Why Be Religious - Archbishop Rowan Williams' Reith Lecture

I know the BBC is a complex organisation, and in recent times has been guilty of some offensive antisemitism, but I still hold it dear.

For years I’ve made a commitment to listen to the Reith Lectures – four lectures given, every year, by leading figures in their field.

This year by four different figures, taking their cue from the four freedoms articulated by the then President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt in his 1941 State of the Union address; freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.

The speaker addressing the freedom, in a lecture given in their home-town of Swansea was the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.[1]

It was a remarkable talk – I recommend it. And I want to share some of Archbishop’s ideas about the value of worship as a follow up to the sermon I gave last week about the value of Judaism. And I hope, next week, to share something on the value of prayer – the kind of Jewish worship we engage in here, week after week, after week.

In the first part of the speech, the Archbishop disdained to care very much about protecting freedom of religious conscious – the right of a person to believe whatever they wanted to believe as a internal, purely spiritualized faith commitment. He was interested in what he called “manifested religion” – protections to do things because we believe in things.

If we say we are in favour of freedom of religion and we only mean freedom to privately believe in anything anyone wants to believe, we put religion in a category that doesn’t matter.

It is, Williams argued, “the kind of repressive tolerance that some radical social theorists of the ’60s identified, a tolerance that undermines what it purports to allow.” I think that’s exactly right. Religion doesn’t want to be considered a private set of beliefs that have no impact on the way we live our lives. Religion, if it means anything at all, means that the beliefs we have must be manifested – must be lived out. Belief drives action.

But also, he went on to say, freedom to worship can’t be merely about protection of rights to do strange, ritualized things, the rights of Jews to take time off work on Rosh Hashanah, or the right of Sikh men to wear long hair, or Islamic women to cover their hair.

“Modern societies,” Williams argued, “have settled for a kind of lukewarm tolerance, a recognition that within reasonable limits of public order people may conduct whatever rituals they please because none of this should impinge on the way they make significant decisions or order their civic and personal lives. But this gives the unmistakable impression that religious practice is essentially a sort of leisure activity, probably harmless, but definitely marginal to the main business of society.”

You might want to  swim, I might want to play football. You might want to go to the theatre, I might want to hear jazz. You might want to keep kosher and I might want to keep Halal.

So be it, and we can probably get on, more or less, with most of that. But that, also, argues Williams, isn’t enough to justify why it’s worth caring about relgion.

So what is really going on when we say that religion matters?

What does it really mean to say that we want a protected space for religion in the public sphere.

Religion starts, rather obviously, with God. That is to say, not with humans. That means two things.

Religion is a counter to what Williams called the “double dangers of modernity,” that on the one hand strength and might is the only true locus of power – that, of course is the danger of fascism, and on the other that my own internal compass should be the only locus of authority over me, a danger that he calls vacuous.

I have to admit, a deep dislike of the sort of life-task Ibsen’s Peer Gynt spent a life pursuing, “be true to yourself.” “Follow your own truth.” It’s a kind of self-serving, self-aggrandizing way of seeing one’s place in the Universe. The chances are that the Universe doesn’t really need us to focus on our own self-satisfaction and our own pursuit of our own self-interest. In fact for us to get on as a society we’re going to have to peer outside the silo of our own self-interest and start working out how to live in society.

And that leads us to how we make decisions as societies. What happens on the other side of Rousseau’s social contract? Williams argues that, were it not for religion, were it not for some ‘other’ centred location of absolute importance in our world, the only other way societies work out how to behave is by power; power expressed by authoritarian regimes, but also by democratic regimes.

what’s at stake in all this is the freedom to believe that certain human actions and policies derive their goodness or rightness not from consensus or even legality but from something more lasting, something about the way things are, and the freedom to organise your actions, public and private on that basis. It’s the freedom to see your human choices and habits as part of an attempt to discover some kind of fit with a reality that is quite outside human control. It’s the ethics as tied up with a process of discovering what is lastingly appropriate for the kind of beings that human beings are in the kind of world that this world is.

