When somebody dies, we want to remember them. We try to celebrate all they were, what they achieved, and how much they meant to us.
In truth, this task is near impossible. How can a whole life be summed up in one epitaph, one eulogy, or one memorial? The connection that a mourner feels to their deceased is infinite, so it is hard to even imagine giving something to the dead that feels so finite.
But we do our best. Although their bodies no longer function and their souls no longer dwell on earth, we strive to honour their memories.
So Abraham did, when Sarah died. Abraham adored Sarah. She had been his fellow traveller and faithful believer for over a century. She had been brave and powerful and kind. All Abraham wanted was to show her the great respect in death that she had earned in life.
He negotiated for her the finest cave on the choicest plot of land as a burial site. He insisted on paying for it in full, despite the landowner’s offer that he could simply take it. He wanted to feel its full value. In turn, he imagined, Sarah might feel fully valued too.
Sarah had a life well-lived. One hundred and twenty seven years. At every stage, she lived fully. Without doubt, she had her faults, and made her mistakes, but she lived a life worth remembering. Abraham wanted to honour that.
At the Battle of Gilboa, King Saul fell on his sword and died fighting Amalekites. How could one remember a ruler as great as Saul? What could David, the successor king and shepherd boy, say to honour such a hero?
David wrote and taught a lament; a eulogy in the form of a song that he distributed to everyone in the ancient kingdom. That tribute remains, to do this day, a moving work of literature.
“O how the mighty have fallen,” repeated twice by David, has since become an English idiom. In its original context, it is a profound, heart-wrenching expression of grief.
“May the mountains of Gilboa know no more dew, nor showers, nor rain,” David exclaims, as if wishing for the whole natural world to express his grief.
“Daughters of Israel, weep for Saul,” David adjures the whole nation to join him in his anguish.
Thousands of years later, we can hear David’s deep love for Saul and his son Jonathan. The words give a finite conclusion to an infinite love.
And what a life Saul lived! He ruled forty-two years as Israel’s first king. He spoke with the dead and danced with the oracles. He consolidated his authority and that of God.
He erred, as any leader would. He took too much power for himself and became paranoid at being overthrown. Saul died, like a warrior, aged 70 and still battling his enemies.
Friends, we gather today on Remembrance Shabbat, the closest Sabbath to Britain’s national day of mourning for those killed in war.
At 11am on November 11th 1918, the countries of the world signed an armistice. They vowed they would no longer fight, and swore that the horrendous death toll from the Great War would mark an end to all wars.
That conflict, now known as the First World War, was unbelievably painful. In just one day in 1914, over 3,000 people were killed in the Battle of Mons. Aggrieved by the startling loss, Laurence Binyon wrote a poem on the cliffs of Cornwall.
“For the Fallen,” which we read earlier in this service, commemorated those who died on that one day, but came to form a core part of the liturgy for all memorials of that terrible time.
In the century that has passed since, we have endeavoured to remember and honour all those who died in war. Like David lamenting Saul, we have written and spoken words to commemorate their sacrifice. Like Abraham eulogising Sarah, we have laid wreaths and erected cenotaphs, so that some space will mark their passing.
Yet what distinguishes the war dead from the great lives of Sarah and Saul is how much they did not do. They did not get to live full lives into old age. Many did not even get remembered by name, but were interred in tombs for unknown soldiers.
As Binyon’s poem reminds us: “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.”
Those who died in wars largely did not get to enjoy the things we take for granted about ageing, like seeing weddings, blessing children, having careers, drinking with friends, raising children, and even having birthdays.
The most common age at which a British soldier died in World War 1 was 19. In more recent decades, the average age of a soldier killed in Afghanistan was 22; and in Iraq was 21. This is a loss that most of us cannot comprehend.
Like Abraham and David, we construct memorials to all those lives lost. We build our memorials from words, from rituals, from structures, and from pinned poppies.
And we commit ourselves to the memorial we most need: a world of peace. We vow to do all we can to ensure that no more young people die on battlefields. We honour those brave enough to take on military roles by doing our solemn duty as civilians: to make sure nobody has to fight. We will strive, even in these trying times, to ensure diplomacy in conflict, friendship between nations, and love between people.
On this Remembrance Shabbat, we honour their memories, and we remember to seek peace.
“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
The pastor, Fred Rogers, said these words. He was speaking to nursery age children on American public TV. He was a gentle Christian minister, who gave people hope and comfort through trying times.
This year, I have returned to his words often. This has been a difficult year for the British Jewish community. We have seen previously unthinkable and frightening acts of antisemitism.
And, yet, for every one person sowing hatred and fear, there have been hundreds of others bringing love and solidarity.
On days when a disaster happened, I wished that every KLS member could be in this building. Then you could receive the cards, the flowers, the emails, the calls.
You could see all the neighbours checking in on us. All the faith leaders extending solidarity. All the politicians asking what we need. All the emergency services coming round to offer us reassurance.
I wish every member could receive all the love, because to look at the news, you would think there was nothing but hate. But there are so many good people, who are happy that Jews are here in Britain, and who want to build with us a society based on tolerance, liberty, and compassion.
They are our helpers. And we have had so many.
While some may want to kill and destroy, without the helpers, there would be no such thing as civilisation.
Indeed, there was a time when even knowing Rosh Hashanah’s date depended on a great community of helpers.
In this modern age, we can look at our phones and quickly find out when Rosh Hashanah begins. Some use paper calendars or have the information stuck up on their fridges.
