Thoughts on No Longer Being the Parent of Children - Shelach Lecha

On this auspicious occasion – the Bat Mitzvah of my youngest child. Mazal Tov Eliana. I thought I could compare myself to God.

Spoiler alert, that might not mean what you think it means.

But here’s a way to retell the story of the spies, in fact it might be the simplest and most straightforward way to tell the story.

God says to Moses, appoint spies – let them to scout out the land.

And Moses sends spies – to scout out the land.

And the spies come back and say, “It’s a good land,” and then most of them say, “But we don’t think we can take it.”

And God is furious, that God decrees none of the generation of the spies deserves to make it into the Promised Land.

And if we were to construct a parable – a Mashal – LeMah HaDavar Domeh, as the Rabbis are so keen to say, what is this thing like?

One might suggest a suitable parable would be a parent who says to a teenage child just before they go out for the evening, “Sure, go out, stay out as late as you like.” And when the child comes back with a phone that ran out of battery hours ago at two in the morning, the parent is there, sitting on the stairs looking furious, so furious that the child gets grounded for the rest of the summer.

Any resemblance to the life of any parent and any child here, in Shul today, is of course, entirely co-incidental.

Or perhaps, it we are looking to make our parable a little less unfair on the parent maybe this.

Mashal, Lemah HaDavar Domeh – what is this like, but the child says, “but you told me it was OK to stay out as late as I wanted.” And the parent responds, “what I meant was for you to take a mature and sensible decision as to the right time to come home.”

As I say, any resemblance to the life of any parent and any child here, in Shul today, is of course, entirely co-incidental.

It’s not the first time I, as a parent and a lover of the Torah, I’ve been troubled about the way instructions are set forth by God. After all, I’m not only a parent, I’ve been a child as well.

Way, way back in the Book of Genesis, God put the first human being in the Garden of Eden and says to them, eat anything you like, just not the fruit from this one tree, right here in the middle of the garden.

And when Eve and Adam eat from the fruit …

Mashal LeMah Hadavar Domeh – what parable could this be compared to?

A parent who says to a small child, you can play with any of the toys in the room, just don’t play with the computer that’s plugged in, switched on and sitting in the corner of the room.

And when the child is found to have been playing on the computer …

And, of course, Adam and Eve shouldn’t have eaten the fruit, and of course the child shouldn’t play on the computer, but what would say about the parenting of a parent who puts a child in a room with a computer and walks away having told the child not to.

Of course these two examples aren’t really the same; in one case the parent told the kid what to do and the kid did it and got in trouble. In the other, the parent told the kid what not to do and the kid did it and got in trouble.

But I wonder the extent to which any of the children here – any of us who have ever been children, might be struck by the way in which being parented can sometimes feel like that.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Any resemblance to the life of any maturing adult here, in Shul today, is of course, entirely co-incidental.

But there is something deeper, I think, about this comparison between being a parent and – forgive the hubris and possibly even the heresy – God, creator of heavens and earth and everything in it.

There is the classic Rabbinic idea that God felt somehow desperately alone in God’s absolute perfect power and so sought to create this world so God would have something with which to relate – something to point to as an achievement in life. And the thing that God decides to create – you, me, all us humans – is not some kind of blind automaton, that robotically does exactly what God wants, precisely as God wants it. The thing that God decides to create – you, me, all us humans – is a creature endowed with a certain freedom of choice, a certain jumble of competing instincts and inclinations, a being that grows from immaturity towards maturity, but sometimes – let it be admitted – not always perfectly moving from one to the other in a uniform straight line.

The thing that God decides to create – you, me, all us humans – is a being who is not minutely controlled by God – not a computer game avatar toggling left or right depending on which key is pressed, but somehow makes up our own mind to love God, and follow in all the paths that God sets out for us without being moved about pixel by pixel.

And yet there is this paradox at the heart of the creation of the first human being and every human being since. You can’t have a human being with freedom of choice who does exactly the thing we want them to do.

That’s just not how it works.

And the thing that God has to learn to do, and it takes some of the greatest leaders of our tradition to help God into this relationship with us, all of human creation, …

The thing God has to learn to do is find a way to allow us space to explore a bit, fail a bit, fail badly sometimes, maybe even many times. The thing God needs to learn to do is not bring Mot TaMut – thou shalt surely die – retribution on God’s creation every time they – we – trip up and eat of the fruit or bottle it and fail to realise of course we can take the land, or pass the exam or succeed in any journey to which we apply ourselves seriously. There’s even a Pulitzer-winning book, God: A Biography, by the former Jesuit seminarian, Jack Miles, in which the author suggests that God finds it so difficult to be in a relationship with human beings who trip up, fail, fail badly even sometimes, that God goes into a sort of withdrawal – what the Rabbis call Hester Panim – hiding of the Divine presence is a consequence of God finding the way in which live out our freedom of choice NOT to do the thing that God wants us to do too difficult.

