Rosh Hashannah 5779 - Day One Alterity

In case anyone be under any doubt, I agree with you. Jeremy Corbyn has acted antisemitically.
Too many times.

And too many people in the Labour party have been acquiescent - or worse - in this antisemtism.

Here’s a phrasing I’ve appreciated, as these conversations seem, too often, seem based on the notion that there is something unalterably evil about Israel, a country whose right to exist, surely, should be a given.

This is the difference between a Zionist and a non-Zionist;

A Zionist is someone who agrees that every people have the right to self-determination.

An Anti-Zionist is someone who agrees that every people have the right to self-determination, apart from the Jews.

Those of you who are standing up to this blight in contemporary politics - I join you, I salute you. But I want to speak about something broader today something more religious; on this Rosh Hashanah day.

Aside from the disgust and the anger this story stirs in me - what is the most ancient of hatreds doing on the front pages day after day in the year 2018! - there’s a big part of me that is frustrated that our energies are getting sucked into this important fight when there are so many other important fights. So there will be more on this - I am interested in this - but I want to do something else also.

I want to talk about Alterity - a word made famous - well famous in my world - by the Jewish philosopher Immanuel Levinas.

Alterity is an approach to life built from valuing otherness, other people in particular. It’s the refusal to force other people into being just like me. To value alterity is to value the very opposite of the cosy, self-serving narcissism of so much of the world in which we live. Too often we surround ourselves with voices that agree with us and consider those different to us with disdain and distrust - if we consider them at all. That, Levinas would say, is the greatest human failing. He’s right.

Ve-ahavtah Le’Reacha Comacha - love your fellow as you love yourself says the Torah.

It’s the central organising principle in Judaism, taught Rabbi Akiva. Many of us will have heard that idea many times.

But here’s the thing.

Loving your fellow like yourself cannot be a big deal if it means loving people you like already. It can’t be a big deal if it means loving only those people who don’t do things we don’t understand, or disagree with.

Ve-ahavtah Le’Reacha can’t be a big deal if it were easy.

Loving others, valuing others, doesn’t mean agreeing with others. Rather it means caring for them even in disagreement, valuing their difference of opinion even if it feels wrong.

A commitment to alterity doesn’t mean we don’t try and persuade people of their errors. It doesn’t mean we accept the unacceptable.

It means that we make a space for the other’s otherness.

The great commentator on the Zohar, Rav Ashlag had a wonderful term for what I’m calling alterity. He called it - Ahavat Zulato[1] - the love of the one who is other. Ahavat Zulato, he says, “draws a person beyond their narrow world of pain and obstacle and into a world of timelessness and breadth.”

What he means is that focussing on loving people like us, sets up our lives to experience frustrations and pettiness whenever we encounter difference - which we are destined to do all the time. We might think life is easier in a clique where everyone behaves the same, dresses the same and values the same, but cliques are dull and too often more than a little bitchy - that’s no fun for anyone, even the people who find themselves momentarily in favour.

On the other hand when we commit to Ahavat Zulato, when we set up our lives to value people in their difference, we come to appreciate the splendour of humanity. We set ourselves up for joy.

Ashlag went further - the whole purpose of creation - the kabbalist wrote - was God’s desire to have an ‘other’ to be in a relationship with. God wanted something that was beyond God, God valued us - values us, because we are not like God.

God values alterity.

So should we.

Let me go back to the matters of politics - polis - the State.

I’m a democrat only in the sense that Churchill was a democrat - it’s the worst system of Government apart from all the others. I’m not interested in power wielded by majorities. I’m, frankly, nervous of the masses getting together and deciding what’s right for me - in my oddness and idiosyncrasy.

The thing I love about democracies is the way good democracies control the power of the majority; limiting how much power the majority gets to wield. Good democracies value as absolute NOT the majority, but the minority; the right of the opposition to be an opposition, the right to protest, to disagree and to be different. Good democracies need good oppositions. When I hear politicians, in this country or any other, suggesting that to disagree is somehow traitorous I get deeply nervous.

I believe in alterity because I want to live in a society that is as vibrant and multi-faceted as possible.

Valuing alterity is how we learn, how we develop economically, scientifically, artistically - in every way. I really believe in this alterity thing.

And here’s how to value alterity.

Don’t poke fun at people who disagree with you.