But there was a time before all that. Not just before phones and fridges. But before we even had a fixed calendar.
Back then, if you wanted to know when Rosh Hashanah began, you had to stare up at the night sky.
Rosh Hashanah always starts with the new moon of Tishri. The new moon is a slither in the sky, visible only for about fifteen minutes on a clear night, and requiring expert precision to identify.
So, Jews throughout the Diaspora would gaze patiently at the waning moon, perhaps as they tended flocks, or nursed children, or laid on their backs under a cloak of stars. They would wait for it.
And then they’d see it. The exact moment when the moon looked almost entirely black, save for a faint glow around the perimeter. Blink and you’ll miss it. But see it, and the new moon has come, and with it, the new year.
Still, it wasn’t enough for one person to spot the moon from a field. Every Jew had to agree that this was indeed the start of their year.
So, the witnesses walked to Jerusalem. They trekked from wherever they were in the countryside to the old Temple. They gave testimony there before learned teachers, holding up picture charts, who could confirm that what they saw was a true new moon.
On the walk to Jerusalem, you could find others walking the same path, all heading towards the Temple courtyard, because they had seen the same moon that you had seen. Hundreds would descend on the courtyards to bear witness to fifteen minutes of a blackened sky.
Rabban Gamliel, the head of the Jewish community in the early first century, wanted to make sure that all these helpful people felt valued. So, he threw a great feast in the courtyard for everyone who came to volunteer their sighting of the moon.
Gamliel ensured that every witness was questioned thoroughly, and asked to describe the moon they saw. And he made a new law, saying that anyone who was giving this testimony could walk two thousand cubits in every direction, even in violation of Shabbat. He wanted to reward people; to make sure they continued helping.
When every witness had been interviewed, and the rabbis had confirmed that the new moon had been seen, they would light up a fire on the Mount of Olives to declare that the festival had begun. And everywhere across the Jewish Diaspora that they saw a burning pyre, they’d light their own bonfire, to let the whole community know that this was the beginning of the year.
The Rosh Hashanah of Antiquity was made by helpers.
Now, every year, for thousands of years, at exactly this time, we have gathered, just as they once did, to celebrate this day.
Yet, this Erev Rosh Hashanah is not only a celebration.
We meet here on the 25th anniversary of the World Trade Centre attacks. September 11th 2001, a quarter-century ago, forever changed the world.
I remember coming home from school to see that now iconic footage of the Twin Towers falling live. My mum stood, ironing shirts, transfixed by rolling coverage on the BBC. She said: “there will be bombs dropping somewhere tomorrow morning.” She had a tone of detached fear.
Terror, I suppose, is the word.
A few days later was Rosh Hashanah. Rabbi Alexandra Wright preached. In her sermon, she summarised the mood:
“The sickening fear that refused to dissipate, the disbelief and unutterable shock of seeing those elegantly poised silver towers, knifed by the steel of two airliners, buckle slowly, almost gracefully, crumbling, shattering into a million pieces amidst a plume of lethal dust and smoke, held back for a little while any contemplation of the global implications of this attack.
“But by the following morning, a voice of anger, outrage and retribution had been discovered. America would avenge the deaths of its thousands. Retaliation would be bitter-sweet comfort in its hour of loss.”
Rabbi Alex was sadly proven right. A month later, the attacks on Afghanistan began. That war lasted twenty years. Subsequent wars followed in Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Lebanon, Pakistan and Syria. Some say we are still living through the same war.
Immediately following 9/11, there was a climate of fear. If even New York were vulnerable, anywhere could be attacked.
We in Britain feared for how we might be hurt, and we feared for the hurt that our own country might inflict on others.
In this climate of panic, there was another message that cut through, too. Televisions re-ran the message of Mr. Rogers. “”Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
The speakers directed us to think of the heroes that day in New York. The firefighters who rushed towards danger. The first responders who came to the scene. The nurses and paramedics who treated wounds.
These are the same people mentioned in the Mishnah of Rosh Hashanah where we learn about the team of volunteers that called the new moon. Because Rabban Gamliel didn’t just create legal exemptions and special protections for the new moon volunteers.
He extended Shabbat privileges to midwives, firefighters, sentinels, and anyone who needed to take swift action to counteract a disaster. He made a halachah for the helpers, to say that their helping mattered more, even than Jewish law.
“Look for the helpers,” that was the message. Find strength and comfort in all the people who run towards disaster with the sole goal of helping others.
Realising that his voice was needed once more, Mr. Rogers came out of retirement to record a message for the post-9/11 world. Rogers, a Presbyterian minister, used a Jewish concept to anchor his message: “tikkun olam”; healing the world.
He said:
No matter what our particular job, especially in our world today, we all are called to be repairers of creation. Thank you for whatever you do, wherever you are, to bring joy and light and hope and faith and pardon and love to your neighbour and to yourself.”
This was a message to everyone.
The work of being a helper did not just belong to those who did exceptional professions, but to anyone willing to do the right thing. Anyone who came forward with a volunteer spirit to address a problem was a helper.
The message to look for helpers has recurred many more times since September 11th 2001. In 2018, a terrorist shot up the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, killing 11, and injuring 8. The neighbourhood where the attack took place, Squirrel Hill, had been home to Fred Rogers.
Tovia Jacobs came from the same neighbourhood, and was a student at Yeshiva University. He penned a profound reflection on coming as a Jew from this place, inspired by Fred Rogers, and wanting to find helpers. He acknowledged, in particular, the Muslim organizations who raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Synagogue within a few days of the attack. “The helpers were definitely there,” he said, “each acting as a small vigil candle in the darkness.”
