Act I

“And Hagar went, and sat at a distance…saying: ‘I can’t bear to see the death of the child’, and she sat at a distance and burst into tears” (Genesis 21:16-17). Keeping at a distance, the unbearable knowledge of deaths occurring as eyes are turned away, voices raised in distress, waiting for someone/something to intervene…is there a more poignant, prescient, verse in the Torah?

Jews enter the New Year and what are we asked to focus on? What do our Torah texts (Genesis 21 and 22) focus on? The tradition, in its wisdom and subversiveness, says: It’s all about life and death; the fragility of life and the ever-present shadow of death. In particular: death by design, death by callousness and neglect. Remember the binding of Isaac, says the tradition, remember how the continuity of the Jewish people hung on a knife-edge – literally: Abraham’s raised knife (Genesis 22:10). Remember the exile of Hagar and the rejection of her child, Ishmael.

Remember, the tradition says, how your own people matter, the Hebrew people, the Jewish people – and remember how other people matter who are not your people, the outsider Hagar, who was Egyptian, along with her child full of laughter and hope. Remember and see, the texts say, how from God’s point of view, ‘they’ matter as much as ‘us’. Their lives are as important, and valuable, as our lives.

Remember this, says the tradition, as the New Year begins and you seek to evaluate the meaning of your lives and the values you hold, remember that human life is precious. Jewish life, non-Jewish life, equally precious – from the point of view of the Holy One of Israel – and therefore that exquisite preciousness should be what you are committed to, you who stand here today as God’s special people, a specialness that insists – oh, divine paradox – that those who aren’t part of your community are as important, as valuable as human beings, as you are.

God has chosen you, says our tradition, to teach the world that chosenness by God is a universal phenomenon. You have been chosen to teach that chosenness belongs not to you alone but to all God’s creation. The value of each human life – this is what the tradition, in its wisdom and its subversiveness, offers to us as the New Year begins.  

Enough theology, more than enough some might say.

Act II – this text is a drama in 5 Acts.

You know this quotation, it comes in slightly different versions. This version is translated from the original German as preserved by the Martin-Niemöller Haus in Berlin:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I kept quiet; I wasn’t a communist.

When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet;
I wasn’t a trade unionist.

When they locked up the social democrats, I kept quiet;
I wasn’t a social democrat.

When they locked up the Jews, I kept quiet;
I wasn’t a Jew.

When they came for me, there was no one left to protest.

There are times in history when events overwhelm religious institutions and organizations. When they allow their core values to go into eclipse. When, through a combination of pragmatism, fear – sometimes hypocrisy – they lose their moral compass for goodness, as the forces of history overwhelm the voices of conscience.  

Martin Niemöller was a German theologian and Lutheran pastor, conservative, anti-communist, he had conventional antisemitic feelings, was initially a supporter of Hitler, but as the 1930s went on his views underwent a profound re-orientation. As we know, from 1933 Nazi legislation sought to ban first Jews and then Poles, Slavs, Serbs and Russians – in other words ‘outsiders’ – from participation in civic society and social institutions: education, the law, health care, scientific research, the whole professional life of the nation was affected; and when the Nazis sought to take state control of the churches, the German Protestant Church, the Evangelische Kirche, split.

The majority of pastors and their communities stayed within the ReichsKirche, but Niemöller was a founder member of what became known as the Confessing Church, dedicated to standing apart from and opposing, as a matter of Christian conscience, the state’s racist laws and the Nazification of the Church.  There were mass arrests of Confessing Church pastors, including Niemöller in1937 – he spent the war years in Sachsenhausen concentration camp and then Dachau.

Before his arrest he continued to voice his dissent in his community but his sermons were published not at home but by Thomas Mann in the United States. (Mann had already gone into exile in 1933). Members of the Confessing Church were involved in hiding and saving Jews during the war, but once its leading figures were arrested, there was no-one to protest acts of resistance being seen as acts of treason – with predictable consequences. The most creative theologian of his generation, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was hung in Flossenburg concentration camp.

That now famous text I quoted (1946) belongs to Niemöller’s post-war reflections on the moral abyss into which Germany had fallen and the way in which the majority of Christian religious groups and institutions had failed to adhere to the ethical vision of love of neighbour incarnated at the heart of their religious teaching. Niemöller dedicated his post-War life to questions about guilt and responsibility and what other options there might have been to stand against the criminal regime of the 1930s.

Act III

So, first we had theology, then we had history. Let’s have some politics, current affairs – what’s happening now. How did you feel about those 110 -150,000 benighted souls marching through London a few weeks ago? Waving their flags, shouting their slogans, all with a shared antipathy to so-called ‘outsiders’: those with brown skins or black skins, or non-European features, immigrants, asylum seekers, those here legally and illegally, those born in the UK and those who have come more recently. Hatred camouflaged in the language of patriotism (and militant Christian faith). Did it make you feel vulnerable? Did a chill go through you? Did it make you wonder: is this the shape of things to come? The future, not just resonances from the past?

Vulnerability is hard for us humans to bear. Yet feeling you are vulnerable, feeling not in control of your own lives or well-being, does not by itself turn you into a bigot or a racist or a xenophobe. But deprivation, be it economic or emotional or social, does lead to a build up of resentment and rage – and the wish to take out these feelings on others.

Feelings of hopelessness and despair, of pointlessness, feelings of life being without meaning – beneath the rage and the name-calling there are a lot of people suffering up and down the UK, and looking for someone to blame flows from this as night follows day. We see it throughout Europe, in the US, in the Middle East – and now we are seeing our homegrown version.

