Calling In - A Rosh Hashanah, Second Day, Sermon for 5873

A series of tweets collected by my colleague, Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber, will serve as a place to start. Over the summer, the Anne Frank Trust, an organisation working to empower young people to challenge prejudice, inspired by – you guessed it - Anne Frank, was rebuked for asking Michael Rosen to write a poem in support of their 75^th Anniversary. The problem being that Rosen is no friend of Israel.

Then, in another tweet, they were rebuked for not mentioning that Frank was a Jew, and was murdered for being a Jew. That’s despite the fact that they do. Then they were rebuked for using an exclamation point when mentioning the Holocaust. And then again for appointing a Quaker as its Chief Executive.

I’m interested, today, in the way language is used, especially in the public realm and especially interested in how we demarcate between people we speak to or speak about with compassion, and people we call out, or attack or … in that most current of terminologies, cancel.

It's not just that so much of what passes for debate in the public realm is nasty.

It’s not just that, on all sides of political divides in this country, we are simultaneously being told that there is a dangerous culture of cancelling being practised by the other side, and at the very same time told that we shouldn’t accept these dangerous other-siders as acceptable parties for reasoned debate.

It’s also that the way this calling out of people is being cultivated as an acceptable way for us to behave. Calling out others as beyond the pale of discourse is emerging as a dominant form of public discourse.

I’m scared, scared as a Jew  - for this stuff will always come back to bite us as Jews, and scared as a member of a society that seems to be closing in on itself, rather than opening out.

Maybe these aren’t modern challenges, here’s a very ancient version of a similar issue, taken from the Talmud.[1]

It’s the year 70 and the Romans are besieging Jerusalem. The Jewish political leadership of the city – the Biryoni – are so sure the Romans represent the very worst kind of foe that they’ve threatened anyone who wants to negotiate with the Romans with death.

Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai realises the only way he saves something of Jewish life, is to negotiate, so he arranges to be smuggled out of the city in a coffin. This is, of course, before the days of Zoom. The Jewish Biryoni challenge the pallbearers; they want to drive a spear through the coffin to ensure its occupant is indeed dead. But they are warned away. So Rabbi Yochanan escapes the doomed city and negotiates with the Romans for the survival of Judaism, even as Jerusalem is destroyed.

One of the most remarkable features of the Talmudic presentation of the story is its ragged ending. Its protagonist, Rabbi Yochanan, doesn’t emerge as a hero. For sure, he saves something of Rabbinic Judaism, but another Rabbi calls him out for failing even to try and save Jerusalem.

‘[God] turns wise men backwards and makes their knowledge foolish’ [Isa. 44:25]’ rebukes Rabbi Yosef, or maybe it was Rabbi Akiva. “I did all I could,” protests Rabbi Yochanan. He gets the last word, but there’s no valedictory conclusion, just an unfinished argument about whether negotiating with an enemy can ever be the right thing. The tale becomes a tale about the relationship between purity and possibility.

There are two sets of puritans in the story. The Biryoni – sure that no one should negotiate with the enemy  – and Rabbi Yosef, or maybe it was Rabbi Akiva, who claim that if you are disturbed by a threat to Jerusalem, you should fight to save Jerusalem, and anyone who accepts anything less deserves approbation.

And on the side of possibility is Rabbi Yochanan. Yochanan surrounds himself in deceit to smuggle himself out of the city and gives up the possibility of saving Jerusalem to achieve something. He is a practitioner of the art of the possible.

Whose side are you on? Instinctively are you a puritan, in argument, in practice, in your relationships or are you a wheeler-dealer, a merchant in the art of the possible.

Here are the advantages of being a puritan. It’s clean. There’s a comfort in knowing that you are right. For the Romans are clearly wrong, and Jerusalem is clearly right and anyone who messes with the clear distinctions between my sense of wrong and right has to be dangerous and should be avoided. Being a puritan is also, in a strange way, the easier option. You nail your colours to a mast and you just stay there.

And here are the disadvantages of being a puritan, in argument. You end up in an ever-decreasing circle of people with whom to stand. And, like the poor Biryoni, you can end up without, not only the very thing you sought to protect but with nothing at all.

I get that it feels more comfortable confronting people with their faults than trying to find a point of meeting with people who hurt us or discomfort us. And I get that sometimes we are just too bruised to handle the challenge of seeking dialogue when we are hurt. But it cannot be that we allow ourselves to descend into a society that lobs verbal grenades rather than seeks to build bridges through our willingness to engage with those who distress us.

Rebuking people is, in fact, a Mitzvah – straight out of the Torah. הוֹכֵ֤חַ תּוֹכִ֙יחַ֙  - you shall surely rebuke your fellow - אֶת־עֲמִיתֶ֔ךָ, but it’s a dangerous charge because it’s so easily done wrong. It’s so easy, in rebuking others, to create division, defensiveness and to close down relationships. And that’s even when we, as rebuking people, are trying to rebuke genuinely. It’s worse when rebuke becomes a way to say, I don’t want to have to deal with you, so I’m just going to rebuke you and then I won’t have to deal either with you or the ideas you represent.

The context of the Biblical mandate to rebuke is revealing – the verse opens with the insistence

לֹֽא־תִשְׂנָ֥א אֶת־אָחִ֖יךָ בִּלְבָבֶ֑ךָ – don’t hate your fellow in your heart

You shall surely rebuke your fellow

But then the verse ends

וְלֹא־תִשָּׂ֥א עָלָ֖יו חֵֽטְא – but don’t incur your own sin on their behalf.

