A Prayer of Rebbe Nachman - Sermon for Rosh Hashanah

This is a prayer of Rebbe Nahman, adapted by Jules Harlow, first printed in a 1972 edition of the Rosh Hashanah prayerbook.

May we see the day when war and bloodshed cease, when a great peace will embrace the whole world.

Then nation will not threaten nation and mankind will not again know war.

For all who live on earth shall realise we have not come into being to hate or destroy. We have come into being to praise, to labour and to love.

Compassionate God, bless the leaders of all nations with the power of compassion.

Fulfill the promise conveyed in scripture: I will bring peace to the land and you shall lie down and no one shall terrify you.

I will rid the land of vicious beasts and it shall not be ravaged by way.

Let love and justice flow like a might stream. Let peace fill the earth and waters fill the sea.

And let us say Amen.

I’m on my third complete redraft of this sermon. The first was written when the concern at the heart of how I would address you all, my dear friends, today, was merely the border between Israel and Gaza, and the hostages, the raw memories of that day just under a year ago and the destruction that’s happened since. The second was written during the recent escalation on the borders between Israel and Lebanon. And yesterday I was writing again, in the aftermath of over 180 missiles being sent into Israel from Iran.

Like all of us, I’m reeling.

And on this day when we should be trying to act like angels, I’m feeling like a fool attempting to rush in. Having the temerity to say, really anything beyond ‘ow.’ Because everything every word – every line of our Machzor and every word I might share from his holy Bimah - feels both overloaded and oversimplified.

How awful it is that there are still over 100 hostages held in Gaza, held for an entire year, and this is only one, maybe not even the heaviest weight with which I enter this Rosh Hashanah Year.

How ridiculous it is that I, stood here in my diasporic splendour so far from the reach of Hamas tunnels and Hezbollah missiles, but also, let it be admitted so far from the devastation wrecked on Gaza and Lebanon, complain about how hard it is to write a sermon.

I want to make suggest two things, with humility and with the request for gentle hearing from you, my dear friends, the treasured members of this community.

The first is about responsibility.

Rosh Hashanah is a good day to talk about responsibility. We sing of the sins for which we are responsible - She’Anu Hayavim Lifnecha.

Rabbi Sharon Brous put the case for the responsibility for the 7^th October well, Hamas are she said recently a, “deranged enemy that manipulates a just cause, the need for a just future for the Palestinian people, into a perverse sadistic death cult that abducts and rapes and massacres innocents and then hides and executes in tunnels beneath day care centres.” And then there is that other clear responsibility in all this; the responsibility that emerges from the Supreme Leadership of Iran, a responsibility for building a nuclear threat and emboldening proxies and, in the last days, firing missiles. Bravo to those marshalling Israel’s air defenses and the allied countries of the civilized world who have stood up to affirm Israel’s right to defend itself.

The fact that Israel, even in the very first days after the attack, found herself blamed for provoking supposedly decent peace-loving people into a fit of murderous attack is more than stupidity. It reveals the ways some people who profess decency, strip from Israel, and Jews more generally, the same security and the same right to determination any group of humans deserves. You can spot a racist and you can spot an antisemite by how they allocate responsibility.

But allocating responsibility in one direction doesn’t mean other responsibilities don’t co-exist.

There’s a passage of Torah we read just a couple of weeks ago about the aftermath of murder in Biblical times. When there’s been a murder, the elders of the settlement local to the place where the body was found stand over the body and say this.

“Our hands did not shed this blood, nor were we witnesses to it, but, dear God, forgive us – the word is Kaper, as in Yom Kippur -  forgive us our responsibility. Do not let guilt of innocent blood remain in our midst.”

It’s a remarkable command – that we accept guilt and plea for forgiveness for a blood which our hands did not shed.

What exactly did the elders do so wrong? The Talmud tells us the people of the village closed their eyes to a stranger passing through, missed the opportunity to provide a safe escort. Other responsibilities still pertain, even having taken account of the responsibility of the murderer.

And the complex part of all of this is not in allocating clear, primary and appalling responsibility on the leadership of Hamas and Hizbollah and the Iranian Supreme Leadership. That piece is utterly straightforward. The complex part of all of this is that there are other responsibilities that fall on, for want of a better term, us.

She’Anu Chayavim Alehem.

For the sin of failing to keep safe the residents of the Gaza envelope and those happy hippy trippy ravers of the Nova Dance Festival, there is a weighty responsibility.

And then it gets harder, and as a Rabbi in the Diaspora I watch and read and care and feel tremendous pain and also feel a humility and a sense of trepidation and I hate it when inside I feel a call to criticize the State and its leaders. But I can’t get to today, understanding what I understand about why the Gaza envelope was left so little protected, and understanding what I understand about the prioritization of releasing the captives and understanding what I understand about the destruction wrecked on Gaza and feel there is nothing to be accountable for.

I’m no expert in military geo-strategy, I don’t understand how much responsibility vests precisely on whom, but I do know that none of these responsibilities disappears just because we hate the actions of Hamas so deeply.

There was an extraordinary lesson in the bearing responsibility provided by the President of the State of Israel, Itzhak Herzog just a few weeks ago. President Herzog, spoke at the funeral of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, one of the captives found murdered at the end of August. He said this;

“I stand here today as the President of the State of Israel, asking for your forgiveness, from you and Carmel and Eden and Alex and Almog and Ori and from all of your loved ones, I apologise on behalf of the State of Israel, because we failed to protect you in the terrible disaster of October 7^th and we failed to bring you home safely.”[1]

That’s a kind of Teshuvah, a bearing of responsibility that, I think, helps and mends and builds towards a different and a better tomorrow. I think it helps to think and talk about responsibilities – rather than a singular responsibility - even if it’s painful. To get to that place, the place, “where war and bloodshed cease, and a great peace will embrace the whole world,” we’ll need a level of honesty and acceptance of plural responsibilities. And, despite the way in which our world today threatens to welcome only simplicity, we each need to play our part in welcoming complexity even if it is painful.

