O That my Words Were Written Down - A Sermon to be shared at the Churches of St Mary's and St James, NW6 on Remembrance Sunday 2025

  

I’ve been reflecting on the reading from today’s service, the reading from the Hebrew Bible[1] –

‘O that my words were written down!
O that they were inscribed in a book!

מִי־יִתֵּ֣ן אֵ֭פוֹ וְיִכָּתְב֣וּן מִלָּ֑י

On a day like today, it reminds me of the last words of the great Jewish historian, Simon Dubnow, born in 1860. Dubnow was resident of the great Jewish community of Riga when the Nazis came - all but 150 of the 40,000 Jews of Riga were murdered by the Nazis. He was one of the first, old and infirm at the time, as he was being led away, he called out, “Write it down, write it down.”

If these atrocities were not known, if those in this country and our allies had not understood the threat the Nazis posed and the fate they felt my people deserved, I would not be here. The debt I feel to those who served, in the Second World War especially, is very personal.

My own family were already in London at the outbreak of the second world war. My grandfather, with his 'essential profession' and flat feet, spent his days, during the War as a kosher butcher managing ration allowances and his nights manning anti-aircraft guns on top of a blacked-out hotel on Park Avenue.

It's my wife’s grandfather who has my family’s best claim to war-time heroism.[2] Jack Eldridge Cowen's father, Max (pictured above with his son), came to these isles on a boat he thought destined for America. The captain pulled into port, the locals spoke English with an accent, and so he disembarked … in Dublin, where his son, Jack, trained as a Doctor. With the advent of the Blitz, Dr Cowen headed to London, serving first as a civilian Doctor and then as a commissioned officer, with the rank of Captain. He served in the North African campaign under Montgomery, saw action in the two El Alamein battles and was part of the invasion of Italy. The family story is that his chief concern was supplementing the inadequate rations provided for his company – very Jewish. That included, once they arrived in Europe, hunting for deer and raiding cellars filled with Chianti. Captain Dr Cowan’s war ended in 1944, when shrapnel hit his back as he pulled two injured soldiers to shelter while under fire at the Battle of Monte Cassino. He was mentioned in dispatches and awarded the Military Cross.

He never talked about his heroism. If pushed, he would admit a certain regret that King George was, by that time, too ill to present him with the medal personally. We only know the story because it was written down.

O that my words were written down! - מִי־יִתֵּ֣ן אֵ֭פוֹ וְיִכָּתְב֣וּן מִלָּ֑י

My wife’s grandfather’s tale, of course, is a tale about a sort of double immigration; from Eastern Europe to Ireland and from Ireland to this country. It’s the tale also of a sort of doubled religious integrated co-operation; a Jew who became a Doctor in Catholic Dublin, defended this Protestant nation and ended the war with shrapnel pockmarks on his back and a medal of valour on his chest. It’s a story – and there are millions and millions of them, from people of every religion and nationality and every skin tone and accent – of decency, the sense of obligation to serve a greater good and the kind of patriotism that knows no hatred of another human being because they look different, or sound different or pray differently

It's a tale of decency, obligation and patriotism that so many of those we remember today understood so clearly and gave their lives to uphold. It’s a tale that those we remember today, those who gave their lives to protect the decency, obligation and patriotism they understood so well would be horrified to see threatened by resurgent antisemitism, racism in all its forms, anti-immigrant scapegoating and the setting of one human against another for the sake of populist adulation.

We forget so quickly. We need to remember these tales

O that my words were written down! - מִי־יִתֵּ֣ן אֵ֭פוֹ וְיִכָּתְב֣וּן מִלָּ֑י

It’s an honour for me, as a Jewish member of this parish, to pay tribute in this church to those for whom Christianity played a vital role in their military service and especially to those for whom their Christianity played a vital role in their accepting the risk of the loss of their life to defend this country and, frankly, the Jewish people of the world, from Nazi genocidal attack. For every ounce of courage to stand in the face of evil drawn from Christian faith, I’m moved and inspired in my own faith. Thank you.

But I’m a rabbi – so I pray for your indulgence if I share a rabbinic articulation of what I think it really means to be proud to be British, what I think it really means to be a patriot, a human who understands their obligation to humanity and a person of decency, even accepting these things comes at a terrible cost, even if it comes at the cost of the loss of life.

In the midst of what we now heartbreakingly call World War I – back then, of course they called it the Great War, because who could conceive humanity would be stupid enough to ever again return to war – King George called for a “special day on intercession on behalf of the nation and empire in this time of war, and for thankful recognition of the devotion  … [of] the manhood and womanhood of the country” for Sunday 2^nd January 1916. The Jews went a day early. And on the Jewish Sabbath, 1^st January 1916, then Chief Rabbi of British Jewry, Joseph Hertz, whose local Synagogue, on Abbey Road, just up the road, is the Synagogue I now have the privilege to serve, gave this address.[3]

We, children of the age of science, cherishing the dream of universal peace, had come to think of the future story of humanity as one of unbroken triumphal progress. Then in one day a cataclysm engulfed civilization.  None could have foretold that civilized mankind would rush to savagery with such dreadful fervour.

