Author Archives: sylviarothschild

6th Elul :We don’t abstain from helping others if we want to call ourselves religious

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6th Elul

“If someone comes to you for assistance and you say to them, ‘God will help you,’ you become a disloyal servant of God. You have to understand that God has sent you to aid the needy and not to refer them back to God.”  (the Lelover Rebbe)

There is an old joke of the person who refused to follow the warnings of a coming flood and persisted in stating that as a person of faith, they knew that God would not let them come to harm. The rains came and the person stayed in their house, moved onto an upper floor and prayed. Suddenly a boat came floating past the window – “quick –get in” said the person in the boat, but the faithful person replied “I will pray and God will save me”. The rain continued, the boat came again, and again the person refused to get in, citing God’s protection of the righteous.

The next morning found the flood even higher, the person had climbed onto the roof of the house, and watched as the rain continued. Suddenly the boat reappeared. “Quick, get in, we won’t be able to come back after this it is too dangerous”. Once more their offer was refused. The flood waters covered the house and shortly afterwards the soul of the faithful person stood before God. Furious, they demanded to know why they had drowned when they had been demonstrating their faith in the goodness and salvation of God. And the Divine Voice replied “who do you think sent the boat?”

In this world we may or may not have a strong faith in God, but we do have a responsibility to each other and to ourselves. And that responsibility extends way past any category of who deserves and who does not, who is like us or how we would like to be, and who is very different.

For those of us who see ourselves as people of faith, it is not enough –not nearly enough- to expect that faith to save us or save anyone else. It is a requirement of our faith that we use it to increase our activity in the world for good, that we recognise that we have our own agency, and we must use it.

It is not enough to say “the Government has a plan” or “there are organisations for these situations or these people” or “other people are helping”. It is not enough to tut and frown and say “what a shame but it is not our responsibility” When people need help, it is our human obligation to give that help. For the Lelover it was an obligation based on being a loyal servant of God. Jewish texts repeat this message in a myriad ways. But however one frames it, the bottom line in Judaism is that we don’t abstain from helping others, we must not abstain – this is our primary work in the world.

 

 

 

 

5th Elul – fragmenting ourselves or unifying ourselves?

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5th Elul

“On Judgment Day God will not ask you to which sect you belonged, but what manner of life you led” (Chafetz Chaim)

We Jews have a habit of fracturing into different groups, and cordially disliking or despising those not in our particular corner of the Jewish world.  The famous joke of a desert island with one Jewish inhabitant having two synagogues – one he would go to and the other he would never go to, has a kernel of truth at its heart. I’ve lost count of the people who tell me that Reform Judaism is not authentic, or that the stricter one is, the more Jewish one is. The lurch towards increasing humras (strictnesses) in behaviour, of being more pious than anyone else has happened in my lifetime, possibly because the confidence of doing things like our parents did them has taken a knock, as the generation of survivors who were dislocated from their destroyed communities began to look instead to texts and guidelines rather than trust their custom and family habits.

I belong to many on-line groups where the questions are put – is it allowed? Is it kosher? Is it forbidden? Instead of living a life of continuation, many Jews are now living a life of uncertainty, of the need for being told how to do their Judaism – with the information usually coming from books and compilations of judgments, rather than from lived generational experience which may not always match with the letter of the “law” but which was how Jews did it for centuries.

The problem with this need for certainty, is that it leads to a univocal Judaism that will not tolerate difference in practise. It leads not only to “orthodoxy” but to “modern orthodoxy” and “ultra-orthodoxy” and “Haredi orthodoxy” and even the group lev tahor (google them and weep) or neturei karta – and heaven knows what else.

Judaism is not univocal and it never was. There are local customs and traditions that suit the community that has them, and that should not be given up for the sake of recognition by other Jews. Yet they are often under pressure to do just that.

The Talmud tells us “Jews were not exiled until they separated into sects” (Johanan bar Nappaha in TJ Sanhedrin 10:5). That “the command in Deuteronomy 14:1 (You shall not cut yourselves) means, according to Shimon b Lakish that “You shall not cut yourselves into separate sects” (TB Yevamot 13b)

Yet still we do it. The Hasidic world follows many different dynasties which often do not have good relationships between them. The progressive world is divided into different movements which have developed n the last few hundred years. Time was a Jew was a Jew was a Jew. We trusted them to follow their Judaism without fear or favour, criticism or taunt. There were plenty of other problems without having to have the internal squabbles, or at least without spending so much time and energy on them

During the Yamim Noraim and our preparation for these days, when we will all stand before God as one people, and all differences of nuance and practise fall away, let’s try to savour the feeling that we are Am Yisrael, and hold onto it when these days are done. And so go into the New  Year giving each other respect for our differences, and support in our Jewish living – however it may be expressed.

 

4th Ellul – our determination to return, however hard the path, will keep us located in our source.

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4th Elul – massacre of the Jews of Barcelona 1391

Across Europe the conditions for the Jews deteriorated between the late 13th and 14th centuries.  Expelled from England in 1290 and intermittently from France from 1306, the most violent deterioration was across the Iberian Peninsula. Barcelona, which had a substantial Jewish population with roots going back to at least the year 870, suffered a terrible pogrom on this day and for 500 years no Jews lived in Barcelona.

