The Presence of Absence and the Absence of Presence - Yizkor 5786

I want to talk about a Kabbalistic term – Reshimu. It means impression or trace. The term is used in Lurianic Kabbalah to refer to the presence of God even after the Infinite presence of the Divine retreated from the world right at the very start of creation.

Creation begins, in the Lurianic imagination, with God retreating away, while leaving behind a Reshimu that can still, sometimes, be felt.

 

Over the summer, my family and I took a tour of the Mellach – the old Jewish quarter of Tetuán in Morocco. Jews used to make up a substantial part of the city. And while our delightful guide Mohammed assured us that, “in Morocco the Jew, the Muslim and the Spanish live together as brothers and sisters,” something was disquieting
about being advised to peer through the wire grills over the windows of the only Synagogue still standing, of the once 16 Synagogues in the Mellach, standing, that is, as a museum, not a centre for Jewish life. Not that we could go inside, the museum was closed for the summer.

There’s a beautiful blue ceramic tiled water fountain in the Mellach, inscribed with that verse from Isaiah, וּשְׁאַבְתֶּם-מַיִם בְּשָׂשׂוֹן, - and you shall carry water in joy. It’s beautiful, but no longer working and certainly no longer slaking the thirsts of Jews no longer living in the area.

And there is the Horno El-Mellah – the oven of the Jewish quarter – the place where the Jews of Tetuán would once take their Hamin –pots of stew – on a Friday afternoon to cook over Shabbat and be ready for lunch. There’s a heritage sign, explaining the oven's date of construction, but … no pots of Hamin.

The Jewish life we felt, and you could definitely feel something, was an impression – a Reishimu; a presence defined by its absence. It could be felt in the pit of the stomach, like an ache that was somehow familiar and in its pain somehow simultaneously comforting.

The thing that I was really looking out for, as we wandered down the streets of the Mellach, along streets named Rue Haifa or Avraham Ben Tata – were signs of Jewish life on doorposts. There are a few left, not actual Mezuzot, but hollows carved into doorframes – just above shoulder height – just at kissing height – where the Jewish inhabitants of Tetuán carved out a space in which to secrete the scrolls of the Shema, Uchtavtem al Mezuzot Beitecha. Apparently, that was the way you fixed Mezuzot in Tetuan in the early to mid-20th century – you carved out a space in which you placed the thing you cared about. And fifty/sixty years later, though the Jews are all gone, the empty space is still, sometimes, present.

I’ve seen these absent spaces on doorposts before, wandering through the Shetls and Ghettos haunted by once-Jewish communities in former Nazi Europe. There’s even a project – MiPolin’s Mezuzah From This Home, where Judaica artists Helena Czernek and Aleksander Prugar travel to the great centres of Jewish life, pre-Shoah, making plaster casts of the hollowed out once-places of Mezuzot on the doorposts of Lublin, Krakow and the like and making new Mezuzot from these casts of absence. The group of New Londoners who travelled with Angela Gluck to Poland this year bought one. Stood in the shop, Angela, I’m reliably informed, taught about the absence of presence and the presence of absence. Of course she did. Jewish life casting its own Reshimu.

That word – Reshimu – is based on an unusual Biblical root. It appears only once in the Bible, in the Book of Daniel, where an angel uses it to explain something inscribed - הָרָשׁוּם בִּכְתָב אֱמֶת –inscribed in a writing of truth. The commentaries suggest that Roshem is more powerful than the normal kind of writing – Katav; closer to the Hebrew word Chokek –literally to carve. You have to think like an ancient; to really intend to leave a record, in ancient times, you would carve away.[1]

For the Kabbalists, all presence, all creation is built from absence, lined with a Reshimu – an absence in which there can still be felt to be a presence.

 

I had a similar thought, about the absence of presence and presence of absence, around the bereavement that hit me personally the hardest this last year – the loss of our former Chazan of blessed memory, Stephen Cotsen. Stephen was a friend, a mentor, a partner and our Chazan and his passing in Nissan left me missing him and, even with the beauty of the Slichut we’ve been so blessed to have from Yoav and David last night, I still feel both his presence and his absence, especially today. I feel a kind of friendship still alive.  But there’s also a raw absence, a stomach pain that occasionally manifests as tears – another kind of Reshimu.

 

At Chazan Stephen’s funeral, we, as a community formed an escort – literally a Levaya - for him. As scores of his Bar Mitzvah students and wedding couples and congregants from Mill Hill or Cardiff or Brixton or Hackney emerged alongside friends old and new, I had this sharp sense that his life –  too short as it was – was Nirsham inscribed in the negative space delineated by all our presence, Nirsham as an absence held by our presence.

A bit like that image of Rubin’s vase – that sometimes looks like two human faces facing one another and sometimes looks like a vase. Edgar Rubin – the Danish psychologist behind that image was Jewish, by the way.

I’m not sure which, in this analogy, for a life that is past, but still present, is the vase and which are the faces, but at the funeral and the Shuva and since, there have been those of us standing round and remembering and talking about a life that has passed, and embodying in our own lives a shift because we knew Stephen and loved Stephen and were touched by Stephen and in that paradoxical moment, he – like so many of those we stand today and remember – is present in his absence.

That’s why we come here for Yizkor – לרשׁם בִּכְתָב אֱמֶת to inscribe again this negative space into our continued lives, to feel absent presence and to trace back the way in which we are changed – made better - by the lives we remember.