Don’t attack people for a supposed sin of disagreeing with you.

Don’t assume others are only disagreeing with you because they have it in for you.

There’s too much of all of that in the world, and none of it is helping.

Engage critically, seriously, even do other people the honour of imagining that it’s you, after all, who might be in the wrong. It’s good to be confident in what we believe, but make allowance for the doubts of others too.

So much for being a better person, what’s it got to do with being better Jews?

As a Rabbi, I struggle with this creeping sense that the melting pot is the way to go. I sometimes hear an argument that Jews should really just consider ourselves just like everyone else, universalist members of a universal society. And that view is wrong; it’s wrong ethically, politically, economically, emotionally. It’s wrong in every way I can count. Among the things we should value when we value alterity - difference - is our own difference; as Jews, as proud committed engaged Jews who understand our faith and our tradition and the contribution we can make to a society in our difference, in our alterity.

We fail to play our part when our Jewish identity - and the things we do to strengthen and preserve that identity - become ever more attenuated.

That’s not to say the antisemtism is the fault of the Jews. I’m not making that point at all. But the power to shift the debate is, in part, in our hands.

There’s this creeping sense many Jews have that the way for us to get on in the world is to request from our schools and our employers and our selves less and less time off work for Jewish sacred celebration. That view is wrong. When we create space in society for our own alterity we strengthen the respect for us in our difference and we strengthen the respect for the difference of others also. The Second Day of Rosh Hashanah is just about the most important day of the religious year. It’s worth a day off work.

I haven’t done the maths - I don’t know how you could do the maths - but in that extraordinary list of Jewish Nobel Prize winners and Jewish titans of creativity and industry I can’t imagine there is anyone who would have failed to make their impact on the world had they not worked on Second Day Rosh Hashanah. But I do believe many of them would have failed had they not relished their own otherness, had they not mined their own otherness for strength, inspiration and insight.

Take off Second Day Rosh Hashanah. If you really can’t, come back at 6:30 tonight for Maariv. Come for first day Succot. Come for Shabbat. Come to understand more, to feel more at home in our alterity. We shouldn’t be strangers to our self.

There’s this creeping sense that we are somehow better members of the human race when we abdicate a commitment to keeping Kosher when presented with a piece of treyf steak. And that view is wrong. Next time you see treyf steak offered on a menu, order something else. Next time you are invited to hosts who might not know, explain ahead of time. It’s not so hard. It might save Judaism, it might save the world.

We need more faith in our own alterity.

I know we get nervous when making claims for our alterity, but unless we confront that nervousness we can get locked into a cycle of embarrassment. We claim less and less until there is nothing left.

A tale lifted from Devorah Baum’s newly published book - The Jewish Joke.

Two people, who used to be proud of being Jews, meet on the street. They haven’t seen one another for some time.

“How are you?” says one.

“Fine” says the other.

End of joke.

(It’s not supposed to be funny).

There’s a muscle that is atrophying in our Jewish identity; it’s the muscle that knows how to explain, politely, but with self-confidence, that we don’t do the same thing as everyone else and that we would be grateful - but also that we expect - respect for our difference - a respect we open-heartedly offer to reciprocate for others in their differences also.

I know it’s tricky - but only at first. The first time we respectfully request a space for our own difference, the easier it is the second time, and more often than not it won’t take a second time.

And if it does go wrong, well, the person who takes umbrage at a polite request for the acceptance of my difference as a Jew is probably not the sort of person I want to spend too much time with.

That brings me back to Corbyn and the Labour party he leads.

When the Labour MP, Frank Field, resigned the parliamentary whip he said he did so for two reasons; because of the antisemtism, and because of the “culture of intolerance, nastiness and intimidation.” It’s the same issue. If you don’t like Jews because Jews are different, you betray your dislike of anyone who holds onto difference. No-one is intolerant just of Jews.

We don’t combat intolerance by effacing our own difference as Jews.

We don’t promote the value of alterity by effacing our own alterity.

No-one is fooled when we efface our alterity as Jews, not even ourselves.

Two Jews meet for the first time, ‘My name was Blum, what was yours?’[2]

I know it’s hard for many of us to feel confident enough in our relationship to Judaism to make the claims that our Jewish differences should be honoured. We are, too much of the time, too concerned that we might be seen as a hypocrite, or a fundamentalist, or maybe we just don’t have enough knowledge to understand why one thing or another is worth standing up for.