How as a society do we find ways of valuing each other? Jews in the Diaspora have always sought to make a contribution to the societies in which they live. They have in modernity become particularly gifted at this: as a Jewish community and as individual Jews we have made immense contributions to developing and nurturing people’s lives wherever we have lived. Through the justice system, in education and psychology, through scientific research, medicine, the arts – it’s endless.

This has been the glory of diasporic Jewry: being a ‘light to the nations’ and being a blessing. Jews have lived this out: religious and secular, believers and non-believers, those involved in Jewish communities and those who have been distant wanderers from community life, we have historically been carriers of an innate Judaic consciousness that cares about and celebrates the human spirit. I am not telling you anything you don’t know.  

But as people turn against Jews – for reasons I don’t need to spell out – it might become increasingly hard to keep on speaking out both about the needs of those outside our community – and the contributions we have made and can make to maintain the values of the society in which we live. So we need to work on this, and this might include raising our voices – as Niemöller taught – before it is too late.

To show solidarity with other minority groups, to defend the rights of fellow citizens, to recognise as the children and grandchildren and great grandchildren of immigrants, that there are multiple reasons why people might seek a safer new home in this country, and we of all peoples can recognise the potential value of newcomers to our shores.

We need to be able to protest against the weaponization of flags – wherever we see it, because Jews can be guilty of this too – and protest against the colonization of social media and TV channels and newspapers by bigotry and disinformation. The intrinsic value of each human being: we remember it today, it’s what those Torah portions we read help us remember, it helps us orientate our thinking. These texts, and the liturgy they generated, are our moral compass – particularly in fraught times.  

And the bottom line, the pragmatic line, is that this work is self-protective. Matin Niemöller’s distressed realization was that failure to defend and support other victimized groups ended up with nobody left to protect him. Sitting at a distance – the universal impulse, as the Torah describes – sitting at a distance and averting our eyes is a failure of responsibility. What we learn from our Torah texts is that that nowadays no divine messengers swoop in to intervene, but that we have been gifted the power to “lift up our eyes and see” (Genesis 21:19 and 22:13) and transform despair into hope.

It isn’t alarmist to say – in the spirit of Niemöller – that they will come for the Jews if (like both Abraham and Hagar within the texts) we can’t see what is in front of our eyes. As the New Year begins we are reminded: this is central to our Jewish purpose, our mission – to be the God-inspired interveners and rescuers and defenders of the marginalised and the oppressed.

 Act IV. (Like in Shakespeare’s tragedies, a comic interlude).

I spent the summer wondering how I was going to speak at the New Year about the unspeakable. About Gaza and the West Bank. I have of course been talking about it aslant. Today, and in the last few weeks. (I recall the poet Emily Dickinson: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant”).

Over the summer I came up with what I thought was a helpful new idea. I remembered how after 9/11 we had had to learn to make a distinction between the religion of Islam, with its spirituality and universal moral teachings, and the political ideology of Islamism, with its perverse and often violent distortion of Islam’s humanity. And I wondered if this might help us as we struggle in the Jewish community with how to position ourselves in relation to Israel and its current government.  And I began to sketch out in my mind what the difference was between Judaism (at least as I understand it) and what I began to think of as ‘Israelism’, a political ideology, nationalistic rather than universalistic, dogmatic rather than progressive, holding the sacredness of land as a higher value than the sacredness of people (obviously non-Jews but even fellow Jews).

Would this be useful as a way of charting what is going on in our divided Jewish world? Judaism vis-a-vis Israelism? But when I mentioned to my colleagues that I was thinking of talking about this phenomenon that I had usefully (I thought) termed ‘Israelism’, my colleague Rabbi Deborah immediately and excitedly asked: ‘Oh, did you see the film?’.

‘Er, what film?’, said he.

 ‘Israelism’, said she, ‘it was shown in London last year’ – quick Google – ‘and it’s had 4 million views on YouTube’.

So much for Howard’s pretensions of original thinking.

Act V

Let me finish by offering you this to take into the New Year. The diaspora synagogue community I am privileged to belong to has, historically, done some Jewish things wonderfully well. It has helped to give people a religious home in which we can nurture a sense of Jewishness through participation in Shabbat services, traditional and creative, in festival celebrations, in life cycle events which always put the personal, the human, before the ideological. Our baby blessings, our bnei mitzvah ceremonies, the way we do weddings, or celebrate anniversaries, the way we create funerals and shivas around the wishes and needs of those who are mourning, our spirit of inclusivity, our generosity of giving tzedakah, of working with local communities, Jewish and non-Jewish, working with interfaith groups or London Citizens, the commitment to tikkun olam, to older people, to our youth and students – in so many ways we have been living out what it means to be a Jew in the Diaspora:  we have focused on practical Judaism and study and prayer, and on core ethical values of Judaism as enacted in everyday life.

Generations of you have grown up in this open-minded, nurturing, spiritually-sustaining atmosphere – this is Judaism as a transnational religious tradition, rooted in foundational values that stretch back to Sinai but with an openness to modernity and an ability to embrace creativity and innovation wherever it has added to that experience of being part of a living Judaism. All that has been the community’s raison d’être.

Meanwhile, Israelism has been growing over the last decades – I am not talking about Zionism, which comes in 50 flavours, from progressive and universalistic to regressive, racist and paranoid – so what I really want is for this community not to become infected, as parts of the Anglo-Jewish world have been, by the politically-driven erasure of the distinction I am making. The distinction between the broad transhistorical, transnational span of Jewish religious teachings – Judaism – and the political, ethnocentric ideology of an Israelism speaking in the name of the Jewish people and making traitors – ‘self-hating Jews’ – out of those who don’t or won’t subscribe to the tenets of their ethno-supremacist belief system.  

