Bad Weather Closing In and It's Nothing To Do With The Snow

 

 

Two members of the community have lost their jobs this week – and that’s only the members I know about. In a week when so much attention has been paid to the weather forecasts, it does feel as if we are standing on an exposed plain watching stormy clouds rolling in.

 

Care of those facing economic difficult, temporarily or otherwise, has always been a central part of Jewish community and commitment. At a time where so many are in fear I offer the following three pieces of Rabbinic advice.

 

Do let us know in the Synagogue. We would want to be able to help on a personal basis and besides there may be opportunities we are aware of that could assist you professionally. We also have a fund for those who are facing financial need, if you are interested in applying to that fund, please contact by e-mail. Of course there is no question of withholding any ability to engage with any part of Synagogue communal life from those facing financial need, we just need to know.

In fact you should tell everyone. Loss of employment in this current climate is no cause for embarrassment or denial, Rather, at least for your Jewish friends, letting us know that you face financial difficulties gives us opportunities to perform a mitzvah – an obligation to recognise our mutual responsibilities. Kol Yisrael Arevim Zeh Lazeh teaches the Talmud. The phrase is usually translated as ‘All Israel are responsible for one another,’ but the exact means is that there is an insistence that we accept a need to act as financial guarantors for one another. Our oft-spoken communal responsibilities are firstly financial.

 

Secondly do approach the Employment Resource Centre - http://www.ercentre.org/ - The ERC offers advice and guidance on developing a CV, training in interview preparation techniques, advice concerning job search strategy, career guidance and networking as well as additional specific training seminars. It is a service provided free to the entire Jewish community and several members of my previous community have found their support invaluable.

 

Thirdly – don’t stop. We live in a society that encourages (and almost demands) we place our professional responsibilities at the centre of our identities – ‘How do you do, I am a banker, an accountant, a ….’ When we lose our job we lose not only the income (and that is grave enough), we also are threatened with a loss of identity. Don’t stop. ‘Even the poor person who is sustained by charitable handouts must give charity,’ teaches the Talmud, that is a demand designed not to increase charitable contributions, but instead to increase the sense of dignity in the giver. If you can’t make the financial contribution you would wish, make contributions in other ways. Just don’t let the loss of employment strip you of your ability and willingness to be a force for good in the world. Judaism refuses to consider human beings = their employment. We are, more importantly, the sum of our relationships with our fellow human beings and the Divine – the cosmos in which we all find ourselves. Loss of employment cannot be allowed to get in the way of those relationships. Indeed, with a little more time, take advantage of the opportunity to nourish those relationships.

 

Tell us, contact the ERC, don’t stop.

And pray.

 

Harachaman hu yifarnasenu b’cavod – May the Merciful one bring us an honourable livelihood.

 

May it come to us all,

Shabbat shalom.

A Neilah Sermon - Don't Forget the Horse

Too much thinking can prove problematic.

There is even a problem with too much spiritual investigation.

 

A parable;

Told in the name of the eighteenth century master Reb Simchah Bunam.^[1]

A prince bought a pure-bred stallion and to protect him from thieves, locked him into a stable built of stone.

The stable gate was bolted and guarded by an armed watchman.

One evening the Prince was strolling past the stable and saw the guard was looking perplexed. 'Hey' he called to the guard, 'what's on your mind?'

'There is this question is bothering me,' said the guard, 'when you sink a nail into the wall, where does the mortar go?'

'An important question,' said the prince, 'you do well to think about it.'

And the Prince went to sleep.

But the Prince couldn't sleep and so, some time later, the Prince went out for another stroll and again passed the guard looking perplexed.

'What's on your mind this time?'

'There is another question that is bothering me; when you eat a bagel where does the hole go?'

'Another important question,' said the prince, 'you do well to think about it.'

And the Prince went back to sleep.

But yet again sleep would not come, so yet again, he went out and yet again passed the guard looking perplexed.

'What is on your mind this time?'