Williams’ point is that, if you make room for religion, you make room at the table for a view of how the world should work that isn’t just about the numbers or feelings of people sharing those views right now. He makes a point that at every point in history large numbers of people have held beliefs that are, when viewed from some other place, palpably wrong – slavery being perhaps the best example.

The point of religion is that it comes at the comforts of our contemporary moment from the outside.

While is might be true that there have been religious moral failures, religious people who have tried to give religious justifications for the unjustifiable. From where else have we or do we learn to see society from outside the prism of number and power?

There’s a wonderful rabbinic commentary on the moment when Moses and Aharon appear before Pharoah.[2]

And Moses and Aaron came [before Pharaoh] (Exodus 5:1)

Rabbi Hiyya son of Abba said, ‘This was coronation day, when all the Kings came to crown Pharaoh because he was the Emperor. While they were placing crowns on Pharaoh’s head, Moses and Aaron stood at the entrance to the hallway.

Pharaoh’s guards told him, ‘Two elders are standing at the doorway’

Pharaoh asked ‘Have they got a crown?’

The guard replied ‘no.’

‘Then let them enter last.’

When Moses and Aaron finally stood before Pharaoh he said, ‘What do you want?’ Moses replied ‘The God of the Hebrews has sent be to you to say, “Let my people go so they will serve me.”’ (Ex 7:16).

Pharaoh replied angrily, ‘Who is this GOD that I should listen to His voice. Doesn’t He know enough to send me a crown, rather you come with words.’

Rabbi Levi said, ‘Pharaoh then took the list of gods and began to read, ‘The god of Edom, the god of Moab, the god of Sidon, yada yada yada,’ and he said to them, ‘There, I have finished all my records and your god’s not on the list.’

So Moses and Aaron said to Pharaoh, ‘Fool, the gods you mentioned are all dead. But the LORD is a living God, Ruler of the Universe.’

Pharaoh asked, ‘Is he young or old? How many cities has he captured? How many states has he humbled? How long has he been in power?

They replied, the strength and power of our God fills the world. God was before the world was created and God will be at the end of the worlds. He fashioned you and placed within you the breath of life.’

What else has he done? Pharaoh asked.

It’s an argument between someone, Pharaoh, who believes in the world as it is as determining what is and what should be done. And someone, Moses, who are trying to make a space for an understanding of the world that comes from outside Pharoah’s experience. It’s an argument about the value of religion. It’s an argument that goes to the heart of what it means to be a human and to hunger for freedom and morality.

Religion doesn’t always get it right, but if religion is going to be given the grief for its errors, then it deserves its plaudits and protections for being the force behind every liberation movement in Western Civilization since the original Exodus.

And what of those errors – the errors of religion to back things that are simply wrong, or immoral? Williams argues that it’s true but also unsurprising. It’s a hard business, attempting to look at the Universe from the outside, and that’s why, at least for me, religion is at its best in humility. When the notion of there being a power outside of the world that is greater than me, and everything in this world imbues in my a humility, a lack of confidence in the absolute rightness of my own position.

The knowledge that I am not God, and that there is a force outside of all humanity that I have to live before should help me find points of meeting even with those with whom I disagree.

As Williams puts it

[The] main thing is that the presence within a society of people with strong commitments about what is due to human dignity puts a certain kind of pressure on the whole social environment, a pressure to argue for and justify what society licences or defends in terms that go beyond popular consensus alone. In other words, it helps to guarantee that argument about issues from environmental responsibility to sexual politics will have an element of real moral debate, debate about the kind of beings human beings are.

Religion isn’t the guarantor of getting these arguments right, but it is, I think, absolutely vital

 

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[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001fw1l

[2] Midrash Tanhumah, V’era 5

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

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

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

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

And he starts piling on the evidence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s why I believe in religion.

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

For Jeremy Lent religion is a spandrel. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shabbat Shalom

Building the Good Place - Rosh Hashanah 5780

You might have seen the TV show, The Good Place. It’s a sitcom set in the afterlife – I recommend it.

