Tag: ritual

judaism · theology

Be humble about what we can know

levtaylor


Before the Enlightenment, the world was governed by unknowable spirits and invisible entities.

There was so much we did not know.

If your farm didn’t produce any crops or the skies did not give you enough rain, you did not have modern technology to inform you about drought predictions for the next three years. You would have no way to know that the water coming from your clouds was directly connected to oceans miles away.

But you had your priests, and your rituals, and your superstitions. You had small gods in the hill country to which you offered libations. And, so far, when you had upheld your traditions, the rain came as it was supposed to.

When you got sick with a skin infection, you could not see a GP who would consult a modern medicine manual and give you a cream that would clear it up in just a few days. You would not have knowledge about germs, allergies, and viruses.

But you had your priests, and your rituals, and your superstitions. You had your rules governing sin and repentance. You had reliable experience that bodily suffering could be healed by atonement. And, so far, when you had upheld your traditions, the rain came as it was supposed to.

Please hold this in mind as we read this week’s Torah portion.

It may be easy for a modern mind, after the Enlightenment, to scoff at the strange priests, rituals, and superstitions that govern these chapters in the Book of Leviticus.

You might feel slightly embarrassed to imagine the rites our ancestors slit open goats, threw their entrails around and burned them for days until they stunk out a tent as expiation for their sins.

You might squirm at the vivid descriptions of cotton-clad priests flailing around the limbs of slaughtered cattle to win the favour of their god.

It may even seem primitive how they delight at the animal fat creating explosive fire, which they see as evidence of their god’s approval.

But they were doing what they could with what they knew. And they were engaging earnestly with what they did not know. Beyond the world they experienced was an unfathomable mystery, and they wanted to draw closer to it.

Indeed, only verses later, we get an insight into their own feelings of inadequacy. We get a real sense that they knew how much they did not know.

Nadav and Abihu do absolutely everything right. They follow the priests, carry out the rituals, and trust in the superstitions. They are formally inducted into all the correct practices by their father, Aaron the High Priest.

They do everything right. And then they die.

The burning animal fat explodes in a blaze that kills them both.

How can our ancestors make sense of this?

Our Torah gives two answers. The first is from Moses. Moses recalls a prophecy when God said: “Among those who approach me I will be proved holy; in the sight of all the people I will be honored.’”

We may interpret this as a way of Moses defending God. Moses is saying: while this may feel like a violation of our belief system, it is in fact proof of it. Holiness is a very dangerous quality.

God has demonstrated how sacred it is to engage in the rituals. God has shown what honour and risk are involved in holy service. 

So, for Moses, this sudden death of their priests does not undermine their belief system. It’s just evidence of how little they understand about their sacred rituals. In the fire, they have reached the limits of their knowledge.

Aaron, too, offers an answer. Silence.

We may interpret Aaron’s unspoken response variously. We may read into it horror, resignation, anger, acceptance, or solemnity.

But regardless of what he was feeling, we see that Aaron has no intellectual answer to the problem. He neither agrees nor disagrees with Moses. Aaron finds the limits of speech. He finds the boundaries of what he can even express.

Moses and Aaron lived in a world of unknowable spirits, governed by superstition. They made sense of their confusing world through priests and sacrifices. And no matter how well they constructed their rituals, they still found their limits.

There were things they did not know.

But we live in an era after such theologies. From the 17th Century onwards, Western Europe was gripped by a profound truth.

As the people challenged the unlimited power of the established church, philosophers pulled apart the stories religions had told.

This was the Enlightenment.

No more would they be hoodwinked by magical thinking or damned by promises of divine retribution. Everything, every idea, would be subjected to ruthless scrutiny. The greats of these generations would challenge the tenets of even science itself.

We live now in a world formed by their ideas. While our ancestors were beholden to talismans, omens, and sacrificial fire, we have evolved to hold modern ideals of truth and rational enquiry.

So, why hasn’t religion disappeared?

Isn’t that the obvious next question?

We have rid ourselves of superstitions, but synagogues are stronger than ever. Most of the world is still deeply religious. Despite constant predictions of its demise, faith remains stronger than ever.

For those who wish to understand God’s persistence after the Enlightenment, they may want to look to Immanuel Kant.

