The Cardinal Bea Memorial Lecture 2011 - Heschel, Soloveitchik, Bayfield and the Point of Jewish - Christian Interfaith Dialogue

I was invited to give this lecture by the remarkable Sisters of Sion, way back in 2011. But with the 60th Anniversary of Nostra Aetate in the news, I'm realising I never posted it before so ... here you go.

 The Cardinal Bea Memorial Lecture 2011

 

Lord Harries, Baroness Richardson,

Friends,

Particularly the Sisters of Sion,

I am most grateful for the honour of this invitation to address you.

To know of some of your extraordinary work and the sense of openness and generosity of spirit that inspires your calling is humbling and inspirational.

Already, simply to be here, as a Rabbi, as a representative of a faith once treated as a fossil, at best, or cursed, at worst, is, in the context of the 2000+ year history of our respective faiths remarkable.

And that, unless I have desperately miscalculated, I feel under no threat of being lynched or attacked isn’t something that even now, even here, I take for granted.

I accept this invitation as an invitation to be honest, to share of my own struggles and those of my faith community – I’m not here to score points, interfaith dialogue is no longer a zero-sum game where a Jew’s success means a Christian’s failure or vice versa. We have come so far it’s almost beyond belief.

 

Indeed, it seems that much of this credit for this extra-ordinary shift in the relationships between Church, the Catholic Church in particular, and the Synagogue belongs to the man whose memory we honour tonight, Cardinal Bea.

I’m not particularly a scholar of the time, nor would consider myself an expert in Jewish-Catholic or Jewish-Christian dialogue (I will I hope justify my place here on a different basis), but I’ve been deeply touched by real warmth that seems to have existed between the Cardinal and my most important teacher, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Heschel was the leading Jewish theologian in discussions with the Vatican in the lead up to Vatican II and Edward Kaplan, Heschel’s biographer, records how Heschel spoke highly of Bea’s critical edition of Song of Songs – Bea, of course, being fluent in Hebrew and Aramaic among other languages.

Heschel could castigate, embarrass religious leaders. In a famous speech to the American Rabbinical Assembly Heschel castigated and embarrassed Rabbis who led services devoid of spirit and guts. And in a famous speech at a 1960s conference on Race and Religion he castigated and embarrassed faith leaders of all stripes for their failure to speak out against slavery in America. But he loved, admired and respected Cardinal Bea for he saw in the Cardinal both commitment to his own faith and also a commitment to recognise the faith of others.

 

Secondly, I’ve been aware of the place in which the Cardinal stood – in the eye of the storm around Vatican II.

The American Jewish Committee made representations to the Cardinal in the run up to Vatican II. They submitted a dossier, and I quote the dossier’s author, identifying and illustrating, ‘slanderous interpretations, oversimplifications, sweeping statements, unjust or inaccurate comparisons, invidious use of language, and significant omissions in American Catholic textbooks’ of the late 1950s and early 1960s. That can’t have been easy reading. It takes a capacious soul to make their way through material like that and respond with breadth of spirit and warmth.

 

And on another side, there were tremendous pressures from within the Church, for there were many in the Church who felt that accusations of deicide were entirely correct and a perpetuation of expiatory contempt for Jews was the only correct theological response to me and members of my faith.

 

The Cardinal also had to stand firm in the face of more than just a whiff of paranoiac anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.

 

The second session of Vatican II saw the wide distribution of a document called “The Jews and the Council in the Light of Holy Scripture and Tradition.” This pseudo-anonymous piece of antisemitism insisted that efforts to alter the Church’s traditional view of Jews were the result of a conspiracy in the council by Jews and Freemasons working on behalf of Communism. These paranoiac Catholic flames were flamed by Arab leaders and clerics, both Copt and Muslim, who pushed and pulled as their own interests dictated.

 

The notion that Cardinal Bea was able to stand as firm as he did in the face of such great challenge is already a tremendous achievement.

 

Nostra Aetate transformed the relationship of the Church and the Jewish people from one of enmity and fear into one of shared commitment; shared commitments to monotheism, the pursuit of peace, justice, to recognise that every human is created in the image of the divine and most important of all a commitment to oppose genocide and speak out against hatred dressed up in the sheepskin clothes of religious terminology.

