It’s been more than a year now and the future looks bleakly uncertain. Can Israel’s leaders really be trusted? They seem so certain of themselves, so assured they know what is best for the people, they are so proficient at issuing orders, and so reluctant to hear the people’s complaints. Memories of how it used to be are rapidly fading because every day the people have to wake up and face the uncertainty of what lies ahead; they are armed and ready but they have no idea how long it is going to take or who they are going to have to fight.  To make matters worse, they don’t have any idea where they are going. What is the destination?  Why can’t anyone tell them what the hardships are for, what the purpose is of the traumas they have faced, and are facing? Is the aim now just physical survival, to get through each day unscathed, survival for its own sake?

It all comes down to trust. And leadership. And whether you can put your faith in a man who claims to know all the answers. And who, if memory serves, has blood on his hands.

Confused?  

Is he talking about Israel now? Or is he talking about the Biblical story we read this week, from the opening chapter of the Book of Numbers? The past or the present?

It’s understandable to be confused. Nothing I wrote so far about the Torah portion isn’t also addressing our current moment. Everything I said describes both the situation of the Israelites in the wilderness as the book of Numbers, B’midbar, begins (the Hebrew name for this forth book of the Bible, B’midbar, means ‘in the wilderness’) – and the situation of the people of Israel today: questions of leadership, of direction, of purpose, of hardships, of fear, of uncertainty about what it is all for and where they are headed. Then – and now.

That’s what happens – it’s wondrous in a way – when one engages with a timeless, archetypal text. The Torah is rooted in a strange dimension of reality: it is immersed in its own time and its own worldview, it has its own preoccupations – while at the same time it is signposting themes and situations and dilemmas which are absolutely of the moment. Our daily news, our daily reality.  Classical Greek drama does this, and Shakespeare too of course. But we have the Torah.

One of the things we always need to keep in mind when we read the stories of the wilderness years is that the people didn’t know how long the journey would last. Can you imagine that? Can you suspend your knowledge of the story and its legendary 40 years, and place yourself into the mental world of its participants and an apparently endless wandering through an arid wilderness?  Yes, we have the manna every day, the daily miracle of being alive and provided for – but how long can this go on, the uncertainty, the aimlessness, the insecurity of a life lived between the horrors of the past and the wished-for settledness of a patch of land we can call our own?

The Israelites were carrying a promise: at some stage, they had been told, they will arrive at a so-called ‘promised land’, a land ‘flowing with milk and honey’, a fantasy land where the people can live at peace, in security, and with all the blessings of material wellbeing. So the promise for that exodus generation is hardship now, but jam tomorrow.

(Thank you Lewis Carroll: the White Queen explains to Alice with pseudo-Talmudic logic that what is on offer is ‘jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today’. That’s because, in the story, jam is available ‘Every Other Day’. Which of course is never ‘today’. Each day it’s ‘jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today’).

Victory tomorrow, hostages released tomorrow, ceasefire tomorrow. Moses and Netanyahu – the White Queens of Jewish history. Unalike in so many ways, this is something they share – the ability to dangle hope for ‘jam tomorrow’ in front of a traumatized people desperate for an end to the perils and uncertainties of an endless journey.

So we need to keep in mind the internal drama of the Torah’s fourth book, B’midbar, its radical uncertainty about what is going on and how long it will continue, but we also need to recognize the way the story unfolds into a collective tragedy.

And the tragedy is that the people who left Egypt with such high hopes, such drama and excitement and sense of wonder at a miraculous survival, this people, this group of survivors of degradation and enslavement and persecution, this people whose identity is branded by the experience of both liberation and revelation, this people promised a great future with a vision to enact – those people all die out on the never-ending journey: the wilderness takes its toll, the wilderness claims its victims, the people numbered in such obsessive detail as Numbers chapter 1 opens – they never reach their promised land. (The exceptions are Joshua and Caleb, the outliers in this tragedy).

So this story contains tragedy – if we read attentively we can feel it and hear it. But if, classically, tragedy also has elements of catharsis, the purging of the feelings of pity and fear, is there catharsis in the Torah’s dark drama?  Perhaps what keeps us reading and not despairing is the way the storytellers allow us to hope that the next generation will carry the vision, and take the story forward, that they will reach the so-called ‘promised land’. The whole of the book of Deuteronomy is a resumé by Moses of the history of what the Israelites went through in the wilderness years. It’s driven by the need to pass on the story: ‘And you shall teach it to your children…’

So the story will go on, beyond the tragedy. And this has been Jewish history, over and over again.

Yet it is one of the deepest truths of the Jewish story, as we retell it year by year, that in a fundamental way, a  spiritual and psychological and existential way, we the Jewish people never do enter the promised land. We come to the end of Deuteronomy in our cycle of readings and ascend Mount Nevo with Moses and are vouchsafed a look at the promised land. But a glimpse is all we get. Then Moses dies and we start again, from the beginning, the cycle of Torah readings returns us to the story of how life came into being and a special people came into being with an identity rooted in a form of timelessness.

The journey is endless (as Kafka knew, and wrote about in his famous parable) and the promised land is not geographical but a metaphor: it’s an image of deferred hope, it’s the spur for survival, it’s what enables a people to bear the vicissitudes of history, the defeats, the disappointments; and to keep on going with the hope – grandiose, seductive, unachievable, and yet devoutly wished-for and prayed-for (by some) – the hope that history and the story of humankind can be transformed for the better; that the Judaic vision of how relationships between people should be, how the relationship between societies and peoples can be, how the relationship with the natural world can be – that this Jewish vision can make a difference to the fate of life on earth. This is the absurd hope, endlessly deferred, of the Jewish story. This is the endlessly awaited promised land, the destination of the never-ending Jewish journey.  

My Jewishness is a Jewishness rooted in story and storytelling, and how  that story, or set of stories, intersects with history. Some Jews, many Jews, reject the story and only want to live in day-to-day history: they are the out and out secularists, and the nationalists, and those religious who have made a Golden Calf out of possession of the land. This is what modernity made possible: Jews who could no longer find an affinity with their mythic and archetypal and spiritual story, the story incarnated in the sacred scriptures, and relegated it to the realms of nostalgia or outworn superstition, or condemned it as coercive indoctrination, or made it into a solely political project.

Some Jews – a small minority – did things the other way round: they rejected history and only wanted to live in the story (they are the original anti-Zionists who rejected the establishment of the State, and reject it still, because the Messiah had not yet come to declare it).

I try and hold on to both story and history – to a story that is still alive, and a history in which it is embedded, and I wrestle with the creative tension this involves, the dialectic between history and story.

But holding on to both, for me, means reading history – the day to day reality of a nation struggling in real time – reading that history in the light of the story: judging the temporal, the everyday, in the light of the timelessness of the story and the vision it incarnates – a vision in which justice and compassion are God’s presence within the story; and justice and compassion are the divine attributes that the Jewish people have to enact as they live in history.

Sorry to wander into theology, into speaking of justice and compassion as God’s signature in the world, but if you abandon theology (and the vision it inspired) then you end up with a pariah state: you end up starving civilians, and in the words of Yair Golan, leader of Israel’s opposition Democratic party “ kill[ing] babies as a hobby…and expelling populations”, or in the words this past week of Ehud Olmert, former prime minister of Israel, you end up with “indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians…war crimes.”

There is nothing in our sacred story that justifies this, although you still hear it being justified both by the secular nationalists and the religious nationalists, in Israel and in the UK. This is what one can truly call a ‘Hillul Ha-Shem’  – a ‘desecration of God’s name’ – the language that Judaism uses to describe actions which cause people to have contempt for Judaism and for the God of Jewish tradition who is the God of all humankind.

We just cannot allow this to happen without comment. We are not a people renowned for our silence, our inability to put into words what matters. And what matters now is to put into words our thoughts about the moral turpitude of what we have seen this past year and more, and continue to see unfolding before our eyes. As a people we are better than this – but we are still ‘in the wilderness’ and we have no idea how long all this will take.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, May 31st, 2025]

I never used to feel apprehension when talking in public – until recently. For many decades I had the honour, the privilege, as a rabbi, of using my understanding of Jewish texts and history and life to explore themes and topics when invited to do so. And I had the confidence that even if there was disagreement with my own angle of vision, it was safe to express things as I saw them. But something has changed.   

It seems that we are in the middle of a particular kind of war. I am not talking about the external war being fought on the ground and in the skies of the Middle East, but another kind of war that has broken out, an internal war that has emerged in tandem with the external one. It is a civil war – or rather, very often, an uncivil war – a war of words (and sometimes more) -within the Jewish community in the UK and in individual synagogues, that circles around what one can and cannot say about how the government of the State of Israel (and its military) has responded to, and is responding to, the horrendous crimes and savagery of October 7^th, that landmark day in the long arc of Jewish history.

What we in the Diaspora are allowed to say has become a fraught issue – even if what we are saying is being said by, and echoing, the disquiet of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of Israelis, on the streets in demonstrations, or in the pages of commentators in the newspaper Ha’aretz, which has become the moral conscience of the country.   

What informs my perspective on current events? This week we read a passage from the prophetic literature of the Hebrew Bible. The text was Isaiah, chapter 1, verses 10-17. So it was from the very first prophetic book in the Bible, the book of Isaiah, from the very first chapter – it’s how this whole genre of prophecy begins; and it was surely  a daring and radical act of religious faith to decide to open this new form of religious thinking/teaching with a text that was deeply subversive of all that the Israelite community held dear.

The visionary rhetoric of the language is powerful, uncompromising, the ethical perspective very clear: as the prophet merges his consciousness with God’s perspective he spells it out: the sacrifices and supplications and prayers of  the Israelite community are useless: ‘“What need have I of all your sacrifices”, says the Eternal One’ (v.11).

And then he asks – he has God ask – a really chutzpadik [cheeky] question: “Who asked you to come and do that?”(v.12). (To which one could reply: ‘Well actually it’s in the Torah – wasn’t it You, God, who commanded us to do all the sacrifices?’ – but let’s leave that be for the moment).

Isaiah’s invective, his torrent of impassioned feeling, isn’t going to be stemmed. He turns from the sacrificial system – with its blood and guts of slaughtered animals, its incense, its visits to the Temple – he moves on from all that ritual life run by the priests, the religious authorities,  and he switches his focus to the celebration of festivals and the new moon, and – channeling the divine voice – he doesn’t hold back. ‘They fill Me with loathing, they have become a burden to Me, I cannot endure them’ (v.14).

And we might wonder why this attack on the religion of the people, their rites and practices and prayers, why this disdain for them, why the vehemence, why is it so strong? This is a very different kind of religious authority from the priests with their rules and regulations. It’s a disruptive and disturbing voice we hear from Isaiah. There’s no attempt to make people feel good here. There’s no place for consensus, no nuance, no attempt at inclusivity. Divine disquiet, outrage, goes way beyond all those liberal pieties.

The prophet has no time for anything that passes for everyday religious practice. And he goes straight for the jugular.  He’s attacking, God’s attacking, what the people think matters religiously because “Your hands are stained with crime…and evil deeds” (vv.15-16). And, says God, says the prophet in the name of God, “This evil has to stop” (v.16). Instead you must “Learn to do good; devote yourself to justice, aid the wronged, uphold the rights of bereaved children, defend the cause of women who have lost their menfolk’ (v.17)

These are God’s priorities. The God of Israel is a humanist, a humanitarian, who tells his people that their sacrifices and prayers and festivals  are not what their Israelite identity is about. What is wanted of them as a people isn’t piety but action, ethical action: justice, compassion, goodness.

Goodness is real, it’s what’s required. But it has to be learnt, says Isaiah, says God, it has to be learned and practiced and enacted. If you are going to be devoted as a people to anything, then devote yourself to justice: this is the essence of prophetic Judaism. It’s what’s spelt out in this opening chapter of the opening book of prophetic literature. And it’s this prophetic Judaism that I was brought up to understand was the basis of Reform Judaism. The raison dêtre of progressive Judaism is to keep on insisting that ethical Judaism is foundational for Jewish life.  