The premise of the show is that our heroes have died and, as good people in life, they wake up, in death, in The Good Place -  a place where everything is really very, very good. Actually, that’s not what the show is about at all, but the premise is good enough to get me thinking. What would The Good Place really be like? What makes a society ‘good’? What I want to do today is sketch out a rabbinic vision of a good place, I want to ask some questions about how we get from here, to there. And I want to suggest some answers.

Let’s start at the top – who should be in charge? As Jews we’ve a bunch of models to draw on. The Torah features God trying out a singular human – but neither Adam or Noah cope. The model of a family too frequently descends into fraternal bickering, if not fratricide. We have prophets, a hereditary priesthood and a monarchy. But the prophets are too unpopular and priests and Kings become corrupted. Eventually, Judaism settles on … rabbis. Now, don’t worry, I’m not planning world-domination myself. The real clue is in the last letter of the word – rabbis. All the greatest rabbinic leaders of the classical rabbinic period come in pairs; you get Hillel and Shammai, Rav and Shmuel, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Yishmael. And these pairs – or Zugim – argue. They argue about everything from Kashrut to theology to what it means to be kind and compassionate. Chavrtuta o Metuta the Rabbis teach – passionate argument or death. In our Good Place there will be passionate argument.

Here’s the other thing about Rabbis – their leadership isn’t purely dependent on what they know, rather they – we – are expected to be decent, ethical and compassionate. I mean, I know I mess up all over the place, but you can’t be a good rabbi and a bad person.

There’s a famous story about the renowned professor of ethics in some secular university, who was an utterly appalling person. And one day a student finally plucked up the courage to ask their teacher how it was possible for them to be such an expert on ethics and such a vile human being. ‘What’ the professor responds, ‘if I taught geometry, would you want me to be a triangle?’ It doesn’t work for teachers of religion.

On the other hand, here’s one of the greatest Rabbinic leaders, Maimonides;

Assur leadam lehiyot achzari - We are forbidden to be cruel, forbidden to be slow to forgive. Rather we should be gentle, willing and slow to anger. And when one who has sinned against us requests our forgiveness, we should forgive with a levav shalem – a full heart a willing spirit. And even if the person has distressed us greatly, or many times, don’t be vengeful, don’t bear a grudge.

Rabbis are supposed to listen hard to even those with whom they disagree and treat everyone with courtesy and dignity. In our Good Place, leaders – and we would need a plurality of leaders – would be wise, and decent and they would argue out the best way to run society.

It won’t just be the leaders arguing. My vision of a Good Place rejects the seductive appeal of mono-culture at every level. Certainly, a Jewish Good Place will have what the Bible calls gerim, outsiders, refugees, resident aliens – you can pick your contemporary term for the people who are different; probably less privileged, possibly less eloquent in our language, less sure of our customs. Loving the stranger is the most frequently repeated idea in the Bible not, I think, just because it’s a nice thing to do, but because Good Places value difference and diversity as a source of creativity and productivity.

And what kind of society would emerge from all this plurality and wisdom and decency?

Here are three laws which appear in a run of seven verses in the three-thousand-year-old book of Deuteronomy.[1]

1.       If you loan someone some money, and they pledge their millstone to secure the loan, and they default, you can’t take the mill-stone away from them ki nefesh hu choveil – it’s their life-blood – you take the millstone, they won’t be able to mill their flour and they will slide into destitution, and that can’t be good.

2.       If you loan them some money with a pledge to repay and they default, you don’t go into their house to take their pledge – you wait outside for them to bring it to you. It’s better to be sensitive to their sense of security in their own home.

3.       And if they pledged their coat – don’t take their coat overnight – they’ll need it to sleep in. If a person pledges a coat, it’s the only thing they’ve got.

There’s a vision of a Good Place in these ancient verses. I don’t suppose anyone here is reliant on a mill-stone today, and I know we’ve learnt a whole lot about astral physics and evolution and the rest of it in the last 3,000 years, but the values of our sacred texts, the checks and balances and the approach to a good place are, surely, exactly what we need in contemporary society. Is credit necessary for economic advancement? Of course it is. Do lenders and their capital need to be protected by the rule of law? Of course they do.