And as a parent, thinking back to that time, dear Eli, when you and your brothers weren’t even a twinkle in our eyes when I think back to those romantic days so many years ago, I have an empathy with God’s frustrations at me as a failing human. I feel a certain level of empathy with God finding it impossible to have a creation of God’s own efforts who of their own free volition chooses to have precisely the same aspirations and goals and sensitivities as a parent would wish for a child.

But that’s not the only thing I feel, and on a day like today, it’s the least of my emotions. The overwhelming emotion that just floods out everything else is the intense sense of pride in seeing the different decisions you make, even as you make decisions I would never have made. Yes, you still drive me occasionally to the point of distraction, but if forced to choose between some automaton that would perform precisely as programmed and the reality of a real human being who makes their own exploratory way in the world. I would take you. Every time.

There’s that wonderful Yiddish phrase – to Shepp Nachas. Shepp means derive, or something like that. And Nachas is the thing you feel when your daughter has her Bat Mitzvah. Other examples are available, but this is the one I’m going with this weekend. It’s wonderful and quite untranslatable, but it requires two things – on the one hand, you only feel Nachas when there is something you have put into this extraordinary creation. But on the other hand you only feel Nachas when your child has found their own way and their way is different from your way, or even from your wife’s way, it’s her own way.

And now, with, certainly your brothers, and even increasingly you – my newly Bat Mitzva’ed adult – and don’t you know it – capable of making your own decisions and controlling your own future in your own increasingly independent way, I wonder if God isn’t merely in retreat having given up on us as useless, but rather is up there Shepping Nachas. God deserves to Shep Nachas, even if we fail, and goodness we fail.

And this thing called parenting, that we experience, it becomes a different thing, at this point, from this point.

Parenting can no longer be the categorical announcement of instruction. It can’t even be the half-opened-up suggestion that, sometimes, is followed and sometimes isn’t and when it isn’t is followed up with the grouchy face of the parent who told their kids to choose their own time to come home and finds the kids arriving at 2am. It has to be a willed desire to Shepp Nachas in the ways in which our creations are not like us. It has to be a willed desire to empower choices even when we don’t understand the choices, or would never make those choices ourselves.

Arik Einstein, the great Israeli singer and lyricist, perhaps put it best.

Hagozalim sheli azvu et haken
parsu knafayim ve'afu
Va'ani tzipor zkena nisharti baken
mekave me'od shehakol yihe beseder

My chicks have left the nest
spread their wings and flew away
I am an old bird left in the nest
I hope that all will be well

Tamid yadati sheyavo hayom
shebo tzarich lehipared
Aval achsahv ze ba li kacha pit'om
az ma hapele she'ani ktzat do'eg

I always knew the day will come
to say good bye
But now when it is here
no wonder I’m a little tender

Ani yode'a shekacha ze bateva
vegam ani azavti ken
Aval achshav ksheba harega az
machnik ktzat bagron

I know it is the way of nature
I left the nest as well
But now when the time comes
I feel a lump in my throat.

 

The time comes to hold this gift of being a parent with such fierce love, that we let go, and send a blessing on your future flight. And prepare still to nudge and boss around and insist and hold to account, but knowing that the pathway leads only towards the option of seeking Nachas.

And feeling deep love.

We should all be so blessed.

Even God.

 

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

Brexit and Exodus - A Sermon Given on the Day of Departure

Last night Great Britain left the European Union.

And this morning we read the story of the Children of Israel leaving Egypt.

So it’s one of those days when the subject of the sermon is crystalline. But the guts of the sermon are tricky.

When the orthodox Chief Rabbi of this country spoke out publicly in the weeks before the last general election, I got a slew of emails from congregants and others. Literally, half the emails thought it was wonderful that a religious leader should speak out on such an important political matter, and warmly encouraged me to do the same.

And the other half of emails warned and worried about the consequences for Rabbi Mirvis and wanted me to keep away from the issue.

On the one hand … and on the other hand.

But there are similarities between the Exodus narrative and the Brexit narrative that go beyond the letters ‘e’ and ‘x’.