What’s the sin a rebuker can commit? Surely the failure to live up to the command of the very next verse – perhaps the most famous in all the Torah –

וְאָֽהַבְתָּ֥ לְרֵעֲךָ֖ כָּמ֑וֹךָ – you shall love your fellow as yourself.

A person who finds rebuking comes too easily is probably a person who doesn’t love as much as they should.

The rabbinic teachings around rebuke are full of the dangers of the kind of rebuke that causes pain – The Talmud in Baba Metzia warns, “One who humiliates their fellow in public, it is as if they were spilling blood,”[2] Rav Nahman Bar Yitzhak suggests the teaching is particularly apposite – after all, when a person is humiliated in public, ‘the red leaves their face and white come in its place.’ It’s better to say nothing than to say something you know isn’t going help, warns Rabbi Abba.[3]

Only rebuke a person in private, teaches Rambam.[4] The Mesilat Yesharim[5] warns that, often, the attempt to rebuke a person ‘will not be heeded and only causes a person in their further wickedness. In such cases, [he continues] the only pious action is to keep silent." Indeed that’s the conclusion of a different Talmudic passage in Yevamot.

כשם שמצוה לומר דבר הנשמע, כך מצוה שלא לומר את שאינו נשמע[6]

Just as it is a Mitzvah to say something when a person can hear it, so too it is a Mitzvah not to say something that a person isn’t going to hear.

The great founder of modern Chasidism, the Baal Shem Tov, taught - “First rebuke yourself, and only after your neighbour.”[7] That’s a particularly sensitive read of a Biblical phrase that contains a doubled verb

הוֹכֵ֤חַ תּוֹכִ֙יחַ֙ – first critique yourself, then your fellow.

I was deeply moved, researching this sermon, by a Ted Talk by the African-American academic and civil rights activist, Loretta Ross.[8] She was tasked with changing the minds of Klu Klux Klan members, and she began thinking, in her words – what the hell! – she just wanted to call these racist wicked people out, and I can’t say I blame her.

But she’s emerged in the decades since believing in the possibility of changing minds by NOT calling people OUT, but instead calling people IN. Calling people in, she says, is pretty similar to calling people out. It’s just done with love. It prioritises finding points of meeting and opening conversation up above point scoring and bravado.

When we are disturbed by another person, we have the decision of whether we speak out, but also, how we speak out. We need to decide if we are going to speak out to strengthen our own sense of how right we are or whether we want to engage and change the realities in which we live.

When Loretta Ross teaches this practice of calling other people in, she talks about the importance of empathy and self-assessment as we prepare to deal with people who have done things to frustrate or hurt us. She talks about how calling people in re-affirms our sense of optimism, that change is possible, and broken relationships can be healed. But none of that can happen when we are more excited about how well we can put other people down, than the possibility of finding a point of meeting, even with those with whom we disagree.

Language is, we believe as Jews, the way of the creation of the world, it’s the tool for the revelation of God’s will to humanity. It’s the greatest and most powerful tool we have to do good in the world.

In this year to come, I want to urge us all to turn towards a language of love, compassion and bridge-building, even in our disagreement and even in our discomfort with some of those with whom we are called to debate.

If we see that which is wrong, we can, indeed we are called to rebuke, but only in love – and if we can’t rebuke with the love we have for our fellow being so clear to them, then we should learn, instead, the importance of knowing when not to speak.

Shannah Tovah

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[1] Gittin 52a & sub

[2] BM 58b

[3] Yevamot 65b

[4] MT HD 6:7

[5] 20:14

[6] Yevamot 65b

[7] Cited in Iturei Torah Vol. 4, p.112, Toldot Yaacov Yosef, Chayye Sara

[8] https://www.ted.com/talks/loretta_j_ross_don_t_call_people_out_call_them_in/transcript

Mutualism - A Rosh Hashanah Sermon for 5783

 Mutualism

This is Cladonia cristatella, known as British Soldiers’ lichen.

I only found out recently, that lichen are not individual species. Lichens are two different species; a fungus and an alga. The alga synthesises sugars that allows the fungus to grow. And the fungus protects the algae. This relationship between two different species – each benefiting from the other - is called mutualism.

Huh.

I was interested in biology as a teenager. But, back then, I never learnt about mutualism. I learnt about Darwin. My exercise books were full of notes about the survival of the fittest and the impossibility of different species occupying the same ecological niche. One or other species would have to leave or go extinct. I knew, back then, that homo sapiens out-performed poor old homo neanderthalensis driving, our evolutionary foe extinct. Served them right, I thought, a punishment for being insufficiently Darwinian.

More biology.

This is Amanita Muscaria, or Fly Agaric

 

It’s a fungus.

I only recently found out that fungi are also mutualists.

Underneath this mushroom stretch thousands of fungal filaments - up to a kilometre in every gramme of earth. The filaments bind to tree roots and draw sugars from the trees in return offering nitrogen and phosphorus, stuff plant need, and can’t produce by themselves. A stable symbiotic relationship – a mutualism.

These filaments – don’t just connect one mushroom with one plant.

 

Next time you go for forest stroll, picture, if you can, an interconnected web joining scores of trees and their mutualist fungi via millions of kilometres of filaments and billions of interchanges, all working symbiotically.

The subterranean network even supports weaker trees. Sugars produced in one tree, typically a stronger tree, are carried through the fungal network and turn up in other trees, typically weaker trees, even trees of other species.

The science is so breathtakingly elegant. And then the commercial loggers come along and pull up the best trees, and commercial agriculture comes along and blitzes the fungi with artificial nutrients that …. Ahh. We can cause greater damage than we realise. Just one tree isn’t just one tree in a mutually reliant symbiotic network.

