Neilah Yom Kippur - Embarrassment & Refugees

The LBC DJ James O’Brian pulled a stunt in his show the other day.

He said he was going to cite an extract from a speech from in the recent conference season and read this out;

The State must drawn a sharp line of distinction between those who are members of the nation are the foundation of its existence and greatness and those who are domiciled in the State simply as earners of their livelihood there.

Then he revealed that the extract came, not from a contemporary British politician, but Hitler’s Mein Kampf - Chapter 2. And the worrying thing is that the extract did indeed sound as if it could have come from a contemporary British politician, because - too much of the time - it sounds as if we are about to embark on a national programme of erecting sharp lines of distinction between those who properly belong here and those painted as interlopers. It’s not that I think anyone in contemporary British politics is a Nazi, but this rhetoric and these calls for action make me squirm.

Here’s a conversation I get into fairly regularly, I suspect many of us are the same. “Where are you from,” someone asks, “London,” I say. “Where before that?” they don’t say it harshly, just interested, “Been here a while,” I say, “My great-grandfather had a pub in the East End,” I say. But no-one’s fooled. Not even me. My family arrived on these shores as economic migrants from points East. And even if there was the occasional pogrom or unsavoury violence back in the Veld, the notion that my ancestors would have crossed a contemporary threshold for a successful asylum application is ... well they wouldn’t.

I squirm reading reports from Calais or Greece or any of these places where human lives get piled up waiting. The largesse I experience as a British Jew whose ancestors arrived on these shores before the doors swung closed - certainly subject to antisemitism and the rest - but nonetheless able to get on, earn a living and give me such opportunities as Jews have but rarely known in our history - makes me feel embarrassed it’s easier to just turn the page and skip those particular articles. But my goodness, there are so many articles to skip.

And while there are so many problems facing us in the world, as Jews, as Londoners, as human beings it’s this refugee thing that haunts me more than any other. I get haunted because I keep getting pulled back by my faith to the central ethical and central narrative challenge of my people.

Some verses from our Torah, drawn from across the Five Books;

Love the Ger, don’t oppress the Ger, let the Ger rest on the Sabbath, the Ger who dwells with you shall be as one born amongst you.

Ger - it’s one of the most significant words in the Torah. In my Lexicon of Biblical Hebrew; Ger is defined as “a temporary dweller, new-comer (no inherited rights). Kindness to Ger,” it notes, “frequently enjoined.”

It turns out the word may be connected with the verb GaRaH ‘to stir up,’ ‘engage in strife with.’

Maybe that’s the heart of it. The Ger is the person who sticks out because they are new and don’t really know how to behave properly confound them, and what are they doing here anyway taking our jobs and clogging  up the waiting rooms and the waiting lists... Economically powerless and culturally awkward the “new-comer (no inherited rights)” stir us up and draw out the puss.

Hopefully, as I’m getting stirred up, the Torah kicks in; Don’t oppress the Ger, Love the Ger. As if the Bible somehow knew that the new-comer would serve as a lightning rod for whatever gripes and grievances might distract us taking responsibility for our own futures. Plus ca change.

Actually the way the Torah warns us off oppression of the Ger is even more tightly bound to my psyche than simply understanding the nature of my relationship with those who arrived on these shores more recently than my own ancestors.

Love the Ger for you were Gerim, ki gerim haitem b’eretz mitzrayim - you were Gerim in the Land of Egypt.

Ah the Torah sticking its fingers into my ribs jabbing away at my desire to shut the door and kick ‘em out, insisting I should behave well to the Ger because I was once a Ger. Actually not just once. Abraham was the first Ger. Then there was Joseph, and his brothers, and Joseph. Moses was not only a Ger, he even used the word in the name for his son Gershon. All of Israel temporarily dwelled in Egypt, and then in Babylon, and then again, and again, from century to century and from continent to continent.

We are commanded to love the Ger because it’s the very heart of who we are - the original Fiddler on the Roof, unstable, not knowing how confidently to tread in a society where we are “new-comers (no inherited rights).”It’s been only a blink of an eye since we began to feel more cosy in this society and we are already in danger of forgetting our historical, emotion and religious obligation to care for the unsettled newcomer we once were.

Where does it leave us, when facing the news, the reports from Aleppo or Greece or Calais?

There are a number of you here who are and have long been proudly involved in this work. In particular I want to salute members who are supporters of JCoRE, the Jewish Council on Racial Equality, and those involved in a new plan to host a group therapy programme for refugees here at New London, and members who are involved in the work of CARA - the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics and there are others, I know there are others. To all of you, I salute you. You’ve plenty to be getting on with.

But for the rest of us.

I want to suggest a couple of things.

Do one, do both. Do something.