 

I don’t have a single English word for the next thing. It’s got something to do with hope, with faith and with belief. The Hebrew word is Emunah, connected, of course to the Hebrew word, Amen. It’s the same etymology as a Hebrew word for pillars, Omnot – things you can lean on when you need something to prop you up.

At the heart of my belief lies the notion of the sacred nature of humanity. In religious terms, that we each contain Tzelem Elohim–the image of the Divine.

It’s the thing that makes what has happened to the hostages so horrendous. There’s a photo of a table outside one of the homes on Kibbutz Nir Oz of Eli and Yifar sitting alone at a table set for 6. Across from them are four empty chairs for Yarden, Shiri, Ariel and little Kfir. Yossi and Margit, Shiri's parents, were murdered on that terrible Saturday. Eli, Yarden’s father, and Yifat, Shiri's cousin, sit alone, waiting. Each one a distillation of divinity in human form. As we said on 9^th Av – Al Eleh Ani Bochiach – for this I weep.

And then comes the hard part – that I have to look for the Image of God, even in those who hate me. And that means, I think, two things.

One is I need to desperately careful with all life, even the life of my enemies, and certainly the life of those who have the misfortunate to be too adjacent to enemies. There is no doctrine of acceptable collateral damage in Judaism, just a dreadful warning that taking the life of an innocent person results in a blood cry that destroys an entire world - ק֚וֹל דְּמֵ֣י אָחִ֔יךָ צֹעֲקִ֥ים אֵלַ֖י. I know that makes it incredibly hard to defend a nation surrounded by enemies. So be it. It is indeed hard. There is no good easy option, not even when I or the ones I love are attacked or displaced or taken captive. There is no good easy option.

The second thing is; I need to treat, even my enemies with the desire to get to a place where our commonality – as fellow human beings – can be of power. I know we are not there today. But the prayer, in Rebbe Nachman’s language, is to get to the place where all who live realise we have not come into being to hate or destroy.

Here’s a verse from Exodus, and it’s worth reminding ourselves that the Bible is not wishy-washy, it can be brutal and tough, but here’s the verse in Exodus

כִּֽי־תִרְאֶ֞ה חֲמ֣וֹר שֹׂנַאֲךָ֗ רֹבֵץ֙ תַּ֣חַת מַשָּׂא֔וֹ וְחָדַלְתָּ֖ מֵעֲזֹ֣ב ל֑וֹ עָזֹ֥ב תַּעֲזֹ֖ב עִמּֽוֹ׃ 

When you see the donkey of your enemy fallen under its burden, and you are tempted to refrain from helping him, help him, help him.

It’s an amazing image, the Torah verse knows what is going through my mind as I see the beast of my enemy struggling, the Torah knows that I want to walk away and it pulls me back and forces me to assist.

So what is this? Is this a sort of wishy-washy Kumbaya empathy? You can find classic Rabbinic commentators who suggest the verse only applies when it’s a Jewish enemy’s donkey and the verse doesn’t apply to those non-Jews. But this is Rabeinu Bachya, the great Spanish Biblical commentator.

The promise contained in our verse is that if you assist your enemy with their falling donkey, they will eventually appreciate you and become אחיך, “your brother.” When you assist them, they will forget the “hatred” between you and only remember the bond of love that unites brothers. (on Deut 22.4)

 

I know it sounds so very, very far away. But Od Lo Avdah Tikvateinu – I still haven’t lost hope, certainly not on the day of Rosh Hashanah where hope and hope for something new and different is at the very heart of our prayers.

Again, I don’t make the claim this is easy, or even that I know how I would approach any of the complex geo-political military-strategic challenges that face those in positions more complex than being a congregational rabbi in London. But Steven Covey has to be right to suggest we need, always, keep the end in mind.

We must train ourselves to be more comfortable talking of plural responsibilities and we must sustain an Emunah and always be orientated towards the end we have in mind.

The end must be, it cannot be anything other than the great prayer of Rebbe Nachman

May we see the day when war and bloodshed cease, when a great peace will embrace the whole world.

Then nation will not threaten nation and mankind will not again know war.

Fulfill the promise conveyed in scripture: I will bring peace to the land and you shall lie down and no one shall terrify you.

Let love and justice flow like a might stream. Let peace fill the earth and waters fill the sea.

And let us say Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/02/world/video/israeli-president-herzog-apology-hersh-goldberg-polin-funeral-bts-nr-digvid

To See Others, To Change Others - A Sermon for Rosh Hashanah Day One 5784

Here’s a cute thing little kids do. They’ll cover their eyes and assume that just because they can’t see you, you can’t see them. “Peekabo.” For a tiny child, the idea that anyone else sees the world differently from the way they see the world is so absurd you can get peals of laughter from playing along.

Adorable isn’t it. From a small child.

My concern, my fear and the driving force of my sermon, on this most holy of days, is that not enough of us have grown far enough beyond this development stage. Not enough of us care deeply enough about nurturing and loving and committing ourselves to understand the different ways the not-me-s of the world see the world. We are all so stressed and tired and so in fear of this divisive and fractured society, that we think the only way forward is to muster every resource we can to protect the way we see the world right now. And while we think this helps - while at a certain level we think that if I can’t see you then you can’t see me – we do know, don’t we, that peekaboo doesn’t really work.

But, despite its obvious flaws, this pre-occupation with allowing into our awareness only our own way of seeing the world, is compelling.

Lee Ross, the recently deceased sociologist, studied and engaged in conflict negotiation in, among other realms, Israel-Palestine. Not once, he wrote, in forty years’ experience, did anyone arrive at a conflict resolution seminar he was running eager to learn how the other side saw the matter at hand. When we call for empathy or gentleness in society, what we tend to mean is, “I deserve more empathy than you –  you better treat me gently,” and we forget that thing Hillel once said, “That which is hateful for you, do not do to others.”

