When This Passes, What Happens Next

Here’s an extract from the 1927 Yiddish book, Gedoylin Fun Unzer Tsayt about an earlier Yom Kippur in a time of pandemic – in 1848 it was cholera; a disease marked by symptoms that made fasting dangerous. One the eve of Yom Kippur, with the permission of the leading rabbis of the great city of Vilna, Rabbi Yisrael Salanter posted announcements in all the shuls that, because of the cholera epidemic, no-one should say additional parts of the prayers, and that, instead, people should spend time outdoors breathing fresh air. In the courtyard of all the shuls they set up tables with pieces of cake that contained less than the prohibited amount of food that may be eaten. The food was there for those who needed to eat. Reb Yisroel got up on at Shacharit on Yom Kippur and announced that if a person felt weak there was no need to consult with a doctor, but instead they may go into the courtyard and eat. In another account, the Rabbi makes use of words from the Kol Nidrei prayer itself- With the consent of the All-Present and with the consent of this congregation, we give permission to eat and drink on the Day of Atonement.” Al daat hamakom ve al daat hakahal anu matirim – Of course the good rabbi was attacked for his supposedly radical stance, but it takes courage to be a Rabbi. Pandemics call on us all to be courageous. Or, and surely enough on pandemics already!, what about Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in 1939? War was declared nine days before Rosh Hashanah in 1939. This remarkable letter, from the Minister of Highgate Synagogue was sent to his congregants apologising that the included schedule of service times was going to have to change – what with the existential threat to civilisation; “all evening services for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are to be scheduled so as to finish one hour before dark,” he writes. “The shofar is not be sounded at the end of Yom Kippur lest it be confused for an air-raid siren. Top hats are not to be worn ‘for the duration of the war.’ And please bring your gas mask.” But what struck me, in amongst the technical necessities of a transformed run of prayer services, was the Rabbi’s spiritual courage. Amid all the woe of the present time, [wrote Rabbi Lew] let us not for one moment forget our faith in God. My appeal to you is to gather regularly in the Synagogue that we may pray to Almighty to save us and our dear ones, our King and country, from the horrible devastation of war which is raging in our midst. May our New Year bring victory and peace to our nation which is the bulwark of justice liberty and freedom. May it bring prosperity to the needy, health for the sick, safety and security for us all. May God preserve the children who have been taken from our midst [he means drafted into military service] and restore them to us in peace. GOD BLESS YOU ALL” Wrote the Rabbi of Highgate Synagogue, in 1939. This miserable virus, it’s nothing new. But we’ve been here before – dark days, plague-afflicted days. And we have had to dig deep to find the courage and the optimism that brighter days are waiting for us. And the models and the inspirations that we can do this and that it’s worth doing this are there right through our faith and our history and our sense of who we are. Way, way back, in the face of the existential threat presented by that Pharaoh, way back then, when Pharaoh came and decreed that every male child should be thrown in the rivers, it was the Meyaldot HaIvriyot the Hebrew midwives who modelled this sense of courage and optimism. They stood up against oppression and darkness and midwived the generation who travelled from bondage to freedom, from darkness to light. Courage and optimism, a willingness to commit and care and midwife a brighter future, even in the darkest of times is the very marker of faith, certainly of this faith. This miserable virus, it’s nothing new. But we’ve been here before. It will take courage and the optimism, but the models are here for us – not far away at all. As I’ve been winding my way through these past months, I’ve kept one of my favourite stories close to my heart. It’s the story of King Solomon and his brave and faithful servant, Benaiah who is sent by the King to find a ring with magic powers. I’m sharing the language of Judith Ish-Kishor. Said the King. “If a happy man looks at the ring he at once becomes downcast and gloomy. But if the person in misery or morning beholds it, hope rises their heart, and they are comforted.” And Benaia searches for the ring from Babylon to Damascus, and from Tyre, to Beer Sheva and from Egypt to Yemen, And no-one has even heard of such a ring. It is only when Benaia returns to Jerusalem, and he is walking along a poor street with small shabby houses that he sees a man, with a mat spread before him with baskets of trinkets and beads, such as people without much money could afford. “Shall I ask here?” Thought Benaia, “What use! Still, it will only mean another no.” But here, of course, there is such a ring. Carved inside are the three Hebrew letters; Gimel Zion, Yud – Gam Zo Yaavor - This too shall pass. This too shall pass. Gam Zo Yaavor Gam Zo Yaavor is a training in seeing our lives from beyond our immediacy. That’s very fitting for today. We arrive at Yom