Rediscovering Hermann Cohen

Who would you name as the most important Jewish philosopher of the 19^th century? People still talk about Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–1888) the founder of Neo-Orthodoxy, Abraham Geiger (1810–1874) the leading proponent of Reform Judaism, Leopold Zunz (1794–1886) who founded the so-called ‘Science of Judaism’ (Wissenschaft des Judentums) making Jewish studies a modern academic disciple. Some might add Karl Marx to the list. But Hermann Cohen (1842–1918)? Who now talks about him? Or has even heard of him?

I have been talking about Jewish teachers and Jewish thought for a long time now but I don’t think I have ever even mentioned Hermann Cohen and the significance of his thinking. He died in 1918 so his work overlaps somewhat with both Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig – of course their influence on Jewish thinking has been enormous and they have come to overshadow Cohen, who was nevertheless an inescapable influence on both of them.

I’d like to approach Cohen through the lens of one verse in our weekly Torah portion. It is such a familiar text that you might have become rather blasé about what a radical concept it articulates.

 “You shall not do wrong to a stranger, you shall not oppress them, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:20) – 36 times the Torah speaks about this core ethical command. As you can imagine, strangers – outsiders to a society – suffered discrimination then as they do now. The stranger is always at risk from the ignorance, the prejudice, the fear of any majority community to which they don’t innately belong.  

But underpinning Jewish consciousness is the historical memory of being outsiders, in Egypt; and the Biblical writers’ awareness of this was so omnipresent that they made it the cornerstone of  interpersonal Jewish ethical living: an enhanced concern for those we don’t naturally think of as ‘us’.  The Torah mandated that those living amongst us who were not inherently one of ‘us’ were to be embraced, protected, cared about, as if they were one of us. They are, as it were, family. Our human family.

As I said, I think we can get blasé about this : we may not appreciate just how revolutionary  – and subversive – an idea that was two and a half millennia ago; let alone in Trump’s America or for certain politicians closer to home in the UK.  

Hermann Cohen’s comment on this verse goes like this: “This law of shielding the alien from all wrong is of vital significance in the history of religion. With it alone, true Religion begins. The alien was to be protected, not because he was a member of one’s family, clan, religious community, or people; but because he was a human being. In the alien, therefore, man discovered the idea of humanity.”

For Cohen, the treatment of the other is the foundation stone around which Jewish ethics is built. He understood ‘loving one’s neighbour’ as inclusive not exclusive. He read it as a universalistic demand rooted in our shared humanity with others, not a particularistic demand to look after our own. The Biblical emphasis on protecting the stranger was a call to a morality of care over and above those whom conventional thinking might prioritise – “one’s family, clan, religious community, or people”, as he put it.  Charity might ‘begin at home’, in conventional thinking – but Judaism’s core demand was to transcend conventional thinking, self-absorbed thinking, emotionally complacent thinking, tribal thinking, and embrace a much more demanding and maybe uncomfortable ethical position. The inherited memory of our history of outsiderdom becomes the catalyst for moral action in the present.

So Cohen’s reading of the Torah, his understanding of the Jewish task in the world, sees Jews as having a distinctive ethical contribution to make: to be a particular people whose concern goes beyond our own group. He saw this as a model of how to bring the messianic age – universal concern for all, beyond nationalism, transforms the divisions and conflicts of what is into the harmony and fraternity of what could be.

There is a terrible, and tragic, irony in all this: Cohen experienced himself to be, and saw Jews in Germany to be, an integral part of German society, indeed European society. They were now emancipated, it was the modern condition – Jews were now newly permitted to enter fully into the mainstream of national life. He’d studied at Dresden, Berlin  and Halle universities, by 1875 he was professor in philosophy at Marburg, he was completely integrated into the life of his homeland while recognising that, historically, Jews had been vulnerable wherever they lived, they had suffered over the generations – and suffered with dignity – while remaining true to their faith; and although of course he was aware that they still suffered from prejudice, he believed that the only way Jews could overcome this history was by emphasising and enacting their moral mission. Their mission was pedagogic – to teach the universal ethic of sustained humanitarianism. That was the Jewish purpose in whatever land they lived – and Jews needed to live in many lands to fulfil this purpose (that’s why he opposed Zionism). He was committed to Diasporism as the route to societal transformation, as the route to the messianic age foretold in the Biblical texts.

