Own the schmutz - A Kol Nidrei Sermon

 

A story is told about the Baal Shem Tov – the eighteenth century founder of modern Chasidism –

They asked him - what is different since you have come?

And he replied,

Before I came, when a thief tried to enter the house they would shout and scream and try and scare the thief away.

Now I have come – the Baal Shem Tov went on to say – when a thief tries to enter the house, they lie in wait. They trap the thief and they hand the thief over to the proper authorities.^[1]

 

Shouting and trying to scare the thief away

Or

Letting the thief in before turning the thief over to the proper authorities.

 

It is not, of course, an argument about literal thieves and literal houses.

Rather it is an enquiry into the nature of the human soul.

And it is this enquiry I want us all to engage in on this most holy of evenings.

On the first day of Rosh Hashanah I spoke about community.

On the second day I spoke about the world out there – the world of collapsing share prices and haemorrhaging banks.

Today, tonight, I want to speak to the nature of the human soul because, I fear, we are all to busy shouting and trying the scare the thief away.

And it doesn’t do us much good.

 

So what is going on in this parable of the Baal Shem Tov?

Well the house, as the psycho-analysts among us know already – the house is the body – me.

And the thief?

In psycho-analytical terms the thief is the anima, our shadow – our messy stuff – our failures, our shortcomings, our embarrassments.

It’s not just the things we have done, but the things we are drawn to do; the thief is the siren call to do ill, our lusts and our temptations to do ill.

In Rabbinic terms the thief is the yetzer hara – the evil inclination.

The thief is what the yiddishishts among us would call the schmutz

 

The Baal Shem Tov is saying this;

Before I came, when a person felt the evil inclination coming upon them, they would try and scare the evil inclination away.

Now I have come, he says, we let the schmutz in, we acknowledge that it can’t be scared away, instead we hand it over to the authorities – we work it over, like a baker working over dough, and slowly we purge it of its impurities, we own our schmutz and we heal our schmutz.

 

This is the great contribution of the Baal Shem Tov – helping us to ‘own our schmutz.’

Teaching us that shouting and screaming and trying to scare the thief away is a response of a child – the thief will duck round the corner and plot another burglary, a return.

We are instead asked to admit that there is something to learn from letting the thief in.

There is always something to learn from our evil inclinations, from all of our actions; even the failures, even the poorer moments.

We need to do a better job ‘owning our schmutz.’

 

Actually I think that we, as members of this community and as members of this oh so modern world, are a step behind even the shouters and the screamers of the Baal Shem Tov’s parable.

We wander round in denial.

We refuse even to acknowledge the invasion of the Baal Shem Tov’s thief.

We would rather pretend we have no evil inclination.

We would rather pretend our sins are somehow justifiable, not really anybody’s fault, and certainly not our own.

How many of us are comfortable with the notion that we are indeed, sinners?

Sin has become a dirty word.

Personal failure is considered an unsuitable topic not only for public discussion, but even in our private moments.

We don’t even like the word Teshuvah – penitence, repentance.

I led a workshop on Teshuvah, here at this Synagogue and attendance was weak – not a popular topic.

And, of those who came, we were all eager to suggest a re-working of the idea of Teshuvah.

We were all eager to reframe Teshuvah as some kind of personal self-improvement manual; a way of bettering ourselves, reaching a higher potential and all that.

None of us wanted to suggest that Teshuvah has a connection to sin.

Ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu and all that, well those are just words – but not really about us.

I haven’t lied, I haven’t deceived, I haven’t cheated …my lips haven’t lied, I’ve never coveted that which is not mine

I have no thief lurking around in the bushes at the bottom of my garden.

 

A story.

I was walking down the road with a friend who was taking their doughy-eyed beagle out for a walk, the beagle was on a lead.

A woman was walking towards us, in front of her trotted a squat butch snarling sort-of-a-dog.

The woman called out, from thirty paces distance, ‘watch out for your dog.’

It took us a few moments to realise what she meant.

From twenty paces distance she called again, ‘watch out for your dog, he’ll attack it.’

And sure enough the squat butch snarling dog had broken into a canter.

‘I mean it, he’ll bite ya dog.’

And the, now yelping, dog flung itself at the beagle who scampered behind its master.

‘I told you,’ snarled the woman as she passed us, taking the dog with her ‘I told you he’d bite.’

‘Why don’t you put him on a leash,’ we both called out in unison at the woman’s back, but she was gone, onto the next canine encounter.

To this woman her dog had done nothing wrong.

And she, certainly, had nothing to repent for, she had after all warned us – twice!

No thief in her garden.

If anything had gone wrong it was someone else’s thief, someone else’s garden.

 

A little extreme maybe, but I recognise this woman’s impulse in my own actions.

I’m better at seeing faults in others than acknowledging my own failings.

I am expert at blaming myself last.