Up here today, on the day Chazan Stephen loved more than any other in our calendar. I feel Stephen’s expectation that I pay the closest attention to the page numbers and the congregational responses

wanting me to keep the sermon just a little shorter

wanting me do everything I can to ensure that all of us here today know that this Mesorah, this tradition of prayer, this way of standing before our Creator is powerful and our greatest gift and we do well to tend it carefully.

What are the urges each of our loved ones push up against us, in each of their absent presences?

I know we all feel similar versions of this Reshimu from the death-transcending lives we gather today to recall. Here is the model, the Yizkor services hold up. Now, what are we to do with the breath still granted us?

What was once present can be absent, but what is definitely absent can also be so very present as a feeling and as a challenge.

My point is that what is no longer physically present isn’t really absent, or at least isn’t just absent. Of course, it hurts to, no longer, have someone to hold, or someone to hold us. But the pain isn’t just bad. It’s the cost of love, it’s the Reshimu of having once been intertwined. Our wonderful member Louis is thankfully out of hospital. Louis – this one’s for you – like entangled electrons – we continue to experience presence in absence.

There are places to go to experience the souls of those who have left us on the other side of the curtain that separates the living and dead – you can go to a cemetery, or a Shtetl or to a Mellah, or to a favoured park bench. And there are times when the opacity of the harsh division between the living and the dead becomes translucent.

I don’t really know what happens at the end of time, or when we die. I don’t think any Jew would claim to. We just don’t go big on structuring exactly how which of us gets to be in which circle of heaven – or frankly hell. But I do believe in this;

There’s a time to strive forward in our own right and live with the future before us for as long as we are able. And there’s a time to reflect on the gnawing pains – the Reshimu in our gut – and feel the presence of the absence of those we have loved who now rest behind a veil, sometimes more and sometimes less translucent. For those of us fortunate to have ever been loved by someone now passed, that will be painful. But if we stop our running around and honour the call to come together in places like this, at times like this, we can, if we are lucky, still be blessed by a feeling of presence in that which is absence. And in that moment, our lives become greater than merely the length of our days on this planet.

May we all be so blessed.

May the memories of those we have loved and lost be always for a blessing.

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[1] There’s a similar idea in the opening of the Zohar, where creation begins with God carving out a carving in the light of the heavens – the Aramaic is גָּלִיף גְּלוּפֵי – sharing an etymology with the English word ‘glyph’ as in ‘hieroglyph’. 

Neilah - For This, Ships Are Built

A colleague of mine, Rabbi Paul Arberman, recently shared a sentence he heard from his mother: “A ship in harbor,” said Mrs Arberman, “is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for”.

I’ve been thinking about the phrase – originally attributed to John A. Shedd – in the context of these bruising times and in the context of this day of retreat, this time of Neilah. We’ve been in harbour. It’s time to set sail again soon.

It’s stormy outside.

 

Here, I think, is the goal – the very thing I would want out there on the seas. It’s based on a Mishnah and a teaching of Rabbi Sharon Brous from her book, The Amen Effect.

Mishnah Middot describes, largely, the size of the Temple. And having set out quite how large this building was, it says this.

כָּל הַנִּכְנָסִין לְהַר הַבַּיִת נִכְנָסִין דֶּרֶךְ יָמִין וּמַקִּיפִין וְיוֹצְאִין דֶּרֶךְ שְׂמֹאל,[1]

Everyone coming into the Temple area would come in and turn to the right, and walk around until they exited on the left.

חוּץ מִמִּי שֶׁאֵרְעוֹ דָבָר, שֶׁהוּא מַקִּיף לִשְׂמֹאל.

Apart from those to whom something awful had happened. They would walk around to the left, and the people who would pass these people going around to the left would say,

 מַה לְּךָ מַקִּיף לִשְׂמֹאל,

What has happened that you are going round to the left.

And the person going round to the left would respond, I’m in mourning.

And the person going round to the right would respond, May the One who dwells in this house comfort you.

הַשּׁוֹכֵן בַּבַּיִת הַזֶּה יְנַחֲמֶךָּ.

It’s an incredible idea, of an entire society that understands some people just can’t go around the same way as everyone else, of an entire society that is alert and asks - מַה לְּךָ מַקִּיף לִשְׂמֹאל,  - what has happened that you are going round to the left?

What an incredible society it would be, if you were to share the thing that causes pain with another human being, there would come a response that is compassionate, allows the pain, and just seeks to draw out some of the sting.

I know, I know, it feels a long, long way away.

I know, I know, it feels more often that no one is interested in our pain and that if we were ever to expose just a piece of our vulnerability, we would meet either incomprehension, or dumb silence, or worse, that awful ‘whataboutery’ or even cruelty.

Who among us is brave enough, when faced with the option to go round in the same direction as everyone else, to choose to go round in the opposite direction, along with all of those שֶׁאֵרְעוֹ דָבָר to whom something awful happened?

I’m not often that brave.

And who among us, even if we saw someone coming towards us, in the opposite direction, maybe even bearing a Kriah – a torn garment, or another mark of a torn soul – would trust ourselves to say the right thing, would feel confident saying anything?

I’m rarely that brave and, quite literally, this is my job.

