BRCA - Bracha - Reflections on Breast Cancer

In a few moments, we’ll begin our Yizkor service, and I know that many of us who are here today have memories of beloved relatives so close to our hearts and minds at this time. But I want to take this time to talk, not about those who are no longer with us, but us, who are here, and our relationship with our own mortality. Specifically, I want to talk about breast cancer.

I have a remote, but still nasty, relationship with breast cancer; in my life, my work, and my faith.

I never met my mother-in-law. She would have been 70 this year, but died of the disease before I met her.

A BRCA1 mutation - the single most significant important predictor of breast cancer - wanders through my wife’s extended family. As, of course, it wanders through other families in this special community, and others.

Thinking about this sermon, I’ve spoken with several BRCA mutation carriers, I’ve heard them called previvors – I like that term. I’ve spoken to cancer survivors and previvors who’ve chosen to remove breast and ovarian tissue, women who’ve chosen to remove breast tissue, but not ovaries, and ovaries, but not breasts.  I’ve spoken to a previvor who had a ‘bye-bye-boobs’ party featuring pink-frosted cupcakes with nipples. And I’m sharing this sermon in honour of all these remarkable women – and men – who’ve fought the cruel irony – that the ovaries and the breast – the source of human life - can become lethal if a microscopic chain of amino-acids don’t behave the way they should.

Let me back-track. Somewhere in our vast genome – on the long arm of chromosome 17 – we carry a gene that regulates the repair of broken threads of DNA. It’s called BRCA1. And there’s another gene on Chromosome 13 – BRCA2 – that does much the same thing. And if these BRCA genes are doing what they should do, broken threads of DNA get repaired perfectly. But certain kinds of mutations in these genes can result in mis-repairs and these mis-repairs, can result in tumours, tumours in breast tissue  -for both women and men - and ovarian tissue especially.

And then there is this; certain BRCA mutations have a particularly high incidence among Ashkenazi Jews. In the general population 1 in 400 people carry one of the over 60 different kinds of BRCA mutations that have been charted. Among Ashkenazi Jews, 1 in 40 of us carry one of three BRCA mutations, all of which are dangerous.

Earlier this year I was flown to Brazil to officiate at a wedding of two of our members here – perk of the job. At the reception I was talking to one of the guests, Renee, who told me she carried a BRCA mutation and had not only taken some serious decisions about how to respond herself, but she had also set up an organisation in Brazil to support Jews getting screened and giving support.[1]

Renee told me that until she set up her organisation there was very little information available in Portuguese and very little support available in Brazil. I told her there was a terrific organisation doing similar work in this country – Jnetics. I’m a fan. There’s some information on their work in the foyer. Their founder is the daughter of long-term members here.

And then Renee told me the thing has been gnawing at my mind ever since, ‘JNetics,’ she said, ‘nice name, I called my organisation Brachah’ It was late in the evening, the music was playing, she had great English, but a heavy Portuguese accent and I had to ask her to say it again, ‘Brachah – like BRCA. They sound the same’

And this is the thing I’ve been thinking about, ever since – where, in all the nastiness, pain, and sheer mortal threat of breast and ovarian cancer – does a person find Brachah – blessing?

The thing about Renee, and many of the women I’ve spoken to, who have responded to news that they carry a BRCA mutation by choosing to undergo surgery and the like is that, when they talk about their lot, they tend to use words like ‘blessing,’ and ‘being grateful’ more often than you would imagine.

The keyword, for so many of these women, is agency – the ability to exercise control over that which threatens to control you. Susan Sontag, who had just been diagnosed with cancer herself, wrote in 1978 about the way we talk, or at least talked, about cancer.  Cancer, she wrote, was depicted as “an evil, invincible predator, not just a disease.”[2] Cancer was seen as an automatic death-sentence which could be delayed, perhaps, but no more than that. Cancer, back then, seemed to enable no decisions, no agency. That is, if one even knew what was going on. Sontag records a conversation with a French oncologist who told her that a fewer than a tenth of his patients even knew they had the disease, it was considered too distressing to tell anyone who was not ‘exceptionally mature.’