Betray that, says the prophet, and you not only betray your Israelite identity and heritage, the consequences  will not only be to your souls, but – the text goes on to say – there will be external consequences too :”You will be devoured by the sword” (v.20). This is serious stuff: betray the moral underpinnings of your identity as a people and there will be bitter consequences. It will end in disaster.

Do we Jews take any of this seriously? Do we see ourselves as having a living connection to this kind of Judaic consciousness, this kind of perspective on life? For me this material is a touchstone, a lodestone – or one of them – when I speak about being Jewish, the Jewish vision; this is the perspective I use when I think about current events, when I think about what happens in this county or abroad or what is being done in the name of the Jewish state.

And it means it’s impossible to stay silent when a generation of children in Gaza are starving to death. Seen through the lens of prophetic Judaism it’s impossible to make an accommodation with that or to countenance activities that are displacing a whole people from their land; just as it’s impossible to turn a blind eye to the racist violence and hostility of West Bank settlers. “Your hands are stained with crime…and evil deeds”.

Yes, we know that is true of Hamas as well: “Your hands are stained with crime…and evil deeds”. But that is not a justification for what is happening in Gaza. Jews are supposed to have seikel [wisdom/insight], and menschlichkeit [human fellow-feeling] – and if I stretch back into the past to find the language to talk about this, it may be because we have a long heritage of wisdom and compassion and goodness welded to our souls and it makes us ask: where has it gone? why is it hiding? where is it hiding?

So these days I am apprehensive about talking about these topics because I know that some people don’t want to hear about this, don’t want to face the way the extraordinary life-affirming heritage of Jewishness is being dragged through the dirt, how the soul of Jewishness is being sullied and scarred, and that it’s going to take generations to recover from this. Because what is happening is of course unconscionable: deeply traumatic, devastating, for the Palestinians of course; but it’s traumatic in a different way for us, who witness this, who know what is happening, even if we can’t bear to look any more, and switch off our TVs, and social media feeds, and stop reading the papers – and the impulse is very strong to do that, I understand it. Not to know; or to rationalize; or excuse and justify; or to attack the messenger. I do get it, I do understand how our psychological defenses against pain operate.

And am I allowed to say any of this? I don’t know – I do know of course – but in a way it’s outrageous that I should sometimes feel apprehensive about speaking of this, just reminding us about the Jewish ethical tradition we have inherited. But someone needs to speak about it – and fortunately there are still plenty of those who do.

Those dead old white guys, the prophets, still pack a punch – they probably weren’t white, but you get the point. Their poetry, their vision, their passion are the beating heart of  living Judaism – the question is, do they still have a place in our hearts?  

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, May 17th, 2025]

Here’s a text for our times. It’s read, traditionally, on the Shabbat before Pesach (Passover), the festival of liberation.:

“Behold, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before the coming of the great andawesome day of God. He will reconcile the hearts of parents with their children, and the hearts of children with their parents, so that when I come, I do not strike the whole land with utter destruction.” (Malachi 3:23-4)

This is, how to put it?, the last word in prophecy. Literally so:  the last words of the last prophetic book. When the Hebrew Bible came to be edited, and a running order constructed, the last words chosen were a hope linked to a threat. The anonymous speaker, who takes for himself the portentous name of Malachi – “My messenger” – brings prophecy in Israel to an end by announcing a new hope for the people, a hope for transformation, but a hope that is conditional, a hope shadowed by the threat of a catastrophe: “utter destruction”. 

The time is late 6^th century, early 5^th century, BCE, and the people had only recently returned to their land after the trauma of exile. And as he channels the voice of divinity, the prophet draws on the only other figure from the tradition apart from Moses who was characterised as hearing God at Sinai: “Behold, I will send the prophet Elijah to you…”.

Elijah – who hears the still, small voice of God (1Kings 19), and soon after disappears into the ether – it is he who will return, with a new responsibility: to bring parents closer to their children and children to their parents. This is Elijah’s new role – to be a family therapist, so to speak – and, for reasons not quite spelled out but left for us to ponder, the very future of the nation depends on it.

So yes, Malachi announces that hope will arise, but it is balanced with this threat, which is unequivocal: if something doesn’t change there will be “utter destruction”. That’s quite a powerful choice by Jewish tradition – a touch of Beckett one might say – for prophetic literature to end with hope yoked to the threat of catastrophe. Everything could be lost, again. Fail, fail again, fail utterly.

And what makes the difference between a future of celebration and wellbeing, and future of mourning and loss? It seems to depend, in the prophet’s finely-tuned consciousness, on a dynamic that every era faces – the relationship between the generations; a fraught dynamic that is part of daily life, for families, for societies, and – in the mind  of the prophet – is what will determine how history turns out, for good or for ill. And what the prophet intuits is that hope for the future depends not on the grand themes of politics or economics but on emotional relationships: how parents can be reconciled with their offspring, and how the younger generation can be reconciled with their parents. Here, the drama of intergenerational conflict is the engine of history. This is the prophet’s conclusion – and the conclusion of prophecy.  

This is a text we could unpack and interpret at any historical moment and it would have a relevance, it would pose questions, it would provoke, it would warn, it would encourage reflection on whether there is something inevitable, universal, about one generation not seeing eye to eye with the other. But we are not living at any time in history, we are living now, in the midst of a world – and a Jewish world in particular – in intense turmoil. So how might this text speak to where we are now, as Jews, in our families and in our communities. Because the conflicts are real and the stakes are high.

This year is the second time we have gathered for the traditional Passover seder since the bloody dramas of October 7^th 2023 and what followed it. All  the horrors have forced their way into our seder gatherings. What has been happening, is happening, in Israel, in Gaza, in the West Bank, are the inescapable accompaniment to our Pesach celebrations and gatherings, celebrations still shadowed by the agony of hostages unreleased, by our awareness of violence and illegality, by our pain at blood shed indiscriminately, the blood of young and old, of Jew and non-Jew.  We recall that in the Biblical saga, the first plague visited on the Egyptians is the plague of blood: rivers of blood – an ancient image, still grimly resonant.  

When I have been talking with people about their seder nights – who will be there, the issues and questions they are bringing to the table – it seems that certain themes are present, certain issues where the hearts of parents and the hearts of children may or may not be aligned.

You see, the seder has always celebrated our survival as a people, our miraculous survival as a people. But once the ancient liberation is acknowledged, our liturgy points to our responsibility as Jews to engage with the project of bringing liberation to others, of responding with compassion to the needs of society. The very first text we say, as we break the matzah, the unleavened bread, is ha lachmah anya  (“this is the bread of affliction our ancestors ate)” – and the symbol is not just about the unleavened bread of the Passover story but the generations of affliction that Jews have suffered, what we have had to swallow down.

Our ancestors have been eating, symbolically, the bread of affliction wherever they found themselves in the world – but we break the matza at this point in the evening. Why? Because we live in a broken world. And we hide a part of the matza, to be found by the next generation later on in the evening – this is done to ensure the children will stay interested in what’s happening until the food arrives; but at a deeper level it symbolises how they will discover in their turn (If they don’t already know it) that affliction is a part of this miraculous and fraught story of the Jewish people.

But the text doesn’t stop there because our history is not one of self-pity  – ‘oh, look how everyone hates us’. Some Jews feel that and want to tell the Jewish story that way, as if that’s all that needs to be said about being Jewish, it is the antisemites who make us Jewish (Sartre’s view). But the Haggadah text we read flows on, uninterrupted, and speaks about the  responsibility to use our understanding of oppression and affliction in the service of others:  “let all who are hungry come and eat”, it goes on, “let all who are in need come and share with us our Pesach” . The seder is not just teaching history but it is articulating, right at the beginning, a moral vision the Jewish people have carried and developed as a result of that history.

The power of the story resides in our awareness, passed on through the generations, that we are a people who, yes, have been oppressed, but that then found themselves liberated from the harshness of oppression and committed themselves to feed the poor, to attend to those in need, to bring that freedom to others.

But now, at this point in our history, that next generation will turn to us and what will they say, what are they entitled to say? Well, you can write the script yourselves, because it is a script that of course is not only in the hearts and in the mouths of the younger generations of Jews, our children and grandchildren, but it also might be buried in the secret crevices of our own hearts: a script that might point to the suffering that is being caused to Palestinians, to their children, their families, their homes, their mosques, their universities, their hospitals and schools, their health workers and doctors and journalists; and the hearts of our children, schooled in the moral vision of Judaism, the universal ethical vision of Judaism – of justice and compassion, of feeding the hungry, of hospitality, of care for the stranger – our children schooled in our progressive communities in a commitment to Tikkun Olam, the repairing of our broken world, this whole generation could turn to us and ask (they are asking):  so how can you justify this, and how can you celebrate this festival of freedom, in the midst of such oppression? If the purpose of being Jewish is to be the bearers of a vision, an ethical commitment to alleviate suffering, what does that mean for us now when we see Jews as responsible for so much suffering? When it really matters – and it does really matter – are you siding with power or are you siding with justice?

Although the occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people have been going on for generations (it’s the equivalent of Israel’s ‘original sin’)  – and although people sensitive to these issues have been introducing other symbols onto the seder plate in recent years, like olives from Palestine, lest we forget –  something’s changed these last two years. We all feel it, the hearts of parents and the hearts of children have been carrying this burden when we read about freedom and slavery, hardheartedness, the death of innocent children – themes which have always been in the story – but we are hearing these themes and relating to them in new ways, deeply uncomfortable ways sometimes.  

The final plague, the death of the firstborn Egyptian males, may always have been an element of the seder that raised ambivalent feelings in us; or the drowning of the Egyptians in the Sea of Reeds as the Hebrew people passed into safety. But these traditional motifs from the saga could be rationalised away, or symbolically addressed by diminishing our joy through a few drops of wine spilled from our cups, as tradition dictates.  

But I wonder if those ways of addressing the moral complexities of the traditional story can help us any more in the face of what he know about the dead children of our own times in this current conflict?  If the hearts of parents are to be reconciled to their children, and the hearts of children reconciled to their parents, a lot of grief work may need to take place. Grief will need to be to be shared – and a recognition that compassion is not the sole preserve of one generation: that both young and old can feel the sadness and the compassion, can weep with the fury and the pain of seeing what has unfolded this last 18 months, and counting…

There is a tragedy unfolding in Jewish history and the soul of Judaism is in peril. Can each generation recognise that they share the distress about this, the fears about this, the rage about this?

It may be some comfort, a little comfort – or it may not – to know that moral qualms about aspects of our story have a very old pedigree. Fifteen hundred years ago the rabbis of the Talmud looked at the story and they created a midrash, a story of their own, to give voice to their humanistic and universalistic impulses, when they thought about the drowning of the Egyptians who, yes, were persecutors; who, yes, were oppressors and acted with cruelty – but were also flesh and blood; and perhaps victims in their own way, to the powers-that-be, as soldiers in armies so often are, drafted in and just following orders. But when the rabbis of old read the story, and thought deeply into the human dimensions of it, they said:

“At that time, the ministering angels wanted to sing a song of praise to the Holy One of Israel, blessed be He;  but he restrained them, saying: “My creatures are drowning in the sea and you would sing before me?” (Megillah 10b)

Temper your rejoicing, the rabbis were saying, because from the point of view of the divine, all human life is sacred, all life. And yes you have to deal with moral complexities and the complexities of the costs of freedom, but never forget that it is God’s creatures who are suffering, that the victims of your existential fears share a common humanity with you. Feel the compassion, they said, weep with the compassion, hold each other in compassion, each with another, each generation with the other. This is the only way we can retain hope in the world. This is the only way we can retain the hope for hope: share the compassion we feel for those who suffer, for those who die needlessly, heedlessly. Weep for the pity of it all, weep for the horror of it all.

Stop singing, stop defending the indefensible, stop justifying, stop rationalising, stay with the horror and the pity and your compassion.

