Why do giants feature so prominently in our stories for children?
I recently had the joy of reading some chapters from Roald Dahl’s BFG to my six-year-old godson. Reading to him as he got ready to sleep gave me such warm nostalgia. I remembered my own childhood, hearing this story for the first time; feeling at once so safe, and like anything was possible.
To children, the whole world feels populated by giants. Grown-ups are so much larger and, just like in Giant Country, have built everything to their size. Some adults, like the BFG, are kind and fun. But some, like Fleshlumpeater and Bonecruncher, are decidedly nasty and cruel.
So we give children stories where they defeat giants, and help them process these menacing creatures so much larger than themselves.
The Austrian-Jewish psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim explored fairy tales as one of the ways that children gain their sense of self and develop confidence. In The Uses of Enchantment, Bettelheim writes that “although adults can be experienced as frightening giants, a little boy with cunning can get the better of them.”
Such is the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. I remember so gleefully participating in the school pantomime of this story. (I played Jack’s mother, of course.) Through play, we children could act out a world where we saw those bigger than us for the lumbering oafs they were and used our wits to bring them down.
Giant stories have probably existed as long as we have had the words to tell them. In our Torah portion, Shlach Lecha, Caleb, Joshua, and their intrepid band of boys set out on an adventure to see the Promised Land.
Upon arrival, they spot frightening giants, the children of Anak. “We looked like grasshoppers compared to them, and they must have seen us the same way.”
To show the other Israelites back in the wilderness how enormous their foes were, they brought back the ogres’ food. A bunch bearing a single cluster of grapes required two of them to carry it on a pole. They rolled a pomegranate the size of themselves back out of the land of Canaan.
Throughout the camp, everyone burst into terror. Only Joshua and Caleb had faith that the giants could be beaten. We, of course, identify ourselves with those fearless leaders.
“Fairytales,” says Bettelheim, “intimate that a rewarding, good life is within one’s reach despite adversity – but only if one does not shy away from the hazardous struggles without which one can never achieve true identity.”
“Do not be afraid,” say Caleb and Joshua. “Have faith. Trust in each other. Trust in God.”
Here our Torah gives us the same gift of instruction as a fairytale. It reminds us to be brave and use our cunning, because the giants can surely be defeated.
In Torah, grammar is always important. Joshua and Caleb insist: “we can defeat them.” This is not an instruction to others or a profession of their own greatness. It is an invitation to collective power: together, we are going to conquer the giants.
Later, Joshua and Caleb are proven exactly right. They destroy the children of Anak and drive them out, cowering, into Philistine towns. Later still, King David will slay the last of the remaining giants, a monster called Goliath. No wonder this is one of the best stories to tell at cheder.
These fairytales continue to serve us long after we have outgrown them. Now that we are grown-ups, the world may not still feel so magical, but we still have giants to slay.
The problems facing us are manifold in this world dominated by racial injustice. The oppressions of our age are many-headed monsters, far bigger than the enormous ogres of our stories.
I look at the children in our synagogues and feel pained that, perhaps, they will be less protected from the horrors of the world than we were. I wish we could insulate them a little longer from harsh realities.
As an adult, I discovered that my beloved Roald Dahl actually didn’t much like Jews, but, by then, I was secure enough not to be bothered by it. I see that our young people are far less protected from the nasty views others hold. They are already having to learn the skills to deal with antisemitism in their schools and in the material they see online. I feel blessed not to have had to confront such evils until much later.
I do not envy the challenges our young people face, but I feel deeply proud of how they have risen to the task.
On Sunday 10 May, members of RSY and LJY joined the rallies against antisemitism in central London. Holding true to our Progressive values, one of the movement workers’ placards denounced Islamophobia, racism, and anti-immigrant hatred, alongside their condemnation of antisemitism.
They held their heads high, and refused to back down on the prophetic call for unity. Racism are enormous giants to conquer, but these are the battles that have animated the Jewish religion since its inception. The earliest prophets promised “vindication and justice for all who are oppressed” (Psalm 103:6).
For the supposed infraction of drawing connections with other oppressed groups, our young people were harassed as they marched. They were completely unobtrusive, but drew great ire from the Christian fundamentalist sect, Stop the Hate.
Yet, according to the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, the UK’s only academic thinktank on anti-Jewish hatred, drawing connections with others’ struggles is precisely what we need to do.
In their report last year for the Runnymede Trust, these scholars showed that, by pitting the fight against antisemitism against the struggles of other minorities, the problem was only getting worse. Jews were becoming more isolated, and finding their battles harder.
What we needed, the Institute said, was to build alliances with other racialised minorities, so we could take on the mammoth system of racism together.
Here, the wisdom of established academics meets the optimism and zeal of youth. Just as in the earliest days of Judaism “the old dream dreams and the youth see visions” (Joel 2:28).
Young people – as you go out to fight antisemitism; as you lock arms in the struggle against all forms of racism; as you protest for a more equal world – please know that you are never alone. We are with you, and struggling alongside you.
However small you may feel, come stand on our shoulders. Don’t worry: we are standing on shoulders too. Shoulders of generations before us who battled poverty, war, pogroms, and genocide.
Yes, we Jews stand on the shoulders of ancestors going back centuries, who fought against the same giants you tackle now.
And when you realise that you are standing on top of this human pyramid, you will see that the ogres are much smaller than they first appeared. We may feel like grasshoppers in their eyes, but we stand together on a foundation they cannot even imagine, and that makes us enormous.
Just as Caleb and Joshua once cohorted the Israelites in the desert, we know we need not fear.
Have faith. In your traditions. In each other. In our God.
When the silver trumpet blasted, the Israelites decamped and moved to a new location in the desert.
At the front of the procession, this seems to have been a marvellous affair. The tribal leaders assembled at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting with triumphant fanfare. God’s presence ascended from the Tabernacle as a glorious pillar of smoke in the day or a fearsome column of fire at night, and the chieftains marched in pre-assigned order behind their divinely appointed leaders: Moses, Aaron, Miriam, and the priests.
For the men at the head of the procession, this must have felt like a victorious military march towards the future.
But what was it like at the back? How did this experience of moving through the desert feel to the people who were on the edges of this grand voyage?
Consider how many Israelites were wandering in the desert. We have heard their numbers and know they amount to the size of a small city. There were more Israelites crossing the Sinai desert than there are people living in the modern country of Luxembourg.
In such a large group of people, most had no idea that all this pomp was happening at the front of the group. If they were midway through the camp and all the travellers were silent, they might have had a chance at hearing the vaguest echoes of trumpet blasts. But it is unlikely that anyone on the edges heard these fantastic instruments at all.
Perhaps, at a far distance, they could see the plumes of smoke and fire to let them know they were moving. But, far more likely, the greater indication would be the others around them shifting. They would hear rumours and murmurings, and get ready to move on their encampment to its next stage.
While the priests at the front played with their horns and struck up a marching rhythm, a whole other group of people would get to work.
The people who pitched tents would start the laborious process of deconstructing them. Breastfeeding mothers would gather up their infants in slings. Parents would call out to playing children and try desperately to cajole them into staying close. Water-carriers would haul tankards over their heads or hoist them on their backs. Animal handlers would load their donkeys and camels, and entice them to carry rations.
Our Torah is told from the perspective of those at the front of the procession. We learn their family dramas, hear the complicated rituals they performed, and picture the magnificent relationship they had with God.
For most of the desert Israelites, however, the journey was altogether different. What kept them together, more than these supranatural experiences and religious rites, were their relationships with each other.
I think it is important to centre their stories.
I have a long commute from Essex to Surrey. If the traffic is good, it takes about an hour and a half each way. To pass the time, I spend my journeys listening to audiobooks.