And now comes, among so much extraordinary scientific and medical progress, the discovery of these BRCA mutations and a world of questions and decisions that are, I know they are, scary and complex and we would wish nothing more than not to have to face them. But cancer is not invincible, it’s not even inevitable, not even for previvors who carry BRCA mutations.

Nowadays, previvors step into a world of percentages; the likelihood of contracting this cancer, or that, before or after this age; the degree risk can be reduced by electing to have prophylactic surgery – the counsellors you need to see before you can go under the scalpel don’t call it preventative surgery because, like so much else in this murky uneasy world, not even surgery comes with a guarantee. It’s knowledge, but it’s not certain. The cancer previvor and the cancer survivor inhabit a world between thinking they can live forever and feeling they are the inevitable victims of Sontag’s ‘invincible predator.’

Perhaps, seen like this, these previvors aren’t so different from the rest of us, those of us with perfectly functioning BRCA genes, but nonetheless destined otherwise to mortality. Perhaps you, or I, carry a genetic marker that predisposes us to one illness or another, by some percentage or another, or perhaps we don’t carry a marker, it’s just that mortality will visit us for some other reason. Maybe the thing that will get us is spectacularly unlikely, but even the tiniest of percentages will manifest somewhere, on someone.

As science does that thing that science does, we will find out more and more about our predispositions to mortality in its different forms. And we will be given more choice about how to balance the desire to live in ignorance of what is coming, and the desire to know – to manage our choices.

Back in the late 1970s, Sontag wrote that we are born with dual citizenship; membership of a kingdom of the well and a kingdom of the sick. We all wish to use only the passport of the kingdom of the well, she wrote, but ‘sooner or later we have to identify as citizens of that other place.’ But surely, we are all in the same kingdom, the kingdom of life which is both astounding and glorious, and fragile and mortal. We are all sliding up and down a scale of confidence in our strength and awareness of our fragility.

And we are all juggling bits and pieces of knowledge as we slide up and down the scale. Sometimes the knowledge comes delivered by a professional genetic counsellor who’s looked into the very depths of our chromosomes and can give us statistics backed up by peer-reviewed research. And sometimes the knowledge is chaotic and second-hand and quite possibly nonsense. What’s that about turmeric, and is red-wine good or bad for you this week? It’s hard enough just avoiding the things we know are bad for us when there are so many more complexities being revealed by science.

Well, here’s the bad news for anyone who finds this mass of options and knowledge and confusion frustrating or intolerably morbid; the future is going to present us with more of this; more complex knowledge, less certainty, more uneasy squirming in the face of increasing understanding of exactly how you or I are most likely to die. We would do well to be ready for this brave new world – more ready than we are.

Let me share three lessons I’ve learnt from the previvors and survivors I’ve met.

The first is; get knowledge.

None of the previvors I have spoken with regrets getting screened. Not that they advocate everyone getting screened regardless of their age and stage of life, but get the knowledge about the right age and stage of life to be screened and get the knowledge. It doesn’t make things easy, but the knowledge is worth it.

In some ways the Ashkenaz Jew in the screening room is back in the Garden of Eden, standing before a tree which will allow us to understand things we will never be able to un-learn. The tree promises understanding but that could come at the cost of the myth of our immortality. But here, there is no command to avoid the fruit. Rather, in a post-Eden-world, perhaps the best guiding principle is this verse from Deuteronomy. ‘See I have placed before you blessing and curse, choose life so that you shall live.’ Again, there is information about JNetics in the foyer if you want to know more about screening.

Without understanding, our life choices are no better than random guesses. With knowledge we gain the ability to make meaningful choices. Knowledge is the gateway to the second great lesson I’ve learnt in these conversations.

And the second lesson is; claim agency.

Make meaningful choices. None of us can direct the totality of our existence – that’s the great religious truth of our day, but we do have some power over some elements of our fate – so we should claim the right to make these choices.

It once happened, the rabbis teach in Midrash Tanhuma,[3] that the Roman Emperor Turnus Rufus and Rabbi Akiva were debating. ‘Which is greater’ the Emperor asks, ‘the works of God, or the works of humans?’ ‘The works of humans,’ the Rabbi responds.’ ‘But how can you match the heavens and the earth?’ the Emperor asks. So Akiva brings out some stalks of wheat and some loaves of bread and says, ‘These are the work of God, and these are the work of humans. Isn’t the bread better than the stalks of wheat?’ The Emperor acknowledges he is defeated by the Rabbi who believes in the greatness of human agency.

