Reflections on Mental Health in Jewish Community - In Honour of JAMI Mental Health Shabbat

We are delighted to partner with JAMI, the mental health service for the Jewish Community on this Shabbat on which we read the plague of darkness. JAMI are also running a Parent Café this Sunday, 11am focussed on supporting parents managing children's anxiety, especially around the online world.

 

The biblical plague of darkness is referred to with an extra word Aphela, alongside the standard term for darkness Choshech. It is a darkness, the Torah says, that is tangible in its consuming quality. In Midrash Tanhuma, Rav Abdimi understands the plague as paralysing, “An Egyptian who was standing was unable to sit, while one who was sitting was unable to stand, and one lying down could not rise.” The verses and their commentators feel as if they describe not so much a physical phenomenon, but a psychological one.

 

The paralysing, tangible quality of depression is, awfully, one I’ve seen and heard sufferers share. It is a lethal disease.

 

Peer-reviewed, government-supported actions include normalisation of depression as a medical condition, not a personal failure. As a medical condition, it can and will respond to professional, medically trained intervention. “Lots of people experience these feelings. They can be addressed, speaking with a GP or medical health professional can help.” For many the combination of both medication and therapeutic support will be more effective than either in isolation.

 

Social connection and reducing isolation are also attested as a protective factor. This isn’t the same as telling someone who is experiencing depression that they should ‘cheer up.’ There will be many social spaces that a person experiencing depression will feel they need to avoid. I hope the Synagogue, however can be helpful. It won’t work for everyone every time. But if coming to Shul, sitting together or even sitting apart is ever helpful, I couldn’t be more proud to make it clear that this is, among so many other things, what we are here for. No need to schmooze, no need to come to kiddush. But part of the idea of a community is to know we are never truly alone. And if physically being the space doesn’t work, there’s the stream. And also … me. I’m not a medical professional, but I have resources I can share and would both want to be know and show a sense of care that we all deserve.

 

As Rebbe Nachman shared, and it does seem that the great founder of Bretzlav Chasidism experienced both mania and depression, the world is a narrow bridge, but the most important thing is never to give into fear.

 

May we all know only brightness.

 

Rabbi Jeremy

Annoying Pharoahs Since ...

 

https://truah.org/welcome-to-our-store/

I read, over my winter break, the new book by my friend and successor as Rabbi at St Albans Masorti Synagogue, A Spark of Total Darkness.

There’s a Chapter on Hierarchy or Authority which focuses on a line from the Nishmat prayer, we recited this morning – Ain Lanu Melekh Ele Atah – there is no Sovereign other than You - God.

It is, claims Rabbi Adam Zagoria-Moffet, the very foundation of the Torah’s political principles. That is to say that in Judaism, there is one conception of true Authority, and then there is nothing else in the human or corporeal realm that has true power. Sure, there are social contracts and apparatus to allow for the need of humans to feel led, to appoint a King or President or Prime Minister, but as for true sovereignty? Ain Lanu Melekh Ele Atah.

Nothing counts when compared to a God with whom we have a relationship but who has no physicality, no corporeality.

This relationship with authority, Rabbi Adam suggests, riles those who have come to hate Jews, from Pharaoh’s time, from the time of Haman and … well, until today.

This fundamental, and fundamentally Jewish, refusal to accept human-born power as impressive, the refusal to consider that right can ever be demonstrated by exercising physical might, this might be the thing at the heart of so much of the antisemitism we, as Jews, have encountered and continue to encounter.

“Antisemitism is,” says Rabbi Adam (p. 92) “driven by the fact that Jewish thought is fundamentally threatening to all those who claim power for themselves and attempt to use it to coerce others.”

There’s a remarkable commentary in the Etz Chayim Chumash, way back on the opening chapter in Genesis, that expresses the same idea, as it were, the other way round. It’s on the verse that states that the model for all humanity was created in the image and likeness of the divine.

“In the Ancient Near East,” wrote Chaim Potok, “the ruling king was often described as the image or the likeness of a god, which served to elevate the monarch above ordinary mortals. In the Bible, this idea became democratised. Every human being is created “in the image of God;” each bears the stamp of royalty.”

There’s God, who has no likeness, and then there are each and every human being created ever since Adam HaRishon. And we are all in the same boat, equally neither God nor untouched by godliness. We are powerful, we are limited, and those two things cohere quite beautifully.

Rabbi Adam’s analysis is built on the teaching of the Argentinian-born, Rabbi of the Syrian Jewish community, Jose Faur.

“How [asks Faur] “can a Rex or a pontifical ruler be expected to exercise absolute sovereignty over his subjects when a high-profile minority refuses to subject itself to the absolute sovereignty of anyone?!” 

This question, Faur suggests, leads to the idea that “antisemitism [should be] the preferred strategy of political and religious systems claiming unlimited sovereignty.”

Rabbi Adam suggests that this analysis can explain the way that antisemitism is and has been equally cherished as a political tool by the extreme left and the extreme right, by the Nazis and the Stalinists and a response that has come from both Christians and Muslims.

 

And it’s not that the nature of the kind of sovereignty that we, as Jews, do accept can be compared to the sovereignty of a King of Basar V’Dam – flesh and blood. Faur notes that the image of God that emerges from Judaism is a God who has to entice our acceptance, welcome us into a covenantal relationship. Torah cannot be compelled. It has to be received as an act of free will; kimu vKiblu is the rabbinic term.

The ideal of the only sovereignty to be acknowledged in the Universe is non-coercive, just, and capable of withstanding criticism.

And put like that, it’s no wonder two things apply.

One is that it’s not just Pharaoh and Haman and the like who have struggled to cope with Jews; it’s no wonder that every other jumped-up wannabe dictator, fascist, demagogue through time and across space has struggled with Jews.

 And here’s the second thing, the really interesting thing. It’s no wonder that Jews have got good at standing up to jumped-up wannabe dictators, fascists, demagogue through time and across space.

One of my favourite Jewish social action organisations, T’ruah, has a T-shirt that reads, ‘Been standing up to oppression since the time of Pharaoh.’

Let me do one important piece before going too far.

