How (and where) to build a place for God

Vasu li mikdash vshechanti betocham

 

I want to give a sermon about an idea and a verse.

 

The idea is this.

It is hard for the Children of Israel to feel a connection to the Divine when the magic is turned off.

The thunder and lightening of the moment of revelation has passed and we are left with a bunch of laws and a sense, somehow, that God wishes us to follow them.

And so we stumble, we turn back to old ways and build a gloriously idolatrous cow so we can have something concrete on which we can focus our worship.

And God realises we need something more concrete, Jewish not idolatrous, to ground our worship.

Ain mukdam umeuchar betorah – teach the Rabbis. I know the story of the Golden calf will only be read in the future, but the order of the Torah is not chronology. The calf happened first, and then received the instructions on how to build the sanctuary.

 

And the essential verse in all this pre-occupation with a sanctuary is the verse at the heart of this week’s parasha

Vasu li mikdash veshochanti betocham.

Make for me a sanctuary and I will dwell among them.

 

And the mikdash  - the sanctuary – begat the beit habehira – the First Temple.

And the First Temple begat the second temple.

And the second Temple begat the first synagogues.

And here we are today.

Still finding our access to our faith and our heritage in the shadow thrown by that first mikdash.

 

What I want to do today is look at each of the words of this verse.

Unpack, a little, what Heschel would call the soul of these words and see how, by doing this, we can understand more about what we are doing here, at New London.

How did that mikdash function, religiously,

And how can this community function religiously. What will it take and what can it achieve.

 

Vasu li mikdash veshochanti betocham.

Make for me a sanctuary and I will dwell among them.

 

Veasu

And make.

It’s an innocuous word.

It’s not the special word ‘create’ or ‘form’ or ‘fashion’

Asu has no connotation of particular spiritual insight. It’s the sort of word one would describe to building a lego model.

The point, I think, is this.

There is no magic involved in creating a place where the divine can dwell. It just takes work. Turning up, volunteering to be part of a building effort.

The work of creating a holy place, a place for dwelling is simple.

Simple acts of welcome, simple conversations. How are you, who are you?

My point is this.

We can build this place of Holiness.

We can build a structure to hold that which is unholdable, beyond.

 

Mikdash

Usually translated as sanctuary really means a place of Holiness.

And Holiness, in Jewish thought is often misunderstood.

There is a ritual, we will read of it once we get on to the book of Leviticus of rendering an animal, a sheep, a cow kodesh.

It doesn’t mean that it becomes, suddenly, vested with a religious aura, rather it means you, the owner, can no longer have it.

Holiness means beyond.

That’s why we talk of God being Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh – utterly beyond all human reaching.

Because God is beyond.

Rudolf Otto the great twentieth century academic of religion, writes of God as the Holy Blessed One as the Wholly Other.

Swapping Holy [spell] for wholly [spell].

But if God was only about being beyond, wholly other, relationship would not be possible and the key to this relationship is in the next word of our verse.

 

Veshechanti

And I will dwell.

The Hebrew root sochen is from the same root as the Hebrew word for a neighbour, or a neighbourhood.

It’s the same root as the aspect of the Godhead which is most accessible, nextdoor to our lives – the shechinah

This is the sort of God who you can pop round to see, borrow a cup of sugar – who borrows sugar these days?

The word suggests an intimacy, an approachability.

In Kabbalastic thought the Godhead is sub-divided into different realms, called sephirot.

Some are untouchable, unknowable.

Others are closer.

The Shechinah is as close as we can reach.

Just beyond us, just next door.

So in the idea, in this verse is that through our building of this place the utterly beyond becomes a little nearer.

That which is Kadosh becomes the shechinah.

 

Betocham

Amongst them.

R' Shmuel Tayib , Tunisian C19th

It does not say that I may dwell in it, but rather among them, in order to teach that the Shekhinah [Divine Presence] does not rest upon the Sanctuary because of the Sanctuary, but rather because of Israel

(Tzeidah La-Derekh  in Iyyunim be-Sefer Shemot, p. 353)

 

The idea is this.

That all the building, all the material stuff that we do, ultimately it’s not about these exteriorities, these bricks, these curtains and carpets, this silverware.

All this building is a means to an end.

