It's Not About You - A Kol Nidrei Sermon

This sermon began as a reflection on a counterintuitive idea.

This piece of cloth isn’t supposed to stop me catching COVID.

The reason to wear a mask isn’t to stop me catching COVID, but rather to stop someone else catching COVID from me.

Mask wearing is an act of … what is it exactly, generosity? I don’t think generosity quite covers it. I’m going to make the claim that mask-wearing is religious. I don’t mean mask-wearing is something that can be included in a list of good deeds we stack up in a cosmic account of boxes ticked and not ticked, but rather that mask-wearing unlocks the very nature of what it means to be religious.

Mask-wearing is a very Levinasian act. The great Jewish theologian and philosopher Immanuel Levinas talked about placing value on the other person as the central ethical call of our lives. He wrote, in the decades immediately after the Holocaust, of the importance of placing the mortality of the other person at the very centre of who we are. Levinas is going to stand as an exemplar of what it means to be religious, for me, this evening.

And on the other side of this debate, between the forces of religion and the forces of … not religion, I’m calling as witness a central idea from the writings of Immanuel Kant. I’m going to be a little unfair on Kant who had much else to say, but Kant was responsible for the idea that every individual is the end in themselves, and never to be solely a means to another end. I know that’s to oversimplify Kant, but this is a sermon, not a philosophy seminar.

The reason, I think, it’s OK to oversimplify Kant’s categorical imperative is that his articulation transformed so much of what we think it means to be ethical. Kant’s doctrine of the in-alienable nature of the self has driven human rights legislation, medical ethics and so much else. And mostly that’s good. But placing ‘me’ at the centre of what it means to ethical is dangerous.

If I am not to be a means to another end, I must be the most important thing in my own ethical universe. My rights deserve to be prioritized, my self-determination needs to be vouchsafed. Ibsen’s tragi-hero Peer Gynt can justify frittering away their life in the search to be true to his own self. Thousands of t-shirts and posters can be printed with versions of the slogan, “Live Your Own Truth,” and this idea can, somehow, be cast as ethically OK. And somewhere in all of this, that pseudo-Kantian idea is to blame.

I mean, if I should pursue my own truth as an ethical goal,

if I focus all my ethical energy on not being a means to the ends of another,

if I’m not under the ethical command to discomfort myself with this piece of, let’s admit it, deeply discomforting cloth, then why on earth should I?

 

In response to pseudo-Kantian claim that Living Your Own Truth is the purpose of existence, religion sits down and has a little cry. I mean, what can religion say to someone who has turned themselves into the centre of ethical power in their own private universe? What should I say to someone who has made themselves into their own god?

Religion – at least this religion – is the practice of locating power beyond the self. Religious Jews don’t eat what they feel like, they don’t say the things they feel like saying, they don’t do the things they feel like doing all the time. Rather we eat what we eat, say what we way and do what we do in the context of a covenant, a relationship with a people and a God. That’s the very essence of Judaism – we are not God – we did not create the world, imbue it with life and meaning and we did not bring the Jewish people out of the Land of Egypt.

And so, the entire drive of a Jewish understanding of life, becomes the attempt to live well in the face of otherness we cannot understand and cannot control. The entire apparatus of Jewish law is a training in living with this external sense of obligation.

Let me give two examples.

כִּי תִבְנֶה בַּיִת חָדָשׁ, וְעָשִׂיתָ מַעֲקֶה לְגַגֶּךָ; וְלֹא-תָשִׂים דָּמִים בְּבֵיתֶךָ, כִּי-יִפֹּל הַנֹּפֵל מִמֶּנּוּ.

When you build a new house, you shall put a parapet on the roof so you shall not place blood on your house should someone fall from it. (Deut 22:8)

If I’m not stupid enough to go clambering around my roof, why should parapet building be my problem? Because my actions have implications for other people, and I need to obligated by them, even if I don’t want to be, or don’t see how that could possibly be fair.

Or this one, a little less well known – the law of the Egla Arufa; if a dead body is found in a field beyond my village, the leaders of the village have to come forth and accept responsibility for the death. Why do they have to accept responsibility for something that happened outside their village - it’s not as if the leaders of the village killed the person? Rather it’s because they failed to stop the death from happening and the empty space beyond their village is still their problem.

I think about the law of the Egla Arufa every time I read about a refugee dingy capsizing in the Mediterranean, or when I hear about those left behind in Afghanistan. The people in a field beyond my village are still my problem.