The riots began in Seville on 15th March 1391. Public opinion had been stirred against the Jews for some years, Jews had been discriminated against by both Church and Monarchy  in law – unable to enter work in finance or medicine, not being allowed to have Christian servants or otherwise “have power” over Christians etc. Special items of clothing marked them out, and in law courts their testimony was worth less than those of Christians.  This atmosphere was stoked and fuelled by the sermons of a Christian Monk, the Archdeacon of Ecija, Ferdinand Martinez, who preached his hatred eloquently, and who incited his flock against what he saw as the perfidious and untrustworthy Jews – to the point that the aljama of Seville complained about him several times, and the King of Castile Juan 1st wrote to him urging him to moderate his behaviour. The king tried to keep the peace, but in 1390 he died, leaving his heir, a minor, to rule.

Martinez’ Ash Wednesday sermon in 1391, demanding that Jews either convert or die, incited the crowds into the Juderia, the Jewish section of the city. When the mayor tried to control the rioters, Martinez spoke out against him. In Jun of that year, the rioters came back to finish the pogrom, blocking the exits of the Juderia and setting it alight – four thousand Jews died, the few survivors either converted or left. Their property was expropriated. After this, the pogroms spread across the peninsula, and as Jews lost their property and their lives, it became clear to many that conversion to Christianity was their only option to stay alive.

It is estimated that up to half the Jewish population of the Iberian Peninsula converted, including whole communities, their leadership and rabbis. The violence against the Jews that began in 1391 culminated in the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews in 1492.

The Jewish community of Barcelona, destroyed and murdered on 4th Elul 1391, disappeared. There may have been hidden or crypto Jews, but essentially it was a space inimical to Jewish life until the 20th century, when a few Jews came to the city from North Africa and from Eastern Europe. Today there are an estimated 3,500 to four thousand Jews – the highest concentration of Jews in Spain, and it has synagogues, a day school, an old age home and even a Jewish literary festival and Film Festival.

The stories of pogrom, of the rising anti-Semitism that led to them, of the lack of good government to control the growing violence and hatred, of the lack of good people to challenge prevailing narratives of xenophobic rage – Jews are conditioned in our very DNA it seems to me, to sense this in our world and to be early responders to the threats.

But we also have a different conditioning – we respond by continuing to hold to our identity, by supporting each other in community, by retelling our stories and transmitting our values. By recording our realities and teaching our truths.

It never fails to move me when I visit synagogues that were destroyed deliberately – or worse when they have been renovated by the State back to their former glory, but with no Jews to pray in them, study in them, and create community in them – this seems somehow to make a travesty of our history and our survival – albeit in a different world. But it never fails to move me when the descendants of the forcibly converted come forward to reclaim their lost and dislocated identity. And working as I do in Europe, seeing people come back to Jewish community either informally or more formally after such dislocation, working through brit/mikveh/beit din, I know that however dangerous it might sometimes be to be an “out” Jew, there is another force that drives us. In Ellul it is said the gates to the Divine are open, the possibilities of return are infinite. Be that teshuvah the return from a state of alienation back into a state of connection and however we understand and locate ourselves in those terms, now is the time to record, remember and continue our Jewish journey. And God waits to welcome us home.

image from the Barcelona Haggadah, Jews praying in synagogue

 

 

 

3rd Elul: birthday of Menachem Meiri

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3rd Elul birth of Menachem ben Solomon Meiri or Ha’Meiri (1249–1306)

The Meiri was a Catalan rabbi, Talmudist and Maimonidean, regarded as one of the most brilliant commentators of his time. His works, which have often been ignored by much of the halachic process since, show a clear and logical – and scientific – approach to our great foundational texts.  He was a philosopher whose learning kept him open to new approaches – from the Jewish Encyclopaedia we read that “Meiri was too much of a philosopher himself to interdict the study of philosophy. Thus, when solicited by Abba Mari to give his adhesion to the excommunication launched against the secular sciences, Meiri wrote him a letter in which he emphatically defended science, the only concession he made being to forbid the study of secular sciences by any one before he has thoroughly studied the Talmud.”

He is especially famous for his writings on Jewish-Gentile relationships, repeatedly holding that the statements against the other nations in the Talmud and the discriminatory laws against them, were only about the long-disappeared idolatrous nations of that time, and in no way were to be used in his contemporary setting.  He was also a clear early voice in support of women’s reading of the Sefer Torah and the Megillah within the community.

Other comments of his are also worth bringing forward for attention– for example on the fractious dispute that has surfaced in our time: Kol b’isha ervah – the idea that a woman’s voice is sexually provocative and must therefore not be heard – also provide useful early texts to remind those who would silence women en masse in public spaces, that their viewpoint is not miSinai. On the nature of Ervah as it relates sexuality he is clear that this is highly subjective. “That a person knows himself and his inclinations” and that Kol B’isha does not apply when one knows that her voice will not be sexually stimulating. And concerning this the Torah says I am the Eternal your God” — indicating that each person must draw an honest and individual boundary”

He rules that even a minor may read from the Torah scroll for the community. He believes that one’s obligation to read the Torah publicly is not one that falls under the halachic concept that a person of lesser obligation cannot perform a commandment on behalf of a person with a greater obligation, for that is holds only for individual obligations and not communal ones. Hence, women too can read from the Sefer Torah.