So here’s my top trip.

Worry less, do more.

Judaism is a bit like love. If we worry too much about whether we love someone and how exactly we should show our love, and whether we should call our possible lover back today, or tomorrow, or possibly the third day after we last spoke ... the whole thing will probably just dribble away.

But if you behave in a loving way there’s a chance of it working out.

And if you can get the words, ‘I love you,’ out of your mouth, there’s a chance your conversation partner might become your lover.

The same goes for Judaism. If we wait to understand enough about Shabbat, or prayer ... if we wait long enough to be sure it’s worth being a bit different - it will be too late. If someone asks if we are serious about our Judaism and we prevaricate and equivocate and obfuscate, we’ll persuade ourselves out of this glorious heritage.

So come, join us. Do things. Take opportunities. Speak up. Start now, start in this New Year, start tomorrow when I’ll have more to say about saving the world, and saving Judaism.

Do things. Take opportunities. Speak up. Start now, start in this New Year. May it come to us all for good, in health, and alterity.

Shannah Tovah

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[1] I’m grateful to my colleague Rabbi Adam Zagoria-Moffat for putting me on to Rav Ashlag’s articulation, found in the Sulam, in the article on The Essence and Purpose of Religion. בביאת האדם אל אהבת זולתו, עובר האדם מתוך עולמו הצר המלא מכאובים ואבני נגף, אל עולם נצחי ורחב http://www.kab.co.il/heb/content/view/full/82715

[2] http://www.diacronia.ro/ro/indexing/details/V218/pdf. From T. Farkas, Jewish Surname Changes in Hungary (19^th-20^th Century).

Being Religious and Being Good

Do you have to be religious to be a good person?

No, clearly not.

Are all people who profess to be religious good people?

Sadly, no, there are some people professing to be good people who are pretty awful.

But - and this is my question - does it help?

Does being religious make it more likely that you will be a good person, does being religious help?

I think so.

Let me get stuck into the question in two ways, both prompted by an extraordinary moment at the end of this week’s Torah reading which will help us understand what it means to be religious, and what it means to be good. Spoiler alert - they are one and the same thing but don’t leave quite yet, come with me on the journey.

There’s an argument between Moses and his brother and sister - Aaron and Miriam. They are jealous, ‘has God only spoken to Moses, didn’t he speak to us as well?’ God’s unimpressed. He calls the three siblings together and calls out to Aaron and Miriam - ‘Usually I make myself known to prophets in a dream, but not so with Moses. With him, I speak mouth to mouth. He has seen the image of God. So how come you speak against him? And God was angry with them and left.

You might think I like this story because it’s about a family of two boys and girl being told to get on. And I’m all in favour of families with two boys and a girl getting on. But that’s not it, I’m interested in this idea of God speaking to Moses mouth to mouth’ - peh el peh - in the Hebrew. Actually there is an echo of this image elsewhere in the Torah - way back in the book of Exodus the Bible says that God spoke to Moses face to face - panim el panim.

But this is all a bit odd, for a Jew - we are used to claiming that God has no mouth - like you or I have a mouth. God is God, not a human being. We are used to claiming that God has no a face - like you or I have a face. And what does it mean when the Bible says that Moses ‘saw the image of God - tmunat adonai yabit? Surely the biggest claim of a monotheistic religion like Judaism is that God has no image.

We are at the very heart of the question of what it means to be religious. What exactly is this God thing anyway?

This is a commentary from one of the great Chassidic masters of the late C18 century, Levi Yitzhak of Beridichtev.

Says Levi Yitzhak,[1]

ובאמת זה האדם כשהוא במדריגה זו שיש לו עזר ה' להסתכל על האי"ן אז השכל שלו הוא בטל במציאות

“Moses had the assistance of God to see that which is utterly beyond all sight. And in that moment, his human this-worldly intellect is utterly surpassed - to the point of disappearance.”

אחר כך כשאדם חוזר אל עצמות השכל אז הוא מלא שפע

“And after an experience like that, when Moses returns to the this-world realm of human intellect, he is overflowing with a flow of energy that comes from the Divine - the Hebrew word is Shefa.”

What Levi Yitzhak means is that the way Moses saw God, face to face, had nothing to do with the way light enters through the cornea and is refracted onto the retina in such a way electronic messages are sent through the optic nerve that the visual cortex of the brain recognises as images.

