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.