Here I Am

I had the privilege of being at a 20-year reunion at JTS today.

Amazing!!

20 years.

It turned out we didn't have enough time to make it through all the various plans we had for a day together and my dear colleague Rabbi Rachel Ain asked me to run a closing something in 3 minutes.

I shared the Sugya, in honour of the person from whom I first learnt it, my then Dean, Rabbi Bill Lebeau, who made a special appearance to celebrate the special day.

This is the first time I used the Sugya in a Sermon, my interview sermon at the Synagogue I now lead, and joined 16 years ago, formerly home of Rabbi Louis Jacobs and the synagogue I grew up at.

Dika Anna

 

This is, I think, the sixth time I have had the honour of addressing this community from this pulpit.

And it always feels a bit strange.

 

I still think of myself sitting over there somewhere, with my father.

I still think of myself, as a small child, hiding in the velvet curtains and pretending I had understood the sermon so I could join in the conversation between my parents as we walked home from shul.

 

And it feels particularly strange today.

For me,

To be applying to become the next Rabbi at Louis’ Shul.

 

I’m reminded of a previous American Presidential campaign where Dan Quayle, a man who couldn’t spell the word ‘tomato,’ tried to pass himself off as an inheritor of the legacy of JFK.

‘Senator Quayle,’ responded Lloyd Benson, ‘I knew Jack Kennedy, I worked with Jack Kennedy. Senator Quayle, you are no Jack Kennedy.’

 

Other faith traditions have tales about the glory of having an occasionally errant child of a community wander away and look to return.

Other faith traditions have tales of welcoming back the returning child with extraordinary delight.

But I don’t think those stories reflect us, you and I, today.

I’ve spent almost five hours in interviews this past week facing questions and concerns.

And there’s been a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety. I am too much this, not enough that, what about the legacy of Louis?

 

I want, today, to explore what I understand by inheriting a fearsome and glorious spiritual inheritance and what I understand by the command to carry a fearsome and glorious inheritance forward.

 

It is a perfect parasha to explore these ideas.

Ve’eleh toledot.

And these are the generations.

This week’s parasha is the story of Isaac, an inheritor of a fearsome and glorious spiritual inheritance.

A man who

dug again the wells of water, which they had dug in the days of Abraham his father; and he called their names after the names by which his father had called them.

 

Ve’eleh toledot

And these are the generations

This week’s parasha is also the story of Isaac the ancestor

A man who bequeathed a legacy to the generation to come – to Jacob, Israel, to all of us sitting here today, some four thousand years later.

 

The unfolding of generations.

From one to another.

 

A story, about the unfolding of generations.

It comes from Rabbi Jacob’s charming autobiography.

Rabbi Jacobs has just been appointed to the flagship congregation, the New West End, and he is, in his own words, indulging in some namedropping.

He’s telling of all the Lords and Ladies, the dignitaries and captains of industry and he recalls a moment, just before the first Kol Nidrei service at the synagogue.

And he’s standing in the vestry with the Third Lord SoandSo whom he had only recently met.

 

These are Rabbi Jacobs’ words.

Time was pressing and I suggested that we go into the synagogue for Kol Nidre.

The Lord replied that he did not want to enter the synagogue for a while and that he would explain why after the service.

His explanation was that his grandfather, the first Lord, although a very observant Jew, did not hold with the Kol Nidre formula and used to wait patiently in the foyer until this part of the service was over.

His son, the second Lord, less observant and a little indifferent to the whole question would still wait outside because his father had done so.

The third Lord explained he personally didn’t understand what it was all about, but felt obliged to carry on the family tradition.

 

I find it a sad tale.

A tale of an emptying, a tale about the survival of the husk at the expense of the kernel.

A meaningless ritual followed for no particular reason other than the fact that his father had done is that way.

It’s the kind of story that makes me fear for the future of our glorious spiritual inheritance.

It’s a story that makes me fear, just a little, about this glorious synagogue.

 

I’m sure that as Rabbi Jacobs was writing this tale of his Lordship, he had in mind the famous story that closes Gershon Scholem’s magisterial Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Scholem, of course, was much admired by Rabbi Jacobs who chaired one of Scholem’s lectures in London.

The story of their Lordships certainly reminded me of this tale.

 

When the [founder of Chasidism] the Baal Shem had a difficult task before him, he would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer and what he had set out to perform was done.

When, a generation later [his student] the Maggid was faced with the same task he would go to the same place in the woods and say, ‘We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speak the prayer – and what he wanted done became reality.

Again a generation later Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassov had to perform this task. And he too went into the woods and said, ‘We can no longer light a fire, nor do we know the secret meditation belonging the prayer, but we do know the place in the woods to which it all belongs and that must be sufficient’ and sufficient it was.

But when another generation had passed and Rabbi Israel of Rishin was called upon to perform the task, he say down on his golden chair in his castle and said, ‘We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayer, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done.’”

 

Rabbi Israel died some 150 years ago, and most of us have forgotten even the story.

 

It’s very easy to become maudlin at the passing of one generation.

We mourn those we love.

We mourn those who lit a beacon for us.

