How To Bend the World Towards Love - Parshat Shelach

 It’s exam season, here’s a little physics, for those of us who still shudder at the thought of spending these weeks desperately trying to remember Newton’s First Law of Motion, or some such.

An object, Newton articulated, will remain in uniform motion, in a straight line unless compelled to change its state by the action of an external force.

I’m not, you are probably relieved to hear, going to give a sermon on exam stresses, or Physics. But I am interested in the way in which we travel – in uniform motion or in a changed state – through our lives.

I am interested in the way in which once set in motion, we continue – which is fine if we were set in motion running directly alongside every other human being in the world, each of us set in motion exactly in unison, so we can all travel together in this lonely world.

But what if, for whatever reason, we weren’t set into the world in such perfect alignment with our fellows? What if, what with us all being unique and individual and even deliberately created unique and individual, we were created in diversity – different attitudes, different abilities, different goals, different loves and different hates. If that is the case, then the straight lines go off in opposition.

I mean, if that is the case, and I think that really is the case, then the journey through life would be one of increasingly discovering one’s aloneness, one’s opposition and the loss of fellow travellers. And it really can, in this strange world in which we live, too often feel as if we are increasingly siloed and at odds and in opposition.

If that is the case, then surely the single most important lesson we could imagine, the single most important thing to discover is how to be, as Newton put it, an external force that can pull us away from our straight lines, bend us towards one another, align us, rather than leave us to our lonely straight lines of uninterrupted wandering.

I want to look at Moses, Moshe Rabeinu, in this context, and in particular, the remarkable moment in the heart of the story we read today.

The spies go off. They come back with a bad report – dibat ha-aretz. And the dibah, the Torah tells us, spreads through the camp, vyotziu dibat Haaretz - and soon everyone is heading off in their own directions of mistrust and fear and opposition. And the unity of the people is falling apart.

And it gets worse. When the report of these revolting spies reaches God, God decides God has had enough, “How long will this people despise me [says God,] I will smite them with pestilence and destroy them.” And here we have our scene, of the people heading off in their varying directions of diba – bad-mouthing the land and the leadership, and God, God, heading off in a direction of destruction.

And then along comes this external force, a force that succeeds in changing the will of God, and bending the straight lines from opposition and conflagration into something more hopeful.

Moses starts with a brilliant ploy – God, if you destroy the Children of Israel now, all the other nations will think it’s because you weren’t able to bring them into the Land as you promised.

It’s an appeal to God’s sense of self – God wants to be seen to be powerful. The Children of Israel don’t see that, so God is ready to destroy them, but wait, Moses says, if you do, everyone else will think you are lacking in power.

There’s a lovely comment on this in the Talmud Brachot.

“What,” the Rabbis imagine God responding to Moses (brachot 32a), “what do you mean the people won’t think I’m powerful, didn’t they see the miracles I wrought when the Children of Israel crossed the sea?” “Ah,” they imagine Moses responding, “they’ll think it was just that you were more powerful than that bumpkin Pharoah.” The Talmud doesn’t use the term ‘bumpkin.’

The way to change the will of God, the way to bend disparate and disparating forces in the world is to meet them where they are, and persuade them it is in their interests to bend, persuade them that the bigger truths of who they wish to be are only available if they change course. That takes guts and sophistication and a particular kind of emotional intelligence. All of which Moses possess.

But this opening salvo is just the warmup. Moses returns with one of the most remarkable speeches in all of the Torah.

"Now may God’s strength be made greater, just as you have declared: The LORD is slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.' In accordance with your great love, forgive the sin of these people, just as you have pardoned them from the time they left Egypt until now."

And God changes.

God replies, I will forgive them, as they request. We use that phrasing still, right through Yom Kippur – Vesalachti Kidvarecha. Moses saves the children of Israel, Moses bends the will of God towards compassion and great love, away from anger – justifiable as it may be – and destructiveness.

Again, the rabbis capture and amplify what is quite so remarkable about this brief speech.

Make great – they ask in Midrash Yelamdeinu – how is it great for God to let the children of Israel off the punishment that is their definite due? The answer comes - Make your aspect of mercy greater than your aspect of strict judgement.