We are at a Sabbatian moment in Jewish history. The fervour that swept the Jewish world in the 1660s at the news that the Messiah had finally arrived in the person of the mystic rabbi Shabbatai Zvi – who taught that sinful acts were a new set of Jewish commandments he had come to reveal – that fervour turned into a disaster for the wellbeing of Jews throughout Europe and the Middle East. Sabbatianism – which declared that this is what being Jewish meant now – destroyed communities, tore them apart. It took the Jewish world a century to recover.

I sense this fervour is upon us again and I promise you that in this year ahead I will be doing my best to keep our Diasporic feet on the ground, to teach and preach about Judaism rather than Israelism, and to continue to help this community to keep its core values intact – and that means keeping the wellbeing of our members continually nurtured by, and inspired by, the Jewish values of justice, compassion and peace.    

 [based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, on the second day of the New Year, 2025]

The text is, for once, very clear, unequivocal, uncompromising in its way. Being part of the Israelite community, the Hebrew people, the Jewish people, involves being in a covenant, a symbolic contract – formal, solemn, fateful  (Deuteronomy 29: 9 – 28).

Within the sacred saga – mythos – that we inhabit, this covenant is recorded as having been established millennia ago between the people of Israel and their God. But it not only an event in the past.  

 “I make this covenant”, says the divine voice in the text, “not only with you alone, standing here now” – but with the future generations, “those who are not here with us today.” (Deuteronomy 29:13)

Those who came to the synagogue this week to hear these words as part of the annual cycle of readings are still bound up in this symbolic covenant. Whether they believe in it or not; reject its premises or not; reject the divine authority with which it speaks or not – Jews hearing these words read out, or chanted, are being reminded that they are still part of this faith tradition, still acknowledging there’s something in this whole crazy, dramatic, problematic business of Jewishness that is worthwhile. This covenant brings Jews to the synagogue each week. But even if a Jew never attends synagogue – and there are many who prefer not to, or who have no affinity for the so-called ‘religious’ dimensions of Jewishness – they too still remain inside a sacred covenant, as a Jew.

People attend synagogue for many reasons: to feel a sense of belonging, to connect to their community, or see friends; they might attend out of a sense of duty, or habit, or tradition; or for a yahrzeit, to remember a lost loved one; they  might be there for some space and time in their week, or for a chance to connect more deeply to themselves or, in prayer, to God. The reasons are probably multiple; but they usually don’t say to themselves ‘I am here because I am honouring my part of a longstanding contract, a sacred covenant, between my people and the Holy One, source of all life’.  

But whatever the relationship Jews feel or don’t feel to this covenant, this contract, this week’s text suggests that far from it being about any cosy sense of belonging, it involves being part of a frightening and threatening relationship. Because the covenant makes demands on the people, demands for ethical living – and it spells out the consequences of a failure to enact that vision or keep that vision alive. Inside this relationship there is nowhere to hide. The text acknowledges how easy it is to say: this doesn’t apply to me, it doesn’t include me, “I will be safe, despite following my own wilful heart” (29:18).

This is deeply uncomfortable, unwelcome news – that deviance from paths of righteousness will have consequences, destructive consequences not just for the individual but for the community. And for the land that the community live on.

The text portrays how later Jewish generations will look with horror at what happened to the people of Israel – and the non-Jewish world will look with astonishment at what happened. And everyone will ask ‘Why?’. The simple human question, ‘Why did it happen?’. Why did what happen, we readers of the text ask. Well, the text tells you.

First it describes the desolation of the land itself, barren and unable to support life, “a soil filled with ashes…beyond sowing and producing, not even any grass able to grow, like Sodom and Gemorrah” (29:22) – a picture that conjures up Gaza today, where the suffering is not a divine punishment, but a result of human destruction.  

And then we get the questions about this in the text. Seeing the destruction of the land all the other nations are going to say ’Why did this happen? Why does God punish so harshly?’ (29:23) – it’s a natural question, it’s the question the nations of the world ask today, not in religious terms, but in secular ones: ‘Why? Why this immense fury, this destructiveness, why are the people of God so ungodly?’

And as the text spells out, future generations will be told: this was, is, the consequence of turning away from the paths of peace and holiness; it is a consequence of serving what the text describes as “other gods” (verse 25). It led to disaster – to exile, to loss, to pain. That’s what happens, says the text: the people are already being warned about disaster while still in the desert.

The text can do this – seem to foretell the future – because it is written in exile and is seeking to find a way of understanding why disaster had happened to the people. It is projecting back into the past and letting the saga say, in effect: see, you were warned what would happen.

This text in Deuteronomy is the prototype of the strand of Biblical thinking running through the Hebrew Bible that says: if you are in this sacred covenant there are consequences for failing to adhere to its ethical standards and values. The language Deuteronomy uses is traditional – it is God that punishes the people – but you don’t have to be a believer in that archaic theology to recognise that spiritually and psychologically it is speaking a truth, a truth that we probably want to reject, a truth we don’t want to hear, particularly at the moment: there have been, are, and will be, terrible consequences for a failure to live up to the highest aspirations and demands of the covenant.