In our claiming agency over our lives, we justify and celebrate our existence. Exerting agency over our lives stops us from being nothing other than a sufferer, a victim, it allows us to become the actor – the star, the hero of our own story. I mean we talk about a book of life and a book of death on this holy day, but we are all going to die eventually – that’s the one shared decree we all face – so the question is rather – what do we do with the life we are given. What difference can we make, over our own life and the lives of others while we have the chance?

There are always decisions of agency to make, certainly in the case of BRCA mutations and even at the end of life.

Get knowledge, claim agency.

And thirdly, find the Brachah – find the blessing, if at all possible.

Maybe blessing – Brachah - is too provocative a word. I know this is a tricky one. Maybe a better Hebrew word would be Todah or Modeh. Modeh is usually translated as ‘Thanks’ but it actually means something that doesn’t really translate into English. To be Modeh is to acknowledge the gift of existence as a whole, even if the momentary experience is painful and challenging. Being Modeh is not about being grateful to carry a gene mutation or being thankful to have cancer – God forbid. But there is something about finding gratitude in our encounters with life, even with its pain and inevitable mortality, that can lift us and attune us to what it means to be alive – and it is beautiful and wonderful to be alive, even in pain and mortality.

I know this is difficult. And I don’t want to judge anyone who experiences pain and simply wants to say – stuff this, this is awful. Pain is never good. But I’ve seen, and I know many of us have, people who can experience pain and still find this quality of being Modeh.

Judaism doesn’t want us only to bless, only to express this quality of being Modeh, just when things go well. The Mishnah states Hayav levarech al harah cshem shehu mevarech al hatovah – a person should bless equally when things go well, as we when things don’t.[4] It’s a challenge, but cultivating that sense of being Modeh allows us to feel empowered by our acts of agency. We might not change the outcome, but we can change the way we experience our pain. That’s not insignificant. In fact, it might be the very greatest act of our humanity.

Let me share one example. Judaism has, of course, if does, a blessing to be said when you go to the toilet.

It's a blessing that thanks God for creating in our human bodies, holes and pipes and pipes and holes. Galui va’Yadua lifnei kise kevodecha – it is revealed and known by You – God – that if one of the holes that should be opened should close, or one of the pipes that should be closed would open, it would be impossible exist, for even a moment. Blessed are you God – the blessing ends – who does wonderous things.

It’s a great blessing to be said when everything is going well with our bodies and we feel capable and powerful. It’s also a great blessing to be said when … it’s not and we become assailed by a sense that we are nothing more than fragile physical entities guaranteed only to decay.

I’m not trying, necessarily, to advocate the formal words in the siddur. I think you can express this idea in so many, many ways. I’m also not suggesting that a person shouldn’t feel angry, even express anger and bitterness and all the rest of the emotions that come up when we experience our own mortality in this way. Cultivating this sense of Modeh, while being angry at being ill and fighting with every ounce of our strength to get better, that can all fit together as part of a commitment to finding the very best in the lives we can make for ourselves. But somewhere, somehow, it's helpful to cultivate a sense of being blessed, a sense of being Modeh.

Judaism at its best doesn't lie. It doesn't offer panaceas to the inevitable human condition of mortality. But it does tell us to get knowledge, to claim agency and to find blessings. I think that’s because getting knowledge, claiming agency and finding blessings transforms us from being the victims of a sick irony like cancer and into human beings in the very fullest sense of the term. Getting knowledge, claiming agency and finding blessings makes us the heroes of our lives, it frees us from suffering, even if we do experience pain.

May we all be spared from any experience of pain in this year to come, but should it come, may we play these roles – of seeking knowledge, claiming agency and finding blessing with distinction and courage, both in this year, and in many years to come.

---

[1] https://brachabrasil.org for the British organisation see https://www.jnetics.org/

[2] Illness as a Metaphor, p.7

[3] Tazria 5

[4] Mishnah Brachot 9:5

The Bet is Still On - Yizkor Yom Kippur 5778

The best book I’ve read in the last year is an oddly named book by the French writer, Laurent Binet. It’s called HHhH.[1] In part HHhH is the story of the Nazi, Reinhard Heydrich, known as the Butcher of Prague. Heydrich was intimately complicit in Kristallnacht and convened the conference where the Final Solution was most fully articulated.