Kippur all weighed down by our present situations and our present preoccupations. And all this is fine. But there is a grander time scale, and broader perspective into which our temporary concerns, as pressing as we feel them to be, are not ultimate concerns for the world, for the Universe, from the perspective of its Creator. And it’s no bad thing to be reminded that our pressing concerns, viewed from a grander perspective, will be less dramatic than they feel in this very moment. We shouldn’t disappear into our own private cocoons of self-absorption. Gam Zo Yaavor. And also this Gam Zo Yaavor, especially in a time of pandemic, is a reminder to live forwards. It’s miserable now. I know, but it will pass. There will be something on the other side, and it’s worth living in that direction. Yes we have to live our lives in the moment, and in the moment bad things are just … well bad. But we don’t have to live our lives in the direction of where we are. Gam Zo Yaavor. We need to live our lives in the direction of our future. We can live with our spirit on the other side of where we are now. That’s a leap of faith. It’s also an acknowledgement of the change that comes to us all for Gam Zo Yaavor – this too shall pass. And there will come a time when we, and our descendants, and our descendants’ descendants will tell stories of this time, and our adaptation and our resilience, and our acts of kindness and our attempts to hold together when we are being dragged apart. This will pass. And the way these stories will reflect to our credit is if we live in the direction of the future we seek. I know it’s dark right now. But I know we have been here before, and this shall pass. And I know it’s hard to hold onto an optimism that things will get better. Well, here’s the bad news. Trying to hold onto an optimism that things will get better isn’t going to cut it. Holding on and hoping isn’t going to be enough this time. In fact, I’m not sure holding on and hoping has ever been enough. We get through these times with courage and with optimism. That’s the message. Don’t stop with trying to hold on, push through. Be part of building beyond. I think this is the message of all faith, don’t just hope. We are called to live our lives with courage and optimism. I think this is the very nature and the very role of religious community. We exist to pool this sense of courage and optimism, these energies of care and a willingness to believe in futures that are brighter. We take all our stories and all our histories and we use them to inspire us through the times when we are tender, and bruised and nervous. At our best, that’s us, this religious community, an incubator for courage and optimism in a time of fear. And tonight, that’s you, In some ways the very act of coming to a Zoomed Kol Nidrei on this very day, when the fast of Yom Kippur hasn’t even started yet, is an incubation of this sense of courage and optimism that is so desperately needed. I’m doing my best to nurture these previous sparks in me, by standing here with you. And I know, and I feel, despite the distance-thing, you are doing the same. It’s an honour and a privilege. Together we deepen our communal reservoirs of courage. Together we lift each of us towards the future we not only hope for, but actively build. There is inspiration in our own faith journey, certainly, but let me conclude by stepping beyond our own faith, and even beyond my own gender, to share the words of American Sikh activist, Valerie Kaur. Kaur spoke of the brokenness of this time this way. “What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb. What if our society is not dead, but waiting to be born. What if we just need to listen to the midwife whispering in our ears, You are brave, breath, then push.” Well I’ve never had to breath and push like a birthing mother. But I know so many of you have, and that as crazy as it sounds it’s worth believing in that possibilities of newness, even when it feels so impossible to breath and push. I believe. I hope you do to. After all this, all this will pass. And in its place will come a future we will build together. All of us. We can build that future with heart and our hands, even behind our locked doors. We can pour out enough kindness into this battered world, that the forces of anger and distrust are pushed back. We can create communities of decency and compassion that are so strong, it will be clear to all, that human beings thrive this way, in community, and not as individuals. That’s our task at New London, to be part of that, to foster those redemptive sparks in each of us; I’m up for the challenge, I hope you are too. May we build it well, Gemar Chatimah Tovah

The Hand and the Window - A Sermon for Yizkor