I only understood that quite recently.

As a teenager, I also studied economics. Don’t worry, I’ll get to religion soon.

I was sixteen when Gordon Gekko, a fictional Wall Street supremo, captured the economic mood of my youth – “greed was good” claimed Gekko. The line dove-tailed perfectly with the economics I studied back then. All the economic models I studied assumed a ruthless al      location of resources. There would be winners and there would be losers and that was more than the cost of doing business – that was the very definition of good business. To argue against it was, to my 16-year-old self, as pointless as arguing against gravity.

I remember reading Hobbes, as a precocious teenager. Life was “nasty, brutish and short,” said Hobbes. Nature, and our fellow human beings are out to get us. Get for yourself some kind of government that can restrain the central destructively competitive nature of human existence.

Maybe.

This year I read The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, an anthropologist and a political theorist. Their main point is no. That’s not the human story, particular rly when you look back at the evidence of ancient humanity. When you look at the evidence you see play, a sense of adventure, a willingness to forgo frantic competition to create less ruthless, kinder ways to develop and unfold the human narrative over time.

[The famous anthropolisit] Malinowski’s [wrote in] 1922 [that] in the islands off Papua New Guinea, men would undertake daring expeditions across dangerous seas in outrigger canoes, just to exchange precious heirloom shells and necklaces – only to hold them briefly, then pass them on again to a different expedition from another island. Treasures circle the island chain eternally, crossing hundreds of miles in opposite directions. To an outsider, [they write] it seems senseless. To the men of the Massim [however] nothing could be more important.

This isn’t about trade, it’s about taking joy from inter-personal encounter. The human that emerges from the Graeber and Wengrow’s book is very different from the Homo Sapien described by Noah Yuval Harari, and the authors of a Dawn of Everything do a pretty conclusive job debunking Harari’s Hobbesian version of human history. But what if we humans we also, at our very deepest level, mutualists

But let me do one more picture. Back to biology

 

This is glimpse inside a human cell – you and I look like this in every cell of our being. These are mitochondria. And they break down sugars into the useable energy that powers all cell-life.

I only recently found out that researchers now think that mitochondria are another example of mutualism. Before there were mitochondria, single-celled organisms floated in a gloop. But then, around 1.5 billion years ago, a stray bacterium found its way inside a single cell organism and began a mutual, symbiotic relationship with its host. The bacterium produced energy for the organism, and the organism provided nutrients for the bacterium. Over time, the bacteria lost their independent existence, and that’s the origin of mitochondria. Each of us, in each of the 27 trillion cells in our bodies, are stuffed full of the products of a billion and a half years of the pursuit of mutualism.

Graeber and Wengrow conclude

While humans do have a tendency to engage in dominance - submissive behaviour, what makes societies distinctively human is our ability to make the conscious decision not to act that way.

At our most distinctively human we are not nasty and brutish. At our most human we seek out partnerships, mutualisms, relationships with our fellows that bring mutual benefit.

It’s certainly a Jewish idea, that the very thing that makes us most human is our ability to stop pursuing dominance over other people and the world in which we live. That’s how Shabbat works, as Heschel taught;

Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul.

Or, this prayer for peace, from Rebbe Nachman of Braslav,

May we see the day when a great peace will embrace the whole world, when all who live on earth shall realise that we have not come into being to hate or destroy. But to praise and to love.

I think, instinctively, we know the value of stepping back from the attempt to dominate others. Instinctively, we know that nothing makes us more happy than doing something decent for another person. Instinctively, we know that loving relationships are only be possible when we stop fighting to prove that “we” are better than “they”. But I’m not convinced, for myself certainly, but really for enough of us, that we have truly understood the beauty, the possibility and the potential that could be unleashed if we spent our lives pursuing mutualism, rather than dominance.

I had a clarifying moment earlier in the year. We were, as a community, in the midst of appointing David and Yoav as our new cantorial leads. I sought the counsel of one of our members who works in Human Resources. Drafting employment contracts for cantorial leads is a fiddly business with bits of hours for this and bits of hours for that, and David and Yoav are – for the first time – working a job share. So, I took counsel.

Actually, let me pause for a moment to acknowledge this. This is the first time David Djemal has led a full Rosh Hashanah Musaf service. He, and Yoav have taken on an enormous and terrifying task. And he’s done magnificently. To David I want to say – it will never be this difficult again, apart from, maybe Yom Kippur. And to us all, I want to ask for your hearty Yashar Koach.

But to my point. I took counsel on the employment contract and David Franks suggested dropping the phrase ‘for the mutual interest of all parties,’ in all our conversations. And in that moment, the complexities of the employment situation dissolved. Of course, this Synagogal endeavour is never going to work with David competing with Yoav, or either of them competing with Stephen. Of course, this isn’t going to work with anyone competing to turn be the winners in this relationship, backing others into being losers. Of course, of course we know this to be true. But how much of our lives are still spent seeking dominance over our fellows?

The story is told of the great Tzadik of Jerusalem, Rabbi Aryeh Levine, who attended his doctor along with his limping wife. “What,” said the Dr, “seems to be the problem.”

“The problem is,” said the Rabbi, uncomfortably speaking on behalf of his wife, “the problem is our foot is hurting.”

It’s a touching tale, with a gender complexity I want for today to overlook. It’s a tale about the mutuality of love and pain and hope and concern. If one of us hurts, we all hurt.

So too with success. Your success is interwoven with my success.

So what if we can still the shouty voice of dominance and instead pursue the mutually beneficial?