Kant was the last of the Enlightenment thinkers. His impact on this period of intellectual history was so great that some even date its end to his death.

Kant was a profound writer on truth, ethics, the scientific method, and what we can really know. He was also a devout Christian.

Kant was animated by the same questions that bothered our ancestors who witnessed Nadav and Abihu die.

He was not confused about why burning fat could cause a blaze, or why religious rituals didn’t always yield the same results. Those were the questions of the past.

The question still lingered, however: why does it seem like there is no justice in the world? Why do bad things happen to good people, and why do the wicked seem to get away with it? Why, no matter what happens, does evil seem to persist?

In his essay, The Miscarriage of All, Kant says he will put God’s justice before the trial of reason. Kant contemplates all the possible answers.

Maybe what we think is evil isn’t really. Maybe the world works in ways we don’t understand so that evil has to be permitted. Maybe there are other forces in the world beyond God’s goodness.

And Kant gives us an answer, which is… we don’t know.

All of these explanations only expose the limits of our understanding.

None of the answers anybody has come up with is satisfactory.

We are finite beings trying to understand Infinite Truth.

And still, says Kant, we retain our faith.

For Kant, none of these questions undermine the existence of God’s justice. They just show what we do not know.

So, perhaps we need to approach these stories with more humility and less contempt.

The ancient priests may well have splashed ox blood around an altar to ward off sin, but we are no closer to answering the questions that motivated their rituals.

We are barely separated from them by any time at all.

We are still just animals, scrambling in the dark, trying to make sense of our world.

And we still need each other, with all our beliefs and rituals, to get through this life that can seem so unjust.

We are each other’s guides through a mystery we may never resolve.

We need to be humble about what we do not know.

israel · liturgy · theology

What can we learn from the Holocaust?

levtaylor

Back in January, I attended a civic service for Holocaust Memorial Day. As part of the proceedings, we watched a video, in which a local volunteer interviewed a survivor from the Warsaw Ghetto. The volunteer was kind and gentle. She asked sensitive questions about the survivor’s life.

Then, she asked another question: “what can we learn from the Holocaust?”

The survivor shook her head: “Nothing.”

This answer clearly took the interviewer aback, so she rephrased, and asked again: “What moral lessons do you think people should take away from what the Nazis did?”

Again, the survivor responded. “Nothing. There is nothing to learn. Nobody can take anything from it.”

Her tone was not accusatory or angry. It was matter-of-fact. It seemed so obvious to this survivor that the genocide was not ethically instructive. It seemed just as obvious to the interviewer that there must be some lesson from it.

This reflects something of how the Holocaust is taught today. In British schools, children are educated that the Nazi genocide is an example of man’s inhumanity to man, and that they must learn from it how to act morally.

In the aftermath of the Nazi genocide, the United Nations signed up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. When Holocaust Memorial Day was officially adopted by the United Nations in 2005, its then General-Secretary, Ban Ki-Moon said the purpose was to “apply the lessons of the Holocaust to today’s world.”

This was, presumably, the message the interviewer hoped to hear: “You should learn from the Holocaust how to be morally good.”


Why did the survivor refuse to give her that answer? I can only speculate. I think I can see why somebody who had endured such brutality would not want it to have moral meaning.

After all, what would it say about the death she witnessed and the misery she experienced if it was all just there to teach somebody else a lesson?

What is her life, as a victim of Nazi persecution, if she just a stepping stone for Christian Europeans to develop a moral conscience?

If it is all just a lesson in ethics, then the Shoah’s martyrs are just side characters to help the stars – that is, the genocide’s perpetrators – on their journey to self-improvement.

By giving the Holocaust meaning, something is detracted from the meaning of the survivor’s own life.

Tomorrow, Yom HaShoah starts. In Israel, tomorrow evening, the country will enter into 24 hours of solemn contemplation. They will remember all those who died and suffered during the Second World War.

Then, a week later, next Monday evening, the country will erupt into celebrations for Yom HaAtzmaut, Israeli Independence Day. The streets will be draped in blue and white flags as Israel rejoices at turning 76.

The proximity of genocide remembrance to national celebration is not a coincidence. It is part of how the Shoah is taught in Israel.