I don’t think it’s just Jews, who have suffered as a result of the same false claims to power made by those who want us to believe that true power comes in a human form. It’s been those on the left and the right and Jews and Muslims and everyone else. And, again, more importantly, it’s not just the Jews who have learnt and excelled and performed mighty deeds in overthrowing demagoguery.

I like, in particular, a comment from Tikvah Frymer-Kensky who observed that the heroic Meyaldot HaIvriot – midwives who saved the boys from drowning and faced down Pharaoh with exactly the level of disdain his genocidal hatred deserved – can be understood either to be Egyptian women serving the Hebrews, or Hebrew midwives. It’s perhaps exactly correct that there is the sort of ambiguity that should lead us to consider it’s really up to us all.

But this, this ability to model a relationship with power that is above the selfish self-serving claims of illegitimate political leadership, is the very role for us, Jews. It’s what we, at the very heart of everything we believe, stand for. And the models of how to stand up in opposition to oppression and the abuse of power permeate our texts at every level, again and again and again; from Abraham willingness to stand up to even God, to … the Hebrew midwives standing up to Pharoah and the daughters of Tzelophachad standing up to Moses and Natan standing up to King David and … it’s the very essence of who we are.

The best collection I know of of what all this means – all these lessons in how to oppose wrongdoing and stand up for the good – is in David M. Blumenthal’s book, The Banality of Good and Evil. As I wrote in my weekly words, it’s a survey of how inculcating prosocial behaviour has worked and also has failed – has worked and failed during the time of the Holocaust.

I’ve been aware of a kind of malaise creeping into our contemporary discourse, a sort of Yeiush – despair at how complex these times are, with the ecology thing and the economic thing and the AI thing and all the other things. And it won’t do, it certainly won’t make anything better.

It’s not the case that it’s never been darker. It’s been much darker. And it’s not the case that, from the previous darkness, we, as Jews and as members of the human race, have been unable to emerge. We’ve emerged. And it’s still the case, it will never not be the case that at the heart of the re-emergence from dark times, there will always be a need for courage and faith and the sort of disregard of the necessity of might always winning out. We should remember what has happened time and time again in our history and human history when fools have made the case that might will win out. Might never wins out unless it is accompanied by a commitment to decency and justice and the respect for all humanity. The question, the challenge is, how quickly can we organise, motivate ourselves and find the courage to stand strong in the face of demagogy.

The Sikh peace activist, Valerie Kaur, shared an analysis of the darkness she was experiencing, particularly as a mother raising, as she put it, “a brown boy in America, [in] a world that is more dangerous than the one I was given.”[1]

And she said this

“What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if our [country] is not dead but a country that is waiting to be born? What if the story of America is one long labor? What if all of our grandfathers and grandmothers are standing behind now, those who survived occupation and genocide, slavery and detentions and political assault? What if they are whispering in our ears, “You are brave”?

And then she takes as her inspiration the verses we read just today, the verses about those Hebrew midwives.

“What [she said] does the midwife tell us to do? Breathe. And then? Push. Because if we don’t push, we will die. If we don’t pus,h our nation will die. Tonight we will breathe. Tomorrow we will labor in love through love and your revolutionary love is the magic we will show our children.”

It’s a terrific speech.

The moral of the story, our story, the story of Exodus, the story of our continued existence as Jews is that there is something more powerful than the power wielded by human Pharaohs and wannabe Pharaohs. There is the One and Only Sovereign who rules without coercion and the threats and actualisation of violence. And then there are us – created in the image of the Divine and called upon to oppose demagoguery and cruelty, to stand up for what is right, even in the face of that which is more superficially mighty than we are. We shouldn’t be despairing. After all, we’ve got the greatest story ever told on our side.

 

Shabbat Shalom

---

[1] https://speakola.com/ideas/valerie-kaur-interfaith-watch-night-2016

The Banality of Good and Evil - Reflections on a Great Book in Contemporary and Earlier Times

 This week, against the backdrop of the news of our time and the opening of the Book of Exodus, I’ve been reflecting on David Blumenthal’s The Banality of Good and Evil, a book which would make it onto my desert island shortlist.

Blumenthal’s book is an enquiry into how NOT everyone folded into the superficially attractive genocidal horror of Nazism. It’s steeped in sociological and psychological investigations of the heroes of that bleak time – the righteous among the nations, the subjects of the Oliners’ The Alturistic Personality and the like.

In this time, as we are being drawn, banally and otherwise, into accepting things that should call us to action in fierce opposition, Blumenthal’s lessons are worth restating.

The central idea that emerges from Blumenthal’s research is that heroes, bystanders and even villains don’t emerge ready-formed. They are shaped by their experience, or lack thereof, of prosocial and antisocial values. This seems as true today as it was in the run-up to the Holocaust and – on this week in which we read of Pharaonic genocide and brave resisting midwives –in the time of the Exodus.

Blumenthal’s call is that we – religious leaders, teachers, parents, humans of all kinds –teach and model what he identifies in powerful and moving lists as ‘prosocial’ actions and values. We need to discuss terms such as “inclusiveness, goodness, kindness, justice, fairness, law, integrity, virtue, uprightness, caring, protest, resistance, humanness, and humanity. And the complements: exclusiveness, isolationism, ethnic superiority, injustice, oppression, prejudice, unfairness…”

We – all of us – need to be sensitive to the way that the language we use forms who we are and who we become. When we speak with “compassion, concern, affection, love, [and] care”, we create one set of ripples that impacts on ourselves and those around us – we are drawn towards the prosocial. The reverse is also true.

We – Blumenthal counsels – must discuss the nature of social processes and provide proper instruction about social hierarchies; “Discuss the terms: authority, obedience, disobedience, resistance, autonomy, ingroup-outgroup, conflict management win-win,”

We must teach critical thinking and empathy. We must encourage and model the identification of our own, and others’ feelings and emotions – are we feeling proud or brave or scared or tired?

Perhaps most of all, we need to share the central idea that human beings are built towards doing good. We have, as humans, banally allowed awful things, but we have also stood firm, resisted and thrived by being social, co-operating and celebrating difference. We can again. We must again.