I think we all do it.

We see thieves lurking in all our fellows’ gardens – we see their jealousies, plot out their psychological failings, their paranoia and only rarely submit ourselves to the same clear-sighted honesty we reserve for those around us.

We’ve trained ourselves to find excuses, we’ve deemed ourselves worthy of dispensations, justifications, anything rather than have to acknowledge our own shortcomings when faced with our own responsibilities.

 

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, not a person I cite with particular regularity, made an excellent observation about the difference between a Rebbe and a Rabbi.

A Rabbi, said Rabbi Sacks, is a person who can speak to a crowd of a hundred and everyone thinks the Rabbi has perfectly encapsulated the person sitting next to them.

The Rebbe, on the other hand, speaks to a crowd of five hundred and everyone feels the Rebbe has encapsulated ‘me.’

I have no pretensions beyond my station, but let me clear – I mean you, each of you, each of us and I certainly include myself.

We need to do a better job acknowledging our darker side, acknowledging that we do, indeed, fail, sin.

Especially on a night like tonight.

Al daat hamakom, v’al daat ha kahal, anu matirin lhitpalel im ha avaryanim.

With the acceptance of God, with the acceptance of the community, we pray with the sinners.

We are, on this night, those sinners.

 

 

Like Eskimos and their snow,

We Jews have lots of words for sin.

• Aveyrah – A wilful spite; the term implies a flagrant, almost joyful riding out against the grain of appropriate behaviour.
• Cheit – A miss, close, but not good enough. If only we had concentrated a little more …
• Avon – A weight, a burden, sitting across our shoulders, our guilt.

If we are prepared to accept our thief inside we have a hope of understanding our averot, our chatayim, our avonot.

Letting the thief inside a little will help us plot through the jumble of our flagrant disregard, our laziness and our guilt.

Letting the thief inside can help us mend these breakages in our soul, in our relationships.

It can help us be more whole, more complete, more suited for the tasks of our human existence.

 

Oh ye woeful sinners, don’t be too downhearted.

Failing, sinning, possessing schmutz is no terrible thing. In fact it is quintessentially human.

Human beings were not designed to be perfect.

According to the Rabbinic tradition God had perfect company – angels – before the creation of the first human but felt angelic company lacked something, lacked the all too human propensity for schmutz.

 

From the Midrash,

When God came to create the first human the angels fell into dispute. Some said don’t create, some said create. The angel of kindness said, ‘create’ because the human will perform acts of kindness. The angel of truth said, ‘don’t create, because the human will lie. The angel of justice said create for they will seek justice and the angel of peace said don’t create for there are full of strife. And while the angels were arguing and debating God created Adam and said to them, ‘what are you arguing about, it’s done already.’^[2]

 

When the Bible uses the term ‘create’ to detail the creation of the first human it spells the word vayitzer unusually, with two ‘yuds’ rather than the one that would be the normal spelling.

The unusual spelling cries out for Rabbinic commentary

Btairin yitzrin – with two inclinations - says the Mediavel Targum Yonatan -

The first human, and every human since is created with yetzer hatov and yetzer hara – the inclination to good and the inclination to evil.^[3]

 

Having a yetzer ra, owning up to carrying around a bunch of sin and failure doesn’t make us beyond the pale, it makes us who we are, as human beings.

This is how God wishes us to be.

 

Italo Calvino, the twentieth century fantacist, wrote a tale of the Cloven Viscount. It’s an account of a mythic Viscount - Medardo of Terralba – who set out to battle and gets himself blown up. His remains are carried to the field hospital only for it to be realised that the Viscount has lost not only an arm and a leg, as Calvino writes;

the whole thorax and abdomen between that arm and leg had been swept away by [a] direct hit. All that remained of the head was one eye, one ear, one cheek, half a nose, half a mouth, half a chin and half a forehead. The long and short of it was,’ [suggests Calvino in playful seriousness], ‘that exactly half of him had been saved, the right part, perfectly  preserved, without a scratch on it, excepting the huge slash separating it from the left-hand part which had been blown away.’^[4]

 

This cloven Count is nursed back to life and, much to the distress of all who knew him before his accident, it turns out that only the wicked, the evil part of the Count has been preserved and this right-hand-side of the Viscount spends his life inflicting cruelty on any beast or animal that comes his way.

The story takes a turn when the left-side of the Count arrives on the scene, some chapters later. Here at last comes the good-side, and at first all seems well.

But Calvino isn’t letting us get away with such simplicity.

[The Good ‘un, as he was known] ‘would come hobbling through the pine trees with a bundle tied to his shoulder. It held clothes to be washed and mended which he gathered from lonely beggars, orphans and the sick, and he got [the farmer’s daughter] Pamela to wash them, thus giving her a chance to do good too.’ And he would help her, or read to her with, as Calvino puts it, ‘the aim of civilizing the rustic girl’s deportment. But [being] unable to follow the thread [she spent the time] quietly inciting the goat to lick the Count’s half-face.’^[5]

 

 

Of course the Bad ‘Un is insufferable, but the good half is equally intolerable, he even falls out with the local lepers, too goody-goody.