Nobly have also the sons of Anglo-Jewry rallied round England in the hour of her need. And our Honour Record will be rendered longer and more luminous now that the large number of our brethren who are naturalized British subjects, or the children of naturalized subjects, have been admitted to the glorious privilege of fighting for their country. Millions have been made to feel what mankind steadily refuses to see in times of peace, that there are certain absolute values for the vindication of which no sacrifice, not even the life of our nearest and dearest, is too great.

With the victory of Great Britain [Rabbi Hertz continued], the heathen ideals - the worship of brute force will be shattered. It will be a chastened humanity that will emerge from the ruins that this War will leave behind it. Let us prayerfully resolve that the new order be a better order, rooted in righteousness, broad-based on the liberty of and reverence for each and every nationality, and culminating in a harmony of peoples.

Amen, may it be so.

It doesn’t always feel that way.

These are stories we still need to tell.

O that my words were written down! - מִי־יִתֵּ֣ן אֵ֭פוֹ וְיִכָּתְ-ב֣וּן מִלָּ֑י

These are the stories we need to tell,

in the desperate hope, in prayer, that someone, anyone, any of us, will listen and change,

in the desperate hope that we, as a society and a humankind will come to realise the true value of life, in all its plurality and difference,

that we, as a society and a humankind will come to realise the fragility of life and the terrible cost of unnecessary death,

that we, as a society and a humankind will come to realise something articulated so beautifully by a nineteenth Century Chasidic Rabbi called Nachman of Braslav,

Words with which I finish.

May all the inhabitants of the earth
recognize and know
this great truth:
that we have not come into this world
for strife and division
nor for hatred and rage, 
nor provocation and bloodshed.

We have come here only
to encounter You,
eternally blessed One.

We ask your compassion upon us;
raise up, by us, what is written:

I shall place peace upon the earth
and you shall lie down safe and undisturbed
and I shall banish evil beasts from the earth
and the sword shall not pass through your land.
but let justice come in waves like water
and righteousness flow like a river,
for the earth shall be full
of the knowledge of the Holy One
as the waters cover the sea.[4]

And let us say,

Amen

 

---

[1] Job 19:23

[2] https://www.quora.com/What-did-your-parent-or-grandparent-tell-you-about-what-it-was-like-to-be-in-World-War-II/answer/Michael-Mark-Ross?ch=10&share=fb71037d&srid=ndWL

[3] Taken from M. Saperstein’s Jewish Preaching in Times of War

[4] https://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/story/rabbi-nachmans-prayer-peace

On the Meaning of Friendship - a sermon on Lech Lecha

Right at the opening of this week’s reading God calls Abraham.

Get the sense that God has been looking for someone to be in a relationship with. Sense that been looking for a while.

God’s tried turning to Adam and Eve, and then Noah, sense that hasn’t worked, quite.

Now with Abraham it feels different, sense that it works.

What is the thing that God is looking for, and finds in the call to Abraham, that didn’t find, or didn’t work previously?

Wonder if God has the same problem many parents in the room might recognise?

God wants human beings to do exactly what God wants entirely through the act of free choice.

Feels familiar to me, as a father. I want my children who will do exactly what I think they should do, without me telling them twenty seven times, bribe them with treats or threatening to withdraw television. If that’s what God is after then I’m feeling delighted to be in such good company.

Or maybe it is a little more complicated than that. Maybe what I am really after isn’t exactly children to do precisely what I think they should be doing. Maybe it’s something more complex and, actually, much more interesting. And maybe, by thinking a little more deeply about what God is looking for in Abraham I can learn more about what this search is really about.

In the mind of the Rabbis long before there were humans on this earth God would hang out with Angels - and the wonderful thing about Angels, if you are God, is that Angels do whatever they are told. And so there’s God, surrounded by Angels who will do whatever God wishes. And it’s not quite enough. God wants more.

Naaseh Adam, says God, Let’s make a human, and - the Rabbis imagine - the Angels throw up their wings in horror. How can you do that, humans will lie, and cheat - what about us, aren’t we perfect enough for you? Apparently not - here we are.

Look at what happens a moment later. The first human is lonely, so God creates an Ezer Knegdo - a help against. That’s the relationship between Adam and Eve, the model for all paradisiacal love - help against. The model isn’t someone who simply does everything we wish - like some sci-fi avatar created only to embody our every wish. That isn’t the model. The model is someone who pushes back.

Or have a look at what goes on in any Yeshivah - any house of Jewish study. Yeshivot are full of Chavruta pairs - pairs of students arguing with and against one another trying to work out what a particular text does or does not mean. Truth comes from the encounter with others, it emerges out of argument. There’s a great story in the Talmud of a great Rabbi, Rabbi Yochanan, whose long-time Chavruta dies and the Rabbis find another person for him to study with. But the new Chavruta only finds ways to agree with the great Rabbi. And Rabbi Yochanan isn’t impressed. He wants a Chavruta with a bit of fight in ’em, someone to bounce ideas around with.

That word Chavruta - it’s as close as it could be to the Hebrew word for friend - Chaver, Chaverah. Friendship, real friendship, emerges from precisely this sort of vigorous exchange. Real friendship isn’t about a person telling you what they think and you just say, ‘Oh yes, you are so right.’ A person who only tells you how wonderful you are isn’t really a friend. They don’t help you grow. They don’t help you understand anything you don’t understand already. In fact maybe that’s the very point of friendship, the very point of a partner - an Ezer Knegdo, maybe that’s the very point of having children - the very point of life itself - to understand things that we don’t already know.