When Moses saw God he experienced sight in a way that no other human being has ever experienced sight.

Another of greatest Rabbis - Maimonides - zeroes in on these verses when he tries to explain quite how unlike any other prophet Moses was. Anything you know about sight - that’s not what Moses saw. Anything you know about speech - that’s not what Moses heard.

Perhaps the best way to explain is through the example of a great short story, written by Edwin Abbott a long time ago. In the story Flatland everyone exists only in two dimensions until someone realises that there is a third dimension, and that world doesn’t just go up & down and left & right, but in & out too. Or maybe you might be into string theory - the great attempt of physicists to work out all the complexities of the world. Every time they can’t explain the world with a number of dimensions you thought you knew about the add another dimension to explain the things that were previously beyond imagining. According to the string theorists, there are up to ten, or possibly eleven dimensions in the Universe. And when physicists look at the eighth or ninth or tenth dimension they don't look like you or I look at another person, they are looking that it’s almost impossible to understand.

And the dimension in which God has a face that Moses sees says Levi Yitzhak, is the dimension beyond all that, it’s the dimension that Moses could only see with the assistance of God, it’s the dimension that wiped out all human intelligence. But having seen that image which is beyond sight, Moses understood something no other human has ever understood, and no other human can ever understand.

Being religious means allowing for that to be the case, it means allowing for there to be that extra dimension beyond all human intellect, beyond all human sight, a realm where the secrets of the universe will always be beyond human grasp and understanding.

And in the Jewish tradition, the claim we make is that one great prophet, Moses, in a way I cannot understand and cannot replicate and cannot test and cannot explain, crossed that threshold between the dimensions of human capacity and the realm of Shefa - divine energy.

That’s the nature of religion.

So what has any of that got to do with being good?

We need one more verse.

Way back in the first Chapter of Genesis God creates humanity, and the Torah says this,

God said, Let us make humanity in our image and our likeness, so God created humanity in God’s image.

And this, for me is the heart of all Jewish ethics. Just like the shadow thrown by a cube is a square, and just like the shadow a sphere is a circle, so too the shadow, the image, of God is me, or you, or you - or any of us.

Actually, that’s kind of the point - the image of God isn’t a single human being - it’s the totality of all human beings that have ever or will ever be created.

In a 2,000-year-old Rabbinic Text, Mishnah Sanhedrin[2], the Rabbis ask why God created all humanity from a single original human - and their best answer is that it was God’s way of demonstrating how beyond understanding God really is, for - say the Rabbis when a flesh and blood Monarch wants to press a coin, they create a mould and every coin comes out looking exactly the same - but when the king of Kings, the Holy Blessed One, wants to create a coin they create a mould and every coin comes out looking different. That’s us, of course, we are the coins that come out looking different.

It’s one of my favourite images in all of Rabbinics, because back then, just like today you get faces on coins. And back then coins were things that most human beings thought were really important. But coins are boring - they all look the same. It’s human beings that are really important, because we all look different, and each of us in some unique, mysterious way that is beyond human ability to describe, each of us contains within our humanity something of the image of God.

And this is where religious ethics comes in. If you have a belief that there is a divine power beyond all human understanding and that that divine power created us to contain some element, some whisper, some potentiality,  some shadow of that divinity in our humanness - then how could you possibly mistreat another human.

The best word to think about to understand religious ethics is ‘otherness’ - God is wholly other, wholly beyond in a way I can’t explain, in a way that makes no human sense. But every other human being in the world is other in a very direct way that tests my ability to respect the image of God every time I want to have an argument with my siblings, or every time I walk past a homeless person on the street, or every time I buy something in a shop, or send an email or ...

The goal of our human lives is to acknowledge the otherness of other people in such a way as to acknowledge how they are created in the image of God every bit as much as I am.

The goal of our human lives - not Moses, Moses was different, Moses looked at God face-to-face and saw the image of God directly - but you or I  - our goal is to look at the image of God as expressed in the faces of the people we meet, the people we know, and the people we don’t know, the people we like and - and here’s the kicker, even the people we don’t like.

And you want to know how to be really good? Treat everyone you meet as if they are made in the image of God.  I don’t know a better way of putting it. I don’t think any secular philosophy has ever got close. I like Immanuel Kant, but Kant falls short.  I think the secular world will fall short because the secular world doesn’t value otherness the way religion values otherness.