There, the country has a national liturgical cycle. The full name of this remembrance day is Yom HaZikaron leShoah veLigvurah: A Day for Remembering the Holocaust and Heroism.

Yom HaShoah is timed to coincide with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when a thousand Jewish militants attempted to physically resist the Nazis. The date is chosen to tell a story that Jews were not passive victims, but did all we could to fight against them.

Six days after Yom HaShoah comes Yom HaZikaron, a day for remembering the soldiers who fought in Israel’s wars. This narrative paves a path. First, the deaths of those killed by Nazis; then, the deaths of those killed for the Israeli state; all pointing towards the joyous outcome, when Israel is founded.

That path is clearly outlined the evening after Yom HaZikaron with Yom HaAtzmaut, Israeli Independence Day.

This is the core story that the state of Israel tells through its Holocaust remembrance services. Once we were victims because we had no state. Now we are not victims because we have a state. The Jews as a people began as ghetto resistance fighters, became soldiers in the wars for Israel, and now enjoy security in their own country.

That liturgical cycle continues on to early June, when Israel celebrates Yom Yerushalayim, the anniversary of the conquest of Jerusalem in the 1967 War. Look, says the calendar, we won, we kept on winning, we will expand as far as we need. We are not victims after all, but military heroes.

You can see why people would want to tell this story. So much of the storytelling paints Jews as pathetic.

This version of events, the heroic one, stands in direct contrast to the one where the victims are just moral guides to instruct Europeans. Here, they are masters of history, taking events into their own hands.

Yet this story is deeply worrying, especially now, in a context of an ongoing and aggressive war. The deep wounds of the Nazi genocide, when told as a story of heroism, can become a justification for just about anything. Every conquest, every military victory, every land grab, becomes just another way of enacting vengeance for the Holocaust. In showing that Jews are not victims, this story absolves Jews of turning others into victims.

In different ways, the Shoah remembrance events are troubling. They tell stories, but, when you start to pick those stories apart, they look problematic.

We are trying to make sense of something which, by its very nature, was senseless. There is no reason to racism, and there is no great moral lesson in unimaginable suffering.

Nevertheless, we are forced to make our own meaning. Through liturgy, through rituals, and through storytelling, we have to find a way to explain how the world could be so incredibly cruel. We have to develop our own answers to that everlasting question of suffering.

Emil Fackenheim survived the Shoah. He was imprisoned in a concentration camp before escaping to Britain, then Canada, and becoming a Reform rabbi. He taught that the Holocaust might not have its own meaning, but that we Jews would create one from its ashes.

Rabbi Fackenheim argued that, in the wake of the Nazi genocide, we Jews had to add our own commandment to the prior 613. In addition to the Laws given to Moses, we would add a 614th Commandment: never to give Hitler a posthumous victory.

To Fackenheim, this meant that, despite everything, we would keep on being Jews. We would not abandon our faith. We would not forget those who had perished or the extent of their suffering. We would never give up hope. If we did any of these things, said Fackenheim, we would be letting Hitler win after his death.

So instead of looking for an answer to the Holocaust, where all of that suffering finally makes sense, let us take up Fackenheim’s clarion call and respond with a vow.

We will never allow Hitler to win.

We will survive as Jews, full of the hope and ethical mission and faith that make us Jews.

We will never allow anyone to erase the memory of the Shoah martyrs or deny what happened to them.

We will not allow fascists and genocidal forces to win.

Ever.

Anywhere.

Shabbat shalom.

Picture: Edith Birkin, The Death Cart – Lodz Ghetto

Sermon for Birmingham Progressive Synagogue, Parshat Acharei Mot

story · theology

Why do Jews break a glass at weddings?

levtaylor

Whenever a couple comes to discuss their upcoming wedding, there is one ritual more important to them than any other. Anything else, they feel they can set aside, but this one action, they absolutely must do.

They insist on breaking the glass.

Smashing a glass under the chuppah is not a matter of halachah. In Jewish law, it makes no difference whether you do it or not.

It is also probably not the most visually popular image. If you picture a Hollywood Jewish wedding, the stock footage in your mind is the chair dancing, with couples thrust into the air, and holding on for dear life.

Why do couples want so much to smash the glass? When I ask them, they are not sure. It just feels right. It feels natural.