Reaching Out of Windows The LORD hurled a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken. And the mariners were afraid, and cried every person unto their god; and they cast forth the wares that were in the ship into the sea, to lighten it unto them. But Jonah was gone down into the innermost parts of the ship; and he lay, and was fast asleep. I feel like Jonah, fairly often, at the moment. With the storm breaking around me and threatening to break me, fairly often, I just want to pull the duvet over my head. Jonah, in this moment, isn’t an embodiment of the triumph of human possibility in the face of challenge. I’ll get back to that. Here’s a Talmudic tale, imagining the experience of Adam after expulsion from the Garden of Eden “Eat the fruit in the garden, God tells Adam, Mot Tamut. You will surely die.” But instead of death, Adam is exiled. And also this. Let’s suppose the world was indeed created on Rosh Hashanah, that would have exile starting just around about now, in the calendar-year, as the leaves begin to turn And it was as Adam saw the days getting shorter and shorter he said, woe, maybe the world is getting darker and darker because of my sin, and this is headed back to the chaos and disorder of the universe before creation. And this is the sentence that was decreed by heaven. But, of course, the world eventually stops getting darker and darker, and the days start to get longer and longer. And that’s when Adam holds an eight-day festival of lighting candles – a sort of precursor of not only Chanukah but the mid-winter celebrations of so many peoples around the world. Better than Jonah, facing up to the despair and eager to mark its passing, but unable to transform the ever encroaching darkness. One more story; Noah is on the ark, in the midst of a devastation that has wiped out kol hayakum – humans, cattle, insect and fowl of the heavens; really, Covid pales in comparison. And as Genesis Chapter 7 comes to an end, Noah is sealed in, the ark is lined with pitch inside and out with only one window for light and the waters rage for 150 days. This of course is pre-Zoom, or Netflix and the rest of it. And when Genesis Chapter 8 opens, it opens with the words ‘And God remembered Noah.’ Did God forget about his hero? Or is it just that Noah felt forgotten, lost, alone. And this is Noah’s response. Vayiftach Noach et HaChalon Vayishlach et HaArev Noah opens the widow and sends out the raven. He sticks his arm out of the ark and begins the process of re-establishing human possibility in this world. It’s possible, of course, to look at these tales, of Jonah of Adam and of Noah from a psychological perspective. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, in her book, On Death and Dying, set out five stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. That’s a good place to start. And for our Covid-addled times you can add to the list this nagging ennui, maybe a bit of despair and well – there is one other thing. The one thing that perhaps above all might help us get through this time with our souls intact – for that surely has to be the task. What about the moment when Noah opens the window and reaches out his hand? My friend Rabbi Marc Wolf asks the question – what strength must it have taken; to reach out of the darkness and take – what should we call it – a leap of faith, a stretching out a hand from the darkness into the light, an act of spiritual heroism? I want to share the work of Professor Melissa Raphael. She writes, in The Female Face of God in Auschwitz of a desire to try and find something to say to her daughter about the bleakness of the Holocaust. She wants to “wring from her own unease, a respite which conviction and hope moves them to transmit to others.” Raphael collects, from the wreckage of the Holocaust, moments of love and care demonstrated and shared even in times far darker than we – in our rather middling pandemic – have any right to compare to our own existential concerns this year. During roll-call – often lasting a day and a night without interruption – Lucie Adelsberger remembers how the women stood still, in rags, in all weathers, beaten whipped and lashed with pistols if they fell, with empty stomachs, often with diarrhoea and unable to move. And yet here too; ‘furtively and inconspicuously they pressed up against one another to keep warm, and thus they began to support their comrades when they began to reel.’ Charlotte Delbo too remembers how, at roll-call, each woman would both support and be warmed by another by placing her hands in the armpits of the woman in front of her. And when the legs of women in her work detail became too swollen for them to walk the other would try to carry them, terminally weak as they themselves were. One girl,” Raphael continues, “Adele, fling into the trucks turns to help those behind her … She is not afraid. Her arm encircles a weaker girl whose knees are failing her.” Raphael’s point is theological. Not the sort of theology most of us think of when we think of theology – if we think of theology at all. She writes, “The father God, the Monarchal Man of War was of little or no consolation or relevance to these women.” Rather, she writes, these women are embodying a godliness which is made manifest in acts of comfort and care of others. Raphael cites the Talmudic passage where we are called upon to behave like God and the examples of what it means, to behave like God, are examples of simple, yet powerful, acts of Hesed – kindness; clothe the naked, visit the sick, offer comfort to the bereaved. The godliness Raphael is interested in is neither the theoretical postulates of Maimonides or the sectarian claims that demarcate on denomination from the other, but actions that simultaneously bind all humanity towards the existential possibilities of what is greater than all humanity. In our treatment of what is other than us, writes