This year, that message has reverberated in my brain once more. Look for the helpers.
Tonight, I want to retell the story of this last year, not as one of victimhood and fear, but one that has been profoundly shaped by helpers.
Last Yom Kippur, there was an attack on Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester. The leadership of this synagogue carried out the necessary risk assessments and made the brave decision to stay open. The Synagogue Protection Group understood that we needed to change how we do shul security, and stepped up to the plate. So many members, through their volunteering, ensured our community flourished in proud defiance of hatred.
In the weeks after the attack, we were inundated by gifts of flowers and messages of support. We made a notice board purely to showcase all the words of solidarity we were receiving. Some people called the synagogue office, just to say they were thinking of us, and to let us know that we were their neighbours, and that they cared about us. A man came round and, to my surprise, handed me an anonymous cheque to help with our increased security costs.
On the first night of Chanukah, after the attack at Bondi Beach in Australia, we received so many messages of support. The local MP, Monica Harding; the Council leader, Andreas Kirsch; the mayor, Noel Hadjimichael, and several dignitaries immediately came round to support us. We received visits from all of the local police services. Some of the police then came in the evening to our Chanukah Party, danced with us, and ate doughnuts.
When there was an attempted arson attack at Finchley Reform Synagogue, all the faith communities of their area immediately came together to stand as one. Cantor Zoe Jacobs, FRS’s spiritual leader, said at the time: “We are extremely grateful for the solidarity of our neighbours, local police, and politicians. They help us remember that we are always a community who would choose to build bridges rather than walls.”
When there was a stabbing attack in Golders Green, the local vicar, Reverend Joe Moffatt, and the council’s faith worker, Marina Payen, called and asked what we needed. I said we needed a public show of support. They said: “then that’s what we’ll do.”
That weekend, all the faiths came to stand together against hate outside the Bentall Centre in Kingston. The mosque promoted the event at Jummah prayers on Friday. Some of the churches stopped their Sunday services to join us. We were surrounded by Kingston’s community representatives and faith leaders. I looked around and thought: “I am so glad the Jews are outnumbered here.”
In Kingston, we are blessed with exceptionally strong civil society, positive neighbourly relations, and a culture of collaboration between the faiths.
So, yes, there have been stories this year that I need not repeat. But there are other stories that we should be telling again and again. Stories of the helpers.
We have seen them. And we need to keep looking out for them.
We look for the helpers because, when we feel scared, they give us security.
We look for the helpers because, when our faith in humanity is tested, they restore it sevenfold.
We look for the helpers because, when we’re not sure what to do, we know we can follow them.
All across this city, this country, this world, there are people who have decided that hatred will not win. They are determined to stamp out the scourge of bigotry and intolerance. They are building a world based on love and diversity.
There are those, now, who are scared and confused, and looking for helpers.
They are looking for you. So find that helper within yourself.
In Antiquity, when the Temple stood in Jerusalem, the New Year wasn’t declared until the helpers arrived. Then, when they had confirmed that they had seen the new moon, they lit a torch on the Mount of Olives to say that Rosh Hashanah had begun.
And everywhere across the Jewish Diaspora that they saw a burning pyre, they’d light their own bonfire, to let the whole community know that this was the beginning of the year.
Today, let us each light the fire within ourselves that we will be numbered among the helpers.
Let us set up the beacon from this synagogue that says we will promote tolerance, liberty, and compassion.
Let us look out and see all the many other flames, shining bright in the darkness, coming from every place that believes in the vision of a shared society.
And, as we look out at the sea of lights in the darkness, let us say: a new year is here.
About ten years ago, I used to sit over there on a Shabbat morning. Rabbi Nathan was still a student, taking over from Rabbi Janet, and I was applying to Leo Baeck College. This community was then, and still is, such a wonderful home for all kinds of Jewish characters.
I’ve just moved back to south London after a long time away, although I’ve been commuting to my synagogue in Kingston from Essex for nearly two years.
This fortnight, I have finally found myself living and working in the same area. The best bit? I can do something I haven’t been able to do for a while in my daily life: walking.
I love walking. I love the meditative rhythm of getting between places; seeing what the landscape, the nature, and the people are doing along the way.
I love a good hiking holiday. Wandering with my husband and friends through the hills.
In the mountains, anywhere you may walk in this country, you’ll find paths that have been paved. Not by bulldozers and concrete but by the gradual gentle treading of a route over thousands of years.
Rocks are smoothed over; ledges and grooves formed into the hillside like staircases; rubble cleared and large boulders pushed aside. These pathways are a reminder that people have trampled the same routes for generations, each traveller beating out a physical memory into the mountain, following on from those before, and leaving a trail for others to follow.
This is, I think, what we do with Judaism. In every generation, we are taking our own path up the mountain of religious truth. We are trampling our way up towards the Heavens. We follow a path that others have made, and, through our footsteps, make sure the way is clear for others to follow.
The Hebrew word “halachah” is often mistranslated as “Jewish law,” but its literal meaning is “the path.” Similarly, “minhag” gets translated as “customs” but its literal meaning is “the way we go.” That is what Judaism is: in every community, a way of walking the path to God.
This week is Shabbat Nachamu: the Sabbath of Comfort. In our liturgical calendar, we begin the six weeks of consolation, taking us to the High Holy Days. Each week, we read words from the prophets that offer us solace.