It is like they are remembering something. Something, a story; not just the stories of all the weddings of family members; not even another wedding in a mythic ancestral past. Something else. Something further back.

Perhaps, the Kabbalists suggest, what they have remembered is the very first smashed glass.

The very, very first crack.

Before there were weddings or people or creatures or planets or stars. Before there was anything at all.

Before there was anything, there was a crack.

In the beginning, there was a crack.

A crack in the Nothingness.

Before the crack, we can only talk about the Nothingness. We cannot even really talk about there being such a thing as before the crack, because, in the Nothingness, there was no time. The Nothingness was an absence. Lacking anything, it had no before, nor after, nor now.

When the first crack appeared in the nothingness, it created the first event. The first now.

Before long, the crack split. It broke further, like a chip in a windscreen that slowly breaks. Now there was a succession of events. A story in the cracking of the Nothingness. Now there was such a thing as now, and before, and after. There was time.

Then, the Nothingness could not bear the weight of the crack any more. It burst and shattered into an infinite myriad of broken fragments. Suddenly, there was time and there was space and it was filled up with the thousands of shattered splinters.

The Nothingness was broken. And there could never be another Nothingness again. It had ruptured and given birth to the Something: to all the imploded pieces of possibility.

And out of that possibility came yearning. The shards could see that they could form into combinations and make Somethings that were greater than just their fragmented pieces, but were the genesis of ideas.

So, they made wisdom, knowledge, and understanding. They made strength, love, and beauty. They created endurance and splendour.

From the broken bits of the Nothingness, they made the potential for Everything. And, with that, they made matter. They made the foundations of all existence.

Now, there could be galaxies and moons and oceans and forests and reptiles and insects and primates and civilisations and cities beings that could contemplate this entire mystery of existence and wonder how it all began.

This was how our world was made.

That is where we live: in the broken world.

We are the products of that initial shattering that yearned to be Something greater than Nothing. And we are able to see the world as it is: infinitely complete and completely broken.

We are those sentient beings who can witness this world and wonder how it all came to be, and wonder if it might ever be like that again. We are able to yearn with our whole souls to be reunited with the great forms that once birthed us. We long to feel again that splendour and majesty and wisdom that brought us into being.

Everything that exists is but a microcosm of the original system of shattered fragments that first delivered creation. We contain within us fractals of the understanding, beauty, and strength that initiated all being.

Those creative life forces exist within everything. They continually reach out to each other, interact with each other, and recreate each other, so that everything is one miraculous dance of metaphysical juices, bubbling beneath a mundane surface.

This means that, inside our own souls is the very first crack. We are the broken vessels that yearn for Something more than this. Out of our own breakages is the genesis of all creativity. It is as if the whole world was given order straight from our own souls.

We are perfect. We are broken. Our hearts were broken long before we were ever born. The Creator burst a puncture in our souls right from the outset. It was what would allow us to love and be loved.

And our hearts have been further broken by life. They get fractured every time we encounter something we do not understand. We can feel ourselves breaking every time we lose a loved one, and every time we see the beauty in a sunrise. Yes, our hearts break in sadness, but they also break in joy. It is our brokenness that brings us back to the very first creation.

So much in this society teaches us to scorn our own brokenness. We are encouraged to deny the parts of us that feel most acutely.

Instead, daily life makes us treat this world as if it is still nothing. As we work and pay bills and undertake routines, it can feel like there is no meaning to any of it.

But, deep down, all of us know that our existence is a miracle. We are divine shrapnel in a seemingly impossible universe.

So, when the couple comes under the chuppah, their first thought is: I want to smash the glass.

I want to see outside of me the brokenness that is within.

I want to remember how, once, in a past that never was, the very first crack made everything possible.

I want to be reminded that this brokenness inside of me is what allows me to connect with others. That fracture inside my heart is what makes me yearn for the love of another. It is what makes my being permeable enough that someone else can enter, and share in it their own broken lovingness.

Without this crack inside me, I would never be able to reach beyond myself. This brokenness is what connects me back to God.

We are broken people in a broken world.

Our brokenness is not a cause of shame. Our brokenness is what makes Anything possible.

I know I am broken when I feel grief and anger and jealousy and pain.