In 1972, Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Rabbi, the anti-racism and anti-war campaigner wrote: “Morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings. Indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, [and] in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.”

Much is made of the notion of Jewish guilt. I think it’s usually a mis-understood concept. The issue isn’t that we are going to burn in hell for every infraction of an ancient set of rules. The issue is, that our lives are to be judged on a scale of how successfully we lived up to our obligations towards others and otherness. By the standards of the cosmos I don’t believe, for what it’s worth, that there are many points available for successfully doing what seems right in our own eyes – whatever that happens to be.

That’s why wearing a mask that keeps, not me safe, but you safe, is such a fundamentally religious act. Mask wearing is perhaps the paradigmatic way in which we, in a pandemic, accept the burdens imposed by the other.

By the way, if you’re exempt, you’re exempt. If you shouldn’t be wearing a mask, of course it’s ethically correct not to wear a mask. If you’re exempt, I don’t mean you.

But let me do a piece on vaccines also. Because while I know so many of us in this sacred community took the very first opportunity presented to go and get vaccinated, I’ve had invitations from members of this community, to protest against a supposed unfairness of vaccine fascism or whatever it’s being called. And I’m sorry for the discomfort I’m going to try to impose on the vaccine resistant in this community, but not that sorry.

To be fair, I’ve encountered far more vaccine resistance in the yoga circles I wander through than Jewish world I inhabit. In yoga-classes I’ve encountered younger, fitter people who don’t want to put toxicity into their bodies. They are concerned about the side-effects of the vaccine – and there are side-effects of the vaccine – and rightly or wrongly they aren’t so worried about getting Covid themselves because they think they are young enough and fit enough to fight it off. All that may be true, but these yogis who parenthetically seem to spend a lot of time talking about ‘pursuing your own truth’, or ‘prioritizing self-actualisation’ seem to have missed the point that, if you are young and fit, the reason to get vaccinated is less to prevent your own serious illness than to ensure that there is less infection out there in the society in which we all live. For the more infection there is out there in society, the more those who are less young, and less fit will suffer.

Again vaccination, especially for the younger and fitter among us, is at least as much an act of generosity or ethics or religion as it is an act of self-protection.

That’s why I got vaccinated, that’s why I wear a mask. That’s why it’s such a privilege to serve as a rabbi to a community who – and here you all are in your masked splendor – get this. And simply by being here, in your holy, holy masks embody your commitment to this idea. Thank you.

But this isn’t really a sermon about mask-wearing or vaccines. I’m interested in something far broader. It’s going to take much more than wearing masks, and coming to Shul on Kol Nidrei to transform the society in which we live. It will take an inversion of the entire pseudo-Kantian idea that my own needs are the way to go, ethically, and as a lifestyle. It will take a whole re-centering on the value and desperate importance of living our lives for the sake of others.

So where might one find a training in this radical new idea?

Forgive me for making a political sermon on Kol Nidrei so overtly religious. I sent out a survey just after Yom Kippur last year and had some respondents who told me my Yom Kippur sermons should be less political and some respondents who told me I shouldn’t use my sermons to bang on so much about being more religious. Sorry. But this is what we do here, week in, week out. Prayer service in, prayer service out. We practice locating the central obligating force in our lives as other than us. We’re training ourselves to hear that voice, the voice of faith articulated in the language of Mitzvah – commandedness, obligations to others. That’s who we are, as a faith community.

So, thank you for being here – in your masks. Thank you for joining us on-line, and those of you who are here on-line, I suspect that you are on-line precisely because you value exactly these ideas. But do more. Make more space for the prioritization of the religious voice, the commanding voice of the other in your lives. Join us here, in person or on-line, as we continue to explore this journey in all its glorious and extraordinary manifestations, and in doing so may we all be sealed in the Book of Life.

Gemar Chatimah Tovah.

Mourning Alone - A Yizkor Sermon

This is a sermon that began, in my mind, at a funeral. The parent of a member had passed away in the depths of lockdown. They had two children – roughly my age. And between them, the children made a decision as to which would be with their parent at their death, exposing themselves to Covid, and which would attend the funeral.

And when it came to the funeral there were just the two of us at the cemetery together with the exhausted cemetery staff, streaming a ceremony to everyone else.

Covid, dratted Covid, took from us – as it has taken from so many of us – the ability to be properly together at times when we have most needed company. I mean I’m proud of the technical wizardry we’ve put to use, I’ve been moved at so many Zoom Shiva services that have a remarkable spirituality. But it’s not the same.

