On Language - Its Uses and Abuses - Kol Nidrei

For the sin which we have committed before You with an utterance of the lips.

And for the sin which we have committed before You by impurity of speech.

For the sin which we have committed before You by foolish talk.

And for the sin which we have committed before You by scoffing.

For the sin which we have committed before You by speaking evil of another human being. 

And for the sin which we have committed before You by causeless hatred.

Val Kulam Elohai Slichot, Slach Lanu, Mochel Lanu, Kaper Lanu,

 

There is some ferocious language in the Torah reading from a couple of weeks ago – Parashat Ki Tavo

That is to say, there’s a little bit of lovely language – if you do good and follow God’s commands God will bless the fruit of your womb, the fruit of your soil and your basket and kneading bowl will be blessed and enemies will flee before you – which sounds nice.

 

But if you do not hearken to the voice of God, the Torah goes on to say; damned be your basket and kneading bowl, dammed be the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your soil. God will strike you with consumption, with fever, with dehydration, with blight, with jaundice. These things will pursue you until you are destroyed.

Which is less nice.

And in one of the most – no – the most brutal verse, I think, in the entire Torah, the famine that will sweep the nation, it is claimed, will be so severe that, even the tenderest among you will resort to the cannibalism of their own children.

Language, in Judaism, counts.

Language has what, in Hebrew, is called Mashmaut a concrete reality. Language has power.

So much so, that the very Hebrew word for a thing, an object, Davar, is the very same as the Hebrew word for a word, Davar.

So much so, that the mechanism of creation, in Judaism, is speech – And God said, “Let there be light, and there was light.”

 

There’s a remarkable coda to the awful verse in the Torah reading from a couple of weeks ago, buried in Josephus’ The Jewish War.

Josephus, once a Jewish General protecting the Jews from the Romans, wrote a thousand years after this verse in Deuteronomy comes to be. He writes about the Roman siege of the Temple in Jerusalem and he describes a famine so severe that the kneading bowls and the baskets are indeed damned, and even that there is a parent so desperate in their hunger, that they commit this unimaginable cannibalism of their own child, just as the Book of Deuteronomy prophesied.

In so many ways, there’s nothing that could possibly be said about something so awful, but, the thing I feel, reading Deuteronomy and Josephus and God help me, the news and everything else, is that the Russian play write, Anton Checkov’s, most famous rule is somehow at play.

"If in the first act [wrote Checkov] you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise, don't put it there."

Somehow it feels that the action of invoking in strident speech a loaded gun, even if it were only meant as to terrify, or persuade, or keep us far from mistake, it feels like that action has somehow presaged that gun going off.

Language has Mashmaut.

I wanted to talk about this since before the murder of Charlie Kirk on 10^th September, or the Unite the Kingdom rally in Central London on 13^th September. I’ve wanted to talk about this since before October 7^th as well as almost every day since. This stuff has been causing pain and fear for too long.

I wanted to talk about this in the context of my own in-tray, the sort of emails that come in, not so frequently, but too frequently, that cross a line between seeking to disagree with what I have to say – always welcome – and into a world of strident discourse that is designed not to engage, but instead disparage with a level of hatred and aggression that veers away from a disagreement and into the personal.

Here's a quick tour of the greatest hits of my own in-tray.

There was the time I thought an unknown number calling my phone might be a pastoral matter – I tend not to answer phone calls from numbers I don’t recognise. So, I answered, only to hear someone scream their accusations that I was responsible for the genocide of Palestinian babies.

Or the time, I wrote something about something – I can’t even remember, I don’t think it was particularly pointed at all – and someone, a Jew!, responded that they hoped I felt guilt for the responsibility for the murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim at the Jewish Museum in Washington. To be clear, Lischinsky and Milgrim were murdered with no justification and certainly not by me.

Or the time when I dropped a politically engaged member a note ensuring they knew that our local MP was coming to speak at New London in the run up to Rosh Hashanah.

And the member wrote back this way,

Thank you for mentioning the event with Rachel Blake MP next week. I must admit that my utter hatred of this horrific Labour government runs so deep within me that I have no interest in anything that a politician willing to hold the Labour whip has to offer.