Maybe that’s exactly what God is looking for in Abraham.

It’s not the first time in the Torah that God has called on someone to do something. Just last week we read the story of God calling on Noah. God announces God is going to destroy the world, and calls on Noah to gather the animals and build an ark. And Noah gathers the animals and builds the ark. Sounds fine. But there is a wonderful criticism levelled against Noah by the great Chasidic master, the Kotzker Rebbe. The Kotzke accuses Noah of being a Tzaddik in pelts - a righteous person in a fur coat. There are, the Kotzker taught, two kinds of people who find themselves in a cold room, full of people. One puts on a fur coat - that’s the Tzaddik in pelts - the other lights a fire. Noah’s failure, in last week’s reading, was not lighting a fire for anyone else. He should have challenged the people, urged them to improve their ways. He could have challenged God not to destroy an entire world - imagine the destruction.

Abraham, of course, is the paradigm of the Tzaddik who doesn’t just pull on a fur coat when things get a little cold. We’ll read this story next week. God tells Abraham God is going to destroy Sodom and Gemorrah and Abraham pushes back. ‘Shall not the God of justice act justly?’ I debates, provokes, teases God into relenting. Perhaps he didn’t save the cities, but he tried. A true friend. A Chavruta, a partner - an Ezder Kenegdo. And ultimately the partner God is looking for.

The relationship between God and the descendants of Abraham is still going.

And the attitude is still going strong too.

Just one example, from much later in the Jewish journey. King David. The story in Second Samuel is that David is overseeing the ark of the God on its return to the Jerusalem and the ark slips on the wagon carrying it and is about to fall on the ground. Uzzah jumps forward to stop the ark falling, and God - affronted by someone touching the ark - smites Uzzah and kills him.

וַיִּֽחַר־אַ֚ף יְ-הֹוָה֙ בְּעֻזָּ֔ה וַיַּכֵּ֥הוּ שָׁ֛ם

And God was angry with Uzzah and smote him there

And how does David, the beloved of God, the one God chose to be King respond?

וַיִּ֣חַר לְדָוִ֔ד עַל֩ אֲשֶׁ֨ר פָּרַ֧ץ יְ-הֹוָ֛ה פֶּ֖רֶץ בְּעֻזָּ֑ה 

And David was angry with God’s striking, striking Uzzah!

And David refuses to take the ark back into Jerusalem until God calms down and stops smiting people for trying to help.

That’s Ezer Kenegdo, that Chavruta, that’s the thing God was looking for that God found in Abraham - but missed in Noah.

There’s a wonderful rabbinic teaching where the Rabbis pick up on the fact that God tells Abraham ‘walk before me’ - it’s as if, they say, God has asked Abraham to light the way for God - as if God needs Abraham to light up a path for God to find the way. I know - we don’t usually talk about God in these human terms - but this is the language of the Torah and the greatest of our sages. And it’s true. All of us need other people to light the path for us, to allow us to see things we cannot see, to allow us to experience that which we cannot experience if we surround ourselves with those who simply do precisely what we ask of them. Even God.

And this brings me back to my attempts to get my children to do their homework, or tidy their plates up after dinner, or all the rest of it. At a certain level I just want to be to be obeyed. I want everything I want done by everyone I come across, instantly and all the time. But that’s not really, deeply, the case. Really, deeply, I know I need to be challenged, disagreed with, objected to, criticised and ... and this is the really important piece - improved. And I can only be improved by reaching out to those who oppose me.

Sorry parents among you.

And I whisper this to the teens and the nearly teens, and even the younger kids who are here.

It might sound a lot, as if your parents only want you to do what they tell you to do, precisely as they tell you to do it. But that isn’t really the case.

What I want, what they want, is really someone to push against us. Stand up for what they feel is right, even if it’s different to what I say I want.

We are all looking for Chavruta, we are all looking for an Ezer Kenegdo. We are all looking for an Abraham.

Because as attractive as it sounds to live a life surrounded by everyone doing exactly what we want, instantly. It’s not what we need. It’s not even really what we will - quietly - admit that we need.

Shabbat Shalom

 

Walter Benjamin and the Unicorn

 If this sermon had a title – and I have a fondness for the thing you sometimes see outside Churches where the title of the sermon is posted for all to see – if this sermon had a title, the title would be ‘Walter Benjamin and the Unicorn’

The Walter Benjamin piece is inspired by a pilgrimage my wife and I made to Benjamin’s last resting place in Portbou, right on the Spanish side of the border with France.

And the Unicorn … well … one should never really need an excuse for talking about unicorns. In the Talmud, Tractate Zevachim folio 113b, the Rabbis discuss the Reima – a mythic beast of incredible size.