We are here, on the cusp of the New Year of 5783 and I’m not sure many of us still cling to the conflation of the pursuit of dominance and morality. Personally, I’m done with it. I’m done with the notion that we can even survive as a race if we pursue the sort of rapaciousness Gordon Gecko claimed to be good. And that’s not even out of sympathy for the less greedy, but because we could do so much better, I’ve come to believe, by pursuing mutualism.

In our very cells, we are designed to be mutualists. In every web of interwoven possibility that maps out the existence of all creation, mutualism is the way we have learnt to thrive.

Our possibilities for joy, our chance to experience love and even the future of the planet on which we all, mutually, travel, depends on us getting this deep truth, quickly, and obeying its call profoundly.

But what if we could make that shift, even in a small way, what if we could tilt our existence away from competition towards the pursuit of mutualism, with everyone and everything we meet? What if we could re-configure our training in rapacious competition into a similarly rapacious pursuit of mutualisms?

If we can, and of course we can, perhaps we will unlock possibilities for sweetness, joy and delight and a future of health and the right kind of prosperity.

May it come to us all

Shannah Tovah

50 Years Since the Munich Olympic Massacre - And the Pursuit of Jusitce

This is a real story, a dark and bloody story, that happened 50 years ago Monday.

At the Munich Olympic Games in 1972, a group of Palestinian Terrorists broke into the Athletes Village, took members of the Israeli Olympic delegation hostage and killed them. Well, two were killed immediately and the other nine were killed having been marched from the village to waiting helicopters as part of a supposed negotiation for the release of over 200 Palestinian terrorists.

It now looks as though the Germans had a tip-off that an attack was planned, failed to protect the athletes in the village, and bungled a rescue attempt by failing to have anyone with experience in hostage negotiation or extraction involved. Mossad’s head of interrogation at the time, Victor Cohen, discovered later on that ‘some of the policemen who were supposed to take part in the rescue operation made a decision before it started that they were not ready to risk their lives for the sake of the Israelis.’[1]

And what about the Palestinians? On the one hand the murder was by a splinter group – which called itself Black September, on the other hand, there was delight across the Palestinian political spectrum. The bodies of the terrorists who died received hero’s funerals

And the Palestinian newspaper, Al-Sayyid, wrote, in pride,

[Nothing] could have had greater resonance with every person in the world than that caused by the Black September operation in Munich.[2]

So today, I want to do two things. I want to honour the lives of those murdered by those terrorists, then.

And I want to ask the question – what does it mean to say ‘Tzedek Tzedek Tirdof’ – justice justice pursue in the aftermath of an appalling act of murderous terrorism?

The response of the Israeli government is well known.

On September 11 1972, the cabinet authorized prime minister, Golda Meir, to approve the assassination of targets even in friendly countries, without notifying local authorities. “Retaliation or no retaliation,” Meir told the Knesset on September 12, “at any place where a plot is being laid, where they are preparing people to murder Jews, Israelis—Jews anywhere—it is there that we are committed to striking them.”[3]

 

And so it began. You may have seen the movie, or read the book, a systematic attempt to assassinate those responsible for the attack.

First up – Wael Zwaiter who was shot in the stairwell of his Rome apartment. Next Mahmoud Hamshari was blown up by a telephone bomb, and so operation Wrath of God continued.

I’ve been re-reading the remarkable Rise and Kill First by Ronen Bergman which tells the story with astounding precision and insight. Bergman writes,

Whenever [Zvi Zamir, Mossad Chief], asked [Prime Minister Meir] to sign a “Red Page,” as the kill order was called because of the color of the paper it was typed on, she would convene a select group of her cabinet ministers to deliberate with her—including her minister for religious affairs, Zerach Warhaftig, who would anoint each mission with a religious stamp of approval.

A religious seal of approval. I looked up the biography of the minister for religious affairs, Rabbi Warhaftig – one of the signatories of Israel’s declaration of Independence. He was a holocaust survivor who came to fame having negotiated thousands of visas from Japan and Holland to allow Polish Jews to escape the Nazis. I wonder what was on his mind as, in Bergman’s phrase, he ‘anointed each mission with a religious seal of approval.’

It's not that Judaism is pacifistic. There are plenty of death sentences meted out in the Torah. One that I often think about is

Leviticus 20:9 – anyone who curses his father and mother should be put to death.

Parents here, you can thank me later for sharing that one.

There’s also a Biblical command to defend oneself from criminal threats. In Exodus the Bible says that if you discover a thief breaking into your house in the middle of the night, you are not to be considered guilty for killing them – the understanding of the Rabbis is that if a thief is breaking in at night they have to expect someone is in, which means they can be assumed to strike you if you disturb them.

But there are Biblical verses that lean in a different direction – in a number of places the Torah instructs the construction of Cities of Refuge. If one person kills another, and it was an accident, and the person – in the lang of the Torah ‘didn’t hate the person from their past,’ they can run to one of these cities and stay there safe from retribution. Not that the doctrine of the Cities of Refuge applies to the terrorists behind the attacks in Munich.

And hovering over all the legal back and forth is this most stunning Biblical idea – that every human being, even the cruelest and wicked, is created in the image of the Divine, and any life taken destroys that spark of divinity and worlds of possibility. And while, of course, that applies to the descendants and the descendants of the descendants of those murdered so cruelly, it also, radically applies to terrorists and murderers. All life is quite literally sacred.

But when it came to the killers of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich what do you do? Turn politely to the Libyans and ask for them to be extradited, or put on trial in a foreign jurisdiction.

I don’t want to suggest that these are easy decisions, particularly for those who are placed in positions of great national responsibility, particularly for a country like Israel, up against so much, with memories of Nazi genocide so alive.

But the problems of a violent response to violence are many.

