In our Scriptures, the changes are often dramatic.
Avram is an idol worshipper who lives in Mesopotamia, then undergoes complete conversion to monotheism and sets out on foot to a new country. With that, he gets a new name: Abraham.
Sarai is barren then, miraculously, in her old age, conceives a son. God gives her a new name: Sarah.
Jacob is a lying trickster who wrestles with an angel in the wilderness. When his heart has truly changed, he gets a new name: Yisrael.
In fact, in each biblical story, a change of direction, outlook, and often name, are the key points of the narrative.
So, what about our Rosh Hashanah reading? Who is it that changes there?
In the Aqeidah, our Torah reading for the new year, Abraham is called upon to climb a mountain and sacrifice his son.
We know nothing about Sarah, who is largely kept out of the story. We don’t know anything of how Isaac feels about this, since he stops talking once he realises what his dad could do to him.
Abraham is remarkably unchanged. At the bottom of the mountain, he is willing to do whatever God says. At the top, God says Abraham is no longer required to sacrifice his son, and to sacrifice the ram instead. At the top of the mountain, Abraham still just does whatever God says.
But there is a character who really changes in this story: God.
God begins the narrative as zealous and demanding of human sacrifice. God ends the story compassionate and eager to enter into meaningful relationships. God begins by effectively threatening to blot out all of Abraham’s children, then ends by promising Abraham as many descendants as stars in the sky.
And, yes, God undergoes a change of name. Through the whole of the story, God is called Elohim, a name associated with strict justice and universal truth. At the very end, God is revealed by a new name – יהוה – Adonai, a name associated with the close personal relationship God has with every human being.
In this story, the character who undergoes the greatest change is God.
Even God, the Creator of the world, the Almighty and All-Powerful, can transform. The Holy One, who by nature is completely eternal, can shift from being strict and distant to close and loving.
So, if even God can change, why can’t you?
In our Talmud, the rabbis introduce us to the idea that we are supposed to imitate God.
Rabbi Hama baRabbi Hanina teaches: be like God. Just as God clothed Adam, you will care for the poor. Just as God visited Abraham when he was unwell, you will visit the sick in your community. Just as God consoled Isaac over the death of his father Abraham, you will comfort the mourners. Just as God buried Moses, you will inter the dead.
God shows us a model of how we ought to live. Like God, we are supposed to be compassionate, loving, kind, morally clear, and doing justice in the world.
But more than that. Like God, we are supposed to change.
Here, at Rosh Hashanah, we learn: just as God can change, so can we.
We are made in God’s image. At the start of each year, we read a story where our Creator transforms. So we know that we can change too.
We can face our fast-shifting world. We can rise to the challenge of our changing community. We can look inside ourselves and love our own souls a little more.
Blessed are You, Eternal One our God, who gives us the power to change.
There is a verse in the Torah so radical that one of my teachers did not believe me it was even in there.
I was working on a project as a rabbinical student and I brought a text that cited this verse.
“That can’t be in the Torah,” my teacher said. She was a serious scholar, with not only rabbinic ordination but also a PhD in rabbinics and a host of published articles.
“No ancient society would allow a law like that. The entire economy would collapse.”
I thought, perhaps I had misread it. It was a bold claim. So I went back to look.
But there it was, nestled among a litany of miscellaneous commandments in Deuteronomy. On one side of this law was the instruction to make sure soldiers did not have nocturnal emissions, and on the other side was the requirement not to bring money gained from prostitution as a Temple offering.
There it was, a law completely at odds with ancient society, which threatened to collapse an entire economy if enforced:
Do not hand over a slave to his master who is taking refuge with you from his master. He will dwell with you in your neighbourhood in the place he chooses, in one of your gates that is good for him. Do not oppress him.
– Deuteronomy 23:16-17
Let us start by acknowledging why this law is so radical. Ancient agrarian states were built on slavery. Prisoners of war, pillaged people, indentured servants and trafficked humans did back-breaking work to make the farms run. Their unpaid labour was what made the brutal machinations of early states even possible.
Here we have a rule: do not hand over any slave to their master. The Torah is biased, and it’s not on the side of the owners!
More than this, if you get a runaway, your duty is to look after them. You have to give them accommodation. You have to give it in a place where the refugee himself feels is good for him, within the gates of one of your towns.
This is bold.
But still, it may be I had misunderstood. We already know from many other Torah sources that Israelites cannot be held as slaves. They might be debt labourers and bondsmen, but if somebody is part of the Israelite family, they can never be subjected to lifelong slavery.
So, perhaps, this law is just talking about what to do if an Israelite runs away. In such a case, they might have been the slave of another Israelite, in which case they were being held against the law. Of course you would then give the slave refuge.
Or they might have been an Israelite running away from another country, like an Edomite who had captured them in war. Well, then, they have come back to their people and need to be cared for.
So, have I mistranslated? Is this actually about Israelite slaves?
I’d have to look at earlier translations to check what it means.
The earliest translation of the Torah is Targum Onkelos, a 2nd Century rendition of Scripture into the vernacular Aramaic.
This translation gives details that clarify things. In this case, it adds an adjective to the Torah’s word for slave. עממין – from the foreign nations. A non-Israelite. The translation is unambiguous: we are talking specifically about foreigners.
This is even more radical. It’s saying we insist on looking after complete outsiders. They have no connection to us.
They may even, then, be running away from Israelite masters. The Torah is saying that, if a slave runs away from their master, even though the slave is definitely not one of us, and the master might actually be one of us, we are on the side of the slaves.
About a century after this translation, the rabbis in the school of Rabbi Akiva wrote a commentary on the Book of Deuteronomy to expound its meaning. The book is called Sifre Devarim, and it takes all the legal verses from these books and adds oral traditions about how to interpret the laws.
Sifre’s explanation of this verse gives details on how you are supposed to treat a runaway slave when they come to you. Not only do you have to welcome them into your towns, say the rabbis, you also have to make it possible for them to make a living. They have to live with you, and not on the borders of the town.
It adds that the commandment not to oppress the runaway extends even towards words. Even the language you use must be kind. And it insists: you have to make them feel like the place they have come to is better than the one they left.
This is even bolder than where we began. It’s an official open borders policy to every runaway, with the requirement that they not only get refuge but actually get a livelihood and integration in the place where they move to.
It is not only uneconomical, it goes against all the foundations of the ancient economy.
You cannot even appeal to other economic reasons. There’s no organised mass of runaway slaves that the law-givers need to accommodate. There’s no suggestion that there was great pressure from the peasantry to be kind to foreigners.
It is a law entirely based on compassion.
What makes this law so radical is that it seems to be motivated entirely by altruism. That is why my teacher was so incredulous about the law being in the Torah at all.
