How to be a Hero in an Time of Narrowness - A Lech Lecha Sermon

 Simon Armitage has published a new translation of Gilgamesh, the 4,500 year-old epic about a wandering Babylonian hero and his encounter with a world that strikes us as strange.

“The genius of the poem,” Armitage writes, “is that it conveys a sense of the protagonist’s own uncertainty, so that every episode or scene feels as much of a revelation to us as it does to Gilgamesh.”

It’s an idea that applies remarkably well to Abraham who also, of course, begins his epic, really our epic, this Shabbat.

Go, says God, and Abraham goes.

Avram’s journey is truly epic, filmic even. I wonder if Christopher Nolan might be interested. Certainly, many of the episodes of Nolan’s version of the Odyssey and Armitage’s version of Gilgamesh have echoes and resonances in our Biblical epic. Not least on this fascinating point of the uncertainly haunting the protagonist.

There is, in the Genesis epic, a famine and the fleeing from famine, there’s a sibling dispute and a kidnapping and a military campaign and visions inspired by God and burning sacrifices with לַפִּ֣יד אֵ֔ש – fiery torches and the desperate attempt to find a way to pass on an inheritance. And throughout it all, you can feel Abraham’s uncertainty - the protagonist’s own uncertainty, so that every episode or scene feels as much of a revelation to us as it does to him – even after having read this epic so so many times.

Abraham is sometimes, particularly by the Danish Christian theologian Kierkegaard, as magnificently assured and confident in his heroism, but that’s not how he comes across to me.

There are two moments in this week’s reading that … well I bump on them.

Perhaps the hardest part to read – for those of us who wish to look up to Avram as an inspiring hero is his relationship with Sarai, his wife.

There’s a time when, fleeing famine Avram goes down to Egypt and, worried that the Egyptians will see his wife, Sarai, and think her so beautiful that they will kill him to get her, suggests that they agree to pretend that Sarai is his sister - לְמַ֙עַן֙ יִֽיטַב־לִ֣י בַעֲבוּרֵ֔ךְ  - so it will go well for me [Avram] because of you. And that dishonesty results in Sarai being taken off to be a, it seems for a while, a plaything for Pharoah. God steps in to protect Sarai’s honour, but it’s uncomfortable. And to make matters worse, there’s a similar episode in next week’s reading also.

 

And then the moment recorded in the sixth Aliyah

God speaks to Abraham and says, be not afraid אָנֹכִי֙ מָגֵ֣ן לָ֔ךְ שְׂכָרְךָ֖ הַרְבֵּ֥ה מְאֹֽד׃

I -  God - am your shield your reward will be mighty.

Which sounds great.

And Abraham responds,

What have you got to give me? I’m going to die under a curse, my house-servant will succeed me. You, God, haven’t given me an heir.

Avram comes across as unsure of his footing, flawed, nervous.

וַיְהִ֤י הַשֶּׁ֙מֶשׁ֙ לָב֔וֹא וְתַרְדֵּמָ֖ה נָפְלָ֣ה עַל־אַבְרָ֑ם וְהִנֵּ֥ה אֵימָ֛ה חֲשֵׁכָ֥ה גְדֹלָ֖ה נֹפֶ֥לֶת עָלָֽיו׃

And behold the sun was coming and a deep sleep fell on Avram and a fear, a great darkness fell on him.

I mean, there’s some magnificent stuff to come but this week the claim that Avram is a great Knight of Faith rings a little hollow.

 

Maybe we have things backwards and maybe we are thinking of the wrong thing when it comes to thinking about what it means to be a hero.

I think, when we think of a hero, we think of someone resolute and unflinching, bulldozing through any molehills that might have the temerity to rise up in their way.

But wonder if we might be better off with a different model.

Kol HaOlam Kulo, we sing in the name of Rebbe Nachman, Gesher Tzar Meod – the whole world is a very narrow bridge and the main thing to recall is to have no fear at all.

Or rather – if you look up the original source of the famous song – Likeutei Moharan 2:48, Rebbe Nachman puts it this way;

וְדַע, שֶׁהָאָדָם צָרִיךְ לַעֲבֹר עַל גֶּשֶׁר צַר מְאֹד מְאֹד

Know that a human has to cross over a very, very narrow bridge.

וְהַכְּלָל וְהָעִקָּר – שֶׁלֹּא יִתְפַּחֵד כְּלָל

And the main thing, the essence is to not to Yitpachad – it’s reflexive for those of us following the grammar – the essence is not to let yourself become frightened.

The broader context of the original quote in Likkeutei Mehoran is fascinating and I’m grateful to Rabbi Jeremy Schwartz for doing some really moving work on the original Rebbe Nachman material that I’ve been able to use.[1]

When a person begins in the service of God, Rebbe Nachman teaches, that journey begins with a feeling of distance – a הִתְרַחֲקוּת - It seems to them that they are being distanced from on high and that they are being altogether prevented from entering into the service of God.