It was the phrase, “utter hatred” that caught my attention. It made me think of the connection between Chekhov’s law about pistols on the wall and the language in Deuteronomy and Josephus and then Charlie Kirk and, I don’t know who even remembers Jo Cox at this point. It reminded me of Jo Cox of blessed memory. And Yitzhak Rabin of blessed memory – Oh, I really hope we haven’t forgotten about Yitzhak Rabin.

It has to stop.

All of it, from the left, from the right, from the so-called lovers of Israel and the so-called lovers of Palestine, from the supporters of Labour and the supporters of Reform and everyone.

It has to stop.

We have to stop using and valorising the sort of strident language that isolates, intimidates and belittles the very humanity of people who take views other than our own.

Even if the positions other people take seem to us obviously wrong, so obviously cruel and unjustifiable that it seems to us so obviously justifiable to use the most strident language we can, it has to stop.

Even if we find ourselves in a society where those who express themselves carefully are accused of being dull or uncharismatic, and those who use language to whip up emotions draw our attention, it has to stop.

We have to take back control of the language we use and the language we permit to exist before us as if language has Mashmaut – physical corporeal power – for indeed language has Mashmaut.

We need to start treating language as if, every time we use strident language, we hang something on the wall in Act One of a Chekhov play.

Here are the three problems with this sort of strident language.

The first is that the language we use has a life of its own once it leaves our lips. There’s a cute story about the Rabbi who wished to teach some poor kid who spoke ill about some other poor kid about the Jewish principle of Lashon HaRa, evil language. The Rabbi told the kid to find three down pillows, bring them to the top of a mountain and pound the pillows until the feathers flew away in the wind. The kid does as asked, looks at the Rabbi as if to say – “Is that it?” and the Rabbi tells the kid to go and find every feather and bring them back and return them to their pillowcases.

Language has a life of its own once it leaves our lips. It might be that my ideal audience can cope with my strident language. It might be that 99.9% of my audience are going to hear my strident language and realise that I mean no physical harm towards those I critique. It might be that only a person affected by mental illness or trauma could possibly understand my strident use of language as justifying physical harm. But that 99.9% is not enough. Not even close to being enough.

 

The second and third reasons to avoid strident language when speaking about those with whom we disagree are connected. They are that we are likely to be both wrong and make things worse, rather than better. I think it’s helpful to think about this in the context of Teshuvah. When it comes to my own failings and errors, I tend to think of myself as basically a decent and reasonable person whose errors, even the bad ones, are slips that deserve to be forgiven. But when I think of the failings and errors of those I disagree with, I tend to think of them as entirely corrupted by their failings. But the truth is that these other people think of themselves as reasonable people, too. I’ve met many, many people in my life who think of themselves as reasonable if occasionally errant – even if I think they are acting most unreasonably. I might even be one of them. I don’t know if I’ve ever met a true sociopath.  It’s both fair and sensible to treat those with whom we disagree as we would wish to be treated ourselves. No-one’s going to change when backed into a corner and belittled.

I’m not recommending we start hugging terrorists. I’m not recommending naivete, but if we want a society that is more cohesive, more kind, more generous of spirit, we have to stop the strident use of language to attack those with whom we have disagreements. We have to stop hanging pistols on the wall. We have to speak about, even the people who hurt us and who we disagree with, as if they are complex human beings with their own self-perceptions of reasonableness. It’s not going to help to keep pushing ‘them’ away from ‘us.’

 

I’m talking about a fundamental commitment not only to change the way we talk ourselves, but also in the way we treat the speech of others.

There’s an idea that goes around that the people who ‘speak well’ are the people who are capable of wrecking a sort of scorched earth demolition of their opponents. These are the clips that wander around our social media algorithms and inside our minds. These are the sorts of spokespeople we just wish we could have more of, on our own side, of course. And they speak so forcibly, how could they possibly not result in our case being considered absolutely correct? That doesn’t happen, of course. Those who disagree with us continue to disagree with us and often even more vociferously and painfully. We are going to have to relearn an approach to language that is careful, gentle and makes space for disagreement. We’re going to have to learn how to listen, to explore and test out our arguments in discussion.

