Parshat Shlech in Febrile Times

 The piece that really caught my attention in this week’s Torah reading isn’t the piece where the spies either do or don’t share their confidence in the outcome of a military campaign.

 

The idea that some people believe that war will have a positive outcome and some don’t feels so close and so scary. And while the story we read entails a clear right and wrong side of the argument; that’s because God’s presence, on one side of the argument is Bolet – entirely clear. And I don’t live in such a clear world where God’s presence, on one side of the argument or the other is so dramatically manifest.

 

The piece that really caught my attention is what happened to the outcome of that disagreement.

I mean, I have a certain sympathy for the 10 spies who suffer from what the Rabbis calls, choser Emunah, lack of faith. They are clearly terrified. The classic thing to point out is this moment when they say, “We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked like grasshoppers to them.” They are scared, scared people assume that everyone else is stronger than they are.

 

But the thing that happened immediately after this is the bit that really breaks my heart. The whole community raise up their voices and weep. Vayilonu al Moshe – they rail at Moses and they gather together as a rebellious mass with a dismissive force that on the one hand seeks to isolate Moses and on the other unite all their efforts in opposing him.

“It would be better for us to go back to Egypt. Nitnah Rosh, Let’s get a new head and go back to Egypt.” And then when Moses attempts to calm their fears, they threaten, or start or agitate – the Hebrew’s unclear – to pelt Moses with stones.

And I can sermonise on this.

And my heart weeps for this – not the disagreement, but the overspill of disagreement into ad hominin attack into mob opposition into the threat of violence.

And at this point, the entire edifice that has been crafted since … well since Genesis really, starts to crack open.

The unity of the people is lost, in the opening of next week’s Parasha there’s a full on rebellion.

Moses’ ability to lead is lost, in the following week, he deals with another rebellious moment by castigating the people he’s supposed to lead and turning violent himself – to a rock, not a human, but that’s too much. Moses too loses the ability to enter the Promised Land.

God’s angry, and as a result of this week’s parasha decrees that none of the people who left Egypt will be let into the Land of Israel.

These are the things that happen when a grain of an understandable fear meets the industrial scale complex of magnification and difference, weaponised polarisation and political opportunism.

Ezra Klein, in his recent book, Why We Are Polarized analyses what is perhaps the gravest danger to the continued civil functioning of civil society – he’s got a lot to say about this society, but he’s writing largely about the United States, we shouldn’t hold that against him

There is much awry in American politics, but I’ve come to believe the master story—the one that drives almost all divides and most fundamentally shapes the behavior of participants—is the logic of polarization. That logic, put simply, is this: to appeal to a more polarized public, political institutions and political actors behave in more polarized ways. As political institutions and actors become more polarized, they further polarize the public. This sets off a feedback cycle: to appeal to a yet more polarized public, institutions must polarize further; and so on and so on.

He charts how we claim noble motives for ourselves and accuse those who disagree with us as self-serving idiots and how we excuse our own errors as incidental and go after the errors of the others as indicative. He charts much of this through the lens of 21^st century social media and 24/7 news cultures. But these aren’t new challenges and the response we should be seeking, in this increasingly polarized world are certainly not new responses.

We Jews, of course, tend to pride ourselves on our ability to argue. For every two Jews there are three opinions and all that. It’s a skill we’ve been working on for almost two millennia.

The word Talmudic is most often misused in contemporary discourse. I caught one definition – clearly not written by a Rabbi – that suggested Talmudic meant,  “characterized by or making extremely fine distinctions; overly detailed or subtle; hairsplitting.” That’s not really it, at all. You can trust me on this, I’ve read a lot of Talmud.

Talmudic passages classically work like this. One Rabbi says something is OK, then another Rabbi says it isn’t. And then everyone else piles in to analyse the first Rabbi’s argument – how could he (it was almost always he, back then – we’ve got better) how could he have said that this particular thing was OK when he said another thing, so similar to the first wasn’t OK. And the reverse applies too, and on the passage goes, weighing, counter-balancing and analysing each argument until, several folios later the passage concludes triumphantly with the conclusion that we were right all along. The first Rabbi was consistent with their own position in saying this thing was OK, and the second Rabbi was consistent with their own position in saying that it wasn’t.

The overriding commitment of the Talmudic project isn’t to demonstrate which side, and certainly which Rabbi is right or wrong. The overriding commitment is to justify each argument – present it as coherently as possible, to express it in such a way as to demonstrate the search for holiness and decency that its holder embodies.

That’s what it means to be Talmudic.

There’s even a Rabbinic doctrine of Mahloket BShem Shamayim – a disagreement for the sake of heaven, the kind of disagreement that survives.

I think this Jewish approach to argument as a good is predicated on three very Jewish ideas – not unique to Judaism, certainly, but characteristic and capable of explaining, I think, who we are at our best and who we need to strive to be again and again.