And the end, as Kant would surely have recognised, is us, you and me.

The end is that we feel a sense of connection, to God, to the world in which we live, to one another betocheinu.

A whole slew of Rabbinic commentaries make the point that God doesn’t need a mikdash, God’s glory fills the world.

The need for a structure is ours.

This is very Jewish.

And it applies as much to the notion of a mikdash as it does to any of the formal physical elements of our faith. The candlesticks, the bits of matzah, the sound of the prayers, even the reading Torah.

None of these things are in themselves ultimate.

They are the tools to allow a sanctity to manifest inside us.

And if you have never felt it, I’m sorry.

But it does work, it’s been working for thousands of years.

It’s a form of practice. We have to throw ourselves into our practicing, let go of the little voice that says, why is it really important to light these candles, because ultimately we all know that it is not.

But the candles are the mikdash – the frame which allows the sense of the Divine to find itself in us.

The Jewish experience of the presence of the Divine is designed to be found inside us.

 

So this is a verse about a dance

A dance between two sides of the divine – the transcendent – the Holy. And the immanent – the tangible.

Between side that is beyond and the side which we can have a relationship with.

That is the promise, the deal, of Synagogue life.

That which is beyond can be discovered betocheinu inside ourselves.

And how do we find it? Through simple acts of commitment, connection, building.

 

Shabbat shalom

 

In Search of a Hebrew Word for ‘Empathy’

As many of you will know I have spent a chunk of time in Israel these past few weeks and I want, today, to reflect on two of my experiences there and offer some observations on, perhaps the single most important element of the emotional tug to do good that there exists in Judaism, for it is an element in rich display in this week's parasha.

 

Last week, as part of Rabbinic Assembly Convention I travelled with a number of other Rabbis to Tel Aviv to see a side of Israel most Israelis don't know about, let alone most tourists.

The area around the old bus station in Tel Aviv was long ago abandoned by Israelis who could afford to move elsewhere; too dirty and noisy. Now it has become the centre for illegal workers, eking out an existence on the edge of Israeli society. Some of these workers are refugees; fleeing atrocities in Darfur, Eretria and the like and others came over legally, for example to work as home carers, only to lose work permits. It's a strange world, one where very odd rules apply. The butchers sell pork and along the streets are signs in all kinds of languages, just not in Hebrew. The owners of brothels love the area because none of the local residents dare complain to the police since they risk deportation. Even the police are happy, the area is centred on one main thoroughfare and every now and again they come down, seal off one end, seal off the other and deport everyone caught in the middle.

 

We met with an Eritrean who spoke of the oppression he faced in his home country and his decision to flee to Israel, a country he knew of from the Bible stories. He walked across Egypt and the Sinai was shot at by the Egyptian border guards, who killed his brother and now he is in Israel he is seeking asylum, but the Israeli government refuse to make a deliberation on his case. The problem, for the Israelis, is that they have good diplomatic relations with Eritrea which they don't want to jeopardise by acknowledging that this one-party, military dictatorship known for mass arrests, torture and illegal killing. And so this Eritrean boy, who's read his Bible, turns up in a land first claimed as Jewish by a bunch of refugees from Egyptian oppression, and in a State forged out of the horrors of the Holocaust and is told that there is place for him.

I know it's not easy for Israel. There are plenty of corrupt abusive regimes arrayed around her borders and Israel is rightly concerned not to be seen as a sink-hole for refugees from across Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but the irony of refugees from slaughter and oppression being told that they can't find even a work permit in the State of Israel is sharp enough to cut me.

 

About four weeks ago, at the tail end of Operation Cast Lead I met with a well known Israeli educator who had just come back from a training for Israeli born youth leaders - madrichim who were preparing to spend the summer staffing American Jewish camps.

He had tried to run a session on empathy – on feeling the pain of others – a useful enough skill for Youth Camp madrichim – but had felt he had come up against a brick wall in the context of Operation Cast Lead.

'There wasn't,' he told me, 'any space left for these guys to feel the pain of those in Gaza. Their ability to hold pain was all used up by their own suffering, their own sense of being victims, attacked, terrorised.'

 

That distressed me.

'There's no word in Hebrew for empathy,' I noted, 'empatia' he suggested, not really in disagreement.