It's one of the things I love most about Judaism, love, or loved? – I’m not ready to use the past tense yet, that when there’s a loss everyone just turns up. I’ve been to funerals in Waltham Cross, at six hours notice with hundreds of people. Because there is something wired into the Jewish gut that when someone passes away – you turn up, in person.

It’s one of the great gifts of my own strange career. I feel incredibly blessed to have job which allows me to drop everything and go.

It's not just the funerals and the Shiva services that have been transformed into private affairs. It’s not even the B.Mitvah celebrations in an empty sanctuary, or the Britot Milah celebrations with only a Mohel present. Every element of our lives, religious and otherwise. And now, as we turn our gaze beyond the lockdowns of the past, I’m worried for what habits, and ingrained expectations of our own behaviour, we might have lost as Jews and as humans.

Covid, dratted Covid, threatens to have accelerated a path into individuation that has been in play for some time. Robert Puttnam, the sociologist, wrote the book, Bowling Alone, some twenty years ago. In it, he recorded the decline of the Bowling Leagues of his own youth. It wasn’t that less people were bowling in 2001, it was just that people went bowling by themselves and not in groups. We’ve been drifting in this direction for some time.

Covid has broken us out of rhythms of turning up to be part of the interweave of human existence that is necessarily communal. And as Covid recedes, what will it leave in its wake?

It’s something I can feel in Shul, even today, even making allowances for the limited numbers we’re allowing into the building.

My nervousness, can you hear my nervousness?, isn’t just about what this means for Judaism, it’s about what it means for humanity. But let me concentrate on the Jewish piece for a moment.

Jews pray in the plural –

Baruch Eloheinu

Blessed is our God.

Ashamnu, Bagadnu, Gazalnu

We are guilty, we have stolen.

Our prayers have particular power in the plural – without a minyan there are prayers we have to skip. Unless - as it were - we can be bothered to turn up ourselves we aren’t permitted to request God to turn up for us. And more than that, there’s something that happens when we all pray together. Last night, for the first time since all this began, there was communal song, really song, filling this space, and you could feel a force present in a way that not even Chazan Stephen – and I love Stephen –can pull off if he has to Bowl Alone.

Physical closeness is an extraordinary unmatchable gift to another person, particularly another person in pain. And loneliness, in these painful times, can be an extra heartbreak.

There’s a stunning moment in one of my favourite Chasidic texts, the Eish Kodesh of the Reb Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, better known as the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. In the depths of struggles unimaginable, Reb Kalonymous taught week in, week out trying to give comfort and strength to his community as the ghetto was ground out of existence. And right before the end, as, surely, he knows the end is coming he teaches this passage.

“How is it possible to go on,” he asks, “when I am always on the verge of tears.” Really, it’s impossible to imagine the pain and the stress of the time. He suggests that even in those most intense moments of loneliness and suffering it’s still possible “to push in and come close to God in God’s most inner chambers. A person,” Reb Kalonymous taught, “weeps together with God, and studies Torah with God. Just this makes the difference: the weeping, the pain which a person undergoes alone, may have the effect of breaking them, of bringing them down, so that they become incapable of doing anything. But the weeping which a person does together with God – that strengthens a person. They weep – and are strengthened; They are broken – but find courage.” [1]

To those of you here today who have had to mourn alone, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for our own failures to support sufficiently, and I’m sorry for the way Covid has interrupted – or is it broken, no I’m not ready to say broken yet – our desire to come together.

I know grief is ultimately private. But I know that coming together helps. Coming together always helps; it helps light up darker times, as it helps set in context our celebrations.

I know that Teshuvah, repentance is ultimately private. But I know that it must be communal also. For we live lives that are inescapably communal, even if we never cross our thresholds – we consume and interact in ways that are new, but none the less inescapably part of a broader narrative.

John Donne was right,

No man is an island entire of itself; every man

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;

if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe

is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as

well as any manner of thy friends or of thine

own were; any man's death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind.

 

Certainly, we are, as humans and as Jews, so much stronger when we stand together.

I want to invite us to spend more time together, particularly to support one another. I want to invite us to take more opportunities to reach beyond our own bubbles – safely, of course, and for some that reaching will have to be very safely. But we are in danger of slipping into a nation bowling alone, as Jews and as citizens of our time.

And the memories of those we love and commemorate on this day would be weakened if that were to be the case. Memories serve as blessings through a process not unlike pebbles being dropped in still waters. Let me tell you a story about my grandfather of blessed memory and as I do, he will live on.

