The Patterning Instict, Religion and the Improvement of our Human Selves

I want to talk about a book I’ve been reading, Jeremy Lent’s The Patterning Instinct

Lent starts with the model we think we know about how human beings evolve. He suggests that most of us think that human development starts with a proto-ape who hits another proto-ape with a bone, resulting in the other fighting back with a stone, then a pointy thing, then a bullet then a missile. And the narrative of human development is I’m going to hit you and if you hit back I’ll hit you harder. And the world out there can feel a bit like that.

But then he says this – we’ve got it backwards. The driving force of human development is not ever-increasing violence, it’s ever-increasing kindness, or rather ever-increasing turning towards community building and co-operation.

And he starts piling on the evidence.

If the goal was to be stronger and tougher, why are we so weak? Through evolution we have lost claws, lost sharp teeth, our skin is soft. In area after area he documents how the human has evolved to work together, in community, in selflessness, not selfishness.

The scientific consensus is that being tougher and harder isn’t how the fittest of us have survived.

We’ve survived through becoming softer and weaker – almost so as to force ourselves, as an entire human race, into relying on other people for our own survival and flourishing.

The book piles on the evidence for this in terms of the evolution of our bones and organs, our brain most particularly – on a neurological level – we are built to look for patterns of interconnectivity.

And I know we live in a world that too often doesn’t feel that way, but it turns out that the story of humanity is the story partnering with one another, using empathy and being communal, rather than selfishly minded.

It’s a big issue, in our fragile world, at this fragile time. I saw one reviewer suggest that Lent’s book could be read as a counter-argument to the conclusion of a similarly expansive narrative of the human race, Noah Yuval Harari’s Sapiens. Harari sees the human as essentially violent. He sees religion as essentially a tool wielded by frauds to wreck that violence. He sees the end of the human race – and this emerges in his second book Homo Deus – as we are overtaken by computer algorithms and, with a nod to no-self Buddist teachings, he’s fine with that.

Lent on the other hand wants to stop us slipping away from who we truly are as social, interconnected, communal minded creatures. There’s work to do pull the tiller towards the direction of this social version of ourselves, it’s urgent work, but it’s work to pull the tiller towards who we truly are. That’s hugely optimistic.

So what does Lent have to say about religion? Of course, if you want to know about how humans beings have come together to form communities – religion is going to be at the heart of that narrative. If you want to know about our greatest communal creations; from the buildings we have built to the music we have composed to the stories we have told – religion is going to be at the heart of that narrative. If you want to tell a story of how one person changed or improved the life of another person, or how one group of people sought to improve the life of other – religion is going to be at the heart of narrative again, and again across time and across the world.

Let me pause a moment and address this canard; sometimes I hear people say that religion is a cause of violence and therefore a bad thing. Let me just try this. Think of the three worst instances of violence in the century now 20 years past – I’ll give you Stalinism, I’ll give you Nazism and I’ll give Maoism, or I don’t know you would want to include genocide in Cambodia or Rwanda or former Yugoslavia – well I would consider religion culpable of zero out of six right there. And if you were to want to suggest that every now and then there was a Pastor who supported Hitler or a Jew who became entranced by Stalinism, I would say this. Let’s put religion’s culpability for violence on one side of a scale, and then put religion’s power as a force for peace on the other. Give me, as the advocate for religion, points for Archbishop Desmond Tutu for his work in the peaceful dismantling of Apartheid, give me points for all the religious among the Righteous Among the Nations who gave their lives and risked their lives for the sake of Jews fleeing Nazi brutality – give me points for Sister Maria Rozak who turned her nunnery into a shelter for dozens of Jewish refugees from the Vilna Ghetto including the great poet and resistance fighter Abba Kovner and future Member of Israel’s Kenesset Haika Grossman.

 Give me points for Martin Luther King, an ordained second-generation Baptist minister, and his good friend, the man who marched on his right hand side at Selma, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel – actually the great uncle of one our members here. Give me points for every act of charity and love and mutual support that has ever emerged from a church, a mosque, a Gurdwara or a Synagogue and I’ll stack any failing of religion on the other end of the scale and, Dr Harari, Prof Dawkings and colleagues, we’ll see how the scales balance out.