‘Our sensibilities became numbed,’ says our narrator, ‘as we felt ourselves lost between an evil and a virtue equally inhuman.’^[6]

 

It might be superficially appealing to consider ourselves only the good-side. But, aside, from being dishonest, it would be awful, who would want our company?

 

A life lived purely under the influence of the good inclination is also a feature of a Talmudic encounter from tractate Yoma.

The Children of Israel, we are told, find themselves recipients of a particular moment of grace and decide to pray for the evil inclination to be handed over to them. And so it is.

They are about to kill off this wickedness when they are warned that doing so would destroy the world.

They imprison the inclination for three days and ‘looked in the entire land of Israel for a fresh egg and couldn’t find one.’

So they let the evil inclination go.^[7]

The evil inclination is a necessary part of life, we shouldn’t hide from it, cleave it apart from our good side or imprison it.

 

So the aim is not to do without the evil inclination, and not to disregard it.

The aim is to own it.

Take responsibility for it.

Accept our humanity.

And then to tweak at it, to use our awareness of our own failings and shortcomings to prod at us, allow us to understand more deeply the nature of our humanity.

The aim is shleimut – from the same Hebrew root as shalom, it means not so much peace as wholeness.

The aim is to stand before our Creator whole.

In honesty

Bringing both schmutz and our merit with us.

 

The danger of the contemporary world with its self-help positive thinking is that it prompts us to forget ourselves, or at least half of ourselves. We imagine ourselves wandering around like Calvino’s cloven Good ‘Un and that’s not good.

Instead we need to let the thief in. Allow ourselves to consider our sins, our failings, to ask why, after all the these years, we keep making the same mistakes.

We need to know that we could be better, that we can improve, and we can’t do that unless we acknowledge that, just like every human in this glorious universe of ours, we have our faults, we have, indeed a thief in the bottom of the garden.

 

And as for Calvino’s Cloven Viscount, what became of him.

Well the two halves are re-united. As Calvino’s narrator recounts, ‘my uncle Medardo became a whole man again, neither good nor bad, but a mixture of goodness and badness… Some might expect that with the Viscount entire again a period of marvellous happiness would open; but obviously a whole Viscount is not enough to make all the world whole.’

Indeed it is not.

 

But the journey towards this wholeness, this shleimut, this shalom-ness of the world begins with each of us and our individual response to the thief lurking at the bottom of our gardens.

 

Gemar Chatimah Tovah – A good sealing, to one and all.

---

^[1] I heard this story and its perush from Rabbi Yeshoshua Engleman

^[2] Bereshit Rabba 8:5

^[3] Rejected, forcibly in Rashi Gen 2:7, but see Bereshit Rabba 14:4

^[4] The Cloven Viscount in I. Calvino Our Ancestor (Vintage, London, 1998) p. 10.

^[5] P. 55

^[6] P. 64

^[7] Yoma 69b, actually they blind it ‘It helped inasmuch as he no more entices men to commit incest.’

Article on Rothko, Published in the Jewish Chronicle

From The Jewish Chronicle - http://thejc.com/node/6299

Rabbi Jeremy Gordon

September 25, 2008

A religious spirit fills the paintings of the abstract-expressionist master.

Mark Rothko, ne Marcus Rothkowitz, hated being called an abstract expressionist - he even disliked being called a painter. He wanted his work to pour over the viewer, sucking them into his world. He wanted the work to shake its viewers out of an accustomed way of viewing gallery-art; bustling through the halls en route to tea-room and gift-shop. For him, pretty, chocolate-box images on big white gallery walls would not do.

"There is the danger," he wrote, "that the pictures relate themselves as decorative areas to the walls. This would be a distortion."

To break in on his viewers he felt he had to paint vast canvases that dominated the space in which they were hung - "to paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience," he wrote. "However, [when] you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command!"

Goodness knows what he would have thought the thousands of posters and prints IKEA, Habitat and the like offer to those who would like a "bit of red" in the corner above the mantelpiece. Rothko wanted the work to dominate. For a 1961 exhibition, the Whitechapel Gallery was instructed to paint the gallery walls "off-white with umber and warmed by a little red". The pictures were to be hung "as close to the floor as possible, ideally no more than six inches above it". He even went as far as to mandate that viewers stand precisely 46 centimetres from the canvas - there was to be no escape.

Rothko's earlier work was figurative. He was fascinated by great myths - powerhouse tales that touch upon the great issues of life and meaning, and he often painted images from Greek mythology. He even took on a commission to illustrate a Hebrew Bible, eventually published by Macmillan.