Even if we think, in theory, that we have ‘got over’ the mourning for a lost loved one, our losses prey upon us,

Most particularly when we face the all too concrete question of moving on - opening our homes and our heart to someone else – that’s when our losses can haunt us most fiercely.

And in the face of this ferocity it is all too possible to cast any potential next partner as a fraud, as a failure, as not really ‘my type.’

It’s all too possible to subject any incomer to a test that will break anyone.

I’m sure we have all done it.

And it’s a good thing to be scared about, if you are in the business of vele toledot.

And I am scared.

 

I was thinking about this, particularly last week, in the context of Eliezer’s attempt to find a partner for his master’s son Isaac.

I couldn’t help but read this story from the perspective of a Rabbinical Search process.

Abraham sets out the brief;

no-one from the daughters of Canaan, Gd forbid,

And off Eliezer goes, loaded up with trinkets and baubles to attract some bright young thing for Isaac.

I wonder how Eliezer felt on the return journey, coming back with this stranger, someone to lead into the future. Leading a search committee is a daunting task, Milton, I suspect you know this better than I.

A lot of nerves and a good slice of fear.

 

I wonder how Rebecca would have felt, shifting a little uncomfortably on her camel at the prospect of spending the rest of her life with a man she had never met.

I wonder how Isaac would have felt, at the prospect of some new woman in his life.

Actually while we know nothing about Eliezer and virtually nothing about Rebecca’s feelings, we do know about Isaac – the suitor.

 

v¼¨­¦t‰k IËk›h¦v§T³u vÁ¨e‰c¦r›,¤t jÍ©E°H³u IºN¦t vɨr¨G ¿vŠk¡v«Ît¨v e½¨j‰m°h ¨vɤtˆc±h³u 

IœN¦t hË¥r£jœ©t e¼¨j‰m°h oË¥j²B°H³u ¨v·†c¨v¡tœ®H³u

 

And Isaac brought Rebecca to the tent of Sarah his mother

And he took Rebecca and she was for him a wife

And he loved her

And he was comforted after the death of his mother.

 

We know it works.

 

Oddly there is virtually no Rabbinic commentary on this verse.

There’s a charming Midrash[1] that tells us that once Rebecca was installed as Isaac’s wife a cooling wind – a ruach, a spirit, that had been lacking since Sarah passed away – returned.

We know it worked, but we don’t know how.

There are no stories about Isaac and Rebecca going on dates in the foyers of the King David Hotel.

No clues as to what I could do, now, to help find a way to have you accept me as the next Rabbi of this special community.

 

The verse is so stark in its simplicity –

He took her as a wife, and then he loved and then he was comforted.

Maybe there is wisdom in the order of the verbs.

You have to commit before you can love.

You have to love before you can be comforted.

Courting seems so much more complex these days.

But I’m not sure it is possible to feel comforted until you fall in love again,

And I’m not sure it is possible to fall in love without commitment.

 

It’s easy to feel maudlin at the passing of a generation.

 

This is the very last Mishnah in Tractate Sotah. It is describing the end of a generation some 1800 years ago.

 

When Rebbi Meir passed away, there were no more great tellers of tales.

When Ben Azzai passed away, there were no more keen scholars.

When Ben Zoma passed away, there were no more great sermons.

When Rabbi Akiva passed away, there was no more honour for the Torah.

It goes on.

When Rebbe died, there was no more humility and there was no more fear of sin.

 

It’s a maudlin, almost terminally despairing view of Jewish life.

And admittedly it was a hard time to believe in a Jewish future.

But we, Jews, are forbidden from yeush – despair, and by the time of the completion of the Gemarah this Mishnah has a different ending.

 

Rabbi Yoseph turned to the teacher of the text and he told him,

Don’t include the piece about there being no more humility – d’ika ana.

For here I am.

Rabbi Nahman turned to the teacher of the text and he told him,

Don’t include the piece about there being no more fear of sin – d’ika ana.

Here I am.[2]

 

Who did these fools think they were?

Rabbi Yoseph, I knew Jack Kennedy, I worked with Jack Kennedy...

 

Actually I suspect they knew exactly what they were doing.

I love the idea that Rabbi Yoseph waits, while this whole litany of what is no more unfolds, until someone says there is no more humility. And this is the point he challenges – what holy chutzpah does that take!

The Mishnah can’t be allowed to stand because it’s too maudlin, and we are forbidden to despair.

 

I love the idea that the only possible response to what has passed, as one generation unfolds into another, is to say

Ika ana

Here I am.

 

And so,

Ika ana

Here I am.

And I don’t know how to light the fire, I don’t know the words of the Baal Shem’s magical prayer, I don’t know where to go in the forest.

But I do know the story.

I know Scholem’s story, the story as it appears in Major Trends.

I know a whole bunch of Talmud and philosophy and theology and all that good stuff.

And I know the story of this place, of New London Synagogue.

 

But more important even than all that, I know something else that the Baal Shem and the Maggid and the rest of them knew.

I know that there is something that needs to be done.

A task which summons our attention and our best efforts.

And what is that task?