Because I am broken, I can feel love and wonderment and resilience and curiosity and awe.

Thank God I am so broken. I only wish to be moreso.

Dear God, let me be more broken.

Let my heart be more porous so that all its dreams may be freed into this world of infinite possibilities.

Puncture my soul and rip it open, so that I can truly feel the longing of all humanity. May I hear in the depths of my being the cries and joys of all that exists and could exist.

May I truly see this world, in all its diverse variance, and marvel at the infinite Nothingness from which we came.

May I fulfil the prophecy of Ezekiel:

“I will give you a new heart and place a new spirit within you. I will remove that heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My spirit within you, so that you will walk in My ways and uphold My justice.”

Dear God, break me.

Break me, break me, and break me again.

Shabbat shalom.

fast · sermon · theology

Tonight, we begin grieving.

levtaylor

Tonight, we begin grieving.

As the sun goes down, I will eat my last meal for 25 hours. I won’t bathe or shave or change. I’ll probably read a book, or some poetry, and contemplate what it means to be destroyed.

Tonight, the fast of Tisha bAv begins. It commemorates every disaster that has befallen the Jewish people. If we were to dwell on every time we had been injured, our year would be non-stop suffering. We would never have time to celebrate. 

So, we compound all our catastrophes onto a single day. Every exile. Every genocide. Every desecration of sacred texts and spaces. Every racist law and every violent uprising. As far as we are concerned, they all happened on this day: on Tisha BAv.

It is a day of immense profundity. The tunes are haunting. The texts are harrowing. It is the hardest fast of the year, taking place in the heat of summer, with long days and disturbing topics. 

For years, I marked this fast alone. Very few Progressive Jews wanted to participate. Many Reform and Liberal synagogues don’t mark it at all. I would turn up to Bevis Marks, the centre of Sephardi Jewish life in the city, where cantors from the Netherlands regaled us with their greatest piyyutim. But this occasion attracted so little interest from the people who shared my religious beliefs: the other Progressives. 

Why would they not want to mark it?

The first reason is emotional. It is difficult to sit in misery for a full day. It paints a tragic picture of our past, compounding every struggle we have faced into a single problem, overwrit by centuries of destruction. 

In fact, I think this objection is what really commends Tish bAv. Grieving what’s gone can teach us important lessons. It can put us in touch with our most challenging emotions, like guilt, misery and despair. 

True, if we went around all the time complaining about how difficult Jewish history had been, we would never move on, and we would be bound by a negative self-image. By placing all of Jewish suffering on a single day, we are able to confront atrocities, and engage with them, then move on.

Progressives have also objected to Tish bAv on theological grounds. As Reform Jews, we have no desire to return to the Temple or its sacrifices. We are the heirs to the rabbinic revolution, which rebuilt our entire religion after Jerusalem was destroyed. 

Because of the early rabbis, we became a Diaspora people; replaced animal slaughter with prayer; and substituted hereditary priests for a system in which all Jews could be equals. 

But those rabbis understood something profound. You have to engage with the past in order to progress from it. We cannot just pretend things never happened. 

Our rabbis pored over their ancient texts, repeated their oral traditions, and grappled with the world that had gone before. They may have moved beyond the time of the Temple, but they always referred back to it. They faced their tragedy, and rebuilt their religion.

Perhaps the biggest reason that Tish bAv is not given the respect it’s due is because it has been replaced. Since the Second World War, many Jews now instead mark Yom HaShoah or Holocaust Memorial Day.

This is understandable. The Holocaust was, of course, unprecedented in the scale of slaughter; the degree to which industrial machinery could be dedicated to human suffering; and the gleeful participation of so much of Europe in Jewish extermination. It is absolutely right to mark it and honour so many outrageous deaths.

But these events have their own theology. They teach that Jewish suffering was a thing of the past, now resolved. In the case of Holocaust Memorial Day, the problem has now been solved by the United Nations in international commitments to human rights. 

Yom HaShoah is part of the secular cycle of the Israeli calendar, a week before Yom HaAtzmaut celebrates Israel’s victory in 1948, and a fortnight before Yom Yerushalayim celebrates Israel’s Conquest of Jerusalem in 1968. Yom HaShoah suggests that the answer to Jewish suffering is the state of Israel’s military might.