In each generation Pharoah’s hardheartedness is reborn, it is incarnated within leaders and followers alike. Leaders who lack compassion, followers who lack compassion. But the Jewish task is to keep compassion alive when others forget it. This is a transgenerational task: whatever the hurts you are carrying, do not let that hurt blot out your capacity for compassion.

If the generations around the seder table (and beyond it) can keep in touch with their compassion, their shared vision of compassion, then maybe, maybe, hope might be present and we won’t as a people have to face the alternative: utter destruction.    

{based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, April 12th 2025]

It was June 1983 and I was finishing my third year of training as a psychotherapist. It was the last time I and my colleagues would be meeting as a formal group. We’d had seminars together and been in a weekly experiential setting sharing all sorts of personal issues and preoccupations. But it was the end of term, the course was over, and we were having some food together: it was a party I suppose, a celebration of sorts. We’d survived. 

The food was all laid out on a rug on the floor and we were sitting around, – on cushions, if memory serves, (that was all very much of its time) – and maybe we had been drinking some wine; and suddenly one of my colleagues – we were a group of eight, different ages, men and women, different backgrounds but all British-born – said to me: ‘Howard, I have been wanting to ask you something for quite a while’.

I will call him Harold, for convenience sake. And because that was his name. (He is no longer with us – he died many years ago). He was in his early 60s then, I guess – so he was 30 years older than me – English to the core, upper middle class, educated but not particularly thoughtful. He was good with numbers, I think he was an accountant, but he wasn’t that emotionally intelligent.   

Anyway: ‘What I want to know’, he said, ‘is this: are you one of those Zionists?’ And the condescension, the lip-curling disdain, is what I still remember, vividly. ‘Are you one of those Zionists?’ He knew I was Jewish of course – it so happened that I was the only Jewish member of that year group  – and on this last evening, this is what he wanted to ask.  Like he’d been saving it up.

Now some background. June1983, you might recall, was less than a year after the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Beirut, massacres of Palestinians and Lebanese Shi’ite civilians, perpetrated by Christian Phalangists under the tutelage of the IDF, the Israel Defence Forces. Israel had invaded Lebanon in mid-1982 with the intention of rooting out the PLO, which they had succeeded in doing. By September of that year there was a ceasefire agreement in place – the PLO had withdrawn; but in violation of the ceasefire the IDF advanced into West Beirut, and this enabled the Christian militias to carry out their war crimes.

Between 1300 and three and a half thousand civilians were killed, the numbers are still disputed, but the independent UN commission investigating afterwards established that as the atrocities were taking place, the IDF had received reports of what was happening but had done nothing to prevent them. Indeed they had stationed troops at the exits of the area to prevent the camp’s residents from escaping.  The commission concluded that the IDF had been complicit in a situation which met the agreed criteria for genocidal activity. 

Simultaneously, the Israeli Kahan Commission found similarly that the IDF was indirectly responsible for the massacres and it forced the Defence Minister, Ariel Sharon, to resign. Incidentally, or maybe not, twenty years later Sharon was Prime Minister.

So, all that ancient history is just to sketch out the backdrop to my colleague’s question:  ‘Are you one of those Zionists?’. Over the last couple of generations, Jews in the UK have found themselves having to respond to that question, often spat out by the non-Jewish world. And of course it is still a live question.  

But if we are honest, it is a question that is asked, usually more benignly, by Jews themselves. When we ask the question of each other – or pose it to ourselves –  ‘Are you one of those Zionists?’  or just ‘Are you a Zionist?’ the question won’t carry the same antisemitic undertone as Harold’s question. Or not until recently, not until this last 16 months, when Jews being asked this question by other Jews – checking out one’s Zionist credentials as it were – have sometimes been abused, excoriated, condemned, if they haven’t given the ‘right’ answer. Unless you give the ‘right’ answer you can be accused of being secretly antisemitic;  or rather – to use the jargon bandied around – ‘a self-hating Jew’.

It’s become a very loaded question in the wider UK Jewish community, and in synagogue communities: ‘Are you a Zionist?’ There is a whiff of McCarthyism around: “Are you now or have you ever been harbouring any doubts about Zionism?”

As an aside, a small but not insignificant detour: I looked up the Rules of Governance for the synagogue where I work, our constitution as it were, and where it describes the aims of the synagogue it says they are “the practice, promotion, development and advancement of Judaism [my italics] through public worship, and religious, educational, social, cultural and charitable activities” and there is currently a suggestion that the word “humanitarian” should be added  to that list. So it is all very edifying – but you will notice that neither Zionism, nor indeed Israel, is mentioned. We are a Diaspora congregation and the focus is on the expression and nurturing of Judaism.

But back to 1983. I was shocked by Harold’s question – or maybe by the way he said it – and I’m sorry to say that I don’t remember what I replied.  But what I should have said, or rather asked, was the question I would ask now: ‘Well, I suppose it depends what you mean. Who are ‘those’ Zionists? Who are you talking about? Are you talking about the ethnic cleansers in the government? Or are you talking about those who belong to Jews for Justice for Palestine?’

And, secondly, and perhaps even more fundamentally, I should have asked: ‘And what are you actually talking about when you speak about being a “Zionist”?’

You see there are so many Zionisms, past and present, that the term is almost devoid of meaning. It is analogous to the word  ‘Judaism’ – you always hear people say, ‘well Judaism says XYZ’ as if Judaism is some monolithic entity or object; but I have started to say ‘Actually there is no such thing as ‘Judaism’ – there are just various Judaisms. We are incorrigibly plural. And I think that is even more true of Zionism: there’s no such thing as Zionism, there are just various Zionisms.

Martin Buber’s ethical Zionism was radically different from Jabotinsky’s militant Revisionist Zionism, which was itself a world away from Achad Ha Am’s cultural Zionism. Amos Oz’s Zionism was always radically different from Netanyahu’s. The Zionisms of Israeli NGOs like B’Tzelem or Breaking the Silence or Peace Now – or the New Israel Fund here in the UK – are as far from the racist thugs of the settler movement or ministers like Ben-Gevir and Smotrich as it is possible to be. To talk of Zionism – unqualified and in the singular – rapidly becomes meaningless.

I would argue that the concept ‘Zionism’  can only have a meaning – rather than it being a weapon in a verbal war fuelled by the need to feel self-righteousness – if it is immediately qualified in some way. In a way that opens up what kind of values you are committed to.

So one could talk of oneself as being committed to a Zionism that is dedicated to building a society aligned with Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence, one of adherence to social justice, religious pluralism and universal human rights, within borders agreed by the international community, a democratic  state  attentive to the rights of all indigenous ethnic groups – and so on. The key question is: what are the values you are aligned with?

So, I would now say to Harold, no I am not one of ‘those Zionists’: the ethnic cleansers, or the defenders of the Occupation and so-called Greater Israel, or the backers of the 2018 Basic Law that made Arab citizens of Israel into second-class citizens, or the Zionist denigrators of Diaspora Jews  for having the chutzpah to believe they can live full, richly-textured Jewishly-committed lives in the suburbs of any city in the world. No, I am not one of ‘those’ Zionists.

If senior Muslim and Jewish denominational leaders in the UK can sign a agreement this week – the so-called Drumlanrig Accord (it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue but I guess you can’t have everything) – to foster deeper understanding and a commitment to work together for the common good, then we should celebrate a rare ray of sunshine amidst the storm clouds that are gathered around us. If Zionists and non-Zionists and anti-Zionists were able to come together to share their passionate convictions about  what values they share, then it is here in the Diaspora that Jews are leading the way in enacting our Jewish purpose: to be or l’goyim, ‘a light to the nations’ (Isaiah 42:6).

The sad thing is that such an Accord within the Jewish community feels light years away. These last 16 months have exposed a deep and elemental fissure in the Jewish world. The debates about what Israel does, or fails to do, what it has done over 75 years, what it should do or shouldn’t do now – these debates are part of a desperate battle being fought for the soul of Judaism itself.

What has been revealed are incompatible visions of what Jewishness is, what it is for. These visions of how to live out the essence and purpose of a three thousand year old Judaic civilisation compete for airspace, for validation: the battle of competing visions, and for the role of Israel within these visions, is desperate because each faction needs to feel that their values are the ones that count and that they are on the right side of history; and of Jewish history. 

Some synagogue communities have been feeling that there’s been a failure of moral rabbinic leadership since October 7^th  2023 in relation to what has unfolded in the Middle East. Clergy have had to work out their own perspectives and then find ways of holding together communities with widely divergent views on the tragedies experienced by Israelis and Palestinians alike. I have tried to be consistent in adhering to and articulating a particular Jewish vision of the ethical issues involved, while at the same time acknowledging that the Jewish world has been painfully split.

It should have been clear over these 16 months (and before that) that I am not one of ‘those Zionists’ – I am more attuned to someone like the Israeli novelist David Grossman, who is as near to a prophetic voice in our beleaguered times as we are likely to get. Here are some sentences from his essay entitled ‘What Is a Jewish State?’:

The Judaism I connect with is repelled by the euphoria and arrogance I see among certain circles…and by their shackled fusions that tighten around my neck: the fusing of religion with messianism, of faith with zealotry, of the national with the nationalistic and fascistic…An occupation regime cannot be democratic: it simply cannot. After all, democracy stems from the profound belief that all human beings are born equal and that it is wrong to deny a person the right to participate in determining his or her own fate.

Years of occupation and humiliation can create the illusion that there is a hierarchy in human value. The occupied nation is eventually perceived as existentially, innately inferior. Its misery and wretchedness are perceived by the occupier as a fate that supposedly stems from its essence. (That is how, as we know, anti-Semites have always treated Jews). Its members are viewed as people whose human rights may be denied, whose values and desires can be disparaged. It goes without saying that the occupying nation sees itself as superior and, therefore, as innate master. In this reality, and as the influence of religion grows, there is an increasing belief that it is God’s will. And it is not hard to see how, in this climate, the democratic world view wanes.

And I ask: how can those who believe man is created in God’s image trample that image?

(fromDavid Grossman, The Thinking Heart: On Israel and Palestine, Jonathan Cape, 2024),pp.37-8)

I suppose that is what you call ‘moral leadership’.  

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, February 15^th, 2025]

We are coming up to five years now since it arrived: you will each have your own memories of how you were affected, what changes to your life you had to make. Because the changes were sudden and dramatic. Covid appeared in January 2020 from China; by February in Italy people were forbidden from going out of their houses; and by the end of March we in the UK were in lockdown. And a lot of people were in hospital, and a lot of people were dying – and one realised this was not going to go away soon, that something was happening that was affecting, and was going to affect, everything we did.

It may be hard to remember the sheer surprise and drama and fearfulness of those months. I remember writing, talking, about it in that early period:  about life from now on being divided into two time periods: BC and AC. BC was Before Covid – which we’d look back to with nostalgia for its freedoms, and our assumptions of how life could go on pretty much unchanged; a period of naivete and wishful thinking. And then there’d be AC – and AC didn’t mean ‘After Covid was over’,  because for that first year there didn’t seem any possibility of that, but AC meant the new reality of living with an uncontrollable disease that had turned our lives and our freedoms upside down.

Why recall this ancient history? Well, not only because new variants of Covid are around that are evading the vaccines and causing mayhem to people’s well-being; but also because things happened in 2020 that shouldn’t just be swept under the carpet now that Covid just raises a yawn. Because that first year was pre-jab and the speed with which vaccines were developed was an extraordinary and almost miraculous international endeavour – although we just accept that now as if it’s just what medical science does, find the drugs we need to keep us going. But we didn’t know at the time how long it would take to develop some protection – or indeed it was going to be a possibility.