And yet, isn’t that why we turn to the Torah to begin with? Not for cold economics, but to know the right way to live. We want a moral guide for how we should treat people.
Rabbi Julia Neuberger, who serves as a crossbencher in the House of Lords, has been a consistent voice for refugees, as each successive government has threatened hostility and sanctions.
As a lawmaker and a rabbi, she has to balance the high moral demands of our religion with the practicalities of government.
In all her addresses, she emphasises the need for compassion. She treats refugees as a litmus test for the compassion of a society, because their marginal status tells us how our country is likely to treat everyone else.
Baroness Neuberger advocates firmly for the rights of refugees.
Perhaps that is why the Torah introduces this seemingly radical rule. It wants to set a culture where the most vulnerable people get the best possible treatment, so that the whole of society will be based on kindness.
The foundation of Torah law is about caring for the poor, the orphan, and the widow. This most intense case – a complete outsider running away from slavery – is the Torah’s own test for its moral system.
It is a test every society faces. How people treat refugees shows what they think of human beings.
For the past few weeks, protesters have been gathering outside hotels, demanding refugees be sent back. The main political parties have entered into a race to the bottom for how unwelcome they would make refugees.
Their rhetoric and laws may turn out to be a threat to us all. They may undermine the very basis of a compassionate society.
Let us consider what would happen if Britain implemented Torah laws in its approach to refugees.
What would happen if this country made an active decision to welcome refugees and refuse to send them back? To deliberately integrate them and make sure they were firmly part of our towns? To set them up so that they could make a livelihood and refuse any insult to them?
Would this collapse our economy, or would it make this place better for everyone?
And, if we had to choose, why would we not choose to follow the Torah?
1. We are living in apocalyptic times. War, climate disaster, and neoliberal capitalism are plunging us into ongoing and worsening crisis. Apocalyptic times call for apocalyptic theologies.
2. When we survey how Jewish people rebuilt their communities in the face of devastation, we see that Jews have stubbornly held onto hope. From the destructions of the Temples, through Crusades and Expulsions, to colonialism and genocide, our greatest leaders have never wallowed in despair. They always reaffirmed their faith in God and humanity.
3. The task of building the Messianic age is more pressing than ever. Like our forebears, we affirm that the Messiah will not be a man, but a time, in which all will understand the Oneness that lies beneath all superficial differences. The Messianic Age will be defined by equality between people, peace between nations, and harmony with nature. Our task is to build it.
4. Because of faith in God, we understand that our desire for a transformed world is sacred and just. With an outstretched arm and wondrous deeds, God liberated the slaves from Egypt. God hears the cries of all who suffer and shares their pain. God continues to defend the dignity of all who are subjugated.
5. In every age, our people have sought to understand the will of God. In their hardship, they communed with their Creator. Out of their struggles, they developed theologies. These are our inheritance: Torah; Prophets; Writings; rabbinic literature; Jewish philosophies. We claim them for our own time.
6. Our texts are central to our worldview. They are incomplete and polyvocal. We will never make idols of them by treating them as unquestionable authorities. Rather, they are our dialogue partners to understand our God, our world, and ourselves. We uphold the tradition of questioning, reconsidering, and retelling. Every answer is open to interrogation.
7. We affirm belief in the pure monotheism to which our ancestors aspired. We seek to connect with God, who is singular and infinite; immaterial and transcendent; eminent and imminent. Our God is nevertheless directly part of our lives. As the source of ultimate truth, God seeks to impart to us truth as we can understand it.
8. Life has meaning. Its meaning is intrinsic. Everything that lives on this earth was placed here deliberately by a loving Creator to serve a purpose. All that affirms life affirms God.
9. Jews are called upon specifically and by name. We feel that the task of healing the world has been entrusted to us, personally and collectively. This is what it means to be chosen. The task of Jews is to speak God’s truth and to fulfill God’s dominion on earth. A world ruled by God will be one in which no human being can subjugate another.
10. God created all people, replete with diversity, deliberately. We do not wish to make others like us. We reject any uniformity. We accept that people inhabit multiple, contradictory, and overlapping spiritual realities.
11. We bring our spiritual reality to life through our rituals. Our laws, practices and customs are all articulations of our moral purpose. Even where they carry no obvious moral instruction, they instill within us discipline, wonder at creation, and hold us together in community.
12. Our ancestors call to us from history. As refugees and outcasts, they knew what it was to live on the margins. Their memories demand vindication.
13. We have witnessed the progress of humanity. Scientists have developed incredible medicines. Engineers have shown how to harness natural resources to power the entire planet. Activists have shown how collective strength can transform history. We believe that it is our duty to sustain that progress.
14. In the hands of oppressors, progress is a dangerous force. Warmongers have found ever more efficient ways to kill. Capitalists have found increasingly profitable ways to exploit. We have seen how human ingenuity can be employed for systemic violence. We must wrest the tools of progress from those who worship the false god of wealth.
15. Nationalism is a sickness that is plaguing the world. We repudiate all xenophobia and chauvinism. We will not worship the false idols of states and their symbols. We reject all efforts to politically divide humanity.
16. Until all of humanity is fully redeemed, we remain in exile. Only when everyone has achieved full political, economic and spiritual freedom can we say we have reached our Jerusalem. The earthly Jerusalem is as much a part of exile as any other city, until the day when it becomes the heartland for peace and brings all humanity into unity with God. As such, we align ourselves with all those who seek to bring about an earthly Jerusalem based on the prophets’ visions of dignity, human rights, and liberation.
17. Individualism is killing us. Human beings have survived by being social creatures. The ideas of autonomy and personal choice do not serve us in this age. We need to resist the atomisation of people and create community, which necessitates sharing norms, ideals, and practices.
18. We see the Jewish family as expansive and interconnected. We are all responsible for one another, and want to live as if we are one family. This includes a commitment to loving rebuke where necessary.
19. We return to halachah. We see it not as the binding decisions of previous generations but as the creative forum of the present, in which we find new ways to live by our shared values.
20. We commit to Jewish time, which is shaped like a snail shell: always progressing, and always returning to the same points. We return constantly to our shabbats, our fasts, and our festivals. Every time we return to them, we learn more of what God requires of us, and we urge ourselves on to the next stage of our development.
21. The end of time is coming. It does not have to be disastrous. It could be wondrous. Our telos is a perfected world. We will never reach it. We will always fight for it.
Suppose you woke up one morning and discovered, to your surprise, that you had inherited an enormous mansion.
The lord of the manor has welcomed you as a guest to his entire estate. You have no need to pay rent.
This country villa has plush places to sleep, wonderful waters to swim in, and endless entertainment.
More than that, this house is magical. It provides for your every need. Its luscious garden grows your favourite fruit and vegetables. There is plenty of space to graze and raise whatever animals you desire.