This has opened up a new world of literature to me. My usual reading is philosophy and theology, but that’s hard to focus on at the same time as the road. So I’ve started listening to sci-fi and fantasy novels.
Over the last few months, I’ve made my way through a whole bunch of stories by Ursula Le Guin. As a storyteller, she is a favourite of the college principal, Rabbi Dr Deborah Kahn Harris, and was beloved by her teacher, the legendary Rabbi Sheila Shulman.
Fiction, Rabbi Deborah assured me, is sometimes the best way to get across theological ideas. I have found this to be totally true.
During my car journeys, I have listened to Le Guin’s Earthsea Quartet from beginning to end. For the first three books, this was a world inhabited by dragons, powerful mages, young kings, demonic spirits, and magic spells. It was captivating.
The fourth book, Tehanu, has a sudden change in tempo and style. It was written more than 25 years after the first novel, with the characters having aged by the same amount of time.
At first, hearing this final book, I was somewhat disappointed. The pace is slower. Far less seems to happen. The characters, who had previously been magical heroes who cast spells and rode dragons, were now old, disempowered, and facing a world that is violent and cruel.
Only after I finished listening did I get to hear the author’s own voice. In a recorded post-script for the audiobook, Le Guin says that Tehanu looks at the high fantasy world from below. It shows what the world I had loved and lived in during my car journeys is like from the vantage of the people without power: women, workers, and children. She says this was her way to give voice to her own people in the world of Earthsea.
Now it made sense. I was, I discovered, learning a philosophical and theological lesson from the story, just as Rabbi Deborah had threatened I would. The world, after all, can be violent and cruel, and it is especially so to those without power.
History and politics are very different when you see them through the eyes of people who don’t march at the front, but gather at the back.
That doesn’t mean that life for workers and women is all misery. In Le Guin’s story, the powerless still have their own magic, their own rituals, their own beliefs, and build their power in community with each other.
That’s true for our biblical ancestors, too. Thanks to archaeology, we now have a better idea of what life looked like for the earliest Israelites who had no access to the Temple cult. They had their own parallel religious practices, with God centred in their homes. In their kitchens and bedrooms. They had fertility rituals, prayers they recited, and stories they told, even though they were excluded from the world of priests and kings.
This is one of the great joys of Judaism. While it has always had its figureheads who spearhead the community from the front and pronounce the direction for all to proceed, it has also always had its margins.
Within Jewish life, those who were excluded from the centre have built a religious life on the edges. These are exciting, creative places. They are, often, where real changes are first ignited.
Today, we must pay attention to the wonderful world of Jewish life that is being created far from board rooms and conference podia. There are other Judaisms, constantly being made in people’s homes, and in communities quite separate from the centre of north west London. Why, there are even congregations south of the River! This Judaism may not always make headlines or even get written down, but it is the lifeblood of our religion.
We should, of course, listen to the sounds of the great trumpets blasting to tell us we are moving.
But we must also pay close attention to what people are saying at the back, as we move on our eternal journey to freedom.
If you are looking for a religion to make your life easier, give you comfort when you’re troubled, and to help give you certainty in life… I wouldn’t recommend Judaism.
Judaism gives us many things, but certainty, comfort, and ease? You won’t find those here.
Our religion is one of ‘ol Torah – the yoke of Torah. Our Talmud teaches: We must subjugate ourselves to the Torah like an ox to a yoke. Like a donkey to its burden.
For everyone, life feels heavy. It feels like too much to bear.
For Jews, our Torah comes along and says: would you like some more obligations to go with your struggles? I can add a few more worries to your load.
At Shavuot, we read the story of Ruth. Ruth has lost her husband. She has no land or property. There is famine and disease. She is in the middle of nowhere. She and her sister, Orpah, face a choice. They can go back to their own people, the Moabites, get new husbands and start life anew. Or they can stay in the wilderness with no possessions to look after their mother-in-law, Naomi.
Ruth takes the harder option. She chooses to stay with her mother-in-law, learn new ways, and take on a new God. It is an act of remarkable bravery.
We read it at this time of year to remind ourselves that we are always out in that wilderness, always with the option to turn our backs and leave behind this people and this God. But, like Ruth, we keep on choosing to stay.
Ruth’s is a personal story of her connection to Judaism. Shavuot is also the story of our collective embrace of the Torah.
This is the festival that commemorates when forty thousand freed slaves received the Torah.
Our Talmud says that, when they came to Sinai, God lifted the mountain up over their heads. From underneath, they could see the enormous peak suspended above them like a keg.
Out of the clouds, God declared: “Accept the Torah, or this will be your grave.”
Now, our Talmud concedes, in that situation, accepting the Torah would be the easy option. (When a robber says “your money or your life,” they’re not actually expecting you to think it over.)
If that’s the case, the rabbis say, we should be able to reject the Torah now. If our ancestors had to accept it under duress, faced with threats, we are not bound by the decisions they made.
But, says the Talmud, our ancestors affirmed their Jewishness in the time of Esther. Here, the shoe is on the other foot. In the time of Esther, being Jewish was a dangerous thing that might get you killed at the hands of a tyrannical regime. But, the story says, the Jews reaffirmed their Torah and took upon themselves even more commandments.
That’s right, at the time when they were carrying the heaviest burden, they chose to weigh themselves down more.
Look at our present situation. There is no threat to us that we must keep being Jewish. Everyone here has the right, without consequence, to walk out of this synagogue, and never come through the doors of another one again. We could take the easy choice, and forget this old religion.
But what actually happens? On the days when there are attacks on Jews, synagogue attendance goes up. When it feels dangerous to be Jewish, we get more requests from people who want to connect with their heritage. In just the last few weeks, we have had more requests than usual from people seeking conversion.
When being Jewish is the toughest choice – that’s when our people really show up, and take on the burden of the Torah.
Now, you may be thinking, this sounds like an awfully Orthodox sermon from our extremely liberal local rabbi. All this talk of the burden of Torah, and the yoke of submitting to Heaven – it sounds like something that belongs to the black-hats.
Let me tell you something I feel quite sure of: being a Progressive Jew is a much greater burden than being an Orthodox one.
A year ago at this time, we brought together our Liberal and Reform strands to build the Movement for Progressive Judaism. A uniting figure from our shared history is Sir Basil Henriques, who led both Reform and Liberal communities in the Jewish East End. He set out his vision of what our shared belief system is, saying:
“The Law has been handed down to the Prophets of Israel. That Law is not static, but ever expanding and progressing. It has been revealed to Israel in every generation, and every age should be able to stand on the shoulders of the previous generation, and to see further and be able to see more clearly what is the perfect Law of God. The Law, the Torah, should be the highest ethical code of which man can conceive. If the Perfect Spirit of Righteousness demands of us perfect righteousness, then the Laws of Righteousness must be as perfect as we can conceive them to be.”
In other words, we Progressive Jews must embody, through our lives, the highest moral standards possible. The question we ask is not: “what does the tradition say I should do with my life?” but, the far tougher question: “what does God require of me?” An individual Jew ought to wake up every morning, asking how best we can serve our Creator. As a movement, we should be in a constant struggle to work out together the morally best choices.
It is relatively difficult to say no to pork and shellfish, as I do.
But it is far harder to grapple with the morality of food itself. Should we be eating any kinds of fish? What are the air miles on our vegetables? Can we truly eat ethically in this unjust system?
But a Progressive Jew wants to know what the morally right thing to do is, not just what conforms to ritual law. So these are the questions we must ask ourselves.