In those first 9 months with the dynamics of lockdowns and ‘bubbles’ and 2 metres distance, there were two parallel strands of experience: there was the brutal reality of over-stretched hospitals, of care homes overwhelmed, of all the death and suffering, numbers kept on rising; and there was the disproportionate impact on ethnic minorities – I’ll never forget the picture spread in the Guardian after a couple of months of thumbnail photos of dozens and dozens and dozens of front line staff of NHS doctors and nurses who’d already died and they were almost all Asian and black faces; and that wasn’t just a reflection of how much the NHS is dependent on British and non-British ethnic minority staff but the particular historical and social circumstances that made some people more constitutionally vulnerable than others. This was a particular kind of British scandal that maybe the ongoing UK Covid Inquiry might illuminate – or maybe not.

But suffice it to say that there were all these dark and desperate social realities going on as people suffered, there was all the pain of separations in hospices and care homes, the heartbreaking inability to be with some one as they were dying; and then there was the claustrophobia for children not at school, for teenagers who couldn’t meet their friends, for community life no longer functioning. All this just descended on us.

And yet in parallel to that, and maybe you had to have a degree of middle-class privilege to appreciate it, there was something else that happened: there was a quiet that descended as roads became almost traffic free – apart from grocery delivery trucks that suddenly became a lifeline – the air in the street was fresher, at a time when breathlessness was a major issue, you could breathe in the air when you walked outside, you could hear the birds, who seemed to take over the urban soundscape;  you could look up at quiet plane-less skies as international air traffic just stopped, overnight; animals started appearing in deserted city streets; and meanwhile new bonds were being made closer to home – neighbours, community, human contact took on a much sharper focus and value in our lives. Screen life became a lifeline for many, opening up new ways of being together. You met new neighbours on those weekly evening appreciation gatherings for NHS staff. Something emerged that was healthy and life-affirming.

It was as if there was a glimpse of a whole new way of life that had become possible, with more humane values – patterns of work and business and leisure all changed, people realised that maybe they didn’t have to fly abroad on holiday or for work  and their lives wouldn’t collapse, they could even be enhanced. The great slowing down that was forced on us as a society opened up new possibilities, a glimpse of how we could live together without such manipulation of the environment, without so much abuse of resources, without so much anger on the streets. Acts of kindness to other rippled through society.

So on the one hand there was this awareness – or so it seemed – ‘things will never be the same again, we didn’t know how fortunate we were’, as if we’d be been living in a Golden Age. It felt like it might have done to those who’d lived in Edwardian England 1910, 1911, 1912, a world that those living through it never realised would soon be gone forever; along with that regret that we hadn’t sufficiently appreciated things.

But it was balanced with that growing awareness that maybe something was being opened up for us, maybe something was being offered to us, as if – and here I speak in a language that anthropomorphises the virus in a way that is intellectually suspect, but I will do it anyway to make the point – it was as if the virus had appeared from some deep place of a planetary consciousness that was forcing us destructive plunderers of earth and air and water into a realisation that we could all manage with much less, that we could all survive and thrive by focusing on the simple and sustaining good things of life: human connectivity, attention to nature, attention to living more lightly on the planet and in the world.

As if the virus was on the side of the ongoing survival of all interconnected life forms on the planet, not just homo sapiens.

We would never have chosen what happened to us, and it was no gift, but certain lessons became available to us through it. And those lessons seem worth trying to spell out now. Firstly, the work of being human means learning to pay attention, to find out what really matters about human flourishing, and pay attention to what matters here and now; secondly, we were being told to learn to be patient, not a quality that we find easy: be patient, and find out what it is that really counts, don’t just grab for something because it is there or because someone else has it – not everything we think we need, or we’re told we must have, do we really need.

So: pay attention to what matters; cultivate patience; and thirdly, keep a humble eye on your dependence on your body – remember that your body is vulnerable, it will wear out and you will die, but while you can still breathe, appreciate it, treasure it,  it is carrying your life forward moment by moment.  

I was wrong about BC and AC – for most of us, most of the time, it’s as if Covid was just a blip, an inconvenience, that we have put behind us. Life has gone back to so-called ‘normal’. Of course if you lost loved ones, or if you are still suffering from the complex aftereffects of long Covid, it’s not just a blip. But so little has really changed – work patterns, to some extent; and yes there’s been a knock-on effect for schoolchildren and students. But that glimpse of another world to live in – where has that gone?

It’s as if that year, before the vaccines, the year of living more frugally, more simply, more focused on what really mattered – that tantalising intimation of other possibilities than the derangements of late capitalism – the door to an alternative way of living and being has closed almost shut. But maybe we can peek back in again – my own uncomfortable debilitating brush with Covid these last few weeks has prompted me to look back in and wonder what might have been lost.   

I would never describe Covid as a gift, but collectively it was an opportunity. Can we still salvage something from it? After all, I think I am not alone in feeling something was missed. There was an extraordinary YouGov survey done in that first 6 months, in the UK, where people cited the air quality and the wildlife and the closer social bonds and other factors and 85% of those questioned said they wanted to retain at least some of the changes wrought by the pandemic. Fewer that 1 in 10 wanted to return to the status quo ante. So what are we doing with that knowledge, those wishes, and hopes?  I don’t believe they have been lost. We need to keep that door ajar. Glimpses of another way of living don’t come along that often.

[based on a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, January 4^th, 2025]

This week, it began again: the old story, the ever-renewing story, the story of beginnings, one of the most significant pieces of imaginative literature in human history. Jews throughout the world began to read the Torah, the so-called Five Books of Moses, from the beginning of the book of Genesis. There are pieces of religious literature that are older – Indian Sanskrit texts for example – but the chapters of the Torah that we read at the beginning of our annual cycle are woven deep into Western culture, secular and religious. The faith traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all use the images and motifs of these stories in Genesis to create structures of meaning for believers to live within.  

These narratives offer myths to live by, stories which structure our lives – even the most devoutly secular believe in, live inside, a seven day week, for example.  Even the most ardent atheist telling a story to their children will begin ‘Once upon a time…’ This is what the Book of Genesis  does when it starts ‘In the beginning…’  The Biblical world view can still structure our thinking without us even being aware of it. The repetition of the same texts allows us to live within cyclical time while the content of Genesis and what follows tells us we live within chronological time, where events unfold with a linear, forward momentum.

The storytellers of the Hebrew Bible were poets, literary artists, mythographers, weavers of words aspiring to craft a narrative in which the Israelite community could find where they belonged and why they existed and what their purpose was within the community of nations. To get their national story going they started in pre-history, with universal questions about origins, and found a narrative mode, a mythic language of symbols and images and characters, that offered meaning but also waited to be interpreted.

The need for interpretation was a necessity once they committed themselves to choosing words to build sentences. Every writer knows this. That whatever words they choose people will impose their own understanding onto them. Writers can’t control what readers will do with their words – for good or ill. (I will come back to this later).

In the first chapter of Genesis those ancient storytellers conceived of a Conceiver – they gave birth to the idea of a divine energy that gave birth to the world and everything in it, a creative force bringing into being the heavens and the earth and all of the life that it contains, including us. And they conceived of this Conceiver in their own image, as a creative force that used language, words, to bring things into being: “And God said ‘Let there be light’ – and there was light” (Genesis 1: 3). Within their mythic thinking, God speaks the universe into being.

They, the storytellers of the Hebrew Bible, only had language, words, to create something out of nothing – to create a masterpiece of narrative that would last forever – and in that act of radical imaginative daring they fashioned a God who also spoke – spoke the world into being, stage by stage, “and God said…And God said…And God said…” culminating in humanity, us, who – in a deft twist of poetic paradox – they described as being “created in the image of God” (Genesis1:27).

‘Humanity created in the image of God’ is a piece of thinking foundational to the Torah – although we might now feel the freedom to say that it works the other way round too: that we created God in our own image. The Torah is full of that: a God of compassion, kindness, mercy, but also anger, jealousy, destructiveness. The storytellers’  multidimensional image of the divine, of God, was a mirror of who they were.

So: those inspired weavers of words, creating language worlds for people to live in, projected that language-generating  gift onto the God of Genesis.  It is an inspired piece of collective storytelling, a piece of literature in which every word counts, every word is part of an elaborate structure and pattern – words appear three times, seven times – it is all woven into a magnificent tapestry in which the final act of creation is human beings. The narrators’ artistry created a sublime portrait of divine artistry. All of nature matters: sun, moon and stars, land and seas, plants and animals, birds and fish – and humanity, with its special role, the responsibility of stewardship.

So in six bejewelled paragraphs the architecture of creation is laid out, stage by majestic stage, but the forward momentum of the narrative contains as its destination something beyond humanity. In the seventh paragraph, something radically different is described – not activity but rest. A time for the breath of all life to breathe out.

And this rest, this act of ‘shabbat’, is not just blessed like other aspects of creation but something else is added: this rest, the capacity to rest, is made sacred, kadosh, holy : the word appears here for the first time in the Torah (Genesis 2:3). We often talk about life being sacred, but this opening narrative doesn’t actually say that – what is says is that the ability to stop activity, the necessity to stop speaking worlds into being, the capacity for silence – this is sacred. Within the creation myth, it is stopping that is sacred. In other parts of the Torah it is activity that is sacred, but the story begins quite differently: the sacred is what happens after all the activity has stopped.  

And then the whole story of creation is given to us from another perspective, juxtaposed with the first, like a Cubist portrait. Genesis 2:4 tells us “This is the tale of the heavens and the earth when they were created…”  ele toldot hashamayim ve’ha’aretz  b’hibaram… And we get the whole story told from underneath as it were. The first seven paragraphs were seamless: each sentence is constructed in a continuous flow from the last, with the letter vav (‘v’) joining them up – the letter means ‘and’ – so it reads ‘and this, and then this, and then this’ .

But that unstoppable stream of narrative stops in verse 4 of Chapter 2, and the eighth paragraph of the Torah is a new beginning: ele toldot hashamayim ve’ha’aretz b’hibaram – “This is the story of the heavens and the earth when they were created” – and yes, we hear the echo of the first line of the Torah (the words ‘heavens, earth, created’ are repeated from Genesis 1:1) but in a different order; as if the storytellers are saying, okay we are going to tell you about this another way round now, not in terms of grand divine choreography but as a story told from a human perspective.

And the key word from the human perspective is that word ‘toldot’ – which means literally, ‘generations, begettings, acts of giving birth’, and this word ‘toldot’  takes on the meaning of ‘story’ and ‘history’. One generation’s narrative merges into the stories of the next generation and it adds up over the generations to become history.

So in this second telling of beginnings we find many images of fertility: a lush garden, four rivers, two mysterious trees offering knowledge and life, the imagery is grounded in water and the earth; and then, from the earth, an ‘earthling’ is formed – the play on words is in the Hebrew (adama, adam) – and the only characteristic of this creature that the storytellers choose to describe is its capacity for language: it names the creatures around it – this is the divine gift bestowed on humanity, the ability to find the words that matter.  

Our Torah storytellers were besotted with language, obsessed with language, both what it could do and the relationships it can build – but also the trouble it can cause when it fails, or fails to be honest and becomes manipulative. In the Garden of Eden everyone is suddenly talking, Adam, Eve, God, even the snake and its slippery dialogue with Eve. Dialogue becomes a generator of the story, but the absence of dialogue is also generative: Cain’s absence of words to describe his anger leads to the murder of his brother (4:8) – the text says that he speaks, but there is then a hiatus, a gap, and instead of words there is the murderous act.

You see in these early chapters of Genesis the storytellers wrestling with the power of words: too many words, the wrong words, the wrong kind of conversations, lead to the Tower of Babel. ‘This is what happens when everyone speaks the same language’ the narrators have their God say, ‘they think they can do anything’ (Genesis 11:6). The narrators are sensing here the shadow side of language – the way it can easily create a false consensus, a belief that whatever one says must be right because everyone else is saying it.

At Babel you see the storytellers describing the problematic nature of believing there is only one way of talking, one way of thinking, one way of using words; they show the hubris of that. So languages – plural – enter the Torah’s story. And once there exists this confusion of tongues, words needed to be translated, interpreted, and there’s not only one way to describe reality. And not only one way to reach heaven.