There are downsides to his writing. In particular I found his comments on who to marry disappointing: Commenting on BT Yevamot 63a where Rav Pappa advises “Be patient and marry a woman who is suitable for you. Descend a level to marry a woman of lower social status, and ascend a level to choose a friend”   Rashi glosses: “Do not take an important woman as your wife, lest she find that you are unacceptable to her” But the Meiri goes further in his commentary -“Never seek a wife among those who are greater than you, lest as a result of her higher standing, she rules over you. Surely then she will not obey you regarding household tasks.”

We are all children of our time, and we have all absorbed the generation norms in which we live, to a greater or lesser degree. The Meiri was of his place and time, but had the courage to speak against much of the prevailing fear of “the other” – be they women or gentiles.  And he continued to be open to knowledge from whatever source, defending the learning of the sciences and a good and rounded education. We need more such voices today.

2nd Elul – the Shulchan Aruch and why we need to examine the pre-set table and also our own received certainties

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2 Elul

The great legal code compiled by the Sephardi Rabbi Joseph Caro, and called the Shulchan Aruch (“The prepared table), was published in Venice in 1555 on the 2nd day of Elul. Along with the commentary by Moses Isserles, which builds on the Sephardi rulings and adds the Ashkenazi traditions – and which he called the Mappah – the table cloth – it is the go-to code of choice for anyone wanting to decide what the ritual and legal requirements might be for their issue, and is core learning for those who wish to have orthodox semicha.

Structured in four main sections following the pattern of the earlier Code of Law the Tur (Arba Turim of Jacob ben Asher) and the Beit Yosef, (Caro’s earlier and much more detailed work commenting on the rulings of the Tur): there is Orach Chaim– the laws of prayer and synagogue custom for daily,, Sabbath, and holiday times;   Yoreh Deah – Laws about kashrut; family purity, relations with non-Jews; vows; Israel; conversion, death and mourning, offerings etc.   Even Ha-Ezer– Laws addressing marriage, procreation and divorce; and Hoshen Mishpat– Laws for courts of justice; loans and claims; agents; finance; acquisition, purchases and gifts; legacies and inheritance; lost and found property; theft, robbery, damages.. The Shulchan Aruch was designed to provide and exhaustive but relatively easy guide for those without deep knowledge of Jewish law. Caro himself saw it as an entry point into halachah rather than embodying the final conclusive rulings of Halacha. In his introduction it is clear that for him the main text is to be the Beit Yosef, with its citations, its legal arguments, its logical threads. The Shulchan Aruch was for young students not yet able to cope with the complexities of drilling into the text to derive legal precedent.

When I was a rabbinic student, I was taught Talmud by a very orthodox rabbi in Jerusalem. When I asked about learning more Rabbinic Codes, he would say “You are training to be a Reform Rabbi. For that you need to learn how the Rabbis who wrote and codified halachah would think, and for that you need to be well versed in Talmud, not just look up the Codes”.  I used to joke that it would be for us to write the mappiot – the napkins.

Indeed my teacher was not alone. Many of Caro’s contemporaries were concerned that this book would end up being the definitive answer for many people, and they would stop their own investigation and curiosity that might provide different ways for Jewish practise to go. And their worries were well founded – an answer may be found in the Shulchan Aruch that gives no indication of why it was decided, on what grounds, and whether it was a matter of substance or of opinion.

There is a strand of Judaism that tends to the conservative, in the sense that once something is written or done, it is no longer open for question. We no longer notice that it is no longer appropriate, or that the context has radically changed. There is a well-known story of the synagogue where, when the Torah scroll was paraded, it was the custom to bow at a particular place. No one knew why this custom was there, many stories were created to explain it – and the answer only came to light when doing renovations it became clear that there had been a low level gas light on the wall, which would have knocked into the Sefer Torah had the scroll not been lowered momentarily in what appeared to some to be the carrier bowing.

We all have our habits that once served us well and that now we don’t even notice, even though they may actually be harmful or prevent us from living our full lives. We all cling to memories or traditions – such as my refusal to eat kitniot on Pesach despite knowing it is a minhag shtus – a stupid custom. It may be a minhag shtus, but it is my mother’s and her mother’s….

The kitniot minhag is not dangerous or life limiting, indeed for me it is part of Pesach despite all rational proof of its irrelevance. But we all hold other ideas, which we have not examined and simply taken on another person’s word.  Whether it be a low self-image derived from childhood experiences, unconscious misogyny or low level racism, a sense of supremacy of our own nation/ religion – whatever, we have all swallowed uncritically and with absolute certainty all kinds of things we should really have critiqued and reflected on and had the courage to work on or even deny.

So as Elul moves on into the Yamim Noraim, now is the time to say to ourselves – what ideas have we absorbed uncritically and then not bothered to examine again? It’s time to read the Beit Yosef alongside the Shulchan Aruch, to go back to the creativity of the Talmud and the extraordinary openness of the Bible. As my teacher said, Reform is nothing if it does not critique from foundational texts the accretion of beliefs and folklore and rulings of the Codes and challenge them.