Raphael, we are sustained by a godliness that is more profound than the prototypically masculine models of classic theology that lie broken and wrecked by the Holocaust. Etty Hillesum was a young Dutch Jew, murdered in Auschwitz. Her last recorded words were scribbled on a postcard which she threw out the window of the train that took her to her death. I know what will happen to us next (…) [Hillesum wrote on this remarkable artefact from the midst of that awful terror] The latest news is that all the Jews will be deported from Holland to Poland, through camps in the province of Drenthe, and the English radio said that since last year 700,000 Jews have perished in Germany and the occupied territories. If we do survive than we will have that many wounds to carry for the rest of our lives. And still life makes sense to me, my God, I cannot help it. I have already died a thousand deaths in a thousand camps. I know it all and I do no longer get upset over new information. And still I find this life beautiful and full of meaning, every minute of it. I get Jonah, I know sometimes all I want to do is run away, and pull the duvet over my head. I get Adam, I know it can feel desperately dark and helpless. But more than that, I know I am called, by Noah, and by Hillesum, and those countless myriads of women, and men, who have reached their hands out of the prisons of arks and carriages and lock-downed homes in compassion and love. Reading Hillesum’s postcard both, heart-breaking and heart affirming, is so powerful. It’s about a resistance that survives even death, it’s about holiness, courage and the very nature of life. We’re all doing. This is our spiritual inheritance. This is what has been handed down to us today. This is the job – to keep reaching out the windows, in compassion and love, despite our ennui, and despite the gloom. For what it’s worth, it’s always been the job, the very role of humanity, the very expression of what it means to be human; to keep reaching out the windows. May we always be so emboldened. One last thing. I want to share. A bit of a vision. In my mind, in this strange tangled web of our contemporary Covid-ed existence, our awful history and our very humanity, the hand of Ettie Hillesum reaching out the window of that train meets the hand of Noah, reaching out the window of that ark. And those fingers, in some echo of Michelangelo, touch. Maybe that’s my deepest dream this holy evening. That as we reach out, in these glorious acts of humanity, we touch, and we find someone else reaching out towards us. Chatimah Tovah, May it come to us all in sweetness and in health.

Twist or Stick - A Neilah Sermon

Twist or Stick Here’s a sermon brought to you by the card game blackjack, or vingt-et-un, or twenty-one or Esrim V’Achat. Oh and Covid. I’ll get back to the Covid thing. Let me do the card game first. In the card game, you get dealt two cards and the aim is to get near to, but not over, 21. The key question is ‘stick or twist?’ Do you want another card – it will give you more points, but you could go bust? Now, if you have a great hand, I don’t know, 19, 20 or that magical 21 already in your hand, you stick, of course you stick. But what if the score’s lower? Not really low, I mean, you have two cards in your hand and you’ve a score of four or five, that’s easy too. But what if your score is 13, 14, 15 something pretty poor, by the standards of the game, but there’s a risk in turning over another card. If you have 13, then any 9, 10, J, Q or K will bust you out of the round. That’s a lot of cards to dodge. Just in case you are concerned, I’m not much of a card player, certainly not for cash, so here’s the same story from a more Jewish perspective. The Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Gittin, tells the story of the Romans at the walls of Jerusalem. The Biriyonim who are defending the city are fighting off the Romans and, in bid to raise the spirits of the defenders, announce that anyone seeking any kind of compromise with the Romans will be killed. That’s sticking. Our hand may not look so great right now, but we’re not twisting. We’re sticking with what we know, we’re sticking with what we have. And one rabbi, trapped inside the besieged city, Yochanan Ben Zakkai, looks at the starving masses in the city and he looks at the mighty Roman garrisons arrayed beyond the walls, and he twists. He pretends to be dead, gets himself smuggled out of the city and brough before the Roman General and starts negotiating for a future for Jerusalem that will look very different from the cards he began the round holding. This twist or stick thing cuts right to the central moment Rabbinic Judaism. The first Temple, home of the Priestly system of worship and singular centre of the Jewish people, was destroyed and the children of Israel went into exile until, some 70 years later they were allowed to return. And then they returned, and rebuilt a Second Temple, on the model of the first, with the same system of Priestly worship and the same centrality in Jewish life. That’s sticking. But when the Second Temple was destroyed, Judaism transformed. The priestly thing went from being the very essence of Jewish worship to a few small pieces here and there. And instead of Jerusalem being a singular centre of Jewish life – here we