We see this, says Rebbe Nachman, from all the Tzaddikim – he doesn’t explicitly mention Avram in this week’s parasha, but he could have.

וְצָרִיךְ לִהְיוֹת עַקְשָׁן גָּדוֹל

And one needs to be extremely stubborn not to get distracted from the task לִבְלִי לְהָנִיחַ אֶת מְקוֹמוֹ

Heroism begins, suggests Rebbe Nachman, not with certainty, but in distance and fear and the essential quality of the hero is not confidence but refusing to give up on feeling that the journey from where they are now to where they want to be is necessary.

That goes for Odysseus, for Gilgamesh, for Avram, for Rebbe Nachman and for me and you too.

שֶׁהָאָדָם צָרִיךְ לַעֲבֹר עַל גֶּשֶׁר צַר מְאֹד מְאֹד

 

I wonder if that’s a way to understand Ben Zoma’s famous line in Pirkei Avot

Eizo Hu Gibor – who is a hero

HaKovesh et Yitzro – the one who conquers their inclination.[2]

What’s the inclination that needs to be conquered? That niggling sense we all suffer from, from Avram onwards, that it might not be worth bothering, that we can’t really make a difference, that we might just as well stay at home and give up.

That read of Ben Zoma certainly describes the efforts of my own Yetzer Hara – inclination towards evil. My own Yetzer Hara doesn’t spend much time encouraging me to be actively bad – I’m not easily tempted towards being actively bad, most of the time. It just distracts me with feelings of impotence in the face of the challenges of my personal epic journey through life. It tells me, ach, don’t bother, give up, just scroll through another couple of minutes of cat videos or miserable prognostications about the state of the world.

But when I’m at my best – at my most heroic – I’m not distracted by this kind of  self-imposed distancing from my task in life – my הִתְרַחֲקוּת. I feel an excitement about the journey, about the possibility of doing things to make my life better, to make the lives of the people I care about better, to make the circles in which I move better and the society and, please God, even the world, better.

I get on and do things. I try to cross narrow bridges.

And here’s the really exciting thing about trying to be this kind of a hero, about conquering that inner voice that tempts us into giving up, worrying about doing things rather than doing them, or just scrolling our lives away.

It works.

Rebbe Nachman puts it this way

Know [that] each time you detach and shift just a bit from materialism to the Blessed One's service, all the movements and changes accumulate, combine and bind together, and come to your aid at a time of need.

Oliver, you crossed a narrow bridge today – I don’t know if you were wracked by doubts about whether you could indeed pull of a magnificent Bar Mitzvah – it certainly never felt you were. In fact the ease with which you traversed the challenge of today might make a person think you haven’t taken on a mighty challenge – you definitely took on a mighty challenge.

And thing thing I hope, now you are on the other side of that particular challenge, is that you feel  the things we should all feel on the other sides of the successfully completed challenges of our lives; heroic, powerful and ready for what comes next.

For there will be challenges to come, very narrow bridges to cross, and the most important thing is not to give up, to remember that Avram never gave up and to remember that back in the days when you became an adult in the eyes of God and the people of Israel and this community and your amazing family, pushing on, taking on challenges and rising to them, was worth it.

May we all, always feel the same,

 

Shabbat Shalom

 

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[1] https://voices.sefaria.org/sheets/494107.4?lang=bi

[2] 4:1

NAZA, Abraham and Systems

I went to see NAZA this week. Its subject, as many will know, is the destruction of life and property in Gaza. Its content is almost entirely rooftop shots of anonymised Israeli intelligence soldiers reporting on how decisions that led to ‘collateral damage’ in Gaza were made. The documentary has been the subject of adulation by some – including many long-established haters of Israel. And the subject of vituperative attack by others – including many long-established defenders of Israel.

This isn’t an attempt to set the film in context. I know who started ‘it’ on October 7^th and I have nothing but absolute anger and disdain for those terrorists and deep empathy for those left in pain and mourning because of that awful attack, but this is my reflection on the movie and its connection to the central idea in this week’s – and perhaps the entire year’s Torah reading.

I'm also linking to a rebuttal of the movie written by someone who claims, " firsthand knowledge of how strikes were reviewed and approved" and disagrees with the movie's claims. I didn't understand the movie in the way Miron suggests the movie would be understood, and may well be understood, by some or even many viewers. For me, the rebuttal, while important, doesn't change my views. I understood the counter-factual claims as focusing on degrees, rather than in absolute terms.

I felt two things watching NAZA.

The first was a lack of surprise. In part, that’s because the movie isn’t airing revelations never-before discussed, but largely because … what else had I expected? What else could have served as connective tissue coupling the public announcements of Israeli politicians to those images of Gazan rubble and loss of life? Surely there was always going to be a chain of humans – Israeli soldiers – quantifying other humans – Palestinians both culpable and innocent – as numbers? I know the claims that Israel’s army is the most moral in the world and that warnings are shared and that investigations into accidents take place, but the way in which anger was and is expressed in Israel – and anger is clearly justified – and the scale of destruction in Gaza meant, as much as I would have wished to believe otherwise, that hearing and watching soldiers breaking down exactly how that connective tissue functioned was heartbreaking but not surprising.