These may well be the political views of some congregants, but they are not the religious views of rabbinic Judaism. Judaism shies away from simplistic answers to subjugation and refuses to allow genocides to be resolved by slogans. We actually have to engage with the horrors of the Shoah, and to understand that they cannot be explained away. We have to sit with our grief.

Tisha bAv poses an alternative response to our experiences of evil. It tells us to fast and grieve, but, unlike on any other fast, we are to carry on working. We can still do many of the things we would on a normal day. Our world is upended, but we must keep going. 

The idea of Tish bAv is that we can face destruction and, through faith and community, nevertheless survive. We can still hold onto our God and our values. Even while we are being destroyed, we are able to rebuild.

Consider how Reform Jews of the past responded to the Shoah in the 20th Century. While in the camps, Rabbi Leo Baeck preached Torah beside waste heaps. When he was liberated from Theresienstadt, he immediately published a work of optimistic theology, expressing his hope of Judaism’s continuity. Think of Rabbi Albert Friedlander, who, having escaped the Nazis, spent the post-war years establishing synagogues and saving scrolls so that our religion could be preserved. Their lives are a testament to Jewish hope in the face of despair.

That is the story told by Tisha bAv. That, yes, we have suffered, but we have also survived. We have refused to let Judaism be extinguished. Into every generation, we have passed on our values and our faith. We have always found ways to rebuild. Tish bAv teaches us that we may always suffer, but that we have also always carried on. 

So, tonight, we begin grieving. I hope you will join me at ELELS for our ECAMPS service to mark this important fast. We will read poetry, hear the chanting of the Megillah, and reflect on the tragedies of destroyed cities and vanquished people. And, through this sorrow, we will learn again the strength and creativity of our people. We will remember all those who have kept this Judaism alive.

Tonight, we begin grieving. Tomorrow night, we will begin rebuilding.

Shabbat shalom.

judaism · ritual · spirituality

Sacred skinny-dipping

levtaylor

It was midsummer in a basin in the Welsh valleys. I found myself completely naked with a friend in a lukewarm tub of rainwater. We were supposed to wait for it to properly heat up over the log fire, but I was in a hurry to go from teaching Torah there to preaching in north-west London. The sunshine compensated for us. 

All around there were huge green trees, rolling hills, a babbling brook. Hippies not far away chanted in Hebrew while banging on drums.

“OK,” I said. “Now what do I do?”

“So I’m going to tell you my practice,” she said, “but you can come up with your own.”

Her practice, I later discovered, was the same one as you would find Orthodox Jews performing on Friday afternoons, as sanctioned by rabbis and law books. She had a way of making every tradition feel New Age.

She dunked fully underwater three times, twice emerging to recite a prayer.

Al hatvilah – thank you, God, for making me holy by commanding me in immersion.

Shehechiyanu- thank you, God, for keeping me alive to see this day.

On the third dip, she came up, smiled and said: “That’s all there is to it.”

I copied her every move. And that was it: my first mikveh.

I had previously associated this ritual with Orthodox women washing off the ritual impurity associated with menstruation. It had seemed to me outdated and misogynistic. 

The only other people I knew of who did it were converts, undergoing a form of Jewish baptism to initiate them into the religion. I had thought, cynically, that these new Jews were washing off the goy.

But here was my teacher, Yael Tischler, far more radical than I was in terms of religious innovation and transgressive liturgy; a witchy feminist affiliated to the Kohenet movement in America – a bohemian collective for women-centred spirituality. 

With her, the act of immersion didn’t feel problematic. It felt like my whole body was wrapped up in Jewish history. It felt connected to the earthy, fleshy customs of long-gone ancestors.

This was strange, because I know that none of my recent ancestors would have done such a thing. Liberal Jews were, by and large, decidedly opposed to many embodied rituals. 

Like their reforming Christian counterparts, many of the early Progressive Jews felt that religion should be a matter of intellectual faith. It should be stripped down to its essential meanings, devoid of excessive piety or symbols. 

In the great platforms decreed from Germany and the USA, Reform Jews repudiated circumcision, abandoned kashrut and denounced tallits. They ridiculed shockeling, the Eastern Ashkenazi prayer movements, as “bowing and scraping.” One British Liberal rabbi called kippot “the eccentric trappings of the Orient.”