Ah, my grandfather. I remember accompanying my Grandpa Monte on his last walk to Shul. He was old and unsteady on his feet. And I remember following behind him as he made his slow way down the aisle in Muswell Hill Shul, clanking his Zimmer frame as he went. I remember how everyone rose to greet him along the aisle, my grandpa. His father wanted him to become a butcher, you see. He wanted to be an opera singer, so he became a butcher who sang in Shul. And he took me with him before it was too late to show me how much he was loved, in the Shul he helped found. I don’t think my grandfather ever imagined I would be a rabbi. But memories of him inspire me to this day.

That’s a 40-year-old-memory I am passing on to you, because you’re here and we can do that – keep alive those memories. Passing them on to the next generation and the next enriching, lifting and inspiring in ways we can never really imagine.

So, that’s my memory. Come back soon, and pass on your memories to me. I like good memories. Or pass them on to someone else, or better still lots of people. Be an evangelist for the cause of passing on good memories from one person to another. Be an evangelist for the cause of passing on the contagious excitement of being amongst people – safely of course.

I want to invite us to spend more time together, particularly to support one another. I want to invite us to take more opportunities to reach beyond our own bubbles – safely, of course, and for some that reaching will have to be very safely. But we are in danger of slipping into a nation bowling alone, as Jews and as citizens of our time. And I’m not ready for that. I don’t think any of us should be.

Chatimah Tovah

---

[1] Esh Qodesh, Parashat HaHodesh 5702 (March 14, 1942) (Based on Hagigah 5b)

Pause - A Neilah Sermon

Tonight, as it begins to darken outside, I want to talk about pausing.

It’s a sermon that began, in my mind, as I made calls around the membership, back in the days when no-one went anywhere or did anything. I would ask people how they were doing. And far more than you would imagine, people would share “It’s not so bad.” They would admit it a little sheepishly, “Actually, I quite like it.”

As long as we had health – for ourselves and our loved ones – and of course health makes all the difference, member after member would share that as life became simpler they were finding joy. We had no choice, but to let go of a bunch of the things we used to spend our time chasing and chasing and it turned out OK.

Pausing isn’t the same as doing nothing, of course. It was Alain de Botton who said, “how did it happen that we started to consider gazing out of the window as a waste of time.”

And before we entirely lose that experience of a pause and head back into the year out there, I want to hold us on that limin – that doorpost. And explore some Jewish wisdom.

 

On Rosh Hashanah we began what the Torah calls a Sabbatical year – a Shmittah, a year of release. The Torah shares in five different places instructions for this year of pause, or release. Here are the key verses from the book of Leviticus;

And God spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai saying, ‘Speak to the Children of Israel and say to them, when you come into the land that I give you the land shall keep a Shabbat for the Lord. Six years you will sow your field and six years you will prune your vineyard and gather her produce. But the Seventh Year will be an ultimate Shabbat for the Lord.

Every seventh year we are told to let the land rest – and this is that year. Elsewhere the Torah tells us to welcome the stranger into our fields to eat of crops growing there of their own will, during the Shmittah, or to release debtors from their debts. It’s a vision of a world of mutual support and hospitality, a vision of a world where we are told to pay more attention to treating other people than treating ourselves. I don’t know how many of us here tonight even knew.

In five different places in the Torah, we’re imposed upon to pay attention to a rhythm in time we might not feel or understand as necessary. And at centre of this Mitzvah of Shmittah is a direction to pay attention to the world in which we live, and our true place in it.

It is, of course so easy to take this world for granted, despite the destruction we wreck upon it.

I felt something of this traipsing round the Heath, in those months of lockdown when the Heath was so important to our sense of humanity. On Shabbat afternoon walks, my family and I joined tens of thousands striding over London’s green and pleasant lands, turning narrow dirt pathways into vast swathes of mud. Week by week the mud deepened and the grass retreated. I mean Covid simultaneously heightened my appreciation of nature and at the very same time forced me to pay attention to how easily I damage even ecosystems that seem robust.

It takes an imposition into our sense of normal to allow us to see what was there all along, but somehow invisible when we were un-imposed upon.

It's only by stopping that you notice things. It’s the gift of that dratted Covid again.

But it’s also the gift of our faith. It’s the gift of Yom Kippur.

The thirteenth century Rabbi ,Yonah HaGerondi called Teshuvah, repentance, a Mikdash – a sanctuary. That’s the very same name we use to refer to this room, this space. Teshuvah is the act of a spiritual pause, taking a retreat from action and finding, in our repose, reflections and understandings that don’t come when we are on the go.