Language is the greatest gift we possess as human beings. It’s the greatest responsibility. It’s capable of causing the greatest amount of damage.

It’s also the best tool we have if we want to mend, to bring compassion, to offer hope.

Here’s a resolution for us all – as we go through this day, and as we run through that list of speech-related sins we thump our chest to be freed from - use language as if it had Mashmaut – for indeed, it does.

And may this year come to us all in peace,

Chatimah Tovah

The Presence of Absence and the Absence of Presence - Yizkor 5786

I want to talk about a Kabbalistic term – Reshimu. It means impression or trace. The term is used in Lurianic Kabbalah to refer to the presence of God even after the Infinite presence of the Divine retreated from the world right at the very start of creation.

Creation begins, in the Lurianic imagination, with God retreating away, while leaving behind a Reshimu that can still, sometimes, be felt.

 

Over the summer, my family and I took a tour of the Mellach – the old Jewish quarter of Tetuán in Morocco. Jews used to make up a substantial part of the city. And while our delightful guide Mohammed assured us that, “in Morocco the Jew, the Muslim and the Spanish live together as brothers and sisters,” something was disquieting
about being advised to peer through the wire grills over the windows of the only Synagogue still standing, of the once 16 Synagogues in the Mellach, standing, that is, as a museum, not a centre for Jewish life. Not that we could go inside, the museum was closed for the summer.

There’s a beautiful blue ceramic tiled water fountain in the Mellach, inscribed with that verse from Isaiah, וּשְׁאַבְתֶּם-מַיִם בְּשָׂשׂוֹן, - and you shall carry water in joy. It’s beautiful, but no longer working and certainly no longer slaking the thirsts of Jews no longer living in the area.

And there is the Horno El-Mellah – the oven of the Jewish quarter – the place where the Jews of Tetuán would once take their Hamin –pots of stew – on a Friday afternoon to cook over Shabbat and be ready for lunch. There’s a heritage sign, explaining the oven's date of construction, but … no pots of Hamin.

The Jewish life we felt, and you could definitely feel something, was an impression – a Reishimu; a presence defined by its absence. It could be felt in the pit of the stomach, like an ache that was somehow familiar and in its pain somehow simultaneously comforting.

The thing that I was really looking out for, as we wandered down the streets of the Mellach, along streets named Rue Haifa or Avraham Ben Tata – were signs of Jewish life on doorposts. There are a few left, not actual Mezuzot, but hollows carved into doorframes – just above shoulder height – just at kissing height – where the Jewish inhabitants of Tetuán carved out a space in which to secrete the scrolls of the Shema, Uchtavtem al Mezuzot Beitecha. Apparently, that was the way you fixed Mezuzot in Tetuan in the early to mid-20th century – you carved out a space in which you placed the thing you cared about. And fifty/sixty years later, though the Jews are all gone, the empty space is still, sometimes, present.

I’ve seen these absent spaces on doorposts before, wandering through the Shetls and Ghettos haunted by once-Jewish communities in former Nazi Europe. There’s even a project – MiPolin’s Mezuzah From This Home, where Judaica artists Helena Czernek and Aleksander Prugar travel to the great centres of Jewish life, pre-Shoah, making plaster casts of the hollowed out once-places of Mezuzot on the doorposts of Lublin, Krakow and the like and making new Mezuzot from these casts of absence. The group of New Londoners who travelled with Angela Gluck to Poland this year bought one. Stood in the shop, Angela, I’m reliably informed, taught about the absence of presence and the presence of absence. Of course she did. Jewish life casting its own Reshimu.

That word – Reshimu – is based on an unusual Biblical root. It appears only once in the Bible, in the Book of Daniel, where an angel uses it to explain something inscribed - הָרָשׁוּם בִּכְתָב אֱמֶת –inscribed in a writing of truth. The commentaries suggest that Roshem is more powerful than the normal kind of writing – Katav; closer to the Hebrew word Chokek –literally to carve. You have to think like an ancient; to really intend to leave a record, in ancient times, you would carve away.[1]

For the Kabbalists, all presence, all creation is built from absence, lined with a Reshimu – an absence in which there can still be felt to be a presence.