He was the archetypal representative of what became known as the German-Jewish symbiosis, the idea originating with Moses Mendelsohn in the 18^th century, who had argued for a synthesis of Jewish tradition and German Enlightenment ideals. Jews could be fully acculturated in their homelands in Europe, said Mendelsohn, and still stay true to Jewish practices, beliefs and values. And for over a century this is what happened: Jews integrated into German and Central European life and became adept in law, medicine, business as well as providing new creative energy within literary, scientific and artistic life across the continent.  

So Hermann Cohen’s commitment to social justice was part of  a wider and deeper shift in Jewish self-understanding about how to be both Jewish and European.  This was the first time in history this had been possible. And although assimilation and conversion were also aspects of the Jewish response to modernity, Cohen represented the ways in which one could be fully participating in one’s national culture while maintaining and enacting one’s Jewish religious beliefs and practices.  

But the tragic irony of this, of course, was the way in which within twenty years of Cohen’s  death Germany had turned against its fellow Jews – with all the horrors that was to involve. Some might argue – this became part of the currency of Zionist thinking, particularly after the Shoah – that what happened in Nazi times negated the whole rationale of Jewish purpose that someone like Hermann Cohen represented. Perhaps that’s why he fell out of fashion. In the 1960s Gershon Scholem, for example, called the German-Jewish symbiosis  a ‘one-sided love affair’ – that Jews were naïve in believing they were fully accepted and their contributions welcomed. Well, there is some evidence for Scholem’s scepticism – but there’s nothing like being wise after the event.

But I would like to rehabilitate, as it were, Hermann Cohen’s philosophical Jewish idealism – to rescue it from the condescension of history. Because if social justice is not the centrepiece of ethical Judaism in the Diaspora, or in Israel – if it is relegated to a sideshow or a luxury – then it is hard to know what justifies the dogged determination of the Jewish people to keep on going as a distinctive people. Without adherence to the core justification for Jewishness – to bring the divine into the world through acts of compassion, love and justice – we might as well just assimilate and have done with the whole crazy project.

For me the significance of Cohen has taken on a new urgency in the light of the last few years in our long and complex history. Cohen believed that Jews were destined to fulfil their ethical obligations – their mission, so to speak – as participants in the countries in which they lived. He disagreed with his contemporary Martin Buber in this. Buber felt that the dispersion of the Jews meant they were prevented from collective self-realization. That led Buber to support Zionism, although he maintained a consistent ethical stance about its obligations in relation to those already living in the land, that statehood should not be built on the suffering of the Arab Palestinians. So while Cohen did not support the Zionist project, what they agreed on was that the Jewish mission in the world had a universalistic aim, a messianic aim of societal transformation. They just disagreed about whether Jews needed a separate state to fulfil this.

In some ways I would suggest that Buber’s vision is now buried under the rubble of Gaza and is being desecrated daily on the hilltops and valleys of the West Bank. Which leaves us Diaspora Jews with the dilemma: Cohen or Buber? Do we stay true to Cohen’s messianic hopefulness that here where we live is the Zion in which Torah is enacted and our moral responsibilities as Jews find their expression? Or do we stay true to Buber’s messianic hopefulness that despite the failures and flaws of Jewish nationalism, the pain it has caused, the opprobrium it has garnered that has spilled out onto Jews around the world, do we stay true to the hope that the Jewish mission of bringing compassion and justice to a fractured world can be salvaged from the ruins? That a national home can recover, restore, its Jewish values for the good not just of fellow Jews but for the strangers, the outsiders, with which we share a common humanity?