The other thing I felt was a sense of the imprisonment of the interviewees and everyone else featured in the movie. (NAZA is not a film about the imprisonment of either hostages or Gazans – those stories also deserve attention). Time and again, director Yuval Abraham, who appears in the shot during these interviews, asks whether these soldiers ever raised concerns, or refused orders to wreak destruction, and these soldiers – who are identified as progressives, inhabitants of secular, liberal Tel Aviv no less – explain their inability to turn away from actions one considers Retzach Am – genocide – and all know are deeply ethically problematic. The interviewees share how they were (are?) imprisoned in a system which not only forced them against their ethical nature, but eviscerated that ethical nature away. There are others who appear imprisoned in the movie – intercut in the movie are cutaways of random inhabitants of Tel Aviv, partially obscured, filmed from the same rooftops used to film the interviews. They appear inside boxes, also seemingly trapped in this system, also disconnected from the ethical weight of the destruction being visited just miles away. I felt imprisoned myself; I wanted to get up and leave the cinema several times. My own sense of imprisonment, as a viewer in this country so far away, connects to something Rabbi Lev Taylor observed about his viewing of NAZA this week - https://simlev.blog/2026/10/22/reflections-of-the-experience-of-watching-naza/, “In truth,” Rabbi Lev writes, “we [British viewers of this movie] have been morally lucky. None of us really knows what we are capable of resisting until we are instructed to commit war crimes and know the price if we do not.”

But yet, at the heart of this week’s Torah reading; at the heart of the entire Torah, is the election of Abraham who provides a commanding model for how to respond to a system that feels overwhelming. Avram, as he appears in Parshat Lech Lecha, is the first עברי - Hebrew – he crosses over – ויעבר - to stand on the other side of the river. To be a Hebrew is to be someone willing to cross over and stand on the other side of systems that are not good. His crossing over is at the heart of the two great Midrashim that articulate why and how Abraham is so important for us as Jews; the Midrash in which Abraham stands up to the great ruler Nimrod and rejects the call to bow down to any false god (Bereishit Rabba 38:13) and the Midrash in which Abraham looks out over a burning castle and asks a question no-one before had ever asked (Bereishit Rabba 39:1), “How is it possible that this castle burns and there is no ruler to look after it?”

That is to say, it’s very hard to stand against societal failure, but it is the defining quality of Abraham, every prophet ever since and, I think, still our continued task. As painful and as partial as NAZA undoubtedly is, I’m grateful to have seen it.

Shabbat Shalom

Whattaboutery, Shooting Messengers and Ecological Disaster

Here’s a classic Rabbinic tale

Midrash Tanhuma

Said Rav Huan in the name of Rav Yossi, God warned the generation of the flood about the oncoming flood for 120 years in the hope they would change their ways.

But they didn’t so God said to Noah, ‘Make an ark of cedar wood.’ Noah got up and planted cedar trees.

And the people asked him, ‘what are those cedars for?’ And he said, ‘God wants to bring a flood on the world.’ And they laughed at him.

And Noah watered the cedars and they grew, and the people asked him, ‘What are you doing?’ And he answered said God wants to bring a flood on the world. And they laughed at him.

And eventually he cut the trees down and planed them. And they asked him, ‘What are you doing?’ And he answered them. And since they didn’t change their ways, God immediately brought the flood.

--

There seems to be something in the human psyche which doesn’t like to change and doesn’t like to admit change is underway. We find it easier to mock those who are warning of the truth than to accept their truth. And even if change is acoming, we feel, we are going to be able to resist it.

These are very old stories.

--

Talmud Sanhedrin

When Noah rebuked them and spoke words to them tough as fiery flints, they mocked him. They said to him, ‘Old man, what is this ark for?’

He replied, ‘The Holy Blessed One will bring a flood upon you.’

Ha! ‘A flood of what,’ they jeered? ‘if God brings the Flood up from the earth, we have iron plates with which we can cover the earth! if from heaven, we have a substance called ‘akob’ which can ward it off.”[1]

--

Technology is extraordinary, and we clearly def need tech advance to get us out of this hole, but it’s not going to be enough. Indeed somewhere in the way in which technology gets monetized, and we get tempted into buying more and more, it might even be that the promise we can build our way out of this mess with more and more consumption is going to get us into even greater trouble than we were in in the first place.

That, of course, is the lesson of the tale we read at the end of the Parasha.

Faced with a challenge the humans of the generation of the Tower of Babel, turned to technology – let us build a tower, they said.

As if a tall building could be the solution to the problems of their lives.

And they succeeded in building a tall building, but didn’t succeed in taking due account of their lives.

And the building eventually crumbled, as buildings eventually do.

The truth is that change needs to be radical and we need to be honest about the scale of change required.

There are, of course, prophets who will tell us of the damage to the oceans and the glaciers and the fragile systemic nature of our planet’s ecosystem.