In a way I can’t believe I am saying this. I don’t want to talk about this. Because I don’t want to believe this is how things turn out. I don’t believe in the punishing God of the Hebrew Bible – in other words, I don’t believe these texts literally. But I do thing they speak things that are true, I do think they speak symbolically and psychologically and spiritually about what happens to a people that loses its orientation towards holiness.

I wish I didn’t think this – for one thing it makes me sound unbearably naïve – but if we take these texts of the Torah seriously, if we still connect ourselves to the sacred covenant, it just seems to be the case that they are, as our liturgical blessing puts it, Torat Emet, a Torah that speaks a truth, a profound truth. Beyond logic, beyond that pernicious fabrication ‘common sense’, the Torah speaks about what can happen when there is a betrayal, when a people – the Jewish people – fail to stay true to the vision of compassion and justice they have been given, and told to enact.

The imagery is graphic – “poison weed and wormwood”, bitter and deadly (verse 17) will sprout up in the community who serve “other gods”, betraying the vision: the gods of military might, and nationalism, and ethnic supremacism, the gods of self-righteousness and self-pity, there are many other gods being served as we speak, but not the God of mercy and compassion – el rachum v’chanun (Exodus 34:6).

And once we abandon that God, we end up being abandoned. And we are being abandoned – by the nations of the world, and by people of conscience, non-Jews and Jews; we end up in exile, exiled by those who turn their backs on us and our proud and tragic history, turn their backs on seeing the Jewish people as a force for good in the world. This is happening and it is a bitter exile. We may possess a strip of land in the Middle East, but spiritually we are having to endure again the pain of exile, of being cast out. This is what the Torah is talking about: if you betray the vision of the covenant you will end up without security, without the feeling of being at home in the world.

This is our new Jewish reality and we are going to have to work very hard as a people to turn this round. As we enter the New Year this week let us hope, let us pray, we can find our way back to our true path, a  homeland rooted in the vision of Sinai, the vision of the prophets, the vision of justice and peace.  

That homeland is worth fighting for, and worth protesting about when we see it being corrupted.

[based on a sermon given at FInchley Reform Synagogue, London, September 20^th, 2025]  

In this month of reflection before the Jewish New Year begins, it’s traditional to look back on the year that has passed and ask oneself how one might have lived a fuller, richer, more emotionally honest life, a life more congruent with the values one holds, the ideals one aspires to, the habits of mind and heart and action that might have a modicum of integrity in a bruising and disharmonious world.

And my mind goes back to the Day of Atonement last year, Yom Kippur, a day that Jewish tradition suggests can be used for an excavation into one’s personal failings, but also the failings of the community one belongs to – which for me is, in a collective sense, the Jewish community. I spoke in the synagogue about that remarkable Oscar-winning film, ‘The Zone of Interest’, which dramatizes, in mesmerizing fashion, how it is possible to live one’s everyday life – filled with laughter and love, dedication to family and friendship and one’s work, to the natural world around us, to music and art – while at the same time, just beyond a wall we construct, literally or metaphorically, all sorts of horrors and barbarities are taking place.

The setting in the film is the home and family life of those living next to Auschwitz concentration camp – but the film offers a  compelling enactment of how this particular juxtaposition of inhumanity and civilisation has a universal resonance: how we use cognitive dissonance to seal off what we can’t bear to think about while we get on with our everyday lives.  

In the course of my remarks last year I said that it wasn’t possible to see this film and not think about the varied Jewish responses to Israel’s activities in Gaza – from supportive to indifferent to horrified. Comparison of course is not equivalence, but just to bring together in the same thought-stream the past and the present – so that we can reflect on these weighty issues – was too much for some. A complaint was made about me – defamatory and rather absurd – that I was antisemitic, ill-disposed towards the Jewish people, and  “the enemy inside” the community.  

This notion of  ‘the enemy within’ has a long history of course – ironically it was Hitler’s view of the Jews in Germany, and goes back many centuries (into medieval Christian polemics against Jews) as the antisemite’s go-to belief about Jews wherever they lived. (It is also the language utilised by Donald Trump to characterise any group he objects to – the press, judges, scientists, Democrats, and so on).

But over the course of this year, as the heartbreaking dramas in Gaza have continued, and racist and murderous  attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank have increased, and the anguished situation with the hostages remains a live issue, I have become inclined to reclaim that language of “the enemy inside” and wear it – not as a badge of pride, but more as a useful reminder of the Jewish values I am committed to and try to articulate as best I can.    So I want here to sketch out what I am an ‘enemy’ of – enemy as in ‘one who is antagonistic to’ and ‘one seeking to confound an opponent’ (Longman Dictionary of the English Language). These are thoughts I will not articulate in this way in the synagogue, in a sermon, but here in a blog the rules are different, as it were.  And I am freer to speak my so-called mind.

I am an enemy of – i.e. implacably opposed to – the values and actions of the current government of Israel in the ways it has pursued its collective punishment of the people of Gaza for the last nearly two years.

I am an enemy of using starvation – wittingly or unwittingly – as an instrument of war.

I am an enemy of the collusion between the government of Israel and the settlers in the West Bank in enacting what is amounting to a second Nakba of Palestinians from their homes and livelihoods in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967.

I am an enemy of the appropriation of the historically specific language of ‘Holocaust’ as a form of emotional manipulation – both by defenders of the Israeli state who live in fear (real or imagined or rhetorically useful) of some imagined repetition of annihilation; and by those who speak for Palestinians, for whom such language is a convenient, off-the-peg, performative gesture designed to express outrage, grief and fear as if within a ghoulish competition over comparative suffering.

