Goats, Flies and Freedom in an Unsafe World - Reflections on the Shabbat Before the New Moon of Nissan

 

Pesach is coming – first night Wednesday 1^st April. It’s an odd time to be preparing to celebrate freedom. There are those sprinting back and forth to shelters, and many more for whom shelter feels a far-off dream. That’s not even merely about Iran, Lebanon, Israel and others experiencing militarised conflict. There was an attack yesterday on a Synagogue in Michigan. One of my Detroit-based colleagues posted about his close connection to the team there. And then there is this creeping sense of violence and real and perceived offence hanging in the air; locally, nationally and internationally.

We are, as ever, grateful to our professional and volunteer security team and working closely with CST, local and national police and political leadership. But also, this is a good time for faith.

My mind turns to the almost-doggerel which ends the Seder; one little goat swept into a cycle of violence – the cat, the dog, the stick and on the list goes. But there is a vast and vital difference between the spiralling song of my non-Jewish youth – There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, and this song about One Little Goat.

The song about the Old Lady ends in death, of course. But the song about the Goat ends with God defeating death, of course. As an act of faith – and I think it is an act of faith rather than a cool-headed geo-political calculation – we are not spiralling into only ever greater cycles of violence. As an act of faith, I claim there is a force greater than violence, stronger even than death. And with that faith position, if you join me in that faith position, we enter a sort of existential Game Theory experiment. If we hold a space for something to be more powerful than spiralling violence, we make it possible for something stronger than violence to thrive in this world. If we live our lives on the basis that violence is the greatest power in the world, we equally make it so.

I’m reflecting on something I heard, shared by a Vicar at a Mosque – such is my rabbinic existence. Last week, I attended an Interfaith Iftar hosted at the Regents Park Mosque at which the Vicar of St Johns Wood Church, The Revd Dr Anders Bergquist shared an observation about friendship (perhaps poorly transcribed by me). The Iftar itself, of course, was a radical act of hospitality offered by our Muslim cousins. And speaking at the dais, reflecting on the often-reported cycles of violence and hatred in our society, the Rev Anders made this simple but exquisite call, “Be friends,” he shared, “Be the best friend you can be to your fellow. Bring out the best in your fellow.”

He is right, of course, not only to observe that this possibility exists for us, even in our fear and seeking of shelter, but also that, if we dedicate ourselves to this task, we will bring out the best in each other. While that, in itself, will not bring an instant end to war, violence and oppression, it is the best, and I think single, task that can help, in the words of Maimonides, “tilt the scale for ourselves and the whole worlds towards the side of merit, causing deliverance and success,” and, dare we say it, building a world in which we, all of us, can be free. May it soon come.

Shabbat Shalom