The point is this, if we are communally hardwired, as humans, and I believe we are, it’s not, I believe, just a mathematical weighing up that has caused us to be this way. Somewhere, somehow we have trained our subconscious to look beyond our own need. We have been touched by a belief that otherness, beyondness is necessary for our human flourishing. And that’s where religion comes in. Religion is the millennia-old act of believing that there is something to be gained by looking beyond our own personal selfish understanding, and an attempt to fuse that looking out at the beyond ourselves with the looking out of our fellows, other people with whom we share a belief in the way to look beyond. And all the stories we tell of our religions, and all the traditions and songs and the foods and all of that – it’s how we hold ourselves together so we can look beyond.

And I believe, as a person of faith, that somehow, somewhere in all of that, we are met – in our looking beyond, by that which is truly beyond. Somehow, we are touched, or if not ourselves, we’ll share the journey with someone we believe was so touched – even if they are long dead. And that, in that moment of being touched, all our reaching toward community and the beyond is guided towards decency and selflessness, or, as I would say as a religious person, holiness.

That’s why I believe in religion.

But let me give Jeremy Lent his due, and I also want to say something about so-what, about what we should do now.

For Jeremy Lent religion is a spandrel. 

A spandrel is the triangular piece that emerges in architecture when you use arches, or really any kind of circular form embedded in a square form. We’ve got a good few in this very building. For Jeremy Lent the spandrel is something that is capable of looking beautiful and attracting attention, but it’s not really a genuinely important part of the architectural scheme – it’s the bit that is left over because you really wanted an arch. His point is that though religion might seem to be integral to how human beings have come together through thousands of years and integral to how human beings have shown kindness and altruism for thousands of years, religion isn’t really the thing behind all this. Religion, says Jeremy Lent, is the left-over bit from the other stuff. Well I just don’t agree. That is to say, I do agree about the metaphor, I just don't agree with the message. The real issue about a spandrel is that it’s a necessary part of building an arch in a square space. You can’t have one without the other and every architect knows that. Spandrels are the equivalent of a Rubin-vase-that-is-also-two-human-faces. Similarly, religion is an intrinsic part of the human instinct and a necessary complement to our quest for human progress, it isn’t the irrelevant afterthought. And it's unfair and lacking in a much-vaunted claim to desire scientific rigour honesty to suggest otherwise.

That’s some high-level theology. So what do we do about it? Actually, this week’s Torah portion provides helpful insight. Jacob is dying and he has twelves sons he wishes to bless. Lola gave the example of the blessing Jacob give Joseph – about a wild donkey and an archer and she said it wasn’t a blessing that could guide her in her life, and indeed, I think that’s the point. Jacob’s blessing of Joseph wasn’t a blessing for Lola, it was a blessing for Joseph. And for each of his 12 sons Jacob has a different blessing, and a different blessing for his grandson also. We could have had a very short Torah reading today in which the Torah could have said, Jacob wanted to bless his children. He called them all together and said … and then there would have been the thing he would have said to all of them. But that’s not what the Torah records. It records each blessing individually.

I’m reminded of a portion we’ll read later in the year. Eventually, the children of Israel will get out of Egypt and head into the wilderness and receive the instructions to build a Tabernacle in the wilderness. And when the tabernacle is dedicated, a representative from each of the twelve tribes of Israel brings an offering. Each tribe brings;

One silver bowl weighing 130 shekels and one silver basin of 70 shekels, both filled with choice flour with oil mixed in, a gold ladle of 10 shekels, filled with incense; a bull a ram, a lamb in its first year, a goat two oxen, five rams, five he-goats, and five yearling lambs. 

And we get told, in identical language, this list 12 times, for each of the tribes. And the question is asked, why didn’t the Torah just tell us that everyone bought the same thing and do it once and be done.

The Rabbis say it’s to remind us that each individual needs to be honoured in their own right.  Just as Jacob does at the end of his life.

Here’s how to give a blessing; You look into the heart of a person, You look to find that particular part of that person that is utterly unique, never before seen, never after to be seen – it’s to look for what we would call the Tzelem, the image of God infolded into each human – but infolded differently in me than in you or you or you.