I, like so many of us, fight against this urge to lurk in the habour where it is safe. But, as Mrs Arberman reminded her son, “that’s not what ships are built for”.

I want, as the Gates are closing, to give us a bit more confidence, a bit more hope, a bit more faith in being a ship on the open sea, in being a human who is prepared to encounter another human with compassion. Because I think this is what we are built for – meeting, encountering, sharing, caring.

 

My oboe-playing daughter was at a week-long music camp over the summer, and I traipsed off to Kent to watch the performance and pick her up at the end of the week. As we were leaving, my daughter, her oboe and I, kippah-on, one of the other parents came up to me, took my hand, looked me in the eyes and said, “Awful, I know, awful these things. I just wanted to say, I’m with you.” And then he slipped away to re-find his woodwind-playing child. These things happen a lot.

 

I was touched by something written by Sarah Tuttle-Singer, a Jerusalem-based writer. She wrote of a bunch of things she doesn’t trust – it’s not so easy to trust in what she calls a “post-truth, apocalyptic swirl of fake news, AI manipulations and narrishkeit” But there are, nonetheless, many things in which she does trust;

I trust [she wrote] the bus driver who slammed on the brakes and opened the doors when he saw me sprinting down the street.

I trust the greengrocer who explains why the mangoes are perfect this summer, and why the avocados are disappointing.

I trust the Old City merchant who told me not to buy floaty dresses from his stall, but to go instead to the wholesaler he uses, where they cost a third of the price. [I presume that’s an Arab old city merchant, she’s written plenty about meetings with Arabs in Jerusalem].

Trust is a spiritual practice, it takes … practice.

And Tuttle-Singer also wrote this

And I trust my children. Not because they are perfect, but because they are growing. Because they are learning to choose kindness, to discern, to stumble and get up again. Because they carry tomorrow inside them - and they’re stubbornly refusing to let go of the hope that can come with it.

I trust my own children.

Actually, I know a bunch of your children, the children of New London Synagogue. I trust them too. And not just our own children, there’s an entire generation out there worth trusting, because despite the Covid thing and the AI thing and everything else, they are growing, learning to choose kindness and stubbornly refusing to let go of hope. Our children are remarkable.

And I think it’s up to the rest of us, the supposed grown-ups, to more stubbornly refuse to let go of hope.

I think it’s up to the rest of us to try and be bolder on the stormy seas.

The story is told of the four Jews, of a certain age, who would meet every Thursday for a cup of late-morning coffee.

Oy, said the first

Oy vey, said the second

Oy veyz mir, said the third.

Listen, said the fourth, I thought we agreed not to talk about politics.

That’s not going to be good enough. That’s not what we are built for.

The story should be told about four Jews of a certain age who gathered for a late-morning coffee.

“Wow,” said the first, “did you see the way the autumnal sun glints through the yellowing leaves?”

“Just yesterday,” said the second, “I excused myself for accidentally bumping into a stranger and they responded, perfectly civilly. We had a momentary meeting of hearts over the contents of our shopping bags.”

 “Actually, I’m not doing so well,” shared the third. “I need to ask for your help,” and the conversation soared and the world, just a little piece of it, was mended.

On the occasions in my life when I have, in the language of the Mishnah from Middot, indeed turned to the left – allowed myself to be seen in need of care, I’ve always been surprised by the warmth that has greeted me. At the very least, turning left has always clarified for me who I should seek out as friends. And there are many, many I should be seeking out as friends.

The turning to the left, the admittance that I’m stumbling, the abstaining from grunting, ‘yeah fine’ when asked how I’m doing, has served less, in my life, to mark me out as someone to be avoided, and more, in my experience, as someone others have wished to know better.

My experience of fighting back the desire to remain in harbour and instead make myself available to meet strangers and strangeness and otherness and pain has not brought me to a place of depression or anxiety but rather given me a sense of the beauty that exists in humanity; a beauty that is available to us all – if we set sail from our harbour.

I know. Other experiences differ. I’m not recommending we present every stranger we pass with the fullest list of every ailment and woe we’ve experienced since childhood, on first meeting. But can we tweak the way go around in this world? Can we look out for the other brave ships with whom we share this sea, all of whom are all built for this purpose of seeking companionship, sharing kindness and building a world of decency? What a world we might build.

My mind goes to that extraordinary idea in Talmud Kiddushin (40b), and Rambam’s Hilchot Teshuvah (3:4), that the world, and all the people in it are like a set of weighing scales precariously balanced in equilibrium. And one act, one single gesture towards the direction in which we wish the world to follow, will tip not only our own self, but Col HaOlam Kulo – the whole wide world – towards the scale of merit, towards the scale of compassion, towards the scale of a better world for us all.

In a world so febrile and seeming to be so hostile, setting sail, being willing to bare weaknesses, to encounter – with compassion – the weaknesses of another is, surely, the greatest act of spiritual resistance.

There is a world out there, beyond this day of harbouring, in which the forces that do not make our world a better place, rely on our spiritual nervousness to argue there is nothing in this world stronger than hatred, or at the very least, as if we are all playing a zero-sum game where your benefit must mean my loss.

But the truth is, there is love in this world. There is that which we can trust and there is a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, and if we were only able to build this world together, what a wonderful world it would be.

May we sail well. May we love well. May we be bold and brave and compassionate and kind. And in doing so, may we build and bring just a little bit closer, the world in which we would all wish to live.