Rabba Bar Hanna said, I have seen a day-old-Reima and it was as large as Mount Tabor. How large is Mount Tabor, the Rabbis ask, 40 parasangs – that would be 120 miles to you or me. And its neck was three parasangs long, and its head a parasang long and – would you forgive me for being a little scatological? But this is a direct quotation from the Talmud, which isn’t as dry as you might think - רְמָא כַּבָּא וּסְכַר יַרְדְּנָא – it sprayed out feces and dammed the river Jordan.

I’m sure you are all wondering about the same thing the Rabbis, wondered about as cited on page 113b of Talmud Zevachim – how did Noah get a beast of that size into the ark.

There follows a discussion about whether you could get the whole head of the Reima into the ark, or just the tip of its nose and eventually the Rabbis settle on the notion that the Reima and a massive Giant, named Og, who the Rabbis assume was alive before the Flood and is finally defeated in battle by Moses, survived the flood tied to the Ark and were fed through a window by Noah.

Elsewhere in the Talmud (TY Shabbat 2:3) [1] there is discussion of a special pure animal, hidden since the days of the construction of the desert tabernacle – a Keresh.  And Rabbi Hoshaya taught that this animal had a singular horn.

And that was enough for the great Jewish fable-ist, Gertrude Landa, to create a tale, published in 1919 book Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends

 

 

that included this.

 Then the various creatures began to march forward into the Ark. Father Noah watched them closely. He seemed troubled. “I wonder,” he said to himself, “how I shall obtain a unicorn, and how I shall get it into the Ark.”

“I can bring thee a unicorn, Father Noah,” he heard in a voice of thunder, and turning round he saw the giant, Og. “But thou must agree to save me, too, from the flood.”

“Begone,” cried Noah. “Thou art a demon, not a human being. I can have no dealings with thee.” “Pity me,” whined the giant. “Once I was so tall that I could drink water from the clouds and toast fish at the sun. I fear not that I shall be drowned, but that all the food will be destroyed and that I shall perish of hunger.”

Noah, however, only smiled; but he grew serious again when Og brought a unicorn. It was as big as a mountain, although the giant said it was the smallest he could find. It lay down in front of the Ark and Noah saw by that action that he must save it.

For some time he was puzzled what to do, but at last a bright idea struck him. He attached the huge beast to the Ark by a rope fastened to its horn so that it could swim alongside and be fed.[2]

And here, I suppose, we should leave our unicorn and turn to Walter Benjamin.

Benjamin, 1892-1940, was one of the great Jewish minds of the last century, a close friend of Hannah Arendt, a close friend of Gershon Scholem. He’s best known for his extraordinary critique of the impact of modernity – by which he means the ability to mass produce stuff.

He’s thinking of factories and chainstores and especially art. He was deeply interested in the transformative technology of his age – the camera. The fact that art stopped being something that only a select few people could ever see, but that art could be photographed and everyone could then get to see the photo. He started to think about the difference between the thing itself and the mass reproduced version of the thing – the photo in what he called ‘the age of mechanical reproduction.’

He comes up with this word, aura.

The aura of a thing is the real quality of a thing. It’s the very painting itself. To stand infront of a painting is to appreciate the aura of a painting. A photo of a painting has less aura. There are good things, particularly if you are a Marxist – and Binyamin was a Marxist, about being able to take photographs and goodness knows what he would have thought of the digital cameras in our phones and the ability to upload to Instagram and everything else. But there is a loss of aura. Something about works of art gets lost in the ‘age of mechanical reproduction.’

Benjamin was living and working in Paris when the Nazis invaded but he managed to get a Visa to the States, and he fled south, to Spain – officially neutral in the Second World War. But at his first stopping point south of the French border, in Portbou – and it’s hard to imagine the trauma of what must have felt like, he was told his paperwork was wrong. The rules had changed and he was therefore to be deported back into the hands of the Gestapo. And for Benjamin it was too much and he took his own life rather than be deported into the hands of the Nazis.

His great friend Hannah Arendt wrote to his other great friend, Gershon Scholem,

“The report of his death took nearly four weeks to reach his sister and us. Jews are dying in Europe and are being buried like dogs.”

Benjamin has no grave, no gravestone his body was dumped, like a dog. It’s somewhere on the top of a promontory overlooking a beautiful bay and there it lay until 1994. Thirty years ago a memorial to Benjamin, by the Israeli artist Danny Karavan, was opened and last week Josephine and I went to see it.

Here’s a photo.

 

Here’s another.

Doesn’t look like much, does it. Got no aura – these photos. Let me try and explain.

The reality, the unique, unrepeatable, exquisite reality of going inside the memorial, taking time to climb down a flight of clanking metal stairs inside a dark and slightly rusting iron corridor-like tunnel, overlooking a stunning bay in which life teems and promises and looks so beguiling is extraordinary. It made me want to cry for the sheer waste of a remarkable life – Benjamin’s life, and every life brutally brought short then, and since.

The memorial to Walter Benjamin, unmistakably, brilliantly and clearly completely deliberately has aura.

And there is nothing quite like aura. No photo, no blog post, no social media viral meme can ever match the aura of the thing itself in all its reality.

And that’s why I like this. That’s why I think this is important.