By the early 1940s, Rothko was still painting recognisable objects from recognisable narratives, but the objects and narratives were becoming less and less central. "The theme," he wrote of his work The Omen of the Eagle, "is derived from Aechylus. The picture [however] deals not with the particular anecdote, but rather with the Spirit of Myth which is generic to all myths, of all times. It involves a pantheism in which man, bird, beast and tree - the known as well as the knowable - merge into a single tragic idea."

Soon afterward he escaped narrative entirely and entered into his most recognisable phase. For seven years following the death of his mother in 1948, Rothko painted only "multiforms", the vast swathes of colour that have made him famous. These works were, for Rothko, religious.

"The people who weep before my pictures," he wrote, "are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their colour relationship, then you miss the point."

Rothko's religious message was the message of a lifelong provocateur, an iconoclast and an outsider. He never had a dealer, representing himself, standing outside the norms and fashions of the 20th-century contemporary art world. But more than that, the work itself is best understood as a sustained attempt to stand outside the expectations and conventions of his time.

Writing in the 1920s, Rothko stated his aim as presenting "objects and events as though for the first time, free from the accretions of habit and divorced from the conventions of 1,000 years of painting". By the 1950s he was at his most iconoclastic. He accepted a commission to paint a series of murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram building in New York - a restaurant, Rothko observed, where the rich "will come to feed and show off". Rothko claimed he accepted this assignment as a challenge, with strictly malicious intentions. "I hope," he told John Fischer, an editor of Harper's Magazine, "to paint something that will ruin the appetite" of everyone eating there. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the murals never made it to the walls of the restaurant.

With this new exhibition, a number of these murals, never before seen in Britain, are to be reunited with their sisters which have hung for some time in the Tate and now Tate Modern. It is a tantalising prospect, but it will not be easy viewing. The works are brutal. "The colours seep up like new blood through a bandage in which old blood has already dried," author John Banville has written. "The violence is hardly tolerable."

Rothko is determined to press our nose up against the reality of our existence - the fragility of human life, the capacity for cruelty, the intensity of pain. He paints like a Hebrew prophet, stripping away hiding places of civility, hypocrisy and fashion, challenging us to dig deeper, challenging us to face the reality of the human condition, 46 centimetres from our nose.

There is something serendipitous in the choice of an opening date for the exhibition of works by Rothko - just on the eve of the High Holy Days.

Indeed, as a congregational rabbi, I have a great deal of empathy for Rothko. This is the time of year when my colleagues and I try and break in on congregants whose relationship with the startling messages of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is the Jewish equivalent of bustling through an art gallery en-route to tea-room and gift shop. Instead of paint, we have liturgy and some glorious biblical passages.

"Is this the fast I have chosen?" the prophet Isaiah demands, railing against the meaningless conventions of the Four Seasons' diners of his day. Rothko, admittedly not much of a shul-goer, would surely have liked that.

Rothko is at Tate Modern, London SE1, until Feb 1 2009. Information at tate.org.uk/tickets. Jeremy Gordon is rabbi of New London Synagogue.

 

Snapshot

Born: Marcus Rothkowitz in 1903, in what is now Latvia. Grew up speaking Yiddish and as a child studied Talmud. His father, Jacob, was religiously Orthodox

His work: Started as a figurative artist, but is best known for his post-war "multiform" paintings featuring his signature blurred blocks of colours

His death: Rothko committed suicide in 1970, a few weeks after splitting from his wife Mell. He left two children. The settlement of his estate became the subject of a famous long-running legal wrangle

 

Judaism in the First Person Plural

A sermon for the first day of Rosh Hashanah

---

 

Let me take an analogy from the world of theatre.

Suppose you don’t like Shakespeare,

Suppose you find Shakespeare difficult to follow, old-fashioned, overly melodramatic. Besides you’ve seen them already, a number of times.

But from somewhere inside you feel you ought to give Hamlet another go.

So you arrive in time for the end, you don’t want to have to stay too long.

You might be feeling a little awkward shuffling into place.

But, more likely, as you sit down you are already congratulating yourself that you were right, this whole Shakespeare thing isn’t really for you,

Maybe you are deciding to pop into the Macbeth playing next week – the bit at the beginning with the witches isn’t bad – and then give the whole thing a rest for another year.

And you’ll wait for the curtain to fall and head home.

Undisturbed by the cauldron of emotions unfolded on the stage before you.

 

It’s one of the great frustrations of this time of year that so many of us treat our faith, our community, like this soulless theatre excursion.

 

And if this is the way in which we attend shul on this day, it doesn’t matter what I say in this sermon.

It doesn’t matter how movingly Chazan Costen and the choir lead us through this magnificent liturgy.

No sermon, no prayer, no tune will make any difference to the way we live our lives, the way we treat those around us, the way we relate to our Creator in the year ahead.