May it come to us all.

Chatimah Tovah

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[1] 2:2

A Rosh Hashanah Message - The Things that Happen Behind a Veil of Ignorance

May Pundak and Dr Rula Hardal on Receiving the Innagural Vivian Silver Impact Award 

It is, again, a difficult year for writing Rosh Hashanah sermons. I don't expect much sympathy. It's easier to write a sermon than spend even a minute as a captive in some godforsaken tunnel under Gaza. It's easier too, to write a sermon than to spend even a minute in some Gazan not-very-safe refuge. But I've been thinking about what is ‘just.’ I’ve been thinking about Israel and Gaza and Palestine and I want to share that journey with you.

Tzedek Tzedek Tirdof – pursue justice, only justice Lmaan Techyeh VYarishta Et HaAretz – pursue justice that you may live, and possess the land. Justice and land.

I’ve been reading John Rawls’ Theory of Justice. Imagine, suggested Rawls, that you brought together the brightest people you can find and task them with working out principles of justice for the society they would enter. But they have to figure this stuff out behind what Rawls called a ‘veil of ignorance’ where no-one knows, as he puts it,

“[their,] class position or social status, their fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, intelligence, strength, and the like.”

It’s only once they have figured out what is and what is not just, that the specific nature of how they will exist in society will be revealed.

It’s a remarkable thought-experiment.

I think the Torah expresses a similar idea when, just before the verse, Tzedek, Tzedek Tirdof, there’s an instruction given to judges - Lo Takir Panim. That’s often translated as ‘do not show partiality’ but literally the phrase means, ‘don’t recognise faces.’  I’m going to understand that to mean, don’t lean into recognising the things you already know about yourself, and the people around you.[1] Try to disregard what you already know.

Let me take a case from today’s Torah reading. What if you had to debate the justice of this morning’s Torah reading from behind a veil of ignorance? What if you didn’t know which character in this tale you would find yourself cast as: Sara or Hagar, or Isaac or Ishmael. In the passage we read, something seems to have happened between Sarah’s son Isaac and Hagar’s son, Ishmael. It’s not clear. The Torah says Yishmael Metzachek – was playing. But Sara is appalled and insists Hagar and Ishmael are kicked out of their homestead. Abraham acquiesces and there’s a moment where Hagar, having been sent into the desert and run out of water, places her child under a shrub expecting him to die of thirst.

What if you don’t know if your people – in this story – are the descendants of Isaac, or the descendants of Ishmael? What does it mean to pursue justice now?

And so to Israel and Palestine. What would you say about justice if you didn’t know whether you would emerge from behind Rawls’ veil of ignorance and find yourself living on a Kibbutz on the Gazan border, like Itay Shabi who spoke of his experience on Oct 7^th from this very Bimah earlier in the year?

Or what if you were to be a Palestinian? Someone like Awdah Hathaleen who Rabbi Natasha and I met on our trip to the South Hebron Hills in March. Hathaleen was a peace activist living in the West Bank. While protesting against settler encroachment on his land, in his village, he was shot dead by a Jewish settler on the UK Government’s sanction list.

How would you determine what is and what is not the just use of force in Gaza, in Israel, in the West Bank if you didn’t know how you would emerge from behind a veil of ignorance?

Rawls’ thought experiment is captivating, but hard. It’s not easy to think myself away from my knowledge of myself. But as I tried, and I got stuck, I started to feel something else; that attempting to think about justice from behind a veil of ignorance is somehow both less important than I had thought, and simultaneously absolutely vital.

Here's the less important part. I’ve been lobbied about my sermons this year – I’ve had emails asking me to condemn ‘this’ as being unjust, or not condemn ‘that’. I’ve been invited to use or avoid one kind of language or another to justify or refute one element or another of this awful situation. And, it’s not that I’ve lost my moral compass, it’s just that I’ve become less interested in the value of making that kind of a call about what is and what is not just. It’s felt, increasingly, that these kinds of public calls are unlikely to actually move anything – anyone’s mind, anyone’s freedom. They seem to be opportunities to show how much I agree with one group of people or disagree with another, so one group or another can know if I’m an acceptable Rabbi or should be cancelled.

But trying to think from behind a veil of ignorance, trying not to recognise the faces – in that language from Deuteronomy, trying to decentre my own experiences and narrative has drawn me into thinking more about the experience and narratives of others. Again, it’s not abandoning a moral compass, it’s becoming increasingly interested in trying to recognise what other people – the so-called other side – are saying rather than focus solely on my own sense of my own views.

I looked at one of the saddest pieces of sociological research I have ever encountered. Robert Brym and Bader Araj[2] surveyed the 138 suicide bombers responsible for 657 deaths in the Second Intifada in the early 2000s and tried to work out why they acted the way they did. Their research suggests these bombers didn’t act irrationally and didn’t act strategically, but rather as part of what the researchers called a “cycle of retaliation.” They wrote;

“Much of the impetus for Palestinian suicide bombings can be explained by the desire to retaliate against Israeli killings of Palestinians; and much of the impetus for Israeli killings of Palestinians can be explained by the desire to retaliate for suicide bombings.”