The most quoted verse in this week’s reading reads ‘Justice, Justice you shall pursue.’ My favourite explanation of the importance of repeating the word ‘justice’ comes from Martin Buber. The only way to pursue just ends, Buber argues in Ten Rungs, is to pursue just means. Creeping up in the middle of the night, and shooting a man to death in the stairwell of their building isn’t a just means.

And maybe, that particular killing is problematic for another reason. The man shot in his stairwell might just have been a Palestinian with no direct connection to the Munich atrocities. One former Israeli agent told Bergman,

“Zwaiter had nothing to do with the killing of the athletes.’ Another called the assassination of Zwaiter “a terrible mistake.”[4]

Back in the days of the Sanhedrin 70 judges would be called to decide on any capital case, and if only one felt there was a shadow of a doubt, judicial killing would be out of the question. And in the end, the entire apparatus of judicial killing fell away. Rabbi Akiva famously said that any Court that sentenced one person to death every 70 years should be considered a Bloody Court.

To add to the danger of mistakes comes this powerful truth about violence. Violence doesn’t build peace. If the goal is a world in which Israeli athletes, none of us, has to worry about terror and violence, how do we get from here, or then, to where we want to be? If they kill eleven of ours, we can, perhaps, strike back and kill 22 of theirs, but … Gandhi wasn’t wrong when he argued ‘an eye of an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.’

Bergman’s book – Rise and Kill First is more than a telling of the Munich story, it’s the story of a very Israeli attitude to the appalling violence, terror and threat the country has experienced in its short life – from British officers in the mid-40s, to Iranian nuclear scientists in this century, Israel has held firm to a line that you mess with us, we will come for you with a greater force than you came for us.

So many of the great political leaders of Israel are men – largely men – for whom this has been their life. Ehud Barak, former Prime Minister, was one of the crack assassins sent into Beirut to take out four of those Israel believed were responsible for the Munich murders, as was Yonatan Netanyahu, brother of another former Prime Minister, Bibi. Being tough, and uncompromising in the hard line that promises death will come to anyone messing with Israel has long been a vital strategy for anyone who wanted political power in Israel.

But Bergman’s book contains another voice. Time and time again, leaders of Mossad and similar crack teams – the Caesarea Operatives, Shin Bet, Sayeret Matkal, at the end of their careers and, in some cases, at the end of their lives, have come to argue again this policy.

Most dramatically there is the case of the former head of Mossad, Meir Dagan, a man who authorised any number of targeted killings, who at the end of his career, turned against then Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu for misapplying the tactic of targeted killing, for not doing enough to find other tactics – pathways towards building peace. What, Dagan wonders, if all the energy, the bravery, the courage and the incredible resources that Israel has invested in the targeted killing of her enemies, what if all that had been invested in changing hearts, not stilling hearts.

That’s not the view of a wishy-washy liberal armchair liberal that’s the view of a Mossad Director, a man who had, in Bergman’s line, ‘a knife between their teeth.’

Justice, justice you shall pursue, tricky.

Justice, especially in the threat of terror is tremendously difficult, only a fool looks at a complex situation and sees simple solutions.

Meeting violence with violence will always tempt us, especially if we feel we are physically stronger, but violence cannot build towards peace, and somehow we need to keep a space for our dreams for peace, we need to pursue peace and build toward it, even if other avenues tempt.

And maybe that’s the greatest lesson for us all – for those of us who have the fortune not to be at the very sharp end of these impossible decisions – when someone or something does something bad to us, there will always be a temptation to respond with a simple response, perhaps a forceful or an aggressive response. It might even be fair to so do, but it will always behove us to check those temptations – how are we building for a better future? How can we respond to the bad done to us in such a way as to lessen the chance that someone else will even want to do bad to us again?

It was the great 1^st Century Rabbi, Hillel, who called on us all

הֱוֵי מִתַּלְמִידָיו שֶׁל אַהֲרֹן, אוֹהֵב שָׁלוֹם וְרוֹדֵף שָׁלוֹם, אוֹהֵב אֶת הַבְּרִיּוֹת וּמְקָרְבָן לַתּוֹרָה:

be like the students of Aharon, brother of Moses, who love peace and pursued peace, who loved creation and drew them closer to the correct instruction.

Shabbat Shalom

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[1] Bergman, Ronen. Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations (p. 151). John Murray Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] Bergman, Ronen. Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations (p. 152). John Murray Press. Kindle Edition.

 

[3] Bergman, Ronen. Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations (pp. 152-153). John Murray Press. Kindle Edition.

[4] Bergman, Ronen. Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations (p. 161). John Murray Press. Kindle Edition.

Jubilee Torah - in Honour of Queen Elizabeth ... and a Special Bar Mitzvah

 

Here’s a good pub quiz question, for this Shabbat, and the coming week.

What connects Sudan, Malaysia, Cyprus, Kuwait and Jamaica?

Well, they all celebrated independence between 1952 and 1962, in the first ten years of the reign of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

The list of all the countries who have taken that step towards independence in the 70 years of our Queen’s reign is 50 long – from Belize and Botswana to Vanuatu and Zambia.

And it struck me as an interesting thing on which to speak, on this week, Freddie, of your BM,

Because the English word Jubilee, in Hebrew Yovel, is one of the themes of today’s Torah reading.

You shall make the fiftieth year holy, and proclaim liberty – ukratem dror -  throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a Yovel – a jubilee to you; and each of you shall return to their own property, and each of you shall return to their family. 

And then, just a few verses later, again,

In this Year of Jubilee – Shanat HaYovel - each of you shall return to their property. 