This week’s haftarah comes from the Prophet Isaiah and begins with the words “nachamu nachamu ami”: comfort, take comfort, my people, hence the name of our Shabbat.
Isaiah declares to the Israelites: “clear a way in the desert for the Eternal One; raze a highway for God! Let the rugged ground become level and the ridges become a plain!”
This is, of course, not literal. The Jewish religion is incompatible with the brute force of bulldozers and never seeks to subjugate land. Our Torah’s ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace.
Isaiah is speaking metaphorically. The valleys and mountains he wants to flatten are spiritual.
Isaiah is writing to the exiled Israelites in Babylon, promising them that there is still hope. These refugees are held in captivity and have no idea if they will ever return.
To them, God feels miles away. Without their home or their people, they don’t know how to communicate with their Creator.
Keep walking, says Isaiah. Tread down that path with your feet. Wherever you are, you are on your journey to God.
Remember that this way has been trodden many times before.
For forty years, the Hebrews wandered in the wilderness. There, their feet really were stepping literally. But something deeper was happening too: their souls were on the voyage to freedom. They were learning to live without certainty and material comfort in harsh conditions. They had to walk the path of faith, putting their trust in God.
At our point in the Torah story, Moses knows that his physical journey is coming to an end. He tells them, with some heartbreak: “I must die in this land, I cannot cross over the Jordan.” After a lifetime of roaming, Moses has to finally hang up his sandals.
But he knows the spiritual journey is far from through. He is passing that on to the next generation.
He tells them: stay on that sacred path to God. Don’t deviate from it by turning away to worship idols. Keep on that search for the divine. Walk on the way I have shown you.
Today, coming back to the South London Liberal Synagogue, I feel myself treading again on an old path. These are the steps I walked on my journey to becoming a rabbi, and I feel a wistful nostalgia to come back to this part of the mountain.
I feel conscious, too, of those who trod down the path into this synagogue for me, especially the wonderful members of this synagogue, now departed, who made me feel so at home here.
And I think to those who first saw a path for a Liberal Synagogue in Streatham. They had walked the path of Judaism inherited from their ancestors. They could see that some more conservative Jews were carrying on walking ahead, but no longer ascending the mountain. They were stuck on a path to nowhere, and heading towards a ravine. So those Liberal Jews had to beat out a new path and clear away rubble others dared not touch.
They made the way for a Judaism, our Judaism, that would be inclusive, justice-oriented and spiritually meaningful. Over the last century, the way they foresaw has been walked on more, made deeper grooves, and come further.
Over the last few years, we have found that many of those brave first pathways are now converging with routes that others have trodden. Liberal and Reform paths are coming together. The traditional and the radical are finding they can walk the same way.
What a joy to walk on the same road after waving at each other for years! Together, we are going to walk a deeper and wider path.
The challenge for those of us who hold onto the vision of the earliest Liberal Jews will be to make sure the way is always progressing up the mountain.
If ever the tracks that everyone else is going down look too narrow, or like they are heading somewhere stagnant, we must have the confidence to point towards the Heavens.
We, today, must continue to walk the path that others have paved. And we must look ahead, so that there will be a clear route for others to follow behind.
“Every valley shall be raised up; every mountain and hill made low. And the glory of the Eternal One will be revealed.”
Walk together. Keep on hiking. Let us climb towards our God.
Hanukkah. It’s such a great festival. The candles, the dreidls, the latkes. Everything about it seems so heimishe, so wholesome, so Jewish.
Would you believe me if I told you that, in the biggest, most important corpuses of Jewish literature, it barely gets a mention?
Of course, it doesn’t appear in our Bible, the Tanach. Hanukkah is one of the only festivals we celebrate that isn’t ordained by the Torah. That’s because everything recalled by the Hannukah festivities took place in the 2nd Century BCE, right at the time our canon was closing. All the stories that were going to be in our Bible were already there.
The accounts of what happened – how the Hasmoneans rose up against Greek occupation – were only preserved by the Catholic Church, who considered them ‘Apocrypha,’ or intertestamental books, leading up to the time of Jesus. The Jews didn’t hold on to them.
But it’s not just our Bible that omits Hanukkah. Even our rabbis, the creators of Judaism as we know it, scarcely paid attention to the festival.
The Talmud is an enormous compendium on every aspect of Jewish life. Want to know about marriages? There’s a book for that? Divorces? There’s a book for that. What to do if somebody swears an oath that they won’t cut their hair and then wants to renege on it? There’s a book for that. What to do if your ox attacks another farm animal? Book for that.
Every festival has its own book. Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, Pesach, Purim, Sukkot, and Shavuot all get extensive tractates. But not Hannukah.
If you want to know what the Talmud says about Chanukah, you have to look in a completely different treatise, on the topic of Shabbat. There, it gets a brief mention, in amongst a much larger conversation about candles.
In the whole library that is rabbinic literature, Chanukah only gets four pages (or two sheets, front and back) dedicated to it. What did this poor Festival of Lights do to deserve such neglect?
You might say, well, it’s just a minor festival. It’s not one of our big ones. It’s only really become a major holiday in response to the booming of commercialised Christmas.
But, looking at what the Talmud actually says about Chanukah, we are confronted by a bigger mystery. The Talmud begins with a debate between the two great Sages who founded rabbinic Judaism, Hillel and Shammai. Shammai says that we should start by lighting eight candles, and decrease each day. Hillel says we should start with one and work our way up. As usual, we follow Hillel.