These lists contain so many deeply Jewish ideas, values and concepts; Blumenthal, aside from his philosophical and sociological academic efforts, is very much a Rabbi. Nowhere, in our sacred texts, are these ideas more powerfully modelled and articulated than in this week’s Torah reading and in the weeks to come. This is important. These teachings can, and have, changed the world. These teachings are needed again, this time around. The challenges of the banality of how humans can be habituated and trained towards evil are not new. The solutions are not new either. We just need to pay attention and believe.

Shabbat Shalom

Three Ways With Chanukah

Is the moral of Chanukah, is the moral of all contemporary Jewish life, 'they hate us', 'oppose assimilation' or 'spread light'?

I want to share three modes of understanding the Festival of Chanukah, both of which are very much alive in our contemporary times.

The first takes, as its core text, the Al HaNissim prayer, dropped into the Amidah and Grace After Meals

ימֵי מַתִּתְיָהו בֶּן יוֹחָנָן כֹּהֵן גָּדוֹל, חַשְׁמוֹנָאִי וּבָנָיו, כְּשֶׁעָמְדָה מַלְכוּת יָוָן הָרְשָׁעָה עַל עַמְּךָ יִשְׂרָאֵל, לְהַשְׁכִּיחָם תּוֹרָתֶךָ וּלְהַעֲבִירָם מֵחֻקֵּי רְצוֹנֶךָ,

In the days of Matityahu, the son of Yochanan the High Priest, the Hasmonean and his sons, when the wicked Hellenic government rose up against Your people Israel to make them forget Your Torah and violate the decrees of Your will.

It’s a part of the classic summation of Jewish holidays that runs,

They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.

It’s a story of Chanukah about how much they – the big bad outside world with its big bad animus to us Jews doing the things we want to do – hate us. And wish us harm. It’s a story about the importance of standing up in the face of antisemitism and a story about the power of God, the ability of God to defeat any opposing force and the inalienable connection between God and Israel.

וְאַתָּה בְּרַחֲמֶיךָ הָרַבִּים, עָמַדְתָּ לָהֶם בְּעֵת צָרָתָם. רַבְתָּ אֶת־רִיבָם, דַּנְתָּ אֶת־דִּינָם, נָקַמְתָּ אֶת־נִקְמָתָם, מָסַרְתָּ גִבּוֹרִים בְּיַד חַלָּשִׁים, וְרַבִּים בְּיַד מְעַטִּים, וּטְמֵאִים בְּיַד טְהוֹרִים, וּרְשָׁעִים בְּיַד צַדִּיקִים, וְזֵדִים בְּיַד עוֹסְקֵי תוֹרָתֶךָ. וּלְךָ עָשִׂיתָ שֵׁם גָּדוֹל וְקָדוֹשׁ בְּעוֹלָמֶךָ,

But You, in Your abounding mercies, stood by them in the time of their distress. You waged their battles, defended their rights, and avenged the wrong done to them. You delivered the mighty into the hands of the weak, the many into the hands of the few, the impure into the hands of the pure, the wicked into the hands of the righteous, and the wanton sinners into the hands of those who occupy themselves with Your Torah.

And there are those who see the story of Chanukah in these terms, and those for whom the place in which we find ourselves today is that place.

Here we are, us Jews, trying to do the things we want to do, and the world hates us, and masses its antisemitic forces against us and it will take a miracle to turn back the tide of hatred towards us. But, the good news is, we believe in miracles,

Al HaNisim V’al HaGevurot

That’s the first modality.

Here’s the second,

And it comes from the best, closest historical account of the Wars of the Maccabees, from the Book of the Maccabees.

I mean the Al Hanissim prayer is old, 7^th Century CE – but that’s still of course 850 years after the events it records. The Book of Maccabees is usually dated to 1^st CE before the Common Era a mere 50 years after the wars it describes – for those doing the maths and thinking about the nature of history – 850 years ago from today, the Normans invaded Ireland – you remember the great Norman invasion of Ireland, don’t you?

And fifty years ago, President Nixon resigned in the afternmath of the Watergate debacle, back I the days when American Presidents resigned when they were caught doing something wrong.

The point is, if it’s a question of which mode to trust as an accurate bearer of historical record, it’s not close.

The book of Maccbees opens, more of less, with this story;

In those days there appeared in Israel transgressors of the law who seduced many, saying: “Let us go and make a covenant with the Gentiles all around us; since we separated from them, many evils have come upon us.” The proposal was agreeable; some from among the people promptly went to the king, and he authorized them to introduce the ordinances of the Gentiles. Thereupon they built a gymnasium^* in Jerusalem according to the Gentile custom.

And the persecution of the Jews was led by a desire to make the whole of the Kingdom of Antiochus, one kingdom with one set of customs. And the Book of Macabees records the conflict between the Jews who “ delighted in [the religion of the King]; they sacrificed to idols and profaned the sabbath. [and built] pagan altars and temples and shrines, to sacrifice swine and unclean animals, and left their sons uncircumcised” and on the other hand, the puritans who fled into hiding.

And the famous story in the second chapter of Maccabees, where Matityahu is refusing to bow down to an idolatrous God when a ‘certain Jew came forward in the sight of all to offer sacrifice on the altar in Modein according to the king’s order. When Mattathias saw him, he was filled with zeal; his heart was moved and his just fury was aroused; he sprang forward and killed him upon the altar. At the same time, he also killed the messenger of the king who was forcing them to sacrifice, and he tore down the altar.”

In the Book, 2^nd Maccabees, also from the same, early, period it’s even more clear; there are Jews fighting other Jews, Jews who wish to stay pure and have nothing to do with the world of the Helenizers and Jews who felt the Jewish traditions needed, at the very least, radical updating to still be worth their time. It’s a civil war before it’s a war between nations.

This second mode is a little more complex. The small piece of grit that allowed the pearl to form, as it were is, assimilation. A willingness to be cajoled into a set of universalitistic values that is not Torah. The bit that opens the door to allow a foreign King to come in and legislate against us, and persecute us is not some deep-seated antisemitic animus, but rather the assimation of Jews, the ease with which we turned out back on the central claims on us made by our faith; avoidance of idolatry, shabbat, circumcision.

