Category Archives: high holy days

21 Elul: knowing our worth as God knows our worth

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The Psalmist asks “Eternal God, what are human beings that you should care for them, mortal creatures that you should notice them?”

The question is carefully posed.  We recognise that we are indeed fragile presences on the earth, our lives barely impacting in time or space, yet we confidently assert that God notices us and cares about us.  We wear celebratory white during this season of penitence because we know that God will forgive us if we sincerely repent.

Our tradition provides us with a strong sense of ourselves. We are at one and the same time both “dust and ashes” and “the beloved children of the Sovereign”.  We are mortal and yet we are bound up in immortality. We are fully individual and also we are a small part of a whole creation.  It takes a particular view of the world to be able to hold both all the opinions at the same time, yet the Jewish mind is asked to somehow encompass them all, just as our liturgy speaks of God in a variety of ways all at the same time. And it is this dynamic tension that traditionally nurtures our distinctive identity and sense of self.

Yet how easily could we agree with the Psalmist today? Are we able to put a direct question to God? And even if we are comfortable with that relationship, would we dare to remind God that a precondition of the conversation is that God must pay attention to us and care for us? For many of us the easy familiarity of the covenantal relationship is lost and we struggle to find a bridge to that place.  This is what the month of Ellul is for, and it is also some of the work of the High Holy Days.  We may no longer be sure of God; we may wonder about the purpose of prayer. And yet part of us doesn’t want to let it all go; we want to return to that clarity that gives meaning to our lives. The Psalmist had many doubts and fears, but he knew his worth in relation to God.  It is time for us to reclaim that knowledge, to search ourselves and to begin to really know ourselves. This understanding is the foundation of the bridge we build into the future, the bridge we build back to the knowledge of God.

20th Elul – the great shofar sounds…

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20 Ellul

Even though the blowing of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah is a Biblical decree, it hints at something, i.e., “Wake up, sleepers, from your sleep! And slumberers, arise from your slumber! Search your ways and return in teshuvah and remember your Creator! Those who forget the Truth amidst the futility of the moment and are infatuated all their years with vanity and nothingness that will not help and will not save, examine your souls and improve your ways and your motivations! Let each of you abandon your wicked ways, and your thoughts which are no good.” (Maimonides Mishneh Torah, Hilchot teshuvah 3:4)

The shofar is a peculiarly powerful instrument. Its call pierces the air – we cannot ignore its sound.  It has been used to summon people for battle, as a warning, as a blast to terrify the enemy. It was heard at Sinai – though it is not clear who was blowing it. The ram caught in a thicket at the binding of Isaac was caught by its horn, from which comes the rabbinic idea that God instructed Abraham that his descendants should blow the shofar whenever they were in danger of divine punishment – the merits of the protagonists in the Akedah would be brought in front of God who would therefore forgive us.  Bible tells us to blow it to announce the New Moon of Tishri, and from that comes the idea that every new month is publicised in this way.

The sound of the shofar is also close to the sounds of wailing and of more gentle but insistent crying.  The Talmud (Rosh Hashanah 33b) discussing the sounds has one tanna saying the Teruah means a wailing sound, the Sh’varim denotes moaning or broken sighs.  The Tekiah, the straight blast of sound, is both introductory and closing sound, to contain and to announce the sorrowful nature of the other calls.

The shofar does much of our work for us. It is designed to wake us up, but also to give voice to our fears and anxieties, and then to strengthen us in our battle to become our best selves.  There is a debate in the Talmud about whether the shofar should be bent or straight, and the implication is that the shofar represents the person who is approaching God – should we approach with our backs straight and, so to speak, look God in the eye while asking for forgiveness, or should we be bent with the weight of our sorrow at the sin we are carrying, and looking down to the ground?

There is no answer given – all shofarot whether straight or curved are permissible. Each of us, however we feel about ourselves, can come before God and under that divine gaze, be open about what and who we currently are.

 

 

18th Elul – I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine – and our love can transform the world

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18th Elul

The name of this month of Elul can be seen as an acronym for the phrase

אֲנִ֤י לְדוֹדִי֙ וְדוֹדִ֣י לִ֔י

I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine (Song of Songs 6:3)

One would normally expect the month leading up to the Day of Judgment and the Day for Atonement to be less about love and more about Awe – after all these are the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe.  Indeed the Maharal of Prague  Judah Loewe ben Bezalel (1520 – 1609) wrote of this month “All the month of Elul, before eating and sleeping, a person should look into their soul and search their deeds, that they may make confession.”

While the awe is appropriate, and a certain fearfulness will facilitate our search of our souls in order to repent, the idea that this is done within the context of love, of the love between God and us, is a powerful one.  The work of Elul is not about punishment, not a negative self-loathing, but is about closeness to the love for God and the love of God. We are actively searching for a positive relationship, which will help us to live better, to be better, and we do this under the compassionate gaze of God.