 

That lack of space to feel the pain of the other.

That lack of ability to find in our own hearts space to see those who scare us, those who many of us  would consider enemies, is occasioned by more, of course, than the last few year's worth of rocket attacks. There are the wars of 73 and 67 and 48, not to mention the Holocaust and pogroms and the expulsions and everything else. Many of us have run out of space.

We've become so trained in seeing ourselves as the put-upon, the oppressed, the victim, that we need a prod to remind ourselves that it is possible that we might have become oppressors, perpetrators. It's not a matter, to me, of counting up the number of missiles that have landed in one place and balancing them against the number of missiles that have landed in another.

It's not even a case of balancing the number of dead, God help us.

The question is this – can we find the room to see in the stories of the other our own stories? Or are we so invested in seeing every tale of redemption and escape from tyranny as being about our redemption and our escape to exclusion of any other people getting a look in?

 

All this brings me to this week's parasha.

 

וְגֵר לֹא-תוֹנֶה, וְלֹא תִלְחָצֶנּוּ:  כִּי-גֵרִים הֱיִיתֶם, בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם.

 וְגֵר, לֹא תִלְחָץ; וְאַתֶּם, יְדַעְתֶּם אֶת-נֶפֶשׁ הַגֵּר--כִּי-גֵרִים הֱיִיתֶם, בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם

 

As for the stranger in your midst, you shall not wrong or oppress them, for your were strangers in the Land of Egypt.

And again,

As for the stranger you shall not oppress for you know the soul of a stranger, for you were strangers in the Land of Egypt.

 

The command not to oppress the ger is repeated 34 times in the Bible.

And it's clear that ger in this context doesn't mean the convert. It means the outsider to the Jewish community who wants to live in the Israelite camp, it is precisely the model of the migrant worker, the economic refugee that so many of us, or our parents have been over time.

It certainly would cover the case of our Eritrean friend.

This is the way in which empathy functions in Hebrew.

There may be no word for it, but the idea could not be clearer.

We are commanded to feel the pain of the dispossessed, the alone, the widows, the orphans, all of them, because we know the soul of the ger.

It is hard wired into what Jung would probably call our collective unconsciousness.

And while the Bible tells us to do many things zecher yitziat mitzrayim – as a response to our own redemption from pain, the thing we are told most often is to take care of those contemporary victims of oppression, those who in a contemporary milieu, a milieu in which we English Jews function so well and feel so comfortable, have no voice, no power, no legal personality.

For this has been our story. Ki gerim hayinu.

And we give meaning to it by the way we live out its moral in how we treat other gerim.

 

In fact it may even be that the Jewish version of empathy, forged as it is in the instruction to neither wrong or oppress.

Why empathy might be seen as merely an emotional response the Rabbis, with their eye for concrete action take the general terms 'wrong' and 'oppress' and render them even more explicitly as commands not to wrong with words and not to oppress with financial opportunism^[1]

 

One ancient Aggadah even looks at the placement of this verse, next to a command to avoid idol worship to suggest that one who oppresses a ger by making something of their different religious outlook is deemed to have committed the great sin of avodah zarah themselves.^[2]

 

It turns out that to be a true survivor of the experiences of our faith we have to look beyond our own people.

As tired as we may be, as hurt as we may be.

The command is clear – but it is not a command to feel empathy – we can be reminded of what we might have forgotten – ki gerim hiyitem – but the command is to action.

To hear the voice of those who suffer from the same lack of legal personality, economic possibility and emotional security as we have suffered from throughout time.

 

Shabbat shalom,

---

^[1] Mechilta and Rashi ad loc

^[2] Leket, cited in Torah Shleimah Exodus 22:266

Happy New Year To Trees Everywhere

 

It snowed this week.

You might have noticed.

It snowed and all the big grown up things in the world froze up, clammed up and shut up.

And all the young things in the world, jumped up, ran out and played.

 

It’s Tu B’Shvat tomorrow night.

The Jewish New Year for Trees, so I thought, this week, I would look at a Jewish relationship with nature, with weather and with nature.

 

Psalm 148, one of the daily repeated Psalms contains this beautiful piece of poetry.