It belongs to you and your descendants forever.
What if I told you that you had indeed been bequeathed such a home, and that you were already living in it?
It is this Earth.
That is how Moses understood the planet on which we live when he instructed the Israelites in Deuteronomy. Moses wanted to impart to the people what a miracle it was to be alive, and to get to live in this abundant and fertile world.
So, says Moses, “the Eternal One your God is bringing you into a good land – with brooks, streams, and deep springs gushing out into the valleys and hills; a land with wheat and barley, vines and fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey; a land where you can eat bread and never run out, where you will lack nothing; a land where the rocks are iron and you can dig copper out of the hills.”
This is the biblical mindset. You are guests in God’s mansion.
You have inherited a paradise and it is the whole world. The seas, the ice caps, the deserts, the mountains, and the forests. They are all yours. And they are all everyone else’s too.
Every human being was granted this world as a gift. Every living creature was placed here by their loving Creator.
Now, if you inherited a mansion like that, you wouldn’t trash it on the first day. You’d want to look after it and make sure your children and theirs got to enjoy it the way you did. You’d want to make sure the grass stayed green and the water kept flowing and the fruit trees kept producing. You’d want to know that everybody would be able to dwell in it for all time.
So, says Moses: “Keep faithfully every commandment I am giving to you this day, so that you can thrive and increase and come and inherit this land which was promised to your ancestors.”
Yes, this land requires no rent, but it does have conditions attached. You have to tend to it. You cannot be violent or greedy or deceitful. You must regularly redistribute the land, and make sure that everyone who lives in it gets their fill, and make sure everyone gets plenty of time for rest.
Well, these are small stipulations, given how wonderful my portion is. I get to live on this earth, which is so abundant, and all I have to do is look after it and share it? It sounds like a fantastic deal.
It is, but there is a trap. You see, you might get used to how great this mansion is. You might forget who gave it to you.
You might commit the gravest sin: you might think that this is yours, and yours alone.
This, says Moses, is a terrible error. “You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” Instead, remember the Eternal One your God, for it is God who gives you the power to produce wealth.”
You might think that you earned the mansion, and you built it, and you can do with it as you please. Well, then, you would become a threat. A threat to the mansion and everyone that lives there. A threat to its babbling brooks and fig trees.
If you fool yourself into thinking this is yours, warns Moses, then “your heart will become proud and you will forget the Eternal One, your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.”
Yes, you have a dark past. A history of slaves and masters. There was a time when people claimed ownership over everything. They declared that the Nile River and the rainwater belonged to them. They hoarded the grain and took possession over the vineyards. They owned the animals. They even owned you.
Do you want to go back there?
Now, look around at our home, here in Surrey. This place truly is wonderful. Working here, I have had the chance to paddleboard down the River Wey, walk on the Surrey Downs, and watch others swim in Divers Cove. I can really believe this county was a gift from God.
And yet this county is certainly not treated as a common treasury.
How did it happen that God’s creation became so gated?
You see, Moses’s description of the world as a common heritage bequeathed by God wasn’t just an idle fantasy. That was how many people saw the world throughout a large part of history.
Until the start of the 17th Century, large swathes of English land were held in common by all people. This meant that everyone could graze the land together. They could rotate crops together; care for the land together; and make sure everyone got fed.
It’s not that England was one great egalitarian utopia. Far from it. There had been kings, paupers, lords, peasants, and landless workers, for centuries. But, at least a part of it was treated as a shared inheritance.
Then, in 1605, the government began a process called Inclosure. They took all that had been previously common and handed it over to the already wealthy. They stripped the poor from their land and forced them into the cities to work in factories. They destroyed whole ways of life.
This mansion, already divided, became the possession of just a few. Just as Moses had warned, the wealthy imagined that their power had come about by their own hands. They thought of themselves as more than lords; more than pharaohs: as gods.
Now, right here in Surrey, a group of people tried to resist them. In 1649, on St George’s Hill, and at Little Heath near Cobham, a group of religious dissidents got together, and decided that they would take the land back from the lords. They were called The Diggers.
Their leader, Gerard Winstanley, has a memorial plaque near Weybridge Station, and there is a tour you can take with historic placards, showing where the Diggers went.
The Diggers wanted a return to the Law of Moses and the biblical attitude.
In the Levellers’ Standard, Gerard Winstanley wrote: “The Earth (which was made to be a Common Treasury of relief for all, both Beasts and Men) was hedged in to In-closures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made Servants and Slaves: And that Earth that is within this Creation made a Common Store-house for all, is bought and sold, and kept in the hands of a few, whereby the great Creator is mightily dishonoured, as if he were a respector of persons, delighting in the comfortable Livelihoods of some, and rejoycing in the miserable povertie and straits of others.”
Like Moses before him, Winstanley was adamant that God was not a propertarian but a generous host, and human beings simply welcome guests. How, then, could some divide up the land and force others off of it?
The Diggers lost their battle for the land, and the world we inherit is made according to the laws of those who enacted Inclosure.
But there is a message, that rings out through time, from the era of Moses through the 17th Century, and right up to today.
That message is that this world is a paradise, bequeathed to us all. And we need to act like it is so.
But, if you do not love others, if you do not seek peace, if you do not choose life, who will you be?
When Moses ascended Sinai, he found God adding flourishes to the Torah’s letters, which only Rabbi Akiva would ever be able to read. Moses asked to see what became of Akiva.
The Holy One showed Moses how the Romans flayed Rabbi Akiva’s skin as they martyred him, then sold his flesh in their marketplace.
Moses threw his hands in the air and demanded: “Is this Torah, and this its reward?”
“Silence,” said God. “Such is My will.”
This is Torah. This is its reward.
Vivian Silver was murdered by Hamas on October 7th.
Vivian Silver founded the Israeli peace organisation, Women Wage Peace. She worked for human rights groups like Btzelem and ALLMEP. She lived on Kibbutz Beeri, near the Gaza border, where she engaged in solidarity work with Bedouins, Gazans, and Palestinian construction workers.
Three days before October 7th, she organised a march of 1500 Israeli and Palestinian women for peace.
On October 7th 2023, terrorists broke into her home and murdered her.
Even as she hid from the militants, she gave an interview to Israeli radio, where she said the very fact that she was under attack showed the need for a peace deal.
A year later, her son, Yonatan Zeigen, eulogised her. He said:
“Being a peace activist is not something to save you from being killed in war. It’s something to prevent a war from happening. And to create a reality where war is not an option.”
Silver’s love of others did not make her popular.
Pursuing peace did not make her safe.
Choosing life did not protect her from death.
But it made her fully human.
This is Torah. This is its reward.