What do I mean by this – this Jewish thing, this Shabbat thing, this Synagogue thing, this Bat Mitzvah thing. This thing of family members and friends and a community of fellow Jewish travelers coming together to experience the reality, the unique, unrepeatable, exquisite reality of a young girl preparing to read from the Torah, to read from a vellum scroll written in ink made from a recipe 1,500 years old, reading a tale that is thousands of years older still and in the process she becomes almost magically a woman, an adult member of the community right infront of our very eyes. This thing has aura.

No Facebook post can match that.

No Bat Mitzvah present of the latest mass produced I-don’t’-know-what matches the very reality of what, Edie, you did here, on this Bimah. Nothing ever will.

This is the thing itself. This is aura.

That’s what Shabbat is really all about – aura. The thing we only get to experience when we switch off the phones with their extraordinary lenses and apps. Shabbat is the very essence of turning round to Benjamin’s Age of Mechanical Reproduction – which is indeed amazing, and I’m not even a Marxist – and saying, thank you, and I’ll be back tomorrow, for now I want to concentrate on the reality, the unique, unrepeatable, exquisite reality of the aura of the work of art which is my life.

כִּי־שֵׁ֣שֶׁת יָמִ֗ים עָשָׂ֤ה יְ-הוָה֙ אֶת־הַשָּׁמַ֣יִם וְאֶת־הָאָ֔רֶץ וּבַיּוֹם֙ הַשְּׁבִיעִ֔י שָׁבַ֖ת וַיִּנָּפַֽשׁ׃

For across six days did God create the heavens and earth and on the Seventh Day, God rested – Shavat - and was re-ensouled - Vayinafash.

And for any of us who ever feel a bit lacking in that feeling of being rested and re-ensouled. I recommend turning off the age of mechanical reproduction, of digital reproduction for a day, even part of a day, and encountering instead the the unique, unrepeatable, exquisite reality of Shabbat, or, really anything that has aura.

I recommend coming to Shul.

I recommend being in a community where every week someone is celebrating or mourning, or hoping or fearing or some combination of all three that can never be explained or recorded, but can only be experienced.

I recommend going to see real art – like Danny Karavan’s sculptures.

I recommend going for real walks in real parks with real trees.

I feel like we need to make much more of the desperate value of aura, we need to be so much clearer about the dangers of thinking that value can be reproduced, reprinted, reposted.

Which brings me back to my friend the Keresh, or the Reima or the Unicorn. It’s gone, I’m sorry to say, the reality behind these glorious mythic tales of pooing beasts the size of mountains with single horns so strong they could be tethered to an ark in a flood that destroyed the world.

And all the memes and cute sparkly prints just don’t cut it.

And it’s not the unicorn. It’s the dodo and the wooly mammoth and the megalodon and the sabre-toothed cat.

And it’s not just the animals, it’s Walter Benjamin and all 6 million of them, and my grandparents of blessed memory and every life lost and remembered.

We have, in this fragile, unique, unrepeatable and exquisite reality that is our life, we have the opportunity to do real unique, unrepeatable, exquisite things. And if we don’t do them well, if we don’t do them carefully, those moments will be lost.

Organising our lives around mechanical or digital reproductions won’t cut it. Life cannot be lived well in reproduction. We’ll lose the very that is most special about being alive. My mind goes to a remarkable Midrash in Kohelet Raba.

When the Holy One blessed be He created Adam the first man, He took him and showed him all the trees in the Garden of Eden, and He said to him: ‘See My creations, how beautiful and exemplary they are. Everything I created, I created for you. Make certain that you do not ruin and destroy My world, as if you destroy it, there will be no one to mend it after you.[3]

Choose life

Experience aura whenever you can

Shabbat Shalom

---

[1] כֵּיוָן שֶׁעָשָׂה בָהּ מְלֶאכֶת הַמִּשְׁכָּן נִגְנְזָה. רִבִּי אָבוּן אָמַר. קֶרֶשׁ הָיָה שְׁמָהּ. תַּנֵּי רִבִּי הוֹשַׁעְיָה. דְּחָדָא קֶרֶן. וְתִיטַב לָיי מִשּׁוֹר פָּר מַקְרִין וּמַפְרִיס. מִקֶּרֶן כָתַב רַחֲמָנָא.

 

[2] https://dianabuja.wordpress.com/2015/04/04/the-unicorn-and-the-ark-a-talmudic-story/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Talmud%2C%20the,and%20growing%20a%20single%20horn.

[3] 7:13

On Language - Its Uses and Abuses - Kol Nidrei

For the sin which we have committed before You with an utterance of the lips.

And for the sin which we have committed before You by impurity of speech.

For the sin which we have committed before You by foolish talk.

And for the sin which we have committed before You by scoffing.

For the sin which we have committed before You by speaking evil of another human being. 

And for the sin which we have committed before You by causeless hatred.

Val Kulam Elohai Slichot, Slach Lanu, Mochel Lanu, Kaper Lanu,

 

There is some ferocious language in the Torah reading from a couple of weeks ago – Parashat Ki Tavo

That is to say, there’s a little bit of lovely language – if you do good and follow God’s commands God will bless the fruit of your womb, the fruit of your soil and your basket and kneading bowl will be blessed and enemies will flee before you – which sounds nice.

 

But if you do not hearken to the voice of God, the Torah goes on to say; damned be your basket and kneading bowl, dammed be the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your soil. God will strike you with consumption, with fever, with dehydration, with blight, with jaundice. These things will pursue you until you are destroyed.

