1st day Rosh Hashanah 5783
You can listen to Rabbi Tony's sermon here or read it below.
Let me begin by wishing you all another happy and healthy New Year. It’s great to be back here, thankfully inside once again, and it’s even better seeing you all looking so eager and upbeat.
“How are you?”
“I’m really good, thank you, Rabbi. Hundred percent.”
“And your family?”
“They’re all good as well. A couple of minor issues but fine really. And your family Rabbi?”
“Absolutely tickety boo, as my wife Jacqui would say. Miriam has quite a lot on at the moment. But you know Miriam; she takes it all in her stride. No stress. My son has quite a lot on as well but then he’s a barrister specialising in insolvency! You have a sweet and peaceful Rosh Hashanah.”
“You too, Rabbi.”
What a load of rubbish. What a shedload of whistling-in-the-dark expletives deleted.
Today is the beginning of a long and gruelling journey through the month of Tishri. And our professional team (sorry, I can’t abide the term ‘clergy team’) will, as always, walk with you, stand beside you, sing with you and do their very considerable best to help you to the end of the month feeling able to face 5783 with hope.
But right now, on the first day of Tishri, on Rosh Hashanah when we attempt to begin again, I need to acknowledge where I am – and, I think, where some, perhaps many of you are – right at this moment. And it isn’t predominantly a good, sweet, happy place.
But I’ll speak for myself.
I feel a constant sense of deep unease these days, even when I’m with my family on Friday night; or even on a day when West Ham, thankfully, aren’t playing! I was born in 1946 and I’ve never felt like this before. Un-ease, un-settled, anxious – even if I’m not about to give a sermon. In part this stems from my alte kakadom: the burdens of responsibility; the demands of life weigh much more heavily than they did when I was younger. Cue: Kurt Weill’s “September Song”.
But my mood isn’t just a reflection of an ageing juvenile’s anxiety-depression; it’s also a perfectly understandable, completely rational response to the time and tide we’re all being swept along by and the world in which ominous threats hang over us, the spinning vortex of a gathered storm.
I’ve been a service leader all my Jewish adult life until recently, so it’s not surprising it’s a liturgical refrain that’s been running through my head, troubling me for months now. “The sword, famine and sorrow.” It’s suggestive of the Hashkiveinu – for the person sitting next to you, Hashkiveinu is a prayer from the daily evening service after the Sh’ma. Last night it was sung particularly beautifully by a quartet led by Zoe. The words I’m referring to now appear in our current siddur as “(the) enemy: disease, violence (and) hunger and sorrow”; “(the) enemy: disease, violence (and) hunger and sorrow”.
I looked up the phrase in the ‘sacred texts’ of early 20th century Jewish liturgical research, Elbogen and Idelson – no prizes for guessing where they came from - and then turned to the equally important 21st century Hoffman but found little or nothing there either about this particular phrase. So I spoke to my friend Canadian/American Rabbi Larry Hoffman directly – nothing like going to the horse’s mouth, so to speak. He said that Jewish prayers often gather more and more adjectives over the centuries. He mentioned the second paragraph of Kaddish - yitbarakh v'yishtabbakh v’yitpa’ar, v’yitromam v’yitnassei v’yit-haddar v’yit’alleh v’yit-hallal, eight adjectives – and, said Larry, absolutely no significance whatsoever attaches to any particular adjective in this accretion of words other than permitting the rabbinic interpretive tradition full sway: how does it speak to you/us today and what does it enable you/us to teach/learn?
So fine: “(the) enemy: disease, violence (and) hunger and sorrow”.
THE ENEMY: Well, to start with, I’m especially glad to see that disease, violence and hunger are seen as the enemy. They’re not interpreted as divine punishment as so often happens in classical rabbinic tradition nor are they yissurim shel ahavah strictures of love – another curious rabbinic concept in which some rabbis interpreted the suffering inflicted on really good people as God testing their faithfulness. Lastly, they’re not unfortunate facts of life which we have to accept and bear in the knowledge we’ll be compensated by that eternal bliss emphasised so strongly last week at the Queen’s funeral by Archbishop Welby. Disease, violence, hunger and sorrow are none of those theological flights of evasion. They’re the enemy to be confronted with all our might.
THE ENEMY: DISEASE. Today, at this particular time of unease and anxiety, disease simply screams ‘pandemics’: the Black Death in the 14th century – the most fatal pandemic in
the whole of European history which in England wiped out between 40 and 60 percent of the population and led to acute shortages of labour, uncontrollably rising prices and untold misery for those beneath the ruling class who’d somehow survived. It took 50 years before the government of the day began to handle the situation properly and got inflation under control.
The Black Death came back in the 17th century as the Great Plague causing fewer deaths but still wiping out nearly 25 percent of the population of London. In 1918 the ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic carried off my Amsterdam-born great-grandfather Eliezer Goudeket in British Street, Bow and then, of course, came Covid-19 which carried off my father in 2020. I’d be very surprised if there was anyone here who doesn’t know someone who died or was badly affected by Covid; anyone here who was unaffected by the pandemic and the lock-down. Covid may now have been downgraded from pandemic to epidemic – like a typhoon to a tropical storm – but it’s still very much with us, not to mention the no-longer-spoken-of possibility of deadly variants.