I’ve read a bunch of books about Nazis. I am sure many of us have. But what makes Binet’s work particularly interesting is that it’s not a book about a Nazi. It’s rather a book about writing a book about a Nazi. Having introduced us to Heydrich’s brutality, Binet steps out from behind the fourth wall. ‘You see,’ he writes, ‘Heydrich is the target [of this book] not [it’s] protagonist. Everything I’ve written about him [to this point] is by way of background.’  And if that sounds a bit arch, a bit - forgive my generalisation - a bit French, bear with me. Because Binet is on to something deeply important.

The book unfolds, Binet recalls the events of Heydrich’s life. He introduces us to his heroes; Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš; two Czech partisans, trained in England and sent by the Czech Government-in-exile to assassinate Prague’s Butcher. On the fateful day, as Heydrich’s car slows - as the assassins knew it would - at the corner where they planned to strike, Gabčík’s gun jams. The plan - so carefully considered - looks to be failing. But then Kubiš has a moment to lob a grenade in Heydrich’s direction and does. It seems to affect only minor damage on Heydrich the target. But then septicaemia sets in and the Butcher of Prague dies an invalid’s death a week later. Binet goes on to tell the story of Lidice, the Czech town of 500 razed to the ground by the Nazi’s as punishment for the assassination - razed on the entirely erroneous notion that its inhabitants had something to do with the plot. And finally Binet recounts the final moments of Gabčík and Kubiš, holed up in the basement of a Prague Church, keeping 800 Nazis at bay [through a day and long into the night], until at last, they too suffer the same mortal consequence that met their target.

And all through this brilliant storytelling, Binet keeps peeking out from behind the fourth wall, asking us, and asking himself - does it matter? In the shadow of the Holocaust, and millions murdered in so many awful ways, does it matter that the butcher Heydrich dies on a hospital gurney while Gabčík and Kubiš die in a heroic last stand. In the face of the impossible awfulness of Nazi brutality does any of this matter?

Back in the earliest pages of the book, as we first meet Heydrich the child, Binet tells us his target grew up in the German village of Halle. He supposes he ought, at that point, wax lyrical about the village, but admits that he doesn’t know which of the two German towns called Halle Heydrich actually was from, ‘For the time being,’ he tells us ‘I’m not sure it’s important.’ Binet asks if it matters that the gun jammed, or if it matters that more Czech’s died because of the assassination that would have died had Heydrich been left to get on with his awful existence.

As the Nazi’s destroy Lidice and every man and most of the women who lived in the town, Gabcik and Kubis hide in a Prague basement, in despair at the wave of Nazi destruction unleashed in the aftermath of their ultimately successful assasination. They knew, they surely knew that their plotting could result in their own death, but did they consider the mass deaths of innocents their actions would provoke? Was it worth it? ‘Gabcik and Kubis weep from rage and powerlessness,’ Binet writes, ‘No one ever manages to persuade them that Heydrich’s death was good for anything . Perhaps,’ he continues, ‘I am writing this book to make them understand that they are wrong.’

HHhH becomes a book about the possibility of meaning, it’s a challenge posed in the face of Nazi brutality. But it’s a challenge, I suspect, we all feel sometimes. Particularly especially at this point on this day, with our memories of those who are no longer here; some taken peacefully at the ends of long fulfilled lives, others taken too early or too bitterly.

Soren Kierkegaard once wrote, a “single event of inexplicable horror ‘has the power to make everything inexplicable, including the most explicable events.’”[2]

This is part of the problem of the Holocaust, it can strip us of all understanding, it can make it seem impossible to care about anything anymore.

And here I find myself drawn into the awful debate, now some 30 years old, surrounding the death of one of the bravest souls ever to have looked into the furnace of Auschwitz; Primo Levi. [3] In 1987 Levi was found dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs in his apartment building. Almost immediately Eli Wiesel pronounced, “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz ... forty years later.” The coroner in seeming agreement called his death a suicide. The American homme des lettres, Leon Wieseltier felt the loss not only of the man, Levi, but everything Levi stood for. "[Levi],” wrote Wieseltier, “spoke for the bet that there is no blow from which the soul may not recover. When he smashed his body, he smashed his bet.”