A Progressive Jew can live life just as an Orthodox Jew would, with one exception. We can never unlearn the Enlightenment. We cannot backslide into racism and sexism; or magical thinking and superstition. We must always face the world full-on, with all its problems, to see how we can live up to the highest moral ideals in our time.
That is far harder.
Let me give you some living examples.
Here in the UK, in the last few months, we have experienced some real threats as a Jewish community. Things that make us rightly scared.
Cantor Zoe Jacobs’ shul, Finchley Reform Synagogue was attacked recently. What did she do? She threw open the doors and welcomed in the whole community. People of every nationality and religion came to join her in prayer.
Do you think that was easy? Do you think it is comfortable to open doors when your instinct is to put up walls?
But that is what Progressive Jews do. We refuse racism and fear. We refuse to be pushed back into the ghettoes.
In Israel, compare our religious leaders there.
On the one hand, the Ashkenazi Orthodox ‘Chief’ Rabbi Kalman Ber has supported Netanyahu, his corrupt cabinet, and his wicked war every step of the way.
On the other hand, Rabbi Avi Dabush, one of the leading Reform rabbis, comes from Kibbutz Nirim, a place that was attacked by Hamas on October 7th 2023. For the last three years, he has been demanding answers from the Israeli government for why his community was abandoned, while at the same time, physically putting himself in the way of attacks against Palestinians and trying to stop this war.
Now I ask you, who took the easy route? And who took the hard one?
And let me ask the real question: which response is the more godly; the more moral; the more Jewish?
Doing the correct thing, the Progressive thing, is harder. It takes real courage, and most of us will not live up to such high standards.
This is the burden of our Torah.
That, no matter how difficult things are, we will take on responsibility for doing what is right.
And, we all keep taking on that challenge, in every generation.
All has been foreseen. That is a warning, not a comfort.
When the Progressive Jewish movement was born, its founders pledged to uphold the religion of the Prophets. Our guides would be those men of ancient Israel who courageously denounced injustice and proclaimed hope to the world.
At the time, I wonder how much attention they paid to the lives of the visionaries they sought to emulate. We know little about most of the historic prophets, if indeed they existed at all.
But, if we have one image of what they looked like, it’s probably Rembrandt’s painting of Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem.
Jeremiah is surrounded by darkness, slumped on the craggy rocks of the Negev. His left elbow rests on what are possibly his only possessions, including a book that we know will become part of our Bible.
The most illuminated part of the composition is Jeremiah’s bald forehead, drawing our eyes into his face. That face. It is so intensely pained; so sullen and exhausted. The wrinkles furrow, as if calling us to ask whether anything of this destruction was avoidable. I am captivated by the eyes, which cannot be more than two dark brushstrokes, but communicate more anguish than any scream I have ever heard.
Jeremiah spent his entire life warning Israel that it would be destroyed. He chastised them that their social injustice and complacency would be their ruin. He promised them plagues, persecution, exile and war.
Jeremiah had the unfortunate honour to see all of his visions come true.
At every stage, he promised them they could be redeemed if only they would repent of their ways. Whether that part was true, we will never have the fortune of knowing.
This is the model of our religion; the person whose mantle we have chosen to take. It is that of a man miserable enough to have been proven right; to watch everything he loved, and all that he held sacred, burn.
In some ways, prophesying doom is an easy gig. Economists are always predicting the next crash and defence experts are forever prepared for the next war. Misery is one of life’s guarantees.
When Progressive Judaism began, its progenitors insisted that prophecy was about forthtelling, not foretelling: speaking the truth about how the world really is, rather than guessing what is to be. But really one yields the other. When you see clearly how terrible the world is, you can accurately predict its tragic ends.
In Greek antiquity, Cassandra was cursed by the god Apollo to always tell the truth and never be believed. She issued accurate prophecies, and nobody took note.
Perhaps with hindsight, what she foresaw was obvious. War was coming and Troy would be defeated. Then King Agamemnon would be captured and slaughtered, as would she. The Greek ships would sink. As the city states fell, people would spend decades at sea without mooring. Disaster awaited.
All Cassandra had to do was see clearly what was happening in Greece’s unfolding civilisational collapse to know that destruction was inevitable.
And we cannot blame her countrymen for disbelieving her either. If someone stares that far into the abyss, nobody wants to be dragged into the darkness with them. Their misery sounds cloying and narcissistic. It feels impossible to bear.
If somebody tells you that the world you know and the people you love are on the brink of destruction, you have to disbelieve them. How else will you go to work, raise your children, care for your sick? How can you live in this world if you honestly believe it is ending?
Torah warned us that if a prophet predicted something and it did not come to pass, you could ignore them. They prophesied in vain.
The grand visions of peace on earth and justice rolling out like a stream haven’t happened yet.
The Christians circumvented this by writing their texts so it looked like their carpenter was fulfilling all the visions; even if the world self-evidently was not perfected. They deferred it by saying the other prophecies were still to come.
And we Progressive Jews have avoided the problem too, by claiming that the Messianic Age is forever not yet.
Perhaps it is forever not at all.
The only prophecies that have come true are the promises of disaster. The only accurate predictions were of death, plague, humiliation, and exile.
We said we wanted to be heirs to the prophets. We saw in their proclamations antecedents to the Enlightenment values of truth, equality, peace, comradeship, progress and righteousness. We heard God’s word refracted through them like a clarion call, and said we would now take it as ours.
Scattered in exile, we would be a light unto the nations. We would teach the world to study war no more. We would bring on the day when the false gods of prejudice and materialism were finally vanquished before the altar of Infinite Unity.
I need you to know that I believed every word. Even if nobody else did, I really did.
I thought I might see it in my lifetime. The great unfolding of history. Our glorious march towards true justice and equality. Call it the Revolution or the Messianic Age or Peace on Earth, I truly believed it was coming.
And it didn’t matter to us that the only full life story we knew was Jeremiah’s. Jeremiah went to jail and we would go to jail too. For the climate, for peace, for civil rights, for democracy. Progressive Jews have proudly broken the law and resisted injustice to take up the place of the suffering servant.
In Lamentations, we see the words Jeremiah spoke when he witnessed his city destroyed.
“I am the man who has seen afflictions at God’s hands…”
“…We have suffered terror and pitfalls, ruin and destruction. Streams of tears flow from my eyes because my people are destroyed…”
“…My people have become heartless, like ostriches in the desert…”
“…All this has happened because of the sins of the prophets and the iniquities of the priests…”
“…The visions of your prophets were false and worthless; they did not expose your sin to ward off your captivity. The prophecies they gave you were false and misleading…”
“… All our friends have betrayed us, and become our enemies…”
I am not sleeping well.
I wake up multiple times in the night with my fists clenched, gripping my bedsheets. I’m scared and angry and I feel so alone.
In the last month, an Iranian was arrested for hostile reconnaissance on the college where I trained to be a rabbi. A close friend, my witness at my wedding, had her street evacuated because terrorists were hiding in the gardens. A close friend, who I’m going on holiday with at the end of the month, had the synagogue where she works targeted with a petrol bomb.
None of these incidents made national news.
They are background noise to stabbings in Golders Green; murders at Heaton Park; arson at Nelson Street; smashed windows with lighter fluid at Kenton Park. Every festival, I interrupt the running of religious services to say Jews have been killed somewhere.
Am I even praying any more, or am I just trying to keep people calm?
All of this was so foreseeable. At least it feels so in hindsight.
We Progressive Jews fully embraced citizenship in Europe. We aligned ourselves with the British establishment for our protection. We swore fidelity to the monarchy in our weekly prayers. We embedded ourselves in this country and became integral to the state.
Then, in a moment of counter-culture, when people became anti-establishment and angry at the state, we were the accessible human bodies they could grasp, and stab.