But not all the time, not to take all pledges from all debtors and not in any way creditors might deem suitable.

The vision of society that emerges, time and time again through the Bible and Talmud is a society that demonstrates compassion alongside a commitment to justice. I’ll take that balance of compassion and justice as a model for my Good Place

And then there will be Shabbat. We’ll have the chance, in our Good Place, for six days of the week, to get on, to make, to create, to seek for more and better. And then we’ll all pause, turn off the phones and the emails and turn our attention towards celebrating what we have. We’ll eat meals with friends and family. We’ll converse without the distractions of screens or headphones. Shabbat, in The Good Place, will help us realise that ‘better’ doesn’t always mean ‘more.’ That should help us find better ways to protect the environment in our Good Place. In my little thought experiment, basic rules of physics will still apply, as God said to first human beings as they guided around the Garden of Eden, “Look at my works! See how beautiful they are—how excellent! For your sake, I created them all. 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.”[2] That one will still apply, but we’ll be ready for it and we’ll take due care.

Well, that’s the vision. Do you like it? It could do with a tweak, here or there, I’m sure. But it would do, no? Creativity, decency, a space to celebrate the gift of our humanity?

Here’s the question. How far away are we? How impossible, how fairy-tale, how beyond the reach of possibility is this Good Place?

I mean, working out how we get the right kind of political leadership is a tricky one, but the really radical thing about this vision of a Good Place is how simple it is.

We could all get on with creating this Good Places even if without the political leadership problem entirely sorted – in fact it’s probably much better if don’t wait on the politicians – they seem to have their hands full for the time being. Certainly, those of us who lend, could lend with the sort of empathy and humanity that the Bible calls for. Many of you, I know, do exactly that. The rest of us can get on with, I don’t know; making sure that the blind aren’t confronted with stumbling blocks, or that if, even our enemy is stumbling we don’t gloat. We could get on with not coveting things that belong to others and we could all benefit from taking Shabbat more seriously and we don’t really need anyone’s permission to do that.

Two other verses from Deuteronomy;

It’s not in heavens that have to ask, who will go up to the heavens and bring it down for us. It’s not beyond the sea that you have to ask, who will cross the sea to bring it back for us.

We all have the possibility of creating better places, for ourselves, for our loved ones, for all of society. In fact, we had better get on with it sooner rather than later.

It will some gumption and well, there’s really no other words I can use, it will take religion and it will take faith.

Here’s the thing that puzzles me. If, I could get a bum-on-a-seat for every time someone told me this past year that they weren’t really into Judaism as a religion, this place would be rammed full. And I wold love to see this place rammed-full on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, but that’s not really the point. The point is, if you want to live in a Good Place, in a better place – where do you find the pointers towards the way that society will function? How do you puzzle your way towards making that vision a reality when your desires come up against the desires of others? How do you protect yourself and your society from the forces that will weaken us and strip our values from us. I’ve an answer – be more Jewish. Do more Jewish stuff, read more about Jewish stuff. Speak up and take more pride in the Jewish stuff. I’ve nothing against other religions, I’m sure other religions can help, and if you’ve another faith tradition that speaks more clearly to you – gei gezunte heit – go for it. But if you are here today, do more of this. Be prouder of this. If you find yourselves in environments where self-declared atheists or lapsed-Jews or any of the like are taking opportunities to explain how much smarter they are now they don’t do Judaism, raise the eyebrow. Ask how they intend to get to a Good Place, suggest that they could do with paying more attention to some very old, very holy and, frankly, very Good suggestions in the pages of the Good Book. Creating the Good Place will take religion. Do more religion.