I’m hugely proud of our community’s connection with the Separated Child Foundation, founded in memory of New London member, Ester, who passed away almost exactly ten years ago. The Foundation offers emotional, social, financial and physical support to separated children and young people, refugees, in Britain. It also engages in educational activities that raise awareness of their needs. It’s particular experitse is providing packs - good bags that provide physical assistance, but also offer an emotional recognition and validation of the humanity of those who are, perhaps, most on the edges of our society. The Foundation has an appeal for goods. There are fliers outside listing the sorts of goods they are looking for and what to do about them. On your way home tonight, take a flier. Make a donation.

Some members at our sister Synagogue, New North London, started a drop-in for asylum seekers in 2006. It meets monthly, on a Sunday afternoon. Just one asylum seeker arrived for a meal, some clothes, a travel voucher and a shopping voucher. The Centre has grown these past ten years. Those of you who were at the Q&A in the Hall just now will already have heard about it. Actually the stuff handed out is only part of the story. What the Drop-In offers is human to human contact. It’s a place where seeking asylum isn’t a ugly word. It’s a place where there is welcome and the acknowledgement that behind the headlines and the poisonous rhetoric are real human lives and real human suffering.

This last month over 500 came. The New North London Drop-In has become the largest centre of its kind in the country. And it’s far too large. Several months ago the leadership of the New North Drop-In asked for our help. Could we take some of the strain? Our member Sam Leifer - a long-time volunteer at the NNLS programme is helping us bring together a team. And we have a plan. On Sunday 6^th November we are looking to host 70 asylum carefully vetted asylum seekers at a school in Finchley. We are piggy backing on the skills and experiences of the team at New North London, and we have plans and a crack team of volunteers in place. But we need more person-power and we need funds.

And that’s where we all come in. Do you have a few hours on the first Sunday in the month to volunteer? It’s not a particularly skilled job. The most important thing is to smile, and there is some sorting and cooking and the like. We also need some money. The venue is a small cost and the idea is that the asylum seekers get a travel voucher and a food voucher worth a total of £20. We are looking for people to sign up to give £20 a month to cover those expenses. We’ll even take £10 a month, or £5.

Will supporting the Seperated Child Foundation or the Drop-In Centre bring an end to the suffering of those who have arrived in this country in search of something more than “a temporary dweller, new-comer (no inherited rights)?” No.

Will it put an end to the violence and persecution that has driven so many to this country? Also no.

But it will do this.

It will demonstrate that we care. That we remember. That we still love the Ger ki gerim hayitem.

For we were once Gerim too.

And it will help the few individuals we touch. And there is very little more than helping a human who is suffering.

Lo Alecha HaMlachah Ligmor teaches our tradition - you don’t have to complete the work, v’lo atah ben horin lehivatel mimena. - But neither are you free to desist from it.

I also belief that this kind of support will help up be less stricken by embarrassment in the face of the onslaught of tales told about refugees in this and other countries.

In a few moments we will be back to our regular Yom Kippur business of prayer and self examination.

But in an hour’s time, when we blow the shofar and just before you pile off home, please take one of the fliers in the lobby.

Consider a gift of goods or money or your time. They are all most valuable commodities.

I could make a point about the size of the experience of hunger of asylum seekers for whom days without food are not a voluntary once a year interruption in an otherwise replete diet.

I could share some gut wrenching story from some broken life.

But I believe no-one in this community, at this time, needs that.

I believe that this community only needs to be given an opportunity to rise to do the decent thing.

And we will.

Because we do remember, and we do care.

And we know that this can make a difference.

Chatimah Tovah,

A good last chance saloon daven.

And a good year to us all,

Like We Mean It - Yom Kippur

I’ve been making my way through Hilchot Teshuva, teachings on repentance collected by Rabbi  Moses son of Maimon d.1204.

The collection is remarkable for how little emphasis it places on going through the motions. The essential obligation is not fasting, or dressing this way or that, or incanting prayers - as beautiful as the prayers may be. The essential obligation is personal confession; ‘I have sinned by doing this and that.’ In fact one can’t even rely on a confession; “A person who confesses, but does not determine in their heart to leave the matter [and no longer sin], is like one who immerses in a ritual bath holding a creepy-crawly in their hand.” That’s a stunning image to the rabbinic mind - the ritual bath is a place of purification, but lizards and the like are the embodiment of impurity. Certainly, ‘A person who says “I will sin and Yom Kippur will atone,” - repentance is withheld from such a person.’

Yom Kippur only works if we mean it. So I offer us all the chance to let this extraordinary array of observances into our heart. We should say the words as if we mean them. We should share contrition as if we are truly sorry. We should have the courage to open ourselves to the possibility of a better future.

May it come to us all.

Services this evening begin at 6:45pm and start 9:30am tomorrow (10am in the Minyan Chadash).

David-Yehuda will be leading a discussion on confession this evening for anyone who would like to stay back after the Kol Nidrei service.