We Progressive Jews rejected all politics of race and nation. We would be a moral movement, expressing only the best of the prophetic message.
But the rest of the world is based on racism and nationalism. Everyone else sees the world through the lens of race. Through their glasses, a Jew at prayer in London is indistinguishable from a Jew driving a tank in Gaza. They think they can exact war and revenge on us.
We aligned ourselves with Israel because it promised us hope. After the Shoah, we needed some guarantee of safety to cling to. We advocated for Israel and defended it. Maybe in our own eyes, too, the Diaspora and the State became indistinguishable.
We muddied the waters of our own understanding of what antisemitism was. We fought with each other, to define it, and to show where our loyalties lay. People couldn’t trust us to say what was happening. Now they absorb hateful propaganda that says we are doing all this to ourselves.
We chose bad allies to bring down people who weren’t real enemies. At the time, I expressed my fear that because of all this, people would blame the Jews for Britain’s problems.
‘Of course they wouldn’t,’ a friend assured me. ‘That would be antisemitic.’
Now, we attend rallies addressed by Nigel Farage. It is the last gasp of a failed effort to find security in race, the state, and the establishment: the very things that are making us unsafe.
The Progressive Jewish answer was always supposed to be different. We would, instead, find safety in solidarity. Our best defence is our neighbours. True security is in the positive relationships we build across other faiths, with all the oppressed communities of the world.
Where are our allies now?
I suppose we may never know whether our way would have worked.
Jeremiah told the Israelites, he told them it would happen. “Do not ally with one power,” he warned, “or another one will destroy you. And then your allies will destroy you too.”
“Do not seek surety in militaries and empires. You can only count on God.”
And then God will abandon you, too.
After the Shoah, Progressive Jews rejected the cruelty of Orthodox theologies that insisted we only had ourselves to blame. We were the victims of unjust systems, who only had bad choices in a world stacked against us.
What a great promise the worker’s revolution had been! The proletariat would shake off the chains of capitalism and all would finally be free. And yet, in every country where Jews lived under communism, they were so far from free.
The Bund: the Jewish worker’s movement; the Yiddish pamphleteers; the revolutionary singers. They would save us!
I think, now, that we romanticised them so much because they were all dead. They couldn’t make mistakes or show their weaknesses or try out their ideas and see them fail. They are all dead. All of them. The dead cannot save us.
Maybe some day, we will be the subjects of nostalgia too: the last Jews crazy enough to have faith in the prophets.
And the tolerance of liberal democracy, what of it? Didn’t it offer the very first promise under Napoleon’s tricolor that Jews might have freedom?
The safest places are safe until they are not.
I think of my great grandmother who left Lima for Berlin at the start of the 20th Century. How confident she must have been that she was heading to the safest haven on earth. I don’t need to tell you what happened to her.
I don’t think we have anywhere safe to run this time. Not Israel, even with its Iron Dome and bomb shelters. Not America, even with the hegemon’s promise to be the land of the free. I cannot imagine escaping to anywhere.
And do not pretend to me that there is any virtue in the Orthodox fantasy of good wives helping their little husbands do mitzvot while they all pretend the world is unchanging and grow ever more sadistic with it. You cannot pray your way out of reality, or study your way out of people’s dignity.
Every option available to the Jews failed miserably. Zangwill imagined that Salonika would be a great centre of Jewish life as part of an international community. The Nazis had a near complete kill-rate there.
After the Shoah, we had to find hope somewhere else.
Israel may have been a mistake, but it was the only mistake the Jews had left to make. Zionism was the only dead end the Jews hadn’t yet gone down. And, after all that, sadly, it will not bring us safety in the end either.
Why would the Palestinians give up their land and abandon their homes without a fight? How could we expect the Muslims to tolerate Jews controlling Jerusalem? There was no way any of it could survive without subjugating the Arabs and contorting the Jews until neither were recognisable.
The Jewish Left said that the Israelis and Palestinians would either all live together or all die together. I fear the choice has been made for them in board rooms they have not entered.
If I could see into the abyss as clearly as Cassandra did, I would wager that, in less than a hundred years, Jerusalem will be a desert wasteland, where every few weeks a new man will declare himself Pope, Emperor, Caliph, or Mashiach. The only thing we can’t yet imagine is what awful weapons they will have.
The only option still not explored is the prophets’ dream of lions lying down with lambs and justice flowing like an ever-flowing stream. It hasn’t happened yet.
I need you to know that I still believe in it. Even if nobody else does really, I still believe.
I just don’t think it will happen in my lifetime. It may never happen at all.
When Progressive Judaism was born, we renounced all claim to Israel. ‘Berlin will be our Jerusalem,’ promised Mendelssohn, as he cajoled us out of the ghetto. The enlightened democracies will be our Zion.
Berlin was Jerusalem, for a while. And then it was a graveyard for a generation of my family.
I’m not sleeping well. I feel like a balding man, clutching his bible, watching his city burn.
With such pride we said that I was the first person in my family to be born in the same country as his father. England was our home.
England is our home. Jewish life here is beautiful and vibrant. If they could only see how our children run around at house parties; how we spend weeks immersed in study; how our musicians play the house down; how our theatremakers make us laugh our guts out. How we bless our babies, our bnei mitzvah, our teens, our weddings, our anniversaries, our dead; how we pray with all our soul and might.
A quarter of Britons say it would make no difference if we disappeared tomorrow.
England has been our Jerusalem too. I do not know what it will become.
Maybe it isn’t too late.
The future is unwritten. That is a threat, not a promise.
In 1633, Galileo Galilei was brought before the Roman Inquisition and instructed to recount his heretical views. Galileo had said, contradictory to the views of the established Church, that the earth rotates around the sun. He had to retract this claim or face death.
So, to protect himself, Galileo assured the Church that he was wrong. The earth remained still.
As he left the courthouse where he had been tried, Galileo raised his eyes to the sky, then back down to the earth. He stamped on the ground beneath his feet and muttered: Eppur si muove: yet it moves.
Yet it moves.
For we who stand on this rock in the solar system, it does not feel like the earth is spinning. We can understand how people once thought the sun moved around them.
We, educated in our modern world, understand that the globe is rotating, and that this rotation is responsible for times and seasons.
But if you don’t know the laws of the earth’s orbit, every winter feels like a divine abandonment.
The earth feels static. And yet, the earth moves.
Hundreds of miles beneath the ground where we stand, plates are shifting in the earth’s mantle. For millennia, continental landmasses have drifted apart and pushed back together. Their pace is imperceptible from where we stand, so we cannot know what a profound impact they are having on the structure of our planet.
We, educated in our modern world, know that migration in the oceanic lithosphere explains mountains, lakes, and volcanoes.
But if you don’t know the laws of tectonic shift, every earthquake will feel like an act of God.
The ground beneath us feels static. And yet, the tectonic plates move.
Right now, the forces of history are at work.
Since the dawn of civilisation, people have arranged themselves into complex societies with varying levels of specialisation and hierarchy.
Within those systems, they have developed new technologies, made laws, and created cultures. They have struggled over resources, sometimes to the point of complete social overhaul, and sometimes to the point of common ruin.
We, educated in our modern world, know that the science of sociology explains how civilisations operate. We have learnt to recognise economic trends, like that spikes in oil prices result in increased interest rates. We have also learnt grand trajectories, like what causes empires to collapse.
But if you don’t know the laws of history, every rupture to the social order feels like a curse.
The social order feels like it will never change. Our world feels stuck on the same trajectory. And yet, the people move.
To everyone in ancient Egypt, the rule of Pharaohs felt like an unshakable fact. By the time the Israelites were enslaved in Goshen, the Egyptian empire had already existed for 2,000 years. The pyramids had already stood for a millennium.