On Monday evening, as my community sat down to listen to poetry in preparation for Tisha B’Av, I received a text to say that a Palestinian peace activist I knew had been murdered.
Awdah Hathaleen was shot in the chest in his home.
Awdah lived in the village of Umm al-Khair in the south Hebron hills. I visited his village twice last year with Rabbis for Human Rights. The second time, I stayed in the bunk beds adjacent to his home. In the morning, he brought breakfast to me and the other solidarity activists.
A delegation of Progressive rabbis met Awdah earlier this year when they went to the West Bank with Yachad.
Awdah was an English teacher. He was born in the south Hebron hills and had known tanks, guns and occupation all his life. He worked with Israelis to protect his home and build a peaceful future.
This did not make him popular. For some Palestinians in neighbouring villages, this meant that he was engaged in normalisation with the Israeli occupier.
Indeed, after the Oscar-winning movie about his village, No Other Land, gained international recognition, the BDS movement called to boycott it, because it showed Israelis and Palestinians working together.
Awdah chose the path of non-violence. Even after his uncle, Haj Suleiman, was crushed by an Israeli police tow truck; yes, even after his elder was cruelly murdered; and yes, even after those who killed his uncle were never brought to justice; after all that, he still chose the peaceful path.
For the settlers who wanted to capture his home and ethnically cleanse his village, his activism made him a target.
He and his family never knew safety.
Awdah wrote for 972 Magazine, a joint Israeli-Palestinian publication, about the struggles of raising his traumatised son in this village under attack. He wrote: “He even knows some of the settlers by name. Sometimes I tell him that they went to jail; I’m lying, but I want to make him feel safe.”
He was lying. Settlers who carry out murders do not go to jail.
The man who murdered Awdah was called Yinon Levi. He was filmed doing it. Still, the only person who has been taken into custody by the Israeli police is Awdah’s cousin, Eid, a fellow non-violent activist.
Yinon Levi was already subject to EU sanctions and recognised internationally as a terrorist. But he is protected by government minister, Ben Gvir, who has dedicated his life to helping settlers get away with murder. Even before the far right coalition took power, plenty of settlers had been able to perpetrate atrocities with impunity.
Loving others did not make Awdah popular.
Pursuing peace did not make him safe.
Choosing life did not protect him from death.
No; you will not be better off if you do the right thing.
But God does not ask us to live lives that are comfortable.
There is no commandment in the Torah that we should be popular.
All of us, regardless of religion, are placed on this earth to be God’s stewards; to uphold God’s most sacred commandments; that we must choose life, pursue peace; seek justice; and love the stranger.
This is Torah. This is its reward.
This sacred work comes with no promises. But who else would you want to be?
It is a charge often laid against woolly moralists like me that we do not really get how militants like Hamas think; that we just cannot understand the mentality of the settlers.
That is true. I do not want to think like them. I do not want to become like them.
Who will we be if we let our hearts become warped and set our minds to cruelty?
Loving others will not make you popular. But it will make you loving. And pursuing peace will make you peaceful. And seeking justice will make you just. And that is what your God asks of you.
We are approaching Tisha B’Av, when we recall every catastrophe that befell our people. If you believe that peace is possible and that these assaults on basic humanity are wrong, you can add another disaster to the roster. On Monday, Awdah was murdered.
Yes, a Muslim murdered by a Jew is a tragedy for us all.
A man who was committed to non-violence was shot in the chest by a settler, leaving behind 3 children. He was 31.
Do not give in to cynicism or try to calculate what you might gain for kindness. This world has no guarantees. And we know nothing about the hereafter.
You do what is right because it is right. Because if you do not, who will you be?
After our wedding, everyone was excitedly sharing photos and videos. Laurence pored over them and made albums.
I liked them, but the pictures felt a bit flat. What I was craving was words.
I wanted to re-read everything everyone had said. I went about collecting the speeches people had given, and recounted them again. On honeymoon, Laurence and I re-read our vows to each other, this time pausing and discussing them.
I discovered anew how much more I loved words than pictures or videos. Pictures are static. Even videos, because they only caption one moment from one perspective, feel too final.
To me, words feel so much more alive. Stories are such a great way to engage with events and ideas, because they can be retold so many times and in different ways.
Isn’t this, after all, what religion is: storytelling to access something sublime and unfathomable; a collaboration by people sharing their best narratives and ideas?
We have inherited a literary tradition, our Torah, which is an exercise in storytelling: a process of openly wondering at the world through poetic sagas and emotion-filled songs.
For some, however, these stories fall flat. They see the words the way that I see pictures.
Fundamentalists will look at our story of a donkey talking to a prophet about an angel and think: that must be the historical truth of what happened.
Similarly, the New Atheists look at this beautiful poetic piece about the prophet Balaam and think: how stupid must religious people be to believe this nonsense?
This is not just a misunderstanding of Scripture. It’s a misunderstanding of storytelling itself.
Seemingly, it does not occur to them that this might be an invitation into conversation. They can’t comprehend that this might be a poem, crying out to be read aloud, sung, chanted, interpreted, and retold to make sense of all the wonders of the world.
Perhaps these talking animals and sword-wielding celestial beings aren’t part of history textbooks but reveal a different kind of truth altogether.
In Britain, we are mercifully spared from most of these types of fundamentalist reading. We don’t have to deal with as many evangelical Christians as our American cousins do.
But we have our own local brand of biblical literalists. They are the radical atheists who have got to know our sacred texts solely for the purpose of showing how irrational they are. The most famous of them is Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou, a biblical scholar at the University of Exeter.
In 2021, Stavrakopoulou brought out her most recent work, God: An Anatomy. The book’s objective is to show that the God of the Bible was an embodied being. He was a gargantuan man with a big beard who sat on his throne in the Jerusalem Temple, gobbling up the sacrifices priests burned for Him.
The God of the Bible, Stavrakopoulou argues, was just like any other ancient god: basically a massive person with all the associated wants and desires. She collapses about 4,000 years of history and three continents into one culture and seeks to show that the biblical god was just like all the others.
And, like all the others, the biblical god had a body.
Sometimes, her evidence for this scant. There are entire pages dedicated to making quite wild claims about the biblical god, appended with just one footnote that points to an obscure translation of a verse from the Psalms.
But, overall, there is plenty of material to go off. If you open up any page of Tanach, you will probably find God described in anthropomorphic terms.
Take our haftarah.
This week’s reading comes from the book of Habakkuk, a 6th Century BCE Prophet in Judah. The book is a vivid war fantasy, where the prophet describes the Judahites crushing the invading armies, some time in the mythic past, and hopes that it will happen again.
Throughout the text, God comes alive as a warrior. He (and I’m going to use the masculine pronoun advisedly here) is an embodied fighter on behalf of the people.
