Two moments from the vast Rabbinic canon, one taught by a son and one taught
by his father.
Let me start with the son, Rabbi Yossi son of Rabbi Yehuda.
Rabbi Yossi taught a person has two angels who accompany them home from
the Synagogue on a Friday night; one good, one wicked. And if the person gets
home and the candles are lit and the table is laid and the bed is made, the
good angel says to the bad angel, “May it be this way next week,” and, against
their will, the wicked angel is forced to reply, “Amen.” But if this isn’t the
case, then the wicked angel says, “may it be this way next Shabbat,” and
against their will the good angel is forced to respond, “Amen.”[1]
And here’s the moment taught by Rabbi Yossi’s father, Rabbi Yehudah
It comes in a commentary on a verse in Genesis just before we began our
Torah reading today. Abraham is old, childless and worried he will have no-one
to take on the mantle of the promise God made to him.
(ה) וַיּוֹצֵ֨א אֹת֜וֹ הַח֗וּצָה וַיֹּ֙אמֶר֙
הַבֶּט־נָ֣א הַשָּׁמַ֗יְמָה וּסְפֹר֙ הַכּ֣וֹכָבִ֔ים אִם־תּוּכַ֖ל לִסְפֹּ֣ר
אֹתָ֑ם וַיֹּ֣אמֶר ל֔וֹ כֹּ֥ה יִהְיֶ֖ה זַרְעֶֽךָ׃
And God took Abraham out of his tent and said to him – Habeit Nah
Hshamayah – look at the heavens, count the stars – if you can count them, so
shall you have offspring.
On this verse the Rabbi Yehudah, [2]
points out that the word Habeit isn’t really the Hebrew word for looking
up at stars, in the sense that you or I might look up at the
stars. Habeit is the Hebrew word for looking down from a high
place to a low place. [3] So,
says Rabbi Yehudah, it must be that when God took Abraham out of the tent, God
lifted Abraham lemala mikpat harakia – above the dome of the heavens-
so Abraham could look down on the stars spread below him. Look down on these
stars, Rabbi Yehudah imagines God telling Abraham – you are not to be
controlled by these stars. Yes, I know, you are old and childless, and it seems
to you that it is written in the stars that you shall have no children, but you
look down on the stars. They don’t control you. You, Abraham, have a future no mazalot
– no astrological destiny – can determine. The possibilities of your
future, Abraham, expand before you with the fecundity of the stars in the
heavens.
In my first story the past controls the future – as last week, so next
week.
In my second story we are to be lifted above the present to look down
on its puny attempt to control our tomorrows.
This isn’t, in case anyone is worried, a sermon about angels and miraculous
interstellar space-travel.
It’s a sermon about you and me, our faith and this world in which we
live.
Because we don’t need angels or miracles to help us understand these
two stories – the one in which the past controls our tomorrow, and the one in
which we rise above the present to futures unknown.
I recently had a conversation with a member who wanted to chat about
the future of the Synagogue. They were worried about the women thing – they
said they came to Synagogue to feel comfortable and they were comfortable with the
roles for men and women they knew and loved from their childhood. And as much
as they knew that women are capable and powerful in so many ways, they just
felt distracted by seeing women and men sitting together or women leading
services.
I have a sympathy for anyone who feels the same. I’ve also felt the
same at some points in my own religious journey. I’m not interested in
labelling the response good or wicked, but rather I’m interested in the way in
which it’s a case of last week’s angel exerting power over tomorrow. ‘May it be
this way next Shabbat’ says one angel and the other angel is forced to say
‘Amen.’
The only answer I can give to such a person is Heschel’s answer.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the greatest rabbis of the last century,
suggested that religion has to comfort us in our afflictions, and also afflict
us in our comfort. We need to be held by the blessing of last week’s angel, but
also we need to fly above the stars.
Ester Perel, the New Yok based therapist, once shared that we all need
both the sense of being comforted by our surroundings, and the experience of
change, provocation and challenge. And we are all continually modulating the
way we embrace the new or surround ourselves with the known, as we go through
our lives. Perel is a couples’ therapist. Her work is to help her clients balance
their own desires for the same and their own desires for the different as they
struggle to get on with each other. She would probably make an excellent
congregational rabbi.
We are in a process of change, at New London. And we are all determined
by the angels of last week, and we all wish for a tomorrow of possibility.
Here’s the process of change.
18 years ago today, while I was still a Rabbinic student, I led the
first services at New London where women were called to read from the Torah. 15
years ago, the day before I got married, I celebrated my aufruf here in the
first fully egalitarian service in our history – both those services took place
next door, in the Hall. Twelve years ago, in my first week as your Rabbi, there
was meeting to decide whether to make any changes in the services in this room
– the meeting split 71-70. Several years
later there was a decision to allow certain Bar or Bat Mitzvah celebrations to
take place in this space as egalitarian services. And then, several years after
that, we went egalitarian on alternate weeks.