Every Pharaoh was called Ramses and every Pharaoh declared himself a god. He claimed that he controlled the flooding of the Nile and the rising of the sun. He could not be moved.
When Moses killed a slave driver, he did not only have to fear Egyptian retribution. The Hebrews themselves were ready to mete out punishment.
Moses’s own people, turned on him and demanded: “who made you ruler and judge over us?”
Moses had rattled the social order, and this terrified even his kin. He could not be the ruler and judge over them. Their ruler was supposed to be the slave master and their judge was supposed to be Pharaoh. They could not even imagine moving.
In the Torah story, we only hear what happened forty years later, when Moses returned from his years as a goatherd for Jethro.
Yet, on his return, tens of thousands of Hebrews, and many others, were ready to leave the only land they had ever known for a barren wilderness.
In fact, even the ordinary Egyptians were in a revolutionary mood. They handed the Hebrews wealth and resources for their journey. They were co-conspirators in sedition against Egypt.
Hebrews and Egyptians alike were willing to bring down a structure that had lasted for twenty centuries, and risk existence itself.
We might attribute this sudden change of mentality to acts of god: those Ten Plagues the Eternal One wrought upon Egypt to bring down the might of Pharaoh.
But I wonder what else happened in those forty years. What were Aaron and Miriam, Moses’s siblings, doing in the four decades when their brother was absent? What did Shifrah and Puah, the rebel midwives, do in the time when all seemed lost?
I can think of no other explanation: they organised.
With Moses gone, the dissidents were preparing the Hebrews for the great exodus to come. They had faith. They knew that the slave system could be defeated. They knew that people would move.
I imagine they were knocking doors, spreading the word in the marketplace, gathering slaves for secret meetings, building alliances across the divides of race. I imagine they were keeping hope alive; sowing seeds of possibility; encouraging people to imagine a future without domination and toil.
To those who do not know their history, the Hebrews’ decision to leave would have felt like a greater miracle than the plague of locusts.
But we know that people can shift the way tectonic plates do: so imperceptibly that anyone higher up might not even notice.
The more they move, the more they realise they have been kept captive. And then they realise they can move some more.
Then what was impossible suddenly seems inevitable.
What was unalterable becomes intolerable.
Then, it is a law of history that they will come crashing against the structures that bind them, like an earthquake.
Yes, the downfall of Egypt at the hands of rebel slaves was a seismic rupture of earth-shattering proportions.
It showed the immutable Pharaoh that everything moves.
Everything, even whole social systems, move. But today, it is easy to feel stuck.
I look at the world around me and feel afraid. It seems that, in every country, our leaders are set on a course to global war. Everywhere, antisemitism is rising and hatred is spurting out on the streets. Everywhere, governments are determined to pursue authoritarian policies.
All of this can be explained by the laws of history. When people do not have enough to live, they turn on each other. In our own history, we know that they often turn on Jews.
When people feel like the world is ending and there is no hope, they become apathetic enough to let cruel demagogues take control.
And when governments fear that their power is threatened, they can quell all dissent with a war.
Fascism and chaos both drink from the same pool of despair.
Some nights I go to sleep despairing, too.
And then I remember that is what the Pharaohs of our own time want. They want us to think that nothing can change: that racism and war are the only way.
They want to keep us heading in one direction.
But we move too.
We are the people too, and we will move where we decide to go. We do not have to follow the shift towards tyranny and hate. Like tectonic plates, we can push the other way.
We can point steadfastly towards a world of equality and peace, and insist that we will go nowhere else. If we start pushing, we can lock arms with others, and build a coalition that can defeat every despot.
Yes, we move. And when we move, God moves too.
God, the great hand of history, is always directing humanity towards justice. God’s hand may be the hardest to perceive of all the forces in the universe, but the Power of Moral Truth is always trying to push us forward.
The Eternal One, revealed through history, is most visible in eras when we decide to do God’s will.
There may be days when it feels like nothing can change.
But, everywhere, at all times, the earth spins, the tectonic plates shift, the people move, and God guides us.
We will not fall into despair. We will not stand still.
Have you ever done something wrong, completely accidentally, with all the best intentions, and, feeling ashamed and repentant, thought to yourself: “that’s it, I better go kill a pigeon.”
Of course you haven’t. Because as an astute reader of Torah knows, if you have committed a sin, you need to sacrifice at least two pigeons. A goat for serious misbehaviour. A bull, if you really messed up.
This week, we enter the Book of Leviticus, an impressive catalogue of sins and sacrifices. This third book in the Torah cycle, called in Hebrew Vayikra, acts as a directory for priests.
Here, you can match up any misdeed or lifecycle event with the appropriate sacrificial animal, and it comes with a handy recipe book for how to make the meat smell nice enough that God forgives you.
(Bit of oil… bit of incense… bake for three days in a smoke oven…)
We leave behind the great moral myths of Genesis. We leave behind the inspiring liberatory narrative of Exodus. And this, too, is where we leave behind Orthodox Judaism.
If you are an Orthodox Jew, the only problem you can see with killing a pigeon to atone for your mistakes is that you don’t have a Temple to do it in.
In the Koren Sacks Siddur, the Orthodox daily prayer book, you will find petitions to be recited every day that God rebuilds the Temple in Jerusalem, brings back the hereditary priesthood, and restores the sacrificial cult.
Finally, if I make an accidental mistake, I will be able to fulfil the Torah’s command that I should splatter a bull’s blood and entrails all over a table.
Frankly, I don’t know how our friends further up the Thames have managed to go so long without enacting this sacred duty.
At its best, the rebuilt Temple of Orthodox Judaism involves some kind of mystical descent of a palace from the clouds at the end of time. At its worst, there are Jews currently hoping to blow up the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount and replace it with a gaudy pillared Roman-style shrine.
I’m not going to get into the geopolitics of why that would be a terrible idea. My area is theology, and I can tell you now, that from a religious, moral, spiritual, and ethical perspective, bringing back any kind of Temple would be a terrible idea.
Even as a metaphor, the yearning for Temple Judaism is an abrogation of responsibility, a refusal to engage in the real world, and a fantasy that blood can avenge wrongdoing. We cannot tolerate this idea on any level, whether real or abstract.
It is hard to overstate what a fundamental difference this is between Progressive and Orthodox Judaism. Opposition to rebuilding the Temple is central to Progressive theology.
In 1885, American Jews came together at the Rodef Shalom Synagogue in Pennsylvania and signed up to their foundational document: the Pittsburgh Platform. This decree has influenced how Progressive Jews see our religion ever since.
In it, they declare: “we expect no sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron.” From the outset, we have believed that the synagogue has permanently replaced the Temple.
The author of the Pittsburgh Platform was an inspiring rabbi, named Kaufmann Kohler. Born in Germany, he became America’s preeminent Reform scholar. If you’ve ever dipped into the Jewish Encyclopedia, you’ve probably read something written by him.
Kohler wrote an introduction to Jewish theology that dealt thoroughly with how we Progressive Jews should understand these Temple texts. They were, for their time, a tool to help Jews gain moral understanding. The rituals and sacrifices showed us how to take responsibility for our thoughts, and even our conduct.
But, over time, we outgrew pigeon slaughter. We moved on to the world of rules and structures created by the early rabbis. And now, in our modern age, we are still moving forwards: so that we will do the right thing without being bound by old laws.
That’s what the progress in Progressive Judaism means: progressing from the age of slaughter through the age of laws towards the age of morals.