 

3. Praise him, sun and moon; praise him, all you stars of light.

4. Praise him, heavens of heavens, and you waters that are above the heavens.

5. Let them praise the name of the Lord; for he commanded, and they were created.

6. And he established them for ever and ever; he has made a decree which shall not pass.

7. Praise the Lord from the earth, you crocodiles, and all deeps;

8. Fire, and hail; snow, and vapors; stormy wind fulfilling his word;

9. Mountains, and all hills; fruitful trees, and all cedars;

10. Beasts, and all cattle; creeping things, and winged birds;

11. Kings of the earth, and all peoples; princes, and all judges of the earth;

12. Young men and also virgins; old men, and children;

13. Let them praise the name of the Lord; for his name alone is exalted; his glory is above the earth and heaven.

 

I feel two things reading this Psalm.

One is the sense that it is all God.

Indeed we have an idiomatic term for earthquakes, hurricanes and the like, we call them Acts of God, even the supposed atheists.

Weather is God’s will made manifest in the world.

To appreciate the weather is to appreciate God’s power, might

 

The other thing is how violent all the weather is.

God seems to like His weather bold, and we are encouraged to be bold in return -

Halelu btziltzelei shema, halelu btziltzelie truah – praise Him with crashing cymbals and clanging cymbals.^[1]

The weather is noisy and scary, it is supposed to be scary.

I’m reminded of God’s answer to Job.

Job challenges God’s justice and ultimately God responds by directing Job’s attention to the weather – to nature, to the violent power of nature.

26. Behold, God is great, and we know him not, the number of his years is unsearchable.

27. For when he draws up small drops of water; they are distilled into a stream of rain;

28. Which the clouds drop and pour down on man abundantly.

29. Can anyone understand the spreading of the clouds, or the noise of his tabernacle?

30. Behold, he spreads his light upon it, and covers the roots of the sea.

31. For by these he judges the people; he gives food in abundance.

32. He covers his hands with the lightning, and commands it where it shall strike.

33. The noise of the storm tells of it, the cattle also of the rising tempest.

 

The purpose of weather is to remind us that we are no in control.

To remind us that there is a power beyond us, beyond our human grasping.

We do not run the world entirely according to our own fiat.

 

We are learning this lesson in any number of quarters at this time.

We are not the Masters of the Universe.

To be a person of faith one needs to cultivate an ability to let go.

This sense is held even in the Hebrew term for belief – emunah it means something that can be leaned on, we rest our weight against the forces of the Universe and hope, through our lives of gratitude and contribution that there will be enough there to keep up propped up in the storms.

 

I remember as a child at School a karate teacher doing a demonstration designed to encourage school kids to sign up for karate classes.

He invited one of the locks from the school first XV rugby team to come up on stage and punch him in the stomach as hard as he good.

Meanwhile the teacher prepared himself in the manner of one Karate school or another. The punch was thrown and thump. It landed, it looked it hurt, but the teacher got on with his presentation.

He asked the rugby palyer to throw a second punch, this time while the teacher prepared himself in the matter of Tai Chi.

The punch never seemed to land. It was thrown and the teacher bent around the onrushing fist and the energy dissipated.

It was the different, he told us, between the oak and the willow.

The oak may well withstand blows, but the truer strength, the deeper strength, was the strength of the willow.

Able to sway with the wind, withstand the storms, existing in harmony with the weather rather than fighting against it.

It’s very Jewish way to face up to the ebbs and flows of the powers that are beyond our control.

Weeping like a willow when things go wrong,

Weeping like a willow even when things seem so wonderful

Swaying like the willow in the fierce winds, bending, buckling even, but retaining the ability to spring back.

That is the strength we should wish for, as humans, as Jews.

Not the strength of the oak – the strength that is impressive right up to the moment when crack, we snap and all our strength is exposed as no more than firewood.

But the strength of the willow, shedding leaves in winter and gaining again in summer.

 

This is what we learn from nature.

We learn that the ebb and flow of success and failure comes like summer and winter, that joy will be followed by sadness and sadness will be followed by joy.

There is a powerful spiritually to be accessed in nature.

It’s not ‘nice,’ it’s not twee, but it is holy.

And it’s true.

 

Dating back, only as far as the seventeenth century is the ritual of the Tu Bishvat Seder.