There’s a certain dangerous, seductive romance given succour by considering Levi’s death a suicide - the whiff of Juliette, taking her life as Romeo lies apparently dead before her. Here, the Levi, takes his life having completed his last great work, having said everything there is to say about the appalling failures of human possibility.

It’s just that - much like Romeo’s apparent death - this dark dangerous romantic vision of Levi might be quite wrong. In the years since his death the notion that Levi gave up on life as a direct result of his suffering in the camps has taken a battering. For one thing Levi himself is recorded active, engaged and excited by life and the various diary commitments he had set out for himself in the weeks after his death. He told his friends he no longer felt under the weight of the experiences of his formative years. And the fall down the stairs is a strange way to commit suicide - especially for a chemist - who could, surely have found easier paths towards death if that was indeed what he had chosen. Levi’s friend and cardiologist, David Mendel, observed that drugs Levi was taking often lower the blood pressure. Mendel imagines Levi on the point of fainting, reaching for banisters to steady himself and instead toppling.

Maybe Levi didn’t accept that the value of life is always trumped by the power of darkness and death.

Maybe Wieseltier’s bet, that there is no blow from which the soul may not recover, that there is no hell which some element of human virtue cannot penetrate, illuminate and palliate is still on.

Maybe life is still worth living - and living fully and heroically and as brightly as we are capable.

We are teetering on a knife-edge, trying to discover if there is anything authentic to do in a world where human will treat human with such abject violence and hatred; a world where the good and the evil suffer the same inevitable mortal consequence. And we are grasping for something that allows us to feel the bet is still on.

Let me draw one more voice into this conversation - Emil Fackenheim - by some twist of fate or coincidence, born in Halle, Saxony in 1916. That turns out to be the very same village in which the butcher of Prague, Heydrich was born 12 years earlier. Fackenheim, by 1939 a Rabbi, fled the Sauchsenhausen concentration camp in which he was detained in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, to become one of the most significant thinkers in 20^th Century Jewry.

To read Fackenheim’s work, To Mend the World, is to feel Fackenheim being eaten away at by the notion that the Holocaust strips the life from ... life. Perhaps everything, he suggests is inauthentic after the Holocaust.

But no. Fackenheim, Binet and even Primo Levi, ultimately don’t suggest life is inauthentic, despite their deep investigations into the very darkest of times. They each emerge, if not with a jolly spring in their step, with a sense of the value of a life lived heroically, frankly, the value of a life lived at all. The stories of those who survived and those who did not, are for each of these three writers, full of authentic responses to the extraordinary gift of life even as their, so often tragically, are cut short. The acts of violence are never recounted as voiding the possibility of finding and creating meaning in these stories.

Fackenheim in particular, latches on to moments of heroism; sometimes the dramatic stories - such as Heydrich’s assassins Gabčík and Kubiš;’ sometimes the simpler triumphs of a survivor like Pelagia Lewinska. Lewinska spent 20 month’s in Auschwitz and her great triumph lay in nothing more than refusing to allow the Nazis to strip from her her belief in the value of behaving with human decency - she’s a hero too. Levi tells stories like these with a cooler spirit, but, I think, with pride nonetheless. Fackenheim’s point is that these  acts of heroism can’t be deemed inauthentic, or meaningless because they were performed in full understanding of the consequences. When a group of German philosophers, called the White Rose, sprayed ‘Down with Hitler’ on the walls of Munich in 1943, they knew they were courting death, and that by a certain standard that their actions would surely be futile. But they went ahead. ‘They knew it,’ wrote Fackenheim, ‘but they did it.’^[4] And this, the philosopher writes, makes activism after the Holocaust capable of touching authenticity.

Or try this example, from HHhH. It comes from a section where Binet considers Theresienstadt, the so called ‘model’ concentration camp where the Nazis encouraged Jews to have a ‘relatively well developed cultural life with art and theatre.’ The Red Cross were fooled by the demonstrations of culture on show. But the Jewish residents weren’t. Of the 140,000 Jews imprisoned at Theresienstadt, only 17,000 survived. Binet cites Milan Kundera, ‘They were under no illusions: [they knew] their cultural life was exhibited by Nazi propaganda as an alibi; but should that be a reason to refuse freedom, however precarious and fraudulent? Their response was utterly clear: their creations, their art shows, their concerts, their loves, the whole array of their lives were incomparably more important than their jailers’ macabre theatrics. That was their [bet][5]. It should be ours too.’