There is a myth that Judaism is not a religion of love – that the “God of the Old Testament” is all about war and vengeance. That is simply not true, but a polemic designed to misinform and miscast the Hebrew bible in order for other traditions to look somehow nicer.

“The God of the Old Testament” – the God of the Hebrew Bible – is all about love. We are commanded in the Hebrew bible to love God, to love other people –whoever they might be and however distant from our own group – and indeed to love ourselves.  This is not a thoughtless and sentimental love, but love as action, love that shows itself in how we behave, love that changes us and changes the world.

The month of Elul, which might be misunderstood to be a month of fear and trembling for what is to come, is connected in Midrash not just with love, but the love from Song of Songs – the total immersive and uncritical feelings of two lovers wrapped up in each other.  That one of the lovers is us, and the other is God, tells us a great deal of how confident rabbinic Judaism is in the compassionate and supportive care God is offering us. We only need to make that first step.

17th Elul: everything is waiting to be hallowed by you

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17 Elul

“Love your neighbour as yourself; I am Adonai” (Leviticus 19:18). There is a Chasidic interpretation of the last words of this verse: “I am Adonai.” – “You think that I am far away from you, but in your love for your neighbour you will find Me; not in their love for you but in your love for them.  The one who loves brings God and the world together. The meaning of this teaching is: You yourself must begin. Existence will remain meaningless for you if you yourself do not penetrate into it with active love, and if you do not in this way discover its meaning for yourself. Everything is waiting to be hallowed by you; it is waiting to be disclosed and to be realized by you. For the sake of this, your beginning, God created the world. –Martin Buber 1952

The one who loves brings God and the world together. What is this love? It is not sentimentality nor is it romantic attachment. Love is an action rather than a feeling – we are commanded to Love God in Deuteronomy 6:5 with all our heart (intellect), all our nefesh (soul/ being) and all our power /strength (me’od).

Love is an action – when we work at love, by caring for the needs of others, by looking outside our own needs and wants and instead thinking about the community in which we live, the humanity of the other – then we bring God and the world together.

Martin Buber’s world view, that everything is waiting to be hallowed by our actions, and it was for this that the world was created, must surely  inform our practice in Elul, as we reflect on what we have done and not done, and the work that is waiting only for us to see it and do it.

As Rabbi Tarfon says (Pirkei Avot 2:20) “The day is short, the work is great, the workers are lazy, the reward is great, and the Master of the house presses.”

He also said It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it (2:16)

More than half way through Elul, it is time to do the work of active love.

 

16th Ellul: the gates of repentance are always open

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16 Ellul

In the introduction to “Orot haTeshuvah” (14:4), Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook writes: “The main reason for our failure to repent is that we do not believe how easy repentance can be”. He notes: “On the one hand, repentance is a divine command that is so easy to perform because the mere intention to repent is already considered repentance. Yet, on the other hand, it is an extremely difficult commandment because the act of penitence is not complete until it has been executed thoroughly in the outside world and in our own lives”

Tradition teaches that the work of teshuvah has two different strands. In Elul the focus is on the teshuvah known as “bein adam l’havero” – between people. When we reach Yom Kippur, that work is meant to have been done, we have reflected on our behaviour and made sincere apologies; where we can we have righted wrongs, or recompensed for them. Repairs have been made to the dislocated and torn relationships we have ignored or abused. We have sought forgiveness from those we have hurt, and we forgive those who seek our forgiveness for their hurt to us. This is important because Mishnah (Yoma 8:3) teaches:  “For the transgressions are between human and the divine, Yom Kippur atones; for the transgressions that are between human and human, Yom Kippur does not atone until one has appeased the other.” (Yoma 8.3)

The personal acts of atonement between human beings are the most critical for us – when we come to Yom Kippur the liturgy – with its collections of confessions, of reflections, of warnings and welcomings –will take us on a different path.

But the best guidance comes – as so often – from Maimonides. The process of Teshuvah is logical and clear for him. First we must reflect and think about what we have done. Then we must actively regret our actions, and move towards the other in order to repair the damage and apologise with sincerity. After that is the requirement that we reject our own behaviour, resolving to no longer choose to act as we have done before. We will behave differently when faced with the same opportunity to sin as before.

Rav Kook had it right – it is both extremely easy and extremely difficult to perform teshuvah. How we act in the world may not always match up with our intentions, and that is painful to acknowledge. But it is interesting to me that teshuvah is one of the seven things said by the rabbis to have been created before the world was created. It means that built into our humanity is the expectation that we will make mistakes, behave selfishly or meanly or thoughtlessly. Yet teshuvah is always available – as the midrash tells us (Midrash Rabbah, Devarim) “ Rabbi Channanya bar Papa asked Rabbi Samuel bar Nachman, what is the meaning of the verse (Psalm), “As for me I will offer my prayer unto You in an acceptable time “? He replied, “The gates of prayer are sometimes open and sometimes closed, but the gates of repentance are always open.”