Back to THE ENEMY: DISEASE, VIOLENCE. Today, violence howls loudly, deafeningly ‘war’. Ukraine: Gratuitous death and devastation; widespread atrocities; families dismembered; huge numbers displaced. But not just the war in Ukraine. The appalling cloud of terminal weaponry hanging over Taiwan, China and the West. I listen to Putin’s threats and his spokesperson ranting on the radio; I observe the cold calculations of President Xi: if history teaches anything, it’s that we have to take power-drunk dictators at their word. Even if the weaponry turns out to be economic and cyber as well as nuclear.
THE ENEMY DISEASE i.e. COVID. VIOLENCE i.e. GLOBAL WAR and FAMINE. Cue the drone cameras sweeping over parched fields from Britain to sub-Saharan Africa. Cue cameras looking down dispassionately on the monsoon and glacier-melted floods destroying everything in more than a third of Pakistan. Famine, crop failure, devastating floods – all resulting from climate change. No longer remote retreating glaciers or marginally shifting seasons but the acrid taste of merciless burning heat shrivelling life right here in Finchley.
THE ENEMY: DISEASE, VIOLENCE AND HUNGER – AND SORROW. The Hebrew word used here and translated as sorrow, yagon is equally validly translated as grief and suffering. Sorrow, grief, suffering. The terrible pain of loss. It’s certainly the pain of our personal tragedies and losses endemic to the human condition which so many of you bear
with such stoicism. But it’s also the pain we’re feeling right now at the loss of certainties, stabilities, continuity and so much death and threat of death, out of season.
So much of all this has been highlighted by the death of Her Majesty the Queen. We’ve lost the quiet continuity and stability that her reign of 70 years gave us, so rare in a deeply troubled world. A world in which we’re continually failed by political leadership: ruthless, power-crazed dictators exposing the terrifying limitations of the leaders of western liberal democracies - held captive by simplistic ideologies, short-termism, personal career ambitions and the narrow interests of their supporters which completely override concern for the wider electorate. The Queen, albeit unelected, represented continuity, decency, concern for everyone and the primacy of public service. I can only understand the impact of her death world-wide – from Japan to Israel and Jordan to South Africa - as a universal, popular recognition of the scarcity of those leadership values.
Disease: pandemics coming closer and closer together in time. Violence: war now and the threat of global war. Hunger: the more than possible collapse of our ability to feed ourselves caused by climate change. Who wouldn’t feel uneasy?
I admitted earlier I was born in 1946, not so much to excuse myself on the grounds of encroaching infirmity as to emphasise that I was born after the Second World War. However, I’m second from the top in a four generational family. My mother is 98, her personality indisputably moulded by the Second World War. She experienced the fear of invasion and what that might mean for her as a Jew. She walked through London burning as she went to work at the Air Ministry. She could never forget being – as she graphically describes it – chased down the street by a German aircraft firing at her, and above all, she had to deal with a seemingly interminable period in which she knew my father, her 20-year-old husband, was fighting in Normandy, not knowing whether he was alive or dead. Her generation were left with attitudes, fears and anxieties which those of us, born after the War with no parallel experience in the years that have followed, were spared.
I believe what we’re dealing with now has strong echoes but is different again. It’s both old and new.
I’ve mentioned before in sermons a German Jew called Hans Jonas. Jonas was born in 1903, one of a group of outstanding young Jewish intellectuals who left Germany straight after the First World War, painfully aware of anti-Semitism, determined to establish true academic freedom for themselves by going to Jerusalem. They founded the Hebrew University, and many achieved world-wide stature. Hans Jonas, as I say, was one of them. But he never quite fitted. Unusually, he chose to enlist and fight in the British Army in World War II and soon after the War ended, he fought with his Israeli sisters and brothers in the War of independence. But he was never offered the Chair in Philosophy he yearned for – either before or after the Second World War - and ended up in an academic institution in New York, the New School for Social Responsibility. It was there he published – in German – in 1979, the most remarkable book titled (when it was translated into English three years later) The Imperative of Responsibility. More than 40 years ago, Jonas insisted that humanity is now in a new, unprecedented situation. For the first time, he points out, human beings have the technological ability to wipe out all humanity. And secondly, we not only could destroy the environment, the globe, but we’re heading in that direction.
Suddenly, we’re back to those words from Hashkiveinu: violence, hunger and sorrow. The violence of a nuclear war that destroys human civilisation as we know it and the hunger, the famine, the floods of climate change, of global warming. The old enemies renewed by technology and by continuing human failings.
I’ve voiced these thoughts once or twice recently and been told I’m too pessimistic, that I lack hope. Maybe. Since I don’t believe in a pre-modern God who intervenes by zapping the wicked, plucking children from under the wheels of cars or suspending the laws of nature for random individuals, I have to accept that we may be stupid enough, insular enough, uncollaborative enough, selfish enough, badly led enough for it to happen. But I still cherish hope.
The hope represented by our synagogue - by its Jewish values, by its outward-looking attitudes, by the common causes it espouses and by those with whom it joins hands. We can do it and the ways in which we can journey forward with others will be emphasised at every stage of the journey through this month of Tishri, a Tishri which is like no other.
I wish you all a deeply uneasy but ultimately hopeful New Year.
Rabbi Professor Tony Bayfield