I am an enemy of those who seek to justify as ‘collateral damage’ the deaths of Palestinian women and children, the journalists and health care workers and NGO employees and innocent civilians, killed while the IDF seek out those who seek the harm of the citizens of Israel.

I am an enemy of those who act as if the particularism of Jewish tradition – specifically, our concern for our physical wellbeing as a community wherever we live – is the overwhelming and predominant concern for Jews; such a belief, and the actions which flow from it, chooses to ignore the universalism encoded in our religious tradition, which is always in dialectical tension with the tradition’s particularism. The universalism of our vision – the values of compassion, generosity, righteousness and justice – have sustained our people for two millennia, offering hope in the darkest of times, and I am an enemy of those who seek to efface them from the image of Judaism in the world.

I am an enemy of those who believe – or effect to believe – that antisemitism is innate within the fabric of the non-Jewish psyche.

I am an enemy of those who seek to justify illegal occupation of land with the rhetoric, however firmly believed, that such occupation is mandated by God.

I am an enemy of those not Jewish who use legitimate criticisms of the State of Israel as a cover story for their conscious or unconscious antisemitism; and those Jews who cannot accept that Zionism exists in a multitude of forms, from reactionary racist supremacism to progressive, pro-Palestinian advocacy and activism.

I am an enemy of those who believe or act in ways that demonstrate that the sanctity of human life is less important that expressions of nationalism, that our shared humanity can be sacrificed on the altar of ideology.

I am an enemy of those who seek to replace the core spiritual and religious values of Judaism with the political and ideological values of Israelism.

I am an enemy of those who seek to colonise the Jewish mind, Jewish spaces and Jewish conversations with the might-is-right dogmatism of an Israelism that effaces internal Jewish differences and Palestinian identity alike.

This is some of what might position me as ‘the enemy inside’ the community – views formed through a lifetime of thought, speech and activity promoting Judaism’s benign, life-affirming attributes while critiquing those aspects of Jewish belief and self-expression that I regard as failing to adhere to (my reading of) core Jewish values and ethics.

I write all this with a deep sadness about the abyss of contempt into which perceptions of Jewishness has fallen. This is not just a question of how the non-Jewish world sees us, but how we see ourselves and how hard it can be in a divided community to articulate a steadfast faith in the integrity of those moral and ethical values that make Judaism a living witness to the best of human nature. I know that many Jews – in Israel and around the world – are fundamentally opposed both to how Israel is prosecuting this war, and to how racist elements within the religious community are capitalising on the situation to pursue their expansionist agenda.

Such opposition gives me hope. It reminds me that although there are those who do not want to hear the cries of pain and distress beyond ‘the wall’ – and seek to attack those who speak of what Palestinians are suffering – there are others who remain true to the noblest aspects of our tradition, a tradition that respects and values the lives of others who are different from ‘us’, a tradition that holds that compassion and justice are divine attributes incarnated in the souls of men and women.

As I reflect back on this desperately sad year, I feel regret for all I have failed to do to make a difference in these historic times. And that includes the failure to find the right words – and the courage to say them – that could address the simple truth beneath this whole complex and bloody conflict: Jews will not be able to repair the hurts and pain and losses they have endured over this last century until there is justice for the Palestinian people. We will not be able to repair the internal damage inflicted on our hearts and souls until we have found a way to repair the external damage we  have caused, and continue to cause. This is how healing works.

We have a long way to go and much work to do.

A Place In The Sun?

The Book of Numbers comes to an end with a chapter (Numbers 33) listing the stopping-off places of the Children of Israel on their legendary 40-year journey through the wilderness. More than forty sires of encampment are mentioned. As the people come to the end of their wilderness wanderings, the text portrays Moses writing down these names (33: 2) , with a historian’s meticulous attention to detail: each place they set up camp is to be remembered, stages of what must have felt like an interminable journey.

Writing down the names, and the chronology of the journey, points to the importance of having a record for the future. As if guarding against any complacency, the Biblical storytellers seem to be saying:  you will need to remember this when – if – you find a homeland: homes can be temporary, and no home lasts forever.  Be prepared to be “a pilgrim tribe housed not in place but in time, not rooted but millennially equipped with legs” (George Steiner).

In tension with this, part of Moses’ role during those desert wanderings was to keep alive for the people that ancestral hope for an end to unrootedness.  He carried the wish, generations-old, that the  people of Israel might feel a sense of belonging, belonging somewhere. Those ancient storytellers crafted their narratives around this hope – they wove into their texts the poetic vision of a chosen land for a chosen people. God’s people, God’s chosen land.

What we don’t often appreciate is that those who composed the Torah created these powerful mythic national themes while in exile from the land of Judea:  the stories were written in Babylon in the 7^th and 6^th centuries BCE after the people had been displaced from what they had come to feel was their land, although it was a land that had always been shared with others who had lived there before them, the various tribal groups we know collectively as the ‘Canaanites’. 

So these narratives that make up the Torah are a literature of exile. Something has already been lost, any settled feeling of belonging somewhere that belongs to ‘us’.  Those writers of the Torah were living settled lives in Babylon, in what we now think of as the diaspora, but the question about where Jews really belong is threaded through their texts as an unsettled – and unsettling – question.

As they wove together the story of the Israelite people – its origins, its place in the world, its development –  the themes of exile and wandering became central: the Garden of Eden, Abraham, Joseph – Genesis is filled with characters that had to leave behind security or settledness to fulfil their destinies; and then the 40 years of desert wanderings after the long hardship-filled settledness of Egypt dominates the rest of the structure of the Torah, with the idea of settledness still unresolved. At the end of the Torah it hangs in the air – the fantasy, the wish, for an end to wandering. A place in the sun of our own.

