1st day Rosh Hashanah 5784
Challenged to produce a Rosh Hashanah morning service with no prayer book, I realised that Screen 5 at the Vue allowed me to integrate all the components: liturgy, music, study passages, Torah reading, Musaf responsive readings and sermon) around a coherent theme. The downside of this is that the sermon doesn’t stand alone and is dependent on its context. For the beginning of the service, I wrote a ‘theological mission statement’ which precedes the sermon here to make the context and theme of the sermon clearer
THEOLOGICAL MISSION STATEMENT
Liturgy is essentially poetry in which we realise - or should realise - we’re in the realm of metaphor and word pictures. Prose intrudes with its heavy literalism. But this is a service in which the intellect will, probably with excessive frequency because it’s me, intrude to question the poetry and challenge the metaphors. Let’s begin with Avinu, our Parent, male or female – and my statement of intent.
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We Jews, like many others, have lived most of our history in a world in which God is our Parent and we are God’s children. We’ve understood that God, as a good parent, takes every opportunity to protect Their child from the vagaries of chance and the consequences of mistaken choices. We saw our Divine Parent as having, as it were, the power to make everything better with a kiss and a cuddle – unconstrained, unlimited, omnipotent. Despite Job, we also acknowledged our Parent as punishing our many misdemeanours, always justly and above all in our own best interests.
That world was, to a great extent, the world in which the Torah scroll was written, the world of the Rabbis, the world of our medieval philosophers and the liturgical poets of our High Holyday services.
But that world – or, rather, our perception of it - has changed dramatically. Today, we’re unprotected from the constant bombardment of chance – climatic, genetic, the consequences of technology – both for good and for ill.
NoOne today sends angels to stay last minute hands when we go to sacrifice our children or other people’s children. NoOne instructs a Moses – caught between the pursuing Egyptians and the unfathomable sea: Don’t turn back, don’t run away: “Go forward”.
Yet God is no less God because She isn’t a magician, and the world is no less our world because it was created to evolve according to the laws of science - probability and uncertainty included - which cannot be suspended by its Creator for anyone.
God is still our Parent, and we are still God’s children; but we need now to understand our Parent as the Parent of adult, grown up children – limited, not voluntarily but inevitably, as all parents are when their children grow up. The Divine Parent is still our advisor, carer, guide, source of love, ethical prompter and acutest critic, a constant filament lighting and warming our lives, the One to Whom we can either respond or ignore.
Today’s service is about acknowledging, accepting the change and taking up the challenge. Its centre point is the Torah service which will be conducted as an adult Bar Mitzvah, our adult Bar Mitzvah – a contribution to the unending flow of Torah which the service aspires to be part of. God is still our Parent; we are still God’s children but God is no longer the ‘kiss better’ magician our parents were when we were little. We are still children but responsible adult children – unprotected from chance and unable to avoid or evade the consequences of human choice, our own and that of others.
Unlike Abraham, no angel will stay our hands. No Moses will say to us: Don’t turn back, don’t run away, don’t blend into the featureless sands of anonymity.
Responding to the urgent command in Exodus ‘Vayisa’u, tell them to go forward’ can only result from listening to the many courageous and insightful voices of our tradition and that irritating, probing, insistent Voice within our heads, within our hearts, within our souls.
SERMON: VIEW FROM THE VUE
If Bob the Builder hadn’t failed to ensure that Saracens had an away fixture today; if the David Lloyd Centre hadn’t insisted on remaining a cost-competitive alternative venue for Finchley Jews on Saturday mornings; and if my adult daughter hadn’t said, “You’re an elderly pseudo-intellectual, Dad; provide some kind of on-screen service for the other elderly pseudo-intellectuals in the congregation”, we wouldn’t be here. But this is the perverse punishment each of you chose in response to chance. Typical!
If there’s anything else unique – as opposed to distinctive - about Jews, it’s a history of periodic exposure to dystopian worlds. Worlds in which values of justice, shared humanity and mutual acceptance are subverted by lust for power, greedy self-interest and widespread cancellation of those outside the self-defined elite. We Jews are used to being the victim but we need to recognise the situation today when we’re not. Feeling uneasy isn’t enough.