 

I had a similar thought, about the absence of presence and presence of absence, around the bereavement that hit me personally the hardest this last year – the loss of our former Chazan of blessed memory, Stephen Cotsen. Stephen was a friend, a mentor, a partner and our Chazan and his passing in Nissan left me missing him and, even with the beauty of the Slichut we’ve been so blessed to have from Yoav and David last night, I still feel both his presence and his absence, especially today. I feel a kind of friendship still alive.  But there’s also a raw absence, a stomach pain that occasionally manifests as tears – another kind of Reshimu.

 

At Chazan Stephen’s funeral, we, as a community formed an escort – literally a Levaya - for him. As scores of his Bar Mitzvah students and wedding couples and congregants from Mill Hill or Cardiff or Brixton or Hackney emerged alongside friends old and new, I had this sharp sense that his life –  too short as it was – was Nirsham inscribed in the negative space delineated by all our presence, Nirsham as an absence held by our presence.

A bit like that image of Rubin’s vase – that sometimes looks like two human faces facing one another and sometimes looks like a vase. Edgar Rubin – the Danish psychologist behind that image was Jewish, by the way.

I’m not sure which, in this analogy, for a life that is past, but still present, is the vase and which are the faces, but at the funeral and the Shuva and since, there have been those of us standing round and remembering and talking about a life that has passed, and embodying in our own lives a shift because we knew Stephen and loved Stephen and were touched by Stephen and in that paradoxical moment, he – like so many of those we stand today and remember – is present in his absence.

That’s why we come here for Yizkor – לרשׁם בִּכְתָב אֱמֶת to inscribe again this negative space into our continued lives, to feel absent presence and to trace back the way in which we are changed – made better - by the lives we remember.

Up here today, on the day Chazan Stephen loved more than any other in our calendar. I feel Stephen’s expectation that I pay the closest attention to the page numbers and the congregational responses

wanting me to keep the sermon just a little shorter

wanting me do everything I can to ensure that all of us here today know that this Mesorah, this tradition of prayer, this way of standing before our Creator is powerful and our greatest gift and we do well to tend it carefully.

What are the urges each of our loved ones push up against us, in each of their absent presences?

I know we all feel similar versions of this Reshimu from the death-transcending lives we gather today to recall. Here is the model, the Yizkor services hold up. Now, what are we to do with the breath still granted us?

What was once present can be absent, but what is definitely absent can also be so very present as a feeling and as a challenge.

My point is that what is no longer physically present isn’t really absent, or at least isn’t just absent. Of course, it hurts to, no longer, have someone to hold, or someone to hold us. But the pain isn’t just bad. It’s the cost of love, it’s the Reshimu of having once been intertwined. Our wonderful member Louis is thankfully out of hospital. Louis – this one’s for you – like entangled electrons – we continue to experience presence in absence.

There are places to go to experience the souls of those who have left us on the other side of the curtain that separates the living and dead – you can go to a cemetery, or a Shtetl or to a Mellah, or to a favoured park bench. And there are times when the opacity of the harsh division between the living and the dead becomes translucent.

I don’t really know what happens at the end of time, or when we die. I don’t think any Jew would claim to. We just don’t go big on structuring exactly how which of us gets to be in which circle of heaven – or frankly hell. But I do believe in this;

There’s a time to strive forward in our own right and live with the future before us for as long as we are able. And there’s a time to reflect on the gnawing pains – the Reshimu in our gut – and feel the presence of the absence of those we have loved who now rest behind a veil, sometimes more and sometimes less translucent. For those of us fortunate to have ever been loved by someone now passed, that will be painful. But if we stop our running around and honour the call to come together in places like this, at times like this, we can, if we are lucky, still be blessed by a feeling of presence in that which is absence. And in that moment, our lives become greater than merely the length of our days on this planet.

May we all be so blessed.

May the memories of those we have loved and lost be always for a blessing.

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[1] There’s a similar idea in the opening of the Zohar, where creation begins with God carving out a carving in the light of the heavens – the Aramaic is גָּלִיף גְּלוּפֵי – sharing an etymology with the English word ‘glyph’ as in ‘hieroglyph’. 