There is even, in some scrolls, a tradition of writing one of the letters of ‘Make great’  supersize in our Torah scrolls. It’s the letter Yud of Yigdal – the letter that makes the word ‘great’ – Gadol – into a verb in the imperfect, incompleted form – you are not quite at your greatest yet, Moses is saying to God, you need to get even greater, and the way to do that is to develop the ability to forgive and show a capacity to forgive that, frankly, God has failed to show before;

And what a list of characteristics Moses reminds God are utterly essential to the way in which God wishes to be, even if they are not the way God has just said God will respond.

Slow to anger?

Forgiving sin and rebellion?

Sure God will punish the evildoers, but Moses allows God to find a place of softness, and Moses allows God to find the ability to define God’s self from that place of softness.

And Moses saves a future for the people of Israel.

Again, there’s a lovely Rabbinic moment – in Sanhedrin 110 a-b - when the Rabbis imagine Moses and God on the mountain, and God is giving dictation to Moses. I’m going to be slow to anger, God says, “Really?” Says Moses, “even to the wicked,” “Trust me,” says God, “You’re going to need it when they rebel.”

I love this kind of rabbinic interplay – sharpening and heightening the relationship between Moses and God. One leans into the other, and the other leans back.

God lift Moses up, higher than any human, and in return Moses pulls God higher, higher, even than God aspired to be.

This is how we can bend in towards one another, in a world where, without empathy, seeking out points of contact and calling each of us towards the person we wish to be – rather than that which we become when our tempers fray and our patience is tested.

This is how the world can be healed.

May we all be merited to find such encounters in our own lives – may we have people who can bend us towards better versions of ourselves.
And may we all have the courage to bend others, to lift them too towards their better selves so we may all live in a world less lonely and more united in love.

 

Shabbat Shalom

A Guide to Jewish Life - Part Two - Love

Last week I gave the first of what I hope will be a three part series of sermons trying to get at the heart of what it means to be a Jew.

I talked about belief - to be more specific a rational supernaturalism - that celebrates the scientific achievements of mankind while still valuing that which cannot be open to rational solution - while still believing in that which is beyond scientific exploration - while still believing in belief.

I had some wonderful feedback, thank you. And also this very good question, 'yes,' said a loyal member, 'that's all very good, but how do you get from there to Shabbat and Kashrut?' I hope, in part to join those dots today.

I want to talk about love, as the next step in underpinning Jewish life, specifically a very Jewish sort of love. There are, in fact, three commandments to love mentioned in the Torah.

V'ahavta et Adonai Eloheicha - And you shall love Adonai your God - that's from the Shema.

V'ahavta et Reicha Cemocha - And you shall love your fellow as yourself - that's the verse Rabbi Akiva, no less, considers the single greatest principle underpinning the entire Torah.

And V'ahavta et haGer - And you shall love the stranger - the single more repeated verse in the entire Torah.

A whole lotta loving. Actually our sister Synagogue, New North London, has these three obligations up in stone on the wall surrounding the ark. It's an impressive site.

I'm going to leave the obligation to love the stranger for next week. Today I want to focus on the twin obligations of loving God and loving one's fellow. In particular, I'm interested in the connection between them.

One the one hand these two ideas, loving God and loving one's fellow seem radically disparate. God is the force beyond all measurement, beyond all constraint of particularity and form. And humans are - breakable, fallible and ephemeral.

But I believe these two ideas are more than linked, they are the equally the necessary outcome of the greatest idea in Judaism.

If I was to be cast ashore on a desert island and given one Biblical verse to take with me, it would be the verse that speaks of the creation of all humanity in the image of God - Btzelem elohim. It's such a radical notion. There's a smart commentary in the Etz Hayim pointing out that all kinds of Ancient Near East religious traditions considered the King, or Pharoah as an embodiment of God. But The Torah goes far, far further - all humanity contains this spark of divinity within. Each of us here, and those not here, the men, the women, the powerful and the powerless, each contain that spark of the creative source of life. How extraordinary is human life. It's such a radical notion, will underpin the value of human rights, democracy, any liberation movement you care to name.

And if we, each of us, are refractions of Divine, containers of Divinity expressed as finite existence - then the command to love God and the command to love one's fellow become more than related.