It’s not that we should discard the laws, or even the stories of slaughter. We should be like students who learn more through our schooling- at each stage, we retain what we learnt earlier, but we refine it, and we realise that some of our earlier ideas were too simplistic. Wanting to rebuild the Temple is like wanting to go back to the crayons of nursery school.
Throughout the moral education of humanity, we received hints that this was where we were going all along. In the Book of Proverbs, written when cattle murder was the normal way of dealing with guilt, it says: “To do what is right and just is more desired by the Eternal One than sacrifice.”
Throughout the books of the prophets we are repeatedly assured that God is far more interested in our moral conduct than in how much fat we can burn off the bones of a lamb.
Centuries later, when the early rabbis were busy codifying all their laws, the midrash explained why the Torah would say this. Sacrifices could only happen in the Temple, but you can do good deeds anywhere. Sacrifices can only atone for mistakes, but with good deeds you can repent for what you did wrong on purpose. Sacrifices only last a short while, but righteousness can endure forever.
At every stage of its development, says Rabbi Kohler, we Jews were a priestly people. Even in the days of animal sacrifice, we were always trying to demonstrate how to live with knowledge of God and concern for morality.
So, says Kohler, our mission on earth is to constantly be a beacon of moral behaviour. If we forfeit that, even for a moment, we will cease to be worthy of being called God’s people.
The idea of rebuilding a Temple isn’t just a dead end: it is a reversal of history. It takes us backwards from reason to superstition. It is the most retrograde step from our understanding of animal suffering to treating God’s creatures as subjects for abuse. It is abhorrent.
And I think most people know that. I honestly believe that, if we asked the vast majority of our friends and family who attend United or Federation synagogues if they think we would be better off with a cult of butchery based in Jerusalem, they would be repulsed by the concept.
In that case, they do not believe in Orthodox Judaism. Mazel tov, they’re Progressives already! Come through our doors, come celebrate with us, come pray with us!
You can leave your fantasies of pigeon massacres at the door. Come and be God’s priestly people.
There are seventeen sleeps to go until Pesach. I am genuinely excited.
You know, one of the things I love most about Pesach is the matza.
I enjoy clearing out all the leavened products from the house, dumping bags of pasta with the food bank, hiding the toaster in the garage, and eating only matza for a week.
It’s not that I like the taste. (Although it is good as a vehicle for my favourite food group: butter.)
In fact, I think it’s precisely the discipline that I enjoy. It is having a religiously-mandated prohibition built into my life, if only for a little while.
I am going to talk here about my own relationship with consumption, food, and restriction, but this will be very different for everyone. I know that, for some, ‘saying no’ to food can become a burden rather than a blessing, and that achieving a neutral relationship with food is its own spiritual discipline.
Judaism teaches us that if a fast or a restriction endangers our health—physical or mental—the commandment is actually to eat. Our goal is to be masters of our impulses, not enemies of our own survival.
So, in telling you what is meaningful to me, I am not trying to tell you how to live your life (I have no such right), but to tell you why the practice of clearing out chametz and eating only matza matters to me.
And, personally, I love the moments of spiritual discipline.
I think there is something in the human condition that means we want some help sublimating our desires. Every religion, throughout the world, places restrictions, either permanently or for short periods, on how people can consume.
We all want to know that we are not slaves to endless gluttony, but can serve something Higher than ourselves.
Two weeks ago, I had the privilege of joining the Dialogue Society‘s iftar at Kingston Guildhall. This is a daily meal, served after sunset every day throughout the month of Ramadan.
Throughout the evening, we learned a number of facts about Ramadan and iftars. But as the evening went on, I reflected that I could never truly know what Ramadan was. I would never understand it as an insider; as one who fasts every day for a month; as one who considers this deprivation a pillar of faith.
The iftar was lovely, but the fast is what brings people to the meal. Through their fast, Muslims learn what it is to sympathise with the poor, to feel one with a global community, and to submit to their Creator’s will.
I was seated with the other clergy: the imams and vicars that KLS has enabled me to befriend. Reverend Joe shared that the Christians were also going through their own period of deprivation: the Fast of Lent. During these forty days, Christians give up the things that tempt them most. In Reverend Joe’s case, this was alcohol and chocolate.
As an outsider, I have seen the end product of Lent – its festival of Easter, filled with chocolate hunts, painted eggs and, once or twice, even a gory reenactment of Jesus’s crucifixion.
Easter looks fun, but I realise that what must make it so meaningful is the period of deprivation beforehand. Their experience of refusing temptation is designed to help them better understand Jesus’s suffering. Here, too, the spiritually important part is saying no to something else.
The idea of saying no to consumption feels so alien to our modern world. The second I want something, I can order it online and have it delivered a day later. If I like the sound of any food from anywhere in the world, I barely need to think before I’m eating it.
And, personally, I have a hard time saying no to just about anything. I struggle to eat just one biscuit or drink just one glass of wine. And, if there’s food on the table, I can be sure I’ll keep eating until there isn’t.
I shouldn’t be surprised by this.
I’ve been completely inundated with advertising and consumer culture since birth. When I’m bored, I can stare at my phone to shut off my brain and get more of the same.
Our old medieval superstitions have been replaced by the new religion of consumption. You can practise all of them at once: eat chocolate at Easter and turkey at Christmas; eat doughnuts at Chanukah and soup at Pesach.
And, of course, at every opportunity, we must buy; we must spend money. We must make sacrifices to the god of The Market who will slump and weep if we stop purchasing for even a moment. In the name of our new religion, we must swallow the whole world.
So, refusing consumption feels like something medieval and irrational.
But isn’t it precisely the foundation of Judaism?
The tenth commandment is לֹא־תַחְמֹד – thou shalt not covet. Do not desire. Do not lust. Do not gaze greedily at everything around you from your friend’s partners to your neighbour’s animals. Do not envy.
This is the basis of all the other commandments. If we don’t want what others have, why would we ever steal? If we don’t lust after anybody else, why would we ever betray our partners? If we don’t want anything but what we have, why would we ever go chasing after other gods?
But wanting is not like stealing or cheating. Wanting is a primal urge.
How can I be expected to have no desires at all for what is beautiful? This rule is telling me to suppress my own feelings; that just the very fact of wanting anything is a sin. That feels cruel and punitive.
We’re not the first to feel this way. Generations of Jews have grappled with exactly this problem.
There is a lovely midrash from thousands of years ago on this topic, that says, it’s not that we’re supposed to say we have no desires for things we can’t have. Instead, we should say “actually I do want all these things, but God in Heaven has decreed against it.”
Some part of me does want to consume everything; to own everything; to control everything. I need to know that this is within me. And then I need to remember that I am more than a gluttonous animal. I have the ability to exercise restraint.
The medieval commentator, ibn Ezra, taught that this is deeper than just self-deprivation. By saying no to our desires, we say yes to our God. We say yes to trust and faith. We see the world’s beauty as even more beautiful precisely because we know it is forbidden to us.
The French-Algerian philosopher, Albert Camus, wrote that saying no is the foundation of all human values. “I refuse, therefore I exist.” What we are willing to say no to determines who we are.
The Israelites were not truly God’s people until they refused to be Pharaoh’s slaves. Our ancestors said no to subjugation; no to tyranny; no to being someone else’s property; no being held back by the false gods of greed and idolatry.
With one no, they could say many yeses. Yes to the God of all Creation. Yes to being commanded by a greater power. Yes to the festivals and yes to the holy days. Yes to the humble pursuit of God’s will. Yes to peace, equality, dignity, and freedom.
And that is what the matza symbolises to me today.
It is more than a cracker. It is a statement about what I am willing to say no to.
I say no to leaven, and therefore no to a system that demands I consume everything until there is nothing left of the world.