I was sent an email today by someone wanting to know if I would perform what they called a Brit Shalom, a covenantal welcome for their baby son which didn’t involved circumcision. I didn’t tell them that the original appearance of the term Brit Shalom comes in the Torah just after Pinchas runs through a couple, one Israelite, one not, fornicating with a spear. It’s not just that the person who wrote to me, it’s far more general than that – it’s all of us, all a bit, in our different ways and to different extents unwilling to accept the call that inspired our ancestors to stay firm within our own covenantal obligations. If we give up on ourselves, of course, this mode of telling the story of Chanukah seems to say, if we give up on ourselves, of course everyone else will consider us unworthy of deserving the space to be different.

So the third mode is drawn from the passage in Talmud Shabbat

For when the Greeks entered the Temple, they defiled all the oils therein, and when the Hasmonean dynasty prevailed against and defeated them, they made search and found only one cruse of oil which lay with the seal of the High Priest, but which contained sufficient for one day’s lighting only; yet a miracle was wrought therein and they lit [the lamp] therewith for eight days.

There’s no mention of a war in Talmud Shabbat, no mention of Jews killed, by Antiochus or certainly by other Jews. And instead only a warming and, frankly quite insignificant miracle. I can’t be the only person who wondered, surely someone crept into the Temple when no-one was looking and replenished the supply of oil?

It feels like a way of approaching the story of Chanukah that wants to look away from the military mythology and the violence. What is the great message of the Haftara fpr Shabbat Chanukah – coming soon to a Bimah near you,

לֹא בְחַיִל, וְלֹא בְכֹחַ--כִּי אִם-בְּרוּחִי,

Not by might – literally the word is not by soldiers - and not by power, but by spirit alone.

As if the moral of the story is, feel a spirit, a warmth, a sense of miraculous survival that exists for all of Israel, assimilated, zeolot alike, and is miraculous and worthy of retell even without a stories of antisemitic hatred, or Jews being pitted on against the other.

This is my last sermon on 2025 – I’m away the next two Shabbatot – don’t worry, you will be in great hands. But I’ve been reflecting on the three different kinds of sermons I’ve been choosing between giving, week after the week.

There is the – they are all out to get us sermon, the Al HaNissim sermon.

There’s the don’t give ‘em an opening sermon, stay committed and stay connected sermon – the sermon that is closest to the tales told in First and Second Maccabees.

And the – don’t watch that, that dark outside world that will only bring fear and close hearts, and instead celebrate the simple miracles of survival and light and warmth sermon – the Masechet Shabbat sermon.

Like all good problems, it’s not a choice between something clearly right and something clearly wrong. There is a grave challenge that rises from antisemitism both here and driven by what has been happening there. There is a grave challenge that rises from assimilation, or perhaps more explicitly a lack of care about the heart of what it means to be a Jew.

And I’ve spoken, I’ve tried to speak about both.

But I’m most comfortable speaking about the miracles of our existence. I suspect that’ spart of what the Rabbis responsible for this passage in the Talmud realised. You can’t really make a Jewish life out of only feeling the threat of anti-semitism and assimilation. You have to make a Jewish life out of the triumph of survival and the sense of warmth and the importance, as I wrote in my weekly words this week, of spreading light, allowing light to be contagious.

It’s not that the world isn’t dark. It’s the response to this sense of darkness can’t just be to fight. It needs to be to celebrate and welcome in and open out. We need to let light shine as the heart of our Jewish existence.

To do otherwise, in some ways, lets the forces that are arrayed against us, win.

Shabbat Shalom

Happy Chanukah

The Cardinal Bea Memorial Lecture 2011 - Heschel, Soloveitchik, Bayfield and the Point of Jewish - Christian Interfaith Dialogue

I was invited to give this lecture by the remarkable Sisters of Sion, way back in 2011. But with the 60th Anniversary of Nostra Aetate in the news, I'm realising I never posted it before so ... here you go.

 The Cardinal Bea Memorial Lecture 2011

 

Lord Harries, Baroness Richardson,

Friends,

Particularly the Sisters of Sion,

I am most grateful for the honour of this invitation to address you.

To know of some of your extraordinary work and the sense of openness and generosity of spirit that inspires your calling is humbling and inspirational.

Already, simply to be here, as a Rabbi, as a representative of a faith once treated as a fossil, at best, or cursed, at worst, is, in the context of the 2000+ year history of our respective faiths remarkable.

And that, unless I have desperately miscalculated, I feel under no threat of being lynched or attacked isn’t something that even now, even here, I take for granted.

I accept this invitation as an invitation to be honest, to share of my own struggles and those of my faith community – I’m not here to score points, interfaith dialogue is no longer a zero-sum game where a Jew’s success means a Christian’s failure or vice versa. We have come so far it’s almost beyond belief.

 

Indeed, it seems that much of this credit for this extra-ordinary shift in the relationships between Church, the Catholic Church in particular, and the Synagogue belongs to the man whose memory we honour tonight, Cardinal Bea.

I’m not particularly a scholar of the time, nor would consider myself an expert in Jewish-Catholic or Jewish-Christian dialogue (I will I hope justify my place here on a different basis), but I’ve been deeply touched by real warmth that seems to have existed between the Cardinal and my most important teacher, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Heschel was the leading Jewish theologian in discussions with the Vatican in the lead up to Vatican II and Edward Kaplan, Heschel’s biographer, records how Heschel spoke highly of Bea’s critical edition of Song of Songs – Bea, of course, being fluent in Hebrew and Aramaic among other languages.

Heschel could castigate, embarrass religious leaders. In a famous speech to the American Rabbinical Assembly Heschel castigated and embarrassed Rabbis who led services devoid of spirit and guts. And in a famous speech at a 1960s conference on Race and Religion he castigated and embarrassed faith leaders of all stripes for their failure to speak out against slavery in America. But he loved, admired and respected Cardinal Bea for he saw in the Cardinal both commitment to his own faith and also a commitment to recognise the faith of others.

 

Secondly, I’ve been aware of the place in which the Cardinal stood – in the eye of the storm around Vatican II.

The American Jewish Committee made representations to the Cardinal in the run up to Vatican II. They submitted a dossier, and I quote the dossier’s author, identifying and illustrating, ‘slanderous interpretations, oversimplifications, sweeping statements, unjust or inaccurate comparisons, invidious use of language, and significant omissions in American Catholic textbooks’ of the late 1950s and early 1960s. That can’t have been easy reading. It takes a capacious soul to make their way through material like that and respond with breadth of spirit and warmth.