 I did warn it was sad, so awfully, tragically sad. And it’s not that I read the article and equated the killing of an Israeli by a Palestinian with the killing of a Palestinian by an Israeli. I didn’t. But I found I was caring less about who started it and who was or wasn’t justified and started caring more about how to stop these awful cycles of retaliation.

The retaliation has been going on for so long that the idea that there is implacable hatred between two sides bent on destroying the other has become not only an acceptable claim, but the only claim that passes scrutiny, BOTH in circles that advocate a love of Israel and hatred of Palestinians AND in circles that advocate a love of Palestine and hatred of Israelis.

And whether the pollsters or the politicians or academics or social media influencers who make these claims are inflating or ignoring one piece of data or another – and they might not be – the really sad thing is that this view seems only to lead to ever more violence.

Thankfully there are other voices.

I was at a meeting of the Palestinian and Israeli leadership of the organisation, A Land for All. It started with this sentence, “There are nine million Jews and five million Palestinians living in this land and we start from the understanding that none of us is going anywhere.” The leaders of the organisation have sat down and tried to work out a plan to share one land between two people. There are plans for the borders and refugees and security and all the rest of it. It’s a path out of here and it’s built, for both Jews and Palestinians, on a commitment to decenter our own claims as the only claim, it’s built on an attempt to step behind a veil of ignorance. It’s an approach that gets mocked for being naïve. It can seem shocking in a world that seems so intent on setting “them” as wholly against “us”. But May Pundak and Dr Rula Hardal don’t come across as naïve and don’t consider themselves to be naïve – they know exactly how miserable the current situation is and how much worse it’s getting. They say it’s their desperation that drives their involvement in this work.

I’ve been deeply moved by listening to Magen Inon this year. Both of Inon’s parents were murdered on 7^th October. He’s responded by calling for peace-building, by standing together with Palestinians who similarly have suffered and stand alongside him. I’ve seen him alongside a Palestinian whose brother had died in an Israeli jail. I’ve seen him alongside Palestinian artists and musicians, fighting for a view of this awful conflict that doesn’t further set Jew against Palestinian and Palestinian against Jew.

We should be embracing this kind of bravery, reposting this kind of content on our social media and in our whatsapp groups, turning up to these sorts of rallies. We need to platform precisely the people who offer a way away from believing the only way to justice is to from our own point of view.

The alternative, I think, is to fold into a place where my view of what is right occupies my entire vision. That entails becoming ever more convinced that views different to my own have to be rejected. And I think that is how we bind ourselves tighter and tighter into places of isolation and cycles of misery.

There’s a passage in the book of Kings when the prophets of Baal are trying to get their god to set fire to a sacrificial bull, and their prayers aren’t working. Elijah taunts them, encouraging them to cry BKol Gadol – with a louder voice - and they cry louder and even “cut themselves with swords until the blood runs out.”[3] And it doesn’t, of course, work. They would have done better to step outside a pattern that had long since established itself as failing.

This isn’t just about Israel and Gaza, of course.

The best thing I’ve heard about the hope this year is from an interview with Nick Cave, the singer, who lost both his sons, one at the age of 15, one at the age of 31.

Much of my early life [wrote Cave] I spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt. It was a position both seductive and indulgent. It took a personal devastation to teach me the preciousness of life, the essential goodness of people, and to understand that the world was crying out for help. It took a devastation to find hope. Unlike cynicism [he continued], hopefulness is hard-earned and makes demands on us and so often can feel like the most indefensible and foolish place on earth. [But] hopefulness is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending and that the world is worth believing in.

It's not remarkable to experience savage pain and want to close down. It might even be entirely just to experience savage pain and close down. But it’s not going to transform. It’s not going to mend. And it’s not necessarily naïve to seek the other thing, it might be easy to accuse those who hope of naiveite. It might feel foolish but, as Cave suggests, hope is a transformational emotion and it might be born of both understanding and desperation.

The seductive attraction of the patterns we know won’t get us to a future that differs from our present. The only way to change is to step outside our own recognition of our own certainties and instead amplify or focus on the views of those who are working how we can live together on this fragile planet.

In a time so divisive and polarising, we need to stop claiming how just we are and instead make space for voices other than our own. We need to be on the side of hope. Whether that’s about Gaza, Israel or any of the challenges of our time, or even the way we treat our colleagues, friends and family. We have to be on the side of hope if we want anything to improve.

So that’s my task, for myself, and my challenge to us all – to hope more, to continue trying to step behind a veil of ignorance, to continue to decenter my recognition of only the faces I agree with, and in so doing find a better way, a better year, a year of peace and possibility.

May it come for us all.

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[1] I think a similar idea is expressed in Sanhedrin 4:5

נִבְרָא אָדָם יְחִידִי...וּמִפְּנֵי שְׁלוֹם הַבְּרִיּוֹת, שֶׁלֹּא יֹאמַר אָדָם לַחֲבֵרוֹ אַבָּא גָדוֹל מֵאָבִיךָ.

And Sanhedrin 74a

מִי יֵימַר דִּדְמָא דִּידָךְ סוּמָּק טְפֵי?

[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/3844485

[3] I Kings 18

A Rosh Hashannah Message - On Jews and Windows

On this eve of Rosh Hashanah, my mind has returned to a passage in the Talmud I last thought about when we revealed the magnificent Cyril Korn stained glass at the Synagogue.