The first is a kind of self-interest. As a people, for 2,000 years, Jews have had to adapt and relocate and relearn new skills. We’ve need to learn things that we didn’t know just a whisper of time ago. And we’ve come to know that disagreement is the only way to learn. Through disagreement we grow, we discover that which we didn’t already know. We test out our hypotheses and learn which to abandon and which to develop. As a matter of self-interest we know we need to hold a space open for the new, for the counter-voice, even if, perhaps particularly if we are absolutely convinced of our own rightness.

The second is theological idea. Our understanding of God is that God understands all things and our understanding of us, as humans, is that we are finite and fragile and can’t. Even if we are absolutely convinced of our own rightness, particularly if we are convinced of our own rightness. To be a decent Jew, to be a decent human, is to be humble.

And the third reason, I think, that shapes our approach to argument is a belief in humanity. Every human, we claim is created in the  image of God. Even the ones we disagree with. Why, teach the Rabbis in Mishnah Sanhedrin, was all humanity created from one primordial Adam? So no-one can say my parent is greater than your parent, for we all come from the same parent. The most commonly repeated instruction in the Torah is to love the stranger, the person who is different. It’s a staggering idea.

And it’s one we desperately need to recover and hold close to the centre of who we are and how we engage with our fellows. We need to get over the idea that listening hard to the arguments of those who currently take opposite sides to us in debate are our enemies.

It’s not such a distant idea for those of us who, like me, take such pride in being a citizen of this country. You have to take pride in a country where the political party that loses in an election, His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.

I love the idea of loyal opposition.

In parliament and in the streets and even, God help us, on-line, we need to find opportunities to listen with a respect and humility and a sense of openness.

We need to treat disagreement as something other than a test in which our job is to triumph while ridding the other side of not only logical legitimacy, but humanity.

We need to treat disagreement as an opportunity to learn, a chance to practice humility, for indeed our reach is tiny and a chance to recognise the majestic nature of humanity.

It’s not true that such an approach renders us weak. The generation of the Midbar – the bratting ridiculing rebels of the desert generation - has long disappeared, but the people who learnt to take argument so seriously as to place it at the very centre of our interpersonal and theological journey through life are still here. And still learning. At least I hope we are. We certainly need to be.

Shabbat Shalom

How to be an Adult - Parshat Naso

It’s been so lovely to celebrate, Rebecca (name changed), with you and your family, and to see you up here doing just so extraordinarily well. And to know you are off and running on this incredible journey of becoming a Jewish adult. It’s enough to make me deeply excited about the possibilities for our future.

Which is good, because, frankly, that isn’t how I’ve been feeling for much of this week.

As we left the festival of Shavuot, I was nastily jolted out of  a sense of peaceful delight by the awful news of an attack on Jews in Boulder Colorado. On members of a Synagogue led by friend and colleague, Rabbi Marc Soloway. Wishing everyone in that community healing and strength in a time of real pain and bitterness.

And then, this week, my wife has opened her new theatre show, The Reckoning, at the Arcola. Tickets still available, since you ask. And yes, it has had wonderful reviews. But it’s also a show about pain. The script is built from witness testimonies of survivors of the Russian invasion into Ukraine, now, staggeringly over three years ago.

And against all that is the news from Israel and Gaza where it’s grim, still terribly, terribly grim.

It feels like a wave.

It takes a certain kind of bravery, a certain kind of strength, to embark on adulthood today. Any kind of adulthood.

I think we need to teach this certain kind of bravery, this certain kind of strength.

So here we go.

 

On my mind are two parts of this Torah reading portion. Both strange. There’s a whole passage about what to do if a husband suspects their wife in adultery. It’s a long passage with a strange trial by ordeal that … well I’ve never seen it because it no longer plays any role in an Jewish community. Why?

 

And then there’s a whole passage where, one after another, the Bible explains that each leader of each tribe brings a dedicatory offering to the sanctuary. But rather than list all the names in one go, and list the identical offering once, the Torah details these each identical gifts one after another. What could have been done in a fraction of the time is expanded in a massive repetition in what becomes the longest Aliyah in the Torah. Why?

The standard answer for why we no longer do this strange ritual around suspected adultery. In Mishnah Sotah it says, מִשֶּׁרַבּוּ הַמְנָאֲפִים, פָּסְקוּ הַמַּיִם הַמָּרִים – when the amount of adulterly increased they ceased doing this ritual.

That is to say, there’s just too much of the same thing going on, we can’t pay it proper attention any more.

And, goodness, I hear that.

I hear that there is just so much of the same thing going on, especially, the same bad things, that it’s hard to pay it the proper attention. But I don’t like that answer.

And, for what it’s worth it’s completely the opposite idea to the standard idea to explain the massive repetition in detailing 12 offerings 12 times again and again and again.

In Rabbinics, the standard answer why we get so much repetition, is that God cares about individuals and doesn’t want see anyone lose their big moment, so even if it is the same thing after the same thing, each Nasi of each tribe, each person gets their moment, to stand proud and central as if their offering is the only offering, as they deserve our upmost attention and acknowledgement.

 

So here we are,  on the one hand, it’s a bit miserable, following the news and seeing the same  thing again and again and again, and the temptation is just to normalise the bad stuff. No longer to protest against it.