The same as it has always been.

 

We live in a world where the unfettered call of materialism spreads misery and threatens to rip the soul out of human beings, turning us into productive units, overpaid hamsters spinning our way round and round and not really getting anywhere.

We live in a world where religious idolatry – fundamentalism – has succeeded in destroying the World Trade Centres and threatens so much more horror.

Ve’ele toldot some things change and some just stay the same.

We are still the inheritors of Avraham avinu who broke the false idols of faux religious piety and struck out on a journey towards a life with decency, integrity and kindness.

The task is still not done.

The story is not at an end.

 

D’ika anna

I know this story.

I know its past and I think I know its future.

A future I want to share with you all.

If you will do me that honour.

Shabbat shalom,

---

[1] Bereishit Rabba 60:16

[2] Sotah 49b 

Kol Nidrei - Hope

I want to give a sermon about hope.

I’ve been thinking of the tale of the person searching for their lost keys in a pool of light cast by a streetlamp.

Someone walks by, sees the person searching round and round the same patch of illuminated concrete and asks why they don’t search over there, along, just a little bit further away, and the person responds, they can only look for their lost keys where they can see them.

I think it’s a perfect story for our time.

We are all a bit trapped looking in places where we know solutions are not.

In Sanskrit, the antipathy towards the perpetuation of our searching in pools of our existing vision has a poetic quality. There’s a line in the Ashtanga Yoga Mantra that says this - Samsara Halahalah. I like the rhythm. It means that the cycle of repeated, repeated action is poisonous.

Let me do the most challenging part of all this first.

Yuval Diskin is a former director of Israel’s Shin Bet counter-terrorist security service. He gave his first-ever interview to Dror Moreh for the documentary The Gatekeepers. The movie, it’s on iplayer, opens with grainy black and white footage of a van driving down a road. 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.

“People expect a decision, and by a decision, they mean “to act.” ‘Don’t do it,’ [he says] seems easier, but it’s often harder.”

Diskin lived his life in cycles of violence - when they hit us, we hit back. Reflecting on his life he’s saying that “acting” – hitting back, might sound like a hard decision to the rest of us, but from his seat, it feels easier; easier, but unable to change the political situation, acting was, in the Sanskrit, a poisonous Samsara. The other decision – looking for ways other than responding to violence with violence – is genuinely hard, but it might bring us all to a new place.

The Gatekeepers is a remarkable movie, in which all six surviving leaders of Shin Bet in Isarel’s history, reflect on how the cycle – the samasara – is failing - halahalah. In its final line, Ami Ayalon, who spoke at a NLS salon a couple of years ago, chillingly shares this, “the tragedy of Israel’s public security debate is that we don’t realise we face a frustrating situation where we win every battle, but we are losing the war.”

Our lost keys, for all of us in so many ways, are in the darker places. That’s where we need to look but to do that we need, I think, hope.

I suspect the Hebrew word for hope is one many of us know, and we know it from one very particular place; Israel’s national anthem HaTivkah – literally ‘The Hope.’

The lyrics come from Naftali Hertz Imber’s poem Tikvateinu where the really great line, the one that sustains me against the gnaw of despair, is actually the opening line of the poem.

עוֹד לֹא אָבְדָה תִּקְוָתֵנוּ – our hope is not yet lost.

I’ve dwelt on that line this year, I think many of us have. But, as I’ve been preparing this sermon, I’ve come to feel I had the wrong conception of what hope, religiously, Jewishly, really is.

I used to think, עוֹד לֹא אָבְדָה תִּקְוָתֵנוּ suggests hope is a kind of bucket that sometimes is more full, sometimes less full and hasn’t yet run dry. Reasonable, perhaps, but, I think wrong. And certainly dangerous. Thinking of hope as a bucket with some level of hope in it feels tenuous. After all, there are those here tonight, particularly when turning Eastwards, who can feel the bucket is empty. “I used to hope,” they tell me – “I’ve given up.” What a year.

If we think of hope as quantity in a bucket, we are in danger of getting to a point where we feel hope is something we’ll just have to muddle on without.

The good news is that I don’t think Tikvah is this, certainly if seen in its Biblical context. I’m grateful to Rabbi Shai Held[1] for directing me to two really important verses that get, I think, to the heart of the matter.

Tikvah, in the Hebrew, means cord, as in the verse in my daughter’s Bat Mitzvah Haftarah - tikvat hut ha-shani, the cord of crimson thread that Rahab hangs outside of her window as a sign for Joshua and the Israelites to let her family live.[2] This kind of Tikvah is a thread reaching towards something beyond Rahab’s current experience, reaching away from doom. By means of this thread, Rahab’s Tikvah is drawing something down from beyond herself to herself; less a bucket, more a pathway to express a yearning for something beyond her immediate experience. Tikvah is the orientation towards that which Rahab doesn’t possess, not a reflection on how much liquid she has in a bucket labelled ‘hope.’ I think that has to be right. Hope is how we address what we don’t have, not a reflection on what we do.

