Tag: shuvah

high holy days · sermon

It’s time to go home

levtaylor

At the end of a holiday, you pack your bags the same way as you did when you were heading out. Only now, your clothes are covered in sand. Your swimwear is salty and smells of chlorine. You put them in black bin bags, and tie them up. Some of the books you brought with you are battered on the spine because you lay them flat on your subbed while you were reading. And some of the books you brought haven’t been opened – why did you think you needed so many?

Maybe you took a photo or two. Maybe there’s a group shot of everyone who was there. Maybe you’ll go back with a postcard from the gift shop, or a keyring, or a fridge magnet, or one of those novelty pencils that you’ll never use.

But ultimately, all you’ll have is your memories. The clothes you wore will get washed and go back in the drawers. The photos you took might get put in a scrapbook, or saved online somewhere, or posted to social media, and then they’ll fade. But it doesn’t matter, because the goal wasn’t to get souvenirs. It was to experience it, and be on the holiday, and enjoy it.

So it is with life. Our mortal bodies are only here for a short stay. Our souls come on a brief holiday. And when we have to go back where we came, everything is a little more worn and broken and used than when we first got it. But that’s only because we’ve used it the way we were meant to. Our faces are a little bit more wrinkled and our hearts are a bit more tired. And we’re ready to go home.

Today is Shabbat Shuva, the Sabbath of Return. It sits at the cusp of Yom Kippur, today, only a day before. Tomorrow evening, we will gather for judgement day, a dress rehearsal for our deaths. Tradition asks us to wear the clothes in which we will be buried and deprive ourselves of food and drink and recite the deathbed confessions and last rites over our own bodies.

Today, Shabbat Shuva, is more muted. It is a day of preparation for that funereal enactment. It is a time when we reflect on the end that is coming, and on what was the point of our lives.

In this week’s Torah portion, we read the final words of Moses and his preparation to depart the mortal world.

God instructs Moses: “Go, climb Mount Nebo, and survey the land. Look over the plains of Moab and the country of Canaan. That is where the others are going.”

“But,” says God. “You can’t go with them. You are mortal just like everyone else. You were only here in this life for a short stay, and now you have to come home. Now, it’s time to come back to Me.”

Moses went up from the steppes of Moab to the summit of Pisgah and looked over absolutely everything, from the western sea to the city of palm trees, and breathed in the life he had lived. Moses was mortal, just like you and me.

He had lived, and he had been great, and he will be remembered longer than any of us will. But, in the end, he was just a man. He had tried and failed and worked just like anybody else. He came to an end and was buried in a plot on the mountain.

Moses returned his soul back to its Sender, now second-hand and a bit more battered than when it had first arrived. He died, as we all know we will.

If you believe the rabbinic tradition, the scroll which recounts the death of Moses was discovered by King Josiah, hidden under a layer of stones in the First Temple. When builders were carrying out renovations on the Temple, they discovered a new text there. That parchment, it is said, was the Book of Deuteronomy, containing all of Moses’ last words and relaying his final hours.

Josiah sent that book by messengers to the prophetess, Huldah, the keeper of the sacred wardrobe. Huldah was then an elderly woman, and one of the sagest prophets to be found throughout Israel. She gingerly inspected the scroll and confirmed that it was indeed the word of God.

Huldah said to the messengers “Go tell the man that you sent you that everything he read in this Book will come true, including the disasters it warns of for Israel.”

The rabbis, reading these words from the prophetess, are horrified. Why does she say “go tell that man” and not “Please inform the King…?” Isn’t this haughty arrogance on her part? Quite on the contrary, because through her gift of prophecy, Huldah could see that Josiah, although King, was still just a man. She knew that he must be, because she had just read in the Torah that even Moses was just a man.

A folktale says that, when Josiah died, there was an enormous procession. Thousands of mourners came out, grieving, and crying, and beating their chests, and lamenting songs in distress.

They carried the King’s casket all the way from Megiddo to Jerusalem, surrounded by crying subjects. They walked with the coffin up to Mount Zion, to the sepulchre of the House of David.

There, at the gates to the tomb where all the great kings had been buried, Huldah, the keeper of the sacred wardrobe, was waiting, keys in her hands. She was ready to begin the final prayers.

At the head of the procession, the High Priest called out: “The Great King Josiah demands admittance to his temple to be laid to rest alongside his ancestors.”

Huldah the prophetess shook her head. “I do not know him.”

The High Priest ruffled with consternation. “King Josiah, son of Amon and Yedidah, descendant of the House of David, Ruler of Judah, insists on being interred according to the Laws of the God of Israel.

Huldah shook her head. “I do not know him.”

Again, the High Priest issued a proclamation. “This is the King, Josiah, restorer of the true faith, protector of the Torah of Moses, rebuilder of God’s Temple, opponent of idolaters and destroyer of the altars of Baal. He must receive burial.”

Again, Huldah shook her head. “I do not know him.”

Now the priest approached Huldah directly and whispered: “A penitent sinner humbly requests to lie down in the ground.”

“Ah yes,” smiled Huldah. “I know him. He can come home.” And she opened the gates.

On Shabbat Shuva, we remember that, no matter who we were in life, we all become the same in death. We were just mortals, offered a split second of existence, permitted to take a short stay on this beautiful planet. We are just holidaymakers here, required only to enjoy this life, and leave this place a little better than when we came. But, eventually, our bodies will go back like battered suitcases from a week away.

On this Shabbat Shuvah, we are called on to return. We remember that we only ever had one true place we belong, and that is with God.

And, soon, it will be time to go home.