Here’s the thing. This debate does not appear anywhere earlier in the tradition. It’s not in the Mishnah or the Tosefta, where we would expect to find it. It’s certainly not attested from the time of Hillel and Shammai. Hillel would only have been born about 50 years after the Maccabees came to power. Surely we would expect to find something contemporary?
The Talmud seems to have invented this debate, nearly 800 years after the event took place and the rabbis named were alive.
There’s a good reason why they would want to do that. When we tell the story of Chanukah, we tell the rabbis’ version. We tell the story as it appears in the Talmud. You’ve probably heard it already. The invading Greeks defiled the Sanctuary and all that was left was one cruse of oil. That cruse of oil lasted eight days, which was an astonishing miracle. Now, as a result, we light candles for eight days.
The story from the time paints a very different picture. The Books of Maccabees were probably written as military propaganda by the Hasmoneans themselves. They show a zealous army of militants, who rose up against Greece, but spent a good chunk of their time massacring Jews who they thought had assimilated too much. They were, effectively, a terrorist organisation.
When they won power, they set up a theocratic dictatorship. They put themselves in charge of the monarchy, the Temple, and the economy. They ripped up centuries of checks and balances in Israelite politics. They engorged themselves with wealth and crushed all dissent.
At the time when Hillel was alive, they would still have been in power. It is unlikely they thought highly of the rabbis, whose interest in Jewish law would have threatened their power. They probably didn’t think much of the early rabbinic schools either, which looked suspiciously like Greek philosophy academies. There’s no way Hillel and Shammai would have celebrated their festivals.
It seems that, centuries later, the celebration of the Hasmonean victory persisted, but people had forgotten why. So, our rabbis came up with a new story to replace it. They replaced war with joy. They replaced spears with candles. They replaced military victory with faith in God.
That’s why they omitted the story of military conquest. Instead, they developed the stories of miracles and burning lights that we recognise today. They replaced the corrupt rulers and zealous extremists with pious sages, who saw the festival as a celebration of God’s surety, rather than of human strength.
The rabbis concocted a festival lectionary, giving us biblical readings to focus our mind on its themes. They chose for our haftarah the prophecy of Zechariah: “not by might, nor by power, but only by My Spirit, says God Almighty.”
This verse directly contradicts the Maccabee myth. Not might. Not power. But God, and faith, and peace.
That is the Judaism we have inherited. That is the Judaism our rabbis intended for us when they created the Talmud. They wanted us to live as the prophets of old dreamed: in peace with our neighbours; seeking justice at every turn; and walking humbly with our God.
Faced with persecution under the corrupt tyranny of the Maccabees, our rabbis reinvented Judaism so that it would be a positive guiding force for all people.
That is a much greater revolution than the Hasmonean victory.
That is the real miracle of Chanukah.
May this Festival of Lights bring you boundless joy. Chag urim sameach.
May this Day of Rest bring you peace. Shabbat shalom.
A young Talmud scholar moves from Lithuania to London. Years later he returns home to visit his family.
His mother asks: “Yossele but where is your beard?”
“Oh, mama, in London, nobody wears a beard.”
“But do you at least keep Shabbat?”
“No, mama, in London people work all the time. We have to make money.”
“Oy vey. But do you still keep kosher?”
“Mum, I’m sorry, kosher food is expensive and hard to find.”
“Yossele…” she says. “Are you still circumcised?”
Thus joke points to a perennial Jewish anxiety: will people stay Jews? Will Judaism continue?
In every generation, a study is published, fearfully proclaiming that Jewishness is declining, which will be swiftly followed by rabbinic pronouncements about how to save it, philanthropists putting money into projects that engage young Jews, and various pundits proclaiming that this proves exactly what they had always said.
Why, when this problem has been repeatedly highlighted, has Judaism nevertheless continued, and Jewishness never seen the burial it was foretold?
For starters, it turns out that many of the things that people assured us would mark the end of Judaism were not that threatening after all. At the start of the Enlightenment, Orthodox leaders agonised that, if Jews went to universities, they would be needlessly subjected to heretical ideas and turn their backs on religion. In the end, Judaism and academic study proved more than compatible.
The fear about Jews losing their beards turned out not to be so troubling either. After all, half the Jewish people had never been able to grow them! In the 90s, the great moral panic centred on mixed marriages, which, experience has shown, only grew the Jewish population, rather than diminishing it.
So, why all the worry? In fact, these concerns undoubtedly go back to the beginnings of Jewishness. In the book of Ruth, we read a story of a young woman faced with the choice of whether to remain with the Jewish people. Either she could stay with her mother-in-law and run the risk of never marrying; or she could return to her original village and begin her life again.
Being Jewish was the harder option. Being Jewish was riskier and unknown. Ruth’s sister, Orpah, chose to leave the Jews and rebuild. Ruth chose Judaism.
She must have seen something in it that made her want to stay. Perhaps it was the God, or Naomi, or the people, or the way they lived. Judging by what she said, it was a combination of all of these. She chose the harder option, because it was the more beautiful one.
That has always been the way with Judaism. High risk. High reward. Hard to maintain. Worth maintaining.
That is why we feel anxiety about Jewish continuity. We know that it is not the easy option. It takes work. So we look around for people who will do it.
Our rabbis understood this feeling well. They told a story of the revelation at Sinai: that, on the day when God gave the Israelites the commandments, God raised Mount Sinai over their heads and told them to accept them. If they took them on, they would live. If not, the mountain would come crashing down on their heads and make the desert their grave.
“Choose life” wasn’t advice. It was a threat. Of course, they accepted.