Certainly it's not possible to claim to love God while treating humanity - any human - poorly. I would say that the reverse is equally true. If you place humanity at the very heart of your every action and motivation then you embodying what it truly means to love God. Certainly the best advice I could give to anyone professing atheism, to anyone unsure about this whole God thing is don't worry so much, concentrate on loving your fellow and let the magic of the utterly profound nature of our existence seep in slowly. The best way to become religious is to be loving.

Moreover, there is something in the loving of either God or our fellow that when we successfully love either God or our fellow we are in some sense protecting and celebrating that which is within us. We are images of God and when I love my fellow I'm loving a cousin, I'm celebrating a commonality, I'm celebrating that which brings us together.

So what do I mean by loving, what does it mean to love God, or our fellow?

I spoke a little about this on Yom Kippur. Loving, certainly as the Torah understands the term isn't an emotional reaction. Judaism cares little for our private emotional state. Loving means acting in a caring way. There's an insight in another of my desert island pieces of Torah, a passage in Talmud Sotah (14b) where the Rabbis are working out how to fulfil the Biblical obligation to 'walk in way of God,' what the Christians would call imitatio dei - how to behave in a godly manner. They come up with a list of Divine accomplishments that are most remarkable for their being least remarkable.

Just as God gives clothes to Adam and Eve as they are exiled from the Garden of Eden, so we are called upon to give clothes to the unclothed. Just as God visits Abraham as he recovers from circumcision, so we are called upon to visit the sick. Just as God comforts Isaac on the death of his father, so we are called upon to comfort the bereaved. Just as God buries Moses we are called upon to bury the dead. Nowhere is there a suggestion that we should resurrect the dead, split the rea, heal the terminally ill. Rather we are called, in that lovely Yiddish phrase, to be Menschen - to be a human through simple acts of kindness, offering basic support and comfort. Loving means acting.

--

And loving means taking these obligations seriously. If you love someone don't be slapdash, don't be rough and approximate. Take what you are doing seriously. I made the point last week in the context of the construction of the Sanctuary in the desert, the same point could be made regarding today's reading. If you want to be in serious relationship with God, take it seriously. Assume that it matters whether there are 49 poles in the sanctuary, or fifty. Assume that it matters whether one eats a cheeseburger or remembers to call one's mother Shabbat eve. Assume that if we aren't careful we don't get to call ourselves loving.

And here we are at the birth of the entire Halachic system, the entire apparatus of Jewish do-s and don't-s. It's an attempt to do the right thing when the desire to act in a loving way is felt. It's at the heart of the balance of Jewish do-s and don't-s that compel us to act in specific ways towards our fellow human beings and towards our creator.

Should we say a blessing before we eat food, of course we should, it's a taking of the fruits of creation and by inculcating within ourselves that spiritual discipline we condition ourselves to be aware of our place on this planet, we become increasingly aware of what we can and can't achieve of our own volition. And then the pursuit of detail takes over; what do we say before we eat this or that, what should we say after.

Should we give to this charity or the other, and how much should we give; these are all entirely genuine questions faced by the Halachic system - how do we balance up the competing claims of different humans, different refractions of the human image; some close to us, some further away.

There's a great legal responsum on whether and how we should treat the poshtei yad - the beggars on the street. There seem to be more and more of them, have you noticed? What if we don't like the fact they might spend the money on booze, or their dog, or their gang master? Complex this business of being loving to your fellow. Needs thought, needs working through. Thankfully we have just such a system of working these issues through - it's called Halachah.

The point is that it's not acceptable to be generally loving, generally nice. The point is that if we want to act in a loving way we need to be precise. Sometimes, I'll admit it, the pursuit of detail can blind. Sometimes we become so obsessed with detail that we lose the bigger picture - but the bigger picture is acting in a loving way.