In the afternoon we offer a class on ‘The Quality of Mercy’ with Aviva Dautch at 2:30pm and I hosting and responding to ‘Q’s with the best ‘A’s I can muster from 4:30pm.

For my errors of commission or omission, and for anything I have done this past year that has caused pain or distress, I am sorry. And seek your forgiveness,

Gemar Chatimah Tovah

Rabbi Jeremy

There Will Be a Test

My thanks to everyone who helped our Rosh Hashanah celebrations; from the professional team led by Jo and Lennin, Cantor Jason, Lester, the Choir, Wardens and everyone who helped the services run so smoothly, our Youth team led by David-Yehuda, Laurence and the Minyan Chadash team and on the list goes. It was a privilege and a joy to feel the building so bursting with engagement.

Anyone who missed either of my sermons you can catch up [here - http://rabbionanarrowbridge.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/rosh%20hashanah%205777] and there will be a test. No, there won’t be a test on the content of my sermons, but there will be a test of the quality with which we have lived our lives. This is the question of this season in these Ten Days that connect Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur.

This Shabbat morning, Shabbat Shuva, we will have the opportunity to investigate this great challenge in the company of four great thinkers and writers who have passed away in the past year; Harper Lee, Elie Wiesel, David Bowie and Shimon Peres. It will also be a chance to meet some members of the community we might not know so well. And there will be Cholent. Do join us

One last thought. The great joy of having so many more children around in the community than was the case a decade ago is also the great challenge. Kids make noise. Usually. We are trying this. We are writing to parents of our older children to encourage them to bring their sons and daughters to Kol Nidrei. We know it’s the most special, dignified service of the year, but we want them to have the experience of an adult Jewish engagement. If you have a child you think might ‘get it.’ Please do bring them along. If you find yourself sitting next to a 12 year old. Give ‘em a smile. They are the future of our community.

Shabbat shalom and every good wish for a Chatimah Tovah, may we all be sealed in the Books of life, sweetness and health,

Rabbi Jeremy

Be Religious - A Second Day RH Sermon

I love Chuppot.

I love doing weddings, and going to weddings - who doesn’t love a good wedding.

But more than that I love the symbol of the Chuppah - the canopy - itself - I love the ideas the physical canopy directs us to understand.

Mostly, if we think about the symbolism of the Chuppah at all, we only get half the story of its power.

The story most often told is that of Abraham’s Tent; open on all four sides, so when some dust-addled strangers appeared over the horizon Abraham could see them, and run out to welcome them into his home. For those of you here yesterday that’s what you might call a Port idea, open, engaged, outward looking.

But it’s only one half of the symbolic power of the Chuppah.

The other idea is that the Chuppah is the bride and groom’s first home, the first ‘roof over their head.’ The Chuppah is supposed to be a place of intimacy, or seclusion. This is the driving intent of the legal literature - [1] which refers to the the Chuppah as a place of Yichud - intimacy. It certainly feels that way, when you are stood there with a couple, almost as if you are, as the Rabbi, invading their private love. And if that is not quite a fort-idea, it’s certainly a long way away from the image of Abraham’s tent. If the Abraham’s tent idea is about being open, the Yichud idea is about being enclosed.

I suspect none of us is worried about this apparent contradiction - the Chuppah as symbol of openness and closedness. For this tension between openness and closedness is exactly how marriage works. Those of us fortunate enough to get to stand under a Chuppah, or even attend a Chuppah pick up, maybe in some unconscious way, something of this relationship between internal strength and outward-looking strength. That’s how religion works of course. In symbols and rituals and liturgies and stories that gently shape us and allow us to pick up something about how we should be living our lives. At its best these symbols and rituals are sophisticated, subtle and enlightening.

The problem is that so often, for one reason or another, we don’t get to understand the full richness of a religious idea. Ideas get half told - like the story of the Chuppah - which isn’t so bad, but also corrupted in the retelling, or hijacked by those with no love for religion who paint some of the most beautiful and sophisticated ideas in our faith as oppressive or childish, or both. That’s more of a problem.

If a person makes a decision to care less about religion, that’s one thing, but to make that decision on the basis of a corrupt version of what is being rejected is desperately sad.

Let me do another example. Actually this example will always be the best example of how Judaism does anything - Shabbat.

Six days you shall work and on the seventh day you shall do Shabbat and - the last word of this verse is hard to translate - vayinafash - be en-souled.

Six days a week get out there. Change the world, drive forward, plan, achieve, create. These are the open four walls of the Chuppah translated into the work of our lives. Six days a week be outward-looking.

And then, one day in seven pause, acknowledge what you have, test what you really need, become a human being, rather than a factor production. Become en-souled. - be inward.

Sound reasonable?

Sounds reasonable to me.

Too much work can exhaust and empty us out.