But, said the rabbis, there were other times when they took on the commandments too. When there were no threats from God but plenty from the ruling powers. They point to the story of Esther, when the Jews lived under Persian imperial rule and could have been slaughtered for practising their religion. God did not appear to make promises or offer consolation. But they chose Judaism anyway.
This is a narrative of how Judaism has been continued. On an individual level, this is what happens to many of us. As children, we go to synagogue because our parents tell us to. We live their ways and eat their food because we have no other choice. Now, as adults, we turn up because we want to. There is no compulsion to attend. We do it because we have found in it something beautiful and worthwhile.
This is true, too, of our history as a community. There was a time when we had no choice but to be Jewish. Think of the periods when Jewishness was stamped on our passports and our job application papers; when being Jewish determined what jobs we could do and where we could live. We kept up Judaism because we had no other choice.
But now we have reached a time when it is a choice. Nobody is making us be Jewish. We sustain it because we want to. You who have turned up this morning could have gone anywhere. You could have done anything. But you chose to come here. Like Ruth and Esther, you decided that something in Judaism was beautiful and worthwhile.
You decided that this religion and these festivals have meaning. That is why I’m not really worried about Jewish continuity. I know that you are keeping it alive. I know that, in every generation, as long as there are a good few people who think Judaism is worthwhile, it will be.
On Shavuot, we renew our covenant with God. We take on the Torah once more. We decide to keep the flame of Jewish truth burning.
If today were your last day, what would you make of the time you have had? Would you be satisfied that you’d lived your life right? Would you feel like you had left much undone or unresolved?
If today was your last day, would you feel confident in your end? Would you know for certain what had made your life worthwhile?
These are the uncomfortable questions Yom Kippur pushes us to consider. And they are indeed uncomfortable questions. Without even mentioning God, morality, or religion, I know that some will feel affronted by the line of questioning. I know that if I were the one being asked, I would feel affronted. I would be raising objections to the questions.
But everything about the rituals of Yom Kippur forces us into that way of thinking.
We dress in the clothes in which we will be buried. A kittle, or cassock, for Ashkenazim. A simple tallit for Sephardim. No jewellery, no perfumes, no fancy shoes. We are dressed not too differently from how we expect to leave this world.
We pray. We pray that we will be allowed to live. We recount the many ways in which we might die: by fire, water, beast, sickness, ordeal. We recite vidui: the final words we expect to say on our deathbed.
We fast, afflict, and deprive ourselves. All of this is supposed to make us reckon with our mortality. It is a death rehearsal. Yom Kippur asks us whether or not we are ready for death.
Today is Shabbat Shuva, the Shabbat midway between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. While some of our readings are special to the occasion, the Torah continues where we last left it before the High Holy Days, with Moses proclaiming his last speeches of Deuteronomy.
At this stage, Moses knows that he will die, and he contemplates his coming end. His life is over, and so is his mission. He will not reach the Promised Land to which he has travelled, and he must handover power. God tells Moses: “The time is coming close for you to die. You will soon lie down with your ancestors.”
God offers Moses no reassurance that he has succeeded in his life’s task. Quite the opposite, God tells Moses that the people will now chase after false gods, neglect the holy laws, and forget their covenant with God.
After all that. Plagues and miracles in Egypt. Signs and wonders and an outstretched hand to deliver them. They had seen the sea part and bread fall from the sky. They had received the commandments from a thunderous mountain. Now, God tells Moses, they will forget it all and ignore what they learned.
Moses must have wondered in that moment if his life had been worth living at all. His projects may not be continued. His beliefs might not be upheld. Everything he did may have been for nought.
Yet, somehow, Moses seems to have achieved a kind of calm. He no longer protests against his Creator. He does not challenge the decree. He hands over to Joshua and lets him take the reins.
Perhaps, by this stage, Moses has learned that what matters in life isn’t whether your work succeeds, but whether you perform it with integrity. What matters isn’t whether you find out all the answers, but that you seek to learn. And what matters isn’t whether you perfect the world, but that you treat the world as if it can be improved. In short, what matters is that you do your best.
In the Babylonian Talmud, Rava tells us that, upon dying, Heaven will ask of us six questions:
Did you have integrity in your work?
Did you make time to study Torah?
Did you care for your family?
Did you try to make the world better?
Did you welcome new ideas?
And did you have reverence for your Maker?
Our task on earth is not to be wealthy or famous or powerful. It is to be honest, studious, caring, supportive, optimistic, inquisitive and loving. It doesn’t matter so much what we do with life, but how we do it.
Heaven doesn’t ask what our job was. It asks if we did it faithfully. Did we conduct our working lives in ways that we could be proud to give account of ourselves before God? Did we act as if how we treated others in business mattered for the sake of our own souls?
Heaven doesn’t ask if you can recite the whole of the Mishnah by heart. It doesn’t ask whether you mastered some sacred texts. It doesn’t even ask if you learnt your aleph-bet. Did you try? Did you take an interest in your traditions and heritage? Did you actually look to the past to see if it had any bearing on your own life?
Heaven doesn’t expect you to have had only one marriage of the right kind. It asks whether you actually looked after people. Did you care for those around you? According to palliative nurses, the most common regret among the dying is that they did not spend enough time with those they loved. At the end of life, God also challenges you with the same question.
Heaven does not ask if you brought about salvation of all humanity. It asks tzafita lishua? Were you on the look out for redemption? Did you search for chances to make the world better? Did you hold onto hope that the world could be changed?