Even those parts of the Jewish system that seem a long way away from this idea of love, I believe connect. Let me take the most love-less example of a Mitzvah I can find, Shatnetz - thou shall not mix wool and linen. Loveless, no? Well no, I don't think so. The prohibition of wearing Shatnetz is part of a series of obligations to hold different elements of creation differently. Don't eat meat and milk together, don't yoke an ox and a mule together, don't plant different kinds of plants together in the same field. They are attempts to get us to understand that everything is not the same. It's so easy to lose track of where the products we take for granted come from. Milk comes from cartons, no it doesn't it comes from cows; sometimes organically raised, sometimes bloated on chemicals. If we are paying attention when we walk into a shop and pick a carton off the shelf we can choose one decision over another. But if we only see clothing as something for us to use and not as a result of a process of manufacture, if we are blind, say, to the difference between clothing that comes from plants and clothing that comes from animals how are we supposed to care about the treatment of animals, or the wages paid to cotton pickers in Ukraine, or the working conditions of garment manufacturers in some awful factory in India that collapses under the weight of human greed - ours as much as the manufacturers. A strange Mitzvah, the very strangest Mitzvah is about awakening our powers of observance. As we observe it we become more observant, and the more we see, the more we understand, the more capable we become of taking care, of acting in a loving way.

The gift of having a system, the Halachic system, is that it gives us a headstart on so many of these issues. We don't need to re-invent the entire interplay of morality and ethics and compassion with our every breath and every bite. Instead, we get to observe Shabbat, keep Kosher, even wear non-Shatnatz clothing and we get to use these pathways of love to become ever more loving.

That the Jewish legal system.

A system of walking in the path of the Divine, recognising the image of God in all humanity and trying desperately to be worthy, trying desperately to understand the right thing to do in the ever more complex web of relationships, pulls and tugs that make up our lives.

It's easy, I know it's easy to lose track of the bigger picture, but the bigger picture is love. Love is at the heart of every call to action we know as Jews.

It's at the heart of what I call on us all to do today, and into the future.

Care more, love more, use our actions to demonstrate our commitment to value all humanity as creations in the image of the Divine, use our actions to demonstrate our commitment to value our creator and indeed, our very creation.

Shabbat shalom

Neilah - Lessons in Love

Lessons In Love

The Maggid of Kozienicz[1] was a great Hasidic leader. But he wouldn't give the sermon on the holiest of days in his home town. You see in those days sermons would be long, technical and full and rebukes and reprimands. But one Yom Kippur the people crowded around him, and insisted. Eventually they succeeded in persuading him. The Maggid went up to the bimah, stood there for some time, and appeared to be ready to start several times, before .... nothing.

And then finally this,

My friends! I wanted to find sins in the Jews – but I have come to see that you are all holy, because your source is holy and your intentions are good. It is really only the exile of this world that has defiled us. So, may the redemption come and bring us out of exile, and let us say, Amen.[2]

And then he sat down.

I like that story. It's a story about a particular attitude towards Jewish leadership. You have to love Jews to be a Rabbi. Fortunately I do, and even if not every one of us keeps every jot and tittle of every legal command, I think you are all lovely.

It's good to love, it's actually an obligation, a Mitzvah no less to love; you have to love your fellow - that's the one Akiva considered the central organising principle of the entire Torah. Then there is the obligation to love God - that's the first line of the Shema, and the obligation, the most frequently repeated in the Torah, to love the stranger. A whole lot of loving.

It's not that I see myself as any particular expert, but I want to share three lessons in love, three challenges, if you will, to determine if we are doing it right, in the hope that we'll do it better, and do it more in the year to come.

Lesson One

Antigonus Ish Socho, on of the most ancient of Rabbinic teaches said this;

אל תהיו כעבדים המשמשין את הרב, על מנת לקבל פרס, אלא הוו כעבדים המשמשין את הרב, על מנת שלא לקבל פרס[3].

Don't be like a servant who serves their master in the expectation of receiving a reward, rather be like a servant who serves their master with no expectation of reward.

Antigonus is talking about serving God, but it's a great question to ask regarding all our interactions.

When we are being nice to other people - and we are all nice to other people at least some of the time - are we doing it in the expectation of reward? Doing nice in the hope of getting a reward is OK. It's certainly better than not doing nice things for other people. But the expectation of reward removes the quality of love from an interaction. If you are putting something into a relationship calculating the scale of your investment against the prospect of a dividend you are not behaving like a lover, you're behaving like a financial analyst. Relationships based on mutual reciprocity, calculated on the basis of getting out at least what you put in are what Martin Buber called I-It relationships; not bad, as such, just quotidian, mechanical, dull - the Hebrew word would be Chol - profane.