But let me set it against the most significant challenge of our age; a challenge so severe that it could leave all our blustery concerns about refugees and US Presidential Elections as nothing more than a tumbleweed blowing through what our descendants might say of our time.

We are destroying our planet. And it’s the only one we have. The problem is that we humans don’t know how to stop wanting more. My favourite example is that of the oligarch who decided they needed a new yacht since the first yacht had only one helicopter pad on it. That meant that when he was on board, with his helicopter, there was nowhere for anyone else to land. Such problems we should all have.

The historian of human existence, Yuval Noah Harari[2] in his new compelling, but infuriating book Homo Deus suggests we could learn a great deal by looking at the games we play. From the board game Monopoly to the computer based civilisation strategy games the principles are always world domination or bust.

But what if the world can’t cope with our appetite for dominance?

Harari’s idea is that knowledge will save us, new technologies and the like. Well knowledge develops with astounding pace and the new technologies are exciting, but I’m not sure it will be enough. In fact it might already be too late. Pretty immediately we are going to have to learn to live with less; or more accurately we are going to have to live with a sense that what we possess or what we can bring into our possession is not simply there for our use. We need to find something more important than relentless consuming … and then consuming some more. And that’s where religion comes in.

At its heart religion - this religion anyway - contains a message about what is yours and what is non-yours. Ladonai Haretz Uumeloo - the earth and everything in it is God’s - we say in Psalms. We get what we have as stewards. It’s not ultimately ours.

It’s not ours because there is something more important than we are, even if we don’t understand what that greater force is, we are commanded to observe, recognise and validate that we don’t place ourselves at the centre of Universe.

Shabbat is a training in existential humility and we are in dire need of some existential humility.

Is it OK to be excited about creating and acquiring and accumulating? Yes, but not only to a point. There are limits, responsibilities and most of all the requirement, once a week, to stop entirely and reflect on what all this rushing around is for.

Religion - this religion, on this day - is about standing before one’s creator and being called to account for how one has lived, called to account for our obsessions with material stuff. It’s about acknowledging that no matter how much stuff we have accumulated our end is dust, we are only as strong as a pottery shard, as life-full as withered grass, as permanent as a passing shadow. Those are all images drawn from our tradition.

Shabbat is the tool to inculcate a positive, sustainable, holy relationship with our desire for possessing things and more things.

Religion is the voice that guides us to live in peace with a creation that is not ours to hollow out and devastate.

At least that’s what I think religion is really for.

Noah Yuval Harari on the other hand has a very different concept of religion. Harari thinks that religion is all about forcing a person to do strange and often unethical things for an invented fairy-tale of a fake divinity to ensure the people respect their political overlords.

Harari’s a smart guy, but reading Harari on religion is enough to drive a rabbi to distraction.

Why do people who understand so little about religion spend so much time writing about it? Reading Harari on religion is a bit like encountering a writer on physics explaining billion dollar space programmes are primarily designed to improve non-stick frying pan technology, or a music-theorist who thinks the point of Bach is to teach a person how to play scales.

You don’t reconsider the value of the thing being described because you can’t get beyond the notion that the writer has entirely the wrong end of the stick. At least you shouldn’t.

I don’t mind people pointing out damage done in the name of religion - for there is damage done in the name of religion - even this religion. But if you are going to do that at least give religion points for the good it has inspired - anyone think that slavery would have been overthrown, in this country or the United States were it not for religion, the notion of the creation of every human being in the image of God and that glorious tale of the Exodus

And if you want to put religion on a scale of the various forces that have caused suffering in the world how would it line up alongside Hitler’s non-religious malevolence, or Mao’s or Stalin’s or the atrocities of Rwanda or former Yugoslavia or Cambodia and what about the Congo?

And on what might be blame the relentless destruction of our planet? Where should we place liberal values; or the right to consume on that scale?

I just don’t get the notion that religion, done well, is a force for harm.

The quest to live life well is challenging. Listening only to our own feelings we too easily fall prey to what the Rabbis call the evil inclination. It’s not that human beings are bad, it’s just we get seduced or distracted into wanting what is not good to want. Having boundaries helps, training ourselves to act decently helps, dedicating ourselves to practices of kindness and justice help. Training our children in these practices helps. That’s what it means to be religious. Being religious helps.

Here is the plea. Support this kind of religion. If you don’t want to become a Salafist Muslim or an Evangelical Christian, or even an Ultra-Orthodox Jew - that’s fine. I don’t buy into any of those stripes of religion either. But I do buy into this version of a quest to understand who we are and how we should live in this world. I buy into the way we do religion here at New London Synagogue.

I buy into the idea that the rituals, rhythms and stories are powerful enough to make my life more meaningful, more full of the possibility of doing well in the world.