And it’s to direct that Tzelem, that unique perfect possibility, on a path of goodness. That’s my job. That’s why I’m so honoured to be a representative of religion and of this religion most especially. A blessing is a direction towards the path of our souls, that part of who we are which knows, somehow that we are here to good, to be kind, to reach towards others. It’s a nudge along the path each of us know we want to tread but area nervous, or blocked, or blinded.

So try this, try this if you are a parent or a child, a person living alone, or living by yourself or in community – find someone to bless. You can like them, or not like them, they can be relatives or strangers – and look for that piece of that person that is truly important. You don’t need to tell them you are blessing them – if you are English that bit will feel awkward, but share something with them that can guide them on this path of goodness, of shared communal existence, share something with them that guide them well on path in which their soul needs to travel. Open up a possibility, acknowledge a piece of wonderment. Just wish ‘em well. But guide towards the good.

I think that action, that moment of blessing or being blessed is the very heart of what it truly means to be religious. And I do like, as I hope you have figured out, I do like religion.

Shabbat Shalom

Water-Carriers and All

I contributed this week’s Masorti Reflection on the Parasha.

Cross posted from

http://www.masorti.org.uk/reflections.htm

 

Shabbat Nitzavim - Vayelekh

 

If you are reading this, in Shul or on-line, congratulations. You are one of the elite; preparing for the major celebrations of the coming days by engaging in Jewish life and study. In less than a week’s time we will be joined by a goodly number of Jews who have been preparing for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur by …. well they won’t have been preparing themselves for Rosh Hashanah at all.

 

I remember once passing a Shtibel – a little basement Synagogue – on New York's Upper West Side on the Shabbat immediately before Rosh Hashanah just as one of the daveners emerged from their Shabbat morning service. We chatted, ‘How many people did you get today?’ I asked, ‘Oh, about seventy,’ came the response. ‘And how many will you get on Rosh Hashanah?’ I asked. ‘Oh, about seventy,’ came the response. It took a while for me to understand what he meant. Then I realised, it’s the kind of community where everybody always comes. They have about seventy people on the first Shabbat in March, the third Wednesday morning in April or the second Tuesday afternoon in May.

 

It would be easy, as ‘one of the elite’ slipping into our regular seat on Shabbat Nitzavim-Vayelekh, to feel that Rosh Hashanah belongs to us. We are the regular attenders and the Talmud frequently teaches ben tadir v’aray tadir maadif, -between regular and occasional, regular is preferred. But that would be a terrible error, especially in the run up to Rosh Hashanah. These are the opening words of the parasha read the week before Rosh Hashanah - ‘You are standing here today, all of you, before God, your bosses, tribes, wise leaders, officers, everyone of Israel, your children, your wives, your strangers; from wood cutter to drawer of water so you can enter into the covenant.’ (Deut 29:10-11).

For the most important moments in our national history and in yearly calendar we stand together, wood-cutters and elite alike. The machers and the twice a year attendees are deemed equally necessary for the success of the covenantal relationship between God and the Children of Israel. The same is true of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. How could we pray, in the words of the Kol Nidrei, ‘alongside the sinners,’ if we were all perfect (a fine hope that). The language of mutual responsibility shared by an entire people before God infuses so much of the liturgy of the upcoming days, from the Zichronot verses of Rosh Hashanah to the confessional recitations of Yom Kippur. We are all in this together.

So my request to the elite, reading this, is this - watch out for the wood-carriers and the water drawers, come Thursday morning. Wish them a Shanah Tovah, introduce yourself, make sure they feel comfortable in your community, even if you have never seen them before. This covenant, these coming days, are for us all.

Shabbat Shalom and a sweet and good year to all.

On Religious Community

We’ve had 85 new adult members in the year just past. In other words something like 15% of our membership is new.

Shabbat morning services are transformed. They are warmer, more dynamic, far busier and with a far broader spread of age groups making up our regular prayer community.

We had 25 kids in our last Shabbat Children’s service of the year. That’s more or less a ten fold increase on where we were 18 months ago.

We’ve had to put a halt on registrations for the youngest classes of our Sunday morning Cheder as registrations passed 60. That’s double where we were a year ago.

We officiated at seven weddings last year and the year before, but have double that number of bookings in the year ahead.