 

And on another side, there were tremendous pressures from within the Church, for there were many in the Church who felt that accusations of deicide were entirely correct and a perpetuation of expiatory contempt for Jews was the only correct theological response to me and members of my faith.

 

The Cardinal also had to stand firm in the face of more than just a whiff of paranoiac anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.

 

The second session of Vatican II saw the wide distribution of a document called “The Jews and the Council in the Light of Holy Scripture and Tradition.” This pseudo-anonymous piece of antisemitism insisted that efforts to alter the Church’s traditional view of Jews were the result of a conspiracy in the council by Jews and Freemasons working on behalf of Communism. These paranoiac Catholic flames were flamed by Arab leaders and clerics, both Copt and Muslim, who pushed and pulled as their own interests dictated.

 

The notion that Cardinal Bea was able to stand as firm as he did in the face of such great challenge is already a tremendous achievement.

 

Nostra Aetate transformed the relationship of the Church and the Jewish people from one of enmity and fear into one of shared commitment; shared commitments to monotheism, the pursuit of peace, justice, to recognise that every human is created in the image of the divine and most important of all a commitment to oppose genocide and speak out against hatred dressed up in the sheepskin clothes of religious terminology.

 

And while the theologians and political bigwigs negotiate over commas and precise turns of phrase, I know all too personally how relationships between Jews and Catholics have been transformed by Nostra Aetate

 

I was born six years after Vatican II. My Jewish parents made the decision to send me to a Catholic School, St Anthony’s in Hampstead, where I received an incredible education inspired by the very best sentiments of open-hearted Catholic commitments to the value of enquiry and human compassion, shared with me, as a Jew; commitments given what we in Jewish circles would call a gashbanka – a seal of approval – by the language of Nostra Aetate. Indeed I know this is an evening in honour of one great servant of the Church, Cardinal Bea, but I hope the good Cardinal, looking down on us all today, would not object if I wish also to honour, in what I share today the memory of another Catholic hero, my headmaster of that time, Tim Patton.

 

I’m honoured and touched that Tim’s successor as headmaster of St Anthony’s School, Paul Keyte is able to be here today. I’m delighted the school continues to foster the very best open-hearted approach to the education of generations to come.

 

I mentioned earlier that I don’t deserve to be here as a historian, for I am not really a historian. I’m a practioner. I practice as a Jew, I practice inter-faith dialogue. I aspire to no level of expertise higher than that of being a practioner.

 

So I want share with you the questions at the heart of my contemporary practicing of interfaith encounter.

 

How much of one’s own faith does one have to give up on to fully acknowledge the faith of another?

Is it possible to believe that the other has erred without that being necessarily disrespectful?

Is it possible to be wholly committed to one’s own faith while still being a pluralist – can you have humility as well as belief?

And if I am not looking to give up on or even alter my own faith, as a result of interfaith dialogue, what is the point of interfaith dialogue?

 

Two end points in my own personal dialectic

Joseph Soloveitchik, known as The Rav, was the leader of American Orthodoxy in the 1960s. And he was not interested in Vatican II at all.

The Rav gave an important address to the massed ranks of American Orthodox Rabbis entitled ‘Confrontation,’ in which he turned his back on anything that could be considered pluralist – especially in relationship to the Church.

 

Jews and Christians should not seek, Soloveitchik demanded, ‘common denominators’ because to do so risks, he argued, frittering away the unique destiny of both faiths engaged in a singular normative gesture.’

Soloveitchik wouldn’t express any care for what the church may or may not say about Jews. He simply insisted that Jews reject any suggestion that our covenant has been superseded. He disdained any attempt to find mutually acceptable forms of language that iron out this central difference. He rejected apologetics, revisionism or other sweet words.

 

Soloveitchik also demanded mutual non–interference. Jews should not, he insisted, ask for adjustment to Christian rituals – no alteration in the liturgical readings during Holy week for example - and the same would apply to any supposed Christian discomfort with Jewish liturgy or ritual.

 

Our goal, said Soloveitchki, is to pursue our path – the path of Halakhah, the Hebrew Bible as understood by the Rabbis, and if the cost of having any other religion or national grouping saying anything nice about us is giving up on one iota of our commitment to that path, that cost is too great to pay.

 

Soloveitchik only spoke of his concern to put an end to attempts to find middle ground in matters theological, but his impact went beyond this. It’s hard to find Orthodox rabbis, certainly mainstream orthodox Rabbis willing to do very much with members of other faiths, certainly in public, certainly away from the photo-opportunities that seem to boost the ego of participants more than fix the problems of a broken world.

 

On my other side is the recently retired leader of British Reform Judaism, Tony Bayfield who wrote of the importance of transcending the stilted and lonely interactions between Jew and Christian which results in Christians praising for Jews for our family life and chicken soup but holding back on articulating the conviction 'it's a pity you are missing out on the greatest truth of all.' While Jews grudgingly praise Christians for their 'cathedrals and self-sacrificing love' while holding back on sharing a belief that Christianity is all based on a mistake. Bayfield believes that both Christians and Jews have to moderate our respective truth claims and give up on hubristic faith claims that claim our beliefs are right while others are wrong. Bayfield claims that we will only be able to enter into genuine and respectful dialogue if we can moderate our truth claims.

 

I consider both positions half-right, though I’m closer to Soloveitchik. Like Soloveitchik I have no problem with Christians thinking I have it all wrong. As long as they don't mind my thinking that they are mistaken. I’m not prepared to sacrifice the creeds of my own faith, the parts of my own self – to become more attractive in the eyes of a sister faith whose creeds, ultimately, are not my own.

 

We live in a society where we are tempted to embrace syncretism, but syncretism is not attractive to me.

Too often it results in a sort of cherry picking of  superficially attractive elements stripped of their deeper calls on our souls and integrity.

 

But I don't accept Soloveitchik's claim that interaction and engagement risks jeopardising our own unique path. My experience of serious Christian-Jewish dialogue has been one that has sharpened my own sense of my own faith, it's forced me to find language to justify my beliefs and practice when faced by an 'other' who understands God and the quest for holiness and decency in ways close to, but ultimately other than, my own.