And what is it that travels along this cord of hope? There’s a verse in Job

כִּ֤י יֵ֥שׁ לָעֵ֗ץ תִּ֫קְוָ֥ה אִֽם־יִ֭כָּרֵת וְע֣וֹד יַחֲלִ֑יף וְ֝יֹנַקְתּ֗וֹ לֹ֣א תֶחְדָּֽל׃

For trees have Tikvah - hope; If it is cut, it will renew itself; Its shoots will not cease.

The Tikvah of this poor tree, cut but still alive and preparing to Yachaleaf - renew, is its lifeforce. Tikvah is the thing that allows us to exist, even after we are wounded.

I think it’s a radically different, and far more resilient way to think about hope; as the orientation towards what we do not have, and the essence of our resilience to pain.

I think Natfali Tzvi Imber knew that too, when he crafted that line;

עוֹד לֹא אָבְדָה תִּקְוָתֵנוּ – our hope is not yet lost.

In a terrific article, Rabbi Dalia Marx,[3] shows Imber created that line as a riff, or inversion, based on a Biblical verse that appears in Ezekiel’s vision. The prophet is instructed to look over a field of dry bones and summon the bones back to life. In the text, the revived bones themselves speak of their experience of death and say this;

אָבְדָ֥ה תִקְוָתֵ֖נוּ – our hope was lost.[4]

In death their hope was lost, and now life comes back to these revived bones and

Od Lo – not so fast, there is life in these old bones yet.

I think these verses paint a conception of hope which is, again, more than the scale on which we grade exactly how miserable we feel about the Middle East. Hope is the very thing of life itself. Hope is what pulses through xylem and phylum, veins and arteries; hope is the essence of our existence and it’s how we find the keys to our future. It’s not an accounting practice. I don’t mean to be rude to accountants. Sorry accountants.

Avdah Tikvateinu isn’t a resigned reflection on how difficult it will be to make peace in the Middle East, or any of the challenges in our lives. Avdah Tikvateinu is death. It’s dry bones. It’s giving up on existing at all. Because existing at all means we reach out and tie threads of hope that take us beyond the solipsism of our here and now towards a future we cannot yet see, even if that feels dark or dangerous or foolishly optimistic. Hope is an attitude toward existence, precisely designed for the moments we are lacking, afraid or in pain or even when close to despair. It’s resistance.

Noah Ephron, not the screenwriter, the host of my favourite podcast from Israel, The Promised Podcast, told this story of the immediate aftermath of October 7^th.

There were still lots of people who were still missing from the Nova music festival [and no-one knew who had been taken captive and who were murdered with bodies undiscovered]. And the soldiers and the forensic types had gone over the area outside the ground and found the bodies they were going to find. And then one professor had this idea, “Let’s track the flight plan of birds of prey and compare them to the normal flight plans and, if they are different, we’ll go to where they are flying now and maybe we will find the remains of the people we are looking for,” And they did and they did. And that idea, “follow the birds,” [said Ephron] is maybe the saddest and most remarkable act of creativity I ever heard of. A brilliant and surprising act of mourning and consolation. And families got their terrible news which was terrible, but at least they knew.[5]

And I don’t know if it feels obscene to consider this a tale about hope. It probably should feel obscene. But this is the kind of hope I’m talking about. The willingness to respond to challenge by looking into the dark places, driven by a refusal to walk away from our commitment to life in all the beauty and fragility of where life has taken us.

I think that’s why we need Yom Kippur so. It’s why Yom Kippur is the most hopeful of all our festivals, even given our fasting and dwelling on our mortal condition.

כל נדרי ואסרי וחרמי, וקונמי וכנויי,

May all those things that have imprisoned our past and threaten to imprison our future.

מיום כפורים זה עד יום כפורים הבא

From this Yom Kippur to next Yom Kippur

כולהון אחרטנא בהון,

Those things - they are no longer to control us.

We are free to hope for something other,

Emboldened to look for something other,

Compelled to hope for something other, even if that means looking in the dark places.

This is my call, don’t give up on hope. Don’t give up on saying, “Yes, I do feel hope.” Don’t fall for the repeated cycles of the Samsara, for - Halahala - they are indeed poisonous. Keep looking in even in dark places, harder places for the keys to our future, as individuals and members of this community of faith, and the broader Jewish community and the community of humankind. And live in this bold direction of reaching beyond the misery to express that sense of hope and make it manifest in this world.  As we read in Deuteronomy two weeks ago.

I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you this day, that I have set before you life and death. Choose life.

Indeed, that’s the only way we are going to see things tomorrow that are different from our experience of today. And it’s the way towards the year of health and peace we seek. May it come to us all.

---

[1] https://mechonhadar.s3.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/HeldHHD5785.pdf

[2] Joshua 2:18

[3] https://www.thetorah.com/article/tikvatenu-the-poem-that-inspired-israels-national-anthem-hatikva

[4] Ezekiel 37:11

[5] https://tlv1.fm/promised-podcast/2024/10/02/the-a-year-edition/  

Yizkor - In Memory of Hersh Ben Perel Chana

I want to do something I’ve never done in a Yizkor sermon before.