For one thing, not everyone wanted to leave. When Moses first went to the Children of Israel, in events we read a couple of weeks ago, they weren’t interested at all.

Shortly after Moses goes to Pharaoh to instruct the King of Egypt that the Hebrew should be freed, and the foreman of the Israelites comes to him and curses him out, ‘May God look at you and punish you for making us loathsome to Pharaoh.’ And we’ve had a bunch of name-calling and bitterness in this journey also.

But eventually the people leave.

Actually, maybe not all the people. There is Rabbinic commentary to the effect that there were some who stayed behind – maybe in today’s situation, they would be the people – the tens of thousands of people who have rushed out to get an EU passport at some point in the last three years.

But let me leave the politics at this point. I’m going to make some points about leaving Egypt, and I’m not trying to make a point about Brexit; whether it’s good or bad. I suspect I’m firmly with the Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai who, when asked in the 1970s what he thought about the French revolution of 1798; "It's too early to tell." Let me instead think a little more deeply about the Israelites who stayed behind, and what the Israelites who left were doing.

Next week we’ll read a line that says the Children of Israel, as they left Egypt, were hamushim. That’s a word that clearly has something to do with the Hebrew word for 5 or maybe 50, but it’s unclear. Our most important commentator, Rashi thinks it has something to do with learning military techniques from their oppressors - now the Children of Israel march fifty abreast in military formation. But Rashi also says this – there is a Midrash (and it’s in the Mekhilta of Rabbi Yishmael) that records an argument about how many Israelites left Egpyt. Perhaps when the verse says they left Hamushim – it really means that it was only one in five of the Israelites left, or maybe even one in fifty of the Israelites who left.

What happened to the rest?

Shmeitu Harbeh MYisrael BMitzrayim

Many Israelites died in Egypt. They just couldn’t bring themselves to be ready to leave. So rather than be left behind, the idea seems to be, they fell dead. When did they die? The Midrash continues, in the three-day plague of darkness. And while the Egyptians couldn’t see, the Israelites who were to leave buried the ones who were not to leave - so the Egyptians would know what had happened.

Because, it seems, that leaving is hard.

Crazily, it seems, there were Israelites who opposed to leaving Egypt even when they were abused, beaten, and genocidally murdered. Actually, that’s a pattern we’ve seen time and time again in history and across the globe. In the face of oppression and slavery, there are always those who protest against any attempt to overthrow the status quo and leave. They worry about what they might lose, they can’t see what they might gain.

And this is the point about leaving Egypt.

When Moses turns to the people of Israel and calls on them to follow him into the desert he promises them something they cannot see. At the heart of the Jewish faith, there is a god who cannot be seen. That’s in radical contradistinction to life in Egypt where the gods can be seen. Now it might be that the Egyptians gods and magicians and the like are all pretty useless, but at least they are there. The same goes for the foodstuff of Egpyt. Slaves don’t get much to eat, but there’s nothing to eat in the desert – and you can understand an Israelite feeling, you know, I’ll stay right here.

You can look at the entire battle between Moses and Pharaoh, the entire point of Exodus as the battle between the attraction of the material and tangible, as little and as fallible as it may be, and the promise of a future that cannot yet be seen, and might never be seen. 

Here’s another Midrash, a rabbinic commentary on a verse we read last week on the moment when Moses first turns up at Pharaoh’s palace to request the release of his people.

[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.

They replied, ‘God stretched out the heavens and the earth and God’s voice carved out flames of fire,[2] God rips open the mountains and smashed the rocks.[3] God’s bow is of fire, God’s arrows are flames, God’s spear is a torch, God’s shield is the clouds, God’s sword is lightening,  God forms the mountains and the hills; covers the mounts with grass, the heavens with clouds, God brings down the rain and the dew and gets the plants to grow and the fruits to ripen. God afflicts the beasts and forms the embryo in the womb of the mother and brings it forth into the light of the world.’

Moses is trying to explain a God that cannot be seen, that is more important than all things that can be seen. And Pharaoh, blinded by the idolatrous world he lives in doesn’t get it. It’s a difficult thing to persuade someone; that the things you can’t see are more important than the things you can.

We even have, in English, the idiom – ‘do see what I mean?’ which is absolutely understood to refer to understanding. So tempting to think that if you can’t see something that it’s not going to be important. Tempting to place all our faith, our hope and our work into those things we can see.

And put like that you can understand why there were Israelites who weren’t ready to leave, you weren’t able to get it.

It was a problem back then and over there, and it remains a problem over here and today.