So: how well has this turned out for us? For the Jewish people? The hope, the fantasy, of an end to dislocation, an end to exile and unsettledness?  We have been told that the State of Israel was supposed to have solved this problem for us. When it was founded it was felt to be a moral and a historical necessity – a homeland would give security and a sense of belonging and would finally see the end to Jewish dislocation and wandering and persecution. It would be the end of so-called exile, after 2000 years. And this has worked, up to a point. With many practical complications and moral dilemmas, we have a homeland for the Jewish people. 

So why does it feel, when we read the Torah, our foundational Jewish story, that we the children of Israel are still in the wilderness? That the promised land is still before us, still to be achieved? Still a hope for the future?

Nearly two years into our latest turn of the wheel of Jewish history it can feel as if we are going round in circles. There’s a disorientation akin to that of those Israelite slaves newly freed, uncertain, increasingly rebelliousness, the destination obscure, the leadership – the ones who say they know – increasingly doubted. The journey of this last couple of years has felt endless at times, dementing, frightening, repetitious:  trauma, hostages, deaths, rumours of ceasefire, no ceasefire, deaths, siege, hostages, trauma, threat, grief, rage, fear, shame, rage, grief, deaths, trauma, and on and on in this endless war in the service of a prime minister’s  own clinging on to power and out of prison. 

75% of Israelis want this war to end now, the military see no point in it, no strategic aims are being achieved, the IDF think there’s no need for more to be sacrificed, on either side. Increasingly, young Israeli reservists are refusing to serve in Gaza. Some are petitioning the High Court to rule on whether Israel’s actions there have become a violation of international law.

We have ‘Humanitarian’ zones where people starve, ‘Humanitarian’ aid centres where people are shot: the Orwellian language masks forced displacement, forced transfer, ‘concentration’ of Palestinians into ‘camps’ – can we bear to bring these two words together in our minds, ‘concentration’ and ‘camps’? – it’s maddening, dementing for those going through it; and its maddening and dementing that we in the diaspora – inside and outside synagogue communities – should even be in a situation where we worry about speaking about it.

(And when we hear descriptions by aid workers and doctors of starving Gazans as ‘walking corpses’, we of course must never say that such experiences, such language, brings to mind the characterization in other camps of inmates who had lost the will to live as Muselmanner – of course comparison is not equivalence, but these memories haunt the psyche).

Jews around the world are being tarnished with the bloody consequences of the political machinations of the particular government that has power in Israel. And we are supposed to say nothing? We are supposed to defend the indefensible?

How is this possible, nearly two years on now from that terrible and traumatic crime that was perpetuated against citizens in Israel, how is it possible that we can’t mourn the losses, keep the hostages in mind, acknowledge that the Hamas pogrom awakened deep atavistic fears in the psyche of those who live in Israel – and also in some in the diaspora reliant on Israel for their Jewish identity – how is it possible that we can’t acknowledge all that grief and suffering that Israelis and diaspora Jews have felt and acknowledge that the punitive collective retribution visited upon the people of Gaza, and their homes and culture and entire infrastructure of life has gone far beyond the bounds of what a thoughtful, ethical Jewish response could have been, a Jewish response congruent with the way we have always valued and promoted, with pride, our belief in the sanctity of life, all life, not just our lives but the lives of the stranger, the outsider, the other, the lives of those who are not us, our family, but are part of the human family?

Why is it so difficult to hold two truths together in our minds, in our hearts? And to talk about that?

And how has this been possible that the image of a Jewishness that values compassion and principles of justice – this image that we hold dear and that justifies our existence, and an image that the non-Jewish world has in the past often admired (and sometimes envied) – how has it been possible that we have allowed this to be blotted out, squandered, along with the moral high ground that we occupied after the Shoah? How has it been possible to surrender all this in less than a couple of years – and how has it become possible that we aren’t supposed to talk about it? It’s maddening, dementing, truly.

If some Israelis and some Diaspora Jews feel they are under ‘existential threat’, that their very existence and raison d’etre is somehow at stake – though in reality Israel has extraordinary technical resources and military power and capabilities to defend themselves – if in spite of all that, the sense of existential threat is still felt (or believed in), I am coming to believe that there is another kind of existential threat at stake here, the one I feel as a religious leader in the Jewish community at this savage and fraught point in Jewish  history. 

And this is the threat to how Jews are being seen in the world; and the threat to how Judaism is being seen in the world; and the threat to how the manipulation and weaponisation by some Jews of our tragic Shoah experiences is being seen in the world; and the threat is to our purpose as Jews in the world – not our survival but our purpose – a threat to the very purpose of our stubborn survival as a people over the generations, a survival not for its own sake but to carry into the world a blessing, a set of values.

“I will make your name great and you will be a blessing” (Genesis 12:2). “And all the peoples of the world will bless themselves through you” (Genesis 22:18). Our Torah storytellers defined the purpose of Jewish existence and continuity through their depiction of  Abraham, and it is this purpose of ‘being a blessing’ that is under existential threat in these times. And that’s the greatest threat of all to Jews around the world – it’s not Hamas or Iran – it’s that our purpose is being hollowed out, sacrificed, rendered a meaningless dead mantra, rather than a living reality. The existential threat is that we are all, all Jews – not just the State of Israel – becoming pariahs again.