Which is less nice.

And in one of the most – no – the most brutal verse, I think, in the entire Torah, the famine that will sweep the nation, it is claimed, will be so severe that, even the tenderest among you will resort to the cannibalism of their own children.

Language, in Judaism, counts.

Language has what, in Hebrew, is called Mashmaut a concrete reality. Language has power.

So much so, that the very Hebrew word for a thing, an object, Davar, is the very same as the Hebrew word for a word, Davar.

So much so, that the mechanism of creation, in Judaism, is speech – And God said, “Let there be light, and there was light.”

 

There’s a remarkable coda to the awful verse in the Torah reading from a couple of weeks ago, buried in Josephus’ The Jewish War.

Josephus, once a Jewish General protecting the Jews from the Romans, wrote a thousand years after this verse in Deuteronomy comes to be. He writes about the Roman siege of the Temple in Jerusalem and he describes a famine so severe that the kneading bowls and the baskets are indeed damned, and even that there is a parent so desperate in their hunger, that they commit this unimaginable cannibalism of their own child, just as the Book of Deuteronomy prophesied.

In so many ways, there’s nothing that could possibly be said about something so awful, but, the thing I feel, reading Deuteronomy and Josephus and God help me, the news and everything else, is that the Russian play write, Anton Checkov’s, most famous rule is somehow at play.

"If in the first act [wrote Checkov] you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise, don't put it there."

Somehow it feels that the action of invoking in strident speech a loaded gun, even if it were only meant as to terrify, or persuade, or keep us far from mistake, it feels like that action has somehow presaged that gun going off.

Language has Mashmaut.

I wanted to talk about this since before the murder of Charlie Kirk on 10^th September, or the Unite the Kingdom rally in Central London on 13^th September. I’ve wanted to talk about this since before October 7^th as well as almost every day since. This stuff has been causing pain and fear for too long.

I wanted to talk about this in the context of my own in-tray, the sort of emails that come in, not so frequently, but too frequently, that cross a line between seeking to disagree with what I have to say – always welcome – and into a world of strident discourse that is designed not to engage, but instead disparage with a level of hatred and aggression that veers away from a disagreement and into the personal.

Here's a quick tour of the greatest hits of my own in-tray.

There was the time I thought an unknown number calling my phone might be a pastoral matter – I tend not to answer phone calls from numbers I don’t recognise. So, I answered, only to hear someone scream their accusations that I was responsible for the genocide of Palestinian babies.

Or the time, I wrote something about something – I can’t even remember, I don’t think it was particularly pointed at all – and someone, a Jew!, responded that they hoped I felt guilt for the responsibility for the murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim at the Jewish Museum in Washington. To be clear, Lischinsky and Milgrim were murdered with no justification and certainly not by me.

Or the time when I dropped a politically engaged member a note ensuring they knew that our local MP was coming to speak at New London in the run up to Rosh Hashanah.

And the member wrote back this way,

Thank you for mentioning the event with Rachel Blake MP next week. I must admit that my utter hatred of this horrific Labour government runs so deep within me that I have no interest in anything that a politician willing to hold the Labour whip has to offer.

It was the phrase, “utter hatred” that caught my attention. It made me think of the connection between Chekhov’s law about pistols on the wall and the language in Deuteronomy and Josephus and then Charlie Kirk and, I don’t know who even remembers Jo Cox at this point. It reminded me of Jo Cox of blessed memory. And Yitzhak Rabin of blessed memory – Oh, I really hope we haven’t forgotten about Yitzhak Rabin.

It has to stop.

All of it, from the left, from the right, from the so-called lovers of Israel and the so-called lovers of Palestine, from the supporters of Labour and the supporters of Reform and everyone.

It has to stop.

We have to stop using and valorising the sort of strident language that isolates, intimidates and belittles the very humanity of people who take views other than our own.

Even if the positions other people take seem to us obviously wrong, so obviously cruel and unjustifiable that it seems to us so obviously justifiable to use the most strident language we can, it has to stop.

Even if we find ourselves in a society where those who express themselves carefully are accused of being dull or uncharismatic, and those who use language to whip up emotions draw our attention, it has to stop.

We have to take back control of the language we use and the language we permit to exist before us as if language has Mashmaut – physical corporeal power – for indeed language has Mashmaut.

We need to start treating language as if, every time we use strident language, we hang something on the wall in Act One of a Chekhov play.

Here are the three problems with this sort of strident language.

The first is that the language we use has a life of its own once it leaves our lips. There’s a cute story about the Rabbi who wished to teach some poor kid who spoke ill about some other poor kid about the Jewish principle of Lashon HaRa, evil language. The Rabbi told the kid to find three down pillows, bring them to the top of a mountain and pound the pillows until the feathers flew away in the wind. The kid does as asked, looks at the Rabbi as if to say – “Is that it?” and the Rabbi tells the kid to go and find every feather and bring them back and return them to their pillowcases.

Language has a life of its own once it leaves our lips. It might be that my ideal audience can cope with my strident language. It might be that 99.9% of my audience are going to hear my strident language and realise that I mean no physical harm towards those I critique. It might be that only a person affected by mental illness or trauma could possibly understand my strident use of language as justifying physical harm. But that 99.9% is not enough. Not even close to being enough.