God’s hand lights up with radiance; God’s feet trample over mountains; God’s piercing eyes make the nations trembled with fear.
God has all the equipment of an ancient military commander. He rides in on a chariot with His horses and shoots out arrows from His archer’s bow. God rips the spear from the opposing general’s arm and stabs it into his head.
How are we supposed to read this?
Well, for a biblical literalist, you have to take it at face value. That’s exactly what Stavrakopoulou does. She makes the case that this was precisely how the ancient biblical authors and audience understood their god.
Their god was a big bloke with some massive weapons and blood lust.
Stavrakopoulou draws on other ancient gods, whose worshippers also describe them in embodied terms. The Canaanite high god El also had radiant arms. The Akkadian god Enki also trampled over mountains. The Assyrian god Ashur also fought with a bow.
The Israelites, then, were just riffing on old themes. Like the Pagans around them, they were silly enough to believe in all that religious nonsense of big beings. The biblical god was no different to Zeus or Jupiter.
Overall, reading Stavrakopoulou, you get the impression of someone listening to a concerto who can identify every note from every instrument but cannot hear the music. Her entire objective is to show that the tune isn’t even that good because other songs have been written before.
All the way through, it seems like a strange motivation for going to all the effort of learning Scripture and Ancient Near Eastern texts. Then, we get to the final chapter, entitled “Autopsy,” and we understand her true objectives.
She concludes: “the God of the Bible looks nothing like the deity disected and dismissed by modern atheism. […] Their dead deity is a post-biblical hybrid being, a disembodied, science-free Artificial Intelligence, assembled over two thousand years from selected scraps of ancient Jewish mysticism, Greek philosophy, Christian doctrine, Protestant iconoclasm and European colonialism. In the contemporary age, this composite being has become a god who forgot to create dinosaurs and failed to account for evolution; a god who allows cancer to kill children but hates abortion…”
Stavrakopoulou despises religious belief. So, if she can demonstrate that the biblical god was just like the Egyptian pantheon, and that this embodied god could be killed, then she can also strip the modern god of His powers and kill Him too.
This is the worst of Enlightenment hubris. 19th-century anti-religionists imagined that all religion was just silly superstition, which would eventually be washed away by the cold science of reason.
Our movement, like all progressive religions, has consistently argued for an alternative approach. We see all of history as an evolving effort to understand the sacred mystery beyond our comprehension.
It almost certainly is true that, before Ezra led the exiles back from Babylonian captivity in the 4th Century BCE, most Israelites did worship a small pantheon of Canaanite deities. The Prophets from before this time regularly condemn them for it.
But, while they may have been idolaters, they were not idiots.
If you told one of them that you’d just seen the fertility goddess Asherah out for a stroll in the marketplace, or that the storm god Baal came to your house this morning for a cup of tea, they would think something was wrong with you.
Another scholar of ancient religion, Iraqi Assyriologist Zainab Bahrani, helps us make sense of the ancient worldview. For the Mesopotamians, images were not reproductions of originals like portraits and photographs are for us today.
Instead, they saw their icons as ways of writing existence into being. They were in an active process with their gods of creating reality.
In matters of religion, literal interpretations are dead-ends. Words like metaphor don’t do it justice. Symbols like clay deities stand in for whole cosmologies. They are ways that human beings have tried to understand something that, by definition, is beyond our comprehension.
Perhaps most importantly, Stavrakopoulou misses what a massive departure it was that ancient Israelites abandoned all images in favour of a predominantly literary culture.
In a society where you cannot depict God, but can only engage in description and storytelling, you have to be more imaginative when you try to make sense of infinity.
Poems, sagas, and speeches, like those from our Tanach, are never fixed in their meaning. They are openings that invite listeners to think with them, talk back to them, and struggle for deeper understandings.
When someone reads a text too literally, they strip it of its vitality. Atheists and fundamentalists, both literalists of different kinds, strip the soul from the search for divine truth.
Tell stories, make poems, create art, look for that great truth beyond our reach… and don’t take any of it too seriously.
We are days away from Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, when we celebrate having received the Torah. At this festival, we affirm we have received God’s word and that it is unfailing.
This is what we think we know: these words are not only God’s.
They have human origins, and they were written over many centuries. The Torah is not a single, unaltered revelation. It is a book with a history.
What happened at Mount Sinai matters immensely. It is the foundation of our faith. It is the basis not only of Judaism but of every monotheism that followed it.
The story has been told so many times. Hordes of Hebrews fled from Egypt, gathered around the foot of a desert peak, and heard the voice of the One True God.
What they experienced, they told to their children, and they to theirs, until – after generations – the vision was written down into a collection of stories and laws we call the Torah.
We have to know what really happened at Sinai; so much hinges on this indecipherable point of history.
We have to believe in the real world, where history is something made by human beings, who work, and struggle over resources, and build societies.
We have to believe in the God of Judaism, who is revealed through history.
We must synthesise the two. We cannot split the material and the spiritual. We need to know what the material reality was that lay underneath this spiritual truth. We need to know what happened at Sinai.
We cannot truly know, but we have to try and work it out. A group of human beings felt so inspired that they wrote down ten commandments and passed them on for thousands of generations. Why?
A group of human beings, who surely worked and slept and ate and drank and dreamed, proclaimed that they had seen God.
Something marvellous must have happened at that time. Something awe inspiring – to give us this treasury of ancient wisdom. Who committed these words to paper, what happened to them, and what made these commandments feel so important to them?
What really happened at Mount Sinai? The biblical historian pores over our texts, strips them back, digs out inconsistencies, looks for parallels in ancient cultures, and analyses the language in which the stories are told. The biblical historian discards impossibilities, looks for likelihoods, and reconstructs the best possible version of events.
We cannot know for certain, but we can do our best to do the same – to discard, seek and reconstruct. And, when we do, the truth of/ Mount Sinai that we are left with is far more radical than we might imagine.
For the historian, Mount Sinai may not have been Mount Sinai at all. It may be, as the Samaritans claim, Mount Gerizim, near Nablus, since that is also one of the mountains the Torah names as a site of revelation. It may have been Mount Pisgah or Mount Nebo, on the eastern side of the Jordan River, since our Torah names those locations too.
We do not know at which mountain the important revelation happened. But there was a mountain.
This is what we think we know: there was a mountain.
Some people went there. They may not have been Jews, since that word did not exist yet. They may not even have been Israelites, since the story teaches that they only became Israelites through the process of what happened at that mountain.
They were, says the Torah, a mixed multitude. They were drawn from all the nations of the Ancient Near East: from Ethiopia and Yemen; through Egypt and Sudan; to Lebanon and Syria.
They were, by their own self-description, border-crossing nomads. They had no land or title. There are no records to suggest they owned any weapons, let alone that they had military strength.