We live in a world that loves the things that can be seen.  And we all spend our lives chasing around after the things that can be seen, and collected and stored up, or maybe not collected, just admired from afar.

And here’s the thing. None of the things we chase after last forever. None of the things we chase after make us a better person. None of the things we chase after unlock, for us, the reason for our existence. Why are we here. What should we do with this extraordinary thing called our life?

To work that stuff out you have to head off into the wilderness, with no-thing. You have to believe that the things that can’t be seen will support us in our wandering.

Ben – you’ve done brilliantly today. I hope you get a whole bunch of presents and things – stuff. But in 20 years time, I guarantee you, you won’t remember the presents and things. If you remember anything about today, you’ll remember things that can’t be seen – how you feel. How you feel connected to your place in this world, as a son – a firstborn, as a Jew.

The word spiritual is much overused, and little understood. To be spiritual means to value the things that can’t be seen more highly than the things that can be seen. It means to value the invisible truths of faith, of love, of feeling, more than the material things, the idols, the gold and the silver. It’s a tough challenge, to be spiritual.

It’s what Moses demanded Pharaoh understand when he attended Pharaoh’s coronation. And Pharaoh didn’t get it.

It’s what Moses tried to inspire in the Hebrews as they were so weary as slaves in Egypt. And only one in five, or one in fifty got it.

And it’s my call today.

Believe in the things that can’t be seen.

Don’t be misled by the things that can be seen.

The story of Exodus survives as a marker of the power of the unseeable. We’ve been telling it and celebrating it for three millennia at this point and it’s going strong, still inspiring generations yet to make their mark on this planet. 

And if I am to venture a view on Brexit it would be this - Brexit will boil down to a bunch of complex trading agreements about … things. And we won’t be reading about it three thousand years.

Shabbat Shalom

---

[1] Midrash Tanhumah, V’era 5

[2] (Psalms 29:7)

[3] (I Kings 19:11)

BRCA - Bracha - Reflections on Breast Cancer

In a few moments, we’ll begin our Yizkor service, and I know that many of us who are here today have memories of beloved relatives so close to our hearts and minds at this time. But I want to take this time to talk, not about those who are no longer with us, but us, who are here, and our relationship with our own mortality. Specifically, I want to talk about breast cancer.

I have a remote, but still nasty, relationship with breast cancer; in my life, my work, and my faith.

I never met my mother-in-law. She would have been 70 this year, but died of the disease before I met her.

A BRCA1 mutation - the single most significant important predictor of breast cancer - wanders through my wife’s extended family. As, of course, it wanders through other families in this special community, and others.

Thinking about this sermon, I’ve spoken with several BRCA mutation carriers, I’ve heard them called previvors – I like that term. I’ve spoken to cancer survivors and previvors who’ve chosen to remove breast and ovarian tissue, women who’ve chosen to remove breast tissue, but not ovaries, and ovaries, but not breasts.  I’ve spoken to a previvor who had a ‘bye-bye-boobs’ party featuring pink-frosted cupcakes with nipples. And I’m sharing this sermon in honour of all these remarkable women – and men – who’ve fought the cruel irony – that the ovaries and the breast – the source of human life - can become lethal if a microscopic chain of amino-acids don’t behave the way they should.

Let me back-track. Somewhere in our vast genome – on the long arm of chromosome 17 – we carry a gene that regulates the repair of broken threads of DNA. It’s called BRCA1. And there’s another gene on Chromosome 13 – BRCA2 – that does much the same thing. And if these BRCA genes are doing what they should do, broken threads of DNA get repaired perfectly. But certain kinds of mutations in these genes can result in mis-repairs and these mis-repairs, can result in tumours, tumours in breast tissue  -for both women and men - and ovarian tissue especially.

And then there is this; certain BRCA mutations have a particularly high incidence among Ashkenazi Jews. In the general population 1 in 400 people carry one of the over 60 different kinds of BRCA mutations that have been charted. Among Ashkenazi Jews, 1 in 40 of us carry one of three BRCA mutations, all of which are dangerous.

Earlier this year I was flown to Brazil to officiate at a wedding of two of our members here – perk of the job. At the reception I was talking to one of the guests, Renee, who told me she carried a BRCA mutation and had not only taken some serious decisions about how to respond herself, but she had also set up an organisation in Brazil to support Jews getting screened and giving support.[1]

Renee told me that until she set up her organisation there was very little information available in Portuguese and very little support available in Brazil. I told her there was a terrific organisation doing similar work in this country – Jnetics. I’m a fan. There’s some information on their work in the foyer. Their founder is the daughter of long-term members here.