We are out of sync with that commitment to alternate egal services here
today. We’ve been exclusively male led on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur ever
since that decision. One of the things I was always going to say, today, is
that the services in here next Rosh Hashanah will be egalitarian – with an
option for mixed seating. But our most recent AGM and a more recent Council meeting
have gone further, with my fullest support. We’ve announced an EGM that will
vote on us becoming fully egalitarian every week of the year. That’s new.
This journey towards the new is a response to all kinds of issues; both
Halachic and social, both rabbinically led and reflective of the mood of our
members. The process has involved hearing the whisper of the angel of last week
and saying instead of ‘Amen’, ‘No – we’re heading towards a different
tomorrow.’ And for some it’s long overdue. And for some it’s deeply
uncomfortable. And we all want to claim we are the afflicted person religion
should be comforting rather than the comfortable person who should be afflicted.
And the strange thing about being the Rabbi of a community balancing
the angel of last week and a trip beyond the stars in this way, is the relationship
between these discussions in our own community and the discussions going on in the
world out there.
One of the great problems in contemporary political life, Professor
David Runciman said recently, is that we’ve forgotten how to lose. In the
political realm, we’ve drawn our battle lines forcibly. We are so committed to
winning our political arguments that we threaten the protections and balances
that hold the space for our civil society. That can lead to the
counter-indicative result of creating a more divisive and fractured society,
even as we do win, and that’s bad for all of us.
I mean I care about Brexit, of course I do, but we’ll either leave
soon, or later or never and more important than winning in one direction or
another is the quality of the society we create together. And judged by that
metric, we are all losing.
We have to get better at modulating our competing desires for
continuing with the same or soaring above the past if we want to be able to get
on. After all there is so much we agree upon. Even the most committed Remainer
knows there are democratic deficits and inefficiencies in the EU. Even the most
committed Brexiter knows the value of the freedoms membership of the EU
ensures. Even the most committed egalitarian advocate knows the value of
ensuring long-term members feel at home in a community they helped build. And
even the most committed non-egalitarian advocate knows their attitude towards women
in prayer is an outlier when compared to every other part of their lives.
Maybe we all need a good session with Ester Perel, the couples’
therapist who would help us, surely, find new possibilities hidden behind the
high fences of our battle lines. We need to learn to lose better.
Let me lighten the tone.
Goldstein was
driving erratically at two in the morning and was pulled over by the police. “And
where are you headed at this time of the night?” the officer asked. “I am on my
way to a lecture about the abuses of alcohol, its toxic impact on the human
body, and the harmful effects of smoking.” The officer responded, “Really? And
who exactly is giving that lecture at two o’clock in the morning?” To which
Goldstein replied, “my spouse.”[4]
The point is that Goldstein is heading home. He, or she, knows they are
going to lose any argument about their behaviour and they are accepting losing
because they know there is something more important at stake. Goldstein has
found there is something more important than being right – it’s being part of a
unit that grows and protects. And if we are all to heal some of the fissures in
a society where my desires will inevitably conflict with the desires of others,
we are all going to have to learn to lose better. Or to put it a slightly
different way, we need to learn how to find victories without winning
arguments. This is a little counter-cultural. It might be that when we focus
all our energies on winning arguments, we actually break the very things we are
most keen to protect. And if we find creative ways to cede being on the winning
side, we can find greater futures even as we lose arguments
It’s Rosh Hashanah, it’s a great time to be open to the possibilities
of not having everything on our own terms. Rosh Hashanah is when we are judged
not on whether we win or lose arguments, but on the quality of the relationships
we maintain. Debate and disagreement is all well and holy and certainly very
Jewish, but perhaps try this for a test of whether or not we have won at a
debate or a disagreement – does our relationship with those with whom we
disagree get stronger or weaker when we debate?
What would our world be like if we judged the quality of our
disagreement by whether we emerged from the disagreement closer to those with
whom we disagree, as opposed to whether we came up with the supposedly crushing
bon mot?
It would be a better society, surely. And we would be better members of
that society.
I opened this sermon with two apparently contradictory stories; one
about the power of the angel of last week, and one about the possibility of
tomorrow. But the two stories are told in the name of members of the same
family; Rabbi Yehudah and his son, Rabbi Yossi. Both stories can exist at the
same time in the same family. Both stories exist, at the same time in this
community, in this society also. Actually, both stories exist within me simultaneously,
and maybe you also.
Our internal peace, and the peace of the communities and societies in
which we live will come only when we can watch these competing narratives in
our own soul and treat them with compassion, the same compassion we should show
those around us, in our family lives, in our religious communities and in our
broader societies. We have so much more in common with one another than any win-or-lose
argument should fracture. And the bright, generous future we wish for ourselves
in all the worlds in which we live, can only come if we learn to find moments
of conciliation and possibility that will strengthen us all.
May it come to us, in this year to come, in good, in health and in blessing,
Shannah Tovah
[1]
Shabbat 119b
[2]
Bereishit Rabba 44:12
[3] Used
to describe looking from a mountain down towards a valley I Kings 18:43,
and the view of God looking down from the heavens Ps 33:13
[4] Based
on a more gendered version of this joke I learned from Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove
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