And just like the prophets of the Biblical period – we’ve largely ignored them – that is to say unless we’ve mocked or blamed them.

There’s an amazing moment in Shelach Lecha when two of the twelve spies sent into the Land of Israel come back with a perspective that is entirely accurate – but the people around threaten to stone them.

There’s poor old Elisha, wandering along the road –

וּנְעָרִ֤ים קְטַנִּים֙ יָצְא֣וּ מִן־הָעִ֔יר וַיִּתְקַלְּסוּ־בוֹ֙ וַיֹּ֣אמְרוּ ל֔וֹ עֲלֵ֥ה קֵרֵ֖חַ עֲלֵ֥ה קֵרֵֽחַ׃

– we’ve been shooting messengers for a very long time.

Elisha gets his own back he calls on a bear to come and mangle the mocking kids.

Prophets often get to be proved right, eventually.

It’s always been easy to attack the prophets for their indelicate ways and blunt language. But it hasn’t mean they were wrong.

We need to stop criticizing climate activists for the blunt=nature of their presentations.

And we need to change.

It’s one of the great truths of humanity – that change is possible.

Our most powerful and well-attended Festivals celebrate the possibility of human change. The entire message of Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur is that even if change is hard, and even if we have been here before and promised to change, and slid right back to where we were just moments ago, this time it can be different.

Rambam – see yourself and the entire world balanced.

And then, Pirkei Avot, Mitzvah Goreret Mitzah, transformational change can come.

Here’s my top tip for allowing change to happen.

Pay no attention to anyone who takes pride in suggesting a contradiction in our actions.

How can you say eco matters are important when you just … I don’t know, left a light switch on.

Similarly, pay no attention to the whataboutery merchants – the sort of people who, if they hear you are recycling want to know challenge you because you aren’t, I don’t know, only eating local seasonal food produce.

Both these kinds of people – and I might be one of these kinds of people sometimes too, should be disregarded.

There’s a lovely line in Baba Metzia – Reish Lakish says

קְשׁוֹט עַצְמְךָ וְאַחַר כָּךְ קְשׁוֹט אֲחֵרִים.״

Sort yourself out, then afterwards, worry about sorting anyone else out.

If you are trying to do better, if you’ve found a first step – take it. It will tip the world, it will tip you, it will make the next step easier.

Change doesn’t come all at once. Change is always messy, inelegant, contradictory. But only way we ever improve. Our unevenness needs to be welcomed.

To those standing tall, raising their heads over parapets where it is so easy to be attacked - I salute you. Keep fighting, keep campaigning, keep doing that most Jewish thing of refusing to give up on us, even as we fail.

And as for the voices that mock – there have always been voices that mock. There always will be.

Those who mock might not deserve to be mangled by a bear – but they don’t deserve our attention. The rumours of the flood are very real and we have a world to mend,

Shabbat Shalom

[1] Sanhedrin 108b

A Response to the Green Party’s Anti-Zionist Policy, An Open Letter

 

I am a Zionist; that is to say, I believe in the right of Jews to live in self-determination, in peace, in the Land of Israel to which we have been bound for millennia.

I also believe in a free Palestine; that is to say, the right of Palestinians to live, in self-determination, in peace, on land to which they have also been bound for millennia.

It’s not going to be easy, neither practically nor emotionally, for both ‘sides’ to get what they wish. But I don’t accept these statements are either mutually exclusive or beyond the realm of possibility. In fact, I believe the only way to have either is to have both.

Some self-describe as ‘Zionists’ or supporters of a ‘free Palestine,’ for whom the statement they adopt requires, either explicitly or implicitly, an eradication of the humanity of the ‘other’, or worse, some kind of ethnic cleansing. There are certainly those on both, supposed, sides of this too-often lethal argument who seek to deny that either Jews or Palestinians have meaningful connection to the land of their ancestors. This seems preposterous, again, in both directions.

It’s heartbreaking that voices of performative dehumanisation and exclusion have come to seem so popular in these extreme and populist times. And I’m saddened to feel that the Anti-Zionist policy, adopted by the Green Party, falls into the category of this kind of posturing, heartbreaking public statement, both in its own terms, and even more so in terms of the failure to show empathy for both Jews living in Israel, victims of despicable violence perpetuated in the name of ‘Palestinian resistance,’ and Jews living in this country, for whom a prayer in the direction of Jerusalem, or for the sake of Jerusalem, now stands to be condemned as racist by a party they might otherwise support or find holding the mandate to represent their democratic interests.

Jonathan Freedland, writing in the Guardian, perfectly captures the problem with the policy’s claim that it is not antisemtic.

[The policy] reveals a wilful misunderstanding of Jews and Judaism. Social media has been full in recent days of supposedly progressive non-Jews telling Jews what Judaism is and what it is not – with an arrogance that, I suspect, they would find unacceptable in a majority group addressing any other minority – and the same error recurs. Breezily, we are told that Zionism is merely a political ideology, wholly separate from Judaism, which means, happily, that one can denounce the former without expressing any animus towards the latter. If only it were so simple.