This is how the Hebrew storytellers generated the tradition Jews belong to – one where words don’t only have one meaning, where words are plastic and stretch in multiple directions, where you the reader have to do some of the work, maybe a lot of the work, to wrestle meaning out of the texts, recognising that there is no single interpretation, no final interpretation to any Biblical text, or midrashic text, or Talmudic text. Actually, to any literary text.  

The process of commentary and interpretation is the lifeblood of the people, this tradition has kept the Jewish people alive for millennia, because we have not reduced texts to single meanings, we have refused to read literally, or hardly ever literally, but we have also learned to read metaphorically, and homiletically, and symbolically, and in multiple other ways of responding with our creativity and imagination to the texts we are presented with. The greatness of Judaic culture is that it has taught the virtues of ‘on the one hand’ and ‘on the other hand’ – interpretation is polymorphous and endless; an antidote to the totalitarianism of certainty.  It enlarges and enriches us, it broadens our horizons, it lets in more life, more light. Only dictators, fascists and authoritarians believe there is only one truth.

I feel humbled to belong to a tradition that has this relationship with words:  what they can do (when used carefully), what they can suggest, what they can create, how they can inspire – and how they can manipulate; how they can move the heart and how they can chill the heart. I enjoy trying to build words into sentences that help us think more deeply into subjects: they might challenge, entertain, stimulate, but they are always fuelled by a sense that I derive from Torah and Jewish tradition that language is a divine creation (so to speak) that we can borrow and play with and, on a good day, mould into something new. And the aim is always to enrich our experience, to give us more room to breathe in, to think with.

In the end though I know that whatever I say, everyone will hear it slightly differently, or will interpret it somewhat differently. Each of us listens through the prism of their own thoughts, beliefs, ideas, prejudices – we all do this all the time, even when we talk to each other (maybe especially when we talk to one another).  And if you read something I have written you will – I hope – have your own thoughts about it, you will project your own meanings onto it, your own associations to the words I use, sometimes you will hear it through your own preconceptions. Listening and reading is deeply subjective – ‘I thought he said this’, ’I thought he meant that’. I am not in control, ever, of how my words are heard, or read. And that is how it should be. Interpretation is always subjective and personal  and usually that is fine but sometimes, of course, it can be problematic.

I want to share with you something that happened after Yom Kippur this year because it both illustrates what I am talking about and is, I hope, instructive. I gave a sermon on Yom Kippur – it was a long day, we had the time – in which I spoke about a film I had found both thought-provoking and inspirational, Jonathan Glazer’s multiple Oscar-winning ‘The Zone of Interest’. And I used it in part to make certain points about our human capacity for denial and not wanting to see what is painful. This is a human, universal, psychological process, and we all do it. I made that clear – or thought I had made it clear. But someone who read my text online afterwards was deeply upset (and angry) about it. They felt it was ‘laced with the language of hate’, that it was ‘antisemitic’, that it ‘elevate[d] anti-Zionism to a moral imperative’, that it ‘posit[ed] that Jews have an inherent badness that must be purged’.

As someone who has spent a good part of his professional life speaking about, and working on, the benign, creative and life-affirming dimensions of Judaic culture – which has included speaking about the ways in which our vision can go into eclipse – this came as rather a surprise.

People who spoke to me afterwards – and people who read it afterwards – were rather grateful about how I’d opened up the themes I was exploring. But – self-evidently – not everyone felt that way. I don’t mind dissent, I belong to an argumentative tradition and people, and I am not in the business of putting thoughts into words with the expectation that everyone will agree with – or, God-forbid, submit to – my way of thinking.

But what I am learning is just how differently different folk can read texts. As they saw it, they reckoned that this Yom Kippur the ‘threat’ to Jews – their language – was coming not from outside the community but ‘from inside’. (The idea that the Jew is ‘the enemy within’ is of course an antisemitic trope – it began in the early Middle Ages – but I will let that pass. That’s just how their words struck me, my subjective association to the language they used to describe me).

So it is all about interpretation. Sermons and blogs are just another text. One person’s inspiration can be another person’s horror show. On the whole – there are exceptions – when I read the narratives of Torah I can feel inspired, enlivened, challenged, stimulated: they can fertilise my thinking and my imagination. When Richard Dawkins reads those same texts he is appalled, dismissive, scornful, sickened to the heart. We all read texts through the prism of our own story, our own personal ‘toldot’, history.

This experience has been sobering. As Jews begin a new cycle of Torah readings this year, I am hoping for an uplifting, inspiring, illuminating journey through the texts of my tradition, a journey which can help us glimpse new dimensions to the texts we’ve inherited and how they inform the texts of our own lives.  I am going to try not to let the prism through which I see this heritage become a prison: I don’t want to feel trapped into only seeing what I have already seen before. “Let there be light” spoke new hope into the darkness; who would want the darkness to stifle new ways of seeing?

[loosely based on thoughts shared at Finchley Reform Synagogue, October 26th, 2024]

1. On Love and Hate

I want to start with a simple question. Can we ever know how someone else experiences the world? I would suggest that we can know a person for a lifetime yet we can’t know what the felt experience is of someone else. We can listen as they describe it, we can be empathetic, we can imagine other people’s experiences where we live or across the world from us, we can read novels which get inside characters, but in some fundamental way we can’t know another person’s inner world. (Of course we may not know much about our own inner world, but that’s another story) . Our felt inner world, our deep subjectivity, is, in essence, known by no-one.

And yet there lives in us, I think, a deep wish to be known. As well as a deep fear. The wish to be known is I think a wish to be appreciated, understood, accepted, wanted. And maybe at root it’s a wish to be loved. Loved unconditionally. But, we worry, if everything about us is  known, would we still be loveable? So the wish to be known is in tension with the fear – the fear that there is, or might be, something in us that stops this happening, that there exists in us aspects of the self that someone else would not be able to accept, or be able to love, parts of our inner world, parts of us, they would not be able to embrace unconditionally.  

So: we contain (in two senses of the word ‘contain’) the wish to be known and the fear of being known. Although there is a wish to be known, we can spend a lifetime developing the art of putting up barriers to being known, truly known in all our complex and multifaceted humanity; it’s strange that the thing we think we want so much, we also spend such a lot of time, consciously and unconsciously, protecting ourselves from. Along with all the time we spend cultivating a persona, a false self, that we think might be more desirable, more acceptable, more loveable, than our real selves in all their quirky and turbulent splendour.   

So if this is how it is, and this is who we are – and now I am moving towards a specific Jewish relationship to this issue – what happens when we Jews come together on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) and are faced with a liturgy that contains the following:

 “What can we say before You…”, we ask, “and what can we tell You?” Here’s the traditional picture of a God figure, so far away, so distant, so remote, absent almost to the point of non-existence.  “And yet…”, we continue to read, disconcertingly, opening up a  religious paradox, “And yet You know everything, hidden and revealed. You know the mysteries of the universe and the intimate secrets of everyone alive…” So: here we are, looking into the mirror of our wish and our fear. “You see into the heart and mind. Nothing escapes You, nothing is hidden from your gaze”.

Again, the traditional picture of a God figure, but this time so close to us as to know us through and through, know us maybe better than we know ourselves, know us as no-one and nothing else can know us. All our idiosyncrasies and vulnerabilities, our foibles and peccadillos, our ugliness and our generosity, our cruelty and our kindness, our capacity for love and our capacity for hate. It’s all known – none of it is hidden, and none of it needs to be hidden.  Whether this so-called “gaze” feels threatening or a welcome relief will say much about us and our feelings about intimacy and  being known. 

We repeat this poetic text in each service through the day – it is at the spiritual heart of the Yom Kippur liturgy: the encouragement one day in the year, for a few brief hours, or minutes, to be open with ourselves about who we are, to admit our frailties and failings, to survey the landscape of our souls and make an account of what we have done and what we have failed to do, to admit how awful we might have been, how inhumane and callous – but also to recognise the ways in which we have managed to remain humane and caring, this too we bring to mind.

And Yom Kippur suggests that all this heart searching and soul reckoning can be done with a kind of confidence. Maybe no other person in the world can know us as we want to be known and fear being known – and yet by rendering an honest account of our intimate selves, our hidden selves, something in us will change. It will be as if we are truly known. The liturgy says: today you can, finally, be truly known – and the experience will be transformative. 

Laying ourselves open in this way – offering ourselves as best we can through deep introspection (without being persecutory towards ourselves) – will be like receiving a gift, a precious sense of being judged with unconditional love. We will come through Yom Kippur and out the other side mysteriously changed – the traditional liturgy calls it ‘cleansed’ – we will know that we are accepted, us poor humble flawed folk, we will feel that by reckoning with our guilt, our failures and foibles and falsehood, by looking honestly at ourselves, the verdict at the trial we are attending will be ‘not guilty’, you are loved, more than you know, more than you imagine. Maybe more than you strictly deserve.

This is what Yom Kippur offers Jews who engage with it and it has a mystery at its heart because even if you have no sense of, or belief in, the God figure of the liturgy, a merciful and compassionate divine presence, rachum v’chanun, even if you are a religious sceptic, if you harbour doubts, or you’re an honest  disbeliever in the literal or metaphorical language of our tradition, even if you struggle with or can’t subscribe to the pieties of old – that is all strangely beside the point.

Because the point is that by engaging with the psychodrama of the day, by spending the time reflecting on your life, you will experience some shift by the end of Neilah, the concluding service of this 25 hour marathon. You may not feel more loving by the end of the day – you will still have your irritabilities – but there will be a shift in your soul’s engagement with life.

There will be more life within you, more sense of the possibilities that life can offer, more hope that your life has got a meaning, or that you can make meaning out of it.  And although you might not think about this shift using the language of love, or – heaven forbid – the language of ‘God’, what matters is that something real will happen within you: you will glimpse what it means to be loved, valued and wanted. 

You can be loved because you have opened your heart to the truths about yourself. You can be loved because there is an indefinable goodness encoded within you. You can be loved because of your unique capacity for accessing the humanity within you, even if it gets battered and bruised by life, which it does; even if it goes into eclipse, which it does; even if your heart gets corroded by shame or guilt or anger or hatred, which it does. At heart you are infinitely precious, and loveable.

Why am I talking so much about love? Love and being loved?  Well, a couple of reasons. The first is to do with something my grandson said a while ago – he was four and a half – that I have been carrying around in my mind and hasn’t left me. From somewhere in him he came out with this: “The only thing that will always be true and never end is love”.

And it struck me, when I heard about this, that not only was he giving voice to his experience of being loved, but he was voicing a deep and universal human wish. For that’s what it is – a wish that “The only thing that will always be true and never end is love”. But it happens to be a wish that is threaded through all of Jewish liturgy, which over and over again talks about God’s eternal love of the Jewish people, a love which survives the vicissitudes of history, a love that endures from generation to generation, despite Israel’s failures and stiff-neckedness and betrayals.

I don’t know what any of that really means, and I don’t believe it in any literal – or even metaphorical – sense, but it seems to me to be a very useful piece of religious storytelling that could still have some mileage in it. Meaning-generating stories that offer benign ways of holding us within the randomness, chaos and vicissitudes of life are not to be discarded lightly, I guess. 

Now you might call that child’s words – that sentiment, that proto-philosophy – about love ‘always being true and never ending’, you might call it naïve – that life just isn’t like that. But maybe ‘naïve’ is the jaundiced judgement of an adult world that has lost touch with the sense of undimmed wonder that children can have. Adults whose lives become enmeshed in all the shabbiness and sickness of soul that surrounds us become cynical, and maybe envious of a child’s uncorrupted vision. Maybe we had that innocence once, but it was knocked out of us by the cruelties of the world and the cruel-hearted we encountered.  Maybe we secretly long to believe it is true, not just a hope. 

 But I found myself wanting to speak on Yom Kippur about love because I am very aware of the fragility of love in a time of hate.