I say yes to matza, and therefore yes to pursuing justice, living with simplicity, and walking in God’s ways.
As we come to this Pesach, consider what you can do to exercise spiritual discipline. My practice is to cut out leavened food, but you may find your own.
Can you clear out your cupboards, and give excess clothes to charity? Can you look at your spending, and set a bigger portion aside for those in need? Can you put a restriction on your phone usage?
What is the chametz, the leaven, that is weighing you down in your life? And how will you make the conscious choice to say no to it?
This sermon will be addressed to two girls who are having baby blessings at Kingston Liberal Synagogue. Their names are redacted from this online version.
Girls, welcome to your synagogue.
I will address this sermon to you, but you will not remember it, and that’s OK, because I am really speaking to all Jewish children when I give this address. And you should know that all adults, no matter how big they get, never stop being children. So I am speaking to you, but really I am speaking to everybody gathered here today.
My message for you, girls, and for all Jews is: learn to be like a spider.
You see, from the moment a spider is born, she already carries everything inside herself to make a home. The silk with which she will construct her web is built into her body. Without ever learning from a parent or attending a school, the spider already knows how to build her home, wherever she goes.
In this way, the spider is the perfect Jew. Jews, wherever we are, carry in us all we need to make our home. Our home can be woven absolutely anywhere. Whether in a desert, an ocean, or an Arctic tundra, Jews will always find ways of creating our sacred spaces.
Our home is not made of silk, like a spider’s. Our home is made of the bonds we build with each other. Between every community member, there is an invisible thread. If you look around this room and squint in exactly the right light, you will see how one thread connects to each other, and every thread interlocks somewhere. That is the web of our community.
Our home is also made of rituals. In Hebrew, the word for a tractate of Talmud is masechet. The masechet is the page of our religious texts that tells us how to mark every moment and celebrate every festival. Do you know what masechet also means, dear girls? It means a weaving; a web.
Because our home is made of rituals, you can find yourself anywhere in the world, and if somebody starts a prayer, or lights a candle, or cooks a food, you will realise that you are suddenly back in your Jewish home.
Our home is made of stories. Yes, we sew together patchworks from ancient traditions and family tales and our life experiences and all of it comes together in this great big web, so that Jews are all brought together by these stories.
Now, some religious knowledge may be innate. Girls, there is a story that before a baby is born, her soul has already been to the Garden of Eden and heard the revelation at Mount Sinai. Perhaps you are sitting there, knowing far more about the secrets of the universe than any of us.
But the truth is, we are not like spiders. We can’t just weave the Jewish home from the moment we are born. We need to learn how to do it. We need teachers and elders who have learned to build the web from the generations before them. The thread we spin with comes from a yarn thousands of years old, and you need people who will pass on the tools to you.
That’s why, here, in your synagogue, you will be able to come to Kinderlach when you are small, and join Beiteinu as you grow, and come to many family services, and go on adventures with your youth movement. All of this exists to help you learn how to make your web, so that it is strong and beautiful and unique, like you.
Children, a moment ago, you came and were held underneath the tallit to receive a blessing. We call the tallit a “sukkah” – a tent, a tabernacle. It represents the Jewish home. “Sukkah” has the same root in Hebrew as “masechet” – the weaving we mentioned earlier. You see, the Jewish home is a portable prayer shawl, made by people skilled with textiles, and we can pull it out at any moment.
In the Torah portion we read today, on this day of your Simchat Bat, God tells us how to build a mishkan – a sacred place where God can live. I’ll give you one guess what it’s made of.
The tabernacle where God lives is made of wool and cloth and thread and yarn. Oh, it comes in so many colours! Blues and purples and crimsons all finely interlocking on a great stretched canvas made of animal hides.
That is where God lived with the Jews for the years we wandered in the desert. After slavery, the Jews had to learn how to be truly free. We needed to be independent of the great demands of Egyptian slaveowners and even the comforts of their homes. We needed to know how to live transiently.
Yes, we needed to learn to be more like spiders. We needed to build a home wherever we went.
And you, dear girls, need to learn to make a home too.
Girls, I have been to your house, and I know how lovely it is. Somehow your dads manage to keep it such a calm and clean place at all times. I don’t know how they do it. I hope they can manage some semblance of the same order when you both start crawling.
But even if you ransack the living room, and draw all over the walls, and leave your toys strewn across the stairs, they will still love you, and it will still be your home. You may move many times, or you may stay in one place, but your home will be the people you come back to. It will be the stories you tell, and the songs you sing, and the rituals you make up. Home will be your own private language that only makes sense between you.
You come today into this synagogue, and know that it will be your home. Around you, you have your whole community, who have come here to show that they will love and support you. They will teach you how to weave webs, and you will soon start wrapping your own silky strands into the patchwork of this community.
When I welcome you to your synagogue, I am not talking about the building. That’s not our home – it’s just the frame we use to make it in.
Our home is the web we weave together – the invisible threads that connect everyone in this community.
We are like the ancient Israelites who carried their home through the desert.
We are like the spiders who carry their homes in their bodies.
We build our home through connection and song and story.
As some of you know, my kippah is a permanent fixture on my head, and has been since my early 20s. I often get asked whether I experience any feedback for being so visibly Jewish. My answer is: yes. Occasionally, Christians come up to me and say “shalom.” I say “shalom” back.
Well, this week, I have a more interesting story to tell.
Last Saturday night, Laurence and I were on our way back from a friend’s birthday lip synch. (Yes, in my time off, I do competitively mime to Nicki Minaj wearing a space suit and kitten heels.)
We were heading into Vauxhall Station. A group of men in their early 20s were dancing around, holding hands, and reaching out their hands for others to join them.
It will probably not surprise you to hear that I joined in. The boys cheered.
Within moments of joining them, I realised I might have made a terrible mistake. The man whose hand I was holding was, in fact, wearing a Palestine football shirt. They were all speaking Arabic. A taller man noticed my kippah and said to the others “hu yehudi.” I know what this means in Arabic, because you say it the same way in Hebrew: he’s Jewish.
And I thought, well, it’s basically the same language, I’ll try talking with them in Hebrew. Friends, these gentlemen did not, in fact, speak Hebrew. Their English was pretty stilted too.
Right next to us, a fist fight broke out between two white guys.
We all fumbled awkwardly, and tried to communicate across a language barrier. The tension became palpable. It was just me and Laurence and a whole group of Palestinian men.
I asked: “where are you from?”
“We are from Gaza,” the one who had been holding my hand said. “Do you support the government?”
I said: “of course not.”
The man said: “Really?”
I said: “Yes.”
The men cheered, and resumed dancing. I got on my train back to Ditton.
There was no time to explain that the Israeli government wasn’t actually my government at all, but my answer would have been the same whichever government he was talking about.
I am under no illusion that this story could have ended differently. But, as it is, the story ended with dancing in the streets of London, and everybody walking away with their dignity intact.
Now, I may have been the first visibly Jewish person these men had met who was not wearing a military uniform. And perhaps now, with the freedom of London, they will get the chance to learn more about who Jews are.
And perhaps I will go away and actually do my Arabic homework so that I can have a better quality conversation. At least, in the future, I won’t default to Hebrew as a good enough alternative.
I think we tend to imagine that tolerance is the true harmony of everyone fully understanding each other; living side by side; eating in the same restaurants; celebrating and grieving together.
I still believe that true peace will come, when everyone has full equality, and nobody has any more need for conflict.
But, most of the time, life is not like that.
As long as there is inequality, those with less will want what those with more have; and those who have more power will exert it over those with less. Until we all have everything we need, there will be conflict for the power and possessions we lack.