The twentieth century Rabbi, Yosef Soloveitchik talked about the experience of being in this Mikdash of Teshuvah as if it were Mikdash of the ancient Temple, and to access the very Holy of Holies itself – it was as if there were a curtain you had to pull aside, to step trepidatiously into before the Ark of the covenant itself, containing the tablets of God’s will for humanity. Can we imagine ourselves into such a place? What might we find there in terms of understanding better who we are, and who we are meant to be.

If we can imagine ourselves into such a holy encounter with our souls, surely, it’s only because of our pause, until this point in the day.

Then there is the Shabbat itself, a time where the pathway from the hectic all-consuming nature of the world out there to an experience of peace which values who we are not what we achieve is, I hope, familiar. As the sun sets, we prepare, we light candles, sanctify the day, open our homes and take a moment to express gratitude. There are rituals to assist us entering this place of pause and repose that are beautiful and ancient, and beautiful and our own. But I’m less sure how many of us make this time, religiously – as it were, every week, to create that distinction between all-on-business and a moment of pause, the moment of sweetness in all this, the moment that allows for the future to be different and better. It’s worth it.

I know for so many of us Covid presented a forced guilty delight in a more quiet world. But that was Covid, forcing us to stop. Can we take ownership of that delight for ourselves when the obligating power is our own ability to recognize the value of pausing, when all we have are our own decisions about when not to go shopping, or into the office?

Or maybe that’s not quite right – that it’s only us capable of making the decision to pause. We have a faith tradition, thousands of years of wisdom, somehow bound into the divine will. Mitzvot – the commanding voice of God. And we have community. Us. We’re here every week – 6:30 on Friday, come and join us. Lean into the rhythms of Jewish life and we’ll do the pausing thing together.

In so many ways the improvements to our lives that we wish for are releases – a willed decision to stop doing something we drift into without really understanding what could happen if we were really to let go of the damaging behaviours of our lives. Certainly, in terms of our relationship with the planet a pause, a commitment to under-consume, to decline to consume is desperately necessary.

I’m not hungering to ‘go back to normal.’ I mean I don’t think you can ever go backwards in life, but more than that, as we stand in these lengthening shadows I’m thinking about what I’ve learnt from my Covid Shmittah that I can use in this new Hebrew year of Shmittah and a big piece of that is thinking through what I can release.

Will you join me in leaning into this pausing thing, now it is handed over to us?

My friend and colleague Rabbi Josh Feigelson recently wrote,

I invite you to consider for yourself, how we might slow down, be more present, and in the process uncover/recover our awareness of the Divine presence within and between and among us. By acts of omission and commission, mindlessly and willfully, we have, collectively, sped up and distanced ourselves so much from the world and one another. In the process, we have dehumanized ourselves and each other. We have closed ourselves off to the Divine presence.

Amen.

There’s a few minutes left, in this Yom Kippur day in this year of Jewish Shmittah, at the end of this Covid imposed sabbatical. It’s a good time to pick something to let go of in this year to come. It doesn’t have to be about the world in which we live – though the world could do with a break.

It's my request, and my invitation – what can you attempt to release – this year, or once a week?

And in doing so, may we all come to the gifts of freedom and insight and delight we wish,

Chatimah Tovah, and may we all be sealed in the book of life for a sweet year to come,

Shannah Tovah

On Why Things Don't Happen the Way We Want Them To - A Rosh Hashanah Sermon

 This sermon began in my mind watching a clip of a senator in the Texas State senate. He was frustrated that Covid still wasn’t done.

“You told us,” he said brandishing his finger towards someone or something, “that it would be the masks that would keep us safe from Covid. Then you told us,” he continued to wag his finger, “that the vaccine would keep us safe from Covid, and now we’ve got masks and vaccines and we’ve still got Covid – so which is it?”

I can understand the frustration. I’ve found Covid frustrating and just so confusing. I know couples who live together where one got Covid and the other didn’t. And younger people who have suffered horribly from this weird disease and older people who have waltzed through it. And fully vaccinated people getting ill and vax-resistors doing fine. And how does that happen? How come?

It's not that Covid is the first time I’ve been frustrated and confused – that happened lots before, but there is something about this journey that has brought me to rethink the question of why things happen, and my inability to understand.

The frustrated Texan Senator reminds me of two other moments of frustration in our text-tradition, both more connected to Yom Kippur than today, but go with me. They are going to model my problem.