If we are to trust how they wrote about themselves, they were menial workers. Water drawers; grain carriers; tenant farmers; shepherds. They had been slaves. They were a ragtag of the ancient world’s lowest classes.
We do not know who these people were. But they were poor and transient.
This is what we think we know: the poorest people of many ethnicities came together at a mountain.
We are not sure when it happened. It may have been any time from the 15th Century BCE. The latest it could have been is the 5th Century BCE, when the Torah was edited into its final form. That is a difference of nearly a thousand years.
We do not know what brought them to that mountain. We cannot prove that the exodus took place exactly as it was described in the Torah.
But we do know that, in the 12th Century BCE, there was a massive societal collapse in all the nations of the Mediterranean basin. In the broad period when our Torah tells us that our ancestors received the Ten Commandments, the Egyptian empire was crumbling.
We also know this. When Egypt was collapsing in the late Bronze Age, a Pharaoh wrote a stele, complaining of slave uprisings by a group of nomads on the fringes of his empire. He calls those people Habiru. The biblical historian notes the linguistic similarity between these people and the Hebrews.
This is what we think we know: the poorest people of many ethnicities rebelled together against a decaying empire some time around the late Bronze Age. They met at a mountain.
The stories they tell of their experiences at that mountain are fantastical. Fire descended from heaven. Thunder crashed and lightning roared. Thick smoke descended over the peak. The earth trembled violently. The Creator of Heaven and Earth became manifest before them.
How can we know if any of this happened? Nobody else could have testified to what they saw. There are no contemporary meteorological records. There are only two possibilities: either the authors of our Torah really believed that was what they experienced, or they made it up.
If they made it up, so many others were convinced that they had been part of that experience at the mountain, that they faithfully transmitted the story for hundreds of years to their children and grandchildren. Which is more likely: that these people lied, or that they genuinely believed they had a transcendent experience?
This is what we think we know: the poorest people of many ethnicities rebelled together against a decaying empire some time around the late Bronze Age. At a mountain, they had an experience so profound that they felt as if they saw God manifest, and it changed their lives and the lives of their descendants forever.
The God they thought they heard told them: “Although the whole earth is Mine, you will be for Me a dominion of priests and a holy nation.”
The poorest people in the world affirmed belief in a God who knew no borders and rejected all hierarchies. Every one of these ancient landless waifs would be holy.
According to our Torah, those people entered into a covenant.
Until this point in history, contracts of these kind were predominantly made between empires and vassal states. They took the form: “you will pay me tribute, and I will be your landlord.”
This was a covenant of a new kind. It said: “you will do justly by one another, and I will be your God.”
They ratified this new agreement and remade what a covenant was. They swore an oath, committing themselves to an entirely new society. They bound themselves to a Law that knew no Sovereign save for a universal God.
They promised that their society would have no more killing; no more trafficking in human beings; no more greed. They declared fealty to each other, to their God; and to their sacred days of rest.
Take our texts. Strip them back. Dig out inconsistencies. Look for parallels in ancient cultures. Pay close attention to language. Discard impossibilities.
From what remains, you can reconstruct the best possible version of events.
This is where we have arrived. This is what we think we know.
Thousands of years ago, poor people from many ethnicities got together in common rebellion against a decaying empire. They had an experience so profound that they felt as if they saw God manifest. At a mountain, they made a covenant to create a society based on dignity.
Many hands have since re-written and interpreted that event – but, deep at its core, buried under years of transmission and analysis, was one moment.
This, is what we think we know:
Somewhere in history, there was a slave rebellion by a mountain.
“It makes no sense to hate anybody. It makes no sense to be racist or sexist or anything like that. Because whoever you hate will end up in your family. You don’t like gays? You’re gonna have a gay son. You don’t like Puerto Ricans? Your daughter’s gonna come home Livin’ La Vida Loca!”
This quotation is so erudite, you may wonder which ancient sage said it. That was in fact, the comedian Chris Rock, in his 1999 “Bigger and Blacker” set.
I must have been about 10 when I heard that line, but it has always stuck with me. Over the years since, I have watched it become true. The world is so small that whatever bigotries someone holds, the people they hate are bound to end up in their own homes.
Recently, I realised that this had happened to me. I hope I am not much of a hater, but a friend pointed out to me how much I used to make jokes about Surrey. I used to say that we should saw around the county lines of Surrey and sink it into the sea, drowning all the golf courses and making a shorter trip for Londoners to the beach.
Now, here I am, eating my words. I am about to marry a man from Surrey and have all my in-laws in Surrey. I’m the rabbi for a congregation in Surrey, and looking to move as soon as I can to Surrey. That thing I hated, even in jest, is right here in my family and inside of me.
I had some terrible stereotypes that everyone who lived here was a tax-dodging, fox-hunting billionaire. They weren’t grounded in reality. They were just about my own fears, projected onto people I had never met.
Chris Rock was right. Whoever you hate will end up in your family.
More than that: whoever you hate is already something inside of you.
All of us can do it: we can stereotype, generalise, and project all our antagonisms onto a group as a way to cast off all the fears we have about ourselves. What do we call someone who captures all this externalised hatred? A scapegoat.
In this week’s Torah portion, we read about the original scapegoat. As part of the rituals for collective atonement, Aaron the High Priest gets two goats and brings them into the tabernacle. They pick straws for the goats.
The lucky one is to be sacrificed for God. Onto the lucky one, Aaron ceremonially transmits all the sins of the Israelites, then chases it out into the wilderness. As it scarpers off, the scapegoat symbolically carries away all of the Israelites’ misdeeds.
The biblical narrative describes a psychological trick we can all play on ourselves. When we are ashamed of something inside ourselves, we take all that fear, turn it into hatred, and throw it at whatever unwitting bystander will carry it.
Is this not precisely what Britain has been doing to trans people?
Gender is changing. The roles of men and women are shifting dramatically. There are so many new ways to live gender, to express ourselves, and to talk about our identities.
Rather than embrace these changes and think about what opportunities they can afford us all to be more free, reactionary parts of British society have whipped up a concoction of bigotry and thrown it all at trans people. Every anxiety our bigots have about gender has been exaggerated and projected onto one small part of the population, who have been turned into monsters through these prejudiced eyes.
It makes sense that people will find social changes scary and destabilising, but why should trans people bear the brunt of those fears?
A few years ago, I went to hear a panel of esteemed Jewish leaders give a retrospective talk about the ordination of gay, lesbian, bi and trans rabbis. On the bimah was Rabbi Indigo Raphael, Europe’s first openly trans rabbi.
In his opening words to the congregation, Rabbi Raphael proclaimed: “I am a transgender man. I am not an agenda; I am not an ideology; and you can’t catch trans by respecting my pronouns.” The room immediately erupted into applause.