If we come to Shul with our minds made up, determined to find what we expect to see.

If we come to Shul already decided, there is, it is true, no need to prostrate ourselves before God right up to the very last moments of Neilah, we don’t need to wait for God to seal the books in which our fate is written.

Because we arrived on the first day of Rosh Hashanah with our books closed already; our little lives already neatly sealed up for the year ahead.

So today, tomorrow, next week, this year.

I ask this of all us.

Open the books.

Open yourself.

Allow yourself to enter into these ten days of awe,

Allow these ten days into you.

Allow yourselves to be broken in upon.

 

This is the essence of what I want to address, not only today, but throughout this holy period.

I want to talk about being broken in upon.

I want to talk about that which is currently around and about me –us – that instead needs to become inside us, part of me.

What needs to be added to the me, the ego, the private book of my life I carried to Shul this morning, tucked under my arm.

 

I want, today, to look at how this community – New London Synagogue – can, and must break in on us.

Tomorrow I’ll turn to the world out there – the world of the credit crunch  – for that world is knocking mightily this year.

And on kol nidrei I’ll be looking at a breaking in on the world in here [head] and here [heart].

You’ll get the picture.

 

I want to begin with a piece of Hebrew grammar.

The most important piece of grammar in the Hebrew language is the verbal suffix nu; the verbal suffix that denotes the first person plural.

 

Nu means us, we, ours.

Avinu Malcheinu – our father our king

Ashamnu Bagadnu – WE have erred, WE have sinned

Al cheit shchatanu lephanecha – for the sin WE have sinned before you.

 

Because the greatest truth of Judaism is precisely this.

Judaism must be lived in the first person plural.

The reason why we, as Jews, pray in the first person plural is because Judaism demands that we live in the first person plural. In community.

 

This is the my central message today;

We must live our Judaism in the first person plural, in community.

 

As a child I used to love a record of jokes titled ‘You Don’t Have to Be Jewish.’ I played it until the grooves bled.

One joke sticks in my mind to this day.

It’s the end of some trial, for some crime or other, the jury shuffles back into court. I won’t attempt the accent.

 

Foreman of the jury, have you reached your verdict.

We have your honour.

And what, foreman of the jury, is your verdict.

Well, your honour. We’ve talked and talked, and debated and debated and, you know what, at the end of the day…

Foreman – your verdict please

Your honour, we’ve decided not to mix in.

 

It’s the saddest joke I know because not mixing in,

Turning away from the nu-ness of Jewish life, the first person plural demand on our souls is a failure.

When we close ourselves off, sealing our self off from being broken in on

Preferring, instead, to hide behind a mixture of our own private concerns, laziness and embarrassment.

We demean our inheritance as Jews.

 

Kol Yisrael arayvim zeh lazeh

 

Says the Talmud,

‘All Israel is responsible for one another,’ say most translations.

But the translation ‘responsible’ falls some way short of carrying the entire meaning of the word. Arayvim

Ayin reish vet – erev – means to mixed in, we have all been thrown into a giant mixing bowel, you and I.

We were thrown together at Sinai, my destiny wrapped up in yours.

‘Not mixing in’ is an abdication of this truth, an abdication of my heritage as a Jew and a failure of the spark of humanity folded within me.

 

I know this most intimately from my experiences with a newborn child, this year.

Every time my glorious wonderful son cries in the dark recesses of the night and I roll away, considering it someone else’s problem – who am I kidding, hoping my wife will drag herself out of bed so I can remain feigning sleep -

I know I fail, I’ve closed myself up, sealed my book all by myself. What about her sleep, what about my son!

 

But this isn’t a sermon about allowing our family, or even our friends to break in on us. That is somehow too self-serving, too obvious.

This is a sermon about allowing us as a community, allowing New London Synagogue to break in on us more often, more profoundly.

 

This is, as you know well, my first year as Rabbi of this august community.

And such stories I have heard this year.

Looking out over faces I know and don’t know I’m struck by the brokenness the

tzores – the pain.

Medical tzores, professional tzores, personal tzores

 

I spoke to one member recently, I introduced myself, it’s taken me seven months to get round to calling. Failing again.

And asked if there was anything we, as a Synagogue could do for her.,

‘There’s nothing now,’ she responded, ‘but you should have called a couple of years ago when …’ and she launched into a story of medical tzores, an illness, ­an operation that had gone wrong, and an extended period of convalesce, all of which she had done void of any support from anyone at the Synagogue.

And I wished, indeed, that I, or my predecessor, had known.

We should have been more open, more ready to be impacted by her suffering.

But then again, this woman hadn’t let us know. She hadn’t told anyone. She hadn’t thought, or didn’t feel we would want to know, or didn’t want to open to us.

So here we both were, this Rabbi and this congregant, alone.

With the books of our lives shut to one another.