It’s possible to articulate an anti-Zionist position without being antisemitic. This wasn’t it. A rabbinic colleague, writing as "Lev Saul", a self-described “activist on the Jewish radical left since childhood,” has analysed clearly the historical connection between the language of the Green Party policy and century-old Stalinist and related antisemitic attack. I commend his article.

These aren’t just matters of historical interest. These kinds of statements and the culture which organises towards them, is used deliberately to shift the ‘Overton window’ of acceptable discourse about and actions towards Jews in this country. They range from the extreme, and thankfully rare – murderous violence- to the almost daily – verbal abuse, loss of professional opportunity and the like. The thing that I see and feel most often is a sort of social recoil as Jews become ‘non-grata’ in liberal circles.

These waters are intemperate and nasty. There is a sense that a distaste for the abuse of Palestinians’ rights in the land of Israel permits and even mandates a nastiness directed in increasing circles towards any Jew who shows any empathy with even a basic, non-racist and non-supremacist, empathy for a Jewish state.

Rabbi "Lev Saul" wrote;

A couple of weeks ago, my suburban Jewish community was baselessly accused of being at the heart of a Zionist plot to control the Green Party. Members of my synagogue’s council (most of whom are not even Greens) were doxxed. I felt many emotions since my congregants were accused of being part of a conspiracy. There is fear: for what it means to have members suddenly on this watch-list. There is bafflement: that people whose values I share, some of whom I have protested with for human rights, should stand charged with such offences.

We have reached a point where there are British Jews, including members of the community I serve, who share that they no longer feel safe in this society. My sense is that this dis-ease is not principally driven even by the murderous attacks in Heaton Park or Golders Green, but rather the social poison that seeps out from the public performances of policies and platforms such as that passed by the Green Party conference.

Freedland, in his recent Guardian article, analyses the difficulties in claiming, as the (Jewish) leader of the Green Party has suggested, that Jews could be ‘left alone’ if they (we) denounce Israel with sufficient condemnatory clarity and I don’t disagree with his analysis in that opinion piece, but it is – as Freedland knows – complex. I think it is reasonable for someone who wishes to know whether a Jew’s connection to the land and State of Israel is or is not racist or ethno-supremacist (and what a Shanda – embarrassment - it is that this is even a question) to expect of a Jew, either in Israel or this country, to show an awareness of how Jewish self-determination has impacted Palestinians. For what it’s worth, I expect the same from those who articulate a ‘pro-Palestinian’ position. Does such a person, in Palestine or beyond, show an awareness of the pain caused by those professing an affinity to Palestinians towards Jews?

If a person wishing to speak on this issue is capable of expressing something that feels genuine, I would argue, it would behove us to give ear, try to learn, find points of meeting, growth and a future that is free of violence for all. If, however, the voice is one only of bombast, accusation and a denial of responsibility, I’m not sure what is to be gained by even seeking engagement. Part of the problem of the Green Party policy is its blindness to that reality – October 7^th isn’t mentioned, no Israeli is considered a good-Israeli etc. I mean, I’ll talk to, almost, anybody, but I’ve spent enough time banging my head against walls to know when I’m wasting effort that could be spent more profitably on healing.

There is an annoying insistence on ‘whataboutery’ in our current approach to public discourse. You say anything about how much pain Israel has suffered and get ‘whatabout the Palestinians’ and vice versa. It’s easy to discount almost every statement about the situation in Israel / Palestine for a failure to sufficiently invoke one thing or another. We need to be gentle in allowing partial acknowledgements from those who wish to show they do indeed understand that this is complex and pain is felt on both sides. Perhaps we can lift a trick from the extremists – what about a good kind of ‘dog whistling’? Extremists use dog-whistling to let others know what side they stand on. We – protectors of empathy and demanding of complexity – should be able to get away with something similar.

So, for what it’s worth, I am a Zionist, that is to say, I believe in the right of Jews to live in self-determination, in peace, in the Land of Israel to which we have been bound for millennia. I also believe in a free Palestine, that is to say, the right of Palestinians to live, in self-determination, in peace, in land to which they have also been for millennia. Bringing both hopes to reality isn’t easy, but I believe the only way to have either is to have both.

As Theodor Zeldin, the great historian of ideas (born in ‘Palestine’ or should that be ‘pre-state Israel’) wrote in the conclusion of his magisterial An Intimate History of Humanity;

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.^[1]

On Heroes and Humanity

 

Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, was interviewed on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning. He spoke of the heroism of the Indian pilot, Captain Smit Machchhar – may he heal speedily – and passengers on that fateful flight who took such heroic measures to save lives; the woman who raised the alarm, the plumber who dragged the co-pilot away and pulled up on the yoke because he had watched a TV show about distressed planes, the man who …

The interview concluded and segued into news of the passing of Dame Ester Rantzen – founder of Childline and Silverline and consumer rights hero and campaigner on so many issues (including assisted death, about which I take a very different view).