Weiseltier’s bet, it seems, can survive the Holocaust because it was undertaken also in the midst of the Holocaust.

At the heart of all these articulations of possibility in the face of death, and in the face of the Holocaust most particularly, lies something irreducibly spiritual, perhaps we might even call it religious. I’m not trying to co-opt any of these thinkers and writers. But, for me, considering art, rebellion and even refusing to lose one’s humanity as meaningful bespeaks our belief that we are not just flesh and bones. We are not just material. We contain something other. We need something more than the material and, most remarkably, we become capable of creating something other than the material. As humans we create something other than material even when we are deprived of all material things; even in the midst of the Holocaust. And the heart of this thing that survives even such darkness as the Holocaust, are stories.

Binet writes that ‘The Nazis kept files, but burnt books.’ Files are the quotidian account of what will pass in time. But books are repositories of our soul, playgrounds for our imagination and homes of our dreams. Of course the Nazis were afraid of books. Of course they sought refuge in the reductive false security of ledgers. But the stories have survived. They have survived because stories of life are more powerful than numbers. The actions of the spirit are more powerful than the losses of the material - as much as the material we have lost hurt us so. That’s, of course, what we are all doing here, at Yizkor, remembering stories, even when the material presene of those we have lost and lost has gone.

As we tell stories, as we remind ourselves of all those we mourn. We remind ourselves of those destroyed by the Nazis and of those who have perished since in ways less brutal. But more than any of this we remind ourselves that life is more important than the material.

We remind ourselves of the value of a life lived beyond the realm of the material.

We remind ourselves that the bet is still on.

We remind ourselves that there is a point to living.

Even - in fact especially - as we consider the lives of those who have gone.

May all these lives be for a blessing.

---

[1] Originally published, in French, in 2010, and winner of the Prix Goncourt Du Premier Roman of that year. I read it in Sam Taylor’s 2012 translation, published by Harvill Secker.

[2] Cited in Kierkegaard’s name but with no citation in Emil Fackenheim’s To Mend the World, p.191.

[3] Much of the discussion of Levi draws on http://bostonreview.net/diego-gambetta-primo-levi-last-moments

[4] MW 266-267.

[5] ‘wager’ in the original.

Yizkor - Judaism Works

Sheryl Sandberg's husband died this year. You may have caught the story on the news. Sandberg is the COO of Facebook and her husband was the CEO of SurveyMonkey. Do you remember the survey we did about the community last year - that was done on SurveyMonkey. He was 47, their kids are even younger than that. Sandberg, some thirty days later, posted - on Facebook, where else, some reflections on what she had learnt. It was a moving and inspirational post, but my eye was drawn to the Rabbinic bit.

Sandberg talked about Shiva, she talked about Sheloshim. When she said, ' I have lived thirty years in these thirty days. I feel like I am thirty years wiser,' I felt that in amongst the pain and the loss, the Jewish piece had played its part in providing a net to carry her and her family from the first moments of horror forward.

I often do.

In part I'm telling this story about Sandberg because she posted, publically. I've got an entire shelf of books written by people reflecting on what does and doesn't help in the aftermath of loss; losses both appallingly tragic and less tragic. I could tell a similar story about the losses so many of the members of this community. I so often feel and so often am told that in amongst the pain and the loss, the Jewish piece had played its part in providing a net to carry her and her family from the first moments of horror forward.

Maybe I'm in danger of overreaching a touch. Maybe there are a few of you here who were dragged through the Jewish observances after the loss of those you have loved most and felt nothing, or felt only anger towards our faith. To you I'm sorry, you may well not like anything of what I am going on to say, but I want to take this moment, on this most special of days, to unpack a little of why and how I think this Jewish thing works, not only in the aftermath of loss, but more generally also.

On the one hand it's terribly hard to know what to do when someone passes away.