And we are not doing our job if we are not critiquing the accretion of beliefs and folklore and certainties we hold and on which we unconsciously act.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tu b’Av: an especially joyful festival to be reclaimed

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The three weeks that lead from the 17th Tammuz (breaching of the walls of Jerusalem)  to the 9th of Av (Tisha b’Av) are traditionally a period of mourning, known as bein hametzarim – in the narrow straits. So it is all the more surprising that just one week after Tisha b’Av comes an especially joyful festival – the full moon of Av brings us Tu b’Av – when we are told:

Rabban Simeon ben Gamliel said: Never were there any more joyous festivals in Israel than the 15th of Av and the Day of Atonement, for on them the maidens of Jerusalem used to go out dressed in white garments – borrowed ones, however, in order not to cause shame to those who had none of their own. These clothes were also to be previously immersed, and thus the maidens went out and danced in the vineyards, saying: Young men, look and observe well whom you are about to choose; (Mishnah Ta’anit 4:8)

The rabbis of the Gemara are perplexed – ““On the 15th of Av and on the Day of Atonement,” etc. It is right that the Day of Atonement should be a day of rejoicing, because that is a day of forgiveness, and on that day the 2nd tablets of the Law were given to Moses; but why should the 15th of Av be a day of rejoicing?”

And so begins a fascinating rabbinic journey into what is behind the celebration of the fifteenth (Tu) of’Av :

“ Said R. Yehudah in the name of Samuel: “On that day it was permitted to the members of the different tribes to intermarry.” Whence is this deduced? Because it is written [Num 36: 6]: “This is the thing which the Eternal has commanded concerning the daughters of Zelophehad,” they claim that “this is the thing” implies the decree was only for that generation, but for later generations the decree doesn’t apply.

  1. Joseph in the name of R. Nachman said: On that day the members of the tribe of Benjamin were permitted to intermarry with the other tribes, as it is written [Judges 21. 1]: “Now the men of Israel had sworn in Mizpah, saying: Not any one of us shall give his daughter unto Benjamin for wife.”

Rabba bar bar Hana said in the name of R. Johanan: On that day the last of those who were destined to die in the desert died, and the destiny was thus fulfilled;

Ulla said: “On that day the guards appointed by Jeroboam to prevent the Israelites from coming to Jerusalem were abolished by Hosea the son of Elah, and he said: ‘Let them go wherever they choose.'”

  1. Matnah said: “On that day permission was given to bury the dead who were killed in battle at the city of Beitar”

Rabba and R, Joseph both said: On that day they ceased to cut wood for the altar, as we have learned in a Baraita: R. Eliezer the Great said: “From the fifteenth day of Av the heat of the sun was lessened and the timber was no longer dry, so they ceased to cut wood for the altar.”

There is a golden rule in rabbinic exposition – the more explanations given for something, the less likely it is that anyone knows what the explanation actually is. Clearly a celebration on the 15th of Av, which coincided with the beginning of the grape harvest, is part of the custom and practise of the Jews by the time of the Talmud, but its origin is already lost in the mists of time.

Let’s look briefly at the Talmudic explanations before looking at the festival itself.

The story of the daughters of Zelophehad is told in the book of Numbers- a rare piece of case law in that book and a powerful piece of text about women confronting Moses in order to attain fairness under the law. Zelophehad is dead, he had 5 daughters and no sons, and according to the rules of inheritance at that time, the girls would be left without anything. They approach Moses and argue their case, including the fact that their father will be forgotten in his tribe. Moses has to ask God about the merits of the case, and God tells him that the case of these daughters is valid; they should indeed inherit from their father. Later a problem arises, the leaders of the tribe of Manasseh – which the family of Zelophehad belong to – also bring a petition to Moses. Should daughters inherit when there is no son, and then marry into another tribe, the inheritance and land that would normally stay within the tribe will be given to the tribe that the woman marries into.

So the law is amended – such women who inherit land from their fathers must marry only within their own tribe – a limiting phenomenon that itself causes problems. So Rabbi Yehuda quotes Samuel by saying that tribes may now intermarry freely – and the date of this decision was the fifteenth of Av on the last year before the Israelites entered the Land of Israel.

The second explanation in the gemara is from a much darker story found at the end of the book of Judges, where a woman staying overnight in the territory of the tribe of Benjamin, was gang raped until she died. The other tribes went to war against the Benjaminites who would not give up the criminals for justice, and a ban was proclaimed which meant no one could marry into that tribe. This ban was eventually lifted on the fifteenth of Av. One assumes that this idea comes from the commonality of Tu b’Av to the statement in the Book of Judges ““And see, and, behold, if the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance in dances, then come out of the vineyards, and let every man catch  his wife of the daughters of Shiloh, and go to the land of Benjamin.” (21:21)

The third explanation – This comes from a midrash found in the Jerusalem Talmud amongst other texts, which say that the generation who were to die in the desert because of their connection to the sin of the Golden Calf expected to die on Tisha b’Av. This would cause a problem – if there were to be so many deaths on one day, then who would be able to dig the graves and bury the people? So Moses sent out a decree: On Tisha b’Av everyone must dig their own grave and sleep in it. Those who would die would die, and the survivors would simply have to fill in the graves with the bodies already in them. But many did not die who felt that they too were destined for this fate, and so they continued to sleep in the graves they had dug for themselves until they saw the full moon of Av and realised that Tisha b’Av was well and truly behind them. They would live!