Rabbi Chiya bar Abba said in the name of Rabbi Yochanan: "A person should only pray in a house with windows.” (Brachot 34a)

It’s an instruction that makes its way into the Shulchan Arukh where it is combined with an additional mandate not to pray in a Makom Parutz, a wild or open space.

On the one hand, we need windows. We do not pray in seclusion. The world affects us and concerns us. We need to feel the turn of the season and – in ten days’ time especially – the turn of the day.

But on the other hand, we need some level of insulation from the chaos and noise of the world.

The Talmudic necessity for windows is accompanied by a prooftext – “And the windows of [Daniel’s] upper chamber were open towards Jerusalem.” (Daniel 6:11) And so it is, from the attacks of almost two years ago, to the pains and loss of life since – both Jewish and Palestinian – to the politics of the last few days, the windows of our chamber are open towards Jerusalem.

The verse from Daniel emerges from the stress of its own scary political time. King Darius is persuaded by his satraps and governors to issue an irrevocable ban on “anyone issuing a petition to any god or man other than the King himself on pain of being thrown into a lion’s den.” And so, Daniel retreats to his upper chamber, with its windows open to Jerusalem, and prays “Di Hava Avad Min Kadmat D’nah – as he had always done.” This dance, in which we pray in private with windows open, is old, it is the thing we have always done.

 

Judaism does not exist apart from the stresses of the world  - we need windows. But religion and I think every attempt towards growth, requires a moment to step back from the Makom Parutz – the wild space. This is our task this year, as it has always been.

 

For those able to join us in our beautiful windowed sanctuary, I look forward to sharing this special journey with you. For those who will be able to join us only on the stream – www.newlondon.org.uk/digital - your company is most warmly welcomed. To all, my blessings for a sweet and healthy year, a year of peace for us all both inside and beyond the windows of this time of prayer.

Shannah Tovah,

Rabbi Jeremy

 

Cancelling Artists - Questions Rabbis (This Rabbi) Get Asked

Subject: After a long time ...

 

Dear Jeremy

 

I wonder if you would mind sharing your thoughts on an internal dilemma I have. I am no longer a member of a synagogue so have no other rabbi to ask.

 

A number of high-profile people in the arts/media have shared views in respect of the Israel/Gaza situation which I regard as anti-semitic, even a statement such as ‘Free Palestine’. An example is the film star Rachel Ziegler, currently starring as Evita in the West End.

 

My dilemma is in going to / watching / listening to those people perform. Is that bolstering the tide of anti-semitism ? For example, can I watch and applaud Rachel Ziegler on stage without effectively providing tacit support for somebody who, in my view, promotes anti-semitism ?

 

I appreciate there may be no easy answer to this, but of course on a confidential basis I would value any thoughts you are willing to share with me.

 

Very best wishes

--

 Hi,

Good to hear from you, and I hope all is well.

For questions like this … you should be in Jewish community.

That’s not meant to be facetious, or at least not just facetious.

I don’t believe questions like this, as clearly as you have expressed them, can be answered in isolation. That is to say there is no objectively correct answer. There are lived answers in community and relationship and over time.

Always welcome at New London and if there’s a partic reason why we might not be the best place for you and your Jewish journey, do let me know what you are looking for and I can recommend.

All good wishes,

Rabbi Jeremy

 

On the 80th Anniversary of the Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

I reread this week the speech given by Terumi Tanaka at the ceremony to present the Nobel Peace Prize to the organisation he co-chairs, Nihon Hidankyo,  the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organisations.

It is, as you will be aware, the 80^th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I’ve been looking at the footage of that time, listening to scratched audio recordings of the pilot who flew the bomber and hearing the voices of survivors.

I am one of the survivors of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki [taught Tanaka]. At the time, I was 13 years old, at home, around 3 kilometers east of ground zero.

It was August 9, 1945. I suddenly heard the buzzing sound of a bomber jet, and was soon after engulfed in a bright, white light. Surprised, I ran downstairs and got down on the floor, covering my eyes and ears with my hands. The next moment, an intense shock wave passed through our entire house. I have no memory of that moment, but when I came to my senses, I found myself under a large, glass sliding door. It was a miracle that none of the glass was broken, and I was somehow spared injuries.

He went on to document wandering through the devastation of the aftermath of that bombing, finding the corpses of two aunts, a cousin, and his grandfather and another uncle alive at that time – who both died shortly after.

The deaths I witnessed at that time could hardly be described as human deaths. There were hundreds of people suffering in agony, unable to receive any kind of medical attention. I strongly felt that even in war, such killing and maiming must never be allowed to happen.

The work of the organisation he leads was in part about providing care and funds for victims, but also about the attempt to save “humankind from its crisis through the lessons learned from our experience.” He claimed, on behalf of the organisation, partial credit for a “nuclear taboo” but noted 12,000 nuclear warheads still remain in the world, 4,000 of which, he said, were operationally deployed. He referred to statements made by Israeli then-and-still junior minister Amichai Ben-Eliyahu who appeared to be open to the possibility of a nuclear weapon being used in Gaza. Prime Minister Netanyahu reprimanded Ben-Eliyahu, but Tanaka doesn’t seem to be re-assured.