Neilah - For This, Ships Are Built

A colleague of mine, Rabbi Paul Arberman, recently shared a sentence he heard from his mother: “A ship in harbor,” said Mrs Arberman, “is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for”.

I’ve been thinking about the phrase – originally attributed to John A. Shedd – in the context of these bruising times and in the context of this day of retreat, this time of Neilah. We’ve been in harbour. It’s time to set sail again soon.

It’s stormy outside.

 

Here, I think, is the goal – the very thing I would want out there on the seas. It’s based on a Mishnah and a teaching of Rabbi Sharon Brous from her book, The Amen Effect.

Mishnah Middot describes, largely, the size of the Temple. And having set out quite how large this building was, it says this.

כָּל הַנִּכְנָסִין לְהַר הַבַּיִת נִכְנָסִין דֶּרֶךְ יָמִין וּמַקִּיפִין וְיוֹצְאִין דֶּרֶךְ שְׂמֹאל,[1]

Everyone coming into the Temple area would come in and turn to the right, and walk around until they exited on the left.

חוּץ מִמִּי שֶׁאֵרְעוֹ דָבָר, שֶׁהוּא מַקִּיף לִשְׂמֹאל.

Apart from those to whom something awful had happened. They would walk around to the left, and the people who would pass these people going around to the left would say,

 מַה לְּךָ מַקִּיף לִשְׂמֹאל,

What has happened that you are going round to the left.

And the person going round to the left would respond, I’m in mourning.

And the person going round to the right would respond, May the One who dwells in this house comfort you.

הַשּׁוֹכֵן בַּבַּיִת הַזֶּה יְנַחֲמֶךָּ.

It’s an incredible idea, of an entire society that understands some people just can’t go around the same way as everyone else, of an entire society that is alert and asks - מַה לְּךָ מַקִּיף לִשְׂמֹאל,  - what has happened that you are going round to the left?

What an incredible society it would be, if you were to share the thing that causes pain with another human being, there would come a response that is compassionate, allows the pain, and just seeks to draw out some of the sting.

I know, I know, it feels a long, long way away.

I know, I know, it feels more often that no one is interested in our pain and that if we were ever to expose just a piece of our vulnerability, we would meet either incomprehension, or dumb silence, or worse, that awful ‘whataboutery’ or even cruelty.

Who among us is brave enough, when faced with the option to go round in the same direction as everyone else, to choose to go round in the opposite direction, along with all of those שֶׁאֵרְעוֹ דָבָר to whom something awful happened?

I’m not often that brave.

And who among us, even if we saw someone coming towards us, in the opposite direction, maybe even bearing a Kriah – a torn garment, or another mark of a torn soul – would trust ourselves to say the right thing, would feel confident saying anything?

I’m rarely that brave and, quite literally, this is my job.

I, like so many of us, fight against this urge to lurk in the habour where it is safe. But, as Mrs Arberman reminded her son, “that’s not what ships are built for”.

I want, as the Gates are closing, to give us a bit more confidence, a bit more hope, a bit more faith in being a ship on the open sea, in being a human who is prepared to encounter another human with compassion. Because I think this is what we are built for – meeting, encountering, sharing, caring.

 

My oboe-playing daughter was at a week-long music camp over the summer, and I traipsed off to Kent to watch the performance and pick her up at the end of the week. As we were leaving, my daughter, her oboe and I, kippah-on, one of the other parents came up to me, took my hand, looked me in the eyes and said, “Awful, I know, awful these things. I just wanted to say, I’m with you.” And then he slipped away to re-find his woodwind-playing child. These things happen a lot.

 

I was touched by something written by Sarah Tuttle-Singer, a Jerusalem-based writer. She wrote of a bunch of things she doesn’t trust – it’s not so easy to trust in what she calls a “post-truth, apocalyptic swirl of fake news, AI manipulations and narrishkeit” But there are, nonetheless, many things in which she does trust;

I trust [she wrote] the bus driver who slammed on the brakes and opened the doors when he saw me sprinting down the street.

I trust the greengrocer who explains why the mangoes are perfect this summer, and why the avocados are disappointing.