When it comes to the way we engage with the great political challenges of this day; in this country, in Israel, in the States, we are quick to write off that vast part of society that doesn’t hold the same views as me as either a bunch of out-of-touch liberal elites or racist bullies. We consider our own position one of careful nuance and compassion, and the positions of those with whom we disagree as blunt and wilfully cruel. We’re all so busy being concerned about being unfairly cancelled by those with whom we disagree, that we end up cancelling them first. That helps, of course, at a certain basic level. If we get our cancelling in first, then we really don’t need to pay any attention to the way they see the world.

Somewhere between Kant telling us that the self is categorically important, and the algorithms that sensationalise and fracture the information we let into our brains, we’ve convinced ourselves that our version of truth is the ultimate destination of all ethics, good behaviour and value. And, as an approach, that will guide us towards an ever more divisive, angry and nasty society, a society that, given a moment’s true and deeper consideration, none of us would wish to inhabit.

We know it’s better to try a different way from our most intimate social spaces, from our families. Just suppose that I vote Tory and my brother votes Labour, or vice versa, it’s not the point. We’re going to hang on in there, fighting not to demonise each other in our differences, disagreeing, sure, but not barricading ourselves in and them out, because it’s my brother.

This isn’t, for what it’s worth, a call to meekly accept every position of every person who disagrees with me as equally acceptable. I’m definitely in favour of some positions, and definitely opposed to others, and I’m up for debate and up for changing minds. But the question is, how do we engage with others when we want to make change and we don’t want to add to the fractured, nasty culture of what sometimes passes for debate in this country?

How do I try and get my brother to change his opinion – and full disclosure, I’m not sure I’ve ever successfully persuaded my brother of anything – I take time, share love, listen hard, ask honest and open questions. That’s the way to change the world, with love and humility, not with shouts and barricades.

I like psychologist John Walen’s image, “You can’t move a string by pushing it, you have to pull it.” When it comes to families, we know, I think, most of us, of the need to pull together. We know, I think, most of us, that pushing apart doesn’t get us to where we want to be. We just need to carry that attitude with us when we encounter everyone else.

So, how do we pull strings in, how can we engage compassionately and pro-actively with each other?

I’ve been hugely moved by the tale of Megan Phelps-Roper and David Abitol, a Jew she met via Twitter. Phelps-Roper grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church, you might have heard of them; a particularly nasty organisation committed to demonising those who have different theological understandings – and among the long list of people they demonise are Jews. In one of those 10-million-people-have-viewed-this-presentation Ted Talks, Phelps-Roper explains why she left Westboro.[1] She was on Twitter, busy demonising, when this Jew, David Abitol, the founder of the blog Jewlicious, started to take her seriously and engaging with her reasonably. He seems a remarkable person. And at one point, Abitol heads to meet with Megan in New Orleans in person. As Phelps-Roper retells the story;

after several months of heated but friendly arguments online, he came out to see me at a picket. He brought me a Middle Eastern dessert from Jerusalem, and I brought him kosher chocolate and held a "God hates Jews" sign. There was no confusion about our positions, but the line between friend and foe was becoming blurred. We'd started to see each other as human beings, and it changed the way we spoke to one another.

And eventually Phelps-Roper left Westboro, and the most important thing that shifted her was the humanity she found in David. She shares later in her Ted Talk

David, my "Jewlicious" friend from Twitter, invited me to spend time among a Jewish community in Los Angeles. We slept on couches in the home of a Hasidic rabbi and his wife and their four kids -- the same rabbi that I'd protested three years earlier with a sign that said, "Your rabbi is a whore." We spent long hours talking about theology and Judaism and life while we washed dishes in their kosher kitchen and chopped vegetables for dinner. I was astonished.

The thing that changed Phelps-Roper wasn’t the intellectual arguments, or the abuse directed at her, but the humanity of the human prepared to stand vulnerable before her.

It turns out the thing that changes other people is, to a great extent, the same thing as holds us together when we disagree with one another. If we treat other people, even people with whom we disagree as real human beings, not caricatures, if we hang on in there, even when conversations get difficult, if we pull in on the strings that bind us, rather than push away, we can achieve both. We can be part of a less divisive world and fight for the change we want to see in the world.

That’s a tall order, I know. I struggle with it too. But let me try and offer two gentle steps, as we set out in this new year to better ourselves and the society in which we find ourselves. Two steps that are, and forgive me, I’m a rabbi and it’s Rosh Hashanah, very Jewish.

The first is – stop digging; as in, if you are in a pit, stop digging. It’s monetised, you know, all those media groups who draw us in to watch one human being fighting another human being in a digital pit. They are making money, you know, off our inability to just say no. The real question is how do we allow ourselves to be shaped by our encounters with others? I send out a feedback form every year after Yom Kippur and every year I say something about God in my sermons and every year someone complains that they didn’t come to Shul on Rosh Hashanah to hear the Rabbi bang on about God. Sorry. But God is at the heart of this. Not the vindictive, bogus theology taught in places like the Westboro Church, but the kind of God we believe in here.

The kind of God we’ve spent this morning praying to; a God who is powerful at a level beyond human power, mysterious and unknowable beyond human knowledge, certainly, but, we believe merciful, slow to anger and willing to bear the weight of our transgressions if we can only find it in our hearts to change our ways. I’ll take that God above any of the social media influencers out there. It’s worth turning off the phones and re-centring our sense of what is important away from the bear pits that pass for debate, and towards El Rahum v’Hanun, a God of mercy and grace. It’s worth our prayers.