And Heaven does not ask if you arrived at the right answers. It asks whether you asked wise questions. Were you curious? Were you inquisitive? Were you interested in what others have to say?
Above all else, the question we are asked is whether we had yirat Hashem, awe of God. Without this, all the other questions are irrelevant. The Talmud compares someone without reverence for Heaven to someone who only has the keys to the door inside the house, but can’t actually get into the house.
Ultimately, what matters is that we treat our lives like they have meaning. You have to actually care about how you live, and believe that it really matters.
When Moses reaches the end of life, he doesn’t wonder whether it was worth it. He is faced with the far more fundamental question of whether he really lived right.
These are the things that really matter in the end. We will get to the end and our only regrets will be the attitude we took towards life itself.
Yom Kippur is, indeed, a preparation for death. But above all else it is a calling to live. It demands of us that we look at our lives and resolve to conduct them better, with fewer regrets.
Once, in a plausible past, a scientist built a machine. It was so powerful it could handle complex reasoning. It could calculate absolutely anything.
The scientist programmed the machine so that it could work out the optimal outcome for any decision. If she asked it whether to eat porridge or cornflakes, this contraption would measure up the nutritional value of each cereal against her personal health, exercise and needs.
It would even factor in how happy each breakfast choice could make her, short term and long-term. This machine would crunch those numbers until it spurted out the best possible result. Porridge this morning. Almond milk. No salt or sugar.
This scientist discovered she could put her instrument to use with every daily task. Before long, she had completely optimised her life. She went to sleep and woke up at exactly the right time. She did the perfect amount of exercise. She worked a job that maximised her fulfilment, income and skill set.
She used it to work out where to do her charitable giving: finding the cause that would save the most human lives for the least amount of money. The machine told her which purchasing choices would have the least impact on the environment for the fairest price to consumer, labourer and business owner.
Such a fine apparatus! Of course, it was only a matter of time before she realised this could have implications far beyond her own life. She brought her machine to the capital city and presented it before the benevolent president.
“Ma’am,” she intoned as she bowed, “this machine will help you make the perfect decision at all times.”
“Let me try,” said the president. She lifted herself from her seat and walked over to the metal block. “For the longest time, I have wondered if I need more advisers to increase the wisdom in my country. Perhaps this machine can tell me how many more I should hire, and what sort of person I need?”
The scientist typed in the numbers, and you have already worked out what happened next. The answer was so obvious! The machine told the president that she did not need any advisors, because all her decisions could be rationally calculated by the computer. Immediately the president dismissed all her advisors.
Now the real work could begin. The computer informed the president of all the best crops that could be grown in the best soil for the best results. It told her what land to capture and which pastures to disregard. It explained which industries would be most cost-effective. Within a matter of months, the country was transformed.
Then the computer updated the president with which workers were most efficient, and which ones consumed more than they produced. The machine enumerated which people were most likely to disrupt social order. It showed how the population would be healthier and happier if it were smaller and more homogenous. The president gleefully implemented its dictats.
The machine calculated who to imprison. Who to promote. Who to ignore. Who to starve. Who to execute.
Because a machine can count absolutely anything. Except the value of a life.
No. The worth of a human being cannot be accounted for by any mathematical system. Life comes from something that is infinite and belongs to that Infinity. As such, it is indivisible, indefinable, immeasurable. No machine can capture God. No machine can understand those inviolable precepts that we call ‘human rights’.
The idea that there is such a thing as human rights is, fundamentally, a religious ideal. It can only be understood by reference to something holy. The rights of human beings are inviolable because they are given by God. Philosophy’s great atheists – Bentham, Marx, Singer – also explicitly rejected the discourse of human rights.
Conversely, Tom Paine grounded his rights of man in the biblical account of God having created us equal in Eden. When Jefferson wrote the American Declaration of Independence, he explained that human beings “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” When the colonised and enslaved people of the Americas answered back that they, too, had such rights, they appealed to the same Divine Source. When Wollstonecraft vindicated the rights of women, she insisted that “God brought into existence creatures above the brutes so that they would have incalculable gifts.”
In this week’s haftarah, God tells the prophet Zechariah: “not by might, nor by power, but only by My spirit” can the Jewish people truly live. All the force and wealth in the world cannot compare to the sacred truth of God’s infinity. We are nothing if we abandon God’s message.
More than a religious value, human rights are a Jewish value. Hanukkah is underway. It is a festival that celebrates an oppressed minority’s achievement of religious freedom in the face of colonial oppression. It remembers how the Seleucids once tried to violate Jews’ every right, but were ultimately defeated. Above all, we are told, it was God who safeguarded their rights.
A testimony to the Jewishness of human rights comes from the author of their Declaration. This week is Human Rights Shabbat, commemorating 72 years since the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Among its composers was a French-Jewish jurist named Rene Cassin. Cassin was keen to ensure that there was some legal framework for guaranteeing people were protected, no matter where they were from; what minorities they belonged to; or what they believed.
In particular, in the shadow of a genocide perpetrated against Jews, the Declaration of Human Rights sought to ensure that never again would a group be systematically eradicated. Human rights were supposed to be a counterpoint against genocide.
Genocide, like the choices described in the story of the morality machine, is the result of mechanical thinking. It is something that can only be justified when human beings are reduced to statistics and social consequences only measured in terms of order or prosperity.
You see, the machine that could calculate anything except the value of a life did not exist only in fiction. It is already a part of our daily reality.