And then Renee told me the thing has been gnawing at my mind ever since, ‘JNetics,’ she said, ‘nice name, I called my organisation Brachah’ It was late in the evening, the music was playing, she had great English, but a heavy Portuguese accent and I had to ask her to say it again, ‘Brachah – like BRCA. They sound the same’

And this is the thing I’ve been thinking about, ever since – where, in all the nastiness, pain, and sheer mortal threat of breast and ovarian cancer – does a person find Brachah – blessing?

The thing about Renee, and many of the women I’ve spoken to, who have responded to news that they carry a BRCA mutation by choosing to undergo surgery and the like is that, when they talk about their lot, they tend to use words like ‘blessing,’ and ‘being grateful’ more often than you would imagine.

The keyword, for so many of these women, is agency – the ability to exercise control over that which threatens to control you. Susan Sontag, who had just been diagnosed with cancer herself, wrote in 1978 about the way we talk, or at least talked, about cancer.  Cancer, she wrote, was depicted as “an evil, invincible predator, not just a disease.”[2] Cancer was seen as an automatic death-sentence which could be delayed, perhaps, but no more than that. Cancer, back then, seemed to enable no decisions, no agency. That is, if one even knew what was going on. Sontag records a conversation with a French oncologist who told her that a fewer than a tenth of his patients even knew they had the disease, it was considered too distressing to tell anyone who was not ‘exceptionally mature.’

And now comes, among so much extraordinary scientific and medical progress, the discovery of these BRCA mutations and a world of questions and decisions that are, I know they are, scary and complex and we would wish nothing more than not to have to face them. But cancer is not invincible, it’s not even inevitable, not even for previvors who carry BRCA mutations.

Nowadays, previvors step into a world of percentages; the likelihood of contracting this cancer, or that, before or after this age; the degree risk can be reduced by electing to have prophylactic surgery – the counsellors you need to see before you can go under the scalpel don’t call it preventative surgery because, like so much else in this murky uneasy world, not even surgery comes with a guarantee. It’s knowledge, but it’s not certain. The cancer previvor and the cancer survivor inhabit a world between thinking they can live forever and feeling they are the inevitable victims of Sontag’s ‘invincible predator.’

Perhaps, seen like this, these previvors aren’t so different from the rest of us, those of us with perfectly functioning BRCA genes, but nonetheless destined otherwise to mortality. Perhaps you, or I, carry a genetic marker that predisposes us to one illness or another, by some percentage or another, or perhaps we don’t carry a marker, it’s just that mortality will visit us for some other reason. Maybe the thing that will get us is spectacularly unlikely, but even the tiniest of percentages will manifest somewhere, on someone.

As science does that thing that science does, we will find out more and more about our predispositions to mortality in its different forms. And we will be given more choice about how to balance the desire to live in ignorance of what is coming, and the desire to know – to manage our choices.

Back in the late 1970s, Sontag wrote that we are born with dual citizenship; membership of a kingdom of the well and a kingdom of the sick. We all wish to use only the passport of the kingdom of the well, she wrote, but ‘sooner or later we have to identify as citizens of that other place.’ But surely, we are all in the same kingdom, the kingdom of life which is both astounding and glorious, and fragile and mortal. We are all sliding up and down a scale of confidence in our strength and awareness of our fragility.

And we are all juggling bits and pieces of knowledge as we slide up and down the scale. Sometimes the knowledge comes delivered by a professional genetic counsellor who’s looked into the very depths of our chromosomes and can give us statistics backed up by peer-reviewed research. And sometimes the knowledge is chaotic and second-hand and quite possibly nonsense. What’s that about turmeric, and is red-wine good or bad for you this week? It’s hard enough just avoiding the things we know are bad for us when there are so many more complexities being revealed by science.

Well, here’s the bad news for anyone who finds this mass of options and knowledge and confusion frustrating or intolerably morbid; the future is going to present us with more of this; more complex knowledge, less certainty, more uneasy squirming in the face of increasing understanding of exactly how you or I are most likely to die. We would do well to be ready for this brave new world – more ready than we are.

Let me share three lessons I’ve learnt from the previvors and survivors I’ve met.

The first is; get knowledge.

None of the previvors I have spoken with regrets getting screened. Not that they advocate everyone getting screened regardless of their age and stage of life, but get the knowledge about the right age and stage of life to be screened and get the knowledge. It doesn’t make things easy, but the knowledge is worth it.