 

And the second is this - for a human being to change, we need to encounter other human beings. We need to be vulnerable human beings encountering other humans to change them, and ourselves. I think that’s part of why it’s worth being here, in a Synagogue, a Bet Kenesset – literally, a place for people to come together. There are different human beings here. Some older, some younger, some distracting because they pray too loudly, or chat too loudly, or snore too loudly.

But we need to be jostled up against different people with different levels of … well everything to grow and learn and heal. We’re a better community and a stronger community by being egalitarian, by having more members of colour, or of different sexualities or who are well … everything.

By the time we are done with the service today, I suspect we are all going to be too interested in lunch to want to have particularly deep conversations about the great matters of our time with our fellow Synagogue-attendees. We’re not even offering a proper Kiddush.

But we could take a moment now to look around this incredible room of incredible human beings, all of whom are created in the image of God, none of whom, despite the ways in which they might disagree with me, are worthy of being demonised or stereotyped or abnegated, all of whom, if I can just connect with them, human-to-human could teach me so much I could never understand just by myself.

We could take a second moment to embed that attitude into our heart, fixing this sense of the vital important of treating other people as valuable fellow wanderers, even if we disagree – perhaps most especially if we disagree.

And dare I request a third moment; to appreciate what it is to be part of a community, this special community, where there are so many different people to learn from?

With our prayers and with this remarkable assembly of human beings there might be everything we need to heal this world here, in this special space, on this special day. As Hillel said, that’s the very essence of the Torah, the rest is commentary, now go complete it.

May we go on to do just that, tomorrow, and beyond, and onwards into the year of sweetness, health and peace we wish for ourselves,

Shannah Tovah

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[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/megan_phelps_roper_i_grew_up_in_the_westboro_baptist_church_here_s_why_i_left/transcript?language=en

Accommodate the Environment - A Sermon for Second Day Rosh Hashanah 5784

The choice of subject was easy. I wanted to talk about the environment today, partly because it’s possibly the most significant area of our lives where we, as humanity, owe a responsibility to our Creator and our fellow human beings to change. And partly because it’s proving so difficult for us, as humanity, to make that change. We’re stuck.

There’s an old joke that feels less funny every time I hear it. A man is taking shelter in a storm. And an announcement comes over the radio that everyone should evacuate. But the man reflects that since he’s a decent person, God will take care of him. So he stays put.

And when the waters start to rise and a storm marshall comes, knocking door-to-door, telling everyone to evacuate, the man protests his decency, assures the marshall God will take care of him and stays put.

And when the waters rise higher, and the man escapes to the roof of his house, a helicopter comes whirring by, and the pilot, through the loudhailer, tells the man to hang onto a rope and be winched aboard, and the man protests his decency and refuses to leave.

And when the man drowns in the flood, he insists on a private meeting with God, “How, God, could you do this to as decent a man as myself.” And God responds, “Who do you think sent the marshal and the helicopter?”

I did warn you, it’s not as funny as it used to be.

I’m not going to do the facts, I think we all have enough of a sense of the facts.

The problem is the link between the input of the facts and the output of a transformed relationship with our natural environment.

I’ve been thinking about an idea attributed to the great Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget.

Piaget’s thought we deal with new destabilising knowledge in two ways; we assimilate and we accommodate. When we assimilate new knowledge, says Piaget, we add the incoming knowledge to the sense of the world we have in place without having to alter anything, without having to alter our schema.

The example of a dog will do. Let’s say, our parent shows us, as a child, a picture of a four-legged, furry creature and tells us that this is a dog – dog, got it. We go to the park, and there’s a four-legged, furry creature that, suddenly, barks. And we don’t know what to do with this new knowledge, but, hopefully, someone confirms to us that, despite our concerns, this is nonetheless a dog, and we assimilate into our schema of ‘dog’ that dogs bark.

But what if, having been shown a picture of a four-legged, furry dog, we go to the park and see a four-legged, furry creature that miaows. Again, we are going to be thrown a bit, but, hopefully, someone confirms to us that this is not a dog, but a cat. And we accommodate our schema, we create a new way of understanding that four-legged furry creatures that miaow are NOT dogs, but instead a cat.

So assimilation – there’s new information out there, and it momentarily destabilises us, but we assimilate that information into our existing schema, and we go on with our lives unchanged.

And accommodation – there’s new information out there and we are destabilised to the extent that we change our schema, and change our understanding of the world.

The issue, I think, with our relationship with the environment, is that we keep assimilating new pieces of information into our existing schema. And don’t accommodate our schema to change.

We encounter a bit of information that suggests our actions are destroying the planet and we will ourselves into a belief the science isn’t clear, or that it isn’t not going to affect us, or that we can’t do anything about it or any one of a litany of different emotional responses that allow us to carry on regardless, or with just enough of a response that we kid ourselves we have greenwashed over an ecological sin. Ahhh the human psyche.

I hope this helps, just naming and calling the difference between an assimilating response to destabilising information and an accommodating response. I hope it can help us accommodate, and change.

But I want to share three other ideas, religious ideas, Jewish ideas that, I hope, can help us accommodate to the environmental challenge, in this year to come.

The first has something to do with the way we treat eco-warriors, or doomsayers, or extinction rebellion protestors or … those sorts of people.

Prophets Are There to Help, But It’s a Tough Job – So Be Nice

When God tells Moses to stand before Pharoah, Moses doesn’t want to do it. He’s convinced no-one will believe him. When God tells Isaiah to instruct the Children of Israel to change their ways, Isaiah says, and this is the original Hebrew, Oy. When Jonah is told to prophecy destruction, he thinks he’s more likely to be killed than change the ways of the people of Nineveh.

I think many of the great, and not so great, ecological prophets of our time would absolutely understand how they felt.