The fourth explanation: King Jeroboam (c900BCE) had challenged Rehoboam the son of Solomon, because of his authoritarian rule, and took the ten Northern tribes with him to his capital Shechem. He built two temples as rivals to the one in Jerusalem (Bethel and Dan) and banned his people from going to worship in Jerusalem.  Fifty years later, the last King of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, rescinded the ban – on Tu b’Av – and the joy that ensued is encoded in the festival.

The fifth explanation also involves graves, in this case the ones slaughtered in the rebellion against Rome led by the false messiah Shimon bar Kochba in 135. The massacre of the Jews by the Romans was estimated by one Roman historian as being at least 580 thousand dead and many more taken captive into slavery in other parts of the empire. The majority of the Jewish population was exiled from the land and the land given a new name by the Romans – Syria Palestina – to try to sever the connection between the land and the Jews. Tisha b’Av saw the final destruction of Temple and hopes, and the fortress of Beitar was breached and its inhabitants murdered and left unburied. So Rav Matnah’s explanation for Tu b’Av is that 6 days after the tragedy (some stories say a year and six days), the Romans finally permitted the burial of the slaughtered Jews – on Tu b’Av.

After such dramatic explanations the final one in the list is more prosaic, but also most likely to be the case. Simply that the full moon of Av is around the summer equinox, the days are beginning to shorten and one might be less sure of enough dry weather for the wood cut down for the Temple sacrifices to be sufficiently prepared for its use, and any wood cut down later would be liable to smoke unpleasantly. This explanation is bolstered by the fact that we know of customs in the near East whereby the end of the season for cutting wood is marked by celebration including dancing and music.

So having established that Tu b’Av was being celebrated in Mishnaic times, that the young women would go out into the vines wearing white dresses they had borrowed so as not to be identified by their clothing, that they danced and sang and that clearly a shidduch market was in full swing on that date – the young men would chase them and choose their brides – the rabbinic tradition tried to explain the event using stories of rape, graves, massacre, orphaned women claiming economic rights and hence losing the right to marry outside of their tribe, civil war and rebellion against both internally among the Jewish people and also against an oppressive occupying power. One has to wonder why.

I am reminded of a recent “tweet” that asks why a prominent politician is tweeting terrible racism, and suggests that the deflection is to stop people paying attention to something worse – the statutory rape of underage girls.  Here the rabbinic tradition has a clear story of strong young single women in public space, helping each other with their clothing and “seductively” dancing and singing among the grape vines, with their symbolism of wine and wealth and fertility. So immediately there is a deflection – Beitar! Bnot Zelophehad! Possibly the darkest story in bible of a young concubine gang raped and murdered, whose fate was to be cut into twelve pieces each of which was sent to one of the tribes of Israel! Sin and death and lying in the grave! Rebellion and Massacre!

It seems to me that the Tannaim (the rabbis of the Mishnah, c50-200CE) were fine with the celebrations of Tu b’Av and the fact of young girls out on a summer evening enjoying their bodies, their strength and their music, but the Amoraim (the rabbis of the Gemara c200-500CE) were decidedly not. So Tu b’Av became a date more often ignored than celebrated. The single attention was liturgical – Tachanun (the penitential section of prayers of supplication and confession) are not said on Tu b’Av. Only since the modern State of Israel has been established has Tu b’Av been celebrated – it has become a kind of Jewish “Valentine’s Day”, a day for love, for weddings, for romance. The 19th century Haskalah poet Judah Leib Gordon wrote about its celebration in the newly planted vineyards and certainly for the more secular Israelis this is a Jewish festival to take to their hearts.

It’s worth noting the framing of the Mishnah where Tu b’Av is recorded. It is mentioned in the same breath as the most solemn day in the calendar – Yom Kippur, the Sabbath of Sabbaths, the white fast. On this day people traditionally wear kittels – the white shrouds they will be buried in. The day is a day of joy as well as penitence, because when we have truly repented, God will forgive us. We leave the day lightened by our activities and return more able to continue with living our lives.

There are real similarities between the two festivals, albeit one is a day out of time “as if dead” and the other a day of sensuous delight. Each reminds us of the importance of living our lives as fully and as well as we can. Each reminds us about living” in the now”, each helps us create our future selves.

So – let’s reclaim Tu b’Av, the full moon that follows three weeks of mourning,  that takes place 6 days after the blackest day in the calendar. Let’s remind ourselves that life must continue, joy must be part of our living, that relationships with others matter and that the future is ours to create

following the majority for wrongdoing – plus ca change…

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The bible says “don’t side with the majority to do wrong”

The chapters following the giving of the Ten Commandments at  Sinai are filled with a variety of do’s and don’ts covering debt slavery, treatment of servants, murder, manslaughter, legal compensations etc. and after the injunction against repeating false rumours and being a malicious witness to protect the guilty, comes this statement– “don’t follow the majority for evil”. As a verse it has an interesting life. Talmud uses it to infer the principle of majority in decision making “Do follow the majority for good”, from which comes the idea of majority verdicts in legal trials.