[my thoughts on Hermann Cohen are a development of themes laid out in Adam Sutcliffe’s brilliant text ‘What Are Jews For? History, Peoplehood and Purpose’ (Princeton University Press, 2020]

[based on a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, February 14th, 2026]

Whoever constructed the literary architecture of the Torah – and in particular the book of Genesis that we concluded this week in our annual cycle of synagogue readings – whoever those unnamed narrators of our sacred fictions might have been, they were writers whose boldness of vision, whose daring in the crafting and shaping of their stories, continues to take one’s breath away. Breathtaking is too casual a word for what they achieved, for the inheritance they left behind them.

Just consider the narrative arc of Genesis: it takes us from the vast panoramic evocation of creation, magisterial in its stately poetic unfolding of an evolutionary process, culminating in humanity; and then, the jewel in the crown of creation, quite unexpectedly – an additional act of benign creativity: the blessings of rest. Shabbat, a breathing space, a respite from all that divine activity that binds us into the fabric of being, for all of time, time unfolding moment by moment as we contemplate creation’s grandeur, its unlikeliness, its random and awesome being-here-nowness – just consider how that narrative arc takes us from all that cosmic drama through fifty chapters to the end of the first section of the Torah: and what do we find there? A dead man, shut in a box.

I like to imagine those writers thinking to themselves: yes, we will take them – our readers, our listeners – on a journey, a journey starting with cosmic grandeur and ending – yes, why not? – in an airless coffin, no breath, no life at all. Let’s see what they make of that destination for our sacred story: Joseph, embalmed in an alien receptacle – coffins were Egyptian artefacts, they didn’t exist in Canaan, the ancestral home, and this is the only time in the Hebrew Bible that we find this word aron used to mean a coffin. 

And just to drive home the irony of this destination, let’s make the last two words of our text “ba’aron b’mitzrayim”(50:26) – Joseph is placed, literally, “in a box, in Egypt”. And we remember that the word Mitzrayim itself has a root meaning of ‘a narrow place’. So: ‘In a box, in a narrow place’ – our journey’s end.

So the storytellers take us through creation and the development of humanity to focus in on one family, a family of Hebrews (Ivrim = ‘boundary crossers’), the family of Abraham and Sara and Hagar, and their children, and their children’s children, through the generations, the focus steadily homing in on the dramas and betrayals, the jealousies and envy, the gradual revelation of the complexities of intergenerational and inter-tribal rivalries, zooming in and zooming out as the generations come and go, right up to this section of Torah with Joseph and his dying father, Jacob – who wants to be buried back in der heim, the homeland, Canaan, a wish that we notice Joseph, the next generation, does not share.

Nor do his brothers, by the way; because having buried their father back in the family plot in Hebron (source of such grievous hostility and oppression right up to today), the brothers choose to return with Joseph back to Egypt (50:14), as if – dare one say this? – as if the enhanced diasporic possibilities of life in an advanced Egyptian cultural and economic milieu were a bit more attractive than herding sheep and tending goats in the ancestral valleys.

Still, it is a narrative arc to reckon with: from creation, b’reshit, to a coffin, ba’aron, with its subtle play on words – taking the first three Hebrew letters of the Bible’s first word, B’reshit [bet, resh, aleph], and inverting them in this penultimate word in Genesis, box/coffin : bet, aleph, resh. From birth to death, it’s the journey of humanity, and of each tribe, and of each individual. This is our story. From the grandeur of the universe to the narrow places. And how far is one from the other, ever? One letter changes in the text of your life and your world turns inside out, or upside down.  Death always only a heartbeat away.

Our storytellers obviously believed that these small details – whether involving wordplay or the symbolism and imaginative resonances of their imagery – carried weight and meaning. This became the lifeblood of Jewish tradition, the endless exploration of our sacred texts, the turning them and turning them for everything of value for life was contained within them (Pirke Avot 5:22). Or could be projected into them. And in truth I would prefer to dwell in this world, eternally rich and suggestive. The problem though is that I am aware that it is not the only world I live in, far from it. To talk like this, with feet planted in Biblical mythos and exegesis, feels like a luxury I can’t allow myself, can’t emotionally or intellectually afford any longer, at this late stage in Jewish history.  It’s a kind of betrayal – or I feel it as such.