 

The second and third reasons to avoid strident language when speaking about those with whom we disagree are connected. They are that we are likely to be both wrong and make things worse, rather than better. I think it’s helpful to think about this in the context of Teshuvah. When it comes to my own failings and errors, I tend to think of myself as basically a decent and reasonable person whose errors, even the bad ones, are slips that deserve to be forgiven. But when I think of the failings and errors of those I disagree with, I tend to think of them as entirely corrupted by their failings. But the truth is that these other people think of themselves as reasonable people, too. I’ve met many, many people in my life who think of themselves as reasonable if occasionally errant – even if I think they are acting most unreasonably. I might even be one of them. I don’t know if I’ve ever met a true sociopath.  It’s both fair and sensible to treat those with whom we disagree as we would wish to be treated ourselves. No-one’s going to change when backed into a corner and belittled.

I’m not recommending we start hugging terrorists. I’m not recommending naivete, but if we want a society that is more cohesive, more kind, more generous of spirit, we have to stop the strident use of language to attack those with whom we have disagreements. We have to stop hanging pistols on the wall. We have to speak about, even the people who hurt us and who we disagree with, as if they are complex human beings with their own self-perceptions of reasonableness. It’s not going to help to keep pushing ‘them’ away from ‘us.’

 

I’m talking about a fundamental commitment not only to change the way we talk ourselves, but also in the way we treat the speech of others.

There’s an idea that goes around that the people who ‘speak well’ are the people who are capable of wrecking a sort of scorched earth demolition of their opponents. These are the clips that wander around our social media algorithms and inside our minds. These are the sorts of spokespeople we just wish we could have more of, on our own side, of course. And they speak so forcibly, how could they possibly not result in our case being considered absolutely correct? That doesn’t happen, of course. Those who disagree with us continue to disagree with us and often even more vociferously and painfully. We are going to have to relearn an approach to language that is careful, gentle and makes space for disagreement. We’re going to have to learn how to listen, to explore and test out our arguments in discussion.

Language is the greatest gift we possess as human beings. It’s the greatest responsibility. It’s capable of causing the greatest amount of damage.

It’s also the best tool we have if we want to mend, to bring compassion, to offer hope.

Here’s a resolution for us all – as we go through this day, and as we run through that list of speech-related sins we thump our chest to be freed from - use language as if it had Mashmaut – for indeed, it does.

And may this year come to us all in peace,

Chatimah Tovah

The Presence of Absence and the Absence of Presence - Yizkor 5786

I want to talk about a Kabbalistic term – Reshimu. It means impression or trace. The term is used in Lurianic Kabbalah to refer to the presence of God even after the Infinite presence of the Divine retreated from the world right at the very start of creation.

Creation begins, in the Lurianic imagination, with God retreating away, while leaving behind a Reshimu that can still, sometimes, be felt.

 

Over the summer, my family and I took a tour of the Mellach – the old Jewish quarter of Tetuán in Morocco. Jews used to make up a substantial part of the city. And while our delightful guide Mohammed assured us that, “in Morocco the Jew, the Muslim and the Spanish live together as brothers and sisters,” something was disquieting
about being advised to peer through the wire grills over the windows of the only Synagogue still standing, of the once 16 Synagogues in the Mellach, standing, that is, as a museum, not a centre for Jewish life. Not that we could go inside, the museum was closed for the summer.

There’s a beautiful blue ceramic tiled water fountain in the Mellach, inscribed with that verse from Isaiah, וּשְׁאַבְתֶּם-מַיִם בְּשָׂשׂוֹן, - and you shall carry water in joy. It’s beautiful, but no longer working and certainly no longer slaking the thirsts of Jews no longer living in the area.

And there is the Horno El-Mellah – the oven of the Jewish quarter – the place where the Jews of Tetuán would once take their Hamin –pots of stew – on a Friday afternoon to cook over Shabbat and be ready for lunch. There’s a heritage sign, explaining the oven's date of construction, but … no pots of Hamin.

The Jewish life we felt, and you could definitely feel something, was an impression – a Reishimu; a presence defined by its absence. It could be felt in the pit of the stomach, like an ache that was somehow familiar and in its pain somehow simultaneously comforting.

The thing that I was really looking out for, as we wandered down the streets of the Mellach, along streets named Rue Haifa or Avraham Ben Tata – were signs of Jewish life on doorposts. There are a few left, not actual Mezuzot, but hollows carved into doorframes – just above shoulder height – just at kissing height – where the Jewish inhabitants of Tetuán carved out a space in which to secrete the scrolls of the Shema, Uchtavtem al Mezuzot Beitecha. Apparently, that was the way you fixed Mezuzot in Tetuan in the early to mid-20th century – you carved out a space in which you placed the thing you cared about. And fifty/sixty years later, though the Jews are all gone, the empty space is still, sometimes, present.