And it will take faith. Faith is the thing that allows a person to do something they know is right even if the rest of the world thinks you are crazy. Faith is the thing the justifies the sorts of actions that we know are good, even if society doesn’t value their performance – things like being nice or charitable or gentle. These tend to be things society doesn’t seem set up to value, sometimes they are even things society seems ready to mock. But have faith. They will make the world a better place. We know that; we have faith in that. Faith is good. Faith doesn’t require us to use the ‘God word.’ It just requires us to believe there is justification for goodness, even if it’s not immediately apparent. We’ll need some faith to build this Good Place.

We are, quite remarkably blessed to have this heritage. It’s an astounding gift in a world that desperately needs our active, faithful and religious engagement, if it is to become a better place, let alone a Good Place.

Don’t give up on this journey.

It’s the best shot we have at turning this world into a Good Place

It could even come in this new year.

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

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[1] 24:6-13

[2] Midrash Kohelet Rabbah, 1 on Ecclesiastes 7:13

Abraham Joshua King, Martin Luther King Jnr and the Accident of Birth

One of my greatest spiritual inspirations is Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Here’s in a picture with his good friend Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jnr

Heschel was born in a Hasidic family. He was expected to become a Rabbi. And he became a Rabbi, also with a PhD. He survived the Holocaust because he ended up in America, as a professor at the Seminary where I studied for the Rabbinate.

King was born in a Baptist family. He was expected to become a Baptist preacher and he became a Baptist preacher, also with a PhD and became the greatest human rights hero of in the history of the United States of America.

The two men met on the 14^th January 1963 - almost exactly 55 years ago to the day at a conference in Chicago on Religion & Race at a time when racial tensions in the States were high. The conference opened with a statement from JFK and then Heschel spoke.

This is how he started his speech.

Speech to conference on, “Religion and Race” (14 January 1963)

At the first conference on religion and race, the main participants were Pharaoh and Moses. Moses’ words were: “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, let My people go that they may celebrate a feast to Me.” While Pharaoh retorted: “Who is the Lord, that I should heed this voice and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, and moreover, I will not let Israel go.” The outcome of that summit meeting has not come to an end. Pharaoh is not ready to capitulate. The exodus began but is far from having been completed. In fact, it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a [black man] to cross certain university campuses.

It’s an extraordinary speech. I love it for a couple of reasons. More than two, but I’m going to share two today.

I love it because it reminds me how quickly humans forget this story - the story we read today, in this Shul, and in Synagogues the world over.  Every year we tell the story of the oppression of a people - our people - by another people who forgot all the good we could do and focussed only on how scary it was to have a different people among them. Every year we remind ourselves, and frankly the whole world, of how quickly we invent supposed sins committed by those ‘not quite like everyone else’

It reminds me that human beings are quick to invent some meaningless supposed sin of people who are unlike everyone else - the supposed sin of being a Jew, the supposed sin of having black skin, the supposed sin of ....

So this is how I’m defining racism - to treat two people different because of an accident of birth is racist; whether that accident of birth resulted in different colour skin, different gender, different anything. There is no justification for treating people differently because of an accident of birth.

Well, it’s kicked off again, just this week.

There are reports that the President of the United States rejected a bi-partisan plan to bring child refugees to America with language I cannot repeat, but he seems to have rejected the plan because the people who are fleeing to America are coming from poor countries like Haiti. It’s not a sin to come from a poor country. It’s not a sin to come from a country visited by earthquakes and hurricanes, and beset with political instability. The stories of the destruction of Haiti should move us to empathy, not disdain.

You are not better than a Haitian because you were born into wealth and health. You are better, or worse, than the next person because of how you treat others, frankly, how you treat the poor and wretched most of all, frankly, how you treat the poor and wretched you don’t particularly feel drawn to treat well. It’s us, the wealthy, healthy inhabitants of what we like to call the free world, who get judged on an issue like this. Not the people born in Haiti, and Congo and Syria and the like.

We are not better than Haitians because we had the fortune to be born here. It’s not a sin that they were born there.

Here’s Heschel again.

Religion and race. How can the two be uttered together? To act in the spirit of religion is to unite what lies apart, to remember that humanity as a whole is God’s beloved child. To act in the spirit of race is to sunder, to slash, to dismember the flesh of living humanity.