From a Jewish perspective, the aftermath of nuclear devastation feels reminiscent of the most apocalyptic visions of our prophets,

“A day of densest clouds, [warned the prophet Zephania, “The people] shall walk like blind men. Their blood shall be spilled like dust... Moreover, their silver and gold Shall not avail to save them.... The whole land shall be consumed.” (Chapter 1)

And in the aftermath of the second world war, throughout the Cold War and Israel pursued her own nuclear deterrence, Rabbis and religious ethicists went to work on this question – awful indeed as nuclear devastation is, can it be permitted to hold, to build and to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent.

Rabbi Brad Artson, spends much of his 1988 book, Love Peace and Pursue Peace, classifying the Jewish approach to war, compulsory wars – to include self-defence – Milchemet Mitzvah and the optional wars Milchemet Reishut.

 And finally, towards the very end of the book, turns to nuclear war.

Recall, [he writes,] the law of the rodef, the pursuer, and how the person who was being attacked had the right to stop the attacker. The right to kill the attacker was strictly limited-only during the actual attack, and only if there was no less extreme way of preventing the assault. [he cites Talmud Sanhedrin 74a]

if one was pursuing his fellow to slay him, and the pursued could have saved himself by maiming the limb of the pursuer, but in-stead killed his pursuer, the pursued should be executed on that account.

The military parallel to this legislation about individual self-defense would imply that warfare which exceeds the minimal level of force which is required for defense is criminal-a capital offense. Nuclear warfare, in its inability to be targeted to limited goals must inevitably exceed any proportional level of force, a violation of a principle of the just conduct of war.

There is, he says, no proportionality in nuclear conflict and, he claims, proportionality is a key part of the Jewish approach to the law of War.

The former Chief Rabbi of British Orthodoxy felt similarly, writing in 1962

It would appear that a defensive war likely to endanger the survival of the attacking and the defending nation alike, if not in-deed of the entire human race, can never be justified. On the assumption, then, that the choice posed by a threatened nuclear attack would be either complete mutual destruction or surrender, only the second alternative may be morally vindicated.[1]

That is to say that Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovitz felt the nuclear response to threat would be so disproportionate as to mandate surrender.

The issue is the way in which civilian destruction comes alongside any nuclear threat. Attack on us is not understood, in Jewish thought as permitting an unlimited destructive response. I’m aware that sentence will have a contemporary resonance.  So be it.

This is Rabbi Maurice Lamm, for decades the guiding voice of Yeshiva University, writing in 1965, i an article entitled, Red or Dead.

Before the atomic era, "war or peace" was a reasonable choice. Political or economic aims could be achieved by means of war. Now, however, the development of weapons that can destroy continents and annihilate whole populations has ended the reasonableness of this choice. It has eliminated the distinction between the military and the civilian, for its devastation knows no bounds. It has nullified the possibility of victory, even the possibility of truce after war, for nothing can remain save rubble and bones.

Rabbi Artson, in his book, Love Peace, writes

There is some irony to the fact that it was Harry Truman, the only President to order the use of an atomic bomb, who understood that: [and here Artson quotes Truman]

You have got to understand that this isn't a military weapon. It is used to wipe out women, children, and unarmed people, and not for military use. So we have to treat this differently from rifles and cannon and ordinary things like that."

Artson suggests a new categorisation for war, in our time, where technology has so far outstripped the imagined horrors of legally acceptable violence in our classical texts – Michemet Mitzvah, Milchemet Reishut, Din Rodef- imagined in our classical texts. The phrase he suggests for an understanding of war in our time is מִלְחֶמֶת עִרְבּוּבְיָא Milchemet Irbuviah – literally a war of chaos.

The phrase appears once in Shir HaShirim Rabba 4:4 to describe a war of over 60,000.

Most modern warfare fits this category [Artson writes]. Yet even modern conventional wars are dwarfed in the number of lives they scar or terminate when compared to the horrible effects of thermonuclear destruction. That truly is a milhemet irbuviah, a war which brings on complete chaos, a war, in fact, which returns us to the chaos which preceded Creation-a chaos which is our impudent and foolish rejection of Creation, a rejection of life.

What are we to learn from this history, this awful history, where the wreckage and devastation of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are so morally challenging and where there are still 12,000 nuclear warheads and where, despite the claims that those bombs would surely bring peace to the world …. ahh, for peace in the world.

My mind returns to the remarkable opening scene in the Oscar winning documentary, The Gatekeepers featuring interviews with all the surviving directors of Israel’s Shin Bet counter-terrorist security service. I shared this in my Rosh Hashanah sermon back in September last year.

The movie, opens with grainy black and white footage of a van driving down a road. Yuval Diskin is explaining the situation.

“Let’s say,” he says, “you are hunting a terrorist and you’ve been looking for them for a long time and you can get him, but there are 1 or 2 other people in the car and you’re not sure if they are part of the gang or not. What to do? Shoot or don’t shoot? There’s no time. These situations last seconds, minutes at most. People expect a decision, and by a decision, they mean “to act.” ‘Don’t do it,’ seems easier, but it’s often harder.”

And the crosshairs of the drone footage converge on the roof of the van and the van erupts into a fireball.

The point of the movie, and I think the lesson of Hiroshima, is that it can be overwhelmingly tempting to use a weapon you have spent time and money developing and readying if you find yourselves threatened or attacked. It feels like the strong thing to do. And it will always feels as if using the very weapon you have spent time and money developing will solve the problem you face – it will bring peace. To a hammer, goes the saying, every problem looks like a nail. But the ability of weapons to bring peace is limited in the extreme – especially when this gnawing question of proportionality raises its head – as it always will in a war of chaos.