Because for religious people other people aren’t something to be tolerated or to be treated as ends in themselves, or to be done to as one would wish to be done for oneself.

For religious people, other people are our test of living up to the gift of our creation.

There’s politics here - how should we treat all those other people who come to our country. The Mayor of London was at an Iftar held in a local Synagogue this week. He said something about how important it is for people from different religions and cultures to come together this because, and I quote “our diversity isn’t a weakness but our greatest strength, it isn’t a challenge to be managed but an asset to be unlocked.” Diversity isn’t a weakness, otherness isn’t a problem, it’s the solution.

But let me end with something micro - about our everyday lives.

Let me assign some homework. Try this.

Look at someone, anyone, and imagine you are seeing on their face the image of God. Imagine you are face-to-face with God.

Shabbat Shalom

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[1] Pekudei 13

[2] 4:5

A Three Part Guide to Jewish Life - Part Three - Otherness

This is the last of a series of three sermons where I am trying to set out the heart of my Jewishness; what I think is and ought to be the heart of our Jewish engagement here, at New London Synagogue.

Let me bring those of us who might need a little refresher, a sense what I think we've covered until now.

Two weeks ago I talked about belief. I tried to articulate a rational supernaturalism where we celebrate everything scientists have found out about this Universe, how it came to be, how it works and how we come be part of this story while celebrating also those parts of this Universe that are beyond measurement and double-blind peer-reviewed scientific review - the nature of love, the very existence of anything rather than nothing. I talked about fostering a sense of radical amazement and practising gratitude as a way of sensitising ourselves to this underlying nature of our existence.

Last week I spoke about love, about how acknowledging our very existence should place us in the habit of loving the God who has created all this and also our fellow human beings who hold in their very essence the image of the Divine. I suggested that even the most apparently love-less alleyways of our faith can and indeed should be understood as acts of love.

I've a couple of outstanding pieces from last week's business I want to return to this week. Last week I noted that the Torah obligates three kinds of love, a love of God and one's fellow - that I dealt with last week. But also a love of the ger - the stranger. I'll have more to say about that today. Secondly, I suggested last week that many of these apparently love-less areas of Jewish life are really trainings in love. Let me pick up that point now.

Odd Mitzvot in Judaism, not wearing Shatnetz - garments of wool and linen, not mixing milk and meat and the like are a training in observance, allowing us to see things and the inter-relation between them and the creator of all things more closely. We are being trained to realise that milk comes from cows, not bottles. The point I made last week is that by becoming more observant we have the chance to make decisions to be better, better consumers - say - of clothes or meat. We become sensitised to the notion that our actions count and that there is a difference between acting well and acting wickedly. And now what?

The problem is that people can do a whole lot of observance and still be brutish. Punctilious observance of the laws of Kashrut, or Shabbat or Shatnetz guarantees no level of decency in behaviour. It's a problem recognised by Nachmonidies[1] who seems to have coined the term naval bereishut hatorah to refer to a person who misbehaves even though they are technically fulfilling each of the black-letter commands of the Halachic system.

We are called upon to live with an underlying ethical approach that is both shaped by our observance, but also becomes ever more apparent at the edges of the observances we are commanded to perform. Once the black letter of law comes to an end what we do at that point is a revealing of our underlined ethic approach to the world; an ethical approach that has both shaped us and been shaped by the practices we have been observing along the way to this point.

Of course, the ethical underpinning of our lives influences us at every step, even if we don't recognise it, even if we are doing the most straightforward things we are in a million tiny, unconscious ways revealing our ethical approach.

So what is the heart of the ethical underpinning that should be at the heart of our Jewish existence? It's the third of the commands to love, the single most emphasised idea in the entire Torah - the command to love the stranger - the ger.

The ger, in the Biblical mind, is the non-Jew who comes to live among the Jewish people in a Jewish state where they have no land and, therefore possibilities of economic survival are slim. They are the most fragile, most poor and most weak members of society. In possibly the most stunning moment in the Torah we are given a precise reason to love the ger - the stranger - 'ki gerim hayitem beretz mitzrayim' - for you were gerim - strangers - in the Land of Egypt.