In some ways the Ashkenaz Jew in the screening room is back in the Garden of Eden, standing before a tree which will allow us to understand things we will never be able to un-learn. The tree promises understanding but that could come at the cost of the myth of our immortality. But here, there is no command to avoid the fruit. Rather, in a post-Eden-world, perhaps the best guiding principle is this verse from Deuteronomy. ‘See I have placed before you blessing and curse, choose life so that you shall live.’ Again, there is information about JNetics in the foyer if you want to know more about screening.

Without understanding, our life choices are no better than random guesses. With knowledge we gain the ability to make meaningful choices. Knowledge is the gateway to the second great lesson I’ve learnt in these conversations.

And the second lesson is; claim agency.

Make meaningful choices. None of us can direct the totality of our existence – that’s the great religious truth of our day, but we do have some power over some elements of our fate – so we should claim the right to make these choices.

It once happened, the rabbis teach in Midrash Tanhuma,[3] that the Roman Emperor Turnus Rufus and Rabbi Akiva were debating. ‘Which is greater’ the Emperor asks, ‘the works of God, or the works of humans?’ ‘The works of humans,’ the Rabbi responds.’ ‘But how can you match the heavens and the earth?’ the Emperor asks. So Akiva brings out some stalks of wheat and some loaves of bread and says, ‘These are the work of God, and these are the work of humans. Isn’t the bread better than the stalks of wheat?’ The Emperor acknowledges he is defeated by the Rabbi who believes in the greatness of human agency.

In our claiming agency over our lives, we justify and celebrate our existence. Exerting agency over our lives stops us from being nothing other than a sufferer, a victim, it allows us to become the actor – the star, the hero of our own story. I mean we talk about a book of life and a book of death on this holy day, but we are all going to die eventually – that’s the one shared decree we all face – so the question is rather – what do we do with the life we are given. What difference can we make, over our own life and the lives of others while we have the chance?

There are always decisions of agency to make, certainly in the case of BRCA mutations and even at the end of life.

Get knowledge, claim agency.

And thirdly, find the Brachah – find the blessing, if at all possible.

Maybe blessing – Brachah - is too provocative a word. I know this is a tricky one. Maybe a better Hebrew word would be Todah or Modeh. Modeh is usually translated as ‘Thanks’ but it actually means something that doesn’t really translate into English. To be Modeh is to acknowledge the gift of existence as a whole, even if the momentary experience is painful and challenging. Being Modeh is not about being grateful to carry a gene mutation or being thankful to have cancer – God forbid. But there is something about finding gratitude in our encounters with life, even with its pain and inevitable mortality, that can lift us and attune us to what it means to be alive – and it is beautiful and wonderful to be alive, even in pain and mortality.

I know this is difficult. And I don’t want to judge anyone who experiences pain and simply wants to say – stuff this, this is awful. Pain is never good. But I’ve seen, and I know many of us have, people who can experience pain and still find this quality of being Modeh.

Judaism doesn’t want us only to bless, only to express this quality of being Modeh, just when things go well. The Mishnah states Hayav levarech al harah cshem shehu mevarech al hatovah – a person should bless equally when things go well, as we when things don’t.[4] It’s a challenge, but cultivating that sense of being Modeh allows us to feel empowered by our acts of agency. We might not change the outcome, but we can change the way we experience our pain. That’s not insignificant. In fact, it might be the very greatest act of our humanity.

Let me share one example. Judaism has, of course, if does, a blessing to be said when you go to the toilet.

It's a blessing that thanks God for creating in our human bodies, holes and pipes and pipes and holes. Galui va’Yadua lifnei kise kevodecha – it is revealed and known by You – God – that if one of the holes that should be opened should close, or one of the pipes that should be closed would open, it would be impossible exist, for even a moment. Blessed are you God – the blessing ends – who does wonderous things.

It’s a great blessing to be said when everything is going well with our bodies and we feel capable and powerful. It’s also a great blessing to be said when … it’s not and we become assailed by a sense that we are nothing more than fragile physical entities guaranteed only to decay.

I’m not trying, necessarily, to advocate the formal words in the siddur. I think you can express this idea in so many, many ways. I’m also not suggesting that a person shouldn’t feel angry, even express anger and bitterness and all the rest of the emotions that come up when we experience our own mortality in this way. Cultivating this sense of Modeh, while being angry at being ill and fighting with every ounce of our strength to get better, that can all fit together as part of a commitment to finding the very best in the lives we can make for ourselves. But somewhere, somehow, it's helpful to cultivate a sense of being blessed, a sense of being Modeh.