Shabbat shalom.

high holy days · sermon

Come back to hoping, even if only slightly

levtaylor

Do you remember how you were as a child, when you only believed good things about the world, and you thought everyone was trustworthy and kind, and you felt you could achieve anything with the power of imagination? Come back to that. Just for a while. Come back to that.

Before the cynicism of adolescence set in and you realised your parents didn’t know everything and you started to question life’s meaning. Come back to that.

You can’t go all the way back. Years of experience have softened some pretensions and hardened some edges.

But try to reclaim a little bit of that optimism and wonder. The person who believed those things lives somewhere inside you still.

You don’t have to come back all the way. You don’t have to believe everything.

You don’t have to believe that God is perfect and created the world and will bring about the Messianic age any day now and will reunite us all with our loved ones.

You don’t have to have perfect faith. I don’t. I doubt many sincere people do.

But you have to hold onto some faith. You have to believe in something. You have to have hope, no matter how fragile it is.

Today is Shabbat Shuvah: the sabbath of return.

It calls on the words of our haftarah, Hosea, where the prophet beseeches us: “come back, O Israel, to the Eternal One your God.”

Return to the faith you once knew.

You have abandoned your self-confidence, says Hosea. You have accepted defeat by Samaria. Assyria will not save you, nor will its gods.

The prophet calls out: “You could blossom like a lily and be beautiful like an olive tree. You can live again.”

Reviving belief is a challenge. We have all suffered our defeats, personal and communal. They have embittered us with cynicism.

Shabbat Shuva is a calling back to faith. It is an invitation to try and remember what it was like to dream.

That is not easy. Some people had life’s harsh realities thrust upon them too young, and had to grapple with injustice too soon.

Primo Levi was such a man.

He was a Jewish chemist in Italy.

When I was a teenager and full of the arrogance that I’d got the world figured out, my dad gave me one of Levi’s books, The Periodic Table. Outside of religious literature, I think that is the only book I’ve finished reading and immediately restarted.

The Periodic Table tells of Levi’s story, through the prism of different elements.

From the noble gases of his Italian-Jewish heritage to the hard, grey metal of Vanadium in his old age, Levi talks us through his experiences of fascism in Italy, which began when he was an infant.

Italy was the first country to adopt fascism. Mussolini came to power on a platform of nationalism, tradition, corporatism, and dictatorial control. His slogan was “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”

In Primo Levi’s teenage years, the Italian fascists introduced their racial laws, directed primarily against Italian Jews and Africans. The Africans were placed in colonial concentration camps. The Jews were initially stripped of citizenship and assets, banned from the professions.

At the time, Levi was training as a chemist in a laboratory. His Christian classmates were civil, but withdrew from him, and regarded him with suspicion, and he became a loner. He took solace in chemistry, hoping that its solid truths could puncture fascist lies.

To survive the racial laws, Levi said, he needed to take advantage of his youth and turn a willing blindness to everything happening around him. He needed to imagine that the world was still fine, as he imagined it ought to be. In that naivety, he did not even realise he could actively resist fascism.

When he and his comrades decided to fight the fascists, they turned to the Bible. He saw in his own struggle the struggles the prophets had waged against empires. But he also looked up to the sky and felt that it was empty. God would not save them. They would have to save themselves.

Perhaps this is what it means to have just enough faith. Not so much that you blindly invest your hopes in a God who rescues, but enough that you can draw inspiration from others, past and present. Enough faith to believe that your cause is just and that fascism can, ultimately, be defeated.

Levi knew he had to get angry, and act. He filled his heart, more with desperation than hope, and took up arms.

In the snowy mountains, he fought as a partisan, and was captured by the fascists.

How did he survive the camps? Levi took pride that he went into the camps as an atheist and never wavered in his disbelief. But he refused to succumb to pessimism. He never allowed himself to become disheartened completely. He would not let the fascists take from him his hope.

Who could blame Primo Levi for not having ultimate faith in God’s redemption? But he had just enough faith. Just enough to stay alive and keep fighting and, afterwards, to testify to the truth.

You do not have to believe everything. But you must believe something.

You must come back to hoping, even if only slightly.

I think you already know why I am telling you this.

Precisely one hundred years after Mussolini marched on Rome, the fascists have returned to power in Italy.

In the days before the election result came through, an Italian friend of many years texted me, to say how scared he was. It looked like the far right’s victory was already assured before the polls.

When the results came, they were worse than expected. Giorgia Meloni, and her far right party, the Brothers of Italy, had trounced all other parties at the ballot box, and would not even need Berlusconi’s support to form a government.

In her election address, she promised to give back Italian national identity that had been stolen by “international financiers.” She said she would bring back the family, which had been eroded by LGBT people.

She immediately pledged to replace the post-war constitution, which had enshrined democracy and minority rights.

I do not want to be alarmist, but I am also unable to blindfold myself to experience. There was a generation who could wait and see how fascism would pan out in Europe. We do not have the pleasure of such naivety.

We have to be sober. We cannot allow ourselves to be blindfolded to what is happening.

But we cannot ever allow that to become despair.

Hosea does not just implore the Israelites to return, but promises that God will come back too.

The Holy One promises: “I will heal them. I will cause them to return to Me in love. I will turn away from My anger.”

If you take a small step towards hope, hope will step towards you too. Hope will carry you.

On this Shabbat Shuva, however much faith you have, try to have a little more.

Remember faith. Come back to hoping, even if only slightly.

Shabbat shalom.


high holy days · sermon

A life without regrets

levtaylor

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. 

Integrity. Curiosity. Kindness. Justice. Effort. Love.

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.

Shabbat Shalom