 

There are two things that happen, in the Yovel, that don’t happen at any other time.

Firstly all indentured servants go free. If I fell into poverty, and the only way I could see to get out was to indenture myself, I would have the right to go free in the sabbatical year, and there are seven sabbatical years between one Yovel and the next. But what if I didn’t want to go free, what – asks the Torah – if I quite liked living working for someone else, letting them take the risks of the ebbs and flows of fortune. Well, if I wanted to, I could stay an indentured servant, but only until the Yovel. At the Jubilee – I have to proclaim my own liberty – I need to take the scary steps into freedom, whether I feel ready to or not.

Rashi asks the question – what is this strange Hebrew word – Dror? Usually translated as liberty. He answers with a reference from the Talmud – it means that a person dwells – shedar bechol makom sherotzeh – in any place they wish, vaino breishut acherim – they aren’t under the dominion of others.

And then, secondly, all land transactions reset. Land ownership in the ancient world is a big deal – it’s a big deal still today. But if you were unable to afford to stay on your land, you could sell it to someone else, but they would only have it until the Yovel. At which point, it would go back to the original owner. As if all all land transactions were leases with the same termination date – every lease would run out on the same day, and the original freeholders – people who were forced to sell their land – would get it back.

The great Italian Biblical commentator, Ovadiah Sforno, put it even more strongly –

שתהיו גם אתם בני חורין משעבוד האומות

That you will be free of the oppression of the nations of the world.

The Yovel, the Biblical Jubilee, therefore becomes about two things – a political independence and a personal independence.

Let me start with the politics.

Underlying this sense of a Yovel, a day of jubilation, is the sense that a people should not be ruled by others.

שתהיו גם אתם בני חורין משעבוד האומות

In my Anglo Jewish mind, when I come across these verses I hear, still, the echoes of a very ancient slavery unto the Egyptians, but I wonder how these Biblical verses would have played out in countries such as Ghana, or as it was prior to the independence granted by her Majesty, the Gold Coas, or those Caribbean countries where this book, our Hebrew Bible, plays such a role. I wonder how a verse about the political necessity to be free and independent landed in Jamaica, Trinidad, Tobago, Barbados, Bahamas?

But here’s a more timely question – I wonder how these verses hold a place in the heart of the Head of the Church of England, Her Majesty. How do you feel, as the ruler of the British Empire, when nation after nation after nation wants independence from your dominion?

Machiavelli, of course, would have none of it. For Niccolo Machiavelli, the whole point of ruling was to keep hold of power and disrupt and tear apart any threat to the perpetuation of the status quo. It takes a very special kind of leadership to let go, to do the thing the Queen seems to have done again and again and again in her extraordinary 70 year rule. She seems to have found a greater power than the grasping-for-power that is the marker of those who follow the teachings of Machiavelli. She seems to have been able to let go. I know, it hasn’t always been easy, it has sometimes been bloody – and that’s a huge stain on this country, but, I think it’s still remarkable that so many of these countries have sought independence, been granted independence and then, as independent nations, wanted to be part of the Commonwealth.

How can you, as a person of power, allow that power to leave, to trust that it’s better to be loved than feared, to trust the people who were once ruled by you, when they make the claim that they want to go their own way?

And what of the other side of this – the personal piece – the indentured servant who decided, on a sabbatical long past that they didn’t want to go free? That they are, come the Jubilee, propelled into a freedom they might not understand, or quite feel ready for, that they are given the courage to know that they / we are better forging our own path as free to choose where we dwell, aino breishut acherim – not under the dominion of others.

I wonder Freddie, if that’s you, today. On the cusp of adulthood. Celebrating your Bar Mitzvah, your coming of age in religious terms, not quite able to stand on your own. Your parents aren’t quite yet, planning on kicking you out of the house to seek your own fortune, just yet, I’m reliably informed. But it’s coming – the Jubilee is always coming, the time when a person has to strive to make their own life … their own life, aino breishut acherim.

And in this personal understanding of the Yovel – the Jubilee, the people of power who have to realise that deep passion for freedom that lives in all humanity, even if it doesn’t always seem as if it does, even if once freed, people make terrible mistakes, the people who have to realise they have to let go – like the Queen.

I wonder if those people are the parents.

It’s possible to read the Yovel as a series of instructions for the young adults in our midst – to encourage them to take control of their own lives, and head off, wheresoever they may choose. And simultaneously a series of instructions for the parents in our midst – to encourage us to let go. To find strength in the thing that the Queen has done, letting people turn back to us in love, not ruling in fear.

Ukratem Dror BaAretz – And you shall proclaim a freedom, a liberty in the land, we read today.

Freedom is scary.

There are the powerful of today who have to be scared to let go, to place trust in a bunch of upstarts who don’t know how to run their own lives, because they never have

And there are the powerless of today who have to be scared to take the step up into dominion over their own.

And for us all there comes a Yovel, a time to proclaim our independence and a time to release claims over others. And for those of us who are feeling a little scared, the advice Moses gave to Joshua – I mean talk about having big shoes to step into – is perhaps the greatest advice we could ever receive – Hazak v’Amatz, usually translated as be strong and of courage. But that word Amatz – it really means independent.

Mazal Tov, your majesty, and thank you for modelling a leadership that places compassion and understanding above the pursuit of power by any means necessary.
Mazal Tov Morris, Louise, Freddie, both in that you’ve done well so far, Freddie, particular you’ve done brilliantly today, but also Mazal Tov in that you should have good luck into the future – to let go and to claim your own Atzmaut – independence

 

And Mazal Tov to us all,

Happy Jubilee celebrations and Shabbat Shalom

Cantorial Future at New London Synagogue

  

We are delighted to share our plans for the cantorial future of New London Synagogue.