I’ve seen these absent spaces on doorposts before, wandering through the Shetls and Ghettos haunted by once-Jewish communities in former Nazi Europe. There’s even a project – MiPolin’s Mezuzah From This Home, where Judaica artists Helena Czernek and Aleksander Prugar travel to the great centres of Jewish life, pre-Shoah, making plaster casts of the hollowed out once-places of Mezuzot on the doorposts of Lublin, Krakow and the like and making new Mezuzot from these casts of absence. The group of New Londoners who travelled with Angela Gluck to Poland this year bought one. Stood in the shop, Angela, I’m reliably informed, taught about the absence of presence and the presence of absence. Of course she did. Jewish life casting its own Reshimu.

That word – Reshimu – is based on an unusual Biblical root. It appears only once in the Bible, in the Book of Daniel, where an angel uses it to explain something inscribed - הָרָשׁוּם בִּכְתָב אֱמֶת –inscribed in a writing of truth. The commentaries suggest that Roshem is more powerful than the normal kind of writing – Katav; closer to the Hebrew word Chokek –literally to carve. You have to think like an ancient; to really intend to leave a record, in ancient times, you would carve away.[1]

For the Kabbalists, all presence, all creation is built from absence, lined with a Reshimu – an absence in which there can still be felt to be a presence.

 

I had a similar thought, about the absence of presence and presence of absence, around the bereavement that hit me personally the hardest this last year – the loss of our former Chazan of blessed memory, Stephen Cotsen. Stephen was a friend, a mentor, a partner and our Chazan and his passing in Nissan left me missing him and, even with the beauty of the Slichut we’ve been so blessed to have from Yoav and David last night, I still feel both his presence and his absence, especially today. I feel a kind of friendship still alive.  But there’s also a raw absence, a stomach pain that occasionally manifests as tears – another kind of Reshimu.

 

At Chazan Stephen’s funeral, we, as a community formed an escort – literally a Levaya - for him. As scores of his Bar Mitzvah students and wedding couples and congregants from Mill Hill or Cardiff or Brixton or Hackney emerged alongside friends old and new, I had this sharp sense that his life –  too short as it was – was Nirsham inscribed in the negative space delineated by all our presence, Nirsham as an absence held by our presence.

A bit like that image of Rubin’s vase – that sometimes looks like two human faces facing one another and sometimes looks like a vase. Edgar Rubin – the Danish psychologist behind that image was Jewish, by the way.

I’m not sure which, in this analogy, for a life that is past, but still present, is the vase and which are the faces, but at the funeral and the Shuva and since, there have been those of us standing round and remembering and talking about a life that has passed, and embodying in our own lives a shift because we knew Stephen and loved Stephen and were touched by Stephen and in that paradoxical moment, he – like so many of those we stand today and remember – is present in his absence.

That’s why we come here for Yizkor – לרשׁם בִּכְתָב אֱמֶת to inscribe again this negative space into our continued lives, to feel absent presence and to trace back the way in which we are changed – made better - by the lives we remember.

Up here today, on the day Chazan Stephen loved more than any other in our calendar. I feel Stephen’s expectation that I pay the closest attention to the page numbers and the congregational responses

wanting me to keep the sermon just a little shorter

wanting me do everything I can to ensure that all of us here today know that this Mesorah, this tradition of prayer, this way of standing before our Creator is powerful and our greatest gift and we do well to tend it carefully.

What are the urges each of our loved ones push up against us, in each of their absent presences?

I know we all feel similar versions of this Reshimu from the death-transcending lives we gather today to recall. Here is the model, the Yizkor services hold up. Now, what are we to do with the breath still granted us?

What was once present can be absent, but what is definitely absent can also be so very present as a feeling and as a challenge.

My point is that what is no longer physically present isn’t really absent, or at least isn’t just absent. Of course, it hurts to, no longer, have someone to hold, or someone to hold us. But the pain isn’t just bad. It’s the cost of love, it’s the Reshimu of having once been intertwined. Our wonderful member Louis is thankfully out of hospital. Louis – this one’s for you – like entangled electrons – we continue to experience presence in absence.

There are places to go to experience the souls of those who have left us on the other side of the curtain that separates the living and dead – you can go to a cemetery, or a Shtetl or to a Mellah, or to a favoured park bench. And there are times when the opacity of the harsh division between the living and the dead becomes translucent.

I don’t really know what happens at the end of time, or when we die. I don’t think any Jew would claim to. We just don’t go big on structuring exactly how which of us gets to be in which circle of heaven – or frankly hell. But I do believe in this;

There’s a time to strive forward in our own right and live with the future before us for as long as we are able. And there’s a time to reflect on the gnawing pains – the Reshimu in our gut – and feel the presence of the absence of those we have loved who now rest behind a veil, sometimes more and sometimes less translucent. For those of us fortunate to have ever been loved by someone now passed, that will be painful. But if we stop our running around and honour the call to come together in places like this, at times like this, we can, if we are lucky, still be blessed by a feeling of presence in that which is absence. And in that moment, our lives become greater than merely the length of our days on this planet.

May we all be so blessed.

May the memories of those we have loved and lost be always for a blessing.

---

[1] There’s a similar idea in the opening of the Zohar, where creation begins with God carving out a carving in the light of the heavens – the Aramaic is גָּלִיף גְּלוּפֵי – sharing an etymology with the English word ‘glyph’ as in ‘hieroglyph’.