Because I don’t live with two feet planted in tradition (and neither do you) : I have one foot, and often both feet, unfirmly slithering around in the muddy  ground of modernity, the world of the omnipresent 24-hour news cycle, the world where, as the Italian philosopher and anti-fascist politician Antonio Gramsci wrote in the 1930s: ‘The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born’. Farewell to surefootedness.

Gramsci was imprisoned in 1926 and remained in jail until just before his death in 1937  but his Prison Notebooks are filled with insight and many quotable sentences. ‘The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born’ is often quoted – but less familiar is the second half of the sentence. The whole text reads : ‘The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters’.

Mussolini and Hitler were obviously on his mind – but who are the monsters now? Am I allowed to speak of the monsters now? One person’s monster is another person’s hero: Putin, Trump, Orban, Netanyahu, Farage. How do we separate the hero from the monster? How do I speak, craft words in public, in the ‘time of monsters’, when, as Gramsci added, ‘morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass’?

As 2026 begins we’d be naïve not to acknowledge – amidst a world filled with many wondrous acts of kindness and generosity and selfless dedication, many ways in which the best parts of human nature keep the world going – it’d be naïve to turn a blind eye to the ways in which collectively we seem to be moving from a world order, of sorts, to world disorder. I don’t need to catalogue the multiple ways in which our futures are in hock to vested interests and corruption and global economic inequalities.

Under threat are  moderation, tolerance of difference, the capacity to listen to other views than one’s own, the wherewithal to separate fact from fiction, truth from disinformation, authenticity from fakery and propaganda and wishful thinking. Problematic convictions are held with passionate – often violent – intensity. What balm is there for the soul amidst all this disordered living?

The morbidity of these trends seems to be intensifying as this decade goes on – but disagreements abound about which of the varied ‘phenomena…that are coming to pass’, as Gramsci puts it, are the morbid ones.

Is hostility to immigration, asylum, migration, the turning back of children in boats crossing the Channel – one in five of those in the boats are children – is this hostility a morbid phenomenon or healthy, self-protective patriotism?

Are the flags we’ve seen sprouting up and down the land (or in the synagogue) morbid phenomena – or proud acts of group identity?

Is the uprooting of olive trees and the terrorising of Palestinian families on the West Bank, the pogroms and the illegal settlements, the bans on humanitarian agencies in now-divided Gaza with over a million people living in flimsy tents at the mercy of the elements (and ongoing ceasefire-breaking bombing): are these morbid phenomena? Or birth-pangs of the messianic age, steps towards the fulfilment of ancestral Biblical dreams, and wishes for Jewish security? 

Is the wish for a land free of Palestinians a pious hope or a morbid phenomenon? Is the analogous wish for a land free of Jews a pious hope or a morbid phenomenon?

Everywhere in the disorder there is splitting, there is projection, there is displacement, there is scapegoating – but this psychological language, the psychological understanding of the inbuilt fractured nature, the everyday mental derangements, of the human psyche, this kind of understanding of the self or of groups doesn’t seem to help us. Disorder and chaos and confusion rules within our unquiet hyper-stimulated minds – and the world we see reflects and acts out our inner turbulence.  

There is so much cruelty in these disordered times and so many morbid symptoms that we don’t want to know about, don’t want to have to think about. And Jews are absolutely no better at thinking about these things than anyone else. Indeed I sometimes think that because of the trauma we unconsciously carry in our psyches – generations old – we might find it more difficult to think about things with clarity, with insight, with sensitivity to nuance, with openness of the heart. With so much trauma unresolved – let alone acknowledged – we find it well-nigh impossible to inhabit a still point in a turning world, a point of view shaped by the timeless vision of prophetic insight and moral teaching, rather than the passions and fears of the moment (which are never just fears of the moment, but mixed with hauntings from the past).