I believe that if more of us adopted a serious relationship with Shabbat we would stand a better chance of saving the planet. Not just because we would stop buying stuff we didn’t need on the Sabbath day, but because the ideas of Shabbat seep into our lives for the other six days of the week. Because that is how religion works. You make space for it in your life, you give it a chance to change how you see the world and you come out better. Not because of some marxist plot and not because of some fairy-tale nonsense, but because for thousands of years we have quested after the whispers of the divine and constructed pathways to connect our lives to something more important than pursuit of base self-interest.

Maybe the way someone as smart as Harari gets away with writing such rubbish about religion is that he doesn’t hear voices of people who do religion the way we do religion sufficiently clearly. So we need to be clearer, we need to be clearer not just in how we talk about the way we do Judaism, we need to deeper in our engagement with Judaism.

This is the plea; actually two pleas. Engage and talk about it. Engage with religious life, make space to observe Shabbat, come to shul, come to our adult ed programme, read a book - if you want a recommendation, let me know.

And talk about it. Don’t accept the sloppy disregard for religion banded about by the Hararis and Dawkins and the like. Speak up the value of living a life attempting to walk in the ways of Hashem. Share an idea about Shabbat as you understand it, as you love it. Share something you love about Judaism, doesn’t matter if you only get half an idea. There is always more to learn.

And keep an eye on the e-mail in tray. I’ll be running a series of classes a sort of Judaism for intelligent adults who are concerned they don’t quite know enough yet in the winter. If that sounds like something you would enjoy, let me know.

Just don’t be put off by the people who don’t get it, or wilfully seek to subvert the one thing that might just allow us to save this planet, and save our humanity. There is indeed, much at stake.

Shannah Tovah

---

[1] Shulchan Arukh Even Ha-Ezer 55

[2] Homo Deus p.210

Port Jews - A First Day Rosh Hashanah Sermon

Here’s a question.

Suppose Sarah looked out at her child, Isaac, and Hagar’s child, Ishmael, playing and said, ‘Awh, isn’t that cute?’ Suppose she smiled as the boys played on - instead of heading to Abraham and insisting he kick Ishmael out of the camp. What would have happened if Sarah had just let them play together?

I know there is a Rabbinic commentary that suggests Ishmael was trying to kill his half-brother, but the verse says ‘m’tzachek’ - they were playing. Let’s suppose they were indeed just playing, as kids do. What would have happened if Sarah had let them play? The boys might have learnt to get along and how might a warm playful relationship between the descendents of Ishmael and Isaac make so many things different, so many years later?

It didn’t happen, of course. Sarah went to Abraham, Abraham expelled Hagar and Ishmael, and here we are so many thousands of years later. But can you hear the wistful whisper of the father of both boys in this Rabbinic commentary on a verse we read tomorrow? ‘Take your son, the one you love’ God instructs Abraham. And, in the mind of the Rabbis, our patriarch responds ‘Isn’t there a limit to the heart’s ability to love both?’[1]

The question is whether having someone else around is a threat, or an opportunity. The question is - how do I respond to a world populated by people who are not ... me, or - to be more precise - me or mini-versions of me?

Theodore Zeldin, the historian of human emotion, is quite clear about the way to go. We need other people for our own growth, claims Zeldin. Left to our own devices, sealed in private prisons of self-interaction, we will never solve any of the challenges that face us in our life. Without different perspectives, without a genuine interest in other people’s points of view, how will we understand anything we do not already understand?

The greatest problem of our age, Zeldin argues in his book, The Hidden Pleasures of Life, is a clash between those people who want to live in a fort and the people who want to live in a port.

Fort dwellers want a thick impregnable wall to keep the outside ... outside; fort dwellers perceive what lives beyond the wall as a threat and prepare to repulse any threat to their dream of security. But port dwellers want to live in an ever-shifting milieu of exchange where the more stuff that comes inside the greater the possibility of enrichment.

Zeldin recasts the struggle of our age as a struggle between those who want to live in a fort and those who want to live in a port. And I think that’s brilliant.

So which are you; a fort dweller or a port dweller, a fort Jew or a port Jew?

Actually it turns out there is a niche field of academic study into the life of Port Jews. My friend Jon Boyd put me onto a book I had to call up from the bowels of the British Library. According to David Sorkin, writing in Port Jews: Jewish Communities in Cosmopolitan Maritime Trading Centres, 1550-1950, there are several characteristics of the Port Jew.

Port Jews, wrote Sorkin, departed the most traditional Jewish communities, the ones that insisted on obeisance, and instead sought out voluntary affiliation to Jewish community. Port Jews questioned what it meant to be Jewish, but displayed nonetheless ‘strong markers of Jewish identity.’ They were ‘enthusiastic about Jewish education and engaged in vigorous intellectual debate among themselves and [even non-Jews.]’

Port Jews, wrote Sorkin, tended not to struggle with the oft-posed, ‘Jewish Question’ because they weren’t burdened by their own, or others, baggage regarding what it meant to be Jewish. They just got on with it. Another scholar writing in the same volume suggested Port Jews felt no need for the great transformations promised by Reform Judaism because, in the open market-place of the port, the port Jew was accepted for who they were and they just got on with it.