Before genocide can be carried out in camps, it is developed on spreadsheets and planned on computers.
Before people can commit atrocities, they have to switch off the part of themselves that connects with their infinite source and plug in only to the finite equations of capitalist mentality. If we are not careful, we can become the machine. We become the automatons that punch out numbers and make calculations and rationally process every evil.
Our media asks us how many people should be permitted into Britain, and we churn back answers into the polls. We are challenged to decide how many people should die of Coronavirus, and how many should be imprisoned to stop their deaths. We are told to weigh up which tools of warfare our country should have to capture the greatest resources for the least sacrifice.
We are asked the most unconscionable questions and, barely processing the implications, return answers like amoral computers. If we permit ourselves to think like robots when we weigh up the values of other people’s lives, we truly do destroy the humanity in ourselves.
We will only break free from such finite thinking when we put it into the perspective of Infinity. It is the infiniteness within someone that makes them holy. It is their Infinite source that makes their purpose sacred.
For the sake of humanity, we embrace human rights.
“Take a break,” Moses said to the Israelites. “I’ve spoken to God, and we’re both very keen on this: you need to take Saturdays off.”
“Yes, we know, we’ve heard this before,” said the Israelites. “You told us when we were around that mountain. You told us when we were building the mishkan. You said these exact same words only a few weeks ago in another parashah. You don’t need to keep going on about it.”
“I do, though,” said Moses. “It’s really important. I’m telling you now so you get it. 24 hours of rest. 25 if you want to be extra about it. But definitely no less. You need to take a break.”
The Israelites sighed. “We get it. Tell us something new.”
“OK,” said Moses. “Take a break. Or I’ll kill you. I’m serious now. Not resting on Shabbat is punishable by death. If I catch any of you picking up sticks or lighting fires on Saturdays, that’s it. Dead.”
“But why? Why does this matter so much to you?”
“Because,” said Moses. “For generations, we were slaves. Our whole lives we worked. When our masters had their days off, we still worked, serving them. We broke our backs. We lost touch with what mattered. We forgot how to think. We forgot how to enjoy life. We have a chance here that we’ve never had before. We can build an entirely new society, where the measure of life isn’t how well we work, but how well we rest. If we instill this day of rest with holiness and make it the cornerstone of our society, we can build a community that resists the tyranny of work and the oppression of masters.”
And that was that. Shabbat became enshrined as the hallmark of Jewishness. No more would people exploit each other on their holy days. No more would we be defined by our productivity. Instead, the marker of Jewish observance was how holy we could make this day by refraining from work.
Generations later, our rabbis were faced with a new question. If work was forbidden, what actually was work? Perhaps in the peasant and smallholder society of ancient Israel, it was obvious. But in the new reality of urban living across a wide Diaspora, it was no longer so clear. They needed to know how to make the day holy.
So they looked to this week’s parashah. Here, in this section of Torah, the commandment to honour the Sabbath bookends descriptions of how to build God’s dwelling place. They looked at all the work that must have been involved in creating this momentous desert structure. Lighting fires. Tanning leather. Dying cloth. Joining wood. Polishing stones. Spinning wool. Carrying. Pushing. Lifting. Choosing. Separating. Drawing. Planning.
If this was the work that was required to build God’s dwelling place in ancient times, they reasoned, then abstention would be the way to build God’s dwelling place today. Just as the performance of work was a holy act in the Torah, not doing the same things could be a holy act in our world. Through their interpretation of this text, our rabbis gave new life to the holiness of Shabbat and the value in not working.
This idea has so much relevance to us today. In recent months, an article has been circulating entitled ‘How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.’ It argues that the generation of people now in our twenties and thirties live in a permanent state of overwork and exhaustion. It gives good material reasons why this should be the case. We were born into post-Soviet Thatcherite Britain. The dominant idea was that anyone could work hard enough to become rich, and we were educated in a system that reinforced this. By the time we entered the job market, the country was in recession, wages permanently stagnated, housing became completely unaffordable and job security became a rare luxury. As a result, we are primed with a need to work hard, but the rewards for this seem completely unattainable.
I think the reason this article was so widely shared was because it spoke to many of my peers’ lived experiences. I doubt, however, that the issue is generational. I look at the teenagers I am tutoring for bar mitzvah, and I am overwhelmed by how much pressure is on them. They seem to be constantly examined, overburdened with extra-curricular activities, and pushed to constantly improve their CVs, even from the youngest age.
At the same time, I see friends in their fifties and sixties who are permanently exhausted. I recently asked an older friend how he was doing. He answered that he wasn’t sure if he was tired from sickness or just living out the regular fatigue that comes from working. We are, as an entire society, exhausted and struggling to keep our heads above water.
This systemic problem may feel insurmountable. The people sitting in this room cannot, on our own, redesign society, push wages up, make housing affordable, or transform the labour market. (Much as I my try to push the line that we can.) Yet there is one thing we can do. We can do what our ancestors did when they left slavery and decided to institute their own rules. We can do what our rabbis did when they were confronted with urban living and needed to re-imagine work. That is: we can shift our focus.
Against a culture that sees work as the end of human existence, we can prioritise rest. In a world that demands us to be constantly online, we can switch off. In a society that tells us we are isolated competitors, we can build meaningful community. We can insist that we do not live to work, but we work to live. Our lives do not have meaning because of how productive we are, but because of how much compassion we can put into this world.
Against the crushing pressure of modern capitalism, Judaism continues to issue forth a two-word rallying cry of protest: Shabbat shalom!