Nachmanides suggests this reason for this repeated claim; Don't imagine that your status as the landed, secure and powerful is so secure. Once upon a time the Egyptians were in charge and you were oppressed, now you are in charge, don't think that I, God, can't roll the dice again and you will find yourselves back underneath the power of others. It’s about more than an attempt to make us humble and gracious for what we have, it’s the ultimate test of whether we understand what it means to be decent  don we respond as a master in a better way than our masters behaved to us when we were slaves? When God tells Abraham that his descendants are to be oppressed and beaten by others he couldn't have imagined the awful catalogue of abuse and hatred suffered by the Jewish people through the generations. But our experiences of being on the receiving end of oppression can never justify our own oppression of others, in fact, the contrary is the case. Our experience of oppression can perhaps only be justified as sensitising us to the awfulness of anyone being oppressed.

We must love the stranger for we were strangers. We must love those who are different to us, and especially those who are less secure than we are, for we have a profound understanding of what it is to be different and insecure - as insecure as a Fiddler on the Roof.

The third tenet in this journey into an understanding of our Jewish identity is otherness. How do we treat otherness when, as Jews, we meet it, as indeed we must meet it all the time?

We are on the territory of the great 20th C French Jewish thinker Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas was obsessed; the word is not too strong, by the face-to-face encounter - a phrasing he adopts from the Torah where God and Moses meet Face-to-Face. A face to face encounter is a test, successfully encountering the other face-to-face involves recognising the radical otherness of the other. He's French he writes like this. It involves recognising the extent to which the other person's fate is bound up in the decisions we make. When we encounter another face-to-face we realise that the other is profoundly different to us, different likes and fears that demand respect. We can't just subsume their interests and desires into ours, for they are different to us. More than this, when we encounter the other face-to-face we realise that the other - when we look into their eyes is terribly fragile, mortal. 

We are all just a thin veneer away from being strangers, our surface comforts covering a deeper level of fear and emotional fragility, just as our skin provides a thin protection for out mortality and physical fragility.

For Levinas, the face-to-face encounter is the ethical moment in our lives, the moment when we make decisions about how to treat others; and, in particular, the weaker and the more fragile.

It's much easier to walk past a beggar on the street when we don't have to look at them face-to-face. It's much easier to treat someone with cavalier disdain by email than in a face-to-face encounter.

But if we can become brave enough to encounter others face-to-face, honestly, if we can allow their difference from us and their fragility to shape our actions we can become ethical.

And now, I think, all this training in appreciating otherness in milk and meat and wool and linen in the thousand ways in which a Halachic life sensitises us to the nuances of difference make more sense. They are training in the ultimate encounter with otherness and difference. They are a training in how to respond to that difference recognising so much of what we. OK, I, have been on about these past three weeks.

Can we recognise difference and allow it, not wishing to suppress it as we have been suppressed so many times and in so many ways. Can we treat difference in such a way to as to reveal we understand that all humanity is created in the image of God, our fellow and the stranger alike? Can we love difference, and through that act of love reveal our love of God and our fellow?

Can our acts of love reveal an underlying belief in a creator who is worthy of our love, as we re-encounter again and again the radical miracle of our lives, as humans, healthy humans for those of us so blessed, Jewish humans perhaps most especially. And can we act in ways that reveal our gratitude for that with which we are blessed.

This is the Jewish task. This is the task for us at New London. I commend it to us all.

It’s a task that is worthy of our every effort for the obligation is great, but, I believe, the rewards equally so.

On the Difference Between Adult Freedom and Childish Freedom - A Sermon for Shabbat HaGadol with added quesitons.

Shabbat HaGadol

Freedom is celebrated in an oddly sedate manner.

No wild parties on the streets.

Very opposite of Bacchanalian celebration.

4 measured cups.

Bitter herbs, salt water.

Freedom comes dipped in the suffering.

Freedom hurts.

 

Empathy as so central.

Hayav Adam Lirot Et Atzmo keilu hu yatzah miMitzrayim

 

Heart of Passover is the ability to see beyond the self.

Put oneself in the position of another human being.

Test of humanity.

 

From perspective of child development,

Tiny baby knows only own needs. And if these needs are not immediately met scream.

Then there comes a moment when a small child becomes aware of the other – that the world become aware of otherness.

That’s the beginning of emotional growth.