He should not need to say it. He shouldn’t need to defend his own existence, but such is the level of moral panic in parts of Britain that he has to assert his right not to be scapegoated before he can even teach Torah.
In the last few weeks, trans people have been subjected to legal rulings and government decrees that may make their lives unlivable and keep them from basic participation in public life. Like the goats of the ancient world, they are being cast out into the wilderness to carry away all of people’s fears.
It should not be this way.
When we feel like scapegoating others, the best thing to do is look inside ourselves. We need to face our fears and work out why others bother us. The chances are, it’s something in ourselves that we’re not happy with, and when we need to get right with our own souls.
When we get to know those we “other” we get to know ourselves better. And when we realise we can like the difference in others, we learn more about what we can like in ourselves.
Reflecting on this, Margaret Moers Wenig, an American Reform rabbi wrote an essay called “Spiritual Lessons from Transsexuals.” She talks about how knowing trans people has enriched her own spiritual life.
Interacting with trans people, Rabbi Wenig says, has taught her that all of us can craft our bodies as we will; we are all more than just our flesh and blood; we have living souls that can differ from others’ assumptions; that only God knows who we truly are. These are wonderful lessons that can only be learned when we turn away from fear and embrace curiosity.
They chime with my own experiences. At first, knowing trans people made me question myself. If gender is something we can change, am I really a man? With time, seeing other people embrace their gender and become who they are has made me feel far more happy in my own gender. I am a man, and I like being a man, and I like being an effeminate man.
When we turn away from fear, we see that we have no need for scapegoats. The parts within us don’t need to be divided up so that some are holy and others need to be chased out into the wilderness. Every part of us is for God.
The world has more than enough hate. It’s time we swapped it for loving curiosity.
After all, Surrey, it turns out, is rather lovely.
Before the Enlightenment, the world was governed by unknowable spirits and invisible entities.
There was so much we did not know.
If your farm didn’t produce any crops or the skies did not give you enough rain, you did not have modern technology to inform you about drought predictions for the next three years. You would have no way to know that the water coming from your clouds was directly connected to oceans miles away.
But you had your priests, and your rituals, and your superstitions. You had small gods in the hill country to which you offered libations. And, so far, when you had upheld your traditions, the rain came as it was supposed to.
When you got sick with a skin infection, you could not see a GP who would consult a modern medicine manual and give you a cream that would clear it up in just a few days. You would not have knowledge about germs, allergies, and viruses.
But you had your priests, and your rituals, and your superstitions. You had your rules governing sin and repentance. You had reliable experience that bodily suffering could be healed by atonement. And, so far, when you had upheld your traditions, the rain came as it was supposed to.
Please hold this in mind as we read this week’s Torah portion.
It may be easy for a modern mind, after the Enlightenment, to scoff at the strange priests, rituals, and superstitions that govern these chapters in the Book of Leviticus.
You might feel slightly embarrassed to imagine the rites our ancestors slit open goats, threw their entrails around and burned them for days until they stunk out a tent as expiation for their sins.
You might squirm at the vivid descriptions of cotton-clad priests flailing around the limbs of slaughtered cattle to win the favour of their god.
It may even seem primitive how they delight at the animal fat creating explosive fire, which they see as evidence of their god’s approval.
But they were doing what they could with what they knew. And they were engaging earnestly with what they did not know. Beyond the world they experienced was an unfathomable mystery, and they wanted to draw closer to it.
Indeed, only verses later, we get an insight into their own feelings of inadequacy. We get a real sense that they knew how much they did not know.
Nadav and Abihu do absolutely everything right. They follow the priests, carry out the rituals, and trust in the superstitions. They are formally inducted into all the correct practices by their father, Aaron the High Priest.
They do everything right. And then they die.
The burning animal fat explodes in a blaze that kills them both.
How can our ancestors make sense of this?
Our Torah gives two answers. The first is from Moses. Moses recalls a prophecy when God said: “Among those who approach me I will be proved holy; in the sight of all the people I will be honored.’”
We may interpret this as a way of Moses defending God. Moses is saying: while this may feel like a violation of our belief system, it is in fact proof of it. Holiness is a very dangerous quality.
God has demonstrated how sacred it is to engage in the rituals. God has shown what honour and risk are involved in holy service.
So, for Moses, this sudden death of their priests does not undermine their belief system. It’s just evidence of how little they understand about their sacred rituals. In the fire, they have reached the limits of their knowledge.
Aaron, too, offers an answer. Silence.
We may interpret Aaron’s unspoken response variously. We may read into it horror, resignation, anger, acceptance, or solemnity.
But regardless of what he was feeling, we see that Aaron has no intellectual answer to the problem. He neither agrees nor disagrees with Moses. Aaron finds the limits of speech. He finds the boundaries of what he can even express.
Moses and Aaron lived in a world of unknowable spirits, governed by superstition. They made sense of their confusing world through priests and sacrifices. And no matter how well they constructed their rituals, they still found their limits.
There were things they did not know.
But we live in an era after such theologies. From the 17th Century onwards, Western Europe was gripped by a profound truth.
As the people challenged the unlimited power of the established church, philosophers pulled apart the stories religions had told.
This was the Enlightenment.
No more would they be hoodwinked by magical thinking or damned by promises of divine retribution. Everything, every idea, would be subjected to ruthless scrutiny. The greats of these generations would challenge the tenets of even science itself.
We live now in a world formed by their ideas. While our ancestors were beholden to talismans, omens, and sacrificial fire, we have evolved to hold modern ideals of truth and rational enquiry.
So, why hasn’t religion disappeared?
Isn’t that the obvious next question?
We have rid ourselves of superstitions, but synagogues are stronger than ever. Most of the world is still deeply religious. Despite constant predictions of its demise, faith remains stronger than ever.
For those who wish to understand God’s persistence after the Enlightenment, they may want to look to Immanuel Kant.
Kant was the last of the Enlightenment thinkers. His impact on this period of intellectual history was so great that some even date its end to his death.
Kant was a profound writer on truth, ethics, the scientific method, and what we can really know. He was also a devout Christian.
Kant was animated by the same questions that bothered our ancestors who witnessed Nadav and Abihu die.
He was not confused about why burning fat could cause a blaze, or why religious rituals didn’t always yield the same results. Those were the questions of the past.
The question still lingered, however: why does it seem like there is no justice in the world? Why do bad things happen to good people, and why do the wicked seem to get away with it? Why, no matter what happens, does evil seem to persist?
In his essay, The Miscarriage of All, Kant says he will put God’s justice before the trial of reason. Kant contemplates all the possible answers.
Maybe what we think is evil isn’t really. Maybe the world works in ways we don’t understand so that evil has to be permitted. Maybe there are other forces in the world beyond God’s goodness.