'I have another question.' Said the guard, 'I can see the stable and I can see the stone walls and the gate, but the horse - where is the horse?

 

This is the problem of spending too much time in spiritual retreat and intellectual engagement.

We forget that we are supposed to be looking after a horse.

With too much thinking and sitting around we can forget what we are supposed to do.

 

So let me offer one simple and concrete request for action, at this time, this time when the simple and the concrete are the messages we should be hearing and the commitments we should be making to ourselves and our God.

 

I want you to do something before you start to eat this evening.

Doing something before we start eating is a well attested Rabbinic tradition. The medakdekim – the precisely observant amongst us –go home and bang in the first nail of our succah before eating.^[2]

 

But I want to suggest something else.

I want to ask that we go home and write a cheque before we start to eat.

Ach, who does cheques anymore.

Go home, log on, make an on-line donation.

Wait, if you have to, in frustration and hunger for the computer to whirr into life before you allow yourself the luxury of moving on from pull of this day.

 

I've never, in honesty, understood why we call it a Kol Nidrei Appeal, who carries money around on Kol Nidrei?

And then you have a day of ashamnu and bsefer chayim and achat v'achat and before you know it we are stuffing our stomachs full of all the goodies we have done without these past twenty-something hours and then we fall asleep.

And tomorrow we get up and go to work.

If we only speak about giving on Kol Nidrei we leave ourselves too many opportunities to forget about the horse.

 

So let me speak about money tonight and ask for action tonight so there is less time to forget, less time to lose the momentary impulse we might feel to support charities facing, this year, the same ferocious economic climate in which we all find ourselves.

 

We have chosen, this year, our own Shul and the UJIA as the charities we would wish you to support most strongly.

New London Synagogue, your Jewish Community – you can't pull off a day like this without office staff, without a full time Chazan, without a year-round choir. That costs.

We have a conversion programme bursting at the seams, an influx of new young adult members, we've had fifteen baby-naming ceremonies since I have been here; parents and toddlers turning to us to help them find meaningful points of entry into Jewish life and community. We are taking our pastoral responsibilities more seriously.

It all costs.

This autumn we are launching our education programme, we want to return New London to its rightful place as the centre for the most important conversations in Anglo-Jewry, the most important conversations in the global search for a place to stand between the rival poles of rampant secularism and religious fundamentalism.

New London is uniquely placed to be that centre, this is a challenge we must rise to meet. And it is a challenge that costs.

 

And our second beneficiary

We ask for support for the UJIA with whom we are building a resource centre in the Galil, the north of Israel, a centre which will bear the name of our beloved founder Rabbi.

And aside from honouring the memory of Rabbi Dr Louis Jacobs zichrono livracha.

And aside from helping some of our least advantaged brothers and sisters in a troubled land we all treat as home,

Aside from all this, this resource centre is part of a bigger effort to ensure that the Galil becomes a place where young Jews can find education, employment and a future.

For a Galil void of these things threatens the very soul of the State of Israel.

And that costs.

 

Go home and before you start eating support this. Support us. Support these.

 

Actually I don't even mind if you find a different charity to support.

I have a folder, in my office, with letters from a vast range of worthy organisations. Each asked me, asked us, to include them in our Kol Nidrei Appeal.

Each includes sometimes harrowing, sometimes moving accounts of the work they do and the even more extraordinary work they wish they could do.

And these letters haunt me. Let them haunt you.

 

British Friends of Neve-Shalom, Wahat al-Salaam

British Wizo

JAMI – The Jewish Association for the Mentally Ill

JAT, formerly the Jewish Aids Trust

Jewish Women's Aid

New Israel Fund

Nightingale House

Norwood

One Plus One Association of Immigrant Youth

The Ashdod Emergency Medical Centre

The Bar / Bat Mitzvah programme for Children with Special Needs run by the Masorti Movement in Israel

The Jewish Bereavement Counselling Service

The Jewish Council for Racial Equality

Tzedek

World Jewish Relief

It's not even the full list, I lost some letters.