The lesson of the 80 years that have passed since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is that the devastation of those cities does not end with the moment military victory is assured. It carries on, like a half-life, slowly, perhaps, diminishing over time, but still raw and horrendous decades after the initial destruction.

We need other paths. We need to spend the efforts and resources we, as humans, have poured into military responses and weaponry and violence into building for peace. Truman again, “Let us not become so preoccupied with weapons that we lose sight of the fact that war itself is the real villain.” Deterrence, Artson writes in the conclusion of his book, “can only be accepted temporarily,” and we must always “pursue [peace even] if is not readily obtainable.” It’s only acceptable to gather military strength to deter and use military strength to fight for peace, if fight for peace, if the fight against war if being waged with even greater commitment.

In the words of the Prayer for Peace, based on language of Rabbi Nachman

May it be Your will,
Holy One, our God, our ancestors’ God,
that you erase war and bloodshed from the world
and in its place draw down
a great and glorious peace
so that nation shall not lift up sword against nation
neither shall they learn war any more.

Rather, may all the inhabitants of the earth
recognize and deeply know
this great truth:
that we have not come into this world
for strife and division
nor for hatred and rage, 
nor provocation and bloodshed.

We have come here only
to encounter You,
eternally blessed One.

Shabbat Shalom

---

[1] Tradition 1962 4,2 p202

Marching to Save Hostages

There is a National March for the Hostages this Sunday. Click here to register and be sent the start location. We gather from 2pm and march to Downing Street for a rally at 4pm.

 

The March is organised by the Board of Deputies and sponsored by all (non-Chareidi) religious denominations, including Masorti Judaism, as well as communal leadership organisations and the Hostages and Missing Families Forum. The awful photos that have emerged of starving hostages in inhuman conditions are appalling. We call for the immediate unconditional release of all hostages, alive and dead. This, of course, is uncontroversial.

 

Original publicity for the March also included a call to Prime Minister Starmer to condition the recognition of a Palestinian state on the release of hostages, stating that doing otherwise risks legitimising extremism. This, of course, is arguable, but not uncontroversial.

 

And the original publicity for March featured one sponsor with a clear Israeli political affiliation, Herut Anglia – associated with Israel’s Likud party. This, I would argue, was a mistake.

 

Subsequent publicity has refocused solely on the question of releasing the hostages.

“We are united in one clear, urgent demand: the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages. Regardless of our diverse political views, this is not a political issue - it is a human one. It transcends party lines, ideologies, and national borders.

Just as in British society, where differing views on government coexist, so too in Israel - a vibrant democracy where debate is a sign of strength, not weakness. The march on Sunday is a powerful testament to that democratic spirit, and to our community's unwavering commitment to the hostages and their families. Our collective voice is unwavering in calling for their safe return: Bring Them Home Now!

The time is now. The hostages don't have time to lose. We need everyone there!”

 

Herut’s sponsoring logo has been removed. Arms have been twisted; communal politics at work. This, I argue, is good news.

 

I don’t think this is a minor issue. Of course, it pales in comparison to the experience of 671 days of capture and now starvation. But we are watching the British Jewish Community work out the relationship between love of Israel in its totality and support of its government.  I’m often pulled into these arm-twisting encounters. I think they are healthy. The sad reality, of course, is that there is no such thing as ‘simply’ showing full support for Israel without expressing a position on the proper response to the invasion of 7^th October, not even when it comes to the question of the hostages. While the responsibility for the capture and imprisonment of the hostages could not be clearer – Hamas and her allies deserve our utter condemnation – the reason the hostages remain in captivity is more complex. The leadership provided by Prime Minister Netanyahu is political. The right wing of his cabinet has been extremely political. So too are the campaigning efforts of more progressive voices. We shouldn’t be shying away from politics. And we certainly shouldn’t shy from seeking to engage across lines of disagreement. I encourage all to attend the rally on Sunday.

 

Two weeks ago, I offered to speak with those who take a different position from me on the question of a public letter critiquing the Israeli government in its pursuit of this war. Several of you reached out, and we’ve spoken. Thank you. We have had frank political disagreement. I have much to reflect upon. I’ve also been told that publicly criticising the government of Israel is immoral, un-Jewish, or doing Hamas’ work. I simply don’t accept that. For the past three weeks we have read Jeremiah’s critique of the first Israelite state. Trenchant doesn’t come close. Just before that we read the verse that calls us to Truly critique your fellow. Judaism has never valued uniformity.

 

In this year of marking the 80^th Anniversary of the end of the World War II, I’ve been reflecting on Winston Churchill’s speech to parliament on VE Day, “The strength of the Parliamentary institution has been shown to enable it, at the same moment, to preserve all the title-deeds of democracy while waging war in the most stern and protracted form.” War shouldn’t stifle debate. We are not weaker when we disagree.

 

In this week of marking the 80^th Anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, I, like many of us, I know, am struck by the still echoing uncertainty of the result of the dropping of that bomb; moral stain or necessary herald of an era of peace. These things are worth arguing about. Lives – and every life is sacred – are at stake.

 

May peace come. May the hostages be released,

 

Shabbat Shalom,