Un-mixed in.

What a waste.

A waste of humanity, a waste of community, religious community especially.

 

We sit here today like too many strangers.

Too many ‘I’s, not enough ‘we’s.

Too much first person singular, not enough first person plural.

Too many closed books.

Look around you, look five seats away, how many names of those five seats away from you do you know.

How many stories?

It’s all too bitty, we are foreigners to one another.

If we are not careful we will be giving a lie to the claim that we are doing this whole Rosh Hashanah thing together – avinu malkeinu¸al chet shchatanu.

This Rosh Hashanah it doesn’t really feel that this is a big reunion of the time we all stood together at the foothills of Sinai, you and I.

We’ve lost out on the greatest gift of what it means to belong, to belong to a religious community most especially.

The gift is this. Belonging to a religious community – this religious community, or any other – grants us a first circle of people to break in on us.

My wife, children, my family and the friends I have chosen because they make feel better, they don’t count.

The real test is my kehillah, my community, the people with whom I have chosen to stand before God on this most important day in the Jewish year.

It is the community – the faith community – that provides the first ripple away from our own selves, our own selfishness.

It is this set of relationships that provide the greatest test of my quality as a Jew, a human.

 

Indeed this is our story, here at New London, the shul founded by and for Rabbi Louis Jacobs of blessed memory. As a Synagogue community we were created and sustained for decades on the basis of a willingness to allow ourselves to be moved by a fellow’s story – a Rabbi’s tzores. We allowed ourselves to share in Rabbi Jacobs’ story and it brought us together, it made us strong.

As a child, as an adult as a Rabbi I have always been inspired by Rabbi Jacobs’ story. That story will always be our history, but it can’t be our future, it’s not even our present.

This shul is no longer a shul about one person’s story – no matter how great the man, no matter how stirring the story. New London is, and must strive to become ever more about all of us; a congregation of a thousand interconnected stories, a thousand interwoven lives.

 

It’s not just the tzores, it’s the joys too, the babynamings, the weddings, the successes. And perhaps above all it’s the sharing of the humdrum, the seemingly unremarkable – where I went on holiday, how’s the new job, how are the children?

A synagogue which exists in the first person plural is a synagogue full of simple acts of connection,

Acts of turning strangers in fellows,

Opening up to the strangers sitting five seats away begin to make tiny credits in a communal account that binds us into the fate of each other, like a spiders web, with every moment of connection contributing more strength, more meaning, more power to our lives as Jews.

The desperate hope is that by the time something awful happens – for indeed it is only a matter of time – there will be enough in this account, enough strength in the web, that we can be held, lifted even, even in the most difficult of times.

Every time we come to Shul and bring ourselves – opening up a bit, week on week – we make a credit in our communal account.

This is the purpose of Synagogue membership –our subscriptions allow us to open this communal account, the cosmically important account, the account which measures the quality of our commitment to our fellows, our willingness to be open the experience of strangers.

 

I’m not, today, going to suggest that we, now, all to turn to the strangers sitting around us, to introduce yourselves, to begin this process.

Because today isn’t the day when we can undo this stranger-ness.

Undoing this stranger-ness, allowing our lives to become mixed in with one another is the work of a year, maybe even more than a year.

It’s the work of fifty shabbatot of introducing ourselves to one another, gently prising open the clasps on the books of our life we are so used to holding tightly shut.

It’s fabulous here, at New London, on the shabbatot of the year.

It’s warm, bright, vibrant, alive.

Don’t be a stranger.

 

Don’t be a stranger.

It’s a common enough plea for a Rosh Hashanah address, but when I ask each and everyone of us here today not to be a stranger I mean it deeply seriously.

Don’t just come more often, but go as far as to bring yourself with you when you come.

And one week pick up a few names, and the next a bit of biography, and the next a chance to learn something important about someone, a fellow traveller in this kehillah kedushah, this holy community.

And share of yourself too. Share your name, your own narrative, what brings you here.

Why you have chosen to throw your lot in with this particular and let’s face it peculiar slice of the Jewish world.

Allow yourself some credits in your communal account, allow yourself to celebrate this gift of belonging and meaning.

Because it is a tremendous gift.

 

This is my big ask on this big day.

In the year ahead, don’t be strangers.

Bring yourself.

Allow yourself to be broken in on.

Allow your own vulnerability to become part of our collective narrative as a community.

Take your own steps to allow us to become a real community, existing in the first person plural, void of strangers, able to pray the avinu malkeinu in the first person plural.

Sharing in the triumphs and disasters of the fragile lives we all need.

If we can do that then, indeed, we have far less to fear from the decrees made against our own small lives in this year to come.

If we can do that then, indeed, we become far more worthy of decrees of life, of health, of love and of happiness.

May they come to us all.

L'Shanah Tovah.