In ten days time, we read a Haftarah from Isaiah. The people surrounding Isaiah are frustrated. They want, like of all of us, a good life, and they claim they are doing the stuff they should be doing to get a good life, and it isn’t happening. Isaiah reports, “[The people] keep asking me for the justice. They say, ‘why is it that we have fasted and you don’t see our suffering?’ ‘We humble ourselves, and you don’t notice.’”

Of course we know the answer to the people’s frustrations and confusion, the reason that all the fasting and bowing of the Israelites of Isaiah’s time fails to work is clear to us, even if opaque to them. The Isaiah’s contemporaries might be fasting, but they are also oppressing their workers and persisting in strife and contention. They protest the system isn’t working, but the system is working just fine. They just don’t understand the system.

Much like our Texan State Senator.

He's missed the point that neither the vaccine nor the masks are offered as perfect guarantees, that’s never been claimed. It’s about %s and probabilities and epidemiological forecasting. But we all make the error of the State Senator, or Isaiah’s contemporaries, all the time. We articulate a frustration at the world not working how we want it to work, but often we’ve performed a wish-fulfillment imposition of a way for the world to work … which is just not how the world works.

It’s the wish fulfillment piece that is, I think, the most interesting piece of all of this. I mean, I wanted Covid to go away so badly, I was prepared to believe it would disappear by Pesach last year, or Shavuot, or last year’s Rosh Hashanah and I’m still prepared to believe it’s going to disappear tomorrow, and I’m still getting frustrated that it didn’t disappear yesterday, even despite all the properly qualified epidemiologists and virologists calmly stating that that’s simply not going to happen.

We’ve all appointed ourselves experts in fields we know next to nothing about, we do it all the time, and then we express surprise that our bent to the world to our will.

So, here’s one way to deal with the frustrations of a world not working out the way we want it to work out. Remember the Talmud’s instruction to “Teach your tongue to say I do not know.”[1]

If there’s something I’m frustrated about – I need to check that the problem wasn’t that I wished a truth into being that … simply isn’t a truth at all. That’s what I’ve learnt from Isaiah, about Covid.

 

And here’s a second moment from our faith tradition – a Midrash about Moses’ experience with God when he comes down the mountain the second time, in the aftermath of the Golden Calf debacle. A day, the Rabbis calculate to be Yom Kippur, some 3300 years ago.

In Masechet Brachot[2] the Rabbis imagine God celebrating with Moses the giving of the second tablets and offering to answer two of Moses’ questions but not offering the answer to the third question. God answers that; Yes, God will dwell with the children of Israel and always go with the Children of Israel, but then Moses attempts this question - “Rasha v’Tov Lo, Tzadik v’Ra Lo” – why do good things happen to bad people and why do bad things happen to good people and God refuses to give a clear answer.

God’s grace is just that, it comes at the will of God, and it goes at the will of God. And even if you follow all the rules, and do everything just as you should – there is still no answer in our tradition to the question – Rasha v’Tov Lo, Tzadik v’Ra Lo. Sometimes there is just no reason. All the doctrines of cause and effect don’t grant a perfect understanding of the world. That’s not just a religious truth, that’s a physicists have come to accept – at the very deepest places of sub-atomic behaviour. For sure we can predict generalities – if enough people wear masks, infection rates will go down, if enough people get vaccinated, severe illness will decrease. But trying to plot precisely who will and won’t get ill is as impossible as trying to predict the behaviour of an electron.

We’re back to this issue of humility. Who will live and who will die, who by fire, who by water – isn’t a primer on how to make sense of the world, but a warning against thinking we can control human destiny. Those words continue with a line about penitence, prayer and justice but doesn’t offer these options as a way to guarantee anything.

I think we have the world backwards. Somewhere we seem to have picked up a notion that the world is ours to understand and control. But, with every twist and turn in this pandemic, with every storm and flood and with every experience of the fragile nature of our hold on the world, we are having to acknowledge that we don’t control the world.

So what now?

Two thoughts.

While we aren’t given the ability to understanding everything in our strange world, that’s not the same as saying we live in a void. We live in a space that is neither anarchy or perfect order. There are general truths about the things that will make the world generally better, for ourselves and the planet. Some of them are obvious, some of them less so. We need to press back against our thinking that wish-fulfillment will make the things we want to happen, happen. But if we open our heart to listen to wisdom, we will learn and even if we can’t control every aspect of our lives, we can improve our lot and that of those around us. Our inability to control everything shouldn’t lead us to feel nothing matters at all. We’re back to questions around vaccination and infection and mask wearing.