But Rashi argues differently, reading within the textual context he argues that it really means that if one sees many people perverting justice, you shouldn’t just blindly follow them, even if they are the majority actors.

In the febrile atmosphere of Tory elections, Brexit, unbalanced relationships with other countries etc, we have seen the limitations of following a majority decision thoughtlessly, and seen that this can be not just wrong but devastating to our well-being. Friendships have strained beyond repair, family relationships grown tense; trust in our political leadership is low and hostility has grown where we believed there was acceptance of the other in our society.

Bible already knows of fake news: “Shema Shav”, it knows about defending the guilty with malicious testimony, deflection, or supporting them publicly and daring others to continue their quest for honesty or justice. It know that a crowd isn’t always right, that it’s easy to be swept along with the prevailing opinions or find one’s critical voice silenced. Don’t follow the majority to do wrong, don’t side with the largest group simply because they’re larger and louder if their values are not good and their behaviour inappropriate or worse. The bible knows, and shouts out its warning.

Parashat Emor: Proclaim God’s Time or Time is more than a packages of moments; it encodes our history, our identity, our meaning, our purpose

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Right at the beginning of the bible comes the need to distinguish time. God divides the phases of creation into days and nights and sets up structures in the universe to define the time that already exists, making the sun, moon and stars. Then God models for us the structure of six days of work followed by a seventh day of rest.

Jewish time is further developed in the rest of the bible. In the book of Exodus in Parashat Bo we find the very first commandment in Torah that is addressed to the entire Jewish people and we find that it is about Time. “Hachodesh hazeh lachem rosh chodashim rishon . . . , “This month shall be to you the first of the months . . . “(Exodus 12:2).

Tradition reads this as an instruction to organise a calendar. And this week, in Parashat Emor, we are given the monthly and daily specifics of what goes on it. Mo-adei Adonai Asher Tikr’u otam . . . , “These are God’s set times which you shall proclaim . . . “(Leviticus 23:2).

Jewish time is the ebb and flow of working week and restful shabbat; it is structured around the major festivals which bound the year – so that until recently most Jews would remember a birthdate or a yahrzeit as being in relation to the nearest festival.

Our calendar is a way of making sure that life is not simply the flow of one homogenous day after another.  It is a way of structuring and therefore being able to use and understand, time.

But it’s not just a matter of giving dates for our holy days in order for us to remember and mark them. Our calendar is more complex and more nuanced than that.

First of all, the days of the year must be indexed to the seasons, otherwise even the tiniest annual discrepancy would, over the decades and centuries, mean that we would be celebrating the Spring festival of Pesach in the winter, and the Autumn festival of Sukkot in the spring. So we have to intervene in how we describe time in order to allow it to work in the right and proper place.

Our sages quickly worked out that neither the solar nor the lunar calendar on their own will solve our problem.  Counting full days does not bring the earth back to precisely the same place in its solar orbit. The solar year – the time it takes the sun to pass from vernal (or spring) equinox to vernal equinox is actually 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds, so there is about a six-hour  or quarter-day margin of error each year. If we did not compensate for this we would create a margin of error of about 24 days after only 100 years.

So in the Gregorian calendar we add a “leap year” with one more day every four years to bring us back to ‘true’.

The lunar calendar, while having the great visual advantage that the eve of the fourteenth day of every lunar month has a full moon (Pesach, Sukkot, Purim, Tu B’Shevat), still brings the difficulty of being one whole lunar month short every two or three years as it is about eleven days shorter than the solar month. We solve this by adding an Adar Sheini, a second month of Adar nine times every seventeen years.

The creation and structuring of time in order to use it is one of the things that makes us human, and how we do it in our particular tradition is one of the things that makes us who we are as Jews. By our working alongside the natural world of day and night, of solar year and lunar cycle and by adding something of our own so as to keep our festivals in their seasons, we are working alongside of God to co-create both our environment and our expression of our history and spirituality. And it is the list of festivals in parashat Emor which gives us the permission and the expectation to do this.  Having been able to create our time and associate our festivals not just with dates, not simply with seasons, but also with a quasi historical meaning, we Jews, so long uprooted from our land and from the agricultural tradition, have learned to build and to buttress our identity and our history through the use of time. Pesach has become the time of redemption from slavery, Shavuot the time of connection with God through Torah, Sukkot gives meaning through our recognition of our mortality and fragility, as well as acknowledging God’s real and practical gifts to us.  Time is more than a series of events of packages of moments; it encodes our history, our identity, our meaning, our purpose.

However secular or distanced from tradition we may be, we still sense the flow of sacred time alongside our awareness of our routine diaries and the calendars of secular events. Spring time still brings thoughts of Pesach, the Autumn heralds the solemn festivals of new year and Yom Kippur. And Jews who rarely feel the need for community or ritual will contact a local community to find out about seder, or a ticket to the high holy days. We still sense the sacredness of time, but how do we express its holiness apart from a tug into community a few times a year? The psalms tell us the messianic age could arrive tomorrow, if only we would listen. Today’s sidra is called “Emor” – the imperative to speak. Yet if we focus only on speaking we would quickly dislocate ourselves in our dialogue, for just as time is lunar AND solar, so is communication about speaking AND listening.  What we listen to, what we hear bible telling us again and again, is the requirement to be holy because God is holy. And how do we do that? Clearly in part it is a focus on what we do, how we act in the world, but Emor tells us also that becoming holy has something to do with how we ‘make time’ for the important things in life, with we use our time on this earth.