are, in a shul – or watching on line – while a Rabbi and a Chazan pray about Teshuvah with not a sacrificial animal in sight. And the paragon of this ability to twist, and to transform and survive, and thrive, is this Rabbi who smuggled himself out of the doomed city. In one of the tellings of the story of Yohanan Ben Zakkai’s escape, the Midrash continues with a story of him walking through the rubble of the destroyed Temple with a colleague, Rabbi Yehoshua. Yehoshua looks at the Temple lying in ruins and says despairingly, “The place that brought Teshuvah for the sins of the people Israel is destroyed!” Yehoshua thinks we’ve gone bust. But Yohannan ben Zakkai replies, 'We can still gain atonement through deeds of loving-kindness. The world” [he continued, citing the verse from Psalms,] “is built upon mercy," Olam Hesed Yibanei. No, we’ve not gone bust, we’re still in the game, we twisted and we are still playing. Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai is prepared to see a wholesale transformation of religious life from a pre-occupation with sacrifices; a religious formalism, going through the motions, to a religious life centred on acts of kindness and Teshuvah affected through an internal process of reflection and questing for personal improvement. And here we are. Getting on for two thousand years later. Let me turn to Covid. While the rates are as high today as they were back in those early days, it’s Yom Kippur, a time to reflect on where we want to be when we can get back out again; specifically, is this a time to stick or twist? What were the cards we were carrying before … all this? I reread something I handed out on the seats this time last year – when everything was still normal, or a whole lot more normal than all this. It’s from the essayist Jia Tolentino; [My local] fast-casual chopped-salad chain feels less like a place to eat and more like a refuelling station: a line of 40 people can be processed in 10 minutes, as customer after customer orders a kale caesar as if their purpose in life is to send emails for 16 hours a day with a brief break to snort down a bowl of nutrients. The neatness of this process obscures its circularity. The ideal chopped-salad customer needs to eat his $12 salad in 10 minutes because he needs the extra time to keep functioning within the job that allows him to afford a $12 salad in the first place. So, as we get out of this, when we get a chance, are we going back to that? Or whatever version it was we had of chopped salad. That’s the question. It’s not really a question about cards, For some great – and all we want to do is return to how it was before; a bit like the Children of Israel after the destruction of the first Temple. For some of us, we’ve been kept away from what they knew, given the chance they were back rebuilding exactly what they had lost. For some it was a complete shambolic mess before all this, and we’ve been trying to twist into something new for a while. But, I suspect, for most of us there was something middling going on. Let me play with the card-game analogy a bit. Let’s make it a bit more like poker. Suppose instead of just adding to the cards in our hand, we get to decide which ones we want to keep and which we want to trade in; which to hold and which to twist. And now imagine a hand of many cards, imagine one card for each facet of our lives. And now imagine that each card isn’t a bearer of a score out of ten – life’s too complex for that. Imagine instead each card portrays our reality in one particular area of our lives. How am I as a father? One card. As a professional colleague? Another card. As a custodian of the resources of the planet? Another card. What would the cards say about my emotional state – the times I anger, the times I lack courage? What would they say about my ability to work for justice, the things I did, and the things I didn’t do? That’s a pretty big deck of cards. But suppose as you shuffle through them, a couple really stand out, there are a couple you really want to trade in. What would be those cards? If our states of existence really permitted us to shuffle through our deck and find a couple of cards to trade in, which ones would you get rid of? What does your Jewish card look like? Have you given this magisterial tradition that is your inheritance a chance, this last year, this last decade? Do you want to twist that? It might help with a bunch of other stuff – that, at least is how it’s supposed to work. It might make you a better descendant, a better ancestor, a person more resilient to the ebbs and flows of lockdown. But if you are going to stick with the Judaism card, that’s OK too. Just take two cards, I’ll give you a maximum of three. And look at them in your mind’s eye. And twist. As you turn these cards in, what are you going to do to make their replacements better, brighter and stronger. That’s the question for the next hour or so. We’re about to go into Neilah and as we prepare to close the gates on this extraordinary Yom Kippur, I encourage you to ponder your two cards, three at the maximum. You can twist. We can all twist. Change is possible. It’s just going to take a little pondering and courage and commitment. But it’s worth it. After all our very lives are at stake. May this year be sealed, for us all, for good.