There are so many different kinds of death, no two could ever be the same. There are deaths that come at the end of a long and richly lived life, and those that come horribly before their time. There are deaths that come at the end of a long illness, and deaths that come suddenly.

And there are so many different mourners, no two could ever be the same. We cover different generations, different levels of dependence on the person who has passed away, different levels of love - let it be admitted. There are the mourners who were once so close, but have drifted apart and there are those who had difficult times earlier in life, but had been successfully putting a relationship back together until death ripped that apart again.

And there are so many different emotions that rampage around a house of mourning. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, widely recognized as doyenne of the study of grief suggests five; denial, anger, depression, bargaining and acceptance. But I regularly see so many others; fear, guilt, relief. I meet mourners who feel guilty because they feel relieved and mourners who feel relieved because they feel guilty. And then the most bleak emotional response; the emotional response which is empty of all emotion.

If all that doesn't make knowing what to do about loss sufficiently confusing there is one extra dimension of complexity. When we encounter the loss of another's parent or lover or sibling or child, God forbid, we are forced to encounter our own mortality. That's scary.

And into all that complexity, and variation and sheer awful pain, Judaism wades in with a collection of observances and Halachah and customs that can seem, from the outside, so strange and old-fashioned, but from the inside, for so many, work - or at least help as much as any response to loss could.

We move quickly, partly because it is felt to be an affront to the deceased to be left just hanging around, and partly because we believe a family can't mourn while, in the language of the Talmud, the dead lie before them.

A body is washed, dressed with the care and a liturgy that would befit the High Priest in Temple times, but in the simplest of clothes - Tachrichim, and placed in the simplest of plain pine boxes. All of us dressed the same way, boxed up the same way - death is universal and universally horrid, 'who is important, who is distinguished [before the angel of death]' notes the Talmud.[1]

The funeral is simple, no complicated liturgical decisions to make, two brief readings and then a eulogy. 'Don't make your eulogy too long' counsels the Talmud - wise advice this one for Rabbis who are called upon to speak at funerals. Don't kid yourself you can effectively sum up a life no matter how long you go on for.

Then that most brutal of moments, when the coffin is lowered and the mourners are offered shovels, and there is that sound of earth hitting the coffin and the pain is palpable. It's done because the Jewish tradition isn't designed to mollify or pacify in the aftermath of the loss of those we love most. It's designed to bring into sharp focus the loss we have just experienced. If the observance feels raw, that is only an attempt to match the reality of what has taken place.

Oh, there are so many moments of detail. There is a tradition I always take a moment to observe - plucking a few blades of grass as we leave the grounds and letting them flutter away through my fingers with reference to a verse in Isaiah, an image used also at the heart of our Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur liturgy, 'Yavesh Chatzir'[2] - grass withers. For we came from dust and will return to dust.

Then comes the food - we are after all Jews, what did you expect? - and the low chairs and the wishes for a long life, and the candles and the covered mirrors and then the Shloshim, and the Yartzeit. There is the way the Kaddish that starts so stiff and foreign in the mouth, even of those who know their way around a service, and after a year becomes easier to say, just as the tradition hopes the loss becomes easier to bear.

So many ideas all coded into ritual and practice.

This is the point.

Out of this panoply of rituals, each one attempting to hold, or honour or confront a web emerges that can, I do genuinely believe, hold all of us, no matter who it is we have lost, or how we have lost them, or who we are, even as we change pinging around in the aftermath of a bereavement from one emotional ebb to another flow.

The ritual, our faith tradition, wants to wrap us up and protect us at the most raw moments of our journey, and gently put us down as the rawness passes, gently ushering us back into the real world for we are forbidden from sitting Shiva for evermore. Of course our rituals don't make all this pain disappear in an instant, but the goal of mourning isn't 'to get over it.' The goal is revealed slowly, over the passage of time.

What a gift. What a gift to be a Jew, to have woven into our spiritual DNA an entire approach to death which is this sensitive and this deep. What a gift, as a Rabbi visiting the bereaved, to know I have this arsenal. When the words don't work, when there are no words that could possibly help, I can reach into this treasure chest of our faith and find something that might help in a way that no words can match.