I’ve lost count of the number of baby blessings we’ve done; somewhere between 25 and 35, and it’s been a very long time since that was the case at New London.

Lastly and perhaps most significant of all, we have the largest conversion programme in Britain, again doubling in size this last year.

 

In difficult economic times,

Against the backdrop of statistics announcing the atrophy and death of Anglo-Jewry.

And coming on the back of a series of challenging years for this community,

That’s not bad.

Not bad at all.

 

And it’s not just numbers, I am continually staggered by the quality of new Jews, new members, members of long-standing, young members and older members who are making their Jewish home at New London and lifting our community with the quality of their presence, contribution and commitment.

 

All this makes for a sense of warmth and welcome in the community.

A confidence in the community.

A sense of community in the community.

To those of you, many, many of you, who are engaged week-in week-out in this enriched sense of what it means to be seriously engaged with our communal life at New London, I want to thank you for your efforts this part year and urge you, urge all of us, to keep our feet firmly planted on the accelerator, there is much more we have to do in the year to come.

But I suspect the regulars here will already know the answer to my major question on this most holy day. So I hope you will forgive me if I address this sermon to the rest of us.

And in particular to those of us navigating the edges of this community, I want to invite you also to step a little closer.

 

My question, my questions are these

Why should a person be engaged in a Jewish community?

Why should a person be engaged in this Jewish community?

Why is it worth caring for, giving up time and money for.

What do you get in return?

 

It’s not obvious.

We live in a world which increasingly confuses freedom and maturity with isolation and individualisation.

We’ve a confused sense of freedom which means we distrust commitment.

We’ve a confused sense of science which means we distrust faith.

And we are all just so busy, busy, busy.

So

Why should a person be engaged in a Jewish community?

Why should a person be engaged in this Jewish community?

 

I want to give two answers, one political, the other personal.

There is a third answer, of course – theological, but I’m not going to address that today.

 

The political first.

Politics – from the Greek, politicos – of citizens or of the state.

A few weeks ago I was invited to speak at the St Ethelburgas Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in the City – St Ethelburgas was in large part destroyed by the 1993 Bishopsgate bombing of the IRA and has risen from the rubble as one of the most important centres for inter-faith dialogue and peace building in the country.

I was asked this question –

 

Since so many of the conflicts and troubles of the world can be blamed on religion, why don’t we give up on organised religion and commit instead to becoming generally decent and ethical?

 

It’s a question I hear frequently.

There are however at least three reasons why this invitation, despite its simplistic appeal, needs to be rejected.

 

Firstly, if you want to blame of the woes of the world on religion, then I would insist that you give religion the credit for its contributions.

 

Democracy and human rights are both intimately bound up in what the outside world calls Judeo-Christian morality – what I would call a belief in the creation of every human btzelem elohim - in the image of a one true God.

If you want to pin the IRA on religion, then give religion the credit for universal suffrage and the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights.

 

Try imagining any of the glorious liberation struggles of modernity without reference to the tale of Exodus  - yetziayat mitzrayaim.

If you want to pin Osama Bin Laden on religion, then give religion the credit for the Rev. Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi.

 

And what of the calls of the great Hebrew prophets to care for the unvoiced, clothing the naked, feeding the hungry?

If you want to pin the Taliban on religion, then give religion credit for leading the work to write off Third World debt and give religion the credit for every life saved by Christian Aid, Islamic Aid, World Jewish Aid, American Jewish World Service and all the rest of them.

 

If you want to blame religion for her failings, then she deserves credit for her extra-ordinary and unmatched successes.

That should even up the scales somewhat.

 

Secondly, the suggestion that religion is to blame for the woes of the world is easily made, but the evidence hardly compels. It’s not clear to me that religions can be blamed for the evils of Nazism or Stalinism or Maoism, Darfur, Rwanda …

277 young men and women lost their lives to knife crime in England and Wales in the year last year, but I don’t think organised religion should be blamed for any of those deaths, or the burglaries, beatings and abuses of contemporary society.

In fact it may be that organised religious communities are the best agents for supporting young people to turn away from gangs and street violence, restoring on our streets and in our homes values of respect, decency and kindness.