I know so many of us are here with our own mourning and our memories of those we have loved and lost. And that is already painful enough, without the weight of the deaths of this last year.

I know too of the tradition that, in that first year after a death, we don’t even expect mourners to attend a Yizkor service. It’s not something I would ever police, but I can understand that the experience of a death, within the year, is too sharp for a decorous moment like this one.

And I know that there have been so many deaths for our people, and for humanity, in this last year, that to pause overlong on just one lost life risks, I’m not quite sure how to express it, an oversentimental favouritism, possibly to suggest that one life takes precedence over any other life. Clearly, I don’t mean any of that.

But I’m going to take the next minutes to share, as this Yizkor sermon, the words of one bereaved parent, for one deceased child; Rachel Goldberg-Polin, mother of Hersh of blessed memory. Hersh Goldberg-Polin, was taken from the Nova music festival on 7^th October. Actually, that’s not quite right. Hersh attended the festival to dance and fled the terrorists who attacked it and took refuge in a roadside bomb shelter along with twenty others who, with extraordinary bravery, survived as grenade after grenade was thrown in and then thrown out. Then Hersh lost an arm in a grenade explosion, and then he lost his freedom. And then nothing was heard of Hersh until, 201 days, later there was a video, he was still alive. Then, most tragically of all, on the 328^th day after 7^th October came the news of his murder.

And throughout that unfeasibly awful time, Rachel fought for her son, together with the lives of all the hostages, wearing a strip of masking tape with the number of days that had passed since his capture written on it, stuck to her chest.

I’m sharing Rachel’s words today, in some ways, as an everyman; for all our pains of love and loss and memory and gratitude and fear and anger and hope.

In some ways, I’m sharing Rachel’s words because it’s been this last awful year, and I think we still need to hear how we need to respond, even here so far away, to those awful events.

And I’m sharing Rachel’s speeches because, well I know so many of us have heard them, because they are a kind of Torah for our age. I am, I have been all year, in awe of Rachel’s strength and heart and also deeply inspired by the way in which she drew on our tradition to articulate that strength and heart. That’s helped me as I’ve done what I can for the release of hostages and fought against the darkness that has risen against me when I’ve turned towards the pain of the losses of this last year.

I hope it can help us all.

If you want to hear Rachel in her own voice, all these speeches can be found on the Promised Podcast, the “Hersh Ben Perel Chana” Edition.[1] It’s an extraordinarily moving listen.

 

On Day 33 of Hersh’s captivity, Rachel said this;

There are 240 souls buried alive deep in the ground, but they are breathing, and here I wait like Yaakov being told, here it's Yosef’s coat. It's all bloody, but just you wait. One day, we will see them all again, and we will fall on their necks, and we will weep when we see their faces and we see that they are still alive. When the captives return to Seon, we will be like dreamers, and our mouths will spill out with laughter all over the floor.

 

On day 67 at the United Nations in New York City.

 

My name is Rachel, and I am the mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin. He is my eldest child, and he is my only son in Gaza at this very moment, as we all stand here, there are 138 being held. They range in age from 10 months to 85 years old. They are from nations all around the globe. They are Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. They have not been attended to, nor treated by any international aid organization. And we, their families, want to ask you to look at their photos, read their names and then replace their names with the name of Your own daughter, son, father, mother, brother, sister, spouse, grandparent, and we want you to tell us that you would do exactly what you have been doing for these past 67 days to get them out. We all remain sleepless, and we all are running to the ends of the earth. We are the best actors in the world. We act like people, when really we are other beings, frozen in our acutely agonizing desolation. On Friday night, October 6, right before Hersh left, one of the last things I did was I blessed him. See on Sabbath evenings, Jewish parents bless their children to be like specific biblical characters. Jewish boys are blessed to be like the sons of Joseph, named Ephraim and Menasha. It's an intriguing choice, given that there's so many more well-known biblical characters. So why do we bless our boys to be like these two not so well-known brothers? Up until Ephraim and Menasha, all biblical brothers suffered from destructive hatred and poisonous rivalry; Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Easau, Joseph and his brothers. But Joseph has two children named Ephraim and Menasha. And those brothers, they loved each other. It sounds so simple, but suddenly, for the first time, we have biblical siblings who broke the pattern of hatred between brothers. And every Friday night, Jewish parents all over the world bless their sons to aspire to be like them, the brothers who didn't fight.

We are at a crossroads. And when I say we, I don't mean we Jews, Muslims or Christians, Americans, Palestinians, Europeans, Israelis, Ukrainians, Russians. I mean we humans. We can keep dividing the world into the paradigm of them versus us, or we can start thinking about those who are willing and those who are not willing. It's an idea that will require the most brave, creative, heroic efforts and strengths unimaginable, for those who are willing, amidst ongoing trauma, angst and suspicion, to build an idea of a future. We have got to learn to live together, or all over the world, we are going to die together.