Judaism at its best doesn't lie. It doesn't offer panaceas to the inevitable human condition of mortality. But it does tell us to get knowledge, to claim agency and to find blessings. I think that’s because getting knowledge, claiming agency and finding blessings transforms us from being the victims of a sick irony like cancer and into human beings in the very fullest sense of the term. Getting knowledge, claiming agency and finding blessings makes us the heroes of our lives, it frees us from suffering, even if we do experience pain.

May we all be spared from any experience of pain in this year to come, but should it come, may we play these roles – of seeking knowledge, claiming agency and finding blessing with distinction and courage, both in this year, and in many years to come.

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[1] https://brachabrasil.org for the British organisation see https://www.jnetics.org/

[2] Illness as a Metaphor, p.7

[3] Tazria 5

[4] Mishnah Brachot 9:5

Parashat Balak - Looking Out at Goodness

I used to go to one of those shuls where everyone was in place 1 minute before the Shabbat morning service started. German influenced. Gotta love those Germans.

And when the service began it began with a terrific verse from this week’s Torah reading - Mah Tovu Ohalecha Yaacov - How great are your tents o Jacob.

It’s not part of our liturgy here. Probably because we are just a little quiet at the very beginning of services. That’s a shame - because it’s a great verse.

The story is that Bilaam eventually arrives at the camp of the Israelites - the people of Jacob. He’s been paid to curse them and off he goes a-cursin’

But when he finally arrives he lifts up his eyes and sees Israel and he says this;

 נְאֻם בִּלְעָם בְּנוֹ בְעֹר

Thus spoke Bilaam, son of Beor, the saying of the man whose eyes have been opened

מַה-טֹּבוּ אֹהָלֶיךָ, יַעֲקֹב

How great are your tents o Jacob.

So what did he see that impressed him so deeply?

I want to share two possible understandings.

One motivated by a book, and one motivated by Rashi.

Let me start with the book.

I’ve been reading the scripts of the original masterpiece documentary television series, recently updated. You may have been watching Civilisations, presented by Simon Schama and others - but I’ve been taken with the original 1969 series Civilisation, presented by Kenneth Clark. I referred to it in my weekly words - I did say there would be a test.

The original Civilisation has been knocked in that revisionist way in which things get knocked, but it’s bursting with tremendously interesting ideas.

Clark opens his masterwork trying to understand what civilisation is. He stands on the bank of the Seine surrounded by stunning beautiful buildings and asks what differentiates the savage barbarian beauty prow of a marauding Viking ship from the beauty of the buildings of what he considers proper civilisation?

In a word he suggests the defining property of civilisation is ‘permanence.’[1]

Wanderers and invaders, Clarke speculates, don’t look beyond the next meal or the next battle. And for that reason, he claims, it didn’t occur to them to build beautiful buildings, or write books.

A civilised person, says Clarke, must feel they belong somewhere specific in space and time. And for that purpose, he says, it’s a great convenience to be able to read and write.

It’s a shock, he says to realise how rare that gift was even in Medieval times. The great military general and Empower Charlemagne born in 742 learnt to read, we are told, but he could never write - too busy chasing the here and now to worry about recording anything for the forever.

Jews, on the other hand, have been big on writing, and reading, and learning, for a very long time. We feel we have an intimate connection to - if not place - then at least time. We play a transgeneration game where the quality of what we have is the quality of what we can pass on to the generations that follow.

So imagine this with me.

Bilaam is a man who is on the make, a mercenary purveyor of curses and blessings to whoever will line his palm with silver.

And when he sets off into the desert to the Israelite encampment he must be assuming he will encounter an  Am Noded, a wandering, nomadic, peripatetic people without commitment to civilisation.

But when he looks out at them - at us - he sees something different.

He sees a commitment to permanence, a commitment to civilisation. I’ll get to what exactly that might look like a little later. But he sees something that strikes him as good - maybe it was our commitment to what Clark considers civilisation, a desire to create for a term longer than even our own lives, a relationship with permanence reflected even in how we set up camp in the wilderness all those years ago.

I don’t think it could have been the buildings - after all the Israelites are travelling - there would have been a beautiful sanctuary in the middle of the camp, but the tents, surely, would have just been tents, ramshackle Succot.

In fact the markers of Jewish civilisation have only rarely and only temporarily been buildings, and more rarely still been buildings as beautiful as this one.

Today is the 17^th of Tammuz, the anniversary of the breaching of the walls of the Second Temple, the start of a religious journey reaches its nadir in three weeks time when we commemorate the destruction of the Temple. We are marking the beginning of this journey tomorrow morning - Shacharit. In three weeks time - POSTER

The Jewish civilisation has had a mixed track record with buildings - they tend to get destroyed. But we have never given up on our commitment to permanence; to building for the future with not bricks and mortar, but through a Masorah - a religious and intellectual and emotional traditional to be passed down from one generation to the next. We’ve built our civilisation out of a relationship with the written word - the Torah, and the books and stories and narratives that have unfolded from it over so many years..

The Jewish civilisation has been built out of a commitment to pass something on to the generations to come.

We believe we can survive, we will survive even despite anything. We always have. Perhaps that’s how we have survived when the Hittites and the Jebusites and the Persians and the Romans and even the Nazis have fallen by the wayside. We’ve structured our camps for the forever.

We’ve always looked beyond the immediate.

We’ve always built for the future.

Enormously proud of our Cheder.

All upstairs learning, celebrating, building for our permanence.

Exactly as it should be.

Presenting prizes at end of service - hope you will share your support of how we are still building for our future.

Maybe what Bilaam saw is that marker of Jewish civilisation - permanence -in the construction of the Tents of Jacob.

But what, exactly would that look like?

That’s Rashi’s question

His comment is a little terse.

What was it that Bilaam saw that was good, asks Rashi?

על שראה פתחיהם שאינן מכוונין זה מול זה:

He saw that the tents weren’t set up to face into one another. It wasn’t possible for one person to look in at the tent of the other.

I had always understood Rashi to be claiming that our commitment to privacy was ‘Tovu’ the good thing Bilaam saw.

As if there was something particularly impressive about privacy.

Turns out I shouldn’t have underestimated Rashi.

Here’s the Midrash Rashi had in mind when he penned his commentary.

It’s from a late collection, Tanhuma Yilamdeinu;

‘Back in Egypt even though there were those who worshipped false gods, even still the people still observed prohibitions against adultery. And when they came out of Egypt they were Tzanuah - modest, each one in their own tent - so Reuven didn’t gaze out on the wife of Shimon and Shimon didn’t gaze out on the wife of Reuven. And even when there were 600,000 in the wilderness, this is how they did modesty. No-one placed the opening of their tent infront of the tent of their fellow. And when Bilaam looked out and saw Israel dwelling in her tribes - [this is what he praised.]

The point of the tents not facing one another is not to stop you looking in on me.

But to stop me looking in on you.

It’s an act of self control.

I know there is a gender critical read of the Midrash and, for the sake of stating the obvious let me clear that I’m not at all interested in the notion that a husband owns their wife, but let me let that go and instead take this as a Midrash which suggests that the thing that is good is the exercise of self control over peering salaciously and greedily at our fellows.

What Bilaam saw was not a nation of acquisitorial net-curtain twitchers, but a nation committed not to covet. The modesty here is a sense of security with what one has - I’m reminded of one of my favourite teachings in Pirkei Avot -

Eizeh Hu Ashir - who is rich - HaSameach B’Helko - the one who is happy with what they have.

It’s a much more moving understanding of the meaning of this much abused term - Tzanuah -

Bilaam is a man motivated by money.

He’s allowed money dangled before him to lead him astray.

And he turns up at the Israelite encampments to see a people who aren’t chasing after what they don’t have - certainly not chasing dishonest acquisition.

It’s a captivating image. What would it be to set up my tent in such a way to send out a sign that I’m happy with what I have - I’m Sameach b’Helki?

We could all do with sending out a message into this battered world that we are happy with what we have.

So two thoughts about the nature of what Bilaam saw that so moved him to utter that majestic verse - Mah Tovu Ohaelecha.

Perhaps he saw something about a commitment to permanence, a commitment not only to build a civilisation, but to pass that civilisation on from one generation to another. Perhaps he saw, in the arrangement of ‘Tzanuah’ modest, non acquisitorial, tents a commitment not to covet that which belongs to our fellow.

Maybe these two ideas are nothing other than alternate ways of expressing the same thing. The person who sees something and wants to grab it immediately is a person who lives in the moment. The person who lives with a sense of permanence wants to build something to pass on. They don’t hunger after their fellow’s possessions because they want to be part of a stable society that doesn’t descend into a dog-eat-dog free-for-all.

A desire to build a Jewish life for the future and a commitment to self restraint are perhaps the great markers of our Jewish life.

And they are indeed, great.

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[1] P.20