As you can imagine, mikvaot did not get much of a look-in. For decades, ritual immersion was not a requisite part of conversion at the Reform beit din. Today, very few progressive Jews will attend the mikveh before their wedding. It is almost unheard of that a progressive Jew will have a regular toiveling practice as the Orthodox do.

This week’s parashah probably provides a good explanation as to why progressives are so uncomfortable with it. This week, we read Tazria-Metzora, a portion dedicated to defiling skin diseases, leprous houses, sexual infections and menstrual impurity. 

To escape the uncleanness that falls upon people by contact with these things, ancient Israelites would ritually immerse in a mikveh. The Torah describes mayyim chayyim – running water – in which people would wash themselves. We know that in the period after the Great Exile, the mikveh was likely an enormous bath at the entrance to the Second Temple. 

In the biblical world, the mikveh does seem troubling. It exists for a people obsessed by physical purity, who want to remove their blemishes before they enter sacred spaces. I would not feel comfortable advocating immersion to congregants on the grounds that their bodies are unclean and carry associations of sin. 

But my teacher, Rabbi Debbie Young Somers, argues that our rabbis fundamentally transformed what mikveh meant. She did her rabbinic thesis on mikvaot and has taught about their virtues in numerous study sessions. When I asked her for sources for this sermon, she immediately sent me detailed source sheets and tweeted her glee that the subject matter was being discussed in our synagogue. 

Impurity, Rabbi Debbie argues, is not the same as defilement for the rabbis. It is what happens when you come close to something holy. Touching religious texts, having sex, giving birth and changing to a more holy status, are acts that require immersion. Faeces, urine and vomit, which are more obviously disgusting, do not require any religious ritual. When we wash ourselves, we are not scrubbing away sinful dirt, but acknowledging sacred contagion.

In a post-Temple world, nobody can be clean or unclean. The mechanisms for such processes are gone and the need to do so – so that one might perform an animal sacrifice in the correct state – thankfully no longer exists. 

The Talmud records that, nevertheless, Jewish women took the obligation of ritual immersion upon themselves. It was a choice that antique ancestresses made as part of their covenant with God. When they did, the rabbis largely trusted women to self-regulate and organise their own mikvaot. It might well be that they already had very little authority over this aspect of life.

Today, feminists are returning to these practices. Led mostly by religious women, efforts to reclaim the mikveh are popping up all over the world. Scholars and lay people are extolling the virtues of immersion for both men and women.

People take these ritual baths before life-changing events, like trying for a baby, getting married, starting a new job and completing a course of study. They also use the mikveh to process life’s trials, like miscarriage, recovery from illness, divorce and redundancy. 

That was how I ended up, a few summers ago, doing sacred skinny dipping in the countryside. I am now convinced that it is a deeply moving spiritual practice, and I commend it to anyone who is interested. 

The Sternberg Centre in North London has a functioning mikveh. There is also a programme underway called the Wellspring Project, which hopes to soon create a mikveh-oriented wellbeing centre. In Manchester, the new building for Jackson’s Row is planned to have a mikveh.

And the wonderful thing about mikveh is that you don’t have to travel far to do it. You can toivel in any naturally occurring water, like seas, lakes and rivers. Just turn up, jump in, and dip your head underwater. 

And thank God for the commandments. 

And thank God for your body.

And thank God you’re alive.

And thank God that we can take these ancient practices and make them our own.

I gave this sermon on Shabbat 17 April 2021 for Parashat Tazria-Metzora at Newcastle Reform Synagogue

judaism · sermon

What do Jews look like?

levtaylor

A woman on a train walked up to a man across the table. “Excuse me,” she said, “but are you Jewish?”

“No,” replied the man.

A few minutes later the woman returned. “Excuse me,” she said again, “are you sure you’re not Jewish?”

“I’m sure,” said the man.

But the woman was not convinced, and a few minutes later she approached him a third time. “Are you absolutely sure you’re not Jewish?” she asked.

“All right, all right,” the man said. “You win. I’m Jewish.”

“That’s funny,” said the woman.” You don’t look Jewish.”