Sure there are some religious bigots and idiots out there, but the notion that religion is somehow behind the troubles of the world is lazy and unbefitting the scientific mind.

It needs to be rejected.

 

And thirdly, forsaking religious distinctiveness is not going to help. I am forced, by faith, to appreciate how every human being was created in the image of God even though every other human being was created differently to me with different beliefs and different ethnic and national proclivities.

We are not going to solve the problems of the world by ‘getting over’ who we are, whether we are black, white, Jew or Muslim.

I’m a Jew, by birth, by choice, by heart and by soul. I’m not going to find peace by forgetting that my ancestors fled Egypt with unleavened cakes baking on their backs. We are not going to solve the problems of Israel and Palestine by pretending that Jews and Arabs are just the same really or that one side or the other doesn’t care about the things we so self-evidently feel so deeply about.

As a Zionist I trace my engagement to the Land and the State back to Biblical times; as do my Palestinian cousins. We have to accept, listen even value to these claims. They can’t be ignored.

 

Jews can’t be told to ‘get over the Holocaust,’ just as Blacks can’t be told to ‘get over slavery.’ We need to find ways to grow and engage with one another because of our stories and histories, our passions, our strangeness and our dreams. Stripping us of our customs and narratives from us doesn’t make for a true meeting of souls. It makes rich colours dull and grey.

 

The suggestion that the world would be better without religion not only implies a drastic refusal to give religion the credit it deserves, it also involves a blinkered willingness to subsume all of society’s ill onto a convenient aunt sally. And most of all it forgets that religion isn’t a bolt on extra that can be deleted from its adherents, it’s a part of the soul of a person – delete that and you lose a person’s passion.

 

The problem isn’t organised religion.

The problem is our ability to articulate what being religious truly means.

Religion means being a son, a daughter of our holy tradition, understanding our place in community and in society, fighting injustice, speaking up for the unvoiced, taking steps towards an engagement with the awesome truth of creation.

 

And that is what we do here.

This is our heritage not only as run-of-mill, standard-kind of Synagogal Jews, but most particularly because we are New London Jews.

We stand for the open minded engagement in a tradition of tremendous richness and value.

And our voice is becoming ever more desperately needed and ever more valued in contemporary society.

In the last two week’s I’ve been invited to speak on BBC, and at the Muslim Council of Britain, I’ve been to Number 10. I’ve been trying to play my role.

Together with colleagues in this Synagogue and other partners in my sister Masorti communities we are at the heart of every major debate where religion should be playing its part in the healing of the world; ecology, poverty, inter-faith, education, evolution.

There is a political reason to be part of the community – politics – of citizens or of the state.

The reason is that our fellow citizens and our society need our contribution.

They, we, need our voice, the voice of open-minded engagement with an ancient tradition of holiness to be strong, particularly now. Particularly in the year we begin today.

 

So much for the politics.

The other reason to be part of religious community, this religious community, is personal, individual.

Each Shabbat I look out from this pulpit at the members I know well and I see stories, some hidden, some known, some in between.

There are those who are fighting cancer, those who are mourning, those who care for sick partners, sick kids, miscarriages, bankrupt businesses and broken relationships.

Each Shabbat I look out from this pulpit at the members I know well and I see the joy.

There are those in love, those expecting, those celebrating.

And we all shuffle in bringing our celebrations and commiserations, our gratitude and our grief and we prayer as a single community - together.

I was hugely struck by an extract from Alain de Boton’s book, Status Anxiety. He talks about Christian experience, but the analogy will do for us here too.

 

We might imagine [says de Boton] joining an unfamiliar congregation within the walls of a cathedral to hear Bach’s Mass in B Minor. Much may separate us; age, clothes and background. We may never have spoken to one another and be wary of letting others catch our gaze. But as the Mass begins, so to does a process of social alchemy. The music gives expression to feelings that had hitherto seemed inchoate and private … the composer and musicians [make] audible to us … the movement of our souls.

Furthermore, [he continues] the public nature of the performance helps us … realise that if the others are responding as we are to the music, then they cannot be the incomprehensible figures we might previously imagined them to be. Their emotions run along the same track as do ours, they are stirred by the very same thing, and so whatever the difference in appearance and manner, we share a common cause, upon which a connection can be forged and extended for beyond the performance of the Mass itself.^[1]

 

This is our Cathedral.