 

Like Bayfield I accept that much Christian/Jewish dialogue is bland, politeness transcending honesty, but I don't accept respectful dialogue demands transcending my own faith claims. Nor, frankly, do I worry about a surfeit of politesse in Jewish Christian encounters - it's only been a blink of an eye since the stakes - when Jew and Christian encountered one another - were far more deadly than being gently bored. A few centuries of gentle boredom between Jews and Christians would be no bad thing.

 

Moreover, and it’s probably my most significant point of – I hope respectful  - difference with Rabbi Bayfield, I don't accept that my Jewish belief that Jesus is not, as a religious fact, a singular son of God, is necessarily to show a lack of respect to the Church. Similarly, I would not expect a Christian to show respect for my own faith by abnegating their sense in my cardinal religious error.

 

I don’t believe that respect is predicated on the need to accept the view of the other. Rather, the reverse; a relationship predicated on the primary need to agree with one another demands politesse triumphs over honesty and that is where I consider a lack of respect. It’s a relationship where the end points of agreement are going to be determined by the fall of a lot – whose turn is it to be right this week – yesterday we ate Italian, tonight let’s do Chinese, yesterday we did Jesus, tonight let’s do Torah

 

Or, alternatively, an overriding commitment to come to agreement simply reflects the relative hierarchical standings of the debaters – I’m stronger than you so you agree with me, or vice versa.

 

Respect means agreeing to suffer the other views of the other person even if they cause one discomfort. That is certainly a Jewish position.

Debate and disagreement, the process of sharpening alternate views is integral to the Jewish faith –

Makhloket – even have the phrase, Mahloket l’shem shamayim – disagreement  for the sake of heaven - is at the centre of the Rabbinic endeavour. We understand ourselves in dispute.

 

One Rabbinic tale to illustrate.

Set in the time of the Apostles

When Reish Lakish, one half of the greatest Rabbinic double act of its time passes away, he leaves Rabbi Yohanan bereft. The Rabbis bring another Rabbi to the table who agrees with everything Rabbi Yohanan says, but this only increases the survivor's sense of despair at the death of his partner.

 

Clarity, refinement, honesty and integrity are forged in the pit of rigorous, principled, engagement.

Not dependent on agreement.

 

Judaism loves difference. The first Rabbinic text, traditionally taught to young children features two people arguing over who should own a found piece of cloth. ‘I found it and it’s all mine,’ they both claim. Talmudic study is principally the attempt to find ways for contradictory opinions to stand even in their opposition. For three years, the Talmud records, the Houses of two of the great Rabbis of the Ancient period, Hillel and Shammai disputed, eventually a Divine Voice is heard to proclaim ‘[both opinions] are the words of the living God.’ Perhaps tellingly, the substance of the disagreement is long forgotten. The point, surely, is that God’s perspective is so qualitatively beyond that of humans that points of difference visible from a human perspective melt away when viewed from the level of the cosmos itself. To claim that my finite human perspective is capable of understanding all the truth there is an act of appalling hubris.

 

In 2000 over 220 Jewish scholars published ‘Dabru Emet’ a  document on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. It noted, ‘The humanly irreconcilable differences between Jews and Christians will not be settled until God redeems the entire world as promised in Scripture.’ Indeed.

 

A last Rabbinic text. In the Mishnah, the foundational document of Rabbinic Judaism, at least 1800 years old, the Rabbis ask why God created all humanity from a single ‘Adam’ – a single first human. My favourite answer is that this was done to increase our wonderment at the glory of God. When a King of flesh and blood mints a coin, the Rabbi offer as a parable, every coin comes out looking the same, but when the King of Kings, the Holy Blessed One, made an original mint –Adam – every human comes out differently. This text justifies the appreciation of otherness in humanity; be that people with other skin colours, nationalities and even religions. We come closer to understanding the glory of God as we appreciate the differences between us and that demands our engagement with interfaith.

 

O That my Words Were Written Down - A Sermon to be shared at the Churches of St Mary's and St James, NW6 on Remembrance Sunday 2025

  

I’ve been reflecting on the reading from today’s service, the reading from the Hebrew Bible[1] –

‘O that my words were written down!
O that they were inscribed in a book!

מִי־יִתֵּ֣ן אֵ֭פוֹ וְיִכָּתְב֣וּן מִלָּ֑י

On a day like today, it reminds me of the last words of the great Jewish historian, Simon Dubnow, born in 1860. Dubnow was resident of the great Jewish community of Riga when the Nazis came - all but 150 of the 40,000 Jews of Riga were murdered by the Nazis. He was one of the first, old and infirm at the time, as he was being led away, he called out, “Write it down, write it down.”

If these atrocities were not known, if those in this country and our allies had not understood the threat the Nazis posed and the fate they felt my people deserved, I would not be here. The debt I feel to those who served, in the Second World War especially, is very personal.

My own family were already in London at the outbreak of the second world war. My grandfather, with his 'essential profession' and flat feet, spent his days, during the War as a kosher butcher managing ration allowances and his nights manning anti-aircraft guns on top of a blacked-out hotel on Park Avenue.

It's my wife’s grandfather who has my family’s best claim to war-time heroism.[2] Jack Eldridge Cowen's father, Max (pictured above with his son), came to these isles on a boat he thought destined for America. The captain pulled into port, the locals spoke English with an accent, and so he disembarked … in Dublin, where his son, Jack, trained as a Doctor. With the advent of the Blitz, Dr Cowen headed to London, serving first as a civilian Doctor and then as a commissioned officer, with the rank of Captain. He served in the North African campaign under Montgomery, saw action in the two El Alamein battles and was part of the invasion of Italy. The family story is that his chief concern was supplementing the inadequate rations provided for his company – very Jewish. That included, once they arrived in Europe, hunting for deer and raiding cellars filled with Chianti. Captain Dr Cowan’s war ended in 1944, when shrapnel hit his back as he pulled two injured soldiers to shelter while under fire at the Battle of Monte Cassino. He was mentioned in dispatches and awarded the Military Cross.

He never talked about his heroism. If pushed, he would admit a certain regret that King George was, by that time, too ill to present him with the medal personally. We only know the story because it was written down.