Hatred right now is all around us, everywhere we look, and it is exhausting. It corrodes our well-being, eats into our minds and hearts. It’s spiritually exhausting being exposed to all the hatred: all that rhetoric in the Middle East about retaliation and revenge, and the wave after wave of racism and neo-fascism and bigotry in so many countries, in Putin and Trump, in India, sweeping through Europe, the list goes on and on, no nation is free of it; and all the denigration we hear of the Other, whether women or immigrants or trans; all the animosity within religious groups, and between religious groups, so much invective, so much intolerance, so much anger. All the polarisation, and lack of nuance, and being unable to tolerate ambivalence – it’s exhausting, and it’s tragic. These endless varieties and manifestations of hate.

I don’t do social media at all because I don’t want to be exposed to even more hatred than I already encounter in the daily news on TV or in the newspapers. But when I hear from my clergy colleagues about being bullied online, even by people from their own congregation, I realise just what a mess we are in. People don’t like it sometimes when I use the word hatred, they deny it is within them: ‘oh I just get a bit irritated’, or maybe they admit to being ‘annoyed’ or even ‘quite angry’ – but hatred, it’s a strong word, and we shirk from it.

But it needs to be spoken about because it conveys an aspect of all our inner lives. And one denies it at one’s peril. I won’t begin to catalogue here the long list of my hatreds. That’s part of the secrets of my heart. But hateful feelings arise out of disappointments, and all the gaps between what we want or need, and the capacity of the world and the people around us to give us what we need. So if we speak of love we need also to speak of hate because they go together within the human psyche. 

Life will always let us down sometimes – and how then do we mange our frustration, our aggression, our rage? Our disappointments can tip into despair, or hopelessness, or depression. Our anger can be turned against those we love, but whom we feel never love us enough. Or it can be turned against ourselves – our bodies, or our minds. Or it can get projected out so we always feel under siege and threatened rather than seeing how threatening we can be. (This is a particular Jewish problem). Or it can be acted out so that we rage against those who don’t think like us, or look like us, or act like us.

Yom Kippur is not only about our capacity for love. It is also about our hatred, and rage and aggression – and what we do with it, personally and collectively. It is the problem of our age – hatred and its ramifications -the defining problem of our times. To say that our very lives depend upon finding ways of thinking about our hatred is not an exaggeration. Our planet itself is loved and treasured – a source of wonder and delight; and it is hated and abused, plundered and laid waste to. Will our love or hate have the final say? 

The Jewish vision on Yom Kippur is a refined form of chutzpa: it is grandiose and, in its way, arrogant. It says that we Jews belong to a people who have a responsibility to think about how to live. And this thinking about how to live is not just about ourselves as individuals and our own personal wellbeing; and it’s not just for us as a collective, Klal Yisrael, and the fate of our people; but it’s a global responsibility – to work out how to be “a blessing for all humanity” (Genesis 12:3) and the fragile planet we inhabit. Our task is to think about how to live, how to live well, how to help others live well. It’s an impossible task – but someone has to do it.

On Yom Kippur Jews try to embrace that task – and in embracing that task they will of necessity encounter the core human dilemma, the psychological and spiritual  and existential question I have tried to sketch out here: how are we to express our love, and what do we do with our hate?

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, on the evening of October 11^th, 2024]

2. On ‘The Zone Of Interest’ 

Although I have written about Jonathan Glazer’s extraordinary Oscar-winning film The Zone Of Interest back in March, I want to return to it – the season of the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), a time of self-reflection and self-examination for the Jewish people, has prompted me into a re-engagement with the profound questions incarnated within it.

These questions have not left me since the day I saw it because I found the film emotionally compelling in the sense that it exerts an overwhelming pressure on the psyche. As I was watching it I knew I was in the presence of something that was important in ways I couldn’t immediately grasp, but felt – in my guts, my soul, wherever we feel these things, maybe the Yiddish word kischkes conveys it best – I felt it had significance far beyond its immediate context. 

To my mind it is the most important film, maybe the most important single piece of artistic creativity, of the 21^st century.

Why? Because it speaks directly to the human condition, our situation in the world now, it speaks to how our attention to the things that are going on around us – in our community, our society, our world – can be so uncomfortable, so unbearable that we find ways of not seeing and not hearing what is actually happening. It is a film of universal relevance about denial, the psychology and dynamics of denial, and how we protect ourselves from the consequences of our actions, and the consequences of our inactions.

Even if you haven’t seen the film, you may have heard about it or read about it, and so you might have heard it described as a ‘Holocaust’ film. Well, it isn’t untrue to describe it as a ‘Holocaust film’  – in the sense that it is set during the period of the death camps in Europe and it is constructed round the family home and garden of Rudolph Hӧss and his wife Hedwig who lived literally next door to Auschwitz.

Hӧss was the commandant of the camp, and the wall of the back garden of his family home was the wall of the death camp. So this is a film about the Holocaust, about evil and about how we insulate ourselves, or try to, from the knowledge of evil taking place on our doorsteps. Part of the extraordinary way the film is made is that you never see into the camp, there are none of the conventional images of prisoners, or ovens, or piles of bodies, the film is tracking the everyday life of the family who lives next to the camp, who go on picnics, tend the flowers and vegetables in the garden, observe the butterflies. In parts  it has an almost documentary feel, or the atmosphere of so-called ‘reality’ TV, fixed cameras watching ordinary things happen. 

So the focus is on everyday life: the cooking, the cleaning, the children playing, swimming, visitors arriving. It is a beautiful, pastoral setting, almost idyllic (if it wasn’t for the broader setting). But the camp is never absent, it’s just over the wall, a space we never enter, except with our ears.

One of the film’s five Oscars was for best soundtrack – and the soundtrack is indeed remarkable: it’s almost another film, for the ears and the imagination, running in parallel to what is seen on screen. There is a dull, grinding, rumbling that you hear throughout the film, ominous and persistent – I thought for a while I was hearing traffic outside the cinema, or maybe the sound coming from another screen in the multiplex I was in – but no, it was the soundtrack to the film, uncanny, unheimlich, the backgroundreverberation droning away like a huge industrial machine always in earshot but never visible in a scene.

What is going on beyond the wall is literally ‘obscene’ – from the Greek, ob-skeen (offstage/out of sight). And from time to time you can hear shots ringing out and shouts and human cries and screams – but this is all behind the wall, ob-skeen. And this  creates a radical discontinuity between what you are seeing and what you are hearing – and thus forced to imagine. 

So of course this is a Holocaust film – about how ordinary people, who come home to read their children a bedtime story, who tend their gardens lovingly and teach their children the names of the flowers and plants, ordinary people like you and me, who have goodness grafted to their hearts – can also have evil coiled into their souls.

But it is not only a Holocaust film, a film about the past: as the director Jonathan Glazer has asserted, it’s a film about the present, about now. And that now can be any ‘now’. The film was conceived and made long before last October 7^th but it is not possible to see the film and not think, for example, about its disturbing relevance to how some people have, and continue to, shut themselves away from knowing about the suffering of the people of Gaza or Lebanon. Jews too can be locked into their Zone of Interest.

As an aside, but an important aside  – I am aware too of the suffering of Israelis, the fears, the losses, the ongoing mourning, as well as the pain many are having to endure from having to shut themselves off from fully facing what is being done in their name by a government whom so many hundreds of thousands don’t support, can’t support, haven’t supported for years; in a different way they are trapped, bombarded psychologically by propaganda and actions they just have to endure, feeling helpless – although there have been many protests – trying not to let that helplessness tip into hopelessness, trying to recover from what one Israeli woman I listened to in the summer, a religious Orthodox woman committed to the end of the Occupation, committed to social action with Palestinians, committed to peaceful co-existence on a shared homeland, what this remarkable soul said – I was running a group with a Christian pastor at a Jewish-Christian conference in Germany (yes, the irony) – what she said she was finding it hardest to recover from was her experience after October 7^th 2023 that for the first time in her life “they made me feel hate for them”. She had never felt that before. Souls are being wounded in so many ways. 

But to return to the film: it is a film that challenges our complacency, the comfort zones we inhabit, any feelings of moral superiority we might harbour: none of us knows how we would act if our lives depended on perpetrating horrors, or pretending horrors weren’t happening a hair’s breath away. The film asks us to reflect on the ways in which in one way or another we all live walled off from terrible things that we hear about and see, things we know about and don’t want to know about. Because if we did face them it would be too unbearable.

“Too long a sacrifice/ can make a stone of the heart/ Oh when may it suffice?” – W.B. Yeats (Easter, 1916). 

Boat people drowning in the Channel. Millions of children in the UK in poverty, fighting hunger, cold, deprivation. Countless homeless folk within an hour of where I live in London (rough sleeping increased 20% in London in the last twelve months). We don’t have to look overseas to see the same dynamic at work much closer our homes – we all function with what the psychologists call cognitive dissonance: inconsistencies and gaps in our thinking, contradictions between what we believe and how we act. Jewish liturgy expresses the wish that “the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts” align; but we might also pray that the wishes for others’ well being might align with the actions we take on their behalf. 

I’ve now started to use The Zone of Interest as a reference point in my own thinking. It has become almost a shorthand for how our imaginations fail to be in sync with our actions. When we know something is happening but turn a blind eye. It can be bullying in the workplace, sexual harassment, abuse in the home – so many situations where we construct a mental wall so that we don’t have to think about what is happening right now, under our noses. I am sure you can all think of situations where you have done this, or do this. Where you just don’t want to know. Can’t bear to know.

The Jewish community at this season, days which culminate on Yom Kippur – the day when atonement/’at-one-ment’ is wished for – admit our shame about this, our failures, our weakness, our inability to live up to our ideals; we admit that our better selves do go into eclipse, our idealism fades. We acknowledge the painful truth that we only just have enough energy to get by, to survive each day. Because life is tough and who has the energy to get involved, to call out injustice, wrongdoing wherever we see it? We all have zones of Interest and zones of disinterest. I know that I do and it fills me with a kind of sadness and a sickness of spirit, as I recognise my inadequacies, my compromises, my weakness, my inability to let my actions truly express the empathy I have for those who struggle and suffer in so many ways. 

Like the Biblical stories of old, The Zone of Interest has moral and psychological complexity woven into every strand of the narrative – it is a piece of art that provokes us into reflections about our lives, our values, our blind-spots, our capacity for goodness and our capacity for evil. Each scene is worthy of attention. Each scene asks questions. Each scene demands a commentary – such a Jewish film!

A last thought, a footnote. And the thought is this: we are obviously living through one of the most fraught, jagged periods in the long arc of Jewish history. The Zone of Interest’s subject matter of persecutors and victims, bystanders and witnesses is all around us. The language that has emerged in relation to, and in the wake of, the Shoah – of ethnic cleansing, genocide, annihilatory intent, abuse of humanitarian law and human rights – this language fills the airways, newspaper columns, social media. It too penetrates the mind and heart. Who can hide from its gaze?

Questions of who will live and who will die (and how) – universal questions affecting Jew and non-Jew alike – press in on us each day. The questions are painful: are we victims or persecutors, bystanders or witnesses? Perhaps we can be more than one of those, perhaps we may occupy each of those roles at different times. It is, necessarily, confusing.

Our souls cower in the face of what we are living through. On Yom Kippur Jews have had – and they may feel it is a blessing or a curse (and maybe it’s both) – but on this day they have had the time and space to consider where  the Jewish community as a whole, and each individual, is in relation to these issues. Israel has managed to hijack Jewish history. We tremble to think about what this next year will bring.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, on the morning of  October 12^th, 2024]

3. Cognitive Dissonance, the Pleasures of Life, and the Need for Stillness

I spoke earlier today about cognitive dissonance and how we all use it to mange our lives. What I didn’t have time to share with you is the most dramatic example of cognitive dissonance I know.

There’s a photo taken in Eagle Creek, Oregon in 2017 by a photographer called Kristi McCluer –  you can google it, she won a ‘photo of the year’ award for it –  a photo in which there is a huge wall of flame dominating the whole of the horizon, devouring a forest, the trees creating an inferno, you can almost hear the roar of the flames, hear the cracking of the branches, feel the heat burning off the page as you look; and in the foreground there is a golf course, it can’t be more than 100 yards from the devastation happening in real time, and on the course three guys are lining up their putts as if nothing is happening. Now on the one hand this photo explains, portrays, cognitive dissonance far better than I can do with mere words.