Let me take us back to the horrific, brutal world of late 15th century Spain and Portugal when six centuries of Jewish life in the Iberian Peninsula – lit up by periods of creative co-existence with Muslims and Christians – came to a merciless and shameful end.
A tiny trickle of Spanish and Portuguese refugees found their way to the other end of the Mediterranean, to Safed, S’fat in the hills above Kinneret, Lake Galilee. They’d witnessed the complete subversion of Christian values by the Catholic Church’s Inquisition and run the gauntlet of torture, murder, forced conversion. And finally, expulsion on small unseaworthy boats – paying exorbitant prices for perilous journeys which often ended in shipwreck or being sold into slavery, invariably meeting hostility and rejection.
Within this tiny, disparate group of survivors and their descendants emerged a theology – an understanding of God – which has enabled me, 350 years and at least one dystopia later, to write this service and make this statement of my personal faith. I want to acknowledge not only Miriam’s panic-stricken dance of the seven screens but also the inspiration and help of my grumpy old buddy, Rabbi Larry Hoffman of New York, that of the prince of unwarranted, self-effacing modesty Tim Franks of the BBC World Service and Isaiah’s true suffering servant, my wife Jacqui.
What Rabbi Isaac Luria of S’fat and his followers – those refuges from the dystopian world of Spain and Portugal – have enabled me to do through this service is to stand before you as a believing Jew and try to articulate my bolshie faith in God in a world in which there is increasingly either vile fanaticism or cynical secularism and increasingly little in-between. So thank you for the happenstance of being with me while I, ever the exhibitionist, put myself to the test.
Let’s return to S’fat and what marked out that motley crew of survivors, refugees, asylum seekers, boat people whom the seas gave up to the hills above Lake Galilee.
Their experience impressed upon them two profound insights.
First, they affirmed God but didn’t blame God for the appalling things that had happened to them, their families and their people. Despite Job’s unresolved questioning of God’s justice, Judaism had always taken the uncompromising position that the good things that happen to us in life are reward for good behaviour, for following Jewish law; and the bad things are punishment for our failures, our sins. Occasionally they may be a test for the righteous but, in any event, what happens to us - for good or for bad - is God’s will, God’s intervention. That view is still the only acceptable one to Orthodox Judaism. However, the followers of Rabbi Isaac Luria in 16th century S’fat, in the hills above Kinneret, broke with tradition, despite what had happened to them. They recognised the reality of evil and suffering in the world – human and natural – but refused to see it as divine punishment. Neither the Inquisition nor the storms that threatened their little boats were divine intervention.
A lifetime ago, when I was in my first year at Leo Baeck College, I was assigned to the small Jewish community of post-Second World War rehoused London Jews in Harlow. As a boy from the Becontree estate in Dagenham, I suppose it made sense. But for my second year, I was transferred to Weybridge in Surrey: who could understand the ways of RSGB then or now! But had I not been sent to Weybridge I would never have met a redoubtable lady called Jill Gordon, now in her tenth decade – who for completely incomprehensible reasons was later to form a deep affection for my son Daniel and who has stayed in touch with me for the last 40 years. Had it not been for Jill sending me a copy, I would never have come across a book by her son Robert S G Gordon – Professor of Italian at that fenland university just north of Harlow. It’s a highly specialist book called Modern Luck but I read it out of respect for Jill. Robert Gordon is an expert on Primo Levi, the peerless Italian Jewish chemist, writer and survivor of Auschwitz. Gordon’s analysis of Primo Levi and chance led me to the personal understanding which the radical, creative, insightful Kabbalists of S’fat were the first in Judaism to explore.
In pre-modern times, many peoples and religions – certainty all three Abrahamic faiths – believed that what happens to us reflects the will of God.
But one of the defining characteristics of the modern world is the realisation of the part played in all our lives by chance. You’ll notice one or two supportive quotations in Musaf. We aren’t just hopeless, helpless, hapless victims of chance – at least not all the time. But, had my father not crawled out of his burning tank in Normandy in 1944, somehow got back behind British lines and had he not survived his severe burns, Jacqui would never have had to put up with me. The kabbalists of S’fat rejected the notion that the good things which happen are divine reward and the bad things are punishment. They exonerated God.