 

And while the theologians and political bigwigs negotiate over commas and precise turns of phrase, I know all too personally how relationships between Jews and Catholics have been transformed by Nostra Aetate

 

I was born six years after Vatican II. My Jewish parents made the decision to send me to a Catholic School, St Anthony’s in Hampstead, where I received an incredible education inspired by the very best sentiments of open-hearted Catholic commitments to the value of enquiry and human compassion, shared with me, as a Jew; commitments given what we in Jewish circles would call a gashbanka – a seal of approval – by the language of Nostra Aetate. Indeed I know this is an evening in honour of one great servant of the Church, Cardinal Bea, but I hope the good Cardinal, looking down on us all today, would not object if I wish also to honour, in what I share today the memory of another Catholic hero, my headmaster of that time, Tim Patton.

 

I’m honoured and touched that Tim’s successor as headmaster of St Anthony’s School, Paul Keyte is able to be here today. I’m delighted the school continues to foster the very best open-hearted approach to the education of generations to come.

 

I mentioned earlier that I don’t deserve to be here as a historian, for I am not really a historian. I’m a practioner. I practice as a Jew, I practice inter-faith dialogue. I aspire to no level of expertise higher than that of being a practioner.

 

So I want share with you the questions at the heart of my contemporary practicing of interfaith encounter.

 

How much of one’s own faith does one have to give up on to fully acknowledge the faith of another?

Is it possible to believe that the other has erred without that being necessarily disrespectful?

Is it possible to be wholly committed to one’s own faith while still being a pluralist – can you have humility as well as belief?

And if I am not looking to give up on or even alter my own faith, as a result of interfaith dialogue, what is the point of interfaith dialogue?

 

Two end points in my own personal dialectic

Joseph Soloveitchik, known as The Rav, was the leader of American Orthodoxy in the 1960s. And he was not interested in Vatican II at all.

The Rav gave an important address to the massed ranks of American Orthodox Rabbis entitled ‘Confrontation,’ in which he turned his back on anything that could be considered pluralist – especially in relationship to the Church.

 

Jews and Christians should not seek, Soloveitchik demanded, ‘common denominators’ because to do so risks, he argued, frittering away the unique destiny of both faiths engaged in a singular normative gesture.’

Soloveitchik wouldn’t express any care for what the church may or may not say about Jews. He simply insisted that Jews reject any suggestion that our covenant has been superseded. He disdained any attempt to find mutually acceptable forms of language that iron out this central difference. He rejected apologetics, revisionism or other sweet words.

 

Soloveitchik also demanded mutual non–interference. Jews should not, he insisted, ask for adjustment to Christian rituals – no alteration in the liturgical readings during Holy week for example - and the same would apply to any supposed Christian discomfort with Jewish liturgy or ritual.

 

Our goal, said Soloveitchki, is to pursue our path – the path of Halakhah, the Hebrew Bible as understood by the Rabbis, and if the cost of having any other religion or national grouping saying anything nice about us is giving up on one iota of our commitment to that path, that cost is too great to pay.

 

Soloveitchik only spoke of his concern to put an end to attempts to find middle ground in matters theological, but his impact went beyond this. It’s hard to find Orthodox rabbis, certainly mainstream orthodox Rabbis willing to do very much with members of other faiths, certainly in public, certainly away from the photo-opportunities that seem to boost the ego of participants more than fix the problems of a broken world.

 

On my other side is the recently retired leader of British Reform Judaism, Tony Bayfield who wrote of the importance of transcending the stilted and lonely interactions between Jew and Christian which results in Christians praising for Jews for our family life and chicken soup but holding back on articulating the conviction 'it's a pity you are missing out on the greatest truth of all.' While Jews grudgingly praise Christians for their 'cathedrals and self-sacrificing love' while holding back on sharing a belief that Christianity is all based on a mistake. Bayfield believes that both Christians and Jews have to moderate our respective truth claims and give up on hubristic faith claims that claim our beliefs are right while others are wrong. Bayfield claims that we will only be able to enter into genuine and respectful dialogue if we can moderate our truth claims.

 

I consider both positions half-right, though I’m closer to Soloveitchik. Like Soloveitchik I have no problem with Christians thinking I have it all wrong. As long as they don't mind my thinking that they are mistaken. I’m not prepared to sacrifice the creeds of my own faith, the parts of my own self – to become more attractive in the eyes of a sister faith whose creeds, ultimately, are not my own.

 

We live in a society where we are tempted to embrace syncretism, but syncretism is not attractive to me.