And it is easy to read this photo as a powerful metaphor for indifference to a catastrophe waiting to engulf us – not just fire or floods or hurricanes or drought or any of the threats to the planet’s well being that are the backdrop to our lives. It is that, and in a way it is astonishing that more people are not crying out and screaming about the looming disaster – although some brave souls, here in the UK, and around the word, are doing that and taking whatever actions they can to protest this suicidal journey humanity is on.

But as we approach the end of our Day of Atonement my thoughts turn in another direction in relation to that scene. It’s a generous reading, interpretation, but I hope you can bear with me as I try and open it up.

In our own lives we all need opportunities – in spite of what is going on around us – just to focus on ourselves: we need to find how life can offer us pleasures, satisfactions, whether it is from companionship with others, from art, or music or poetry or meditation, tapestry-making or marathon running, theatre, gardening, swimming – activities we pursue on or own or with others, yes, even playing golf, or watching sport, ways of engaging with life in all its unfolding splendour.

On Yom Kippur Jews reflect a lot (supposedly) on their failures, avoidances, weaknesses:  this can be painful to do, and painful to glimpse the enormity of the work of transformation that we need to make as a people. Of course we don’t know what this next year will bring. Some Jews are feeling trepidation at the blowback here in the UK of the larger tragedy being played out in the Middle East– I never mentioned antisemitism once throughout the day and I know that is what worries some people the most. But as the day draws to a close what I want to focus on are the possibilities that exist for living well in spite of any fears for the future.

Life is precious. It contains real opportunities for an intense engagement with others, opportunities for an intensity of being, being together, sharing, laughing together and, yes, sometimes crying together, but moments of intensity when we know that we are really and truly alive and we wouldn’t have life any other way: it has its losses and sadnesses but it also has a treasure house of experience that we come across, or create. Those moments of intensity can be with others or just private moments by oneself. I think Kafka got this right, as he got so much right with his finely tuned intuition to what matters:  

“You do not have to leave the room, remain standing at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you, to be unmasked, it has no choice. It will writhe in ecstasy at your feet.”

This is the spirituality of a so-called secularist who understood (though TB was corrupting his lungs as he wrote) that the divine was present at every moment. “Be quite still”, he says: what is available in the world has no choice but to offer itself to you, here and now.

“We declare with gratitude…”  Jews say at the heart of their central prayer “…the signs of Your presence that are with us every day. At every moment, at evening, morning and noon, we experience your wonders and Your goodness.” This is what Kafka is alluding to. Divine goodness is present, present in the wonders of daily life, the ones that reveal themselves to us, and the ones we create for ourselves. After the rigours of the penitential Day of Atonement we will have done our work, we can return to life again. We may wish for one another a year full of new life, a year filled with the blessings life can bestow.

[based on thoughts shared towards the end of the Day of Atonement as a prelude to the final service of the day, Neilah, October 12^th 2024]

On Wednesday evening Jewish communities around the world crossed the threshold. Into the New Year. The old year is behind us – though it isn’t really. It might be fading, but it hasn’t gone. It feels like this last year will never go, will never leave us. The New Year is beginning – but before we can move on into the new that opens up before us, perhaps we do need to pause and remember. The first day of the New Year is, after all, Yom Ha-Zikkaron, our liturgy says, ‘the day of remembering’.  

But what are going to remember from this past year? I imagine each of us in the Jewish community will have their own take on what we want to remember, what we need to remember – but that might be complicated by what we can’t help but remember, that we might prefer to forget. We can’t necessarily control what we remember.  Some images of this past year – if we chose to look, and not everyone did – became indelible: ineradicable traces of what humanity is capable of. For good and ill.

I know that if one was Israeli-born, or have family in Israel, or friends there, this last year has been an agonising time, a time of heart break, of fear (which is ongoing), of being profoundly shaken up by this latest chapter in the fraught saga of a Jewish homeland. This conflict – and this is the case even if a person had no immediate personal connection with those in Israel who have been living through this traumatic year on a daily, an hourly, basis – this conflict has effected us all.

It’s been about identity, and history, and belonging, it’s involved soul and feelings, it’s been about anger and guilt,  hatred, humiliation – and a terrible sense of vulnerability. It has been, in a way, unbearable – but it has had to borne, lived through, survived.

We’ve had no choice, this last year, but to go through and witness these events, in Israel, in Gaza, with as much of our humanity intact as we have been able to muster. This last year will never go, will never leave us. It has scarred the Jewish people collectively – in multiple ways. Scarred and scared. It’s awoken ancestral memories, and re-activated hidden wounds. There’s been so much hurt, and so much need for others to know our hurt – and, sometimes, for them in turn to feel the hurt.

So as we cross the threshold into the New Year, Jews acknowledge all this. I work in a Diaspora community – which means our ties to Israel vary from person to person: for some in the community those bonds are as strong as steel, as deep as life itself; and for others the ties have felt different, sometimes looser, more like chords of silk, entangling us, reminding us that we are bound together in ways that might not always be welcome, but that can tie us in knots, emotionally, intellectually, morally, spiritually.

For some in my own community – and this is of course true of the wider Jewish community in the UK – it has been a year of pride, and resolve; for others it has been a time of troubling self-questioning, or shame, a year of wondering what our Jewish identity is rooted in, what values do we hold dear, and why. Sometimes, sadly, disturbingly, it’s also been a year of self-censorship for those who felt they were not being sufficiently ‘on message’. All this has happened to us.

And whatever one’s stance on what has unfolded this last year, and what is still unfolding hour by hour, Jews have all watched, sometimes appalled, at how the outside world conflates Zionism and Jewishness as if they are the same thing. Which they are not.  And whether it’s been in the workplace or at school or on a university campus, or just on the street, on public transport, in shops, Jews have all had to manage this latest turn in the long, jagged arc of Jewish history.

There has been a lot of suffering this last year, this year that is now past, but has not passed. We have suffered as a people – and we have caused suffering as a people.

The Jewish people are historically used to suffering, we know it in our souls; but we are not so used to thinking of ourselves as causing others to suffer. And this is something else we have had to bear this last year. Please understand me here – I am not making a political point, I am not talking about the necessity or otherwise of the suffering we have caused. I am talking about what our souls have had to bear, I am talking about the emotions we have had to go through, I am talking about the spiritual cost to our psyches, our minds, our hearts.

So, yes, the old year is still inside us – but now the year is turning, the New Year is opening up and Jews come together to celebrate that opening up, and what it offers us. This day in the Jewish year is a great gift, along with the ten day period they open up – they’re ‘Heaven sent’, so to speak  – they are an extraordinary opportunity because they offer us the chance to exorcise some of our pain, our confusion, our doubts; and to question our certainties. Certainties are psychic retreats – they make us feel safe.

Professor Eugene (‘John’) Heimler survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and thirty years later wrote a verse drama, ‘The Storm’, in which he said:  “Uncertainty is our only certainty”. He worked with people as a psychologist, helping people discover where hope lay in the journey ahead, not by looking back but by looking forward, looking around at community, at family, at friendship, at what life could offer now. At the gifts that life offers every day.

So in spite of all the uncertainties with which Jews are faced, the New Year offers us the chance of a re-set. There’s a Biblical verse that is sometimes quoted on the morning of Rosh Hashanah, our New Year. A verse of radical hopefulness.

It’s the voice of Isaiah channelling the divine consciousness within him: “For now I create new heavens and a new earth, and the past need not be remembered, nor ever brought to mind” – Wow, what an idea! – “Be glad and rejoice in what I can create” (Isaiah 65:17-18).

This is extraordinary, this prophetic vision – that whatever we have gone through, we can move on, we can move into the new, we can celebrate a new beginning.  We acknowledge that yes, everything is in a state of flux, of change, of chaos – all predictions you hear by all the so-called experts about these next few days, or this next year, are just fairy stories, to comfort us or scare us, but they are fictions because none of us knows what the next day will bring, never mind the next year.

“Everything, everywhere is always moving. Forever. Get used to it” – Brian Cox, playing Logan Roy, barked it out to his daughter Shiv in that great TV drama Succession. The character is a monster and a bully – but he is given some great lines. We can recognise the truth of the lines, as we do with Shakespeare: “Everything, everywhere is always changing, forever” and yes, we better find a way to “Get used to it”.

And yet, maybe there are some things that don’t change, some values that endure, some truths that endure, from generation to generation. Our Jewish liturgy points the way to that. Something in it remains unchanging. It offers us a different frequency of existence to tune in to, a different world to live in, for a few hours, a few days – a different angle of vision that focuses us on what is unchanging in a world of uncertainties. It reminds us of our vision, our ancient vision that is the justification for our existence as a people.

The liturgy reminds us that kindness matters, compassion matters, justice matters. It reminds us that Jews have not been put in the world to create more suffering. Our task remains unchanging: to alleviate suffering, to avoid harm, to struggle with our innate destructiveness and allow our gifts for creativity and goodness to shine through. 

We have this potential grafted to our souls – this is the radical hopefulness of the Jewish story. Whether it is in our own lives – at home, in our families, in our communities, in our society – or on the world stage, the relationship we have with others allows us to express our divine potential for making a difference for the better.

Our New Year summons us and reminds us – this is also what Yom HaZikkaron means – we are reminded that the potential for making a difference is our Jewish task and our destiny.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, October 2^nd, 2024]

On Saturday night, at the Selichot service, we took our first tentative steps, collectively, to edge towards our New Year. It feels like it’s been a long time coming. The vagaries of our calendar mean that  this year it’s very late, our New Year, it’ll be October already when it begins – it’s been a leap year, so an extra month was added, but still, something about the waiting this year feels different to me.

I think it’s due, perhaps inevitably, to the way this last 12 months in Jewish history have played out, are still playing out, how much has changed, how much we have lived through, how much we have suffered, how much we have been burdened by, how much are hearts have been divided, how much our souls have been squeezed – and we know that the New Year is a time of reflection, of inward-looking, of a re-alignment in our souls towards our core values, a time of teshuvah, of recognition of wrongdoing, of accounting for what we have done and what we have failed to do – and how are we going to do all that at the end of this tumultuous, history-defining, history-defying year?

Have we been more sinned against than sinning? Some may well feel that. Others may feel that whatever the opprobrium heaped on our heads this last year, whatever the aggressions directed against the Jewish people here and in Israel, there is still a burden of guilt on our shoulders too, collectively: I know that some in the Jewish community are feeling that guilt keenly along with a sense of shame at every child buried under the rubble of Gaza. And some in the community, not so much. This has not been an easy year and these are not easy things to talk about. These are not easy things to carry with us into our New Year and the soul-reckoning that this period of the year asks of us.

So all of this makes this New Year now approaching feel different from any other. And, for me, in addition to what I feel like as a fellow Jew with all of you, there is also the added question, which others are perhaps fortunate not to have to consider, the feeling of responsibility to talk about all this in the community, to the community. How to speak what is true to a divided community, for there are very different constituencies here in our synagogue communities and the wider Jewish community – all of them hurting in various ways. And how will I find the words to speak to that divide, across that divide, on Rosh Hashanah and on Yom Kippur? I don’t know yet how I will do it. 

But when I don’t know how to speak, or what to say, I often turn to the writers and poets of the past, to see if I can glean any clues about how to speak in such difficult times as these. Not what to say, for they did not face our situation, but how to say it, how to think about articulating what matters in words. This week I came across a line from a lecture by the Italian novelist Calvino, Italo Calvino, from 1976, in which he said “What we ask of writers is that they guarantee the survival of what we call human in a world where everything appears inhuman”.