But were it not for Moses, or Isaiah or Jonah …

I’m reminded of the Talmudic account of how Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai saved Judaism. The Jews of Jerusalem had barricaded themselves inside the city and the Biryoni, the Jewish leadership inside the city, threaten to kill anyone who even suggests negotiating with the Romans. It took Yochanan Ben Zakkai’s remarkable leadership to see that the path followed by the Biryoni was self-destructive, and it took bravery, even a foolhardy bravery to do something about it.

The prophetic voices are there, in our faith and beyond. They have warned us of exactly what has already happened and they are still warning us of what is to happen. We have to stop barricading ourselves in and shooting the messengers.

Responsibility over Rights

There’s a remarkable line in the Talmud that suggests that a person who doesn’t make a blessing before and after eating is a thief. It’s thieving from God, and blessing is how we seek permission. Because the food we eat, it’s not really ours, not even if we planted it, or paid for it with our earned wages. The same goes for, well, everything. The clothes we wear, the roof over our heads, even the very breath in our lungs. Consumption is not a right, but a responsibility, in Hebrew a Chovah, literally a debit. We are stewards of our possessions, there is only one Master in the Universe and we were placed on earth LOvdah UleShomrah – to serve and tend, not as a god ourselves.

Laws of Shabbat, sabbatical and on and on the list goes can be understood as an attempt to inculcate in us a sense, as it says in the Leviticus that gerim v’toshavim atem imadi – we are strangers and temporary dwellers on God’s property. It’s not ours, even if we are temporarily in possession.

We are not a better or a worse person because we have more, or less, of one thing or another, but we because of how we steward that temporarily in our hands. It’s a remarkably freeing idea. It should free us from the suffering Buddhists articulate so well – that our cravings for temporal material objects bring pain.

But it’s a salutary idea too. Freed of the notion that accumulation is important, we should find it easier to understand that many of the things we chase, we do not genuinely need, we could genuinely do without and, for sake of the planet, we must learn to do without. There are radical changes we need to make to our lives. And, of course, that will feel scary. But we, as a nation, as a species, we’ve made dramatic changes before. Once upon a time, smoking was a fine thing to do, drink driving was fine, human slavery was fine. We’ve changed before, we can change again. We can cut down on our use of petro-carbons, plastics, air miles, it’s not that hard.

I think that seeing the resources of the world as our responsibility, not our right, will help.

We Are the Weather

And finally this. Here are some of the most significant verses in our faith – they come from the second paragraph of the Shema, we recited them last night, and this morning. If you are good, it says in the book of Deuteronomy, “there will be rain in its season. You will gather in grain and wine and oil” But if you are not good, “God will shut up the skies so there will be no rain and the ground will not yield its produce and you will soon perish from the good land God is giving you.”

Or, later in the Book of Deuteronomy, just before Moses passes away, he repeats the idea. If you do well, God will “open for you the bounteous store of the heavens to bless you.” But if you do not do well, “God will strike you, scorching heat and drought; the skies above your head shall be copper and the earth under you, iron.”

Some 3,000 years ago, Moses suggested we are the weather. We are the reason it rains or doesn’t - or rains as and when it should, or floods and destroys when it shouldn’t. It is our doing and it is our fault.

And at one level, this Deuteronomistic way of thinking is so easy to disprove. It feels so obviously absurd when we know there are good people who suffer drought and wicked people who experience plenty. And for three thousand years theologians have argued and pontificated and struggled to explain these seemingly absurd verses.

And then along comes climate catastrophe.

And now, suddenly, this way of thinking about the environment feels obviously, transparently, true. If you cut down all the trees, and if you don’t take care of the ecosystems and if you don’t … and if you don’t … then you are the weather.

It turns out that the way to solve the absurdity of how to make sense of these verses was to think about the environment. Let greed and wanton consumption run unfettered through the planet for 250 years or so and we’ll absolutely get copper skies and iron earth. It will all come to pass, just as Moses always said it would.

Here's the good news.

If we are the weather as we turn the skies copper, we can be the weather in healing some of the scars we’ve inflicted. We know there are things that can work and maybe, maybe even whisper it, are already starting to work.

We are powerful, if we can unite and organise and, perhaps most especially, if we can be prepared to put up with inconveniences today so we don’t mess things up too badly tomorrow. I urge us to try.

We need to listen to the prophets. We need to recalibrate our relationship to stuff to make sure we treat consumption as a responsibility not a right, and we need to take seriously that we are the weather.

It's not that we don’t know what to do. It’s that we have allowed ourselves to assimilate the greatest challenge of our times into something that doesn’t require our attention. In this year to come, for all our sakes, and the sake of our human future on this planet, may we learn to do differently.

And may that bring us the year of sweetness and joy that we wish for ourselves.

Shannah Tovah

 

Building the Good Place - Rosh Hashanah 5780

You might have seen the TV show, The Good Place. It’s a sitcom set in the afterlife – I recommend it.

The premise of the show is that our heroes have died and, as good people in life, they wake up, in death, in The Good Place -  a place where everything is really very, very good. Actually, that’s not what the show is about at all, but the premise is good enough to get me thinking. What would The Good Place really be like? What makes a society ‘good’? What I want to do today is sketch out a rabbinic vision of a good place, I want to ask some questions about how we get from here, to there. And I want to suggest some answers.

Let’s start at the top – who should be in charge? As Jews we’ve a bunch of models to draw on. The Torah features God trying out a singular human – but neither Adam or Noah cope. The model of a family too frequently descends into fraternal bickering, if not fratricide. We have prophets, a hereditary priesthood and a monarchy. But the prophets are too unpopular and priests and Kings become corrupted. Eventually, Judaism settles on … rabbis. Now, don’t worry, I’m not planning world-domination myself. The real clue is in the last letter of the word – rabbis. All the greatest rabbinic leaders of the classical rabbinic period come in pairs; you get Hillel and Shammai, Rav and Shmuel, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Yishmael. And these pairs – or Zugim – argue. They argue about everything from Kashrut to theology to what it means to be kind and compassionate. Chavrtuta o Metuta the Rabbis teach – passionate argument or death. In our Good Place there will be passionate argument.