Following Chazan Stephen Cotsen’s announcement that he will be retiring over the summer, we conducted an extensive search including trial visits and interviews. Following this process, we have offered the position of cantorial leads for our community to David Djemal and Yoav Oved on a job-sharing basis. And they have accepted. Indeed, the idea of a job share came from them both - they are long-standing friends as well as colleagues.

Yoav and David will be splitting Shabbat and Festive prayer-leadership evenly and will be taking on additional responsibilities including lifecycle support (particularly around BM) and membership development and programming.

The community is invited to join us in person the Synagogue (also available digitally) on Thursday 19th May 7pm – Lag B’Omer. We’ll have the opportunity to meet David and Yoav, hear a little more about their journeys and background – and hear them sing. Full details to follow.

Chazan Stephen’s last Shabbat as an employee of the community will be on 24/25th June and we will shortly share a booking opportunity for members and guests to join Stephen for a Friday night dinner on 24th June in his honour.

Yoav and David’s first Shabbat will be 1st/2nd July.

At the completion of the reading of one of the five books of the Torah, the reader chants – Hazak, Hazak v’Nitchazek – Strong, strong and may we be strengthened. Blessings of strength to our two new cantorial leads and may we all be strengthened as on this new journey.

We know all members will join us in wishing David and Yoav every success as the guardians of the precious and special position of leader of prayer for New London.

 

 Rabbi Jeremy, Abigail Levin

 

David Djemal adds:  As a member of NLS and following my work in recent years at the NLS Cheder, I am thrilled to be taking on the position of Shliach Tzibbur alongside my friend and colleague Yoav. Thank you for your faith in me, and I’m very excited about this opportunity!

Yoav Oved adds:  Having led the community of Westminster Synagogue in singing for many years, it is a pleasure to take on a more active and involved role, within a community of heart and a love for Jewish music. Alongside David, our partnership and friendship will be a flourishing time within NLS for many more years.

Who Knows Six? – An Invitation to a Very Special Celebration

Who knows six? I know six, six are the books of the Mishnah.

 

Before the Temple fell, the Rabbis already planning for the future of Judaism. Sacrifices would no longer be possible. The Priestly class had become, variously, corrupt or belligerent. The entire apparatus of ritual purity that was such an important part of Temple-based Judaism was crumbling. What was needed was a way of evolving and protecting our religious heritage. The Rabbis chose a series of terse, sometimes memorable, sayings which could connect the complexity of existence to a Jewish sense of how to behave. They chose Mishnah.

In the dozen decades after the fall of the Temple over 4,000 of these sayings cohered, organised around the six great challenges of life, viewed from the perspective of ancient (male!) rabbinic leaders; Seeds, Sacred Time, Women (I did say they were men), Civil Damages, Sacrificial Offerings and Ritual Purity.

 

For the last six years I’ve been studying Mishnah at a rate of one Seder a year. I’ve presented my learning annually on the eve of Passover. There is a rabbinic fast, for the firstborn, where we share an empathy with those who died on the eve of that first celebration of freedom. But a feast to celebrate the completion of a Seder of Mishnah trumps that obligation to fast.

 

This year, this Friday morning, I will be completing my sixth Siyum of Mishnah, and with it, a completion of the Six Orders we sing about over the Seder Dinner. I invite you to join me. We will be davening at 8:30 in our usual Zoom room. The Siyum will be shortly after 9am – you will have to bring your own feast.

 

And what have I learnt? Let me share three observations.

I often use the analogy of a diamond to describe rabbinic Judaism. It doesn’t really matter where one starts – any facet will serve as a place to begin. The key is to keep exploring and eventually enough facets will emerge to allow an over-arching shape to be grasped. I’m not done with rabbinic learning – far from it – but at this point I’ve passed over each facet of our spiritual diamond. And it is beautiful. Beauty is a huge part of the joy of studying Mishnah; mnemonics, poetry, wit, metaphor are all at play. If you want to survive, it helps to be delightful.

 

The Mishnah is a celebration of the importance of human action. It’s all but entirely God-free and it has almost no interest in our emotional state. Mishnah calls on each of us to roll up our sleeves and get on with things. There is no waiting around for miracles or divine intervention. There is no interest in how we do or don’t feel. The world, says the Mishnah, is shaped by human actions; so many different human actions – how we dress, how we eat, how we treat one another, we greet life, marriage, death, summer, spring and winter. The message of the 4,000+ Mishnayot is that each of our actions is of incredible importance. That, I think, is healthy, clarifying and powerful.

 

Finally, Mishnah is about survival. In a moment of tremendous threat, we, rabbinic Jews, chose Mishnah to vouchsafe our existence. And it has worked. We are still here, still learning Mishnah. Mishnah is complex – this last Seder is particularly abstruse; maybe that’s how both it, and we, have survived. Life is complex and it turns out that simplification might not be the best path to follow. Mishnah is also full of debate and contradiction. One rabbi says yes, the other says no. Maybe, in the multi-vocality of acceptable voices, there is a greater strength than we realise. Maybe we are stronger if we know how to disagree with honour and integrity than if we would insist on a uniformity of opinion and practice that effaces the necessary plurality of the beauty that is humanity.

 

It's an incredible privilege to come to the end of this journey. And I hope you will consider joining me to celebrate its conclusion, again – this Friday, Erev Pesach, in our regular Zoom room, at 8:30 for Shacharit of from shortly after 9am.

 

And then, on to Pesach.