The producers played a clip of her greatest TV moment (the greatest TV moment I’ve ever seen, I’ve watched it scores of times and always cry). Rantzen, invites anyone in the audience at a recording of That’s Life!, to rise if they owe their lives to the retired stockbroker - Nicholas, subsequently Sir Nicholas, Winton. The entire gallery rise in honour of the diminutive and utterly heroic man who saved Jewish children from the Nazis.

There are heroes in our midst – human beings, ‘just normal’ human beings, who are revealed, in moments of awful and awesome importance, to be willing to do things that are, and deserve to be remembered decades after their death.

And yet, it feels society isn’t really up for heroics at the moment, thank you very much. In part, surely, that’s because there have been too many clay-footed pseudo-heroes, subsequently revealed to be frauds or worse and we are all, rightly I think, sceptical. We Don’t Need Another Hero, is, certainly from the mouth of Tina Turner, a reasonable reaction to the false Messiahs and self-serving charlatans and crooks of our time.

Moreover, and I think this is the major part, we seem to be in a time where there is something approximating to a crisis in humanity. The challenges of the world feel so real and so significant, that there is a kind of Yeiush gnawing at our human souls. Who of us can cool the overheating planet, bring peace to the Middle East, tame the dangers of AI? And so, perhaps, we just fold inwards a little, giving up on tasks that seem so beyond our ability.

A current dataset: I’ve been reading my way through the Booker Long (and now Short) List of, supposedly, the very best contemporary fiction. I’ve been struck by the number of anti-heroic protagonists – people who take steps away from leaving their mark on the world. I’ve seen critics write about a crisis of masculinity in the nominated books, but it’s not just the men. Helen of Nowhere, Dilara in The Renovation and Laura in The Palm House join the King in May We Feed the King and the man in The Black Bag in the books shortlisted as protagonists of books, but barely even protagonists of their own lives. These characters evoke empathy as they look at the possibilities of being heroic and … decline. But it’s not enough.

BMakom SheAin Anashim, Histadel Lehiyot Ish – taught Hillel (Avot 2:5), in a place without humanity, strive to be a human.

It’s the best advice. Not only does it create a possibility of saving plummeting planes, abused children and those who would have otherwise perished in Nazi-fuelled abominations, but it’s pointing at the very essence of who we are and who we are called to be – humans! These heroes, the real heroes, aren’t doing it to fatten their bank balances or for the fame, but because it feels compulsory. Their heroism wasn’t pre-meditated or driven by ulterior motives. They felt obligated to use the gift of their existence to be worthy of the gift of their existence. Thank God!

There is a wonderful idea in Mishnah Sanhedrin (5:4) about the nature of human beings, each created in the image of God, but each unique – so unlike a coin minted by a King of flesh and blood, where each coin comes out the same. That’s the source of the ineffable, desperate significance of each human life. It’s also teleological – it speaks to our purpose. When Mordechai attempts to persuade Queen Ester to go to the King and tell him that the Jews are to be slaughtered, he says, “Who knows, maybe it is for this precise moment that you became royal.” Rav Kook avails himself of this remarkable verse in a comment on a line in the Yom Kippur liturgy. “Before I was created, there was nothing in the boundless history of the Universe, that required my existence. Since I was not created until now, it is a sign, that I was not, until now, worthy of existence. I am only needed “for this very moment.” For now, the very moment has arrived for me to fix some element of complete reality has arrived. If only I could dedicate my actions towards this purpose of my creation, I could say “here I am – Hineini.”

We are called to respond to the moment with the answer, “here I am.” And the problem with training ourselves away from an interest in heroes is not merely that good people will die and bad people will triumph, but we will fail to be the human we are created to be.

May we all be saved from having to make the brutal decisions faced by those on that plane, and in so many other arenas where heroism has been needed and shown. But may we not back down if we are called.

There is a Time for Kohelet (Ecclesiastes)

 

For the past four years, I’ve been writing (and publishing) commentaries on the great Megillot of our tradition.

They are available at www.izzun.com. Ester and Rut are complete; Song of Songs will be out in time for Pesach.

Kohelet is stunning in its refusal to hold by conventional religiosity. It’s corruscating and utterly glorious. I’m reproducing here the essay commentary to the first chapter, a reflection on the central word of the Megillah - Hevel.

As will be clear, I’ve been hugely inspired by Prof Michael Fox, of blessed memory.

The art, specially commissioned, is by Sarah Lightman.

Chapter One

Kohelet as Hevel

The Megillah opens with this brutal salvo; ‘Utter Hevel - said Kohelet - Utter Hevel. All is Hevel.’ (1:2) Twelve chapters and twenty-eight mentions of this same word later, he concludes with the slightly briefer, but no-gentler, rejoinder ‘Utter Hevel - said Kohelet - All is Hevel’ (12:8).