And why does all this help? In part because these rituals have been created by wise, compassionate elders of our faith who understand the nature of our mortal condition. In part because these rituals have evolved slowly becoming increasingly attuned to their ecological niche, just as any other evolving system becomes increasingly effective. In part because underneath and beyond all this human endeavour is a divine whisper that our human efforts have managed to pick up like some giant radar array detecting the presence of far-off life.

Again, if I'm overreaching I'm sorry. If you are listening to this thinking I have no understanding of how poorly our faith tradition failed you at your time of greatest loss, I'm sorry. But I hope, and I think I've reasonably safe in thinking that there won't be so many of you thinking that. There are definitely those of you who have shared that this, this whole Jewish thing, has helped. There are those of you who didn't, at the beginning of the journey, see yourselves wanting to sit so many nights of Shiva, or come so regularly to Shul to say Kaddish, but, in the days, weeks and months after the moments of greatest rawness have reflected that it did help after all.

I think this does help.

And so here's my question.

If we got it so right, when it comes to our approach to bereavement, how come we got it so wrong in our approach to so much else of Jewish life?

Or let me try that slightly differently, if, when it comes to bereavement there is a sense that the tradition and its rituals and observances help us, support us and leave us stronger how come we aren't a more observant community when it comes to Kashrut, or Shabbat, or shul attendence.

I mentioned that survey, we did last year - only 52% of respondents ticked the box that said they kept kosher at home and a only 28% ticked the box that said they kept kosher 'out.' That's it? It hurts.

It's not that the rituals associated with Kashrut come from a different place from the rituals associated with bereavement. They come as refractions of divine will and have been pored over and evolved through centuries of wise and careful balancing.

It's not that the rituals associated with Kashrut don't hold and code for profound ideas about the nature of food and ourselves. If we are what we eat we should, surely, be thinking more carefully about what it is we out in our mouths, and if we value life we should, surely, be thinking more carefully about our consumption of meat in particular. Each time a Shochet takes the life of an animal to produce kosher meat they say a blessing, animal life - though different from human life - is honoured. To consume meat is an act of violence, our tradition recognises that, and demands that we shouldn't mix milk - that gift of life - with our carnivorous urges. An observance of Kashurt can make us more sensitive to our place in the food chain, and our place as consumers on this planet. Kashrut is one of the most powerful markers of Jewish identity. If you are one of the ones who don't observe, try it - start somewhere easy. Stop ordering the meat is easy. Milk and meat is easy. Try it, and let me know if you think it helps.

And what about Shabbat. Almost 3/4 of respondents ticked that they light Shabbat candles 'always' or at least 'often.' That's not bad, I suppose. But how many of us desist from shopping, or give Shabbat more than the attention of a brief few moments on a Friday evening? The survey didn't tell us that. But it won't be so many. And again, it's not as if the ideas aren't powerful - Shabbat a day to celebrate what have rather than engage permanently in a never-ending consuming cycle of seeking more and more. We will never realise what we truly have until we stop, and give thanks. Shabbat is about what it means to be human in ways deeper than our choice of vegetables or movie downloads. Again, let me offer this in the most simple way I can. Stop spending money from sundown Friday to stars-out Saturday. Be a human being rather than a consumer. And if you want something a little more challenging, turn the radio off, the TV, the phone even! gevalt, how can a person possibly survive with only books and face to face conversation - well I suppose you could come to shul. We moan about the pressures of life, but the ability to turn the computer off is only a flick of a switch away. Try it, and let me know if you think it helps.

We have, I suspect, the Jewish thing back to front. We start from the perspective of it being a drag and of limited value in our oh so busy lives. And then when we need it, it's there and we find in it meaning and relevance and power. We don't need to wait that long. We can start to find the meaning and the relevance and the power before then, before the gates close, before it's too late to make a difference to the lives we live and the most important relationships surrounding us.

If you think it helped, this Jewish thing, at the moments when you and your family were most in need. Give it a try now, make a promise to yourself to try the Kashrut thing, or the Shabbat thing. Frankly any of the things. Try it and let me know if you think it helps. I hope you will. I think you will. And in so doing, I hope, we can all become better Jews, better members of our families, better inheritors of our Jewish tradition, and even better placed to carry these traditions forward into the year to come.

Chatimah Tovah

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[1] Moed Katan 28a

[2] Isaiah 40:7, used in the Unataneh Tokef