt from this a lesson that has informed how I think about all racism and antisemitism since. Our strength is in each other. Our defence is our neighbours.

This runs contrary to some of the received wisdom about antisemitism. We are, after all, a small minority that lives in concentrated areas of large British cities. One story about how to handle the prejudice we face is that we must depend on the state to defend us against the baying mob of our neighbours. It is because of this that older members will share the axiom: “as long as the king is safe in his castle, we’ll be safe in Tower Hamlets.”

My experiences turn this on its head. The non-Jewish majority is not our enemy. They are our most reliable bulwark against racism. When it comes to fascists, we are the masses and the masses are us. Our greatest strength is each other.

***

That story, of solidarity in the face of racism, is also played out in the story of this synagogue. My friend, Joseph Finlay, just completed his PhD, looking at Jews and race relations in post-war Britain. During his archival research into the history of fighting racism, one shul kept cropping up. This one.

During the 1960s and 1970s, this synagogue was led by the visionary rabbi, Dow Marmur. He arranged visits from volunteers to homes of new immigrants to Redbridge, as well as English conversation classes to help neighbours settle in. In 1978, the synagogue held a “multiracial dance,” in a clear statement of unity against racist scaremongering about miscegenation.

Rabbi Marmur brought a motion to the RSGB Conference of 1968, which encouraged other synagogues to adopt similar policies, and follow SWESRS’ example. He accompanied his motion with a powerful sermon.

While others shied away from fighting racism, or even expressed sympathy with the anti-black and anti-immigrant feeling, Rabbi Marmur issued an impassioned plea. Yes, he said, the racists do draw comparisons between Jews and black people, and “we have a special duty to remember the Prophet’s comparison and to affirm that we are, in fact, alike -in the beneficent eyes of God!”

He encouraged meaningful solidarity, urging “let us beware of condescending and patronising “do-goodery” … “And at no time must we allow ourselves to be fobbed off with cowardly calls for “prudence” and “caution” when these are euphemisms for inactivity and indifference.” Finally, Marmur compelled his listeners: “the primary force of our involvement must be our religious conviction; God bids us act-and we must obey!”

This summons stands at the centre of my own response to antisemitism. It is not only the swastika that calls me, but, more importantly, the voice of the Living God.

In that voice, I hear the demand to continue being Jewish, without apologies.

In God’s Word, I hear the call to resist antisemitism, not only out of self-preservation, but from a religious demand that there must be diversity.

And in God’s Torah, I hear, always, that most-repeated verse: “love your neighbour.” Yes, love your neighbour as yourself. Love them because they are you. Love each other because that is our strength.

And our love for each other may be our salvation.

Shabbat shalom.

high holy days · sermon

We can be proud of how we handle death

levtaylor

It is no secret that Oaks Lane sees its fair share of death. The fact that so many of you are here for this service is testament to that.

This is one of the Reform movement’s largest synagogues, and a large number of our members die each year. During the Covid pandemic, Rabbi Lisa carried out some 350 funerals. How she managed to do that with such grace will always be a source of personal wonder to me.

Before I came here, then, I expected that coming to work at Oaks Lane would mean constantly swimming against a tide of grief. I thought that this community would be defined by pain and sadness, eking out moments of joy through a long slew of burials.

I was wrong. I was wrong about Oaks Lane. More importantly, I was wrong about grief.

I had accepted the conventional wisdom that grieving was the tough work of slogging through sadness. I believed, without much interrogation, that people had to process stages of denial and anger and sadness to eventually begrudgingly accept the mortality of their loved ones. 

Yet, when I began working in this synagogue, I was astounded by what actually happened. I discovered that, in their last moments, people were eager to pass on their happiest moments and their favourite jokes. 

I found that, while funerals were always deeply sombre affairs, shiva houses could be full of raucous laughter and mourners could be alleviated by relief that the deceased had gone on to a better place. I was amazed at how quickly families made meaning of their loss, and turned the memory of their loved one into positive action. 

Even concerning the saddest and most unjust deaths, the grieving people of this community are amazingly strong.

The truth is that this congregation can feel very proud of how it handles grief.

It turns out that grief is deeply sad, but that’s not all it is. It also shows the immense capacity human beings have to be resilient.

That observation is now supported by scientific study. The psychologist George Bonnano has dedicated his life to studying grief. When he first came to look at bereavement, he found that, while there were plenty of big claims about how grief works, there was scant little evidence to back it up. 

Over years of working with mourners, hearing their stories, and measuring their emotional responses, Dr Bonnano found that all the stereotypes about grieving were wrong. 