Al cheit shechatati, for the sin I have committed ….

 

Hey, you could even give money to an organisation that has nothing to do with Jews at all.

That too would count.

You want to give money to cure cancer, care for the needy in this country or abroad, you want to give money to for any charitable purpose, that is fine.

 

Just do this.

Go home, write the cheque,

Before you feed your own needs - give.

Begin this Year with an act of generosity.

Now.

Before we forget or get distracted or overly satiated.

 

I know. It doesn't feel like a good time to giving money, we are all feeling a little spooked by the financial collapses out there.

So let me share some Torah to give us strength.

 

We all have to give, says the Talmud, אפי' עני המתפרנס מן הצדקה יעשה צדקה – even one who survives solely on charitable handouts has an obligation to perform acts of financial giving.^[3]

There is no level of financial destitution that absolves us of the need to support others.

 

And as for those of us in the blessed fortunate position of being a step or more away from destitution, let me offer this.

 

Rambam, in his laws of gifts to the needy, examines the obligation to leave the corners of the fields for the poor.

How much of a corner do you have to leave? He asks^[4]

There is, according to the Bible, no minimal amount.

According to the Bible you could leave a single sheaf and fulfil the obligation, but the Rabbis mandated that we must leave at least one sixtieth of our crop.

ומוסיף על האחד מששים

לפי גודל השדה

ולפי רוב העניים

ולפי ברכת הזרע,

And we add to that 1/60^th depending on the size of our field, the scale of poverty and the blessing of our crop's yield.

 

It's not a bad way to approach how much to give.

Regardless of the size of your field or the bounty of our harvest you have to leave a 60^th.

If our field is larger, we have to give more.

And if the needs of the poor are great, we have to give more.

If we are having a good year, we have to give more, maybe we are not having such a good year, but this is only one part of the equation. It must not be allowed to overshadow all else.

 

I'm going easy on us here. When it comes to tzedakah most Rabbis talk about the obligation to tithe – a tenth, but my sense is that tithing applies in a world free of taxation.

So it's a 1/60^th, plus.

 

For many of us it is not a great year, I'll accept that.

But the needs of the poor are definitely great, and may be increasing at a faster rate than our share portfolios are shrinking.

And for most of us our fields are still pretty large.

It's a 1/60^th plus.

 

Let me share one last text, before the gates close

There are four kinds of person, say the Rabbis of the Mishnah^[5]

One is the person who says,

שלי שלי ושלך שלך

 what is mine is mine and what is yours is yours - 

 

Some of the Rabbis say this is acceptable mediocrity, but yesh omrim – there are those that sheli sheli vshelcha shelcha is the way of Sodom.

There are those who say that the attitude

what is mine is mine and what is yours is yours -

Is the attitude of a city so evil it needed to be wiped from the face of the earth.

 

The attitude

 what is mine is mine and what is yours is yours - 

is an abdication of the notion that other people, other needs, impact upon me.

It is a sealing myself off from these other needs.

And we are back where we started, ten days ago when we began this magical journey.

Back at the sermon I gave on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, the sermon where I asked us to allow ourselves to be broken in upon, affected by those around us.^[6]

 

'What is mine is mine and what is yours is yours' will not do.

Even if we aren't feeling generous, even if we are scared for the value of our portfolio.

It's still 1/60^th plus.

 

We have some last moments of prayer together.

Before the gates close we should let our souls to be touched once more by this glorious liturgy.

We should reflect once more on our failings and our opportunities for improvement.

We should reflect once more on our mortality and the lives of those we have loved and lost.

And then we should go home.

And we should remember the horse.

And we should write out a cheque and only then eat.

And then, please God, we should be blessed to get on with a year of health, sweetness and joy.

 

Gemar Chatimah Tovah – may it come to us all.