Or in the words of Franz Kafka “Only our concept of time makes it possible to speak of the Day of Judgment by that name; in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session”  (Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope and the True Way 1917-1929).

The opportunity is ever present that we can become our better selves small act by small act as the days go by. The month of Elul may prompt us, but every day is an opportunity for teshuvah – and we should take it.

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vayelech: the time for us to grow up and take responsibility for our choices is upon us. or: the bnei mitzvah of the people of Israel

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Eight years ago one of my dearest friends was about to be seventy years old, and she decided to celebrate this momentous and biblical age by having her batmitzvah. I had tried to persuade her to do this for years and she had brushed me off; it is typical of her that she made her choice by herself on a date that had such resonance, and then throw herself into study and thinking for herself.  We talked a little about the date and the sidra, and then she chose to direct her own study and do her own research. Luckily she sent me a near final draft. I say luckily because she never read this drasha or celebrated that long awaited day, for with everything planned and organised and ready to go, she suffered a cataclysmic and sudden bereavement and the weekend was taken over instead with grief and shock and the arrangements to honour the dead.

We spoke a while afterwards about her celebrating her batmitzvah on a different date but we both knew that was not really going to happen. The anticipated joy would never be the same, the shadow of grief never quite left her, and she too would depart this world suddenly and unexpectedly and quite dramatically, leaving the rest of us a small flavour of the shock she had experienced on the day of her birthday batmitzvah, to grieve and to question, and to process the reality of what happens when a life is torn from the world without warning.

Checking my computer recently, and thinking also of her as I do at this time of year, I came across an email where she had sent me this draft of the drasha she was to give to the community she had been at the heart of for so many years. With the permission of her children, I want to share it here.

“Vayelech is the shortest parsha in the Torah. It is 30 verses long, and I don’t recall ever hearing it read. In non-leap years like this one it is linked with Nitzavim. When I read Nitzavim-Vayelech they held together. They are followed next week by Ha’azinu which, when I looked it up I discovered is one the 10 Shirot [songs] conceived or written as part of the Almighty’s pre-Creation preparations. The only one still to be written is the song we will sing when the Messiah comes. 

We are coming to the end of the Torah. This name, given to the first of the three sections of the Hebrew Bible, is better translated as Teaching. We are coming to the end of the month of Elul the month in which we begin to prepare for the approaching High Holy Days, and in the coming week we will celebrate Rosh Hashanah which in turn is followed by the 10 days of penitence and Yom Kippur. Then in roughly a month’s time on Simchat Torah we will finish reading the Teaching, the end of Deuteronomy, and seamlessly begin Bereishit – Genesis – again. 

Vayelech must contain the most important rite of passage in the whole history of our planet. But we will come to that.  

Israel is camped in its tribal groups on the banks of the Jordan, waiting to cross. The preceding parsha, Nitzavim, tells of Moses addressing the whole of Israel, in preparation for entering the land God has promised them. He reminds them they are standing before God, and is clear that every person is included in this relationship.

 [my son] tells me I can tell one joke… a clear example of don’t do as I do, do as I say …but I have two, and we will come to the second soon. A very good friend sent me a card, writing in it “I saw this, and thought of you.” The cartoon was a line drawing of 2 dogs, the larger one saying: “I understand more commands than I obey.” I hope you agree with me, that this is arguable!

Moses and God know from experience that the Children of Israel will fail to follow God’s Teaching. 

Moses warns those listening to him that the consequences of disobedience will be that the land will become desolate, but mitigates this by prophesying they will make t’shuvah, return to the right way, and God will reconcile with them and bring them back.

 And he says something that has always troubled me:  that the commandment he is giving to them and so to us “is not beyond you, or too remote. Not in Heaven, or across the sea. It is very close to you… in your mouth and in your heart, so you can do it.”

 What I have never been sure of is what this is, what it is that is in my heart, and in my mouth?  Not the 10 Commandments – too many!    And not the 613 mitzvot buried in the text. And then the man who is not my chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks said quite plainly on radio 4, no less, what it is, even quoting where I should find it. It is found in Genesis chapter 18, vv 17 – 19, where God is choosing Abraham because he deals with his household with Tzedakah and Mishpat:  two words which together give the meaning of justice tempered with mercy. This is how we hope God will deal with us on Yom Hakippurim.

 And finally Moses said that we have a choice, God has given us the choice of life and death – blessing and curse. We should choose to love God and walk in God’s path and keep God’s commandments. And just as the penalties for not doing so have been listed, the rewards of obeying are explained. 