 

On day 166

 

I think of Ishmael from Sefer Bereshit, when he and his mother, Hagar, were cast out into the desert. You know, Ishmael runs out of water, and he begins to die. And the text describes him crying out to God to save him. And just as [God] is about to save him, our [classical Biblical commentators] tell us that the [angels] say to God, God, what are you bananas? Do you know who this person is going to be, the father of don't save him. He's going to be the father of all the future enemies of your people... But our God is a God of mercy. Our God is a God of compassion. Our God is a God of grace, and he saves him. We are told, in Devarim, “walk in God's ways and be godlike.” And I think to myself, If God saved Ishmael, who he knew, would be the progenitor of all our future enemies, how much more so must we save our people now in Gaza, right now this morning. We have grandfathers, brothers, sisters, fathers, spouses, sons and daughters. We need to save our people. We say we are an Am Kadosh. Kadosh is a funny word. It's always hard to explain in English. We like to say it means holy, but actually, Kadosh means different, separate, special. Part of being different and special is that we will do things that seem extraordinary. For example, we will pay a high price to get innocent people back, because we value life, and we think it's precious, and that is what makes us a holy people, an Am Kadosh. And so paying a high price should be something we are proud of, and we lean into and we embrace. As my husband John has said, the price to bring home these people will be high, but the price not to bring them home will be higher, because we will never recover as a people. We will no longer be the nation who can claim to value life, and we will have to look our children and our grandchildren in the eye and say to them, I love you in Sweet dreams, but if someone comes and drags you from your bed in the middle of the night, we are not coming, and then we really will have lost because we will not be recognizable to ourselves. We will look in the mirror and see a stranger blinking back at us.

 

On day 201

 

Hersh, if you can hear this, we heard your voice today for the first time in 201 days. And if you can hear us, I am telling you. We are telling you we love you. Stay strong, survive.

 

On day 311

 

I am desperate to be able to use masking tape again for normal reasons, for normal reasons, like closing the rice when I'm making rice, not having my name change every single day.

 

And on day 332, Rachel’s gave this eulogy at the funeral of her son

 

I have had a lot of time during the past 332 days to think about my sweet boy, Hersh. And one thing I keep thinking about is how, out of all of the mothers in the whole entire world, God chose to give him to me. What must I have done in a past life to deserve such a beautiful gift? It must have been glorious. And I am so grateful to God, and I want to thank God right now, in front of all of you for giving me this magnificent present of my Hersh, for 23 years, I was privileged to have the most stunning honor to be Hershey's mama.

I'll take it and say thank you.

I just wish it had been for longer.

Part of what is so deeply crushing and confusing for all of us is that a strange thing happened along this macabre path upon which our family found itself travelling for the last 332 days, amidst the inexplicable agony, terror, anguish, desperation and fear, we became absolutely certain that you were coming home to us alive, but it was not to be. Now I no longer have to worry about you. I know you are no longer in danger.

I send each of the families my deepest sympathies for what we are all going through and for the sickening feeling that we all could not save them, I think we all did every single thing we could, the hope that perhaps a deal was near was so authentic, it was crunchy, it tasted close. But it was not to be. So those beautiful six survived together, and those beautiful six died together, and now they will be remembered together forever.

At this time, I ask your forgiveness. If ever I was impatient or insensitive to you during your life or neglected you in some way, I deeply and sincerely request your forgiveness. Hersh, if there was something we could have done to save you and we didn't think of it. I beg your forgiveness. We tried so very hard, so deeply and desperately. I'm sorry.

Now my Hersh, I ask for your help as we transform our hope into grief

and this new, unknown brand of pain. I beg of you, Hersh, please do what you can to have your light shine down on me. Dada, Libby and Orly, help shower us with healing and resilience, help us to rise again. I know it will take a long time, but please, may God bless us one day dada, Libby Orly, and I will hear laughter, and we'll turn around and see it's us and that we're okay.

 

I often think, indeed some of you have heard me say it, that the pain of loss is the cost of love. And I hear that in Rachel’s extraordinary words.

And then there’s the call for us all to do whatever we can to fight for the release of those other brave and equally each-in-their-own-way hostages. And I hear that.

And then there’s the way that the pain, the fear during that awful 10 months of captivity and even the pain Hersh’s murder, has brought Rachel, and so many, many others, to actions of courage and beauty and power. 

That, I think, is the meaning of what we say when we say of someone, Zichronam L’varachah – may their memories be for a blessing. We mean, may we be changed and lifted and inspired and challenged and may we rise to that challenge in their memory to do good in this world.

 

May all the hostages be released.

May peace come to the region.

May the memories of all we have loved and lost be, forever, a blessing.

Amen.

---

[1] https://tlv1.fm/promised-podcast/2024/09/05/the-hersh-ben-perel-chana-edition/

Neilah - A Universe in Which Everything is Pulling Apart

I went to see an unusual play earlier in the year. In Echo, by the playwright, Nassim Soleimanpour. An actor who has never met the writer and has never seen the script, takes to the stage in front of a 20-foot screen on which the face of the writer appears.

“Hello,” says Soleimanpour. “Can you confirm, we’ve never met before?”

The actor, the night I saw the play it was Adrian Lester, confirms.

“Can you confirm you don’t know anything about what you are going to be asked to do, you haven’t done any research into what is about to happen?”