As it turned out, the five stages of grief rarely turned up in people’s lived experiences. In many cases, people did not need to go deep into the recesses of their subconscious to find out why a death had hurt them so much. 

Quite on the contrary, many mourners found that they could make meaning of their lives and honour their dead. Many grieving people found that their emotions were close at hand, and that they could handle them best by being honest about them.

Above all, mourners did not need to “get over” their sadness. Instead, people emotionally processed best when they understood their sadness as a helpful emotion. Sadness, it turns out, slows us down, makes us more contemplative, helps us to create more accurate memories, and focuses us on what truly matters.

Bonanno discovered that one of the factors that made people most adverse to handling grief was the Western obsession with reason. The demand that we be constantly rational, strip ourselves of rituals, and just ignore our spiritual inclinations in times of distress actually exacerbates emotional trauma, and can prolong the grieving process. 

Of course, that does not mean dealing with death is easy. For some people, the sadness can go on for years, and some people experience very traumatic and complex grief. In all of his studies, Bonnano could not find a single unifying factor for why some struggled more than others. It doesn’t really say anything about a person or their loved one if they struggle more with death.  In fact, it seems to be largely random.

One thing Bonnano did find is that, in cultures that ritualise communicating with their dead, and that have a sense of death’s sacred purpose, mourning is often healthier.

From that point of view, I think we Jews can be very proud of how we deal with death.

The tractate of the Talmud that deals with death and dying is called smachot. Literally, the word means “joys” or “festive celebrations.” I had always assumed that the title was a euphemism, to cover over all the other great feelings associated with death. 

Now, I wonder if perhaps the rabbis gave it that title as a reminder of what was at stake. Yes, you will feel sadness, but all of those are for the sake of remembering your joys. Yes, these mourning rituals will be sad and sombre occasions, but they may also be festive celebrations of the lives you have lost.

Smachot sets out a clear set of guidelines for how to handle death. Bury as soon as possible. Sit in remembrance for seven days. Avoid certain kinds of work for thirty. Say kaddish for a year. 

At every stage, the rabbis provide us with a spiritual framework that means we always have something to do, and continually have receptacles for our grief. With the infrastructure established, Jews are free to experience the full gambit of emotions associated with death.

In addition to its regulations on mourning, Smachot advises ways to handle people who are grieving. Rabbi Meir teaches that, in the early days of somebody’s bereavement, you should offer them words of consolation, then ask them how they are. After the first thirty days, you should ask them how they are, and then offer words of comfort. By the time twelve months have passed, you shouldn’t bring up the death at all unless the mourner does, so that you do not re-open wounds. 

All of this provides a way to speak openly and honestly about grief, without allowing it to be all-consuming. I find this rabbinic wisdom incredibly powerful, but it is even more poignant when we see it in real life.

Over the last year, I have watched in awe as our senior rabbi handled his own grief. This time last year, Rabbi Jordan and I switched our expected slots, and I took the yizkor service, so that Rabbi Jordan could have a chance to grieve his recently deceased mother. 

Grief could have swallowed Jordan up. Instead, he set up a weekly minyan so that he could say kaddish with all the others who were bereaved. He wore his mourning openly, and channelled it into helping everyone in the community to heal. Perhaps most surprisingly, throughout that whole period of aveilut, Jordan led this congregation with integrity, sincerity and passion. There is much in here for him to feel proud.

I am also continually impressed by the Jewish Joint Burial Society, whose work can never be sufficiently celebrated. Whenever I call Mitzi, Ian or Andrew, they combine a great sense of dignity with humour and good spirit. They oversee hundreds of funerals every year, and support families in their very hardest moments, and do so with an incredible sense of holy purpose. They are an endless source of pride.

More than anything, this community is a source of pride. Its volunteers in the care team leap at the chance to call up people on their yahrzeits. I rarely attend to a family that hasn’t already heard from a congregant already. Alan, Adrienne, Hazel, Brenda, Sheila, and Ailsa… you do more for the people in this congregation than you will ever fully know.

And that is true for all of you. As members, you repeatedly show up for each other and support each other. As mourners, you do everything in your power to honour your loved ones.

So keep on doing what you’re doing. Keep asking after each other. Keep showing up. Keep being vulnerable and honest. 

As we sit here, together, mourning our dear loved ones, know that you are here for yourself and you are here for everyone else. And we truly appreciate your presence. 

I am incredibly proud of how this community handles death.

Gmar chatimah tovah.