And Kant gives us an answer, which is… we don’t know.
All of these explanations only expose the limits of our understanding.
None of the answers anybody has come up with is satisfactory.
We are finite beings trying to understand Infinite Truth.
And still, says Kant, we retain our faith.
For Kant, none of these questions undermine the existence of God’s justice. They just show what we do not know.
So, perhaps we need to approach these stories with more humility and less contempt.
The ancient priests may well have splashed ox blood around an altar to ward off sin, but we are no closer to answering the questions that motivated their rituals.
We are barely separated from them by any time at all.
We are still just animals, scrambling in the dark, trying to make sense of our world.
And we still need each other, with all our beliefs and rituals, to get through this life that can seem so unjust.
We are each other’s guides through a mystery we may never resolve.
Perhaps, says the Mishnah, it is when we can see the difference between light blue and white. Or when we can see the difference between sky-blue and leak-green. Or perhaps it is when the sun is fully visible in the sky.
‘No,’ says the Tosefta. It is the moment when you can stand four paces from a friend and recognise their face. That is when you know that the day has come.
In the sunlight, new rays shine upon a familiar face and you can truly see them. In the morning, when the darkness has receded, you can recognise who is standing before you.
How different is this face, and yet how familiar. I see this person, this stranger, and, if the day has come, they are no longer a stranger. They are recognisable. It is possible to interpret their face fully; to understand it in ways one could not comprehend in the night.
Then we know that it is morning.
This is not just true for the passing of time. This is something that happens in life.
There are moments when we encounter someone we thought we knew, and new information, or a new realisation, means that we see them in a completely new light. They are transformed. And, in that process, we, who thought we knew, are transformed too, and our understanding of ourselves is changed.
In 4th Century Greece, the philosopher Aristotle termed this moment “anagnorisis.” It means recognition, or discovery. Aristotle writes that, in the world of theatre, anagnorisis “is a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing either friendship or hatred in those who are destined for good fortune or ill.”
How different you appear in the new light of day. I stand four paces away from you and I can finally see that the night has disappeared and some glints of the morning have come.
It is most effective, says Aristotle, when it coincides with a reversal. The one who seemed weak is strong; the one who appeared as a pauper is rich; the one who we thought was dead has been alive all along.
Aristotle presents the example of Oedipus. Throughout the entirety of his tragedy, Oedipus believed he was avoiding a prophecy that warned he would kill his father and marry his mother. In the moment of anagnorisis, at the cathartic climax of the play, Oedipus discovers that he had already fulfilled this prediction right at the start of his story. His father was not his father and his mother was his wife.
The idea of anagnorisis received a revival a few months ago, when the British-Palestinian author, Isabella Hammad, delivered the annual Edward Said lecture. Hammad spoke of anagnorisis as it appears in Palestinian literature, where recognition scenes are crucial.
“To recognise something,” says Hammad, “is to perceive clearly what you have known all along, but that perhaps you did not want to know. Palestinians are familiar with such scenes in real life: apparent blindness followed by staggering realization. When someone, a stranger, suddenly comes to know what perhaps they did not want to know.”
In Hammad’s understanding, anagnorisis is not just a literary trope, but something deeply personal and political, filled with moral meaning.
Let us turn, then, to our own narrative. This week, in the Torah, we witness one of the most staggering moments of anagnorisis.
Joseph wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard him, and Pharaoh’s household heard about it.
Joseph, the Egyptian vizier, strips off his royal clothes, and cries out: “I am your brother Joseph!”
Until this point, Joseph’s brothers believed that he was probably dead, or a slave somewhere miles away. Joseph’s brothers had believed that he was contemptible; a downtrodden misfit. Joseph’s brothers had believed that they themselves were contemptible; that they had sold their own kin into slavery and could never be redeemed for their sin.
Now they learn that Joseph is alive and is, in fact, the vizier over Egypt.
But this itself is not anagnorisis. Because in a real moment of recognition it is not only the characters who understand the truth of their situation, but the audience also discovers something new. We, the audience, already knew that the vizier was Joseph.
So, what did we really find out?
Joseph cried because he finally knew that his brothers regretted what they did to him, and that his father truly mourned his loss. He wailed because he now realised that these brothers could act as a family and care for their youngest brother. Joseph’s brothers were really penitent. Joseph never knew this, and nor did we.
When Joseph sees his brothers as they really are, Joseph changes how he sees himself.
“Then Joseph said to his brothers, “Come close to me.” When they had done so, he said, “I am your brother Joseph.” One word in Hebrew – just one word – changes entirely our understanding of who Joseph is in this context.
אֲחִיכֶם – your brother
“I am your brother.”
Joseph recognises himself as someone else. Not as the grand vizier of Egypt, but as the lost brother of his family.
Now we, the audience, can finally understand what Joseph wanted from this tragic play all along. All he ever wanted was to be loved. He did not really want power or favouritism or grandeur. He was just a lonely boy who wanted to be loved and did not know how. He resorted to such ridiculous measures to get attention, but all he ever wanted was to be accepted by his family. He wanted to be their brother.
This story was not about what we had thought. We thought it was a divine unfolding of a great man’s place in history. We thought we were reading a rags-to-riches story that explained the hidden greatness of our nation and its God.
Then, instead, we see the entire cast as vulnerable human beings. Joseph is just a flawed boy seeking to make his family happy. Judah is just a stupid brother who made a terrible decision and regretted it. This is no tale of triumph, but is a far more gentle narrative, about family reconciliation and the power of repentance.
In the light of this moment, the entire story of the Torah comes into sharp focus. Cain killed Abel. Abraham tried to kill Isaac. Jacob tricked Esau. Laban tried to kill Jacob. Everyone in this family, going right back to the beginning, deployed violence and cruelty to achieve their aims. This is the first time, the climax of the book of Genesis, when these men are able to be vulnerable, use their words, and find healing.
Suddenly, we understand that this story was not about fulfilling a prophecy but about breaking an intergenerational curse.
In this moment of anagnorisis, everybody is somebody else. They are not hostages to fortune but breathing human beings capable of shaping their own family relationships. They cease being stock characters and become emotionally deep people who can recognise the vulnerability in each other.
So, how do we know when it is morning?
In the sunlight, new rays shine upon a familiar face and you can truly see them. In the morning, when the darkness has receded, you can recognise who is standing before you. How different is this face, and yet how familiar.
When you can stand four paces away from someone whom you thought was a stranger, and see yourself anew. That person is not a stranger, and you are in fact a friend.
There is no more a struggle for power, but a moment of recognition. You recognise who you are, and you can finally say: “I am your brother.”
I am your sister. I am your family. I am your kin.
Sim Lev 