It isn’t possible to be silent when this is happening. And if that sounds a bit grandiose of me, then so be it. I take my strength – such as it is – from our tradition, from prophets like Isaiah:

“For the sake of Zion, I will not be still; for the sake of Jerusalem I will not be silent” (62:2).

But although I might draw my inspiration from our heritage, I am more than aware that I am only a small Diasporic voice standing in – and trying to withstand – the maelstrom around us.  You are free of course to disagree with my way of thinking about these things, but I am not free of the burden of responsibility I feel to keep on talking about these things. In the long arc of Jewish history there is so much at stake right now.

Moses wrote down the stages of the journey, wrote it for the future so that there would be a record of the journey taken. This last two years has been a different kind of journey for all of us, and these words are part of my record of the journey taken, as we face the wilderness and all the uncertainties about where it will end.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, July 26th, 2025]

Every age has its demagogues – articulate and inarticulate – who want to shape the world in their own image. In Jewish tradition, the Biblical figure of Korach (Numbers, chapter 16) exemplifies this universal human trait. Korach, the archetypal dissenter, gadfly, dissident, rebel, stirrer-up of trouble, provocateur, subverter of the powers-that-be – his defiance of Moses transcends its context and comes to stand for the bullies and know-it-alls of any generation, the ones who resent those with power and authority and want to bring them down. Or sometimes those with power who want to quash any disruptive views.

The Biblical narrative presents him as standing up against the unelected leadership of Moses and Aaron and arguing with their assumptions that they alone had access to holiness and to interpreting God’s will and mediating God for the community. Korach’s rebuke has its own power: ‘You’ve aggrandized yourself’, he says, ‘you have set yourself up above us, but all of us here in the community are holy and God is as available and present to any one of us as he is to you two’. (Numbers 16:3). Well, we might wonder, what is the problem with that?

Korach is arguing that holiness is integral to the people, and the divine energy that the tradition calls God doesn’t need specialists to make itself present. It doesn’t need an Aaron and a priesthood. It doesn’t need a Moses with his mood swings and his solitary inwardness and his special conduit to the Holy One of Israel.  Isn’t Korach’s argument the anti-totalitarian argument, the argument for democracy, for ‘people power’? Wasn’t Korach engaging in a non-violent politics of dissent? Dissent from the community’s domination by Moses and Aaron.  There’s a seductive logic to his critique of the hierarchy he found himself in.

I will return to the text later.

Post-Biblical Jewish tradition – the rabbinic tradition, the midrashic tradition – was uniformly hostile towards Korach, and his followers, and his motivation in challenging Moses. (One may wonder if the rabbis were particularly sensitive about anyone who might call into question religious authority; it has been known to happen).

The most well-known rabbinic text making reference to Korach is the one from a collection of ethical sayings called Pirke Avot (the ‘Ethics of the Fathers’):

Every controversy which is for the sake of heaven will in the end lead to a lasting result. But one which is not for the sake of heaven will not in the end lead to a lasting result. What was a dispute for the sake of heaven? The dispute of Hillel and Shammai. And one which was not for the sake of heaven? The dispute of Korach and all his company  (5:20)

Given that controversy and disputatiousness is an almost genetically programmed element in Judaic consciousness, what perspective on it is this text offering? On one level it seems obvious – it is trying to distinguish between arguments that are motivated by ego, or rivalry, or personal animus, and arguments motivated by something else, those the text calls ‘for the sake of heaven’, l’shem shamayim, (literally, ‘in the name of heaven’). Hillel and Shammai represent those arguing for that ‘higher’ cause – Godliness, so to speak, the wish to bring sacred values into everyday life. Korach and his followers represent those whose motives are more self-serving. 

Some background here might be helpful. The text of Pirke Avot is dated to around the years 190-230 CE but Hillel and Shammai were early first century rabbis teaching during the Roman occupation of Palestine before the Temple was destroyed in the year 70 CE. Although the Talmud records only five differences of opinion between the two of them, they founded schools of thought and there are more than 300 issues on which the schools disagreed.

One example: the House of Shammai said that on the first night of Hanukah eight lights should be lit, and then they should decrease on each successive night, ending with one on the last night; while the House of Hillel held that we should start with one light and increase the number each night, ending with eight. So that’s a dispute over ritual.

When it came to moral and ethical questions, Shammai’s position was usually stricter than Hillel’s: so the House of Shammai believed only worthy students should be admitted to study Torah, while the House of Hillel believed that Torah may be taught to anyone, in the expectation that Torah study makes a person worthy.

So, the point is that these kinds of disputes – whether about ritual law or ethics – were seen by the rabbis as being ‘for the sake of heaven’ – l’shem shamayim.  These arguments had a higher purpose than power or prestige or popularity. The rabbis knew that they were arguing about how to live their Judaism in times and circumstances very different from the past: they had the Torah, but they had to use their own creativity and imagination to interpret it and respond to it. They believed – or wanted to believe – that God had a stake in their decisions, as if God’s presence in the world was reflected in how they interpreted the tradition. This made it all ‘for the sake of heaven’ – they were trying to uphold the essential values of the tradition for new generations. They were trying to make holiness part of everyday life, and in that task questions of rabbinic ego or personality or rivalry were judged to be quite irrelevant.  

Of course that position – that Hillel and Shammai’s personal disagreements (and that of their Schools) were ‘for the sake of heaven’ – is a wish, a pious hope. We can imagine that in reality things were as fractious and rivalrous then as the rabbinic world still is, in some quarters.  It may be that egos can be disciplined over a lifetime of work and reflection – but they can never be eliminated. There’s always something personal at stake when we present an argument – however objective we think we are being. In that sense dispassionate selflessness is a fantasy. But that doesn’t mean that one need abandon the attempt to see things ‘from God’s point of view’, so to speak.