But when you catch yourself putting more into a relationship than you could ever hope to get out - that's love, that's Buber's I-Thou interaction, that's the fullness of what it means to be a human being, that's holy.

A first test in love - Are you putting in more than you are planning on getting out?

And a second.

You do know, don't you, that love isn't an emotion. It's not something you do, it's something that is revealed by action.

A story.

A colleague, a very successful Rabbi in New York, receives a call from his long-since retired father, who had gone to live in Israel.

Avi, he said, I’m phoning to tell you my plane's been delayed and I'm now coming in to New York on Friday.’

‘Oh Abba,’ responds Avi, ‘That’s terrific, you know how much I love to see you.

I’ll arrange a cab to pick you up at the airport and bring you home and I’ll see you when I get back from the…

‘Avi’ the father interrupts, ‘I said I’m arriving at the airport on Friday.’

‘I heard Abba, and you know how much I’d love to come and pick you up from the airport, but, you see …

‘Avi,’ the voice gets serious, ‘do me a favour, love me a little less, and pick me up from the airport.’

I've told that story before, I love it a great deal. But partly I'm telling it this year because Avi's father passed away in Israel several months ago and at one point, on my Facebook feed, up popped a video of 30 of his congregants who went to the airport to pick up their teacher as returned to New York from the Shiva. They obviously knew that story too - a story in which love is revealed by our willingness to schlep out to the airport; love is revealed by action.

It's a very Jewish approach. The Shema calls us to God, in the Shema, it doesn't mean we are commanded to feel all warm and cosy inside. It means we are commanded to repeat these words night and day, to our children, to put on Tefilin and affix Mezzuzot.

When we are commanded to love the stranger, in Deuteronomy, we are commanded to leave parts of our harvest for them, we are commanded to ensure they have enough to eat and clothes to wear. It's our actions that reveal the nature of love.

Golde was definitely on to something in Fiddler on the Roof;

Do I love you? 

For twenty-five years I've washed your clothes

Cooked your meals, cleaned your house

Given you children, milked the cow

If that's not love what is?

Aside from the gender critique - and there is certainly a gender critique - Golde has  a great point - this, all this activity, reveals love.

Officiating at weddings is great, having the best seat at a Chuppah is the a wonderful  perk of the job, and I am touched by the articulations of love that come from the newly engaged. But I would be much more interested in peeking into their future, and seeing how they are behaving in the moments of normalcy and challenge. How are their actions in those moments revealing the true nature of their relationship?

Do you ever find yourself using the words of love to free yourself from actually having to do something loving? I'll admit it, I do. At least sometimes. It's not really good enough, is it.

Maybe the true test of love is the Martian's test - if a Martian dropped into our homes and watched our behaviour would they consider us loving. Or let me do that in more theological language, with our every action revealed and laid bare before the One who knows all, how loving do we appear before our creator?

Test one - do we put in more than we expect to get out.

Test two - what do our actions reveal about our ability to love.

And one more.

It's a little complex. Love, real love, isn't about the object of love.

The point of love isn't to select with whom we share our love. The point is to be loving not discriminating in our love.

There's a clue in the array of objects of love commanded in the Torah; God and then two categories of human; your fellow (it's often translated as 'your brother') and the stranger. In other words you have to love two types of person, the one like you and the one different from you; the humans you naturally are drawn towards and the humans you naturally draw away from.

Admittedly the Christians have made more of play of loving one's enemies than the Jews, but it's the Hebrew Book of Exodus which instructs, 'if you see the donkey of one who hates you lying down, rescue it with them.'[4]

And it's the Hebrew Book of Proverbs which instructs, 'If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat.'[5] We've plenty to say about the importance of loving those we don't in fact like very much.

I'm quite sure that Akiva, in suggesting that loving your fellow is the central principle of the Torah, must have meant we have an obligation to love those we dislike. What, after all, would be the point of a Biblical injunction to love only those we like already? How can that provide a central principle for anything?

True love isn't to be funnelled only in limited directions.

A love that is too busy selecting what, or whom, to love isn't really love at all. At best it's an exercise in self-gratification, we love that which makes us feel better and we turn our hearts away from anything or anyone who doesn't. At worst a fenced-in love could be the cover for a much nastier emotion - hate.