This classic Jewish joke actually highlights a good question: what do Jews look like? I am often told either that I do look like one, or that I don’t, and when I ask what it is… nobody ever wants to tell me! Whatever the reason, people have in their minds a picture of a Jew.

As it turns out, this isn’t altogether a new thing. Indeed, this week, we read about the clothes for Aaron and his descendants of the priestly caste. They have a strict identifying uniform.

Linen headdress, sash and and robes. A metal encrusted breastplate. Ephod, urim, tumim, incense. Aaron looks holy. Aaron looks like he stands out. Aaron looks… Aaron looks a lot like the Tabernacle he serves.

Aaron is to dress in the same white linen that we are told covers the Holy of Holies. He is to wrap himself in yarns of crimson and turquoise, just like the sashes that decorate the sanctuary. He is framed in gold like the Tabernacle’s curtain rails. He must wear a breastplate encrusted with stones representing the twelve tribes, just as the stones were ritually placed at the major resting points of the Israelites. 

Aaron is the Tabernacle in miniature. He is a microcosmic representative of the function he serves. The clothes he wears even assist in atoning for the Israelites’ sins, just as a sacrificial altar would.

Aaron dresses like what he does. He says: I am going to do holy things, and I require holy garb to do it in.

What a contrast with the Megillah we read just yesterday. In the book of Esther, there is an initial threat to the Jews. Haman, their wicked adversary, stomps through the city and plots Jewish mass murder. But Esther, our triumphant hero, foils the plot and overturns the decision. Now, instead, her uncle Mordechai will stomp through the streets of Shushan.

The Book of Esther draws our attention especially to what Mordechai was wearing on his horseback gallivant. “Mordecai left the king’s presence in royal robes of blue and white, with a magnificent crown of gold and a mantle of fine linen and purple wool.”

What does Mordechai look like? He looks just like a Persian palace. He has the crown and clothes of a king. He has the horse of his vizier. He looks like the empire. He looks like his enemy.

Having adopted the outfit of the oppressor, Mordechai soon acts like one. Under his instruction, the Jews go off on their own rampage, killing Haman, his sons, and 75,500 of their supporters. What Haman had planned for Mordechai, Mordechai did to Haman.

In Reform Judaism, we often gloss over this awkward ending, but it is very important. Victims given power can become no different to their persecutors. Here, the Megillah wants to slap us in the face with that fact. Look, it says, Mordechai looks just like everything he set out to oppose!

There must be a lesson in this for us. If we can look holy and we can look like oppressors, we have to think carefully about how we appear. 

Perhaps, then, I am right in my decision to always wear a collared shirt and suit jacket when I come to preach on Shabbat. After all, these clothes show that I’m serious and taking the services seriously. 

Ah, but the trouble is, arms dealers, politicians and tobacco lobbyists also wear suits. Aren’t I just dressing up like them, mimicking the clothing of 21st Century professionals, and subconsciously siding with them?

Perhaps, then, I need to switch to jeans and a t shirt? Oh, those haven’t been subversive since Tony Blair got out a guitar and rebranded the country as “Cool Britannia.” Mark Zuckerberg goes to work in jeans and a t-shirt, I’d hardly be making a different point.

Maybe I should copy our friends in Gateshead. After all, if I wear a black hat, long coat and beard, nobody will doubt that I’m Jewish. The people who stumbled to tell me why I looked Jewish before will now have a very clear answer.

Only the trouble is Haredim just dress like Eastern Europeans did 300 years ago. Theirs might fit someone else’s stereotypes better, but there’s nothing more authentic about it. Besides, I’m not convinced I’d look any less oppressive to a great number of Progressive Jews.

So how do we stop ourselves looking like our oppressors? In honesty, I think a Jew only looks like our enemy when we are determining what Jews should look like. When we stereotype, we repeat prejudices. When we gatekeep people for their clothes, we play into classism and prejudice. When we set out an image of a Jew, we exclude and hurt others. Deciding who looks Jewish is the least Jewish thing we can do.

So, what does a Jew look like? Open arms. An open heart. A broad smile. Curious eyes. A face that says, welcome, you are welcome here. A Jew looks like someone who knows that Jews look like everyone. 

Shabbat shalom.