Rabbi Jon Adland (US Reform Rabbi) put it like this: “Time is all we’ve got in our lives, and how we use this precious inheritance will determine the mark we leave on this world. Holy days and holidays are not only about acknowledging God, but also about affirming community and remembering that which came before. The rest of time, the majority of moments outside of the holy days, are left for us to structure. In many ways, every day that isn’t a Jewish holiday is chol hamo-eid, an “intermediate day” in a year-long calendar. Just because a day is not a holy day on the calendar doesn’t mean it can’t be made holy through our actions.”

So we need to be asking ourselves each day: “What should we be doing to sanctify our time?”  “In what way should we be speaking out? In what way should we be listening?”

Our religious practise has moved on since the days that we brought offerings to God at set times to the Temple. Now we have to ask how we use our time in a way that honours God and our tradition. Be it fighting for social justice or bringing compassion to individuals in distress; be it offering gifts of food or money or opportunity to those in need or our living with low impact on the environment; be it political activism or small acts of kindness – there are a myriad ways we can use our time in this world. The important thing is that we use our time well, and create holiness in our world.

 

Sermon 2018

Kedoshim Tihyu: Holiness lies in the interconnected world, in our relationships and our responsibilities

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Parashat Kedoshim takes its name from the phrase it begins with: “Kedoshim tihyu, ki Kadosh Ani Adonai Eloheichem” – You will be Kadosh, as I the Eternal your God Am Kadosh.  (Leviticus 19:2)

The root K.D.Sh appears 152 times in the Book of Leviticus, and while usually translated as “separate/distinct” or “holy”, it has a richer and more complex life within Jewish thought than to be boundaried in such a way. It is difficult to fully explicate this word, in part because Kedushah is an attribute of the essence of God, and something we human beings are to pursue in our behaviour and being, the result of such pursuit is attachment to the Divine, understood in mystical tradition as the ultimate goal of all our spiritual strivings.

The 16th century kabbalist Rabbi Eliyahu deVidas explains in his mystical and meditative work (Reishit Chochma) that fleeing evil and doing good creates within us the ability to receive holiness from God. Holiness is a Divine response to our actions, and inhabits and shapes our soul, creating the possibility for communion with God.

Holiness exists in two different frameworks in bible: one is the sanctity of the priesthood and temple rituals which is the focus of much of this book of Leviticus; the second is the sanctity of peoplehood, of the whole community, as is underscored with the first verse of this sidra – “Speak to the whole Israelite community and say to them: You (voi) shall be holy, for I, YHVH your God, am holy (Lev. 19:2).”. It is this second framework that speaks to us. Holiness is an aspiration for a community much more than a state for priest and temple. The focus moves a little away from the ritual rooted in the sacrificial system and more towards the ethical rooted in community living.

Avoiding evil and doing good seems to the main thrust of much of what is contained in the apex of the holiness school of guidance, found in Leviticus chapter 19.(Full holiness Code found Leviticus 17-26) According to Sefer haChinuch, there are 13 positive and 38 negative mitzvot in sidra kedoshim, guiding us towards doing good things, and away from improper behaviour.

We are used to categorising these mitzvot (commandments) in Kedoshim as either Ritual ones or Ethical ones, but there is another way to see these imperatives that does not divide them into different and separate types, but functioning instead together, as part of a whole and complex system.

The commandments that guide us towards holiness can be understood as being ecological in structure –together they are a description of the web of relationships that unite the people, the land, the environment including both flora and fauna, and God.  Together they both set the balance that allows each component to flourish, each constituent to be in harmonious relationship.

There are curious parallels that signal the interconnectedness if one looks – for example the law of pe’ah forbids us to cut the edges of the land (19:9) and the edges of the human head and beard (19:27). People and land are treated in the same way, albeit for different motivations.

The section of bible known to us as “holiness code” (Leviticus 17-26) can be understood as a coherent and unified corpus, which aims to bring together –  through varied and diverse subject matter, terminology and historical perspective – the connection of people and land. Specifically here people and land which each have a distinct relationship with God. The people are to aspire towards ideal behaviour; the land is to embody the sacred.  Each generation is to learn and understand the principles that underlie this text, to draw out and fulfil those principles in their own time and their own context. The texts play with time. This is the generation of the desert being told how to behave in the land they have settled. We are simultaneously at Sinai shortly after the exodus from Egypt, in the desert as a travelling and unrooted people, and in the Land of Israel as the people who are responsible for the welfare of both land and society.

The effect of these time distortions within the text is to reinforce the timelessness of the message and of those to whom the message is addressed – to remind us that each generation of the people Israel is to understand that we too are part of the web of relationship. Just as the Pesach Haggadah reminds us that each of us is to consider ourselves part of the generation that was freed from Egyptian slavery, so here we are reminded that the relationship between people, land and God is one we are firmly held within.

This year the message of the ecology, the web of the relationships and the connections between plants, animals, people, and the environment, has never been so powerful to me, and the balances and imbalances between these relationships cry out for our attention.