Hopefully later on there comes a moment when a growing child accepts obligations to the rest of the world, accepts constraints and limitations on their own choices and freedoms because they know that their lives are enrichened by their taking care of others.

We call that moment the Bar Mitzvah – adult freedom.

 

So there is such a thing as a child’s freedom. Oblivious to anyone else’s experience of my own potential, focussed only on what I want and what I get.

And there is an adult freedom. A freedom make more real by partaking in the notion that our freedom can be measured by our willingness to take care of others, feel their concerns, needs and dreams.

 

Two moments around the Seder

Fast of the Firstborn – feel the losses of the Egyptians – marked Monday after Shacharit. All welcome.

And then, the most perfect ritual in the whole seder.

The pouring out of wine when get to the plagues.

16 times with the 16 mentions of the plagues

 

15^th Century, Don Isaac Abarvanel

Proverbs – rejoice not when your enemy falls, let your heart not be glad when he stumbles.

 

This is the custom that makes our celebration of our own freedom adult.

 

Magnificent 20^th Century Jewish theologian and philosopher, Immanuel Levinas

My being in the world, or my place in the sun, my being at home, have these not also been the usurpation of spaces belonging to the other man whom I have already oppressed or starved or driven out into a third world.

The sensitivity to this dynamic is the root of ethics

This is the root of adult freedom.

 

To come right up to date

 

Obama – in Israel & Palestine this week.

Spoke beautifully and movingly about the coming Passover, the Jewish people’s relationship with freedom and the overthrow of slavery.

Spoke beautifully about the establishment of the Israeli state and powerfully about the right of this State to defend itself and its people from terrorists and military attach.

But also said this.

 

The Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and justice must also be recognized. Put yourself in their shoes [Obama told his audience of Israeli students] – look at the world through their eyes [he continued]. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own, and lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of her parents every single day. It is not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished... Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land.

 

Obama’s talking about an adult kind of Freedom. The one that comes with the recognition of cost and the fear of what my freedom does to my neighbour.

 

Religion gets a bad press.

Those opposed to religion like to blame religion for the closed mindedness of those who only understand a child’s version of freedom, no matter what their age.

But it’s a terrible mischaracterisation of religion – of Judaism certainly.

 

Central of Jewish thought is the notion of plurality of humanity.

Mishnah

When King of flesh and blood

When the King of Kings, Holy Blessed One – everyone comes out different.

 

There is even a blessing to be said when see a great number of human beings, recognition of the difference between us can only be owned by God, can’t be subsumed by any human.

Levinas diagnosed a totalitarianising tendency to force all humanity into a conformity that can never be. A tendency that needs to be fought back as we learn to accept we cannot subsume all humanity to our own needs – like a tiny child.

 

Leading American Orthodox Rabbi, Brad Hirschfield, new book

You Don't Have To Be Wrong for Me To Be Right

Reads verses from Isaiah, in fact reading the entire Biblical and Rabbinic canon.

We don't all need to be the same. I don't need everyone in the world to be Jewish. I don't need every Jew to choose the form of Judaism I myself have chosen, even though I love and am enlivened by this version of my tradition!

Why [should] being right depend on everyone else being wrong? Do other women need to be ugly in order for my wife to be beautiful? 

Wanting to make everyone else just like me is narcissism. Learning to interact with, to respect, and even to love people who are different from me [is the heart of truly] spiritual work.

Not only that religion is not the cause of blinkered self obsession and totalitarianising tendencies, rather that religion is the pathway which opens our eyes to the suffering of others,

Religion reminds us, even at the highest moments of our own celebration of our own freedom, that we cannot be free when another Divine creation is suffering.

Religion reminds us to be pluralists, aware that the other doesn’t need to be wrong for me to be right.

Religion, and specifically the religious notion that all humans are created in the image of the Divine is secret to the enormous possibility of plurality.

 

So at this time of questioning.

At this time of celebrating Freedom, perhaps only the childish freedom, but if we are so blessed, a celebration of an adult freedom.

Some of my questions for the upcoming Festival of Freedom.

 

What breaks us out of the self-obsession a childish sense of Freedom and allows us to feel the broader perspective of adult freedom?

What do we need to do to acknowledge that ‘You don’t have to be wrong for me to be right?’

How can we cultivate more space in our hearts.

 

Shabbat Shalom,

Chag Pesach Sameach, A wonderful Pesach celebration to all