The sad news is that racism remains present, even 55 years after the Chicago conference. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Race remained present even 1300 years after the conference in Egypt - the one with Pharaoh and Moses.

Of course Black Lives Matter, of course it’s appalling that black men have a likelihood of being shot - shot even by police who are supposed to be guardians of justice - crossing the road far, far, far higher than white men. Even 55 years after Heschel pointed out

“it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a [black man] to cross certain university campuses.”

That’s the first reason I love this speech. It reminds me how much we need to do to combat and oppose and challenge racist language and behaviour - language and behaviour that suggests one person is better or worse than another and deserving of different treatment simply because of an accident of their birth.

But here’s the other thing.

I love A.J. Heschel, and this speech particularly because it’s a reminder of what we need religion for, in this day and age, in a time when we’ve learnt to peer into the very earliest moments of the big bang and have learnt to split atoms and genes and become so very very clever.

I love A.J. Heschel and this speech in particular because it’s a reminder that religion can play a role in changing people’s hearts - in fact, it’s probably the greatest source of anyone changing their mind in the history of humanity.

Here we all are, in our silos - we know what we know and we like to surround ourselves with people who agree with us. We select the newspapers that agree with us. We curate out Facebook and Twitter feeds to echo the thoughts in our mind. And we are pro-Brex-this or anti-Brex-that. And we if we let different voices into our private echo chambers at all, we congratulate ourselves on our liberality, as we scoff at those people who have the temerity to think differently from ourselves and go back to reinforcing whatever opinions we have already decided are correct.

When we discount religion, when we no longer listen hard enough to the stories like the great story of Exodus, when we no longer spend enough time in Synagogues and other places of religion, when we no longer make space in our lives for God, we get to a place where human beings are the most important things there are. And that’s not completely errant, but it's woefully insufficient.

If we lock religion out of our lives I am left with just me. And if you disagree with me, in a world without religion, who is to say that I’m not right? Who’s to say that I have to listen to you?  If we stop listening to the voice of religion who is to say that one lot of people aren’t, indeed, more important than another lot of people. Who’s going to jab their finger at us and call us to account for the times we’ve treated different human beings as being of different worth.

Here’s the religious take on race - all humanity is created in the image of God, white skinned, black skinned, yellow skinned, male female, gay, straight, poor or rich ... who is to say, say the Rabbis, that your blood is redder, perhaps their blood is redder?

The thing about religion is that it puts us all in second place, as human beings, behind a God who is our creator in whose image we are all pale reflections. And I don’t care if you understand gene splicing or the big bang, if that makes you confused as to whether you are really the most important creation in this world. Because you are not. I am not. None of us is.

We need religion to remind us an existential humility, we need religion to remind us of how insidious it is to treat another human being as worse less than us. We need religion to remind us that even if we do behave in ways that are subtly racist, God still sees, God still knows and God still records.

In fact that’s the very point of religion - to stand above us and point out our falling short. And I know that that is not very trendy in this, I’m alright, you’re alright world.

But the truth is we need religion today more than ever. More than ever it matters that I do not consider I am the most important person in the world - when the costs and the dangers of seeing other people as less important than me are so huge - when the costs and dangers of seeing the world around me as there only for me to use and abuse it.

We need to learn how to place ourselves below the level of God. We need to learn we are all children of God. We need to learn that our responsibilities, as Jews, as humans, are greater than our claims to be in control of our destiny. We need a humility. That’s what religion teachers.

In our faith, you get up on the morning and the first words on your lips should be ‘Modeh Ani Lefanecha’ - I am grateful God for the gift of another day alive. That should make you think before you oppress another before you place yourself above another.

Let me leave the last words with A J Heschel

Few of us seem to realize how insidious, how radical, how universal an evil racism is. Few of us realize that racism is man’s gravest threat to man, the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason, the maximum of cruelty for a minimum of thinking. Perhaps [Heschel went on, reflecting on the conference on Religion and Race to which he had been invited] this Conference should have been called “Religion or Race.” You cannot worship God and at the same time look at man as if he were a horse.