---

^[1] Retold based on Elie Wiesel, Souls  on Fire p. 224

^[2] Rema OH 624:5

^[3] TB Gittin 7b

^[4] MT Matanot Levyanim 1:15

^[5] Avot 5:10

^[6] http://rabbionanarrowbridge.blogspot.com/2008/10/judaism-in-first-person-plural.html

It's Not Yours

For many of us our relationship, as Jews, with the world in which we live, has been one-way traffic.

The more we have engaged with the world in which we live

The more we have allowed that world to shape and colour the way we live our Jewish lives.

That's OK.

But today I want to make the case for a movement in the opposite direction.

I want to make the case for shaping and colouring the world out there by the way we understand our Jewish identity.

I want to talk about something that can make a difference beyond the walls of this Synagogue.

 

As Jews we have always made an impact on that world, out there.

 

As Jews we celebrate the three thousand year old claim of Genesis - that every human being is created in the image of God.

And this year marks the 60^th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, a declaration drafted by a Jew, a declaration based on this most central Jewish claim.

 

As Jews we celebrate the three thousand year old claim of Exodus - that slavery is vile and will always be overthrown.

And this great truth has been at the heart of every liberation narrative since, well since the time of Moses.

 

And now we need another great claim of our faith.

And it will need to be a great claim, for the challenges faced in the world out there are terribly terribly serious.

 

Let me take one verse.

Leviticus 25:23

Ki li haaretz, ci gerim v'toshavim atem imadi^[1]

For the earth is Mine [says God] and you are dwellers and sojourners with me.

 

This, perhaps, is the most needed Biblical message of our age.

We need it to break in on what I believe to be the greatest problem of our contemporary existence.

The greatest problem is that when we look at the world and its many material things and we think that we – in some meaningful way – can own them.

From a religious perspective this is simply wrong.

Ki li haaretz.

 

The credit crunch, the banking collapse, the stock market devaluations are scary.

Many of us – myself included – have seen the value of our property drop we've lost savings, pensions.

There will be others amongst us who have been rendered unemployed, even threatened by bankruptcy, destitution – those things are awful. And I don't want to downplay the horror of poverty.

But for the rest of us, those of us for whom the collapse of sub-prime mortgage bonds means not destitution, but rather a gnawing fear about our financial security and an ill-wished for need to tighten the belt,

For the rest of us I have this clear message.

Ki li haaretz,

It was never really our money in the first place.

We were its steward, its guardian, we looked after it as an act of grace and favour.

 

And now, well, we just davenned this in the Amidah led so beautifully by our Chazan

מָשׁוּל כְּחֶרֶס הַנִּשְׁבָּר
כְּחָצִיר יָבֵשׁ וּכְצִיץ נובֵל
כְּצֵל עובֵר

 as withering grass, a fading flower, a passing shadow,^[2]

Those material possessions are gone, or threatened.

 

You do look my son in a mov'd sort.

As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful sir.

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself.

Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve,

Leave not a rack behind.^[3]

 

That, of course, is Shakepeare's Propero

The Bible is more direct.

 

Ki li haaretz

It's not yours.

 

It is time to let our Judaism impact on our relationship with the world out there, and in particular with the way we treat the material nature of that world.

We need to step back from the drive to measure our life by the ebbs and flow of the stockmarket, for the problem is not that the FTSE is higher or lower, but that we think these kinds of numbers are a true measure of our value.

 

Let me share something else in the world out there that scares me far more even than this financial mess we are all in – the remorseless destruction of the natural resources of our planet.

It shouldn't need an ex-United States Vice-President or a United Nations Commission on Climate Change.

It certainly doesn't need a Rabbi to rehearse what we know.

We are ripping the very guts out of this planet.
And we are doing so in a profoundly un-Jewish way.

 

One day [says the Talmud] Honi ha-maagal - was journeying on the road and he saw a man planting a carob tree.

'How long before it produces fruit?' He asks

'Seventy years' Comes the reply

'Right,' says Honi – 'and you are going to live seventy years?!'