So here I am, reading about the Jews of C16 Trieste and it feels like I’m reading about C21 New London Synagogue. I feel like I’m reading about myself.

I’m a Port Jew. I think we all are.

To be a Port Jew is to be grounded in a sense of what it means to be Jewish, while still engaged in the world beyond the walls of the Synagogue, using values and experiences from one place to enrich our experience of the other, and vice versa. To be a Port Jew is to understand Judaism well enough to strengthen our experience of the outside world, and understand the outside world well enough to strengthen our experience of Judaism.

I’m not going to live my Jewish life in a fort. It’s too late. Frankly, it’s been too late since Adam and Eve had the opportunity to stay in the fort-like Garden of Eden and risked to know more. We all know too much. None of us is going back.

Actually I don’t even believe life in a fort is as safe as it’s cracked up to be. That, I think, is one of the messages of Jewish history.

One of the classic reasons given for the significance of blowing the Shofar on Rosh Hashanah is to remind us that walls are an illusory source of security. The inhabitants of Jericho hid behind walls, Saadiah Gaon once noted, but when the sound of the Shofar came, the walls came tumbling down. As walls always do, eventually.

Once upon a time, we, as Jews, built our Temples behind the strongest of walls and the Romans still came and tore it all down. So we learnt, and created a Judaism that was more flexible, less centralised, more port-like - more portable - instead. Abraham Joshua Heschel observed that our Temples made out of time are perhaps the principle reason for Jewish survival. Life in a port may sound more risky than life in a fort, but here we are, so many thousand years later.

Brexit looms as I write this sermon. It looms over us all. There were plenty of reasonable reasons to vote ‘Leave’ but so much of the ‘Leave’ campaign focussed around offering the illusory security of a fort. But we can’t go back. Nor should we want to. We know our economy does better in an open-market. We know science does better when knowledge is shared. We know art is more sophisticated and powerful when cultural interchange is possible. We even know comedy is funnier when outsiders get to look in and point out our absurdities. Economy, science, art, comedy - all areas where, as Jews, we have thrived, maybe precisely because we know, as Jews, how to function in a port. We’ve worked out how to thrive in ports; moving inside and outside, a bit of give, a bit of take, we’ve learnt much, and shared much from our port life.

It’s not just Brexit, there is so much politics in this idea of fort v port; the US Presidential Campaign with its Mexican wall and the Calais Jungle and other challenges related to immigration. There’s Black Lives Matter and the rise of the Far-Right across Europe. There’s even Shul politics, for questions of same-sex marriage and how often women should read from the Torah also have something of this fort-port dynamic.

But putting aside all the politics what I’m most interested in is the personal level; what it means to encounter life, encounter other people who seem to threaten my comfort. Because down here, on the personal level, while I see myself as a Port-kind of person, I’m throwing up walls all the time. On the personal level the distinction between the port Jew and the fort Jew is too black and white for my heart. My head might get it, but sometimes the cacophony of the port is too much and I want just to retreat. My experience of the clash between port live-ers and the fort live-ers is less about one political movement against another and more about the inside of my psyche, it’s about the day-by-day and even moment-by-moment.

And the heartbreak is that, in my shakier moments, the tendency to retreat and hide behind a wall swells up in my soul and closes me down to experiencing something new at precisely the moment when I would most benefit from an infusion of the new. I know, intellectually, that I would do better beyond the walls, but I’m not brave enough to live as a Port Jew in all ways, at every moment.

Actually maybe it’s not just a lack of bravery. A life lived with no sense of wall, no sense of fort, is probably foolhardy. Embracing the openness of the port only works if the port is a regulated place of safe, vibrant exchange. You don’t deal with ISIS by opening up your borders and welcoming all and sundry to come on in and do their worst. And to those of you who have given of your time to stand guard and protect us so we can muse about the relative values of forts and ports - thank you. This most definitely is not a sermon about not taking our physical security seriously.

But this is a plea for the value of a port-centred existence, both personally and as a sacred community. I believe we, at New London, are uniquely placed to understand what it means to be a port-Jew, and to reap the incredible benefits of a richness inspired by a committed Jewish life lived in actively engagement with the world out there. This is certainly the Torah I preach and we practice week in and week out. And if you want to know more about that, come back tomorrow, come back next week, the week after or the week after that.

Perhaps most of all this is a call for the value of openness. In the way we do business, in the way we do politics, in the way we do Judaism, in the way we encounter friends and strangers. It’s a call to be brave and not hide behind walls that offer only illusory security. It’s a call to open the walls around the heart letting in some of the scarier stuff, believing we will be better - inspired and indeed safer - by living our lives as port Jews.