Here’s the other thing about Rabbis – their leadership isn’t purely dependent on what they know, rather they – we – are expected to be decent, ethical and compassionate. I mean, I know I mess up all over the place, but you can’t be a good rabbi and a bad person.

There’s a famous story about the renowned professor of ethics in some secular university, who was an utterly appalling person. And one day a student finally plucked up the courage to ask their teacher how it was possible for them to be such an expert on ethics and such a vile human being. ‘What’ the professor responds, ‘if I taught geometry, would you want me to be a triangle?’ It doesn’t work for teachers of religion.

On the other hand, here’s one of the greatest Rabbinic leaders, Maimonides;

Assur leadam lehiyot achzari - We are forbidden to be cruel, forbidden to be slow to forgive. Rather we should be gentle, willing and slow to anger. And when one who has sinned against us requests our forgiveness, we should forgive with a levav shalem – a full heart a willing spirit. And even if the person has distressed us greatly, or many times, don’t be vengeful, don’t bear a grudge.

Rabbis are supposed to listen hard to even those with whom they disagree and treat everyone with courtesy and dignity. In our Good Place, leaders – and we would need a plurality of leaders – would be wise, and decent and they would argue out the best way to run society.

It won’t just be the leaders arguing. My vision of a Good Place rejects the seductive appeal of mono-culture at every level. Certainly, a Jewish Good Place will have what the Bible calls gerim, outsiders, refugees, resident aliens – you can pick your contemporary term for the people who are different; probably less privileged, possibly less eloquent in our language, less sure of our customs. Loving the stranger is the most frequently repeated idea in the Bible not, I think, just because it’s a nice thing to do, but because Good Places value difference and diversity as a source of creativity and productivity.

And what kind of society would emerge from all this plurality and wisdom and decency?

Here are three laws which appear in a run of seven verses in the three-thousand-year-old book of Deuteronomy.[1]

1.       If you loan someone some money, and they pledge their millstone to secure the loan, and they default, you can’t take the mill-stone away from them ki nefesh hu choveil – it’s their life-blood – you take the millstone, they won’t be able to mill their flour and they will slide into destitution, and that can’t be good.

2.       If you loan them some money with a pledge to repay and they default, you don’t go into their house to take their pledge – you wait outside for them to bring it to you. It’s better to be sensitive to their sense of security in their own home.

3.       And if they pledged their coat – don’t take their coat overnight – they’ll need it to sleep in. If a person pledges a coat, it’s the only thing they’ve got.

There’s a vision of a Good Place in these ancient verses. I don’t suppose anyone here is reliant on a mill-stone today, and I know we’ve learnt a whole lot about astral physics and evolution and the rest of it in the last 3,000 years, but the values of our sacred texts, the checks and balances and the approach to a good place are, surely, exactly what we need in contemporary society. Is credit necessary for economic advancement? Of course it is. Do lenders and their capital need to be protected by the rule of law? Of course they do.

But not all the time, not to take all pledges from all debtors and not in any way creditors might deem suitable.

The vision of society that emerges, time and time again through the Bible and Talmud is a society that demonstrates compassion alongside a commitment to justice. I’ll take that balance of compassion and justice as a model for my Good Place

And then there will be Shabbat. We’ll have the chance, in our Good Place, for six days of the week, to get on, to make, to create, to seek for more and better. And then we’ll all pause, turn off the phones and the emails and turn our attention towards celebrating what we have. We’ll eat meals with friends and family. We’ll converse without the distractions of screens or headphones. Shabbat, in The Good Place, will help us realise that ‘better’ doesn’t always mean ‘more.’ That should help us find better ways to protect the environment in our Good Place. In my little thought experiment, basic rules of physics will still apply, as God said to first human beings as they guided around the Garden of Eden, “Look at my works! See how beautiful they are—how excellent! For your sake, I created them all. See to it that you do not spoil and destroy My world; for if you do, there will be no one else to repair it.”[2] That one will still apply, but we’ll be ready for it and we’ll take due care.

Well, that’s the vision. Do you like it? It could do with a tweak, here or there, I’m sure. But it would do, no? Creativity, decency, a space to celebrate the gift of our humanity?

Here’s the question. How far away are we? How impossible, how fairy-tale, how beyond the reach of possibility is this Good Place?

I mean, working out how we get the right kind of political leadership is a tricky one, but the really radical thing about this vision of a Good Place is how simple it is.

We could all get on with creating this Good Places even if without the political leadership problem entirely sorted – in fact it’s probably much better if don’t wait on the politicians – they seem to have their hands full for the time being. Certainly, those of us who lend, could lend with the sort of empathy and humanity that the Bible calls for. Many of you, I know, do exactly that. The rest of us can get on with, I don’t know; making sure that the blind aren’t confronted with stumbling blocks, or that if, even our enemy is stumbling we don’t gloat. We could get on with not coveting things that belong to others and we could all benefit from taking Shabbat more seriously and we don’t really need anyone’s permission to do that.

Two other verses from Deuteronomy;

It’s not in heavens that have to ask, who will go up to the heavens and bring it down for us. It’s not beyond the sea that you have to ask, who will cross the sea to bring it back for us.

We all have the possibility of creating better places, for ourselves, for our loved ones, for all of society. In fact, we had better get on with it sooner rather than later.

It will some gumption and well, there’s really no other words I can use, it will take religion and it will take faith.