It's Not Yours

For many of us our relationship, as Jews, with the world in which we live, has been one-way traffic.

The more we have engaged with the world in which we live

The more we have allowed that world to shape and colour the way we live our Jewish lives.

That's OK.

But today I want to make the case for a movement in the opposite direction.

I want to make the case for shaping and colouring the world out there by the way we understand our Jewish identity.

I want to talk about something that can make a difference beyond the walls of this Synagogue.

 

As Jews we have always made an impact on that world, out there.

 

As Jews we celebrate the three thousand year old claim of Genesis - that every human being is created in the image of God.

And this year marks the 60^th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, a declaration drafted by a Jew, a declaration based on this most central Jewish claim.

 

As Jews we celebrate the three thousand year old claim of Exodus - that slavery is vile and will always be overthrown.

And this great truth has been at the heart of every liberation narrative since, well since the time of Moses.

 

And now we need another great claim of our faith.

And it will need to be a great claim, for the challenges faced in the world out there are terribly terribly serious.

 

Let me take one verse.

Leviticus 25:23

Ki li haaretz, ci gerim v'toshavim atem imadi^[1]

For the earth is Mine [says God] and you are dwellers and sojourners with me.

 

This, perhaps, is the most needed Biblical message of our age.

We need it to break in on what I believe to be the greatest problem of our contemporary existence.

The greatest problem is that when we look at the world and its many material things and we think that we – in some meaningful way – can own them.

From a religious perspective this is simply wrong.

Ki li haaretz.

 

The credit crunch, the banking collapse, the stock market devaluations are scary.

Many of us – myself included – have seen the value of our property drop we've lost savings, pensions.

There will be others amongst us who have been rendered unemployed, even threatened by bankruptcy, destitution – those things are awful. And I don't want to downplay the horror of poverty.

But for the rest of us, those of us for whom the collapse of sub-prime mortgage bonds means not destitution, but rather a gnawing fear about our financial security and an ill-wished for need to tighten the belt,

For the rest of us I have this clear message.

Ki li haaretz,

It was never really our money in the first place.

We were its steward, its guardian, we looked after it as an act of grace and favour.

 

And now, well, we just davenned this in the Amidah led so beautifully by our Chazan

מָשׁוּל כְּחֶרֶס הַנִּשְׁבָּר
כְּחָצִיר יָבֵשׁ וּכְצִיץ נובֵל
כְּצֵל עובֵר

 as withering grass, a fading flower, a passing shadow,^[2]

Those material possessions are gone, or threatened.

 

You do look my son in a mov'd sort.

As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful sir.

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself.

Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve,

Leave not a rack behind.^[3]

 

That, of course, is Shakepeare's Propero

The Bible is more direct.

 

Ki li haaretz

It's not yours.

 

It is time to let our Judaism impact on our relationship with the world out there, and in particular with the way we treat the material nature of that world.

We need to step back from the drive to measure our life by the ebbs and flow of the stockmarket, for the problem is not that the FTSE is higher or lower, but that we think these kinds of numbers are a true measure of our value.

 

Let me share something else in the world out there that scares me far more even than this financial mess we are all in – the remorseless destruction of the natural resources of our planet.

It shouldn't need an ex-United States Vice-President or a United Nations Commission on Climate Change.

It certainly doesn't need a Rabbi to rehearse what we know.

We are ripping the very guts out of this planet.
And we are doing so in a profoundly un-Jewish way.

 

One day [says the Talmud] Honi ha-maagal - was journeying on the road and he saw a man planting a carob tree.

'How long before it produces fruit?' He asks

'Seventy years' Comes the reply

'Right,' says Honi – 'and you are going to live seventy years?!'

The man responds 'I found ready planted carob trees and as my ancestors planted these for me, I will plant for my children.'^[4]

 

And as for us -

At this rate, melting icecaps and all that - our grandchildren won't know polar bears.

 

Ki li haaretz

It's not yours.

 

Or as the Rabbis put it in a blunt Midrash

 

When God created the first human beings, God led them around the Garden of Eden and said: "Look at my works! See how beautiful they are—how excellent… 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.^[5]

 

Or here is another Midrash, this one based on the story of Noah.

In the Rabbis' mind Noah prophesied the coming catastrophe and was bluntly ignored, year in year out, right up to the point where the waters came rising from the deep. And then

 

Seven hundred thousand people gathered around the ark and implored Noah to grant them protection. With a loud voice he replied, 'Aren't you the rebellious ones? Haven't I prophesised for 120 years and you didn't listen to the word of God? And now you want to be kept alive?'

And the sinners cried out, 'So be it. We are ready to do teshuvah now, if only you will open the door of your ark to receive us.'

The crowd of sinners tried to take the entrance to the ark by force, but the wild beast keeping watch around the ark set upon them and many were slain, while the rest escaped, only to meet death in the waters of the flood.^[6]

 

This Midrash appeals to me even in its gloom.