Too often it results in a sort of cherry picking of  superficially attractive elements stripped of their deeper calls on our souls and integrity.

 

But I don't accept Soloveitchik's claim that interaction and engagement risks jeopardising our own unique path. My experience of serious Christian-Jewish dialogue has been one that has sharpened my own sense of my own faith, it's forced me to find language to justify my beliefs and practice when faced by an 'other' who understands God and the quest for holiness and decency in ways close to, but ultimately other than, my own.

 

Like Bayfield I accept that much Christian/Jewish dialogue is bland, politeness transcending honesty, but I don't accept respectful dialogue demands transcending my own faith claims. Nor, frankly, do I worry about a surfeit of politesse in Jewish Christian encounters - it's only been a blink of an eye since the stakes - when Jew and Christian encountered one another - were far more deadly than being gently bored. A few centuries of gentle boredom between Jews and Christians would be no bad thing.

 

Moreover, and it’s probably my most significant point of – I hope respectful  - difference with Rabbi Bayfield, I don't accept that my Jewish belief that Jesus is not, as a religious fact, a singular son of God, is necessarily to show a lack of respect to the Church. Similarly, I would not expect a Christian to show respect for my own faith by abnegating their sense in my cardinal religious error.

 

I don’t believe that respect is predicated on the need to accept the view of the other. Rather, the reverse; a relationship predicated on the primary need to agree with one another demands politesse triumphs over honesty and that is where I consider a lack of respect. It’s a relationship where the end points of agreement are going to be determined by the fall of a lot – whose turn is it to be right this week – yesterday we ate Italian, tonight let’s do Chinese, yesterday we did Jesus, tonight let’s do Torah

 

Or, alternatively, an overriding commitment to come to agreement simply reflects the relative hierarchical standings of the debaters – I’m stronger than you so you agree with me, or vice versa.

 

Respect means agreeing to suffer the other views of the other person even if they cause one discomfort. That is certainly a Jewish position.

Debate and disagreement, the process of sharpening alternate views is integral to the Jewish faith –

Makhloket – even have the phrase, Mahloket l’shem shamayim – disagreement  for the sake of heaven - is at the centre of the Rabbinic endeavour. We understand ourselves in dispute.

 

One Rabbinic tale to illustrate.

Set in the time of the Apostles

When Reish Lakish, one half of the greatest Rabbinic double act of its time passes away, he leaves Rabbi Yohanan bereft. The Rabbis bring another Rabbi to the table who agrees with everything Rabbi Yohanan says, but this only increases the survivor's sense of despair at the death of his partner.

 

Clarity, refinement, honesty and integrity are forged in the pit of rigorous, principled, engagement.

Not dependent on agreement.

 

Judaism loves difference. The first Rabbinic text, traditionally taught to young children features two people arguing over who should own a found piece of cloth. ‘I found it and it’s all mine,’ they both claim. Talmudic study is principally the attempt to find ways for contradictory opinions to stand even in their opposition. For three years, the Talmud records, the Houses of two of the great Rabbis of the Ancient period, Hillel and Shammai disputed, eventually a Divine Voice is heard to proclaim ‘[both opinions] are the words of the living God.’ Perhaps tellingly, the substance of the disagreement is long forgotten. The point, surely, is that God’s perspective is so qualitatively beyond that of humans that points of difference visible from a human perspective melt away when viewed from the level of the cosmos itself. To claim that my finite human perspective is capable of understanding all the truth there is an act of appalling hubris.

 

In 2000 over 220 Jewish scholars published ‘Dabru Emet’ a  document on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. It noted, ‘The humanly irreconcilable differences between Jews and Christians will not be settled until God redeems the entire world as promised in Scripture.’ Indeed.

 

A last Rabbinic text. In the Mishnah, the foundational document of Rabbinic Judaism, at least 1800 years old, the Rabbis ask why God created all humanity from a single ‘Adam’ – a single first human. My favourite answer is that this was done to increase our wonderment at the glory of God. When a King of flesh and blood mints a coin, the Rabbi offer as a parable, every coin comes out looking the same, but when the King of Kings, the Holy Blessed One, made an original mint –Adam – every human comes out differently. This text justifies the appreciation of otherness in humanity; be that people with other skin colours, nationalities and even religions. We come closer to understanding the glory of God as we appreciate the differences between us and that demands our engagement with interfaith.

 

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