Adrian Lester looks as if he is thinking of firing his agent and confirms.

And then the story unfolds. Sometimes the actor gets to read words projected on a screen, sometimes he gets to repeat words whispered into his earpiece. And sometimes, he’s left to respond of his own volition – it’s as new to him as it was to us.

What follows is a meditation on the meeting of two people and the story of one of them – Soleimanpour – an Iranian who fled his home under threat of imprisonment or worse and is on Zoom from his flat in Germany where his dog has a walk-on role, and his wife is losing patience with his getting in the way of her preparing dinner.

And Lester, and the 500 of us sat in the tiered seating all around, are drawn into this story of a life pulled apart; what does it mean to flee for one’s life, what do you pack, what do you miss?

And then things get a little astronomical. Soleimanpour, over the video link, says something about how the universe came into being and, projected on 20-foot video screens, we see stars and galaxies whizzing and the actor, this stranger to Soleimanpour and stranger to Soleimanpour’s script, says this, “In a universe in which everything is pulling apart, to come together is an act of resistance.”

“In a universe in which everything is pulling apart, to come together is an act of resistance.”

And I suddenly understood what the point of the play was.

And I knew what I wanted to talk about for Neilah.

Don’t worry, I’m not submitting the theatre ticket as a business expense.

The play is an exploration of the ways in which we resist pulling apart. It’s an exploration of how not to succumb to that law of physics that nods sagely as each of us and every particle within us drifts ever further apart.

Actually, it’s worse than that. The forces drawing us apart, are greater even than Newton’s law of thermodynamics – there’s also that polarizing drive in contemporary society that both compels and terrifies us. There’s a nice line in Ezra Klein’s book Why We’re Polarized. He’s talking about the way the Youtube algorithm works and, of course, much else besides.

Videos about vegetarianism led to videos about veganism. Videos about jogging led to videos about running ultramarathons. It seems as if you are never ‘hard core’ enough for YouTube’s recommendation algorithm.

The greatest marketing wizards in human history are gleefully drawing us ever deeper into silos of specialization because that’s what keeps us clicking. And I don’t have anything against vegans or ultramarathon runners, but we are also being drawn into silos of identities where we are encouraged to sneer at those in other silos. We increasingly define ourselves and our fellows not as multi-fashioned souls with a host of different interests and ideas, but as people who identify in one way in order to demonstrate our difference form those who identify differently. And in doing so we become complicit in the way in the falling apart of the universe.

What is it, that has the power to resist this particulation and polarization? Soleimanpour’s play suggests we need two things.

One is we build our internal strength, our gravitational mass. We need to treasure and celebrate who we are.

And secondly, we need find ways to encounter and build connection with others, those who are different to us and even those who disagree with us.

We find our own strength through story-telling and making and sharing memories.

We, us members of New London, we’re good at stories, I think.

We’ve got the greatest story ever told – about a ragtag bunch of slaves rescued from a genocidal Pharoah by God with an outstretched hand and a leader with slurred speech who, when the moment came, found the language we still use in our Yom Kippur liturgy today. For Moses came up with the phrase - שׁוּב מֵחֲרוֹן אַפֶּךָ – return from Your anger, O God.

Exodus is a story about the value and meaning of freedom, about the dangers and ultimate failure of human despotism. It’s a story about believing in things that cannot be seen and a story about the possibility of anyone becoming great. That’s a story to hold us together, as it does, of course, year after year, Passover after Passover.

Or, in this 60^th Year of New London Synagogue – there’s the story of our founding.

A story of a decent, brilliant Rabbi who was excommunicated by the Orthodox because he preached that combining belief and critical thought was a truer and more powerful way to be Jewish, and decent as a human, than a retreating into a blinkered fundamentalism. It’s the story of how a group of people cared enough to found, and fund, a Synagogue that is standing strong decades later, bringing Jews together, strengthening its future, and our future.

Storytelling draws us together.

 Memories are, in some ways, similar; but more personal, more revealing our, knowing and unknowing, intimate self.

When we share memories and even better when we build memories with others, we open doorways into our hearts, invitations to join, to have future memories together.

Here’s something my family do every Friday night. We sit around the Shabbat table and do ‘Highlight of the week.’ The deal is you have to have one, and you can only have one.

I’m a little tyrannical about it – you can’t be too general, “oh it was all just lovely” doesn’t count and no-one’s allowed to say they don’t have anything good worth remembering.

For the sin of being a tyrannical enforcer around the Shabbat dinner table…

Actually, the other thing I, somewhat tyrannically enforce, is a zone of phone-free engagement. Especially on Shabbat.

Phones are, I think, anti-memory devices. They are perhaps the central reason we don’t make memories – too busy confusing pixels and social media feeds for love and friendship. Put ‘em down.

Instead tell stories, listen to stories, make memories, share memories. Treasure and celebrate who we are.

 

And then there’s the harder thing – reaching beyond those with whom we find an instinctive fellowship.

We, as a human race, are each other’s only hope. As annoying and frustrating and, frankly as murderous as one human can be to another human, there is nowhere else for us find the gravitational weight that can sustain our existence.