It resonates with both the impending ecological catastrophe and the current financial collapse with equal prescience.

And now we are all trying to escape the flood.

 

Ki li haretz.

So how can we let this attitude to our material possessions 'break in' on us?

So how can we find another way,

To measure the value of our lives

To live lives that do not cause such distress to our battered planet?

 

Another verse.

ששת ימים תעבד ועשית כל מלאכתך:

(ט) ויום השביעי שבת ליקוק אלהיך

Six days work, do all your acts of labour,

But the Seventh day is a day of Shabbat to God.

 

This is the great gift of the Shabbat.

It allows, those of us who allow it to break in,

It allows us to recalibrate our attitude towards the material.

Six days we run, like hamsters on a wheel, to put food on our plates and to earn the necessary crust with which to pay for the car, the new clothes, the mobile telephony, the broadband exchange router.

For six days we are allowed to consider ourselves Masters of the Universe.

We are allowed to throw ourselves into in our financial, material lives.

Uvayom hashvii shvat vayinafash

But on the seventh day we are re-ensouled

 

On the Seventh day we bid 'stop, breathe.'

It is demanded that we remind ourselves that there are things in life that are more important than money.

We are commanded to commit to ways of valuing a life that cannot be measured in terms of bank balances and stock market indicators.

The seventh day is a spiritual practice in reminding ourselves that we have it all on grace and favour.

Ki li haaretz.

 

Actually, it isn't just Sabbath, though Sabbath is crucial, it is the whole apparatus of Jewish ritual practice.

All of Judaism serves as a training, a practice, a spiritual practice in realising

Ki li haaretz

 

'Judaism,' said Abraham Joshua Heschel,

'Is a candle to the soul.

It teaches us to hold on to the melody in the cacophony of life.

It teaches us to listen for the miraculous pulse of life which beats though the veins of the universe.^[7]

 

It's a sound that is heard most brightly on a day like today, a day like Shabbat, when we have stepped back from the pursuit of the material, we have allowed the world to get along without us.

We commit ourselves to be better humans, kinder, in particular we turn our attention to the relationships with those around us, our family, our partners, our colleagues, our friends.

On a day like today commit ourselves to acts of Tzedakah – justice, charity, equity.

We create a space in which to hear more clearly 'the miraculous pulse of life which beats though the veins of the universe.'

 

If a notion of a miraculous pulse beating through the veins of the universe sounds a little highfaluting and abstract, let me make things simpler.

For one day a week; leave the wallet at home.

For one day a week; pull out the intravenous cable that connects us to the internet, turn off the blackberry, don't pick up the phone.

For one day a week put down the credit card that promises we could buy happiness, and not have to pay.

 

For one day a week treat yourself to an escape from the loadstones of materiality.

And instead converse with your fellow human beings face-to-face, 'off-line' as we now have to call it.

Take time to listen to silence,

Take time to have the conversations that were always too rushed during the week.

Take time to celebrate being alive.

 

And protect this day with great dedication.

Fence this day off with candles and Kiddush.

Protect this day and let it protect you.

Strengthen it and it will strengthen you.

Because if ever there were religious claims whose time has come then these are those claims.

Ki li haaretz – It's not yours.

Uvayom hashevii, shavat vayinaafash – and the seventh day shall be a Shabbat and you shall be re-ensouled.

 

This is about more than our own state of spiritual fulfilment and richness.

These are calls, approaches, insights that the entire fragile and battered world needs, we need to share these insights, affirm their importance not just among Jews, but more broadly in the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic worlds in which we all live.

But the first step in helping the world out there to realise this most paramount truth is our own personal commitment  to this more spiritual and spirited way of living in the world.

 

Our greatest strengths, as Jews, have always shone out, eventually.

Those insights, approaches and passions we, as Jews, have tended in our own scriptures, lives and communities have eventually overturned the follies and failures of the world.

This is the greatest achievement of the Jews.

 

But before we can rely on anyone else understanding that possession doesn't really mean ownership,

Before this, we need to affirm our own commitment to the verse ki li haaretz we need to affirm our own commitment to the Sabbath as a way of ensuring we, our children and our children's children have a more balanced world in which to live.

 

I don't make a guarantee that being a better Jew will make you richer.

I don't pretend that observing Shabbat will increase the value of your share portfolio.

But I do offer this guarantee.

Know that the material things in this world are not our own – we have them as an act of grace.

Know that taking a day in seven to recalibrate our relationship with the material world is vital

And we will feel richer.

And we will be better for it

And we might even save the world.

 

My prayer and my blessing is this.

If we can do this,

If we change the way we view and treat the material world in which we live

Then, regardless of the decrees we will face in the year to come, this year, our new year, our new life, will be the sweeter and richer for it.

 

L'Shannah Tovah.