I've long been amused by a provocative insight into the relationship between a Jew and an antisemite. The antisemite, the saying goes, hates all Jews, but has nothing against Shumli, who lives next door. On the other the Jew loves all Jews, but Shmuli...!

Neither Jew nor protagonist emerges from the tale free of taint.

The case I am making is that there is a link between the pejorative notion of being discriminating - that is to say being an out and out racist, and the supposedly non-pejorative notion of being discriminating - that is to say being picky about who or what we love.

We should be working on becoming less discriminating in both senses of the term.

We should loving a lot more and excluding from the bracket of those with whom we share our love a lot less. 

Be more loving, be less picky.

That's my third test of love.

We need to focus our ability to love on being loving, not discriminating.

So this is my Neilah call, it's both simple and complicated.

Be a lover, love more, love better.

Put more into your relationships than you expect to get out from them.

Check and check again that your actions reveal you to be a lover.

And watch out when you find yourself becoming discriminating in choices around love.

Goodness, what a wonderful world we could create together.

What a lovely world.

May we all work to create it in this year ahead,

Let us take these last few moments, before the gates close to commit ourselves to building this version of a new year for us.

And may we all have the merit to enjoy it,

Chatimah Tovah

---

[1] c. 1737-1814

[2] I came across this story in a sermon given by R. Tirza Firestone, formerly the Rabbi of the Boulder Renewal Community.

[3] Avot 1:3

[4] 23:5

[5] 25:21

Song of Songs - On the Subject of Love

On the subject of love ...

 

My thanks to everyone who helped our Pesach celebrations be so wonderful. We go again, with Yom Tov services beginning Sunday night and through Monday and Tuesday (when we will have a Yizkor service). If there are members who can take this opportunity to support the praying community of the Synagogue at this time I would be grateful.

 

Each of the festivals in the Jewish year is associated with a Megillah. For Pesach it is the Song of Songs and we will be reading Chapter 5 as part of our Shabbat services this week.

 

The Song of Songs – and chapter 5 most explicitly – is almost uncomfortably erotic, deeply sensual and laden with sexuality. It’s read, in the Rabbinic tradition, as an allegory of the relationship between God and Israel. God is the heroic male lover, ‘radiant and ruddy, his locks are wavy and black as a raven...  His arms are rods of gold set with beryl, his body polished ivory adorned with sapphires...’ Israel is the blushing female, ‘I am asleep, but my heart is awake. Listen I hear my beloved knocking.’  It’s a tale of youthful passion, full of lust and anticipation. What I want to do in this note is read the classic allegory slightly differently, less as a generalised relationship between Israel and God, and more as the Pesach-related moment in Biblical time, when God takes Israel out of Mitzrayim with a strong hand and an outstretched arm.

Pesach – and the first moments of journey into the Midbar - can certainly be read as an intense tale of youthful passion; there is heat aplenty, God leaps into action to defend the honour of his abused lover, showering the maiden with gifts and mighty demonstrations of His own prowess and might – wiping out Egypt, splitting the sea and so on. But this kind of love is the beginning of the relationship, not the end. In fact the relationship sours. Israel’s attention wanders off in search of sparkly golden idols and God becomes angry, violent and destructive. The relationship never settles into maturity. Jack Miles, in his wonderful ‘God: A Biography’ tells the story of God as the protagonist of the Bible, so hot-headed that, unable to accept the failures in His chosen lover, that He would rather simply retreat than stick around as a cuckolded – the Bible ends with God increasingly aloof and apart.

 

The psychologist and author Eric Fromm talks about the relationship between falling in love, which he derisorily labels ‘lust’ and being in love – which is deems far more significant. Fromm rejects that love is magical and mysterious and promotes, instead a love which is hard fought for through respect, taking responsibility, humility and discipline. It requires a certain self-love and self-knowledge and the commitment to accept the other in everything which they represent. It’s harder work, less immediate, less full of bright heat and more full of warmth.

 

Love takes work, whether it be God’s love of us or our love of God, whether it be our relationship with those we love, or their relationship with love. The passion and heat of the Song of Songs makes for great poetry, but not necessarily a life of commitment, mutual support and intimacy.

 

Shabbat shalom,

 

Moadim L’Simchah