Twenty years after the Shoah every writer – novelist, playwright, poet, essayist – every writer of worth, was facing this question: how to keep on speaking of the ‘human in a world where everything appears inhuman’. As his fellow Italian writer, Primo Levi, said “I am constantly amazed by man’s inhumanity to man” (If This Is A Man). But I am wondering at this season : Do we remain amazed? Do we remain astonished, astounded, dumfounded, by humanity’s capacity for inhumanity? And that can be in the home, in society, on the world stage.

Because if we can bear to look – and many of us cannot bear to look for we fear looking and going mad – but if we do look, if we do expose ourself to acts of inhumanity, which are reported on a daily basis from somewhere near or far, what is evoked in us? Can we give it a name? Maybe we can’t – being ‘amazed’ is not what I experience, it’s more a deep disquiet, a horror, a soul-sickness, a revulsion at what being human can mean, being human but not humane.

How do we ‘guarantee the survival of what we call human in a world where everything appears inhuman’? – for this is surely the task not only of the artist but of all of us. But when we are bombarded by the inhumane it takes its toll on us – of course we can shield ourselves, just not look, we can remain indifferent, or cynical, or even (God-forbid) defenders of acts of inhumanity: ‘They deserved it…they had it coming to them…they are just animals’.

But for anyone who wants to feel that they value the survival of the ‘human in a world where everything appears inhuman’ those responses will feel like failures. But still, what we are do, what are we to feel, when faced with something like the amazing technological ingenuity entwined with the moral barbarism of exploding pagers and walkie talkies? Do we feel ethnic pride – or do we feel human horror? And what do each of these responses say about us? This is the season for these questions.

Can we find a language, can we find the words, to speak of what happens to us, to our souls, when exposed to acts like these? I am not sure I have the words, can find the words, although, as I say, I feel a responsibility to find some words. But if I can’t as yet craft my own words I can at least share with you the words of others, like Primo Levi, who survived the inhumanity and returned to speak of what he had seen and what he had learnt in it and from it. Words like this:

“Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it. Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which marks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.” (The Black Hole of Auschwitz)

Before he died, Moses wrote down the story of what he had experienced with his people – we read the text this week – the events, the lessons, the laws, the failures, the struggles of the journey his people had taken. This story – this ‘Torah’ our storytellers call it (Deuteronomy 31:9), this ‘teaching’ – was to be read to the community every seven years: this is your story, Moses says, you need to know it, it was written not for those who had gone through it personally (almost all those had died on the journey through the desert) but for the next generation, who hadn’t. But it was still their story. And it is still our story.

We remain faithful to the story of the need to re-tell the story.

But we moderns have other words too, words created in our more recent past that have become part of a Torah for our times, a teaching, a kind of revelation that speaks to us of  truths that transcend our own times – you can call them ‘eternal’ truths if you are so minded – and Primo Levi is, I think, a foundational voice within the Torah of our times. We read his texts  and re-read him, for everything is within it.

He offers us an angle of vision to help us look at the human and the inhuman in every society on our fragile planet – and when he discerns that the bacillus of dehumanisation is still alive within the human heart, we might do well to pay attention. He knows whereof he speaks when he calls out the “Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which marks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.”

Torah for our times.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, 28^th September 2024]

I see that the show ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ is back in town: if you want to catch it, it’s on at Regent’s Park Open Air theatre in London. Sixty years old now, it once held the record for the longest running musical on Broadway: 10 years, 3,000+ performances.   

Adapted from the Yiddish tales of Solomon Rabinovitch from Kiev, perhaps better known to you and I as Sholem Aleichem, this piece of musical theatre – the brainchild of three Jewish artists each of whom contributed to its success,  with the book (Joseph Stein), the music (Jerry Brock), the lyrics (Sheldon Harnick) – has retained its appeal over the decades. It’s been revived every decade or so and I am sure there’s no one reading this who can’t hum, or sing, some of its famous tunes. “If I were a rich man”, “Sunrise, sunset”…One way or another it’s become part of our psyches. And yet, if not exactly panned by the critics when it came out, it was met with remarkable condescension by some reviewers who saw it when it premiered in 1964.

Philip Roth called it “shtetl kitsch” and  Cynthia Osick, then – like Roth – at the beginning of a stellar literary career – called it an “emptied-out, prettified, romantic vulgarization” of the Yiddish original. I get that, and if I am being high-minded about these things, I might even agree with them. Though high-minded might be just another word for snobbish.   And yet something about the show hit a nerve with audiences, whether they saw it on stage or in its 1971 film version: not just the singalong melodies but the drama of resilience demonstrated by a cultural group in the face of dark times – “horrible things are happening all over the land” is one line that resonates for audiences in different times and places, in different cultures, and the drama addresses a universal dilemma about how families are to survive difficult times: times of oppression, persecution, prejudice, the hostility of others in a society or the antipathy of governments.

Do you adapt, do you compromise, do you hold on to traditions, do you let go of them? How do you survive in a rapidly changing world: it’s not just a Jewish question but it’s been a question for many cultural groups within modernity, and a question still very much alive today  whether you’re Muslim or Ukrainian or Palestinian or white English working-class.  

When the group you identify with, the group you feel you belong to, feels threatened – and that’s regardless of whether the threat is real or not, this is all about subjectivity – if you feel threatened, how do you stay true to who you feel yourself to be collectively?

For Jews in the 20^th century, the primary solution to this problem was of course supposed to be Zionism. Only Jews living autonomously in their own land and not feeling beholden to others would solve, it was said, the dilemmas of being an unwelcome minority in other people’s lands. Well, we have seen how well that’s turned out. Becoming a semi-pariah state in the eyes of much of the world has replicated the problem rather than solving it.

As a few prescient Jewish thinkers recognised prior to the establishment of the State – Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Franz Rosenzweig, Henrietta Szold, Gershom Scholem – unfettered Jewish nationalism, a nationalism unanchored in the highest ethical standards of the spiritual heritage of Judaism – could only lead to trouble. They foresaw how the existence of the Jewish people within a land to which they may have had a historical claim but that happened to be a land long-settled in and claimed by others would mean that Jews would yet again be a problematic provocation to the non-Jewish world – just as they had been in fictional Anatevka and its real life counterparts in pre-revolutionary Russia.

But let me stay with Fiddler on the Roof for a moment, this very Jewish and yet universal piece of storytelling. Its original investors, by the way, particularly Jewish investors, were worried the show was “too ethnic”  (by which of course they meant ‘too Jewish’); but perhaps because the show was rooted in a family drama, an inter-generational family dynamic of  children wanting to break free of inherited cultural ways, particularly when it came to marriage partners, the show’s ethnic particularism didn’t seem to detract from its popularity; and indeed, when it came to casting the lead (the role of Tevye) for the film version in 1971, the actor most keen to do it – any guesses? – was Frank Sinatra who seemingly didn’t feel that being an archetypical goy was any bar to stepping into the shoes of Zero Mostel.

Actually my thoughts about Fiddler on the Roof were sparked a few weeks ago. They came to me via a circuitous route – but let me lead you down the rabbit hole of my thinking here: bear with me.

When the recent rioting erupted up and down the UK, it was of course really shocking and frightening but as I watched the news each day and read about what was going on, I saw how this outbreak of toxic nationalism was competing for airspace with another form of nationalism, the benign kind, the nationalism of the Olympic Games. So you had the bizarre phenomenon of two opposite expressions of nationalism going head to head: the racist aggression of white Englishness attacking black, brown and Muslim ‘foreigners’ – and on the other hand the countrywide support for Team GB, a team filled with representatives of all those apparently unwelcome ‘others’. And the irony, if that’s what one wants to call it, was of Team GB  being cheered on by many of those same people who were firebombing immigrant hostels and homes and mosques.

Yes, people are strange. They don’t add up. But then maybe none of us do. Maybe we all have our inner contradictions: it’s just easier to see the contradictions in others. And condemn hypocrisy in others, while turning a blind eye to our own.

So – I am coming to Fiddler on the Roof – I was watching how the UK government got to grips with the situation with a sense of real urgency, this was grown-up political leadership, using  the police and the courts and the apparatus of law, and I felt very thankful for living in a country that was able to offer such robust protection to those being victimised, and with a government intent on safeguarding our collective well-being  from thuggery and racism.

It brought to mind the wisdom of Rabbi Hanina’s statement in the Mishnah two thousand years ago:  “Pray for the welfare of the government; for without the fear and awe it inspires, people would swallow each other alive” (Pirke Avot 3:2). But that down-to-earth pragmatism also brought to mind Fiddler on the Roof’s commentary, as it were, on the Mishnah: Tevye’s refrain – you may remember it –  “May God bless and keep the Czar – far away from us!”

Dark humour has always been a Jewish defence against pain, and fear, but there’s also an emotional depth to that line as well: you hear in it, I think, the authentic Diaspora voice of ancestral Jewish ambivalence. On the one hand, Jews have felt gratitude to the secular powers-that-be of the lands in which they lived, an attitude traceable back to the prophet Jeremiah who wrote to the Jews exiled in Babylon: “Seek the welfare of the city to which you have been delivered, and pray to God on its behalf, for in its prosperity, you shall prosper” (29:7). And on the other hand, Tevye is voicing an awareness – “May God bless and keep the Czar – far away from us!” – that not all governments are going to be kindly disposed to the minorities in their midst. Protectors can become persecutors in the twinkling of an eye. Or from one generation to the next.

In the UK, of course, prayers for the government still figure in our Jewish liturgy, during the Torah service, along with prayers for the Royal family: it’s a tradition – “Tradition!” – that goes back to Cromwell’s re-admission of the Jews into England in 1656. Samuel Pepys records in his diary hearing a prayer for the King when he visited a synagogue in 1663.  British Jews wanted to demonstrate their loyalty then to the wider society in which they lived – and they still do. And I suppose we still retain this prayer not to impress any visiting non-Jew, but to remind ourselves we are part of a larger society that we remain committed to. And maybe subliminally the prayer acts as a reminder that our well-being as a community ultimately depends on the laws of the land and their benign application by the government of the day.

So, some final thoughts on Anatevka, and ‘shtetl kitsch’. I think what Roth was offering was a critique of how the show’s dramatists created an upbeat version of the original’s more historically-accurate darkness: Sholem Aleichem’s fictional Anatevka was lorded over by a brutal, cruel, antisemitic Russian official, but on stage he’s turned into a sympathetic friend of the Jews; and in the original source material, Tevye  is left alone at the end, his wife is dead, his daughters scattered. Whereas in the show they are still together – and off to America for a new start. In that sense the show was a betrayal of the fictional reality; and of the historical reality of Czarist Russian antisemitism.

But my additional thought – this is not Roth, I am building on Roth – is that this kitsch betrayal was, remember, perpetrated in 1964, when the awareness of the Holocaust was just entering fully into American consciousness (the word ‘Holocaust’ to describe what had happened only entered into public awareness in the early 60s) and it may be that this Broadway version went some way to unconsciously soothing the trauma of Jews and the guilt of non-Jews, enacting, as it did, a counterfactual narrative of persecution with a happy ending.

Because of course it was all the real Anatevkas that were wiped out a mere generation after Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish stories. Maybe part of Fiddler on the Roof’s popularity is the way it acts as a psychic defence against the traumas of genocide. Then – and now. Amazing to make a record-breaking show out of that.

And if you want a final twist in the tail/tale of this show, you might be interested that  – and here’s life imitating art – there is now a real village, community, called Anatevka.  It’s on the outskirts of Kyiv, and it was established in 2015 on a plot of empty land after the first Russian invasion of Ukraine, Crimea, led to tens of thousands of people being displaced, including thousands of Jews. It was set up to supply food, medicine, housing and education for the refugees. And who set it up? HaRav Moshe Reuven Azman, the Chief Rabbi of Ukraine; he deliberately named the community after the fictional shtetl, and it has, since 2022 , become a leading operational centre for humanitarian efforts in the current war.

So Anatevka lives – not just in the pages of Yiddish fiction, and not just on the stage, but as a living example of tikkun olam, Jewish ethics in action. As so often, history is even stranger than fiction.