A classic piece of Kabbalistic invention, smuggling some of the garb of a ‘ritual rich’ festival and adjusting them to a ritual poor moment in the calendar.

In the classic Tu B’shvat seder of the Pri Etz Hadar^[2] the four cups of wine are matched to different kinds of fruit which are in turn matched to different aspects of creation; Divine creation and our own.

 

The journey begins with the Kabbalistic modality of Asiyah – manufacture.

Putting together bits of wood to make, for example a chair, or a table.

This is the lowest kind of creativity, we can all do it, we all do it all the time.

And this level of creation is marked with consumption of fruit with inedible shells – pomegranates, walnuts, almonds, pistachios and on the list goes.

 

And then the journey continues with the modality of Yetzhirah – formation.

Turning a tree trunk, for example, into planks of wood.

This is a little more sophisticated, as a kind of creation, but not by much. We can all do Yetzirah.

And this level of creation is marked with the consumption of fruit with edible exteriors, but an inedible core – olives, dates, cherries, plums and on the list goes.

 

And the journey continues with the modality of Briah – creation.

This is the highest form of creation we, as humans, can manage – if indeed it is within our grasp at all.

Creating a tree from a seed, an acorn, for example.

And this level of creation is marked with the consumption of fruit with no protective inedible elements at all; grapes, figs, apples.

 

There is a fourth level of creation – Aztilut – the creation of the thing that creates the seed that begats the tree, but that is beyond our realm, as finite humans.

There are no fruits we can eat to touch this level of creation.

 

But the most remarkable aspect of this matching of kinds of creative potential and power to fruit is that the most high, the most impressive acts of creation are matched not to the tough, well protected fruit, but the bare fruit, the naked fruit, as it were.

The fruit most easily bruised, damaged, destroyed.

This is the great irony and great truth about life.

The more boldy and brilliantly we live, the more we are at the mercy of our environment.

The more tiny, secure lives we lead, the better protected we are, but the less creative we are able to be.

 

So this is the call.

That we should our lives more like a willow,

More open to the most powerful levels of creation, willing to take risks,

Willing to bend and rebound.

Living in tune with our God and our Universe.

 

Shabbat shalom and Happy New Year to Trees Everywhere.

---

^[1] Ps 150

^[2] See the introduction and translation in L. Fine Judaism in Practice (Princeton 2001) p.81 & sub.

Fame - of sorts

 

I’m to be featured in a programme about God and the Internet.

Radio 4, Monday 9^th February, 11:00.

 

More info, in case you are interested, here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hc2cx

 

 

Bad Weather Closing In and It's Nothing To Do With The Snow

 

 

Two members of the community have lost their jobs this week – and that’s only the members I know about. In a week when so much attention has been paid to the weather forecasts, it does feel as if we are standing on an exposed plain watching stormy clouds rolling in.

 

Care of those facing economic difficult, temporarily or otherwise, has always been a central part of Jewish community and commitment. At a time where so many are in fear I offer the following three pieces of Rabbinic advice.

 

Do let us know in the Synagogue. We would want to be able to help on a personal basis and besides there may be opportunities we are aware of that could assist you professionally. We also have a fund for those who are facing financial need, if you are interested in applying to that fund, please contact by e-mail. Of course there is no question of withholding any ability to engage with any part of Synagogue communal life from those facing financial need, we just need to know.

In fact you should tell everyone. Loss of employment in this current climate is no cause for embarrassment or denial, Rather, at least for your Jewish friends, letting us know that you face financial difficulties gives us opportunities to perform a mitzvah – an obligation to recognise our mutual responsibilities. Kol Yisrael Arevim Zeh Lazeh teaches the Talmud. The phrase is usually translated as ‘All Israel are responsible for one another,’ but the exact means is that there is an insistence that we accept a need to act as financial guarantors for one another. Our oft-spoken communal responsibilities are firstly financial.

 

Secondly do approach the Employment Resource Centre - http://www.ercentre.org/ - The ERC offers advice and guidance on developing a CV, training in interview preparation techniques, advice concerning job search strategy, career guidance and networking as well as additional specific training seminars. It is a service provided free to the entire Jewish community and several members of my previous community have found their support invaluable.