And this chazzan, this choir; they are singing our version of that Mass.

Congregational prayer is Jewish alchemy that turns us from individual players, wandering our lonely way across the stage of life, into a full corps, a massed choir in which every note makes up a symphony greater, truer and more resonant than any solo narrative.

 

When we stand together, in this glorious vaulted prayer space of ours we stand on giants shoulders. And the differences between us melt before forces and powers far greater than any of us.

 

So if you have celebrations. Come and share them with us. Come and lift up our spirits.

And if you are mourning, come and share with us. Force us to know the realities of this world where good people suffer and pain is only ameliorated by companionship and love. If you are mourning, let us stand beside you, sing with you.

Because we are more powerful standing together.

And whether you are marking the passing of a week, a month or a year, come and share with us. Allow yourselves to become part of the great symphony we perform week-in week-out.

 

The door is open, the welcome is warm, our task is holy and vital and if you do join us, as you do join us, you help us stand together with you, and you stand together with us.

 

This is what we do,

This is the point of religious community.

And this is no ordinary religious community. Aside from our history and all our various qualities, this is our religious community, this is our shul.

It is where we need to come to fight the fight, to spread the messages of our faith.

And it is where we come to sit together and pray together, in our moments of celebration and our moments of loss.

It is a place to come to for politics and for people.

For great big reasons and for a vast host of tiny reasons too.

It is my honour to serve this community as your Rabbi and I look forward to our steps forward in the year to come.

May it come to us all in peace, health, joy and sweetness,

Shannah Tovah.

---

^[1] p. 260

Judaism in the First Person Plural

A sermon for the first day of Rosh Hashanah

---

 

Let me take an analogy from the world of theatre.

Suppose you don’t like Shakespeare,

Suppose you find Shakespeare difficult to follow, old-fashioned, overly melodramatic. Besides you’ve seen them already, a number of times.

But from somewhere inside you feel you ought to give Hamlet another go.

So you arrive in time for the end, you don’t want to have to stay too long.

You might be feeling a little awkward shuffling into place.

But, more likely, as you sit down you are already congratulating yourself that you were right, this whole Shakespeare thing isn’t really for you,

Maybe you are deciding to pop into the Macbeth playing next week – the bit at the beginning with the witches isn’t bad – and then give the whole thing a rest for another year.

And you’ll wait for the curtain to fall and head home.

Undisturbed by the cauldron of emotions unfolded on the stage before you.

 

It’s one of the great frustrations of this time of year that so many of us treat our faith, our community, like this soulless theatre excursion.

 

And if this is the way in which we attend shul on this day, it doesn’t matter what I say in this sermon.

It doesn’t matter how movingly Chazan Costen and the choir lead us through this magnificent liturgy.

No sermon, no prayer, no tune will make any difference to the way we live our lives, the way we treat those around us, the way we relate to our Creator in the year ahead.

If we come to Shul with our minds made up, determined to find what we expect to see.

If we come to Shul already decided, there is, it is true, no need to prostrate ourselves before God right up to the very last moments of Neilah, we don’t need to wait for God to seal the books in which our fate is written.

Because we arrived on the first day of Rosh Hashanah with our books closed already; our little lives already neatly sealed up for the year ahead.

So today, tomorrow, next week, this year.

I ask this of all us.

Open the books.

Open yourself.

Allow yourself to enter into these ten days of awe,

Allow these ten days into you.

Allow yourselves to be broken in upon.

 

This is the essence of what I want to address, not only today, but throughout this holy period.

I want to talk about being broken in upon.

I want to talk about that which is currently around and about me –us – that instead needs to become inside us, part of me.

What needs to be added to the me, the ego, the private book of my life I carried to Shul this morning, tucked under my arm.

 

I want, today, to look at how this community – New London Synagogue – can, and must break in on us.

Tomorrow I’ll turn to the world out there – the world of the credit crunch  – for that world is knocking mightily this year.

And on kol nidrei I’ll be looking at a breaking in on the world in here [head] and here [heart].

You’ll get the picture.

 

I want to begin with a piece of Hebrew grammar.