The man responds 'I found ready planted carob trees and as my ancestors planted these for me, I will plant for my children.'^[4]

 

And as for us -

At this rate, melting icecaps and all that - our grandchildren won't know polar bears.

 

Ki li haaretz

It's not yours.

 

Or as the Rabbis put it in a blunt Midrash

 

When God created the first human beings, God led them around the Garden of Eden and said: "Look at my works! See how beautiful they are—how excellent… See to it that you do not spoil and destroy My world; for if you do, there will be no one else to repair it.^[5]

 

Or here is another Midrash, this one based on the story of Noah.

In the Rabbis' mind Noah prophesied the coming catastrophe and was bluntly ignored, year in year out, right up to the point where the waters came rising from the deep. And then

 

Seven hundred thousand people gathered around the ark and implored Noah to grant them protection. With a loud voice he replied, 'Aren't you the rebellious ones? Haven't I prophesised for 120 years and you didn't listen to the word of God? And now you want to be kept alive?'

And the sinners cried out, 'So be it. We are ready to do teshuvah now, if only you will open the door of your ark to receive us.'

The crowd of sinners tried to take the entrance to the ark by force, but the wild beast keeping watch around the ark set upon them and many were slain, while the rest escaped, only to meet death in the waters of the flood.^[6]

 

This Midrash appeals to me even in its gloom.

It resonates with both the impending ecological catastrophe and the current financial collapse with equal prescience.

And now we are all trying to escape the flood.

 

Ki li haretz.

So how can we let this attitude to our material possessions 'break in' on us?

So how can we find another way,

To measure the value of our lives

To live lives that do not cause such distress to our battered planet?

 

Another verse.

ששת ימים תעבד ועשית כל מלאכתך:

(ט) ויום השביעי שבת ליקוק אלהיך

Six days work, do all your acts of labour,

But the Seventh day is a day of Shabbat to God.

 

This is the great gift of the Shabbat.

It allows, those of us who allow it to break in,

It allows us to recalibrate our attitude towards the material.

Six days we run, like hamsters on a wheel, to put food on our plates and to earn the necessary crust with which to pay for the car, the new clothes, the mobile telephony, the broadband exchange router.

For six days we are allowed to consider ourselves Masters of the Universe.

We are allowed to throw ourselves into in our financial, material lives.

Uvayom hashvii shvat vayinafash

But on the seventh day we are re-ensouled

 

On the Seventh day we bid 'stop, breathe.'

It is demanded that we remind ourselves that there are things in life that are more important than money.

We are commanded to commit to ways of valuing a life that cannot be measured in terms of bank balances and stock market indicators.

The seventh day is a spiritual practice in reminding ourselves that we have it all on grace and favour.

Ki li haaretz.

 

Actually, it isn't just Sabbath, though Sabbath is crucial, it is the whole apparatus of Jewish ritual practice.

All of Judaism serves as a training, a practice, a spiritual practice in realising

Ki li haaretz

 

'Judaism,' said Abraham Joshua Heschel,

'Is a candle to the soul.

It teaches us to hold on to the melody in the cacophony of life.

It teaches us to listen for the miraculous pulse of life which beats though the veins of the universe.^[7]

 

It's a sound that is heard most brightly on a day like today, a day like Shabbat, when we have stepped back from the pursuit of the material, we have allowed the world to get along without us.

We commit ourselves to be better humans, kinder, in particular we turn our attention to the relationships with those around us, our family, our partners, our colleagues, our friends.

On a day like today commit ourselves to acts of Tzedakah – justice, charity, equity.

We create a space in which to hear more clearly 'the miraculous pulse of life which beats though the veins of the universe.'

 

If a notion of a miraculous pulse beating through the veins of the universe sounds a little highfaluting and abstract, let me make things simpler.

For one day a week; leave the wallet at home.

For one day a week; pull out the intravenous cable that connects us to the internet, turn off the blackberry, don't pick up the phone.

For one day a week put down the credit card that promises we could buy happiness, and not have to pay.