I trust the Old City merchant who told me not to buy floaty dresses from his stall, but to go instead to the wholesaler he uses, where they cost a third of the price. [I presume that’s an Arab old city merchant, she’s written plenty about meetings with Arabs in Jerusalem].

Trust is a spiritual practice, it takes … practice.

And Tuttle-Singer also wrote this

And I trust my children. Not because they are perfect, but because they are growing. Because they are learning to choose kindness, to discern, to stumble and get up again. Because they carry tomorrow inside them - and they’re stubbornly refusing to let go of the hope that can come with it.

I trust my own children.

Actually, I know a bunch of your children, the children of New London Synagogue. I trust them too. And not just our own children, there’s an entire generation out there worth trusting, because despite the Covid thing and the AI thing and everything else, they are growing, learning to choose kindness and stubbornly refusing to let go of hope. Our children are remarkable.

And I think it’s up to the rest of us, the supposed grown-ups, to more stubbornly refuse to let go of hope.

I think it’s up to the rest of us to try and be bolder on the stormy seas.

The story is told of the four Jews, of a certain age, who would meet every Thursday for a cup of late-morning coffee.

Oy, said the first

Oy vey, said the second

Oy veyz mir, said the third.

Listen, said the fourth, I thought we agreed not to talk about politics.

That’s not going to be good enough. That’s not what we are built for.

The story should be told about four Jews of a certain age who gathered for a late-morning coffee.

“Wow,” said the first, “did you see the way the autumnal sun glints through the yellowing leaves?”

“Just yesterday,” said the second, “I excused myself for accidentally bumping into a stranger and they responded, perfectly civilly. We had a momentary meeting of hearts over the contents of our shopping bags.”

 “Actually, I’m not doing so well,” shared the third. “I need to ask for your help,” and the conversation soared and the world, just a little piece of it, was mended.

On the occasions in my life when I have, in the language of the Mishnah from Middot, indeed turned to the left – allowed myself to be seen in need of care, I’ve always been surprised by the warmth that has greeted me. At the very least, turning left has always clarified for me who I should seek out as friends. And there are many, many I should be seeking out as friends.

The turning to the left, the admittance that I’m stumbling, the abstaining from grunting, ‘yeah fine’ when asked how I’m doing, has served less, in my life, to mark me out as someone to be avoided, and more, in my experience, as someone others have wished to know better.

My experience of fighting back the desire to remain in harbour and instead make myself available to meet strangers and strangeness and otherness and pain has not brought me to a place of depression or anxiety but rather given me a sense of the beauty that exists in humanity; a beauty that is available to us all – if we set sail from our harbour.

I know. Other experiences differ. I’m not recommending we present every stranger we pass with the fullest list of every ailment and woe we’ve experienced since childhood, on first meeting. But can we tweak the way go around in this world? Can we look out for the other brave ships with whom we share this sea, all of whom are all built for this purpose of seeking companionship, sharing kindness and building a world of decency? What a world we might build.

My mind goes to that extraordinary idea in Talmud Kiddushin (40b), and Rambam’s Hilchot Teshuvah (3:4), that the world, and all the people in it are like a set of weighing scales precariously balanced in equilibrium. And one act, one single gesture towards the direction in which we wish the world to follow, will tip not only our own self, but Col HaOlam Kulo – the whole wide world – towards the scale of merit, towards the scale of compassion, towards the scale of a better world for us all.

In a world so febrile and seeming to be so hostile, setting sail, being willing to bare weaknesses, to encounter – with compassion – the weaknesses of another is, surely, the greatest act of spiritual resistance.

There is a world out there, beyond this day of harbouring, in which the forces that do not make our world a better place, rely on our spiritual nervousness to argue there is nothing in this world stronger than hatred, or at the very least, as if we are all playing a zero-sum game where your benefit must mean my loss.

But the truth is, there is love in this world. There is that which we can trust and there is a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, and if we were only able to build this world together, what a wonderful world it would be.

May we sail well. May we love well. May we be bold and brave and compassionate and kind. And in doing so, may we build and bring just a little bit closer, the world in which we would all wish to live.

May it come to us all.

Chatimah Tovah

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[1] 2:2