Rebbe Nachman was right when he suggested the world is a narrow bridge, and right again to insist the most important thing is to have no fear. For with an open heart, an open mind, courage and curiosity we are ready, ready to greet this New Year with optimism, confidence and hope. May it come to us, to all we hold dear, in sweetness, in joy and in health.

Shannah Tovah - a Good Year to all.

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[1] Bereishit Rabba 55:7

Be Religious - A Second Day RH Sermon

I love Chuppot.

I love doing weddings, and going to weddings - who doesn’t love a good wedding.

But more than that I love the symbol of the Chuppah - the canopy - itself - I love the ideas the physical canopy directs us to understand.

Mostly, if we think about the symbolism of the Chuppah at all, we only get half the story of its power.

The story most often told is that of Abraham’s Tent; open on all four sides, so when some dust-addled strangers appeared over the horizon Abraham could see them, and run out to welcome them into his home. For those of you here yesterday that’s what you might call a Port idea, open, engaged, outward looking.

But it’s only one half of the symbolic power of the Chuppah.

The other idea is that the Chuppah is the bride and groom’s first home, the first ‘roof over their head.’ The Chuppah is supposed to be a place of intimacy, or seclusion. This is the driving intent of the legal literature - [1] which refers to the the Chuppah as a place of Yichud - intimacy. It certainly feels that way, when you are stood there with a couple, almost as if you are, as the Rabbi, invading their private love. And if that is not quite a fort-idea, it’s certainly a long way away from the image of Abraham’s tent. If the Abraham’s tent idea is about being open, the Yichud idea is about being enclosed.

I suspect none of us is worried about this apparent contradiction - the Chuppah as symbol of openness and closedness. For this tension between openness and closedness is exactly how marriage works. Those of us fortunate enough to get to stand under a Chuppah, or even attend a Chuppah pick up, maybe in some unconscious way, something of this relationship between internal strength and outward-looking strength. That’s how religion works of course. In symbols and rituals and liturgies and stories that gently shape us and allow us to pick up something about how we should be living our lives. At its best these symbols and rituals are sophisticated, subtle and enlightening.

The problem is that so often, for one reason or another, we don’t get to understand the full richness of a religious idea. Ideas get half told - like the story of the Chuppah - which isn’t so bad, but also corrupted in the retelling, or hijacked by those with no love for religion who paint some of the most beautiful and sophisticated ideas in our faith as oppressive or childish, or both. That’s more of a problem.

If a person makes a decision to care less about religion, that’s one thing, but to make that decision on the basis of a corrupt version of what is being rejected is desperately sad.

Let me do another example. Actually this example will always be the best example of how Judaism does anything - Shabbat.

Six days you shall work and on the seventh day you shall do Shabbat and - the last word of this verse is hard to translate - vayinafash - be en-souled.

Six days a week get out there. Change the world, drive forward, plan, achieve, create. These are the open four walls of the Chuppah translated into the work of our lives. Six days a week be outward-looking.

And then, one day in seven pause, acknowledge what you have, test what you really need, become a human being, rather than a factor production. Become en-souled. - be inward.

Sound reasonable?

Sounds reasonable to me.

Too much work can exhaust and empty us out.

But let me set it against the most significant challenge of our age; a challenge so severe that it could leave all our blustery concerns about refugees and US Presidential Elections as nothing more than a tumbleweed blowing through what our descendants might say of our time.

We are destroying our planet. And it’s the only one we have. The problem is that we humans don’t know how to stop wanting more. My favourite example is that of the oligarch who decided they needed a new yacht since the first yacht had only one helicopter pad on it. That meant that when he was on board, with his helicopter, there was nowhere for anyone else to land. Such problems we should all have.

The historian of human existence, Yuval Noah Harari[2] in his new compelling, but infuriating book Homo Deus suggests we could learn a great deal by looking at the games we play. From the board game Monopoly to the computer based civilisation strategy games the principles are always world domination or bust.

But what if the world can’t cope with our appetite for dominance?

Harari’s idea is that knowledge will save us, new technologies and the like. Well knowledge develops with astounding pace and the new technologies are exciting, but I’m not sure it will be enough. In fact it might already be too late. Pretty immediately we are going to have to learn to live with less; or more accurately we are going to have to live with a sense that what we possess or what we can bring into our possession is not simply there for our use. We need to find something more important than relentless consuming … and then consuming some more. And that’s where religion comes in.

At its heart religion - this religion anyway - contains a message about what is yours and what is non-yours. Ladonai Haretz Uumeloo - the earth and everything in it is God’s - we say in Psalms. We get what we have as stewards. It’s not ultimately ours.

It’s not ours because there is something more important than we are, even if we don’t understand what that greater force is, we are commanded to observe, recognise and validate that we don’t place ourselves at the centre of Universe.

Shabbat is a training in existential humility and we are in dire need of some existential humility.

