What a Time

It’s dark – this is the longest Shabbat of the year - and then there’s Covid, wreaking havoc and spreading fear. We’ve taken the decision to move all services to streamed-only for the coming three weeks. It’s not an easy decision. There aren’t a lot of easy decisions around.

 

My mind has wandered to the magnificent opening verses of Ecclesiastes chapter 3.

 

There is a time to be born,  and a time to die;  a time to plant,  and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to seek and a time to lose, a time to keep and a time to throw away.

(I love that idea of a time to throw away)

 

The great message of Ecclesiastes is that the world doesn’t work out the way we think it should – this is the problem that prompts Ecclesiastes to consider existence Hevel – usually translated as “vanity.” A better translation would be “absurd.” We expect life to unfold in an ordered and gentle way, and it refuses to. That is the absurdity of it all – Havel HaHavelim HaKol Havel – the absurdity of absurdities. What is a person to do? Tread gently, Ecclesiastes counsels. “Know that you cannot know the way of the wind, or how bones grow in the womb and how much the more so you cannot know the work of God who doeth all things.” Don’t yield to despair, get out into the world, “Sow thy seed in the morning and in the evening withhold not thy hand for you not which shall prosper, whether this or that, or whether they shall both be alike for good.” And take the pleasures of beauty where you can find them, “The light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun. For if one lives many years, take pleasure in them.” Just don’t make the mistake of thinking that the world is a benign and ordered place.

 

But there is something else in, perhaps, the most famous verses in the book, that opening to Chapter 3 which remind us that there is “a time to hug, and a time to refrain from hugging,” (really – this book is the most remarkable guide to how to endure Covid). Ecclesiastes reminds us that is that there is nothing so wonderful that it will not become lost. And nothing so lost that it will not reveal the wonderful. Olga Tokarczuk’s stunning, newly translated, The Books of Jacob contains a remarkable play on the relationship between two almost identically spelt Hebrew words “blindness” – Eilem – and “world” – Olam. The impenetrability of the world is its very nature. Light, she reveals, is only visible next to shade. Beauty only means anything when we appreciate its fragility. Life, strength and courage are only revealed when it is dark.

 

I’m saddened not to be able to celebrate this dark Shabbat in person in this wonderful community. That time will come again soon. But in the meantime, please do consider joining us to greet the Shabbat at 6:30pm tonight, or celebrate it, at 10am on our stream www.newlondon.org.uk/digital. May our prayers herald an ever deeper and more powerful understanding of the light,

Pause - A Neilah Sermon

Tonight, as it begins to darken outside, I want to talk about pausing.

It’s a sermon that began, in my mind, as I made calls around the membership, back in the days when no-one went anywhere or did anything. I would ask people how they were doing. And far more than you would imagine, people would share “It’s not so bad.” They would admit it a little sheepishly, “Actually, I quite like it.”

As long as we had health – for ourselves and our loved ones – and of course health makes all the difference, member after member would share that as life became simpler they were finding joy. We had no choice, but to let go of a bunch of the things we used to spend our time chasing and chasing and it turned out OK.

Pausing isn’t the same as doing nothing, of course. It was Alain de Botton who said, “how did it happen that we started to consider gazing out of the window as a waste of time.”

And before we entirely lose that experience of a pause and head back into the year out there, I want to hold us on that limin – that doorpost. And explore some Jewish wisdom.

 

On Rosh Hashanah we began what the Torah calls a Sabbatical year – a Shmittah, a year of release. The Torah shares in five different places instructions for this year of pause, or release. Here are the key verses from the book of Leviticus;

And God spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai saying, ‘Speak to the Children of Israel and say to them, when you come into the land that I give you the land shall keep a Shabbat for the Lord. Six years you will sow your field and six years you will prune your vineyard and gather her produce. But the Seventh Year will be an ultimate Shabbat for the Lord.

Every seventh year we are told to let the land rest – and this is that year. Elsewhere the Torah tells us to welcome the stranger into our fields to eat of crops growing there of their own will, during the Shmittah, or to release debtors from their debts. It’s a vision of a world of mutual support and hospitality, a vision of a world where we are told to pay more attention to treating other people than treating ourselves. I don’t know how many of us here tonight even knew.

In five different places in the Torah, we’re imposed upon to pay attention to a rhythm in time we might not feel or understand as necessary. And at centre of this Mitzvah of Shmittah is a direction to pay attention to the world in which we live, and our true place in it.

It is, of course so easy to take this world for granted, despite the destruction we wreck upon it.

I felt something of this traipsing round the Heath, in those months of lockdown when the Heath was so important to our sense of humanity. On Shabbat afternoon walks, my family and I joined tens of thousands striding over London’s green and pleasant lands, turning narrow dirt pathways into vast swathes of mud. Week by week the mud deepened and the grass retreated. I mean Covid simultaneously heightened my appreciation of nature and at the very same time forced me to pay attention to how easily I damage even ecosystems that seem robust.