There are a bunch of flashy terms and words for that – habituation is getting used to something so it no longer drives from us a reaction. We come to accept the things that are happening around us, for good or for ill, without question, without opposition, without remark.

There’s the Overton Window, named by Joseph Overton, who noted that the things that we, as a society deem sensible shift over time and the thing that we once though was beyond a pale becomes slowly acceptable, even if, really it should never be considered acceptable.

There’s also that really disturbing idea about boiling frogs. There’s an idea, I’m sure you’ve heard it, that if we only increase the temperature of the water ever so gradually, a frog won’t realise the water is getting hotter and hotter and won’t realise that it’s boiling. Apparently frogs aren’t that stupid. Frogs realise. They get out the water. It’s only the humans that don’t respond suitably to the reality that we are boiling our water, destroying our planet while simultaneously protesting that everything just normal. But maybe that’s a different sermon.

 

So I understand, I think we all understand the notion that if something happens a lot, we give up paying it close attention. That’s a human decision and, I think, a human failing.

Because the other way, the decision to pay close attention and call, again and again the same out every time it happens, that’s what the Torah does, that’s the Godly thing.

I’m reminded of the most powerful prayer of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kipput – the Unataneh Tokef –

כָל בָּאֵי עוֹלָם יַעַבְרוּן (תעביר) לְפָנֶיךָ כִּבְנֵי מָרוֹן. כְּבַקָּרַת רוֹעֶה עֶדְרוֹ. מַעֲבִיר צאנוֹ תַּחַת שִׁבְטוֹ .כֵּן תַּעֲבִיר וְתִסְפֹּר וְתִמְנֶה וְתִפְקֹד נֶפֶשׁ כָּל חָי

All of creation passes before you, God, as if on a narrow mountain path, like a flock before the shepherd, with each sheep passing under the staff, passing by, and counting and being recognised and taken account of – the soul of each living thing.

You can almost hear the staff rising and falling as we each get noted, accounted, counted.

In the language of my wife’s play – did I mention tickets are still available – there will be a reckoning. Everything we do does count.

Rebecca, you become BM today.

You pick up, as an adult Jew, not only a nice collection of new presents, but obligations on your own account – Mitzvot. We say there are 613 of them and they are about, well lots of things. The time you spend on one thing or another, what you are allowed to do, or eat, or wear or say, even the amount of money you should be spending on charity.

That’s because, to be adult, means every single thing counts.

It leaves a trace.

Everything matters.

That’s the very heart of who we are as Jews, with this huge raft of 613 Mitzvot.

We are a people who think that everything counts.

And whether it’s just dull that there are twelve entirely identical passages of different leaders bringing the same sacrifice, or it’s yet another month after month of horrifying news from Ukraine or Israel or Gaza or … everything matters.

And the adult thing to do, the only thing to do is refuse to be desensitised, refuse to become a slow-boiling frog.

We need to be a people who notice, who are provoked, who pay attention.

The good news is that when we do start looking there are incredible things to see; incredibly young girls turning into incredible young women on the occasion of their BM, Mazal Tov Rebecca again.

Incredible boys too, turning into incredible young men.

There is the news that warms our hearts and reminds us of the incredible gift of what it means to be a human being, even in challenging times.

Members will be aware that we welcomed Itay Shabi to New London on Shabbat 25^th April. Itay, his wife and, four-year-old twin daughters, evaded and escaped the invasion of their home on Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7^th.

 

He spoke with astounding humility, from the pulpit, of holding the door-handle of the shelter-door closed as the terrorists attempted to break in and their remarkable escape during the infiltration.

 

He also shared that he and his wife had made the decision that, where the terrorists had brought death, they would bring life. His wife was 7 months pregnant while he was in London.

 

I’m delighted to pass on the news of her safe childbirth and the healthy arrival of Shavit, named in honour of the soldier who, eventually, rescued the family.

 

Shavit’s Brit, earlier this week, was the first in Kibbutz Be’eri since the awful invasion over 600 days ago.

 

Mazal Tov

Even in Ukraine, touching moments of love and compassion and resilience and pure unadulterated humanity in everything we could possibly aspire to be.

Even in Israel, at the fundraiser for Yachad I attended with Rabbi Natasha and others from this community – the Israeli, Elena Kaminika spoke about her son, killed defending Kibbutzim on Oct 7^th, and the Palestinian, Aziz Abu Sarah spoke about his brother, killed while imprisoned by Israel – they both spoke about their work to bring peace, insisting that change is possible, humanity is possible, even amongst the multiplication of pain.

To be an adult, a real adult,, not just someone who has been around for a while, means to continue to see, and be provoked and care pay attention.

As a BM, Rebecca, you will now count as part of our quorum on prayer.

You now count as an adult, but to count isn’t just a function of numbers. It means to have a certain attitude to the gift of being a grown up.

Actually, you, I’m not worried about.

You’re going to be great.

It’s the rest of us who need to remember never to give up, and always to pay attention, to the good things, in particular.

Shabbat Shalom