Rosh Hashanah Sermon - Tomorrow's Troubles and What We Should Do Today

How we all doing? So strange, I know. But I feel a deep sense of privilege to be here with those of you who are in this room. Thank you. And equally, I’m so touched to know there are hundreds of members – and guests and wanderers - taking this opportunity to join us on-line. Hello, thank you. I hope in these storm-tossed times, these services have been a moment of healing and beauty and inspiration for you. So what are we supposed to do? For Rosh Hashanah, for life? That’s been the big question; for the parents of tiny babies who’ve been trying to work out how to arrange Brit Milah, to the wedding couples working out whether to postpone or reconfigure, to our oldest members – working out whether it’s safe to leave the house. Here’s what I’m hoping for, aiming for, in these sermons, and my Jewish engagement, in this year to come. I am looking to share insights from our remarkable tradition – a tradition that has seen plagues and pandemics worse than this, come and go. I’m looking for the insights that can help us reconfigure our lives right now, and into our future. I’m looking for the insights that can help us live better and be stronger in the face of all this. I’m going to start, today, with the most famous triplet of our Rosh Hashanah liturgy Teshuva, tefilah and tzedakah usually translated as penitence, prayer and charity. First the bad news, these things won’t save you. You can do a ton of all kinds of good stuff and still suffer horribly, and that’s sad and frustrating, And I’m sorry. But that line in the Unataneh Tokef that seems to suggest we can change our decrees by doing these things, just doesn’t say that. The decree, the prayer says, is going to be the decree. Who shall live, who shall die? Not in my hands, not in yours either. Mi baEish, mi beMagefah Who by forest fire, who by viral plague, Mi Yanua uMi Yanuach who in distress, and who in rest. Those decrees will be what they will be. Maavirin Et Roah HaGezeirah just doesn’t mean annul the evil decree, that would be a different Hebrew phrase. Rather the Hebrew means take away the pain of the decree. It’s worth doing good things not to change what is happening to us, but to change how we respond to our circumstances, regardless of what we face. I’m aware, this idea might not sound so cheery in a pandemic, But bear with me. It gets better. The Talmud teaches “al tatzar tzarat machar - Don’t suffer from tomorrow’s suffering [today].” It’s so easy to obsess over with tomorrow’s trouble. What if this, what if that? “Ki lo taedah ma yalid yom – you don’t know what tomorrow brings.” There’s a kind of evil we bring into our own lives by an over-preoccupation in ‘what if?’ And in so many ways it’s a fools’ errand to disappear into the concern about decrees we cannot know and cannot alter. It’s not worth worrying greatly about dyes that are cast. Al tatzar tzarat machar - Don’t suffer from tomorrow’s trouble [today]. Those decrees, who by fire and who by virus, I mean stay safe, wash your hands, eat your greens, but don’t get consumed worried about futures that we cannot control and cannot know. Instead why not try this, why not worry about Teshuvah, Tefilah and Tzedakah? Maybe these are the things that can expand our consciousness, our sense of possibility and allow to find a sweetness, even if the decrees are not what everything we wish them to be. For none of us is getting the decrees we wish for this year. Maybe rather than relentlessly updating our news feeds to learn just how the R-number has ebbed or flowed, we would be better of considering Teshuvah; our relationships with our fellows, and our creator. Maybe we would be better off apologising for our errors and striving to transform our behaviour so we engage in the world with the best of ourselves? Improving our relationships with our fellows and our creator is how to find a sweetness in our encounters with the others who populate our existence; our lovers, our family, our friends, colleagues, strangers and even before God. This isn’t a good thing to do because of some kind existential deal-making in the hope of a change