For example it might be very difficult for us to think about whether the rise in antisemitism around the world in recent decades – and particularly in the last few years – might in any way be connected with the ongoing injustices suffered by the Palestinians within and outside of Israel, with the lack of progress towards a Palestinian state, with the erasure in the last two years of  manageable life in Gaza, with 70,000 deaths, maybe a third of them children. It is as if we can’t bear to join the dots on the mental map. And literally can’t bear to have the thought that antipathy to Jews might be connected in the popular imagination, the unschooled-in-subtleties imagination – yes misguidedly connected, mistakenly connected, unjustly connected – but that such anti-Jewish feelings might be connected to the destruction of Gazan lives and livelihoods, of doctors and journalists and teachers, of religious buildings and universities – actions done in the name of what is so proudly and insistently called the ‘Jewish state’.

We can’t allow ourselves to connect the dots on the map this way; and  there are strident voices in the Jewish community here and abroad who tell us we are not allowed to think this way – to make these self-evident connections.

But why are we not allowed to wonder if the tragedy of Bondi beach might in some perverse way be connected to how Jews are being seen around the world as supporters of, or accomplices to, crimes against civilians in Gaza and the occupied territories. This doesn’t justify terrorism, of course – indiscriminate murder can never be justified, please don’t misunderstand what I am saying –  but murderous feelings do get generated by injustices, individual and collective, as the story of Joseph and his murder-minded brothers has been teaching us from the beginning of our history.

Are we allowed to talk about this? I think we have to, that not only our psychological wellbeing depends on it, but our physical security too. Our safely as Jews will increasingly depend on our honesty about what is happening, and what has been done, in our name. That lack of honesty was on display in Netanyahu’s boorish response to the atrocity in Sydney when the Israeli prime minister berated his Australian counterpart by reminding him that he’d recently written to him: “I wrote: ‘Your call for a Palestinian state pours fuel on the antisemitic fire’”.  The lack of honesty here is characteristic: it’s in the inability to consider that the opposite is more likely to be true – that it is the lack of a Palestinian state that pours fuel on antisemitic feelings. The whole history of injustice – from the Nakba onwards – pours fuel on antisemitic feelings.

There is a blemish on the soul of the Jewish people and we Jews – particularly in the Diaspora – are having to suffer because Israel has highjacked our history, and our purpose in the world – to be ‘a light to the nations’ (Isaiah 42:6; 49:6), to be and bring a blessing to humanity (Genesis 12:2).

So here I am standing uncomfortably with one foot in the messiness and muddle of 2026’s unfolding chaos – and one foot in the fertile homeland of these Biblical texts that have been our glory, our treasure house, our security, our salvation, over the generations. Texts can be, of course, misconstrued, twisted into shapes that are malign – that happens in every religious tradition; but I refuse to let these texts be hijacked by fanatics who wish to reduce them to, or co-opt them for, racist supremacism.

Here in the Diaspora, I don’t read them that way: when the texts of tradition lead to cruelty something has gone very wrong and we need to be able to call out those who are poisoning our heritage and our good name. When I come back to these texts, insist on them, it is to play with them, dream with them, feel inspired by them to help us tell stories about the complexity of the human condition, and the hopefulness encoded within our tradition, a hopefulness and a tradition rooted in compassion and kindness and justice and generosity of spirit.

These divine qualities are incarnated in us – but the Torah show us that these qualities are always in a battle with our darker natures. Engaging with the Torah keeps us alert to the interplay of darkness and light within our psyches. The stakes are high. If we fail to acknowledge the complexities and contradictions in the human heart – and the Torah keeps on illuminating these dynamics – then what begins in wonder and creativity can only end with us trapped in a box, a coffin of despair and darkness.

As 2026 begins I refuse to be locked into the narrowest of narrow places – ‘the whole world hates us!’ – because that’s a  place with no hope of a redemption to come.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, January 3^rd, 2026]

I wonder if the storytellers of the Bible knew, two and a half millennia ago, that they were creating stories, narratives, sagas, that would be read until the end of time?  They must have been aware that they were crafting, weaving,  a set of stories to give one people, the Hebrew people, the Israelite people, a tapestry of meaning, of identity, to wrap themselves inside, a verbal tallit woven out of words, words that gave their people a sense of belonging, a sense of continuity, a  sense of being enveloped in an evolving story.