The most important piece of grammar in the Hebrew language is the verbal suffix nu; the verbal suffix that denotes the first person plural.

 

Nu means us, we, ours.

Avinu Malcheinu – our father our king

Ashamnu Bagadnu – WE have erred, WE have sinned

Al cheit shchatanu lephanecha – for the sin WE have sinned before you.

 

Because the greatest truth of Judaism is precisely this.

Judaism must be lived in the first person plural.

The reason why we, as Jews, pray in the first person plural is because Judaism demands that we live in the first person plural. In community.

 

This is the my central message today;

We must live our Judaism in the first person plural, in community.

 

As a child I used to love a record of jokes titled ‘You Don’t Have to Be Jewish.’ I played it until the grooves bled.

One joke sticks in my mind to this day.

It’s the end of some trial, for some crime or other, the jury shuffles back into court. I won’t attempt the accent.

 

Foreman of the jury, have you reached your verdict.

We have your honour.

And what, foreman of the jury, is your verdict.

Well, your honour. We’ve talked and talked, and debated and debated and, you know what, at the end of the day…

Foreman – your verdict please

Your honour, we’ve decided not to mix in.

 

It’s the saddest joke I know because not mixing in,

Turning away from the nu-ness of Jewish life, the first person plural demand on our souls is a failure.

When we close ourselves off, sealing our self off from being broken in on

Preferring, instead, to hide behind a mixture of our own private concerns, laziness and embarrassment.

We demean our inheritance as Jews.

 

Kol Yisrael arayvim zeh lazeh

 

Says the Talmud,

‘All Israel is responsible for one another,’ say most translations.

But the translation ‘responsible’ falls some way short of carrying the entire meaning of the word. Arayvim

Ayin reish vet – erev – means to mixed in, we have all been thrown into a giant mixing bowel, you and I.

We were thrown together at Sinai, my destiny wrapped up in yours.

‘Not mixing in’ is an abdication of this truth, an abdication of my heritage as a Jew and a failure of the spark of humanity folded within me.

 

I know this most intimately from my experiences with a newborn child, this year.

Every time my glorious wonderful son cries in the dark recesses of the night and I roll away, considering it someone else’s problem – who am I kidding, hoping my wife will drag herself out of bed so I can remain feigning sleep -

I know I fail, I’ve closed myself up, sealed my book all by myself. What about her sleep, what about my son!

 

But this isn’t a sermon about allowing our family, or even our friends to break in on us. That is somehow too self-serving, too obvious.

This is a sermon about allowing us as a community, allowing New London Synagogue to break in on us more often, more profoundly.

 

This is, as you know well, my first year as Rabbi of this august community.

And such stories I have heard this year.

Looking out over faces I know and don’t know I’m struck by the brokenness the

tzores – the pain.

Medical tzores, professional tzores, personal tzores

 

I spoke to one member recently, I introduced myself, it’s taken me seven months to get round to calling. Failing again.

And asked if there was anything we, as a Synagogue could do for her.,

‘There’s nothing now,’ she responded, ‘but you should have called a couple of years ago when …’ and she launched into a story of medical tzores, an illness, ­an operation that had gone wrong, and an extended period of convalesce, all of which she had done void of any support from anyone at the Synagogue.

And I wished, indeed, that I, or my predecessor, had known.

We should have been more open, more ready to be impacted by her suffering.

But then again, this woman hadn’t let us know. She hadn’t told anyone. She hadn’t thought, or didn’t feel we would want to know, or didn’t want to open to us.

So here we both were, this Rabbi and this congregant, alone.

With the books of our lives shut to one another.

Un-mixed in.

What a waste.

A waste of humanity, a waste of community, religious community especially.

 

We sit here today like too many strangers.

Too many ‘I’s, not enough ‘we’s.

Too much first person singular, not enough first person plural.

Too many closed books.

Look around you, look five seats away, how many names of those five seats away from you do you know.

How many stories?

It’s all too bitty, we are foreigners to one another.

If we are not careful we will be giving a lie to the claim that we are doing this whole Rosh Hashanah thing together – avinu malkeinu¸al chet shchatanu.

This Rosh Hashanah it doesn’t really feel that this is a big reunion of the time we all stood together at the foothills of Sinai, you and I.