Tolerance, in our society, is the decision to set grudges aside, to suspend prejudice, and to just let each other go on with life. It is the decision of the stronger to spare the weaker. It is a choice to ignore stock characters and old grievances for the sake of everyone getting on with their day.
It is not easy passivity, but a conscious choice to accept the world as it is. Sometimes, that is painful.
So it is with Joseph and his brothers.
Consider all the array of feelings Joseph must have held when he first saw his brothers. The last time he had encountered them, they had thrown him in a pit, then sold him at a cheap price to travelling merchants.
Do you think he was in the mood for forgiving?
And what about his brothers? They are now in abject poverty. They have travelled miles on foot to escape famine in their homeland. And they have to prostrate themselves and beg before a foreign king in a language they do not understand.
The powerful and the powerless have switched places; the resources are now all in Joseph’s hands.
Joseph doesn’t just shrug his shoulders and get over it. Instead, he decides to test his brothers and bring his entire estranged family to Egypt.
Joseph hides a silver cup in his brother Benjamin’s satchel and uses the supposed theft as a pretext to hold him hostage. Joseph announces to his family that he is going to keep their youngest brother as a slave, making them relive what they did to him.
At the moment when our parashah ends, we don’t actually know how the story is going to pan out. We, who have heard this story many times, are already aware that the brothers will repent and offer their lives for Benjamin’s. We know that Joseph will announce himself and forgive his siblings.
But, for this week, we are suspended in the tests of Joseph and his brothers.
The Joseph narrative is the longest part of the Book of Genesis, not least because of the extensive detail given to Jacob’s sons’ journey back and forth between the two countries, and the lengthy description of how Joseph examines his brothers’ hearts.
This story is, in fact, repeated almost exactly in the Quran. Surah Yusuf is a lengthy narrative in the formative text of Islam. Within the chapter itself, the Quran says that it is repeating the words of previous prophets and is confirming the prior revelation of the Torah.
But there is a key difference between the Torah’s version and the Quran’s. In the Islamic retelling, Benjamin is in on the ruse from the start. Joseph reveals himself to Benjamin before hiding the cup and tells him to go along with the ploy.
Perhaps the goal here is to make Joseph seem more righteous. That is, indeed, what many of our midrash do when they retell Torah narratives. They iron out biblical figures’ imperfections.
But, if you look at the texts of the stories side by side, the parallel verse in the Torah reveals something more interesting. In our recension, rather than revealing himself, Joseph runs off to his room and cries.
The Quran’s version, then, makes the story less painful. It glosses over how heart-wrenching and difficult this process is of forgiving and letting go.
There is a lesson here for us. We all want to jump ahead to the part of the story where everyone is friends again and loves each other. We all want to fast forward to the point in history where there is lasting peace and harmony.
But, the Torah tells us, you have to stay in the feelings. You have to live in the mess for a while.
As Jews in Britain, we are forever doing a delicate dance of interfaith relations, while plagued by trauma. As the whole world seems ever more oriented towards intolerance and tribalism, we still need to show up to shared spaces with our best faces and our best expectations of others. We need to set aside prejudices for the sake of a better society.
And that is hard. So don’t gloss over the tears. Don’t hide the pain away in another room. Let us be honest with ourselves and each other that the task of building a multicultural society is tough.
But, while we hold the challenge, remember that we do still know how this story ends. We know that we are heading towards an ultimate conclusion of liberty and equality. God has a plan for the world. And it will end with true peace.
One day, all people will embrace one another as members of the human family. One day, we will all weep together over the years wasted on war. One day, without fear, we will all dance unabashedly in the streets.
May that time come soon and last forever.
Amen.
Alexander Ivanov, The Silver Goblet is Found in Benjamin’s Sack
One of the loveliest parts of synagogue life, which many of you will have experienced here, is getting to teach our religion to visiting schools. It’s such a joy to pull out things we normally leave aside, and point to things we often take for granted.
By teaching others about our ritual objects, things that are familiar become foreign. We have to reconsider what they are, and why we have them.
Take, for example, the tallit. Of course, these prayer shawls have existed in some form since biblical times. But, showing them to non-Jewish children, we need to come up with an explanation for why we continue to use them here and now.
I tell the school kids: these four corners remind me that God is everywhere, and the knots on them tell me all of the good deeds I can do in my life.
I do, indeed, feel that way when I wrap myself in the tzitzit. I feel enveloped by God’s mantle. I see the strings and think of all the mitzvot- not, in the Orthodox sense of listing out food rules, but of all that God has asked me to do in this world.
It’s nice to have a visible reminder of God’s presence.
That’s just what Jacob gets in this week’s Torah portion. Jacob lies down while travelling on a certain mountain and has the profound dream of a ladder ascending to heaven, with angels going up and down.
In his dream, the Eternal One appears to promise Jacob many descendants, spreading out like dust across the desert, and that God will forever accompany Jacob on his travels.
When he awakes, Jacob exclaims: “Wow, God is in this place and I did not know it!”
How could Jacob not realise that God was on that mountain? Surely he already knows that God is everywhere?
Perhaps Jacob did not realise already that God is everywhere. For some commentators, this is the beginning of Jacob’s prophecy. Only now does he really understand who God is and that this God is with him.
There is a deeper meaning in the language, too. Before the revelation, God is called Elohim. For the ancients, Elohim was universal- the God that permeates all places and things.
Then, in the dream, God is announced by the ineffable Name, Hashem, which we often render as Adonai. This name of God, in Torah, is specific. It is the personal God, who communicates directly with human beings.
When Jacob awakes, he says: “Behold, Hashem is in this place, and I did not know it.”
Jacob knew that God in general was there, because God is generally everywhere, but only at this moment does Jacob realise that the personal God who cares about him is also present.
Now we can understand why God says to Jacob: “I will not leave you until I have done with you what I promised.” God is helping Jacob understand that he is never truly alone. Not only is the world full of God, but so is Jacob’s own life.
In fact, in the moment before Jacob falls asleep, a miracle happens that is so subtle it can’t be noticed until after he wakes up.
When Jacob lays down his head, the Torah says there are many stones in the place, and he takes one of them as a pillow. When he wakes up, there is only one under his head.
Our Talmud says that this is a divine act. According to Rabbi Yitzḥak, all the stones on the mountain argued with each other about who would lie under Jacob’s head. Unable to decide, they merged together into a single rock. That rock, in turn, became an altar to God.
This is a wonderful view of the world, where God is not only in all places and with human beings personally, but acts in every part of nature. Even stones are agents of miracles and servants of God.
If we take seriously this idea that God is everywhere and personally connected with all that exists, there are real consequences for our lives. It means that everything is sacred. It suggests that we need to treat this world as an arena for revealing divinity.
For Progressive Jews, this is one way we might think of commandments. Rather than just a list of dos and don’ts, they’re an attitude towards reality. They see everything as an opportunity to do good, and to make the world better. We are blessed with the chance to show how God is everywhere, including in our own actions.
The same section of the Talmud says that this is why God loves humanity so much. Angels can only praise God when they are told to. Rocks can only move by miracle. But we, endowed with freedom and reason, can perform miracles and make things sacred whenever we want.
That’s what I see when I look at the tzitzit of my tallit. That God is in every place and that every moment is a chance to do right.
You don’t need to wear a tallit to do that. This is my suggestion to you for this week. Try and shift, ever so slightly, how you see the world.
Look around, for a moment, and imagine that everything permeates God’s presence. See God in the bricks of your home and the slabs of the street. At some point this week, try to picture the space where you are as a massive canvas that you can paint with good deeds.
Let us all try to be like Jacob and say: “Wow, God was here, and I did not even know it.”
Sim Lev 