And they may have glimpsed too how they were crafting texts where the readers, the listeners, would understand that they were inheritors of, and participants in, an unfolding holy drama that each generation was writing with their lives. But they couldn’t have known, surely, how long these narratives would last, how long their inspired verbal craftsmanship would remain part of the world’s literature and find an enduring place in human consciousness.

Of course we can’t know what they thought they were doing. And maybe it doesn’t matter what they thought they were doing. What matters more, perhaps, is what we think we are doing, in the Jewish community, faithfully reading and chanting these texts week after week, century after century, in an endless cycle of celebration, reverence, puzzlement – sometimes boredom – in a process like alchemy, where we take the ancient time-bound material and – hopefully – transform it, transmute it, into something living and sustaining, something that transcends its rootedness in a small, insignificant Middle Eastern tribe and becomes ours, something that nurtures the soul and fertilises the imagination, that speaks from what is far away and long gone and yet can touch us and speak to us here and now.

Va-yera – the name of the sedrah we read this week is taken from its first word (Genesis 18:1). We could spend all our time with this one word. ‘And there appeared’, ‘and there was seen’, ‘and there came into view’. It is like the start of a play: someone is sitting at the threshold of their home, their tent, their doorstep, their stoop, their front porch – we could be anywhere, in the desert, or the outback, or the Lower East Side, or a coastal town in Kent, or the leafy suburbs of any city; and three strangers appear. The drama is universal – strangers appearing in the heat of the day, ‘out of nowhere’ (as we like to say). Although of course they have always come from somewhere.

And our authors, our dramatists, our storytellers conjure up these strangers, these new arrivals, who appear on the doorstep of our hero – Abraham in our story – whose first response is the key to what follows. He ‘looks up’ (va’yar) ‘he sees’. Attuned to the rhythms of the Biblical narrators, we notice the repetition: ‘Va-yera … va-yar’,  passive and active forms of the verb  ‘to see’.

First comes the theology – Va-yera Adonai , ‘the Eternal One appeared’ , or just ‘the Eternal appeared’ – and we the readers, listeners, are let into the sacred dimension of the story, a story about how divinity reaches us through other human beings.

Something appears over the horizon of our consciousness, something comes into view, Va-yera – and Abraham responds va-yar: ‘and he looked, he saw’. Does he ‘see into’ what was unfolding? Does he understand its deeper significance? The text doesn’t tell us.

What Abraham sees is three strangers and his response is instinctive:  hospitality, generosity, food and shelter. And in chapter 19, Lot too – Abraham’s nephew – is sitting at the gates of the city, in the cool of the day, and two strangers appear and he too (the text emphasises it), he too  va-yar, ‘and he looked, he saw’ (Genesis 19:1) and he invites them to spend the night in his home: hospitality, generosity, bowing low, deference, a deep identification with what it means to be strangers in a strange land. And we remember that he too, like Abraham, had been a stranger in a strange land – they were immigrants from Ur of the Chaldees, making a new home for themselves far from their original homeland.

Migration is the universal story, we are all guests on the planet: here the universal story of human migration over time, over generations, is refracted through the particular tale woven by the narrators of the Torah, weaving a story for their own people in which they intuited – or so I like to think – that hospitality and generosity would be foundational to collective human survival on the planet.

I do like to think this, it gives me pleasure to think this. That the Torah teaches what it means to be human through its storytelling. At times these texts feel inspired by an understanding of the most profound truths about the human condition – but not in a sentimental way, for as this text in Genesis demonstrates, the Biblical texts speak about  both the human capacity for kindness and the human capacity for savagery.

We see how Lot’s actions are contrasted in the story with the aggression of the inhabitants of Sodom, who want to grab these strangers and subject them to the humiliation of rape (19:5). Gang rape is as universal, our Torah narrators know, as hospitality and generosity to strangers. Read the daily news, look up from your cornflakes and see what’s been happening in Sudan. The benign and the brutal reside together in the human heart and the dividing line between the two might be thinner than we fondly imagine, or wish to know. You see it as this story progresses,  when Lot refuses to surrender his guests to the mob, but instead offers them his two unwed daughters. And our modern sensibilities are outraged. The mob are not to brutalise the two strangers but they can do what they like, it seems, to the two young women (19:5-8). 