What we have been told is that all Israel is equally bound by this covenant, regardless of social position or occupation. And that even if we disobey God’s Laws there can be future redemption.

Further, we know that obedience to God’s Laws is within our scope. 

And also that we are to have that freedom to choose that sets us apart from the animals.

 And then we come to today’s portion, .Vayelech “And he went” which is the beginning of the rite of passage for the Children of Israel.

 There is to be a change of “Top Management”. This is the day of Moses’s 120th birthday, and Moses has finally accepted that it is also his death day. It’s been hard for Moses to come to terms with his mortality, and he has behaved a little like a child trying to justify not going to bed, not just yet. There’s no time to discuss this today, try reading Louis Ginsberg’s Legends of the Jews. God has been forbearing with this servant with whom God has been in conversation for the last 40 years.

 In this time the generations born into slavery have died, and the people who are born into freedom have known no other Leader. Moses has taught them, settled disputes, referred knotty halachic problems directly to God, and brought back the answers. It is explained that God will go with them, and lead them across the Jordan. Further, that although Moses may not go, they will have Joshua.

 Moses has been frightened of dying, and the Almighty has shown him Aaron’s painless death. God is giving him the signal honour of dying on the anniversary of his birthday, and although Moses is not to be allowed to cross the Jordan God has taken him to look down upon the land.

 Moses is kept busy on this day – there are the tribes to address, and writing enough copies of the Teaching to give one to each tribe, and lodge one in the Ark of the Covenant. This is talked of as a witness against the people, but I suppose it’s the master copy, and proof of God’s promises and provisions. Moses writes The Scroll to the very end, until it is finished, which is taken to mean that it is prophetic, containing as it does an account of his death. Further, the Almighty gives him a message to deliver, and a song of 43 verses, one of the 10 Shirot, to teach to the people.

  How many people do you think there were, camped by the river? How many going into the Promised Land?

 Jacob went to Egypt with 72 souls in his household. A rabble of 600,000 freed slaves left Egypt – and these were the men of fighting age. Add their relatives – minimally a wife each, one child. – Not parents and siblings – this could cause doubtful accounting – a conservative estimate would be 1,800,000 people. No wonder manna was needed!

Nor was it just Jews who escaped Egypt, plenty of escapee opportunists would have taken the chance, and been the “strangers within your gates” who are to have equality under the covenant with Jacob’s descendants.

 The instruction was given for this to be read every seven years in the shemittah year. All Israel is commanded to gather at Succot in the place God has appointed (eventually the Temple in Jerusalem) and the King read to the people from the Scroll.

 And the chapter ends with the prediction that Israel with turn away from God, and that God’s reaction would be to turn God’s face away from them – but also with the promise that their descendants will not forget the words which will remain in their mouths.

 So what is happening?

 It seems that with the completion of the Torah and our entry into the Promised Land, our Creator considers we are grown up. We have the Torah; we have the record in it of discussions and decisions. We are aware that we can judge matters between human beings – but not matters between human beings and God. We cannot deal with these because it is not our business to govern or over-rule another’s conscience.

 God will not appoint another Moses – there is to be no dynastical continuity. No further theophanies. Israel has become a nation of priests with everyone having access to the Almighty and to God’s mercy.

 And when we begin Genesis all over again, we go back to Creation and the dysfunctional families of Adam and Noah. When we come to Abraham, look out for the Teaching and how it is built on chapter by chapter.

 And where’s the second joke? – listen to the translation.”

Sadly, we never heard the second joke. And the poignancy of some of the comments in the drasha make for difficult reading for those who knew her and knew her later story, though the mischief of her personality comes through this text for me, as does her clear and certain faith in God. This was a woman who, as administrator in the synagogue, would regularly leave open the door to the sanctuary in her office hours “because God likes to go for a walk”, but actually so that visitors would feel able to enter and sit and offer their prayers or order their thoughts. She would tidy up the siddurim and make sure they were properly shelved, saying that upside down books “gave God a headache”, to cover her need to honour God by keeping the synagogue neat. She spent hundreds of hours talking to the lonely, reassuring the frightened, supporting the vulnerable. She spent hundreds of hours creating the databases and systems to ensure that the synagogue ran as effectively as it could. And the roots of all this voluntary caring for the synagogue community was her own life’s struggles and her awareness that if God considers we are grown up now, with equal access to the Almighty and no “top management” to direct us, then we had better get on with it, with the work of creating and sustaining the world with tzedakah and mishpat, with righteousness and justice.

In this period of the Ten Days, as we reflect on the lives we are leading, the choices we are making, and the mortality that will come for us all, either with or without warning, I read her drasha as a modern ”unetaneh tokef”, and, as I was for so many years when I was her rabbi and she my congregant, I am grateful for the learning I had from her.

 

In memoriam Jackie Alfred. September 1940 – January 2017