 

For one day a week treat yourself to an escape from the loadstones of materiality.

And instead converse with your fellow human beings face-to-face, 'off-line' as we now have to call it.

Take time to listen to silence,

Take time to have the conversations that were always too rushed during the week.

Take time to celebrate being alive.

 

And protect this day with great dedication.

Fence this day off with candles and Kiddush.

Protect this day and let it protect you.

Strengthen it and it will strengthen you.

Because if ever there were religious claims whose time has come then these are those claims.

Ki li haaretz – It's not yours.

Uvayom hashevii, shavat vayinaafash – and the seventh day shall be a Shabbat and you shall be re-ensouled.

 

This is about more than our own state of spiritual fulfilment and richness.

These are calls, approaches, insights that the entire fragile and battered world needs, we need to share these insights, affirm their importance not just among Jews, but more broadly in the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic worlds in which we all live.

But the first step in helping the world out there to realise this most paramount truth is our own personal commitment  to this more spiritual and spirited way of living in the world.

 

Our greatest strengths, as Jews, have always shone out, eventually.

Those insights, approaches and passions we, as Jews, have tended in our own scriptures, lives and communities have eventually overturned the follies and failures of the world.

This is the greatest achievement of the Jews.

 

But before we can rely on anyone else understanding that possession doesn't really mean ownership,

Before this, we need to affirm our own commitment to the verse ki li haaretz we need to affirm our own commitment to the Sabbath as a way of ensuring we, our children and our children's children have a more balanced world in which to live.

 

I don't make a guarantee that being a better Jew will make you richer.

I don't pretend that observing Shabbat will increase the value of your share portfolio.

But I do offer this guarantee.

Know that the material things in this world are not our own – we have them as an act of grace.

Know that taking a day in seven to recalibrate our relationship with the material world is vital

And we will feel richer.

And we will be better for it

And we might even save the world.

 

My prayer and my blessing is this.

If we can do this,

If we change the way we view and treat the material world in which we live

Then, regardless of the decrees we will face in the year to come, this year, our new year, our new life, will be the sweeter and richer for it.

 

L'Shannah Tovah.

financial markets and paradigm shifting

I received a touching e-mail from a congregant, a city man, returning from holiday this week,

 

Thank you for your E Mail. I returned from a few days away and since then I have been concentrating on the demise of the banking system as we knew , and didn't much love, it. I haven't had time to respond to the enquiry and shall do so shortly.

 

I have spent a good deal of the hours of darkness awake, this last week.

I wish I could say it has been preparing my soul for the spiritual task of the Festivals to come, but that would be untrue. Harry isn’t sleeping so well, so, armed only with the BBC World Service, I’ve listened to a lot of late night radio.

Late night reporting, from America in particular, has felt apocalyptic.

 

It is of course dangerous territory for a Rabbi and more important than that, it is surely, as Chairman Mao said of the French Revolution, ‘far too early to tell.’

 

As you will see in the newsletter, shortly to arrive through a letterbox near you, I’m presenting a major education programme on money in November. Hopefully things will have calmed down a bit by then.

 

But I feel this is something you have to address.

I’m interested in this notion of the demise of the old.

It may well be that when the dust settles we will be right back where we started, but there does seem the possibility that something has changed.

A paradigm shift.

The end of one way of doing business in the world.

That’s scary, dangerous.

And it is also something about which Judaism has plenty to say.

 

I wanted to look at how Judaism responds to paradigm shifts.

 

The central moment, the central paradigm shift of the Jewish people has to be the moment of the destruction of the temple. 70CE

In the space of a Biblical blink of an eye Judaism is transformed from a faith tied to its land, to a wandering diaspora.

From a Temple based priestly cult, to a Synagogue based rabbinically led combination of prayer and scholarship.

All of a sudden the entirety of the book of Leviticus, not to mention large swathes of Exodus become irrelevant, in terms of Jewish life.