We need to seek out difference and find a way to come to terms with difference in its difference.

This, again, is from Rachel Goldberg-Polin, mother of the murdered captive from October 7th, Hersh. She was invited to speak at the Herzlia Security conference on the 263rd day after her son’s capture.

What shall I share with you, astute governmental policy experts, security virtuosos and learned academics, given that I am just a mother who, in the before, worked at a high school? I found myself wandering around the Talmud.

She shares the story of Hillel and Shammai, the greatest Talmudic Rabbis and the most frequently cited Baalei Machloket – disagreeing debate partners. Why, Goldberg-Polin asks, is the end result of the vast majority of their disputes about Jewish law that the law follows Hillel?

It is [recorded.” She lectured the room of international security experts,] that Hillel was kind and he was humble, but those qualities alone do not explain his exceptionality. The Talmud explains that when Hillel would teach his students, he would always present Shammai’s opinion first, and he would do so in such a compelling and respectful way that his students, each time, were convinced that this must surely be the way the law should be understood. Only at the end of Rabbi Hillel's explanation would he then say, with respect and honor, “I actually think the following,” and only then would he go on to elucidate his opinion. There was no name calling, no shouting, and never attempts to tear down Shammai’s ideas, nor Shammai as a person, as unworthy. Hillel simply disagreed, but only after truly delving deeply, teaching and endeavoring to comprehend Shammai’s approach. It is critical to understand the other side. [Goldberg-Polin continued]. You don't have to agree with the other side, but we must try to understand them, and I think that is what Hillel did so very well, with conviction and with deference.[1]

Magen Inon, whose mother and father were both murdered by Hamas terrorists, wrote this,

From this unbearable feeling of pain and distress, I wish to speak about what I believe is my parents’ legacy. People from both sides of the border have good reasons to hate one another. But this cannot be the only option. … Our shared future is based on the belief that all human beings are equal and deserving of respect and safety. This is how I was raised and how I am raising my own children. In the long term, and even if it’s very far away, the only real future is that of hope and peace.[2]

Or, for those who want to hear the same voice from our Muslim or Arab cousins, I could share with us tonight from, Wajid Iltaf Khan, Lord Kahn, the Muslim Minister for Communities, or Mayor of Camden, Samata Khatoon or, the Gaza-born activist, Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, who wrote this for the Jewish News this week.

In the painful year since the October 7 massacre in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and hundreds taken hostage, I have made more connections with Israelis and Jews as a Palestinian from Gaza than I have in the entirety of my life.[3]

Alkhatib has written powerfully of his opposition to Hamas and powerfully also to ask for an understanding of how difficult it is for those within Gaza to speak out with the same forthright condemnation. Alkhatib, a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Institute had to seek political asylum in the States some 20 years ago.

I could go on. I know there is hatred in the world, I know there is violence and there is thuggery and there is hatred. I know to protect against that and challenge that takes a certain strength.  But we have to stop weaponizing difference. We have to stop being complicit in the pulling ourselves as a single human race apart.

It's not a goal to agree with every human in their every opinion. That’s not the point. It’s that I – we all – have to come to a point where we demonstrate curiosity and strive for empathy with human existence, even if it’s a radically different perspective.

And as much as I will condemn and oppose the actions of those who wish me harm, I can’t, we can’t foster a disregard of their humanity. Because otherwise this whole thing is going to fall apart.

“In a universe in which everything is pulling apart, to come together is an act of resistance.”

I left that performance of Nassim Solempanour’s Royal Court play feeling oddly elated. I had watched in as two complete strangers had met and fallen into intimacy through story and memory and curiosity and openness and I too had become complicit in that act of falling into intimacy along with 500 or so fellow strangers. We shared furtive looks of resistance as we made our way home. In that hour and however-long-it-was, I had felt the resistance grow to the particulation of our existence.

And I was reminded of the conclusion of one of the greatest books I have ever read. At the end of An Intimate History of Humanity, a tour de force exploration of memory, story and human multiplicity and shared commonality, Theodore Zeldin, born in 1933 Mandatory Palestine to Russian Jewish parents wrote this;

It is in the power of everybody, with a little courage, to hold out a hand to someone different, to attempt to increase, even by a tiny amount, the quantity of humanity in the world. But it is careless to do so without remembering how previous efforts have failed. History, with its endless procession of passers-by has so far largely been a chronicle waste. But next time two people meet, the result could be different. That is the origin of anxiety, but also of hope and hope is the origin of humanity.[4]

May it come to us all for good.

---

[1] https://tlv1.fm/promised-podcast/2024/09/05/the-hersh-ben-perel-chana-edition/

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/19/hamas-attack-peace-revenge-border-war

[3] https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/opinion-how-7-october-changed-my-perspective-as-a-palestinian-from-gaza/?fbclid=IwY2xjawF0wQFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHZnGcYgRMetWDP9g34v46xQTMUqNl08w27i1RybAMOlVCHWLvSGzE6xIrA_aem_N0ZDmUic2e2ElpgYikhvmw

[4] An Intimate History of Humanity, Theodore Zeldin