O that my words were written down! - מִי־יִתֵּ֣ן אֵ֭פוֹ וְיִכָּתְב֣וּן מִלָּ֑י

My wife’s grandfather’s tale, of course, is a tale about a sort of double immigration; from Eastern Europe to Ireland and from Ireland to this country. It’s the tale also of a sort of doubled religious integrated co-operation; a Jew who became a Doctor in Catholic Dublin, defended this Protestant nation and ended the war with shrapnel pockmarks on his back and a medal of valour on his chest. It’s a story – and there are millions and millions of them, from people of every religion and nationality and every skin tone and accent – of decency, the sense of obligation to serve a greater good and the kind of patriotism that knows no hatred of another human being because they look different, or sound different or pray differently

It's a tale of decency, obligation and patriotism that so many of those we remember today understood so clearly and gave their lives to uphold. It’s a tale that those we remember today, those who gave their lives to protect the decency, obligation and patriotism they understood so well would be horrified to see threatened by resurgent antisemitism, racism in all its forms, anti-immigrant scapegoating and the setting of one human against another for the sake of populist adulation.

We forget so quickly. We need to remember these tales

O that my words were written down! - מִי־יִתֵּ֣ן אֵ֭פוֹ וְיִכָּתְב֣וּן מִלָּ֑י

It’s an honour for me, as a Jewish member of this parish, to pay tribute in this church to those for whom Christianity played a vital role in their military service and especially to those for whom their Christianity played a vital role in their accepting the risk of the loss of their life to defend this country and, frankly, the Jewish people of the world, from Nazi genocidal attack. For every ounce of courage to stand in the face of evil drawn from Christian faith, I’m moved and inspired in my own faith. Thank you.

But I’m a rabbi – so I pray for your indulgence if I share a rabbinic articulation of what I think it really means to be proud to be British, what I think it really means to be a patriot, a human who understands their obligation to humanity and a person of decency, even accepting these things comes at a terrible cost, even if it comes at the cost of the loss of life.

In the midst of what we now heartbreakingly call World War I – back then, of course they called it the Great War, because who could conceive humanity would be stupid enough to ever again return to war – King George called for a “special day on intercession on behalf of the nation and empire in this time of war, and for thankful recognition of the devotion  … [of] the manhood and womanhood of the country” for Sunday 2^nd January 1916. The Jews went a day early. And on the Jewish Sabbath, 1^st January 1916, then Chief Rabbi of British Jewry, Joseph Hertz, whose local Synagogue, on Abbey Road, just up the road, is the Synagogue I now have the privilege to serve, gave this address.[3]

We, children of the age of science, cherishing the dream of universal peace, had come to think of the future story of humanity as one of unbroken triumphal progress. Then in one day a cataclysm engulfed civilization.  None could have foretold that civilized mankind would rush to savagery with such dreadful fervour.

Nobly have also the sons of Anglo-Jewry rallied round England in the hour of her need. And our Honour Record will be rendered longer and more luminous now that the large number of our brethren who are naturalized British subjects, or the children of naturalized subjects, have been admitted to the glorious privilege of fighting for their country. Millions have been made to feel what mankind steadily refuses to see in times of peace, that there are certain absolute values for the vindication of which no sacrifice, not even the life of our nearest and dearest, is too great.

With the victory of Great Britain [Rabbi Hertz continued], the heathen ideals - the worship of brute force will be shattered. It will be a chastened humanity that will emerge from the ruins that this War will leave behind it. Let us prayerfully resolve that the new order be a better order, rooted in righteousness, broad-based on the liberty of and reverence for each and every nationality, and culminating in a harmony of peoples.

Amen, may it be so.

It doesn’t always feel that way.

These are stories we still need to tell.

O that my words were written down! - מִי־יִתֵּ֣ן אֵ֭פוֹ וְיִכָּתְ-ב֣וּן מִלָּ֑י

These are the stories we need to tell,

in the desperate hope, in prayer, that someone, anyone, any of us, will listen and change,

in the desperate hope that we, as a society and a humankind will come to realise the true value of life, in all its plurality and difference,

that we, as a society and a humankind will come to realise the fragility of life and the terrible cost of unnecessary death,

that we, as a society and a humankind will come to realise something articulated so beautifully by a nineteenth Century Chasidic Rabbi called Nachman of Braslav,

Words with which I finish.

May all the inhabitants of the earth
recognize and know
this great truth:
that we have not come into this world
for strife and division
nor for hatred and rage, 
nor provocation and bloodshed.

We have come here only
to encounter You,
eternally blessed One.

We ask your compassion upon us;
raise up, by us, what is written:

I shall place peace upon the earth
and you shall lie down safe and undisturbed
and I shall banish evil beasts from the earth
and the sword shall not pass through your land.
but let justice come in waves like water
and righteousness flow like a river,
for the earth shall be full
of the knowledge of the Holy One
as the waters cover the sea.[4]

And let us say,

Amen

 

---

[1] Job 19:23

[2] https://www.quora.com/What-did-your-parent-or-grandparent-tell-you-about-what-it-was-like-to-be-in-World-War-II/answer/Michael-Mark-Ross?ch=10&share=fb71037d&srid=ndWL

[3] Taken from M. Saperstein’s Jewish Preaching in Times of War

[4] https://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/story/rabbi-nachmans-prayer-peace

On the Meaning of Friendship - a sermon on Lech Lecha

Right at the opening of this week’s reading God calls Abraham.

Get the sense that God has been looking for someone to be in a relationship with. Sense that been looking for a while.

God’s tried turning to Adam and Eve, and then Noah, sense that hasn’t worked, quite.

Now with Abraham it feels different, sense that it works.

What is the thing that God is looking for, and finds in the call to Abraham, that didn’t find, or didn’t work previously?

Wonder if God has the same problem many parents in the room might recognise?

God wants human beings to do exactly what God wants entirely through the act of free choice.

Feels familiar to me, as a father. I want my children who will do exactly what I think they should do, without me telling them twenty seven times, bribe them with treats or threatening to withdraw television. If that’s what God is after then I’m feeling delighted to be in such good company.