One of my teachers, Rabbi Lionel Blue (may his memory be a blessing), used to speak about how he coped with synagogue council meetings: he imagined God sitting on an empty chair around the table, and he’d use that image to wonder what the Holy One might make of what was being discussed, what the divine perspective might be on the often fraught and vexatious discussions taking place. I pass on to you this piece of homespun whimsy: it’s not a bad piece of practical rabbinic wisdom.   

But back to Hillel and Shammai: one of the areas of fierce confrontation between their schools was about Judaism’s relationship to the non-Jewish world, particularly about the Roman occupation. The school of Shammai took up a stance in alliance with the Zealots, who (as their name might suggest) were militantly opposed to occupation, and – an early example of the use of boycotting – decreed that all commerce and communication with the occupiers and those in surrounding countries who supported the Romans should be prohibited; whereas the School of Hillel was conciliatory and opposed violence. Then, as now, the Jewish community was divided. So contentious was this split that the House of Shammai barred followers of Hillel from praying with them.  So much for arguments being ‘for the sake of heaven’.

While the Temple still stood, the Shammai view of belligerence was the majority view – and those that followed Hillel were as derided in Israel as are those today who might take up dissenting positions on the use of aggression against external enemies. It wasn’t until a few generations after the catastrophe of the Temple’s destruction that the views of the school of Hillel gained the upper hand – and indeed in the Talmud we find that whenever the House of Shammai had disputed the opinion of the House of Hillel, the House of Shammai’s opinion was rendered null and void.

From that time on, the Jewish world evolved its view that Hillel’s opinions – often tolerant, open-minded, inclusive – took precedence over Shammai’s often narrower or harsher views. This is not a case of history being re-written – for this change was recorded in the Talmud – but that later generations came to see that the prevailing majority opinion (Shammai’s) had ended up ‘on the wrong side of history’, as we might put it now. And that Jewish life needed a less aggressive approach in order to thrive.

A final note about the divisions between Hillel and Shammai: in spite of the maelstrom of factionalism and historical Jewish dividedness between the two men and then the two Schools, both opinions are described as ‘l’shem shamayim’. Both were viewed as battling with integrity for the soul of an emerging, evolving Judaism. 

What of the second half of our Pirke Avot text, the example of Korach and his followers as representing a dispute that isn’t l’shem shamayim? On the surface this is rather ironic because in the Biblical text itself it seems that that is precisely what Korach is arguing on behalf of: the question of holiness, and of what God might want.

As I said earlier, the text presents him as standing up against the unelected leadership of Moses and Aaron and arguing with their assumptions that they alone had access to holiness and to interpreting God’s will and mediating God for the community. Although Korah’s complaint does have a certain logic to it,  Jewish tradition is unreservedly ill-disposed to him and what he represents. Former Chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz (1872-1946), in his great commentary on the Torah, is representative of this attitude: ‘With the instinct of the true demagogue, Korach posed as the champion of the People against the alleged dictatorship of Moses and Aaron, the two brothers who usurped all power and authority in Israel’.  So no room for doubt there. (I suppose you don’t get to be Chief Rabbi by deconstructing the authority of rabbinic tradition).  

So the bottom line is – according to Pirke Avot – that an argument like Korach’s is ‘not for the sake of heaven’: the rabbis believed it was an argument to further his own desire for power or prestige or glory. It was – to use contemporary language – ‘ego-driven’. It wasn’t about holiness. He was just using the language of holiness as a cover story for personal ambition. He was using religion – as so many have done through the ages and continue to do – as a stepping stone for personal gain and power. Passionate he might have been, but the Torah is unequivocal that passion alone is not enough. Korach might use the language of heaven – ‘all the community are holy’ – but his wasn’t an argument ‘for the sake of heaven’, it was for the sake of himself.

Yet implicitly both the Torah narrative and the Pirke Avot text pose us a religious question. How are we ever to know – in our own arguments, our own disputes and disagreements, or dissent from received wisdom, the wisdom of the tribe, or what Ibsen called ‘the compact majority’ – how are we able to work out whether we are like Hillel or like Korach? It can be in our families, or at work, or in our religious institutions, or in communal politics, or in relation to Israel’s government – how do we refine our awareness, our awareness of our true motives, not our rationalized motives, when we are in disagreement? This is a psychological task, a spiritual task, a religious task: discerning inside ourselves the dispassionate wisdom of Hillel, and unraveling it from the passionate selfishness of our inner Korach; do we have the energy, the time, or even the wish, to try to do that?

‘All the community are holy’ – what a seductive phrase that is. It’s flawed only in the light of the Jewish understanding that holiness is never an achieved state. It’s always an aim, a goal, something to work towards in a lifetime’s dedication and struggle. It is future-directed: kedoshim tihiyu, “you shall be holy” (Leviticus 19:2). The moment you think you have it, that you possess it  – that you are ‘holy’ – you’ve lost it, lost sight of it. Yes, the potential for holiness is always here, it can animate one’s spiritual life, but it is always elusive. It can never be claimed by an individual or a community or a nation.

This is the great Jewish adventure, the great Jewish paradox  – the unceasing movement towards holiness; and the guarding ourselves from the hubris of ever believing we have achieved it.

[loosely based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, 28^th June, 2025]

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]