Here’s the thing that puzzles me. If, I could get a bum-on-a-seat for every time someone told me this past year that they weren’t really into Judaism as a religion, this place would be rammed full. And I wold love to see this place rammed-full on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, but that’s not really the point. The point is, if you want to live in a Good Place, in a better place – where do you find the pointers towards the way that society will function? How do you puzzle your way towards making that vision a reality when your desires come up against the desires of others? How do you protect yourself and your society from the forces that will weaken us and strip our values from us. I’ve an answer – be more Jewish. Do more Jewish stuff, read more about Jewish stuff. Speak up and take more pride in the Jewish stuff. I’ve nothing against other religions, I’m sure other religions can help, and if you’ve another faith tradition that speaks more clearly to you – gei gezunte heit – go for it. But if you are here today, do more of this. Be prouder of this. If you find yourselves in environments where self-declared atheists or lapsed-Jews or any of the like are taking opportunities to explain how much smarter they are now they don’t do Judaism, raise the eyebrow. Ask how they intend to get to a Good Place, suggest that they could do with paying more attention to some very old, very holy and, frankly, very Good suggestions in the pages of the Good Book. Creating the Good Place will take religion. Do more religion.

And it will take faith. Faith is the thing that allows a person to do something they know is right even if the rest of the world thinks you are crazy. Faith is the thing the justifies the sorts of actions that we know are good, even if society doesn’t value their performance – things like being nice or charitable or gentle. These tend to be things society doesn’t seem set up to value, sometimes they are even things society seems ready to mock. But have faith. They will make the world a better place. We know that; we have faith in that. Faith is good. Faith doesn’t require us to use the ‘God word.’ It just requires us to believe there is justification for goodness, even if it’s not immediately apparent. We’ll need some faith to build this Good Place.

We are, quite remarkably blessed to have this heritage. It’s an astounding gift in a world that desperately needs our active, faithful and religious engagement, if it is to become a better place, let alone a Good Place.

Don’t give up on this journey.

It’s the best shot we have at turning this world into a Good Place

It could even come in this new year.

May it come to us all in health, peace and joy, Shannah Tovah

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[1] 24:6-13

[2] Midrash Kohelet Rabbah, 1 on Ecclesiastes 7:13

The Angel of Last Week and the View from Above The Stars - Rosh Hashanah 5780

Two moments from the vast Rabbinic canon, one taught by a son and one taught by his father.

Let me start with the son, Rabbi Yossi son of Rabbi Yehuda.

Rabbi Yossi taught a person has two angels who accompany them home from the Synagogue on a Friday night; one good, one wicked. And if the person gets home and the candles are lit and the table is laid and the bed is made, the good angel says to the bad angel, “May it be this way next week,” and, against their will, the wicked angel is forced to reply, “Amen.” But if this isn’t the case, then the wicked angel says, “may it be this way next Shabbat,” and against their will the good angel is forced to respond, “Amen.”[1]

And here’s the moment taught by Rabbi Yossi’s father, Rabbi Yehudah

It comes in a commentary on a verse in Genesis just before we began our Torah reading today. Abraham is old, childless and worried he will have no-one to take on the mantle of the promise God made to him.

(ה) וַיּוֹצֵ֨א אֹת֜וֹ הַח֗וּצָה וַיֹּ֙אמֶר֙ הַבֶּט־נָ֣א הַשָּׁמַ֗יְמָה וּסְפֹר֙ הַכּ֣וֹכָבִ֔ים אִם־תּוּכַ֖ל לִסְפֹּ֣ר אֹתָ֑ם וַיֹּ֣אמֶר ל֔וֹ כֹּ֥ה יִהְיֶ֖ה זַרְעֶֽךָ׃

And God took Abraham out of his tent and said to him – Habeit Nah Hshamayah – look at the heavens, count the stars – if you can count them, so shall you have offspring.

On this verse the Rabbi Yehudah, [2] points out that the word Habeit isn’t really the Hebrew word for looking up at stars, in the sense that you or I might look up at the stars. Habeit is the Hebrew word for looking down from a high place to a low place. [3] So, says Rabbi Yehudah, it must be that when God took Abraham out of the tent, God lifted Abraham lemala mikpat harakia – above the dome of the heavens- so Abraham could look down on the stars spread below him. Look down on these stars, Rabbi Yehudah imagines God telling Abraham – you are not to be controlled by these stars. Yes, I know, you are old and childless, and it seems to you that it is written in the stars that you shall have no children, but you look down on the stars. They don’t control you. You, Abraham, have a future no mazalot – no astrological destiny – can determine. The possibilities of your future, Abraham, expand before you with the fecundity of the stars in the heavens.

In my first story the past controls the future – as last week, so next week.

In my second story we are to be lifted above the present to look down on its puny attempt to control our tomorrows.

This isn’t, in case anyone is worried, a sermon about angels and miraculous interstellar space-travel.

It’s a sermon about you and me, our faith and this world in which we live.

Because we don’t need angels or miracles to help us understand these two stories – the one in which the past controls our tomorrow, and the one in which we rise above the present to futures unknown.

I recently had a conversation with a member who wanted to chat about the future of the Synagogue. They were worried about the women thing – they said they came to Synagogue to feel comfortable and they were comfortable with the roles for men and women they knew and loved from their childhood. And as much as they knew that women are capable and powerful in so many ways, they just felt distracted by seeing women and men sitting together or women leading services.

I have a sympathy for anyone who feels the same. I’ve also felt the same at some points in my own religious journey. I’m not interested in labelling the response good or wicked, but rather I’m interested in the way in which it’s a case of last week’s angel exerting power over tomorrow. ‘May it be this way next Shabbat’ says one angel and the other angel is forced to say ‘Amen.’

The only answer I can give to such a person is Heschel’s answer. Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the greatest rabbis of the last century, suggested that religion has to comfort us in our afflictions, and also afflict us in our comfort. We need to be held by the blessing of last week’s angel, but also we need to fly above the stars.

Ester Perel, the New Yok based therapist, once shared that we all need both the sense of being comforted by our surroundings, and the experience of change, provocation and challenge. And we are all continually modulating the way we embrace the new or surround ourselves with the known, as we go through our lives. Perel is a couples’ therapist. Her work is to help her clients balance their own desires for the same and their own desires for the different as they struggle to get on with each other. She would probably make an excellent congregational rabbi.