It takes an imposition into our sense of normal to allow us to see what was there all along, but somehow invisible when we were un-imposed upon.

It's only by stopping that you notice things. It’s the gift of that dratted Covid again.

But it’s also the gift of our faith. It’s the gift of Yom Kippur.

The thirteenth century Rabbi ,Yonah HaGerondi called Teshuvah, repentance, a Mikdash – a sanctuary. That’s the very same name we use to refer to this room, this space. Teshuvah is the act of a spiritual pause, taking a retreat from action and finding, in our repose, reflections and understandings that don’t come when we are on the go.

The twentieth century Rabbi, Yosef Soloveitchik talked about the experience of being in this Mikdash of Teshuvah as if it were Mikdash of the ancient Temple, and to access the very Holy of Holies itself – it was as if there were a curtain you had to pull aside, to step trepidatiously into before the Ark of the covenant itself, containing the tablets of God’s will for humanity. Can we imagine ourselves into such a place? What might we find there in terms of understanding better who we are, and who we are meant to be.

If we can imagine ourselves into such a holy encounter with our souls, surely, it’s only because of our pause, until this point in the day.

Then there is the Shabbat itself, a time where the pathway from the hectic all-consuming nature of the world out there to an experience of peace which values who we are not what we achieve is, I hope, familiar. As the sun sets, we prepare, we light candles, sanctify the day, open our homes and take a moment to express gratitude. There are rituals to assist us entering this place of pause and repose that are beautiful and ancient, and beautiful and our own. But I’m less sure how many of us make this time, religiously – as it were, every week, to create that distinction between all-on-business and a moment of pause, the moment of sweetness in all this, the moment that allows for the future to be different and better. It’s worth it.

I know for so many of us Covid presented a forced guilty delight in a more quiet world. But that was Covid, forcing us to stop. Can we take ownership of that delight for ourselves when the obligating power is our own ability to recognize the value of pausing, when all we have are our own decisions about when not to go shopping, or into the office?

Or maybe that’s not quite right – that it’s only us capable of making the decision to pause. We have a faith tradition, thousands of years of wisdom, somehow bound into the divine will. Mitzvot – the commanding voice of God. And we have community. Us. We’re here every week – 6:30 on Friday, come and join us. Lean into the rhythms of Jewish life and we’ll do the pausing thing together.

In so many ways the improvements to our lives that we wish for are releases – a willed decision to stop doing something we drift into without really understanding what could happen if we were really to let go of the damaging behaviours of our lives. Certainly, in terms of our relationship with the planet a pause, a commitment to under-consume, to decline to consume is desperately necessary.

I’m not hungering to ‘go back to normal.’ I mean I don’t think you can ever go backwards in life, but more than that, as we stand in these lengthening shadows I’m thinking about what I’ve learnt from my Covid Shmittah that I can use in this new Hebrew year of Shmittah and a big piece of that is thinking through what I can release.

Will you join me in leaning into this pausing thing, now it is handed over to us?

My friend and colleague Rabbi Josh Feigelson recently wrote,

I invite you to consider for yourself, how we might slow down, be more present, and in the process uncover/recover our awareness of the Divine presence within and between and among us. By acts of omission and commission, mindlessly and willfully, we have, collectively, sped up and distanced ourselves so much from the world and one another. In the process, we have dehumanized ourselves and each other. We have closed ourselves off to the Divine presence.

Amen.

There’s a few minutes left, in this Yom Kippur day in this year of Jewish Shmittah, at the end of this Covid imposed sabbatical. It’s a good time to pick something to let go of in this year to come. It doesn’t have to be about the world in which we live – though the world could do with a break.

It's my request, and my invitation – what can you attempt to release – this year, or once a week?

And in doing so, may we all come to the gifts of freedom and insight and delight we wish,

Chatimah Tovah, and may we all be sealed in the book of life for a sweet year to come,

Shannah Tovah

The Spirituality of Zoom

I’ve always loved the Priestly Blessing. As a child, I would run through the crowds of Rosh Hashanah and dive under my dad’s Tallis and peek out at the hooded figures on the Bimah. As a Rabbinic student I learnt the reason – so we would not be distracted by facial imperfection of those we gazed at. That reasoning made sense to me. Back in those ‘usual’ times. Before all this.

Nowadays, of course, we daven on Zoom, and the only thing to see is … the imperfection of faces. Actually, it’s not all bad. “I love it like this,” one regular shared, “I love seeing people’s faces when we daven together.”

