Tonight, as it begins to darken outside, I want to talk about pausing.
It’s a sermon that began, in my mind, as I made calls around
the membership, back in the days when no-one went anywhere or did anything. I
would ask people how they were doing. And far more than you would imagine, people
would share “It’s not so bad.” They would admit it a little sheepishly,
“Actually, I quite like it.”
As long as we had health – for ourselves and our loved ones –
and of course health makes all the difference, member after member would share
that as life became simpler they were finding joy. We had no choice, but to let
go of a bunch of the things we used to spend our time chasing and chasing and
it turned out OK.
Pausing isn’t the same as doing nothing, of course. It was
Alain de Botton who said, “how did it happen that we started to consider gazing
out of the window as a waste of time.”
And before we entirely lose that experience of a pause and
head back into the year out there, I want to hold us on that limin – that
doorpost. And explore some Jewish wisdom.
On Rosh Hashanah we began what the Torah calls a Sabbatical year
– a Shmittah, a year of release. The Torah shares in five different places instructions
for this year of pause, or release. Here are the key verses from the book of
Leviticus;
And God spoke to Moses on Mount
Sinai saying, ‘Speak to the Children of Israel and say to them, when you come
into the land that I give you the land shall keep a Shabbat for the Lord. Six
years you will sow your field and six years you will prune your vineyard and
gather her produce. But the Seventh Year will be an ultimate Shabbat for the
Lord.
Every seventh year we are told to let the land rest – and this
is that year. Elsewhere the Torah tells us to welcome the stranger into our
fields to eat of crops growing there of their own will, during the Shmittah, or
to release debtors from their debts. It’s a vision of a world of mutual support
and hospitality, a vision of a world where we are told to pay more attention to
treating other people than treating ourselves. I don’t know how many of us here
tonight even knew.
In five different places in the Torah, we’re imposed upon to
pay attention to a rhythm in time we might not feel or understand as necessary.
And at centre of this Mitzvah of Shmittah is a direction to pay attention to
the world in which we live, and our true place in it.
It is, of course so easy to take this world for granted,
despite the destruction we wreck upon it.
I felt something of this traipsing round the Heath, in those
months of lockdown when the Heath was so important to our sense of humanity. On
Shabbat afternoon walks, my family and I joined tens of thousands striding over
London’s green and pleasant lands, turning narrow dirt pathways into vast
swathes of mud. Week by week the mud deepened and the grass retreated. I mean
Covid simultaneously heightened my appreciation of nature and at the very same
time forced me to pay attention to how easily I damage even ecosystems that
seem robust.
It takes an imposition into our sense of normal to allow us to
see what was there all along, but somehow invisible when we were un-imposed
upon.
It's only by stopping that you notice things. It’s the gift of
that dratted Covid again.
But it’s also the gift of our faith. It’s the gift of Yom
Kippur.
The thirteenth
century Rabbi ,Yonah HaGerondi called Teshuvah, repentance, a Mikdash – a
sanctuary. That’s the very same name we use to refer to this room, this space.
Teshuvah is the act of a spiritual pause, taking a retreat from action and
finding, in our repose, reflections and understandings that don’t come when we
are on the go.
The twentieth
century Rabbi, Yosef Soloveitchik talked about the experience of being in this Mikdash
of Teshuvah as if it were Mikdash of the ancient Temple, and to access the very
Holy of Holies itself – it was as if there were a curtain you had to pull
aside, to step trepidatiously into before the Ark of the covenant itself, containing
the tablets of God’s will for humanity. Can we imagine ourselves into such a
place? What might we find there in terms of understanding better who we are,
and who we are meant to be.
If we can imagine
ourselves into such a holy encounter with our souls, surely, it’s only because
of our pause, until this point in the day.
Then there is the Shabbat itself, a time where the pathway
from the hectic all-consuming nature of the world out there to an experience of
peace which values who we are not what we achieve is, I hope, familiar. As the
sun sets, we prepare, we light candles, sanctify the day, open our homes and
take a moment to express gratitude. There are rituals to assist us entering
this place of pause and repose that are beautiful and ancient, and beautiful
and our own. But I’m less sure how many of us make this time, religiously – as
it were, every week, to create that distinction between all-on-business and a
moment of pause, the moment of sweetness in all this, the moment that allows
for the future to be different and better. It’s worth it.
I know for so many of us Covid presented a forced guilty
delight in a more quiet world. But that was Covid, forcing us to stop. Can we
take ownership of that delight for ourselves when the obligating power is our
own ability to recognize the value of pausing, when all we have are our own
decisions about when not to go shopping, or into the office?
Or maybe that’s not quite right – that it’s only us capable of
making the decision to pause. We have a faith tradition, thousands of years of
wisdom, somehow bound into the divine will. Mitzvot – the commanding voice of
God. And we have community. Us. We’re here every week – 6:30 on Friday, come
and join us. Lean into the rhythms of Jewish life and we’ll do the pausing
thing together.
In so many ways the improvements to our lives that we wish for
are releases – a willed decision to stop doing something we drift into without
really understanding what could happen if we were really to let go of the
damaging behaviours of our lives. Certainly, in terms of our relationship with
the planet a pause, a commitment to under-consume, to decline to consume is
desperately necessary.
I’m not hungering to ‘go back to normal.’ I mean I don’t think
you can ever go backwards in life, but more than that, as we stand in these
lengthening shadows I’m thinking about what I’ve learnt from my Covid Shmittah
that I can use in this new Hebrew year of Shmittah and a big piece of that is
thinking through what I can release.
Will you join me in leaning into this pausing thing, now it is
handed over to us?
My friend and colleague Rabbi Josh Feigelson recently wrote,
I invite you to consider for yourself, how we might slow
down, be more present, and in the process uncover/recover our awareness of the
Divine presence within and between and among us. By acts of omission and
commission, mindlessly and willfully, we have, collectively, sped up and
distanced ourselves so much from the world and one another. In the process, we
have dehumanized ourselves and each other. We have closed ourselves off to the
Divine presence.
Amen.
There’s a few minutes left, in this Yom Kippur day in this
year of Jewish Shmittah, at the end of this Covid imposed sabbatical. It’s a
good time to pick something to let go of in this year to come. It doesn’t have
to be about the world in which we live – though the world could do with a
break.
It's my request, and my invitation – what can you attempt to
release – this year, or once a week?
And in doing so, may we all come to the gifts of freedom and
insight and delight we wish,
Chatimah Tovah, and may we all be sealed in the book of life
for a sweet year to come,
Shannah Tovah
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