 

Thirdly – don’t stop. We live in a society that encourages (and almost demands) we place our professional responsibilities at the centre of our identities – ‘How do you do, I am a banker, an accountant, a ….’ When we lose our job we lose not only the income (and that is grave enough), we also are threatened with a loss of identity. Don’t stop. ‘Even the poor person who is sustained by charitable handouts must give charity,’ teaches the Talmud, that is a demand designed not to increase charitable contributions, but instead to increase the sense of dignity in the giver. If you can’t make the financial contribution you would wish, make contributions in other ways. Just don’t let the loss of employment strip you of your ability and willingness to be a force for good in the world. Judaism refuses to consider human beings = their employment. We are, more importantly, the sum of our relationships with our fellow human beings and the Divine – the cosmos in which we all find ourselves. Loss of employment cannot be allowed to get in the way of those relationships. Indeed, with a little more time, take advantage of the opportunity to nourish those relationships.

 

Tell us, contact the ERC, don’t stop.

And pray.

 

Harachaman hu yifarnasenu b’cavod – May the Merciful one bring us an honourable livelihood.

 

May it come to us all,

Shabbat shalom.

Why I love the Bible, the messy dark Bible

Because no-one has put it better than Yehudah Amichai

---

 

I’ve Filtered out the Book of Ester

I’ve filtered out of the book of Ester the residue

Of vulgar joy, and out of the Book of Jeremiah

The howl of pain in the guts. And out of the

Song of Songs the endless search for love,

And out of the Book of Genesis the dreams

And Cain, and out of Ecclesiastes

The despair and out of the Book of Job – Job

And from what was left over I pasted for myself a new Bible.

Now I live censored and pasted and limited and in peace.

 

A woman asked me last night in the darkened street about the weel-being of another woman

Who had died before her time, and not in anyone’s time.

Out of great tiredness I answered her:

She’s fine, she’s fine.

'See that evil [ra'h] should be before you.'

So says Pharaoh to Moses in one of the many confrontations between monarch and prophet that are a motif of this, and last week’s, portion. There is a Rabbinic tradition that whenever a Biblical verse commands ‘see,’ the Rabbis need to find a concrete object to which gaze is being directed. While ‘see’ in the Biblical sense probably functions in the same way as it does in English – ‘I see what you mean’ - the Rabbis incline towards the concrete.

 

Rashi suggests that Pharaoh is directing Moses’ attention towards a specific star; ‘There is a star called ra’h and Pharaoh claims, “I have learnt from my astronomers that this star is rising to meet you in the desert and it is a sign of blood and death.”’ This is Pharaoh’s prophecy and it explains why, in the aftermath of the Golden Calf debacle, Moses pleas to save the Children of Israel by saying ‘[God you can’t wipe out the Israelites] less the Egyptians will say that God brought them out with ra’h – under the power of this star.’ (Ex 32:12). Pharaoh cannot be allowed to win out. God, the teaching suggests, performs a volte face and the verse in Exodus 32 continues by suggesting ‘God turned back the ra’h’ – flipped over the predictions of Pharaoh’s astrologers and, in place of subjugation brings jubilation.

 

On the one hand it is classic piece of rabbinics, tying together mentions of the same word in different Biblical verses. On the other hand this comment alludes to a profound message of the Exodus narrative. Pharaoh thinks the fate of the Children of Israel is sealed in the stars, secure and knowable (at least by astrologers). Moses, together with God and the Children of Israel, are the proof of the possibility of the new. God transcends the heavens and can transcend the fate the stars predict. The essence of slavery (in a spiritual sense) is the perspective of Pharaoh – the evil star is fated, fixed and will come to pass. The essence of freedom is a belief that no matter where one finds oneself today, tomorrow brings new possibility.

 

I have spent the week in Israel where the country is limbering up for a general election. All four leading parties are campaigning under different versions of the same message - ‘We are strong, we will be strong.’ All three contenders for the office of Prime Minister are offering different versions of the same message that has driven Israeli-Palestinian relations for ten years. Meanwhile Palestinians are bedding in for more of the same. It’s a mentality of slavery for both peoples. We need a prophet. We need God to turn back the stars, flipping over the predictions of the astrologers. It’s a good thing to pray for and if has happened before, it can happen again.