You may remember I said a few minutes ago that Isaac Luria’s band of survivors offered two insights. The second is that they saw their ravaged dystopian world as reflective, as it were, of the image of God and committed to lives centred on tikkun, repair of the divine image. It was they who made tikkun a concept profoundly significant in Judaism. Not as a self-deceiving label for making secular ideas of social justice sound Jewish but as repair of the divine image so damaged by humanity – repair through prayer and religious deeds and by extension today, a demand made of every Jew to commit to the repair of the natural, social and political dimensions of our threatened world.
To this end, through years of reflection on their experience, they created a powerful myth, a deeply spiritual narrative. Poetic. A word picture. Not to be understood literally: the rabbinic term alerting people to theological daring, signalling “not to be understood literally” goes back to the Talmud and is k’ilu, as if, as it were.
God, as it were, Is such that nothing else could exist in God’s overwhelming presence. But God needed to create the world and humanity. So God, as it were, withdrew into God’s self to create a space for the world; a space in which God, as it were, would still be present but as a filament, a source of light and warmth which those in the world can live by, engage with; obscure or deny.
And so the world came into being – evolving, developing according to laws of science, probability and chance – logically, necessarily impervious to magical intervention. The world is as it is. It couldn’t be any other way. Such is the is-ness of life. To which I, in my arrogance or religious enthusiasm, add the gloss: the world isn’t just; it just is.
So, there you have the Lurianic myth which provides Judaism – or certainly provides me personally – with a way of understanding God which, in the face of the hideous cruelty periodically exhibited by human beings and in the face of the beautiful-savage indifference of nature, provides words and philosophy to support my personal faith in a relentless, demanding God.
We live in a universe in which chance affects everyone – life and death. God is no longer a magician who makes images and statues weep tears or plucks us from imminent danger if God so chooses. God is no longer Avinu, our all-powerful Parent who cuddles and soothes us and wipes away our tears. God is no longer Malkeinu, an Absolute Monarch zapping the wicked and sparing the innocent. But God is, as it were, the model Parent who provides light and warmth but Whom we can choose to ignore. And God is, as it were, the Sovereign Who pledges to serve us even as we serve the Sovereign. The One Who gives me, as it were, a kick up the backside whenever I protest – as I frequently do – that I’ve done enough and want to be left to rest.
There are some texts, which we’ll explore in Musaf, that long predate the Kabbalists of S’fat but on the spirit of which they drew. One such (from the Talmud) says, “A person who recites on erev Shabbat va’y’khulu hashamayim v’ha’aretz, heaven and earth were completed – that person becomes a partner with God in the work of creation. Longstanding friend of Finchley, Rabbi Levi Weiman-Kelman of congregation Kol Haneshama in Jerusalem is the author of a phrase in our siddur’s alternative version of the Amidah: “we are all partners in the repairing of Your world”. And in the task of finishing the far from finished.
Judaism advances the daring idea that humanity and God are partners in the work of creation. God, said the Kabbalists of S’fat, not only needs us but depends on us for the repair, the completion of the world, for its future – physically, ethically, politically.
Avinu Malkeinu: keep your children safe from disease and violence, hunger and persecution. Avinu Malkeinu: abolish all oppressive laws. Avinu Malkeinu: bring healing to our sick.
“Personally,” says God, as it were, “I have no intrinsic problem with the words – or with the tune, come to that (though it is a bit dated). However, those are your aspirations, your desires, your hopes. Yes, they’re Mine too. But frankly, what really gets Me is that you still think it’s all down to Me. Surely, surely you can see the distinction between your childish theology and the reality of Our shared world. Have you forgotten your own much-repeated assertion that we – that’s you as well as Me - are partners in the work of creation. Partners. When are you going to act like partners – adult partners, not spoilt children in an atheistic sulk when you don’t get what you want. Grow up and get on with it. Thanks to you and the terrifying mess you’ve made of the world, it was never more urgent than it is now. You want Shanah Tovah? Then do something about it.”
Rabbi Professor Tony Bayfield CBE, DD (Cantuar)