But before we have time to absorb this act of desperation by Lot, before we have had time to label it and judge it as misogynistic and patriarchal and contemptible – which it is – our storytellers craft a verse which on the level of straightforward narrative storytelling is redundant but at a deeper level, emotional and moral, is a moment revealing their sensitivity to a timeless dynamic.

“Stand back”, says the mob, “step aside…this guy [i.e. Lot] is an outsider come to live here and now he’s telling us what to do, let’s get him!” (19:9). I am translating colloquially because the Hebrew here becomes vivid, colourful, idiomatic; this is the language of populism at work. We know this dynamic only too well. This seemingly redundant verse shows how displacement works  as the mob shift the focus of their anger from the strangers to Lot, the defender of the strangers. Again, watch the news, listen to the denigration of, the attacks on, not only immigrants, asylum seekers, refugees but on their defenders, the lawyers or parliamentarians or Church of England clergy or charities who advocate for those who arrive on our UK shores seeking refuge and protection. 

The psychological depth of these texts continues to astonish me. As we listen in to, see into, the inner dynamics and moral complexities of the stories, we realise that the storytellers are not just talking to us, they are talking about us. And part of their giftedness seems to be how often they refuse to resolve the moral ambiguities of the lives they speak about.

They might signpost directions for us to pursue, but they often leave questions radically open, as for example in this story where we have Lot’s protectiveness towards the strangers juxtaposed with his callousness to his daughters.

But the narrative isn’t finished with these two women. Their honour remains intact as the mob turn their fury towards Lot. At this point the two strangers intervene – and the mob are temporarily blinded (19:11). What’s going on? As we read this, we too can’t see what is happening. Like the mob, we can’t find a way to get in: we stand outside the text, dazzled by a mystery. What is happening is blindingly unobvious (to coin a phrase). But the bottom line is that Lot is saved, along with his family – and this includes his two young unmarried daughters.

And so, as this tumultuous apocalyptic chapter ends, having fled the city, Lot finds himself without a wife, living in a cave with his daughters (19:30) – two young women who turn out not to be so innocent after all. In a bravura scene of compassionate and dispassionate storytelling, the women ply their father with wine, and over two nights each one lies with their father and is impregnated by him. The women know that the survival of the family, the continuity of the family – and for all they know after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the survival of the human race – depends on them. The young women prioritise life over death, the continuity of life over questions of conventional societal morality.

As so often in Biblical storytelling these women are anonymous, but their role in the story of their people – although far from unambiguous from a conventional moral perspective, as is Lot’s drunken activity in this scene – is nevertheless momentous. As our chapter ends, we note how the storytellers cast no aspersions on their characters or their taboo-breaking behaviours. It merely gives us the names of the children the women bear: Moab and Ben-Ammi, the progenitors of the Moabites and Ammonites. And that’s it: factual, unemotional, non-judgmental.

We readers, well versed in the texts of Torah, know that these tribes will become the traditional enemies of the Israelites. Which doesn’t sound like a great heritage for Lot’s daughters to be responsible for. Except that – and here again we have the Biblical storytellers’ penchant for the subversion of our expectations – we come to realize that one of the later consequences of what Lot’s daughters and Lot did is that a certain member of the Moabite people named Ruth enters the family of Israel, becoming part of the Hebrew people, and marrying Boaz; and the Book of Ruth lets us know that from this lineage comes royalty – no less a figure than King David. And later Biblical texts will suggest that through David’s line the Messiah, or the Messianic kingdom, will arise in the fullness of time. 

From incest to Davidic royalty to Messianic hopefulness. These stories complicate and undermine our wish for moral certainty – they keep us alert to the messiness, the baffling unpredictability of life as it unfolds through us and within us.  This is what makes them, for me, Torat Emet, as our Torah blessing says: a ‘Torah of truthfulness’.

But sometimes we can glimpse what is true only in passing, out the corner of our eye. But still, we keep on looking. 

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, 8th November 2025]

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]