We’ve lost out on the greatest gift of what it means to belong, to belong to a religious community most especially.

The gift is this. Belonging to a religious community – this religious community, or any other – grants us a first circle of people to break in on us.

My wife, children, my family and the friends I have chosen because they make feel better, they don’t count.

The real test is my kehillah, my community, the people with whom I have chosen to stand before God on this most important day in the Jewish year.

It is the community – the faith community – that provides the first ripple away from our own selves, our own selfishness.

It is this set of relationships that provide the greatest test of my quality as a Jew, a human.

 

Indeed this is our story, here at New London, the shul founded by and for Rabbi Louis Jacobs of blessed memory. As a Synagogue community we were created and sustained for decades on the basis of a willingness to allow ourselves to be moved by a fellow’s story – a Rabbi’s tzores. We allowed ourselves to share in Rabbi Jacobs’ story and it brought us together, it made us strong.

As a child, as an adult as a Rabbi I have always been inspired by Rabbi Jacobs’ story. That story will always be our history, but it can’t be our future, it’s not even our present.

This shul is no longer a shul about one person’s story – no matter how great the man, no matter how stirring the story. New London is, and must strive to become ever more about all of us; a congregation of a thousand interconnected stories, a thousand interwoven lives.

 

It’s not just the tzores, it’s the joys too, the babynamings, the weddings, the successes. And perhaps above all it’s the sharing of the humdrum, the seemingly unremarkable – where I went on holiday, how’s the new job, how are the children?

A synagogue which exists in the first person plural is a synagogue full of simple acts of connection,

Acts of turning strangers in fellows,

Opening up to the strangers sitting five seats away begin to make tiny credits in a communal account that binds us into the fate of each other, like a spiders web, with every moment of connection contributing more strength, more meaning, more power to our lives as Jews.

The desperate hope is that by the time something awful happens – for indeed it is only a matter of time – there will be enough in this account, enough strength in the web, that we can be held, lifted even, even in the most difficult of times.

Every time we come to Shul and bring ourselves – opening up a bit, week on week – we make a credit in our communal account.

This is the purpose of Synagogue membership –our subscriptions allow us to open this communal account, the cosmically important account, the account which measures the quality of our commitment to our fellows, our willingness to be open the experience of strangers.

 

I’m not, today, going to suggest that we, now, all to turn to the strangers sitting around us, to introduce yourselves, to begin this process.

Because today isn’t the day when we can undo this stranger-ness.

Undoing this stranger-ness, allowing our lives to become mixed in with one another is the work of a year, maybe even more than a year.

It’s the work of fifty shabbatot of introducing ourselves to one another, gently prising open the clasps on the books of our life we are so used to holding tightly shut.

It’s fabulous here, at New London, on the shabbatot of the year.

It’s warm, bright, vibrant, alive.

Don’t be a stranger.

 

Don’t be a stranger.

It’s a common enough plea for a Rosh Hashanah address, but when I ask each and everyone of us here today not to be a stranger I mean it deeply seriously.

Don’t just come more often, but go as far as to bring yourself with you when you come.

And one week pick up a few names, and the next a bit of biography, and the next a chance to learn something important about someone, a fellow traveller in this kehillah kedushah, this holy community.

And share of yourself too. Share your name, your own narrative, what brings you here.

Why you have chosen to throw your lot in with this particular and let’s face it peculiar slice of the Jewish world.

Allow yourself some credits in your communal account, allow yourself to celebrate this gift of belonging and meaning.

Because it is a tremendous gift.

 

This is my big ask on this big day.

In the year ahead, don’t be strangers.

Bring yourself.

Allow yourself to be broken in on.

Allow your own vulnerability to become part of our collective narrative as a community.

Take your own steps to allow us to become a real community, existing in the first person plural, void of strangers, able to pray the avinu malkeinu in the first person plural.

Sharing in the triumphs and disasters of the fragile lives we all need.

If we can do that then, indeed, we have far less to fear from the decrees made against our own small lives in this year to come.

If we can do that then, indeed, we become far more worthy of decrees of life, of health, of love and of happiness.

May they come to us all.

L'Shanah Tovah.