Is it OK to be excited about creating and acquiring and accumulating? Yes, but not only to a point. There are limits, responsibilities and most of all the requirement, once a week, to stop entirely and reflect on what all this rushing around is for.

Religion - this religion, on this day - is about standing before one’s creator and being called to account for how one has lived, called to account for our obsessions with material stuff. It’s about acknowledging that no matter how much stuff we have accumulated our end is dust, we are only as strong as a pottery shard, as life-full as withered grass, as permanent as a passing shadow. Those are all images drawn from our tradition.

Shabbat is the tool to inculcate a positive, sustainable, holy relationship with our desire for possessing things and more things.

Religion is the voice that guides us to live in peace with a creation that is not ours to hollow out and devastate.

At least that’s what I think religion is really for.

Noah Yuval Harari on the other hand has a very different concept of religion. Harari thinks that religion is all about forcing a person to do strange and often unethical things for an invented fairy-tale of a fake divinity to ensure the people respect their political overlords.

Harari’s a smart guy, but reading Harari on religion is enough to drive a rabbi to distraction.

Why do people who understand so little about religion spend so much time writing about it? Reading Harari on religion is a bit like encountering a writer on physics explaining billion dollar space programmes are primarily designed to improve non-stick frying pan technology, or a music-theorist who thinks the point of Bach is to teach a person how to play scales.

You don’t reconsider the value of the thing being described because you can’t get beyond the notion that the writer has entirely the wrong end of the stick. At least you shouldn’t.

I don’t mind people pointing out damage done in the name of religion - for there is damage done in the name of religion - even this religion. But if you are going to do that at least give religion points for the good it has inspired - anyone think that slavery would have been overthrown, in this country or the United States were it not for religion, the notion of the creation of every human being in the image of God and that glorious tale of the Exodus

And if you want to put religion on a scale of the various forces that have caused suffering in the world how would it line up alongside Hitler’s non-religious malevolence, or Mao’s or Stalin’s or the atrocities of Rwanda or former Yugoslavia or Cambodia and what about the Congo?

And on what might be blame the relentless destruction of our planet? Where should we place liberal values; or the right to consume on that scale?

I just don’t get the notion that religion, done well, is a force for harm.

The quest to live life well is challenging. Listening only to our own feelings we too easily fall prey to what the Rabbis call the evil inclination. It’s not that human beings are bad, it’s just we get seduced or distracted into wanting what is not good to want. Having boundaries helps, training ourselves to act decently helps, dedicating ourselves to practices of kindness and justice help. Training our children in these practices helps. That’s what it means to be religious. Being religious helps.

Here is the plea. Support this kind of religion. If you don’t want to become a Salafist Muslim or an Evangelical Christian, or even an Ultra-Orthodox Jew - that’s fine. I don’t buy into any of those stripes of religion either. But I do buy into this version of a quest to understand who we are and how we should live in this world. I buy into the way we do religion here at New London Synagogue.

I buy into the idea that the rituals, rhythms and stories are powerful enough to make my life more meaningful, more full of the possibility of doing well in the world.

I believe that if more of us adopted a serious relationship with Shabbat we would stand a better chance of saving the planet. Not just because we would stop buying stuff we didn’t need on the Sabbath day, but because the ideas of Shabbat seep into our lives for the other six days of the week. Because that is how religion works. You make space for it in your life, you give it a chance to change how you see the world and you come out better. Not because of some marxist plot and not because of some fairy-tale nonsense, but because for thousands of years we have quested after the whispers of the divine and constructed pathways to connect our lives to something more important than pursuit of base self-interest.

Maybe the way someone as smart as Harari gets away with writing such rubbish about religion is that he doesn’t hear voices of people who do religion the way we do religion sufficiently clearly. So we need to be clearer, we need to be clearer not just in how we talk about the way we do Judaism, we need to deeper in our engagement with Judaism.

This is the plea; actually two pleas. Engage and talk about it. Engage with religious life, make space to observe Shabbat, come to shul, come to our adult ed programme, read a book - if you want a recommendation, let me know.

And talk about it. Don’t accept the sloppy disregard for religion banded about by the Hararis and Dawkins and the like. Speak up the value of living a life attempting to walk in the ways of Hashem. Share an idea about Shabbat as you understand it, as you love it. Share something you love about Judaism, doesn’t matter if you only get half an idea. There is always more to learn.

And keep an eye on the e-mail in tray. I’ll be running a series of classes a sort of Judaism for intelligent adults who are concerned they don’t quite know enough yet in the winter. If that sounds like something you would enjoy, let me know.

Just don’t be put off by the people who don’t get it, or wilfully seek to subvert the one thing that might just allow us to save this planet, and save our humanity. There is indeed, much at stake.

Shannah Tovah

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[1] Shulchan Arukh Even Ha-Ezer 55

[2] Homo Deus p.210