In Isaiah, Proverbs and Psalms, Hevel, means vapour, insubstantial and ephemeral – like Propsero’s actors, liable to melt into air, thin air. But we first meet the word as the name given to Cain’s ill-fated brother. Hevel, in Genesis, is usually translated / transliterated as Able. The English name seems so jarring and misplaced; named Able and achieving nothing. And so to Kohelet.

Michael Fox’s definition of Hevel, as it appears in Kohelet, took my breath away when I first read it. In this Megillah, he claims, it means ‘absurd. The absurd [being] a disjunction between two phenomena that are thought to be linked by a bond of harmony or causality, or that should be so linked.’ Gevalt.

On the one hand, Kohelet stubbornly expects good actions will be met by a good response and evil actions will bring evil, see 8:10-13. This is the great nexus of cause and effect that dominates Jewish, and indeed most other, ethical doctrines religious or otherwise. But, on the other hand, In my days of absurdity, I’ve seen it all; the righteous perishing in their righteousness, and the wicked thriving in their wickedness. (7:15)

In Deuteronomistic theology, there is a bridge between the good action and its reward and the evil action and its punishment. Evil action does not cause punishment directly, rather it is supposed to anger God who, in turn, is supposed to decree punishment. Kohelet knows this and expects this, but it just isn’t his experience, and he refuses to sacrifice his experience to a dogma unfit for purpose. Fox puts it this way, the ‘distortions warp the larger pattern rather than fading into it.’

Absurdity arises in the dislocation between expectation and experience. That explains why we laugh at sketches about dead parrots. But not here, here the stakes are too high. Kohelet’s absurdity threatens our entire existential condition. What is our purpose, what is moral and how do we find meaning in a world where everything is absurd?

If this absurdity gnaws at you too, dear reader, if you have the courage to look into this abyss with Nietzsche’s eagle-eyes and grasp the abyss with his eagle-claws, then this is the Megillah for you.

Walter Benjamin and the Pursuit of Aura - A Neilah Sermon

 A perk of the job.

I was invited to perform a wedding, right back in the early days of the Hebrew Year just concluded, close to the border between Spain and France.

“We should go,” my wife suggested, “to Portbou” – the first town inside Spain, “and visit the sculpture Passages, Homage to Walter Benjamin, by the Israeli artist, Dani Karavan.”

So we went.

Walter Benjamin first – Benjamin was one of the great German-born Jewish intellectuals of the early 20th Century. Born in Berlin in 1892, he died in Portbou – I’ll come back to that. He was close with Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Theodor Adorno – that crowd. The Nazis hated him, not just for being Jewish – bad enough – but for thinking the way that he thought – he was a roving intellectual, avant-garde, Marxist-ish, not willing to sign up to anyone’s gang and certainly appalled by rise of Nazism.

Benjamin fled to France and got a visa to America. When the Nazis invaded France he fled again, towards Spain, in the hope of getting from there, to the States.

He crossed the border into Portbou on the 25th September 1940 but the Spanish – ostensibly neutral – demanded he be returned to Germany. Benjamin, expecting he would be handed over to the Nazis, took an overdose of morphine tablets, died, and was buried – Hannah Arendt would later say, “like a dog” – in an unmarked grave in Portbou’s municipal cemetery on a cliffside just outside town.

In 1994, Dani Karavan completed his memorial to Benjamin, Passages at the gates to the cemetery. And this is what my wife and I went to see in October last year.

Here’s a photo

Here’s another.

Doesn’t look like much, does it? I’ll get back to that.

The work Benjamin is most famous for is The Role of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He wrote it in 1935, and I think it’s the best thing I’ve read this year about Artificial Intelligence. 1935. It’s a critique of modernity and technology – it’s about what happens when we mass-produce stuff in general and images in particular.

Benjamin is interested in cameras – the transformative technology of his day. He charts the way art, in an age of photography, stops being something only a handful of people might ever see on a wall and can become an image to be reproduced and shared with millions – it feels like he’s predicted Instagram and all the rest of it. His particular interest is in the difference between the art – the thing itself - and the mass reproduced version of the thing.

And the term he uses, to grade this difference, is “aura.”

The aura of a thing is the real quality of a thing. It’s the artistic impact of the art itself. To stand before a painting is to appreciate the aura of a painting. A photo of a painting has less aura. Goodness knows what he would have thought of selfies, filters and AI versions of how we might have looked in the 1980s. But writing about mechanical reproduction in the 1930s he writes about the loss of aura – the thing that gets lost when mechanical reproduction fails, as it will always fail, to reproduce the essence of the art itself.

Something, certainly, is lost in the photographs of Dani Karavan’s memorial to Walter Benjamin. I know the photos don’t look like much, but, in person, the memorial is incredibly moving.

The reality, the unique, unrepeatable, reality of going to visit Karavan’s memorial is that you climb into it – you climb down a long flight of clanking metal stairs through a dark and slightly rusting iron corridor-like tunnel, down towards a viewpoint, shaped like an open doorway, overlooking the Portbou bay. As you look at the sea framed by darkness, the waves glisten like silver and the sky seems a particularly bright shade of blue, and birds, soar like, Kchalom Yauf – like a dream in flight as they soar through the viewpoint over the bay. And the whole thing made me want to cry for the sheer waste of remarkable life – Benjamin’s life, and every life brutally brought short then, and since.