We are living in a time of climate change happening with unprecedented speed. Everything is being affected and generally not for the good of the world. Be it the insect populations diminishing or disappearing due to insecticides, or else the changes in weather which have disrupted their breeding; or the crops blighted by drought or to-heavy rains; be it the animals whose habitats are changing around them, leaving them ill equipped to survive, or the people who face tsunami or cyclones, or drought or blistering heat – we are once again forced to pay attention to the interdependability of our world, and to note how our behaviour is unbalancing not only our own context but the future world of our children.

When one reads this section of Leviticus not to tease out the ritual or ethical behaviours we feel ourselves commanded to follow, but to become more fully conscious of what it means to hear the imperative to holiness that we must pursue in order to come closer to God, it is impossible to ignore how the impetus to Kedushah is situated within the web of relationships between people, animals and land. The book of Genesis (2:15) tells us we have a responsibility to steward the land, to keep it in good order and fully functioning, we have to work it responsibly and mindfully. The book of Deuteronomy reminds us that should we not care properly for the land and for the people we will be expelled from living in the land, reminds us too that God is watching how people treat the land that is so special to God (Deut 11:12) And all the books of bible repeatedly remind us that we are not inheritors of this world by right, but that we are privileged to live here and have a role we must play, relationships we must nurture, transmission we must be part of. How we live our lives matters not just to us or our close family or generation, how we live our lives is part of the ecology of the world and how it will thrive – or not

Imitatio Dei, the imitation of the attributes of God, holds a central place in Jewish thinking, right from the creation of people b’tzelem Elohim – in the image of God. We cannot absorb God nor become God, we cannot understand or encompass God, but we still have the obligation to come closer to Kedushah. The Talmud phrases it best, I think, like this:  “Rabbi Hama the son of Rabbi Hanina said: (Deuteronomy 13:5) “After God you shall walk.” And is it possible for a person to walk after the Presence of God? And doesn’t it already say (Deuteronomy 4:24) “Because God is a consuming flame”? Rather, [it means] to walk after the characteristics of God. Just as God clothed the naked [in the case of Adam and Chava]… so, too, should you clothe the naked. Just as the Holy One Blessed be God visited the sick [in the case of Avraham after his brit milah]…so, too, should you visit the sick. Just as the Holy One Blessed be God comforted the mourners [in the case of Yitzhak after Avraham’s passing]…so, too, should you comfort the mourners. Just as the Holy One Blessed be God buried the dead [in the case of Moshe]…so, too, should you bury the dead” (Sotah 14a:3-4)

It is a lovely description of how to imitate God to make the world a better place. But as our liturgy reminds us three times a day in the Aleinu prayer, it is our duty “letaken olam b’malchut Shaddai” To repair and maintain the world with the sovereignty of God. This is bigger than the cases suggested by Rav Hama – for the sovereignty of God is more than the relationships between people, important as they are. Instead I think the phrase is referring to the Kedushah we find in the Holiness Section of Leviticus – we must maintain and repair the relationships not simply bein Adam v’Chavero (between people) but bein Adam v’Olam – between people and the living beings – animal and vegetable – on this earth.

How we treat the earth – the rainforests with its trees often logged mercilessly and the environment of the animals who live there decimated and unsustainable; the rivers we clog with chemicals or detritus, the seas filled with plastic and becoming toxic to so many who swim in them, be they small turtles or huge orcas; the air in cities that are filled with pollutants, the fields we drench with fertilizers or insecticides, the animals and birds we so carelessly damage, the environment we so thoughtlessly injure, the casual littering and the mindless consumption of limited resources – all of this is in direct contradiction to what we are told about Kedushah, the holiness we should be striving to attain.

In London this week a 16 year old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, came to speak to Parliament and also to the many protestors of Climate Change who brought our cities to a standstill as they sought to persuade the government, by non-violent action, to reduce the UK’s carbon emissions to zero. The group “Extinction Rebellion” which has a Jewish section also held a Seder outside the Parliament buildings, linking the traditional ten plagues to the many threats to the earth if greenhouse gas emissions are not massively reduced, and global warming brought below two degrees.  They linked too to the damage to seas and air and land we are increasingly seeing happen. (The group is also protesting in Milan, Rome and Torino and in other countries too).

Reactions were mixed to the protests – in part because of the inconvenience caused to daily living, in part to vested interests, in part to political games-playing. But what became clearer to me was not just the science the protesters were drawing our attention to, but the religious values we have been ignoring for so long.

For when we categorise mitzvot into ethical or ritual, meaningful or opaque, spiritual or mundane, we mask over something else – the inter-relatedness of our world, which the mitzvot are designed to help  us to understand if only we would pay attention, the web of relationships between us and our environment, between animals and plants and humans and land and God.

When God tells the people that we must strive for Kedushah, an essential attribute of the divine, we often put this into the domain of the heavens, and forget that we live on the earth. We forget that the web of relationships is planet wide, that it involves trees and plants and soil and animals and insects….   Holiness demands from us the awareness of these relationships, and a response that values them.  “Le’taken olam b’malchut Shaddai” – to maintain and repair the world with divine ruling” – that is out task, and it is not in the heavens or far from us, but in our everyday interactions with the created world.

(sermon given 2019)