And also this, what if we were to invert our relationship with control and understanding. What if instead of feeling frustrated when the world doesn’t match our expectation of it, we found ways to take delight in moments of beauty even in their brokenness, even in their lack of complete order and security.

Let me take the example of the rainbow. There have been so many rainbows, placed in windows and chalked onto pavements. And I understand that the rainbow makes a wonderful icon for the end of a period of loss and destruction – that is, of course, a very Jewish idea. But I wonder if we have focused on the wrong part of rainbows’ symbolic power.

Rainbows are ethereal. Sometimes visible, other times not. There’s nothing to touch, nothing to rely upon. No way to reach a rainbow, and certainly – sorry to disappoint – no pot of gold on offer for those who do. Rainbows exist in a moment of infinitely fragile beauty as sun and rain combine. Rainbows are the perfect symbol of what it could mean to find delight in the precarious. And we do, of course. We find rainbows utterly transfixing; transfixing because of their fragility, not despite it.

We’re ready – or almost ready – to find beauty in the gentle moments of grace we can find. We just struggle to admit we can’t find things beautiful in their fragility while still protesting that the world isn’t the dependable solid kind of place we would wish it to be.

So here’s the challenge for any of us who find the world frustrating and challenging in its refusal to function as we would wish.

We need to check that the version of the world we expect is a true version of the world – and not just an attempt to use wish fulfillment.

And we need to acknowledge that the goal of our quest for understanding can’t be perfect knowledge. We need to acknowledge that the Universe will always keep its deepest secrets … secret, and instead of frustration we need to find beauty in the fragile and ephemeral.

That’s a path to delight and ease, even in a world that confuses.

That’s a path, I think, to a year of sweetness.

May it come to us all,

Shannah Tovah.

 

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[1] Brachot 4a

[2] Brachot 7a

On The Frustrations of Other People - A Rosh Hashanah Sermon 5782

 Can we dream, for a moment?

Imagine that while we are all in here – praying away – that rainbow – the one that was drawn on pavements and hung in windows back at the start of this Covid-isation of all our lives – emerged from behind a cloud, and whoosh – it was all gone.

All the fear, all the illness, all the masks and all the swabs… click your heels together three times, or give a hundred blasts on the Shofar and imagine it’s all gone.

So here’s my question for today, and my sermonic journey through this time – what have we learnt?

For me, one of the big lessons has come from re-appraising my relationship with other people.

Not my most immediate closest circle. I know I’m incredibly blessed to have an immediate close circle of people I love – and if you were to ask my kids they would probably share they saw more than enough of me under lockdown.

But once you get outside my immediate bubble and move outwards, and outwards there are so many other people.

The postman, the Amazon driver, the supermarket cashier, none of whom signed up for a job on the front line.

The soldiers staffing a COVID test site, with their camouflage visible under translucent hazmat suits who signed up ready for the front-lines, but didn’t realise they would be fighting an enemy 20nm in diameter.

The faces of those I used to see in this space and chat to in the kiddush hall, who became video boxes in a Zoom room – staring out from locked-down homes at Havdalah ceremonies and learned discourses.

I’ve been rethinking all of that.

And I’ve also been thinking about the people I’ve stopped seeing all together. This is the first Rosh Hashanah in decades where Sonia, our beloved nonagenarian Sonia, isn’t with us. Sonia couldn’t handle the transition to a virtual world and lost just about all kinds of social contact. Sonia died over the summer not from the virus, but the virus stripped her of life nonetheless. And I miss her.

The word that keeps coming to my mind, in these are-we/aren’t-we capable of normal social contact times is ‘precious’ – in both of its meanings. Precious as in beautiful. And precious as in fragile. I’ve come to appreciate anew the extraordinary radical beauty and fragility of the other people in my life.

I’ve realized I’ve taken the human beings around me for granted. And I’ve Covid, dratted blasted Covid, to thank.

Here’s the thing about the world before all of this. I spent a lot of time thinking about me, and my self-determination, and my desires. And the big problem of focusing one’s life on ‘me’ is that when the people I bump into along the way don’t seem as committed to my version of my own desires, it’s too easy to see everyone else as being somehow in the way.

Perhaps the perfect encapsulation of life before all this is the packed tube-carriage, where, even if I’m gracious enough to stand for the journey, everyone between me and the sliding doors too easily becomes obstacles in my path. It’s so easy to get irritated with the obstacle in the path.

And in the world, before all this, with so much already digitally available and anonymously delivered, it was already too easy to forget that there the people in Deliveroo’s dark kitchens and people in Amazons’ fulfillment centres.