The French philosopher-Talmudist, Emmanuel Levinas (d. 1995) devoted his career to the significance of encountering the face of others. He would have loved Zoom. For Levinas, the face of the other is the beginning of all ethics. Seeing another face, wrote Levinas, makes us doubt our own supremacy over the world. We see, in other faces, fragility and mortality and we are moved.

On Zoom, I see the face of a member who wasn’t allowed to attend the funeral of their father who died from COVID. He’s been coming every day to say Kaddish. There’s another member who is at home alone, for whom we’ve provided a tablet and WiFi connection. She’s here for a sense of community. Was that a yawn I saw on the third screen in from the right, fourth row down? On Zoom we are all imperfect together, sharing and staring at the imperfection of perfect human creation.

The Chassidic master, Naftali Tzvi Horowitz (d. 1827), prefigured Levinas in a teaching on revelation (Zera Kodesh, Shavuot p.40). He begins with a tradition of his teacher, Menachem Mendel of Rimanov – that the sound of revelation on Sinai was the sound of the first letter of the first of the Ten Commandments. That’s so good it’s funny – the first letter of the Ten Commandments is an Aleph, a silent letter. Horowitz goes on to suggest that Moses, therefore, experienced revelation not as a sound at all, but a vision; the vision of God’s face. After all, God does speak to Moses, ‘face to face.’ And the Divine face is that Aleph, with the constituent strokes of the Hebrew letter making up a nose and two eyes. Indeed, all be-faced humanity, carries the imprimatur of God on our face. This is the meaning of our creation in the image of the Divine. We carry godliness in our face, in our beauty, in our imperfection, and most of all in the beauty of our imperfection.

Sometimes, when I’m davening on Zoom, I gaze out at these faces, gazing at me; each of us in our little Zoom boxes. And it does feel I’m gazing at the image of God. It’s bloody awful, this lockdown existence. But it’s not all bad.

Dedicated to the New London Synagogue Zoom Shacharit Minyanaires

On the 75th Anniversary of VE Day

I’ve been spending a lot of time, recently, on the phone to our older members. “What memories do you have of VE day?” I asked a sprightly (and doing quite nicely in splendid isolation) nonagenarian in the Shul.

“Oh it was great,” he replied, “we did all sorts of things you’re not allowed to do today.” I didn’t press the matter. I mean there are all sorts of things that aren’t allowed today.

Another shared, “I went to Trafalgar Square, by myself, I was only 14. I remember a lot of people and getting crushed in the crowd.” Ahh crowds.

Other members were celebrating, “But only in Hendon, my father wouldn’t let me leave Hendon for the celebration.”

“We were on a boat,” shared another member. She and her family had spent the war in Canada, and her mother, homesick and desperate to return, arranged berths on a cargo ship leaving North America on 30th April I a convoy, surrounded by smaller Canadian ships. “On the morning of 8th May, I remember all these little ships hooting and hooting. And then they all headed back home. At that point our rudder broke. The journey should have taken 10 days, we were at sea for a month.”

And other members weren’t really celebrating at all. One of our oldest members spent VE day on a military engineering course. For him, VE Day marked only the end of the war in one theatre. He was off to Benghazi, the North African front, after this ‘great day’ passed. Others, also, were not celebrating - at this point, no longer quite sure why. Was it exhaustion from the conflict or the sense the war was not yet over? "Perhaps the latter," one said.

The line, in my mind, was Churchill’s, from November 1942, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

The symbol of this time is the rainbow. We are waiting for the good news that we can come out of our claustrophobic arks, and back into the world we miss. But this epidemic isn’t going to end with a rainbow. There may come a little loosening of restrictions, heavily laden with counter-warnings. There will still, rightly, be much nervousness and tentative baby-steps, even after we are allowed out.

Our emergence from this time of darkness – when and as it will come - will not come like Noah and his sons emerging into a new world. Instead, it will come like VE Day for those who knew that the war was not yet won. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pause to acknowledge the heroic steps forward as they are taken. That was the best reason to head for Trafalgar Sq 75 years ago, and to celebrate this anniversary today. Indeeed pausing to celebrate the moments of joy as they come is perhaps the single best way to make it through this time - day by day - keeping our attention on the present. The sun is shining today. That's a good place to start.

In contrast to the utter horrors of the Holocaust and the Second World War, this lockdown is strange, rather than atrocious, even for those of us who have suffered, and I know many have and others will.

But for the mere gift of our survival, as a Jewish community on the other side of the Holocaust, I am deeply grateful and in awe of the courage and sacrifices of those who fought on the side of the Allies, on the European Front and further abroad. Their heroism inspires me today, as it inspires all of us. It is good to be alive. It is good to live in a democracy that despite its faults, values all human life. It is a blessing to be able to celebrate 75 years since the end of that awful tyranny. May we never again know its like.