 

Rabbi Jeremy

Joseph Caro (Yosef Karo) And the First Tikkun Leyl

 The Cast List

Joseph Caro 1488-157, Toledo, Turkey & Safed

Author of the Shulhan Arukh, other legal works and mouthpiece through which an angelic heavenly voice (a Maggid) recited Maggid MeiSharim.

 

Shlomo Alkabetz c. 1505–1584 Safed & Jerusalem.

Author of a number of Kabbalistic works and, most famously, the Lekhah Dodi. He was the brother-in-law and teacher of Moses Cordevero.

 

Sources

The meeting that this letter records was probably written in Nikopolis between 1529 and 1534.

The Hebrew text comes from the introduction to Maggid Meisharim. The English is from L. Jacobs, The Jewish Mystics (also Jewish Mystical Testimonies).

 

Possibilities of Understanding the Letter

 

I . Nonsense

Rabbi Solomon abi Ad Sar Shalom Bazila of Mantuah (1680-1749)

Emunat Hachamim

Either the Rabbi Karo was utterly wicked and invented these things from his heart or else he must assume that Rabbi Karo never wrote these things but others invented them and attributed them to a great man, similarly the telling of the Shavuot vigil must be assumed to be a forgery.

(btemah – Bazila doesn’t mean this to be taken literally)

 

II . Psychology

Automatic speech, motor speech, automatism

 

R. Werblowsky, Joseph Karo, Lawyer and Mystic (1962)

Epileptoid type, affected by a chronic hallucinosis but with perfect maintenance of the total personality. (p. 284)

 

J. Pratt, The Psychology of Religious Belief 10-11

For consciousness cannot be adequately represented by a geometrical point without extension and with no varying grades of intensity, but should rather be symbolised by field of vision, which has a focal point of clearest sight and a marginal field extending out from the center indefinitely with no clearly marked outer limit.

 

Werblowsky

The Maggid [serves] as a compensatory function necessary for the maintenance of a psychological equilibrium throughout a life dominated by a tremendous intellectual and spiritual ambition, calling for extraordinary energy and discipline of abnegation in addition to he normal rigours of ascetic piety as imposed by Kabbalistic theology.

 

The Maggid is the shadow, the unexpressed alongside the expressed, alongside the halacha lies the mystical experience.

 

III . The Personification of Torah

'I am the Mishnah'

Israel Ben Jospeh Al-Nakawa, (d. 1391),

Menorat Ha-Meor Ed. Enelow Ot 213

A story about a Hasid who was alone in a certain place and he learnt there Tractate Haggigah. And he went over it and over it many times until he knew it well and it flowed in his mouth, and he knew no other Talmudic Tractate, and he would repeat it day and night. When he died he was alone in his house and no-one knew of his death. Then came an image of a woman and stood before him and raised up her voice wailing and eulogizing and weeping and crying out until a multitude were gathered around. And she said ‘praise this Hasid and bury him and honour his casket and you will all be remembered for eternal life, for this one honoured me all his days.... Immediately all the women sat with her and they made a great and mighty eulogy and the men made busy with funeral garments and all the burial needs and they buried him with great honour, while that woman wept and cried out. They said to her, ‘what is your name’. She said to them ‘My name is Haggigah.’ When the Hasid was buried, she disappeared from their sight. Immediately they knew she was Tractate Haggigah who had appeared before them in the form of a woman.

 

What is the border line between a person and their Torah?

 

IV. Nevuah Katanah

Techniques of using dreams to receive Divine advice

Techniques of emptying self in order to receive, we have a sense of recitation of Mishna as rote, as an effective technique.

 

TB. Brachot 55b

If a person gets up early and a verse falls into their mouth - this is minor prophecy

 

V. Chaim Vital

Chaim Vital - Shaarey Kedusha 3:5

Vital informs how one should prepare to receive to receive a vision… 'then the imaginative faculty will turn one’s thoughts to imagine and picture as if it had ascended in the higher worlds up to the roots of their soul. Eventually the imagined image reaches its highest source and there the images of the heavenly lights are imprinted on their mind as if they imagined and saw them in the same way they picture ‘normal pictures’ deriving from the world

 

This is the 'contemplative as if', Werblowsky p. 69

 

Chaim Vital Sefer HaGilgulim  (Frankfurt 1684) p32b

And now let us explain the subject of prophecy and the Holy Spirit … It is impossible that anything that comes out of a person’s mouth should be in vain … for every word that is uttered creates an angel … Consequently when one leads a righteous and pious life, studies the Law and prays with devotion, then angels and holy spirits are created from the sounds which they utter and these angels are the mystery of the maggidim.

 

'Vital's opinion of Karo's Maggid is thus in perfect keeping with his general theory, which is based, like most kabbalistic speculation on a really terrifying conviction of the potency and significance of every human act.' Werblowsky p.78

 

Concluding Thoughts

The repeating of holy texts (Mishnah) is an act of speech (Dibur). Speech is how one (both human and Divine) manifests in this Universe (Shekinah), and is connected to the sfera Malkut. This is where the Divine emanation is most immanent, perhaps so immanent that it can be heard as automatic speech (Maggid).

Mishna = Dibur = Shekinah = Malkut = Maggid

 

For too many years a tendentious and one-sided picture of Judaism as a religion of pure reason and sweet reasonableness has been assiduously fostered and spread. The lack of irrational paradoxes, the absence of manifest absurdities (or so it seemed) and a soberness which knew of no dizzy raptures at the brink of mystical abysses were brandished by apologists as marks of the incontestable superiority of Judaism. To the lovers of paradoxical profundity these vaunted virtues were of course, only proof conclusive of spiritual poverty. Werblowsky p.290