Karavan’s memorial to Walter Benjamin, unmistakably, brilliantly and clearly completely deliberately has aura. And the photos, unmistakably brilliantly and completely deliberately don’t.

And that’s the thing about AI – it reproduces, without the same aura, the real thing. It’s impressive. It’s mightily impressive, but it’s a replication. It makes things, graphic images, undergraduate essays even mathematical proofs, without aura.

I want to sensitize us to the threat of losing an appreciation for aura.

I want, at this most holy time of this most holy day, to make the case for pursuing aura. I mean, if you are trying to work out how to fold proteins, or provide a proof of the Sendov conjecture or cure cancer – you go right ahead and keep tapping those prompts into those remarkable technological portals.

But if you are trying to live well, or be happy, or be immersed in the essence of what it means to be human – pursue things of aura.

Visit art installations on clifftops that you must clamber inside to ‘get.’

Visit any kind of art.

If you want music, listen to the real sound of real instruments and real voices sung by real people.

If you want friendship or a sense of human connection, seek out real people, not avatars, not airbrushed, photoshopped, AI generated slop that scrolls by as we swipe.

Treat this universe, and everything in it, as an invitation to experience its aura – what Benjamin called, “the authenticity of a thing.”

Spend time, by engaging with time passing – maybe even in a Synagogue, on a day like Yom Kippur, watching the way the day turns to night behind the real windows – the ones on that [R] side of the building. Rather than wishing to be where the light always remains perfectly uniformly bright – on this [L] side of the building – though I love those [L] windows. Even though it’s getting a bit gloomy over there [R]. Even if you feel there might be some kind of higher marginal propensity to gain utility if we were to rig up an AI assisted lighting system that measured the luminosity of the slowly dimming day and topped it up with a slowly brightening halogen glow, I wouldn’t want it. I want to experience the aura of the setting sun Ki Fanah HaYom – for the day is indeed turning.

This pursuit of aura is, I think, a deeply Jewish idea.

Shabbat, I think, is the invitation to appreciate aura – connecting to our lives unmediated by mechanical reproductive forces coming along and reproducing, making efficient and rubbing out the edges of the reality of our lives.

Kashrut, I think, is an invitation to appreciate the aura of the food we eat – or don’t eat; beef that comes from cows that chew the cud and produce milk for their calves that should not be drunk in the same meal in which you eat the meat of the adult. Milk doesn’t come from supermarkets or delivery vans. Vegetables grow from the earth and need a different blessing than the fruit of the trees. Sorry for mentioning food at a time like this.

It’s an honour to have friends of our community joining us on the stream – you are very welcome and we’re lifted by your presence. But I know and I know you know, that it’s not quite the same – the stream doesn’t offer the same aura as being in a room with humans. It’s not trying to match this experience. There’s something about jostling up next to other real human beings with their own real hopes and pains and delights and frustrations that allows us to define our own high moments and low moments in community. Hang on to that in this new world of increasing virtual possibility. Don’t give up on that in this new world of electronic wisdom available at the tap of a button.

I know the LLMs are getting really good at offering counselling – lists of does and don’ts to escort us through our darker journeys, and they do it so effortlessly and politely – is there anything else I can do for you today? But don’t lose site of the importance of aura.

I know there is something seductive about AI. But we’ve had wise Jewish voices telling us not to be seduced into attributing too much power to things artificial since long before even Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay. This comes from Psalm 115:5

פֶּה לָהֶם וְלֹא יְדַבֵּרוּ עֵינַיִם לָהֶם וְלֹא יִרְאוּ

They have mouths, but they don’t speak, they have eyes, but they don’t see.

There is a difference between that which looks godly and God – there are and there have always been idols that glitter and are not truly gold. The Psalmist knew that, Shakespeare too. It helps to spend time with ancient sources of knowledge. It will help if we are hang onto the skills that allow us to differentiate between the sacred and the profane.

We’re going to have place increasing value on the real – if we want to value the very things that make us human. We’re going to have to spend time and even money on the pursuit of aura. Even if the LLMs are cheaper at the moment we tap away. I like that line – that if you aren’t paying for some technological wizardry, you aren’t a client, you are the product. We’re going to have to invest in real artists and real musicians, real foods, real synagogues, real time and real human beings. Because unless we sharpen our sensibilities and prioritise our values, we’ll find those things will crumble away and we’ll be left with … well less aura.

So here we are.

Having spent a day together, for real. Feeling hungry, for real. In a room of real people. With real voices singing real prayers. And we have this last hour to fix our Kavvanot, our intentions for the year. My invitation is to spend more time pursuing things that are real, my invitation is to spend more time pursuing the aura of real art in this most beautiful world.

Chatimah Tovah,

May it come to us all for good.