We are in a process of change, at New London. And we are all determined by the angels of last week, and we all wish for a tomorrow of possibility.

Here’s the process of change.

18 years ago today, while I was still a Rabbinic student, I led the first services at New London where women were called to read from the Torah. 15 years ago, the day before I got married, I celebrated my aufruf here in the first fully egalitarian service in our history – both those services took place next door, in the Hall. Twelve years ago, in my first week as your Rabbi, there was meeting to decide whether to make any changes in the services in this room – the meeting split 71-70.  Several years later there was a decision to allow certain Bar or Bat Mitzvah celebrations to take place in this space as egalitarian services. And then, several years after that, we went egalitarian on alternate weeks.

We are out of sync with that commitment to alternate egal services here today. We’ve been exclusively male led on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur ever since that decision. One of the things I was always going to say, today, is that the services in here next Rosh Hashanah will be egalitarian – with an option for mixed seating. But our most recent AGM and a more recent Council meeting have gone further, with my fullest support. We’ve announced an EGM that will vote on us becoming fully egalitarian every week of the year. That’s new.

This journey towards the new is a response to all kinds of issues; both Halachic and social, both rabbinically led and reflective of the mood of our members. The process has involved hearing the whisper of the angel of last week and saying instead of ‘Amen’, ‘No – we’re heading towards a different tomorrow.’ And for some it’s long overdue. And for some it’s deeply uncomfortable. And we all want to claim we are the afflicted person religion should be comforting rather than the comfortable person who should be afflicted.

And the strange thing about being the Rabbi of a community balancing the angel of last week and a trip beyond the stars in this way, is the relationship between these discussions in our own community and the discussions going on in the world out there.

One of the great problems in contemporary political life, Professor David Runciman said recently, is that we’ve forgotten how to lose. In the political realm, we’ve drawn our battle lines forcibly. We are so committed to winning our political arguments that we threaten the protections and balances that hold the space for our civil society. That can lead to the counter-indicative result of creating a more divisive and fractured society, even as we do win, and that’s bad for all of us.

I mean I care about Brexit, of course I do, but we’ll either leave soon, or later or never and more important than winning in one direction or another is the quality of the society we create together. And judged by that metric, we are all losing.

We have to get better at modulating our competing desires for continuing with the same or soaring above the past if we want to be able to get on. After all there is so much we agree upon. Even the most committed Remainer knows there are democratic deficits and inefficiencies in the EU. Even the most committed Brexiter knows the value of the freedoms membership of the EU ensures. Even the most committed egalitarian advocate knows the value of ensuring long-term members feel at home in a community they helped build. And even the most committed non-egalitarian advocate knows their attitude towards women in prayer is an outlier when compared to every other part of their lives.

Maybe we all need a good session with Ester Perel, the couples’ therapist who would help us, surely, find new possibilities hidden behind the high fences of our battle lines. We need to learn to lose better.

Let me lighten the tone.

Goldstein was driving erratically at two in the morning and was pulled over by the police. “And where are you headed at this time of the night?” the officer asked. “I am on my way to a lecture about the abuses of alcohol, its toxic impact on the human body, and the harmful effects of smoking.” The officer responded, “Really? And who exactly is giving that lecture at two o’clock in the morning?” To which Goldstein replied, “my spouse.”[4]

The point is that Goldstein is heading home. He, or she, knows they are going to lose any argument about their behaviour and they are accepting losing because they know there is something more important at stake. Goldstein has found there is something more important than being right – it’s being part of a unit that grows and protects. And if we are all to heal some of the fissures in a society where my desires will inevitably conflict with the desires of others, we are all going to have to learn to lose better. Or to put it a slightly different way, we need to learn how to find victories without winning arguments. This is a little counter-cultural. It might be that when we focus all our energies on winning arguments, we actually break the very things we are most keen to protect. And if we find creative ways to cede being on the winning side, we can find greater futures even as we lose arguments

It’s Rosh Hashanah, it’s a great time to be open to the possibilities of not having everything on our own terms. Rosh Hashanah is when we are judged not on whether we win or lose arguments, but on the quality of the relationships we maintain. Debate and disagreement is all well and holy and certainly very Jewish, but perhaps try this for a test of whether or not we have won at a debate or a disagreement – does our relationship with those with whom we disagree get stronger or weaker when we debate?

What would our world be like if we judged the quality of our disagreement by whether we emerged from the disagreement closer to those with whom we disagree, as opposed to whether we came up with the supposedly crushing bon mot?

It would be a better society, surely. And we would be better members of that society.

I opened this sermon with two apparently contradictory stories; one about the power of the angel of last week, and one about the possibility of tomorrow. But the two stories are told in the name of members of the same family; Rabbi Yehudah and his son, Rabbi Yossi. Both stories can exist at the same time in the same family. Both stories exist, at the same time in this community, in this society also. Actually, both stories exist within me simultaneously, and maybe you also.

Our internal peace, and the peace of the communities and societies in which we live will come only when we can watch these competing narratives in our own soul and treat them with compassion, the same compassion we should show those around us, in our family lives, in our religious communities and in our broader societies. We have so much more in common with one another than any win-or-lose argument should fracture. And the bright, generous future we wish for ourselves in all the worlds in which we live, can only come if we learn to find moments of conciliation and possibility that will strengthen us all.

May it come to us, in this year to come, in good, in health and in blessing,

Shannah Tovah

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[1] Shabbat 119b

[2] Bereishit Rabba 44:12

[3] Used to describe looking from a mountain down towards a valley I Kings 18:43, and the view of God looking down from the heavens Ps 33:13

[4] Based on a more gendered version of this joke I learned from Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove