Shanah Tovah - Bring what you need. Leave behind what you don't.

 

 

It began with a conversation about mobile phones. Really there is no need for mobile phones in Shul. For those of us umbilically attached to these miraculous communications devices, Rosh Hashanah is a wonderful way to experience what happens when we limit our inter-personal conversations to those present before us. It’s also a good deal easier to guarantee your phone won’t go off in the middle of the most poignant moment of the services if you leave it at home.

 

But then there are other things I should be leaving behind on Rosh Hashanah. George Clooney’s character in the film ‘Up In The Air’ suggests that we all carry around a backpack full of stuff that weighs us down. I disagree with his assessment of what should go in the bag, but I agree with his suggestion that the bag deserves a regular sort through and tidy out. The detritus of pretence, partial-truths and prevarications builds up over the years. Out they go. The mis-placed pride, the pain caused to others and the breaking of our promises to ourselves are harder to extract, but should also go. We face a new year. We hope our sins – red as crimson – shall become as white as snow. It’s a good time to work out what we want to leave behind. And a wonderful time to appreciate that which we carry with us into the year to come.

 

I’m excited to be finally here, on the cusp of this special time. It is a huge honour for me to be able to share this Rosh Hashanah season with our wonderful Chazan, Stephen, and all the community. For my failings I request your forgiveness and offer my own forgiveness in return.

 

May this year come to all of us in health and happiness and with much sweetness to us all,

 

Shannah Tovah Tikateivu, May we all be written for a good year.

 

Rabbi Jeremy

Sounds Jewish Podcast

For those who would like a little podcasting interest, I’ve contributed to the Guardian Sounds Jewish podcast on Rosh Hashanah, available at

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/audio/2011/sep/27/sounds-jewish-podcast-september-2011

You may also hear the voices of Chazan Jackie Chernett, Jonathan Freedland and the music of Lemez Lovas among others.

 

Water-Carriers and All

I contributed this week’s Masorti Reflection on the Parasha.

Cross posted from

http://www.masorti.org.uk/reflections.htm

 

Shabbat Nitzavim - Vayelekh

 

If you are reading this, in Shul or on-line, congratulations. You are one of the elite; preparing for the major celebrations of the coming days by engaging in Jewish life and study. In less than a week’s time we will be joined by a goodly number of Jews who have been preparing for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur by …. well they won’t have been preparing themselves for Rosh Hashanah at all.

 

I remember once passing a Shtibel – a little basement Synagogue – on New York's Upper West Side on the Shabbat immediately before Rosh Hashanah just as one of the daveners emerged from their Shabbat morning service. We chatted, ‘How many people did you get today?’ I asked, ‘Oh, about seventy,’ came the response. ‘And how many will you get on Rosh Hashanah?’ I asked. ‘Oh, about seventy,’ came the response. It took a while for me to understand what he meant. Then I realised, it’s the kind of community where everybody always comes. They have about seventy people on the first Shabbat in March, the third Wednesday morning in April or the second Tuesday afternoon in May.

 

It would be easy, as ‘one of the elite’ slipping into our regular seat on Shabbat Nitzavim-Vayelekh, to feel that Rosh Hashanah belongs to us. We are the regular attenders and the Talmud frequently teaches ben tadir v’aray tadir maadif, -between regular and occasional, regular is preferred. But that would be a terrible error, especially in the run up to Rosh Hashanah. These are the opening words of the parasha read the week before Rosh Hashanah - ‘You are standing here today, all of you, before God, your bosses, tribes, wise leaders, officers, everyone of Israel, your children, your wives, your strangers; from wood cutter to drawer of water so you can enter into the covenant.’ (Deut 29:10-11).

For the most important moments in our national history and in yearly calendar we stand together, wood-cutters and elite alike. The machers and the twice a year attendees are deemed equally necessary for the success of the covenantal relationship between God and the Children of Israel. The same is true of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. How could we pray, in the words of the Kol Nidrei, ‘alongside the sinners,’ if we were all perfect (a fine hope that). The language of mutual responsibility shared by an entire people before God infuses so much of the liturgy of the upcoming days, from the Zichronot verses of Rosh Hashanah to the confessional recitations of Yom Kippur. We are all in this together.

So my request to the elite, reading this, is this - watch out for the wood-carriers and the water drawers, come Thursday morning. Wish them a Shanah Tovah, introduce yourself, make sure they feel comfortable in your community, even if you have never seen them before. This covenant, these coming days, are for us all.

Shabbat Shalom and a sweet and good year to all.

An Israeli Interruption

I wanted, on the Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah to write on matters affecting New London; our wonderful Slichot evening – scheduled for Sunday evening – and the Rosh Hashanah festivities of the coming week. But Israel has broken in, as it has a habit of doing.

Today there will, or won’t be, a vote at the UN on recognising a Palestinian State and diplomatic tanks are being lined up less, it seems, to debate the issue and more to disparage and blame one side or the other. I re-read the sermon I gave on Israel last year on Rosh Hashanah. Sadly not so much has changed. We are, I believe, still tremendously un-easy reading, listening and certainly speaking about Israel. The maps, sticking points and energies remain simmering a year on. That said, I do still believe in what I shared from the Bimah on Rosh Hashanah a year ago. I believe it, not only for Israel and her Palestinian neighbours, but for all of us who, a year later, find ourselves facing the very same maps, sticking points and energies that drew our attention a year ago in our interpersonal relationships. What is good for Israel is good for all of us.

There are, I believe, three necessary pre-Rosh Hashanah responses to Israel, then as now.
Firstly, we may not despair, we are, particularly around this sacred time in the Jewish calendar, compelled to believe that change and healing – even if only partial healing - are possible.
Secondly, we must be prepared to admit fault. Too much blame blinds. The posturing that insists it is always someone else’s fault is anathema to this time of year.
Thirdly, we have to acknowledge the religious value, and necessity, of compromise. The Talmud counsels on how to divide a contested piece of cloth and explains who gets to go first over a narrow pass. ‘Compromise,’ states the Talmud in Sanhedrin 5a, ‘is better than a legal judgement.’

There is a terrible history, appalling acts of violence and destruction and one can so easily be drawn into a never-ending cycle of recrimination and accusation. But the path to peace is not this way. Let me end with a text I received this week in a package of material for Rabbis who wish to speak on Israel over the High Holydays edited, distributed and prepared by Israel’s foreign ministry.

Rabbi Eliezer said (Leviticus 19) “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”—therefore do not say: since I have been humiliated, let my neighbour also be humiliated! Know it is the image of God you would disfigure!
Genesis Rabbah 24:7

My sermon from last year is at
http://rabbionanarrowbridge.blogspot.com/2010/09/1st-day-rh-sermon-israel-and-other_11.html
The Israel Foreign Ministry resource guide is available via the website of Israel’s Embassy to the United States
http://www.israelemb.org/index.php/en/component/content/article/526

Shabbat Shalom and Shanah Tovah,

Why Do We need Denominations

A response to the JTS Chancellor, Arnie Eisen’s very good question – Why do we need denominations.

His essay is at http://www.jtsa.edu/prebuilt/blog/denominations.html

 

I wonder if there is an analogy around questions of state versus private funding.

 

I want there to be safe roads to be everywhere for when I travel anywhere.

But I don't want have to pay per mile every time I get in the car and I want roads in areas where no private road builder would want to invest in building roads.

I want there to be a hospital with well trained medical staff for when I get ill.

But I don't want to have to get my wallet out as I lie on a hospital stretcher.

I want properly trained teachers with recognised qualifications in the schools where I send my kids.

But I don't want to have to school inspections myself. I don't have the expertise or the time.

 

I depute these tasks to the State and pay my taxes, despite the sense that there might be creeping inefficiencies and despite the fact that I might wish, at point of need, a different road plan or hospital design or educational oversight.

I commit to the larger, more ponderous, less perfectly attuned to my own desires, organisation – in these cases the State – because I want there to be a structure there and waiting for me and my needs when I am ready. It’s not a plea for communism, but an argument for the State to work out what we as a nation need that private organisations can’t or won’t provide well. And I feel the same things about Movements and denominations.

 

It's easy to find a freelancing post-denominational Rabbi to do a one-off pre-planned special; a marriage, a Yom Kippur service etc. – easy in, easy out. But I am prepared to commit to Synagogue community so there is something there for ‘the other 51 weeks,' if I need it – or if another member of the community I join might need it. I also commit to a denomination – a Movement – to do the things no single Synagogue community can provide; a Bet Din, training for the future and a Youth Movement where kids from my community can join with others. I expect denominational leadership to keep an eye on the horizon, pointing out challenges and opportunities down-stream, beyond my ability to see past my own immediate needs.

 

It’s always going to be cheaper and more immediately gratifying to serve my own interests with a non-denominational, non-community based Jewish identity. Committing to a denomination and a Movement is always going to take more commitment and more of a willingness to engage beyond self-gratification. But commitment and a willingness to suspend selfish desires are the mark of maturity, Hesed and courage. That’s why I’m a proudly denominational Jew. I’m neither Orthodox nor Reform, but I’m delighted for Orthodox Jews to commit to Orthodoxy and Reform Jews to commit to Reform, I don’t even begrudge the emergence of affiliated networks of ‘unaffiliated’ minyanim, I just think we should all be committed to a bigger communal vision than our own.

 

Memory or Amnesia

 

I am in the midst of a short adult education series on the relationship of memory and these upcoming days. Rosh Hashanah is less than two weeks away.

 

‘When we say that a people remembers,’ wrote the great Jewish historian Yosef Yerushalmi in 1974, ‘we are really saying that a past has been actively transmitted to the present generation and that this past has been accepted as meaningful. Conversely, a people “forgets” when the generation that now possesses the past does not convey it to the next, or when the latter rejects what it receives and does not pass it onward, which is to say the same thing.’

 

Memory is about being in a chain of transmission, it is intrinsically connected to meaningfulness and committment. It’s a tremendously provocative, and persuasive, definition and it reminded me of one of my favourite ‘Louis’ stories. Our founder Rabbi, in his autobiography, wrote of his experiences at his first Yom Kippur at the smart and fancy New West End Synagogue, having just left the more Heimish surroundings of Golders Green. It is the eve of Yom Kippur and and Rabbi Jacobs and the third Lord such-and-such are chatting before the service began.

 

‘Time was pressing and I suggested that we go into the synagogue for Kol Nidre. The Lord replied that he did not want to enter the synagogue for a while and that he would explain why after the service. His explanation was that his grandfather, the first Lord, although a very observant Jew, did not hold with the Kol Nidre formula and used to wait patiently in the foyer until this part of the service was over. His son, the second Lord, less observant and a little indifferent to the whole question would still wait outside because his father had done so.  The third Lord explained he personally didn’t understand what it was all about, but felt obliged to carry on the family tradition.’

 

Here is the question. Does the third Lord ‘remember?’ Is this a story of perpetuated memory or amnesia?

 

Part of the why I love this story so much is that it is clearly referring to one of the great Hasidic tales, one that ends Scholem’s masterful Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Here is that tale, as told by Scholem.

 

‘When the [founder of Chasidism] the Baal Shem had a difficult task before him, he would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer and what he had set out to perform was done.

‘When, a generation later [his student] the Maggid was faced with the same task he would go to the same place in the woods and say, ‘We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speak the prayer – and what he wanted done became reality.

‘Again a generation later Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassov had to perform this task. And he too went into the woods and said, ‘We can no longer light a fire, nor do we know the secret meditation belonging the prayer, but we do know the place in the woods to which it all belongs and that must be sufficient’ and sufficient it was.

‘But when another generation had passed and Rabbi Israel of Rishin was called upon to perform the task, he say down on his golden chair in his castle and said, ‘We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayer, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done.’’

 

A cliffhanger, again; is this memory or amnesia? The answer, like the fate of the Jewish people hangs by a hair’s breadth, as it always has done. ‘This is the position in which we find ourselves today,’ Scholem continues, ‘The story is not ended, it has not yet become history, and the secret life it holds can break out tomorrow in you or me.’  As we stand on the cusp of Rosh Hashanah I ask you to be open to secret life held within Judaism breaking out in you, like the Baal Shem’s fire. There are sparks and opportunities aplenty in these coming days to fuel a fire to burn through this time. Why not join me on Monday for the second, and concluding part of our journey into Jewish memory? After all you are already up-to-speed with where we got to last week.

 

Shabbat shalom,

 

Rabbi Jeremy

9/11 One Year On & Ten Years On

Nine years ago I was asked by the UJIA to speak at the one year anniversary of 9/11.

Re-reading this talk, given to end precisely as the minute's silence in NY commemorated the fallen, I'm struck by its heat and some of the turns of phrase I no longer stand by. But I'm also how my own sense of un-ease around 9/11 has changed little this past decade.

May the memory of those killed be a blessing.

---

I’m a Rabbinical Student at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. I’m also a Chaplain (both of these studies have been and continue to be generously supported by the UJIA), so when I found myself in New York on September 11^th 2001 I volunteered with the Red Cross, offering support to rescue workers and later families who lost loved ones.

 

I was there, on the morning of September the 11^th, in Manhattan, on the morning when it felt like the world was coming to an end.

I was there, on the evening of September the 11^th, standing at Ground Zero smelling the acrid smells and, treading in the white ash of two hundred stories of crumpled and crumbled masonry. I stood there and listened to the pain of the firefighters who lost perhaps half their company in the attack.

I was there in the weeks and months after the attack, at the family assistance centre, where family members of those who had lost loved ones wandered aimlessly around a vast sprawl of stalls offering food stamps, death certificates, shiatsu massage and a place to sit and talk and feel like you were not alone in the horror of survival.

 

And now I feel queasy.

I feel queasy about my own hunger to be near the pain, why did I feel the need to go down there, to volunteer, to spend hours upon hours listening to the pain of those who had suffered?

Why in NY does it sometimes feel like a competition - who was closest to the horror, who saw the towers fall from their window, who knew someone who was killed, who, were it not for the intervention of some mysterious fate, would have been in a meeting on the 98^th floor at just that time?

I feel queasy looking at the TV footage and reading the papers. Why the need for ‘new, never before seen photographs’ why the need for ‘footage from inside the towers’ shot by a camera crew who may, or may not have been filming at the expense of assisting with the rescue.

Even Yahoo!, the internet search engine has been transmogrified into a tomb for the day, the usual bright colours replaced by a swathe of grey.

But none of this moves me. It all seems vaguely fatuous.

 

There is an urge to get close to this tragedy, and I fell for it, as hard as anyone.

It is as if the attack of September 11^th represents something ‘authentic,’ something real in our fabricated and insulated lives. As if the sight and the memory of people jumping from the upper floors of the Towers will in some way help us be more real. As if their death will give our lives more meaning.

 

Ernest Becker in his master-work - Denial of Death suggests that we are so scared of our own demise that we seek to hero-ise lives, our lives and the lives of others as a way of escaping our fear of our own fragility. The problem being that we forget that our lives are indeed fragile and our posturing counts for little.

We are now in the ten days of teshuva, a time for feeling and acknowledging our fragility, in the words of the Rosh Hashanah Machzor -

we are dust and our end is dust. Like a clay vessel easily broken, like withering grass, a passing shadow, a fleeting breeze, a vanishing dream.

 

But these days seem to be passing with the war cry of the seemingly immanent invasion of Iraq. Here come the cavalry, we are off to seek our own immortality, heroes one and all.

 

Sadly our pursuit of the heroic may be even worse than merely futile. This comes from the preface to Denial of Death,

‘Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst. We want to clean up the world, make it perfect, keep it safe for democracy or communism, purify it of the enemies of god, eliminate evil, establish an alabaster city undimmed by human tears, or a thousand year Reich.’

We transfer our own fear of death, our own fear of futility onto others, any others, niggers, homos, A-Rabs and of course the yid.

We transfer our dark side onto them and then we strike against them. Maybe it is our desire to pursue our own heroic agenda that causes, what Becker calls, a surplus of evil in the world.

 

So what is the purpose of standing here remembering September 11^th 2001, I’m not sure we can rely on the vacuous notion of remembering in order not to let the errors of the past re-occur. In the last year I have seen precious few attempts to build bridges between different worlds and different world views.

Rightly or wrongly, the Arab world seems as angry with the West today as it was a year ago, if not more angry.

Who among us thinks there are less young men and women willing to give up their lives in a suicide attack this September 11^th than there were last year?

 

We have responded to Sept 11^th not with a introspective systemic attempt to understand and heal.

We have responded with fake bravado and name calling. I remember, perhaps worst of all, standing as one of 100,000 Jews outside the White House hearing Bibi Netanyahu plead for the world not to adopt a stance of ‘moral equivalence’ in comparing the actions of the Israeli government to that of the suicide bombers. And then in the next sentence he compared Yasser Arafat to ‘Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, the Ayatollahs and Osama Ben Laden.’ And the crowd cheered wildly.

 

We have responded to our fear of death by bolstering our own sense of righteous indignation. Frankly we are being foolish, we are learning the wrong lessons.

So what are the right lessons?

 

I want to offer three texts and three commentaries for our battered time,

One

kol yisrael aravim ze le ze - all Israel acts as a surety for one another- Sadly this text is not enough, not even close to being enough. In this global village we can no longer afford parochialism, even if our parish is as large as our entire people.

Each of us serves as a surety for the entire world whether we like it or not. My life is intricately wrapped up with that of a cocoa farmer in Ghana, a Buddhist monk in Daramasala and, much as I hate to admit it, a suicide bomber in the Gaza Strip.

 

Two

Tzedek Tzedek Tirdof - Justice, justice shall you pursue.

We must reject the possibly of reading this verse from Vayikra as calling for the pursuit of justice by any means necessary.

Rather, as Martin Buber demands  in Ten Rungs, we must understand the seemingly redundant repetition of the word tzedek to insist that Justice must be pursued by Just means only. The unjust means, employed to what we might dearly hope to be a just end, is and must be an anathema. If we act immorally or unfairly in our pursuit of what we perceive to be justice we give the lie to our actions. We give the lie to our proud and haughty claims to be the true guardians of peace and justice in the world. We become fundamentalists, blind to anything other than our goal.

Worse still, it is surely inevitable that our unjust means will cripple the vision of the just end we pursue. Acting unjustly will cause us to misunderstand and, even if we succeed in imposing our ends on the world, they will be surely be flawed and unjust, just like everyone else.

 

Finally

We must take seriously the notion of the fragility of the world and act, act honestly and humbly, but act anyway. In Hilchot Teshuva 3:8 Rambam states the following

 

Every person must see themselves as half worthy and half guilty.

And so too all the world, as if it were half worthy and half guilty.

A person sins one sin, behold they tip themselves, and tip the whole world, onto the scale of guilt.

A person performs one good deed, behold they tip themselves, and tip the whole world, onto the scale of merit.

 

Our actions, our futile, fragile actions, are capable of tipping the entire world to the scale of merit. While we cannot complete the work of redemption, we are not free to desist from trying.

 

One: kol yisrael aravim ze le ze is not enough.

Two: Tzedek Tzedek Tirdof means we must pursue justice justly.

Three: Our actions are capable of tipping the entire world, either for merit or for guilt.

 

We are shortly to stand in silence, after which I will offer a prayer for peace. It seems almost foolish to offer such a blessing in this time, almost a brahca l’vatalah – a futile blessing, but I refuse to believe that peace is not possible. This is a statement of faith, ani ma’amin even though there has been delay – I believe that those things that bring us together will triumph over those things that tear us apart. I believe in the perfect possibility of humanity – we are all created in the image of God. And I believe, to lift a liturgical note from the Passover Seder, that in the end the Holy Blessed One will triumph over the angel of death.

 

But for the next few minutes we shall stand in solidarity with those who lost their lives, those who mourn, those who are yet to lose their lives, and those who are yet to know the pain of that mourning.