And it’s not, of course, that the digitally available nature of the world has retreated, with Covid, but, in the heart of lockdown, the only other person I would actually see, for real, would be the delivery driver. With the tube carriages so empty, when the only other humans I would see – for real – are delivery drivers, it was somehow easier for me to see the other people around me for who they really are.

And that’s important because other people don’t deserve to be seen as obstacles in my way.

Other people are miracles wrapped up in chromosomes and sinews and skin, precious in their beauty, and precious in their fragility. Even the most fragile of lives, even the most ugly.

Here’s a moment from the Talmud.[1]

It happened that Rabbi Elazar was travelling from Migdal Gedor, he was riding his donkey along the riverbank. And he came upon an exceedingly ugly man, who said to him “Peace to you my rabbi,” And the rabbi didn’t reply, but said to him, “Oh empty one, how ugly are you? Please don’t tell me that all the people of your village are as ugly as you are.” And the ugly man responded, “I don’t know about that, why don’t you ask the artisan who made me, “How ugly is this vessel you made.””

And the Rabbi realizes they have sinned, and he gets down from his donkey, and prostrates himself on the ground and pleads for forgiveness. It’s a great story, and an incredible story for the Rabbis to have included in the Talmud.

The craftsman, of course, is God. And the essence of God’s craft, in creating each of us, is that we are created in the image of the divine. And when we jostle up against people who seem to be in our way or surplus to my thought-to-be vital needs of the moment, what we really need to do is bear witness to the divinity enfolded in each precious human being around us. The challenge is to see the beauty through the ugliness and perfection in their fragility.

Actually it’s even more important than that.

When we look out at another person we see, or at least we should see, two things – the things we share, and the things we don’t. We should be struck by singular nature of the human race, of our brotherhood and sisterhood shared all humanity.

And then we should see the difference between each and every human, never before and never again will there ever be a human just like me, or you, or anyone. We are each so precious in our uniqueness.

And, of course, all of that should move us to ethical behaviour, to a deep commitment to a decency when confronted by other people that goes beyond simple politeness.

But more than that, a focus on the beauty and the fragility of every other human is a pathway to happiness. I’ll whisper this piece – witnessing the preciousness of others is a more effective pathway to happiness than focusing on our own needs. The more we pursue our own needs, the more dis-ease we feel with how much we are being stymied at every turn. The more we test the quality of our existence by how much we value other people, the easier, the more joyous and the more delightful life becomes.

And I know other people can be annoying, and I know it can so easily feel that everyone else in the world is utterly focused on getting in my way, but if, when we look out at other people, we see the miraculous, divine nature of their existence then perhaps it will be easier to understand why they are behaving in ways we cannot, at this precise moment, understand.

In some ways, what I’m trying to articulate is the point of coming to a Synagogue – a Bet HaCanesset – a house of coming together. It’s to bear witness to other precious people who are bit like us, and a bit different. And we are here together to be moved by the miracle of being in the same place as other human beings, by the precious nature of human existence.

And it’s not that I don’t understand the decisions made by those who feel unable to come inside a building, I do understand. And if you are still with us at the end of a two-hour stream, I’m a little bit in awe, and so grateful.

And it’s not that I don’t understand that there are many who are happier in their own company than in the jostle of crowds, even in a non-pandemic world. That’s all-good too and it might be that introverts get this truth more profoundly that extroverts; properly witnessing the existence of other people should be exhausting.

But this is work for us all. I want to try something, for those of us in the room, and those of us on the stream, you can play along with me as a partner. Look around, right now. Let your gaze land on someone you might know, or someone who might not. You won’t be able to see their smile, so imagine they are smiling. Look for their eyes. I know – we’re in England and this sort of thing probably feels very embarrassing. But look, look on. And if you are fortunate enough to be being looked at, go on, smile. Even from behind your mask.

What do you see? Is it precious and beautiful and fragile? If it isn’t … keep looking. It will be soon.

Give a gentle nod, a nod that says, “I see you, my beautiful, fragile fellow human. Thank you for being beautiful and fragile and holding my gaze.”

And be ready to break that moment. Sorry. But hold on to that feeling. Hold on to that understanding of what it means to see preciousness in other people. And take it with you when you leave today, into the world out there, into the year out there.

And may it bring a sense of delight, and instill a sense of decency and warmth, and may it draw all those things to you.

And may we all be blessed with a year of sweetness and joy and health,

Shannah Tovah to us all

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[1] BT Taanit 20b