And then the slaughter. At just one location, Gamla, the Roman attackers killed four thousand defenders of the city and five thousand threw themselves into the steep precipices of the hill-top settlement.

I’m pleased to say that things don’t seem to be quite that bad in the city.

 

Josephus, the great chronicler of these times is clearly writing in the belief that the Jewish journey has ended.

And here, he says at the end of his great work, Wars of the Jews, we shall put an end to this our history.

But, of course, as we know, Judaism did not die out.

And certainly there has been an impact on Jewish life of the destruction of the Temple.

We are a very different religion today than we once were, sacrifices are indeed no more, but there was no radical break.  Judaism evolved, rolled with the punches, ebbed, flowed

 

The key, at least in the eyes of the Rabbis, much of this was down to the bravery of one man.

Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai who got out of a besieged Jerusalem, hidden, playing a corpse, in a coffin, being carried past guards who wanted to run the coffin through to ensure that no live body was within.^[1]

 

Yochanan escapes Jerusalem and sets up a Yeshivah in Yavneh from which springs the entire corpus of Rabbinic Judaism.

Judaism, survives.

Josephus is not, of course, the first person to mis-diagnose the passing the Judaism.

Not the first person to imagine the unfolding of the narrative that began at Sinai will come to an end.

 

Two others – who made the same error.

 

Shabbatai Tzvi,

The great false messiah of Jewish life passed away in 1676. A the height of the furore that surrounded him he claimed the end of the world was coming – he claimed to be the Messiah. Thousands were convinced

“Everybody talked about having seen a pillar of fire. [read one contemporary account] To some it had appeared at noontime, to another at night, a thirds have seem the moon like red fire, to a fourth the heavens had been opened and he beheld a fiery gate in which there stood  a man in the likeness of Rabbi Tzvi with a crown on his head.’^[2]

 

Tzvi had the classic prayer for the Government under whose graciousness Jews live, ‘may the one who gives salvation to Kings and dominon to princes’ abolished and re-written to bless himself, in much the same language.

Here was a new dawn, a paradigm shift.

That too was a mistake.

And certainly there has been an impact on Jewish life of Shabbatai Tzvi.

There are certain places of radical Jewish thought now, probably forever closed as a result of the catastrophe of Shabbatai Tzvi, but Judaism evolved, rolled with the punches, ebbed, flowed

 

And of course there is the horrific Museum planned, but never realised by the Nazis who thought that the end of the story had come.

They were wrong too.

The 1,564 Torah Scrolls which were intended to be the centrepiece of this horrifically misbegotten plan are shortly to be made, again, available to the public.

At Westminster Synagogue.

And certainly there has been an impact on Jewish life of Shabbatai Tzvi.

There are certain Jewish worlds gone forever as a result of Holocuast, and that is an unspeakable tragedy, but Judaism evolved, rolled with the punches, ebbed, flowed. Got on with it.

 

The point is this.

Jews don’t really admit to paradigm shifts.

We don’t really believe in the story every coming to an end.

Instead we believe in change, development.

If something isn’t working, allow it space to redevelop, grow.

 

It’s more than history, it’s also a guide to life.

An approach, most particularly at this time of year, to teshuvah.

Thursday night I was teaching Rav Kook on teshuvah.

Don’t let yourself be imprisoned by what you perceive to be dead ends, taught Kook.

 

Roll, ebb, use the twinges of pain to free, to lift to free and to evolve into something better, even out of the darkest corners.

Kook, like so many great Jews was a tremendous romantic.

In a world created by a good God,

In a human life created in the image of God.

Nothing is really that terrible.

And when faced with what might seem like the end of the world, the Jewish response is simply this, to respond.

To evolve, to roll with the punches, to ebb and to flow.

To allow ourselves to be impacted by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but steel ourselves with the bravery of Rabban Yochanan Ben Zakkai and go on.

 

Shabbat shalom

 

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^[1] Gittin 56a

 ^[2] Cited in G. Scholem Sabbatai Sevi p.418