in decree, but because improving our relationships with our fellows and our creator is how we face what comes with dignity and decency. Maybe we should spend more time worrying about Teshuvah today than worrying about the worry of tomorrow. Maybe rather than getting swallowed into an ennui driven by yet another day of miserable news, we would be better off considering Tefilah; our ability to pray. The Hebrew word has the same root as the word Peleh ¬– wonder. To pray is to stand in wonder at the world. In that slightly old-fashioned, but lovely phrase, to pray is called to, “count our blessings.” My, this food that sustains me, this breath that moves in and out of me unbidden, this ability to wake another day – how exquisite, how precious, how grateful I should be. And how often do I stop to express this gratitude for what I have already? The rabbis say a person should make 100 blessings a day. Or maybe it would be enough to pause one day a week from the seeking, to express wonderment in prayer. Or maybe even that is too frequently, in which case let this be the day to allow our gratitude and amazement that we are here at all to move us to prayer. And if the language of the prayers of this book feels alienating, don’t be distracted, these prayers are really just a framework for our ability to share the prayers of our heart. And the prayer of the heart can be shared in any language – the prayer of the heart just needs to contain an expression of gratitude and an awareness of a grace visited on us. How would that kind of prayer change us? Would it change our decrees? Who knows, I suspect not, but it would, I am sure, transform us into more gracious and happier and sweeter human beings, regardless of the decrees we face. Maybe we should spend more time worrying about Tefilah today than worrying about the worry of tomorrow. Maybe rather than be beaten down by this gnawing sense that everything going to hell in a handcart – and goodness it’s easy to feel everything is going to hell in a handcart – we would be better of performing acts of Tzedakah; doing things to make this world a more just place. There are as many ways to do Tzedakah as there are experiences of injustice in the world. Giving money is good, so is capacity building, simple acts of kindness, political organising, reducing/reusing/recycling. We speak on Rosh Hashanah of a Heshbon HaNefesh – an account of the soul – the image is a weighing scale. The call to pursue justice – Tzedek, Tzedek Tirdof - asks us to do enough to balance out our gifts with our contribution to the rectification of the injustices of the world. The best way, for what it’s worth, to feel less weighed down by our own sorrows, is to do something for someone else. The best way to feel less bowed down by the mess we are all in, is to be engaged in mending and lifting and healing and forging a brighter future. Making other people’s life better is a wonderful way to feel less aggrieved by the evils of our own decrees. And any of us can do it. I know many of you do it all the time – you tend to be happiest members of this community I know. Maybe we should spend more time worrying about Tzedakah today than worrying about the worry of tomorrow. The delight we take in our lives needn’t be contingent on the decrees we face. The quality of our existence needn’t be determined by the regulations that govern life in a time of coronavirus. Our worth as human beings isn’t a factor of how much we have or who we can and can’t sit next to. That’s not to say that this time is easy. It’s not. It’s a miserable time and a lonely time and I hate all of that. But we can still find joy and still find power and still prove worthy of the gifts of our lives through acts of Teshuvah, Tefilah and Tzedakah. And in that, this year is no different from all those years that have gone before when we’ve stood as Jews, on this sacred day, to work on ourselves, using the insights and the gifts of our tradition to be worthy of the year we seek. It’s not supposed to be easy, it’s never been supposed to be easy. But it is holy, and it is of tremendous value. Our very lives are on the line. Shabbat Shalom Shannah Tovah