Or maybe it is a little more complicated than that. Maybe what I am really after isn’t exactly children to do precisely what I think they should be doing. Maybe it’s something more complex and, actually, much more interesting. And maybe, by thinking a little more deeply about what God is looking for in Abraham I can learn more about what this search is really about.

In the mind of the Rabbis long before there were humans on this earth God would hang out with Angels - and the wonderful thing about Angels, if you are God, is that Angels do whatever they are told. And so there’s God, surrounded by Angels who will do whatever God wishes. And it’s not quite enough. God wants more.

Naaseh Adam, says God, Let’s make a human, and - the Rabbis imagine - the Angels throw up their wings in horror. How can you do that, humans will lie, and cheat - what about us, aren’t we perfect enough for you? Apparently not - here we are.

Look at what happens a moment later. The first human is lonely, so God creates an Ezer Knegdo - a help against. That’s the relationship between Adam and Eve, the model for all paradisiacal love - help against. The model isn’t someone who simply does everything we wish - like some sci-fi avatar created only to embody our every wish. That isn’t the model. The model is someone who pushes back.

Or have a look at what goes on in any Yeshivah - any house of Jewish study. Yeshivot are full of Chavruta pairs - pairs of students arguing with and against one another trying to work out what a particular text does or does not mean. Truth comes from the encounter with others, it emerges out of argument. There’s a great story in the Talmud of a great Rabbi, Rabbi Yochanan, whose long-time Chavruta dies and the Rabbis find another person for him to study with. But the new Chavruta only finds ways to agree with the great Rabbi. And Rabbi Yochanan isn’t impressed. He wants a Chavruta with a bit of fight in ’em, someone to bounce ideas around with.

That word Chavruta - it’s as close as it could be to the Hebrew word for friend - Chaver, Chaverah. Friendship, real friendship, emerges from precisely this sort of vigorous exchange. Real friendship isn’t about a person telling you what they think and you just say, ‘Oh yes, you are so right.’ A person who only tells you how wonderful you are isn’t really a friend. They don’t help you grow. They don’t help you understand anything you don’t understand already. In fact maybe that’s the very point of friendship, the very point of a partner - an Ezer Knegdo, maybe that’s the very point of having children - the very point of life itself - to understand things that we don’t already know.

Maybe that’s exactly what God is looking for in Abraham.

It’s not the first time in the Torah that God has called on someone to do something. Just last week we read the story of God calling on Noah. God announces God is going to destroy the world, and calls on Noah to gather the animals and build an ark. And Noah gathers the animals and builds the ark. Sounds fine. But there is a wonderful criticism levelled against Noah by the great Chasidic master, the Kotzker Rebbe. The Kotzke accuses Noah of being a Tzaddik in pelts - a righteous person in a fur coat. There are, the Kotzker taught, two kinds of people who find themselves in a cold room, full of people. One puts on a fur coat - that’s the Tzaddik in pelts - the other lights a fire. Noah’s failure, in last week’s reading, was not lighting a fire for anyone else. He should have challenged the people, urged them to improve their ways. He could have challenged God not to destroy an entire world - imagine the destruction.

Abraham, of course, is the paradigm of the Tzaddik who doesn’t just pull on a fur coat when things get a little cold. We’ll read this story next week. God tells Abraham God is going to destroy Sodom and Gemorrah and Abraham pushes back. ‘Shall not the God of justice act justly?’ I debates, provokes, teases God into relenting. Perhaps he didn’t save the cities, but he tried. A true friend. A Chavruta, a partner - an Ezder Kenegdo. And ultimately the partner God is looking for.

The relationship between God and the descendants of Abraham is still going.

And the attitude is still going strong too.

Just one example, from much later in the Jewish journey. King David. The story in Second Samuel is that David is overseeing the ark of the God on its return to the Jerusalem and the ark slips on the wagon carrying it and is about to fall on the ground. Uzzah jumps forward to stop the ark falling, and God - affronted by someone touching the ark - smites Uzzah and kills him.

וַיִּֽחַר־אַ֚ף יְ-הֹוָה֙ בְּעֻזָּ֔ה וַיַּכֵּ֥הוּ שָׁ֛ם

And God was angry with Uzzah and smote him there

And how does David, the beloved of God, the one God chose to be King respond?

וַיִּ֣חַר לְדָוִ֔ד עַל֩ אֲשֶׁ֨ר פָּרַ֧ץ יְ-הֹוָ֛ה פֶּ֖רֶץ בְּעֻזָּ֑ה 

And David was angry with God’s striking, striking Uzzah!

And David refuses to take the ark back into Jerusalem until God calms down and stops smiting people for trying to help.

That’s Ezer Kenegdo, that Chavruta, that’s the thing God was looking for that God found in Abraham - but missed in Noah.

There’s a wonderful rabbinic teaching where the Rabbis pick up on the fact that God tells Abraham ‘walk before me’ - it’s as if, they say, God has asked Abraham to light the way for God - as if God needs Abraham to light up a path for God to find the way. I know - we don’t usually talk about God in these human terms - but this is the language of the Torah and the greatest of our sages. And it’s true. All of us need other people to light the path for us, to allow us to see things we cannot see, to allow us to experience that which we cannot experience if we surround ourselves with those who simply do precisely what we ask of them. Even God.

And this brings me back to my attempts to get my children to do their homework, or tidy their plates up after dinner, or all the rest of it. At a certain level I just want to be to be obeyed. I want everything I want done by everyone I come across, instantly and all the time. But that’s not really, deeply, the case. Really, deeply, I know I need to be challenged, disagreed with, objected to, criticised and ... and this is the really important piece - improved. And I can only be improved by reaching out to those who oppose me.

Sorry parents among you.

And I whisper this to the teens and the nearly teens, and even the younger kids who are here.

It might sound a lot, as if your parents only want you to do what they tell you to do, precisely as they tell you to do it. But that isn’t really the case.

What I want, what they want, is really someone to push against us. Stand up for what they feel is right, even if it’s different to what I say I want.

We are all looking for Chavruta, we are all looking for an Ezer Kenegdo. We are all looking for an Abraham.

Because as attractive as it sounds to live a life surrounded by everyone doing exactly what we want, instantly. It’s not what we need. It’s not even really what we will - quietly - admit that we need.

Shabbat Shalom